Spring chemistry, plus blogging chemistry and brain awareness. Health care at last? Oh where, oh where, has my little dog come from?
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THE CHEMISTRY OF SPRING. I am driving into spring. The February Gold Narcissus were up in Maryland, but not doing yet, thanks to the cold strange snowy winter. But here in North Carolina for the moment, the later yellow-and-white Narcissus are cheering up the cloudy days, and fruit trees have joined in with harsh clashing pinks.
If it's full-blown spring, can full-blown scientific meeting season be far behind? The American Chemical Society springfest starts this weekend in San Francisco. If you prefer to save the plane fare and attend in your jammies, live press briefings are supposed to be online, but when last I checked, this entry page hadn't been updated yet.
It's also time to update your chemistry RSS feeds. In the Pipeline's Derek Lowe has manicured his blogroll, adding some new chemistry blogs. Chemical & Engineering News's blog, C&ENtral Science, at age 2 is undergoing division into 7 topical daughter cells. It appears you'll still be able to get all the posts in a single RSS feed. The fissioned subjects will include pharma/biotech, cleantech (? is that the chem name for green tech?), chem business, safety, and — a sign that times are hard all over — "nontraditional" careers for chemists. Whaddya wanna bet one of them is science writing? Maybe someone ought to warn hopeful chemical scribblers that times could be even harder over here.
THE ORIGIN OF DOGS. Even humans who are not dog people (me, for one) can be pretty interested in Canis familiaris because of what the species tells us about Homo sap. That's because dogs are the type case of the work of man the toolmaker. Dogs are our first experiment in genetic engineering, our first animal invention, our first exploitation of animal behavior for our own ends, our first step in domestication, and therefore, I guess, the first step toward our nutsy grasp for world domination. You may not approve of where we have got to, but for some tens of thousands of years many human groups have been accompanied on the journey, and frequently assisted, by tail-wagging tongue-lolling faithful companions.
Where this happened first has been in dispute. The genetic evidence has been leaning toward an East Asian, rather than Middle Eastern, origin for dogs. But a new Nature paper declares for the Middle East. At Dienekes' Anthropology Blog, discussion of the paper emphasizes how to interpret conflicting genetic evidence of population origins. At Gene Expression, Razib Khan speculates not about how we have shaped dogs but how they may have shaped us — pointing out that further studies might well be fruitful because dog-free human groups, for example Bushmen, are available for comparison.
BRAIN AWARENESS. Casting about for additional dogblogging, I ended up at the Dana Foundation's report on an olfaction event at the Rubin Museum in NYC. Columbia neurobiologist Stuart Firestein was quoted as asserting that, contrary to popular belief (and mine), humans have a wonderful sense of smell. Dogs have gained the rep as the master smellers simply because they carry their detection equipment low to the ground. Ours is high up, a competitive disadvantage. I think I remember reading ages ago that dogs have a lot more olfactory receptors than we do, but I'm too otherwise occupied ( = lazy) to look it up, so I won't argue the point. Especially with a neurobiologist.
The encounter did remind me, however, that spring has also sprung Brain Awareness Week. In fact, it's nearly over. But not too late to point out that the Dana Foundation, which funds a lot of neuroscience, is a great place for your science writing needs, providing neuroscience resources and also a brain expert directory.
MATERIA MEDICA MISCELLANY. National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins is hoping genetic testing services will contribute information about what they offer to a just-established public registry.
The Association of Health Care Journalists is trying to persuade medical meetings to change policies that forbid recording and photographing their sessions. The professional group's unassailable argument is that electronic records like these can improve the accuracy of meeting reports. Mine is that it's dumb.
HEALTHCARELESS BUT MAYBE NOT FOR LONG? Rumor has it that the US House of Representatives might actually pass federal healthcare legislation, perhaps even as soon as Sunday. That's not quite the last step, but maybe it's close enough for government work.
The Congressional Budget Office has helped out greatly by telling the Congresspersons that yes, the legislation under consideration will reduce the deficit, in addition to covering 32 million more people and fixing other problems. The Washington Post's Ezra Klein summarizes this miracle, and James A. White at the Wall Street Journal's Health Blog explains even more. Kaiser Health News is linking to the giant full text of the Reconciliation Act of 2010 here.
