Medical marijuana, Olympic physics with Apolo Ohno, genes in Africa, AAAS in San Diego, geophysics in Haiti
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AFRICAN GENES FROM TUT TO TUTU. King Tut is always good for a headline. So now we know that underneath that stunning gold death mask was the mummy of a kid who deserved our pity.
It's true what they whispered about the sex lives of ancient Egyptian royalty. Tutankhamen was a product of brother-sister incest; his mummy was his aunt. King Tut lived and died young, sick and in pain. He had a bone disease and a club foot. He walked with sticks and died, probably, of malaria following a broken leg. This news from DNA studies on 11 royal mummies, which Sharon Begley at The Human Condition says the scientists call "molecular Egyptology." See also Andrew Moseman at 80Beats.
Lacking King Tut, the scientists who studied contemporary African DNA had to rely for their headlines on South Africa's Archbishop Desmond Tutu, one of their study subjects. He's a Bantu and joined four bushmen who opened up their genomes to scientific scrutiny.
The five are a living demonstration that, yes, African DNA is diverse indeed, just as scientists have often said. In fact, as one of them notes in another Begley post, there are more genetic differences between any two bushmen in the study than between a European and an Asian.
The paper is another demonstration that Homo sap was African-born. Carl Zimmer explains why, with instructive diagrams, at The Loom. See also the ever-reliable Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science.
THE PHYSICS OF THE OLYMPICS. I was thinking there would be lots of blogging analyzing the science of what Olympic athletes do, but I didn't find much. Maybe next week. An exception is Rhett Allain at Dotphysics, who delves into the physics of speed-skating with Apolo Ohno. Lots of formulas, and you're welcome to them.
Who, I wonder, is going to figure out how Shaun White appears to do what he does with a snowboard? Speaking of physics, it's obviously impossible. My theory is mass hypnosis.
AAAS GOES WEST. The annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science has just begun, this year in San Diego. Not many blog posts yet, although I daresay traffic will pick up. Nature journalists have blogging plans; you'll find posts here I can't find a similar notice at Science, even though it's a AAAS product. But the Twitter hashtag is #AAAS10.
IT'S ALSO MEDICAL MARIJUANA WEEK. Although I have a hunch it doesn't appear on many official lists, and I doubt that Medical Marijuana Week is one of those celebratory sennights declared by Congress, either.
Perhaps not so coincidentally, the Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research, at the University of California - San Diego, released a report on pot's health effects culled from its 15 clinical studies. The report, a free PDF, can be found at the top of this pub list.
At the Wall Street Journal's Health Blog, Anna Wilde Mathews describes the group's findings thus:
The report argues marijuana may have a "novel mechanism of action not fully exploited by current therapies." The drug may also have an effect on multiple-sclerosis patients' spastic motions "beyond the benefit available from usual medical care," the report says. Other research hasn't shown this effect consistently. The report also flags some mild side effects, including dizziness and, ahem, "changes in cognition." Marijuana opponents will probably say that the studies weren't long-term enough to show the potential downsides of chronic use.
Mathews also wrote a WSJ article (available free) exploring whether marijuana really is a medicine, the upshot being a vague "maybe." Its sidebar is a long list of research studies. But fairly convincing data are pretty thin, strongest for neuropathic pain.
She reports on an American Medical Association study concluding that only 20 randomized, controlled clinical trials of smoked marijuana have been carried out, and they involved only 300 or so study subjects. Researchers complain that it's hard to get funding. I daresay.
Mathews notes that medical marijuana is now legal in a surprising (to me, anyway) number of states, 14 at the moment. A couple more big ones--New York and Illinois--are thinking about it. President Obama has declared pot prosecutions to be a low priority, and the Department of Justice has said it generally won't prosecute when folks comply with state rules. A recent arrest in Colorado makes clear there may be exceptions, though, as Jacob Sullum explains at Hit & Run.
We conclude the celebration with Drug Monkey's take on the neuroscience and legal ramifications of synthetic marijuana. According to Drug Monkey, said to be an NIH-funded researcher, synthetic pot is medical marijuana of quite another kind, with potential for dependence, withdrawal symptoms, and demands for health care:
The interesting thing will be to see how long it take[s] regulatory authorities to criminalize these so-called synthetic marijuana products in various jurisdictions. Availability and cost relative to good old marijuana will dictate whether this becomes a continuing issue for public health or not.
NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION GEOPHYSICISTS IN HAITI. Sorry it took me so long to catch up with this blog. It has just concluded, but posts are archived, so you can see what the geophysicists were up to.
This blog is about a group of geophysicists who are traveling to Haiti to conduct a GPS survey of Haiti to measure ground deformation following the Jan 12 earthquake. These measurements will help us understand important characteristics of how the fault slipped on Jan 12 and to track how the crust is continuing to deform after the earthquake.
So is this a trend? Will scientists now be blogging regularly as they work? I have no idea whether this is the case with the Haiti geophysicists, but I can't help wondering: Will blogging be a condition of getting grant money?
I can see that on-site blogging is potentially a valuable form of outreach, and I certainly believe that publicly funded researchers should be communicating about their work with taxpayers. But I don't want them distracted from their research, either.
Journalists are now often obliged to blog as part of their workload. Many say it can interfere with the main job of writing (or editing) articles and broadcasts. Seems to me that, whatever its virtues, an obligation to blog might well interfere with a scientist's main job too.
