Unless you just discovered YouTube yesterday, you’ve probably seen countless videos of (and maybe even have tried?) the infamous Diet Coke + Mentos reaction… which brings us to the subject of this month’s (belated) paper that I will blog about. An enterprising physics professor from Appalachian State University decided to have her sophomore physics class [...]
No, that’s not a reference to a Jordin Sparks/Chris Brown song, its the theme for the paper of the month. This month, in expression of my gratitude to the kind folks at Open Access publisher BioMedCentral for sending me a “clone” of their very adorable mascot Gulliver (picture left), I have decided to do a [...]
Another month, another paper to read and blog about. Most people know that viruses are notoriously tricky disease-causing pathogens to tackle. Unlike bacteria which are completely separate organisms, viruses are parasites which use a host cell’s own DNA-and-RNA-and-protein producing mechanisms to reproduce. As a result, most viruses are extremely small, as they need to find [...]
Another month, another paper to read and blog about. This month, I read a paper (HT: my ex-college roommate Eric) by a group from Beth Israel about systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS) following serious injury. SIRS, which is more commonly understood/found as sepsis, happens when the entire body is on high “immune alert.” In the [...]
It was the end of February yesterday – which means its time to read/blog about another paper! The paper I read for this month brought up an interesting question I’ve always had but never really dug into: how do individual cells find things they can’t “see”? After all, there are lots of microbes out there [...]
A few weeks ago, I set myself some 2010 goals. One of which was to make sure that I fit in reading at least one paper every month. What I didn’t say though, was that I would try to do a quick blog post on each (to help keep me honest). I forgot exactly how [...]