Diet Coke + Mentos = Paper
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 [...]
Life without Oxygen
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 [...]
Reading for value
My buddy Bill shared an article on Google Reader about the demise of Newsweek which linked to this New York Times article (does anyone else find it ironic that one newspaper experiencing financial problems is calling out another publication’s financial problems?): American newsweeklies were built on original reporting of Large Events, helping readers make sense [...]
United States of Amoeba
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 [...]
Grand Challenges
Over at Bench Press, my buddy Anthony posted about the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s collaboration with the White House and Expert Labs to help identify “which scientific and technological challenges should be the focus of policy initiatives in the coming years.” The collaboration is unique in that, to my knowledge, it is [...]
Collateral damage by mitochondria
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 [...]
A Case Fit for House MD Part 2
A little over two years ago, I blogged on a very interesting New England Journal of Medicine paper about a bizarre medical case where a young female patient actually took on the blood type of a little boy who’s liver she had taken in a transplant. I had noted then that such an amazing (and [...]
Slime takes a stroll
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 [...]
Crazy Y Chromosomes
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 [...]
Bet on chance
When people think about strategy, they’re oftentimes looking for that one “silver bullet” which is the 100% correct and best answer. This is despite the fact that it is sometimes 100% valid to use random chance to make a decision. Well, it turns out that bacteria have figured this out as well, as researchers have [...]
