To many we might seem to be losing the war against bacteria. They keep evolving and getting more virulent while we struggle to catch up and create new antibiotic drugs while misusing the ones we already have.

Still, according to Dr. Bonnie Bassler, there is a bit of a bright side. The recent salmonella scare, for example, was more due to a faulty food system than evolving bacteria.

Read the full interview here.

I’ve had overweight friends who seemed pretty active, physically coordinated and generally healthy, and now science has accepted that fact, too.

Recent reports show that about half of over weight people and about a third of obese people in the US have normal cholesterol, blood pressure and other criteria for physical health.

On the other hand, about a quarter of people with normal weight were determined to be at risk of heart disease or diabetes.

This German patient is sure to be clasping double armfuls of happiness to his painkiller-saturated breast right now, after being the first person in history to receive transplants of two complete arms.

A team of 40 medics labored for 15 hours in a hospital near Munich, Germany to give the unidentified patient back the appendages he lost six years ago in a horrible accident.

And what does one say after waking up with someone else’s hands? “It’s alive!”? Well, according to the doctors the patient’s first words were, “Very good.”

My question is, where did the arms come from? Strangest Science News suggests that the patient watch the film “Idle hands”.

To save myself from a load of acronyms and scientific gobbledygook, I present this link to the full article.

Lazy? Never feel like going out and exercising? would you rather sit in front of the TV or surf the web like you’re doing now?

It could be because of your genes.

A team of scientists at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte have used to number studies to come to a conclusion that genetics may predispose some of us to laziness. I think I just heard a nation of couch potatoes moan for joy.

Complete article here.

If you have a thing about hypodermic needles and all that injection stuff, you’re going to love this. Researchers have developed a type of salmonella bacteria that, when dripped into the mouths of rodents, can trigger the mouse’s immune system without causing further harm. Why? Because it basically kills itself shortly upon arrival.

Hopefully the technology can be applied to viruses, fungi and other baddies soon. How soon? Human tests are expected within a year.

We’ve known for a while that one way to make the body impervious to certain diseases is to give it a low, safe dose of that disease, so our immune system gets a good idea of how to fight it and build up antibodies to fight it. That’s the basic concept for vaccination in general.

What’s so cool about this latest development is, scientists have actually developed a weak-ass artificial polio virus inside a lab. The weakened virus, first developed in 2002 by the same team at the State University  of New York, will hopefully lead to a safer polio vaccine that triggers the body’s immune system without actually being able to cause disease.

The problem with today’s polio vaccines is that they can be accidentally released into, say, the water supply, and there mutate into a stronger version that can cause disease. With the designer virus, this will hopefully be made impossible.

According to a neurophysiologist at the University of California named Katherine Rankin, sarcasm may have played a significant role in human evolution.

Dr. Rankin discovered that sarcasm plays an important role in human social interaction. And when people lose their ability to detect it in each other (such as after head injuries or illnesses like dementia), it affects their ability to react to other people in socially appropriate ways.

And since our social behaviors are part of the reason we’ve been so successful as a species, evolutionary biologists believe that sarcasm, as negative as it may seem, was actually beneficial to us as a species.

But I could care less.

Personally I think sloths are kinda cool.

So I’m glad that new research suggests that they might have gotten a bit of a bad rap as… well… sloths.

People used to think that sloths slept for 16 hours a day, but German and US scientists published a study in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters that found that they actually sleep for only ten, making them not very different from us humans.

What’s so small you can’t see it with the naked eye, has DNA spliced into it, and can solve computer science problems?

It’s the DNA computer!

Here’s the layman explanation, as far as I understand it:

Scientists have found a way to insert a bit of DNA into a living bacterial cell, and the DNA turns the cell into a living calculating machine. The actual experiment involved a pretty esoteric math problem which the DNA computer solved by flipping its own DNA patterns, but suffice it to say that on this particular problem, the tiny nanocomputer outperformed today’s full-sized PCs.

Of course we won’t be using cell-sized PC’s to play World of Warcraft anytime in the foreseeable future, but oh the possibilities…