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.
Numerologists, geomancers, feng shui practitioners and other soothsayer types were probably beside themselves with delight when the news came out Hailey Jo Hauer, a baby whose birth was loaded with the number eight.
Born at 8:08 a.m. on August 8, 2008 (8/8/08), Hauer weighed 8 pounds, eight ounces.
8 is considered a lucky number by many. And if it is, we can probably expect Hailey’s name to come up in the lottery winners’ list in the future.
RNL Bio is the Seoul-based company that has fired the opening shot in the race to profit from nutty pet owners.
This week, RNL Bio released five pit bull puppies cloned form the dead dog of an American woman named Bernann McKinney.
The deceased canine who provided the DNA for this historic achievement bore the appropriately dignified moniker, “Booger”.
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”.
Here’s something all those Beijing-bound Olympic athletes would love to have in their duffel bags: fat-burning, endurance-enhancing pills fresh out of development, presumably not yet tested for in the barrage of drug tests they’re sure to undergo for the next few days.
To save myself from a load of acronyms and scientific gobbledygook, I present this link to the full article.
The smallest snake in all the world has been found, and it wasn’t the one in my pants after all.
Meet Leptotyphlops carlae, indigenous to the easternmost Caribbean island of Barbados, less than 4 inches (10 cm) long when fully grown, and for about 15 minutes, internet star.
The little guy was discovered by an evolutionary biologist from Penn State University named Blair Hedges, who, after realizing he had found a new species of snake, did what any regular guy would do and named it after his wife Carla.
The Time website just came out with a cool photo essay about animals in space. The photo essay is supposed to commemorate NASA’s fiftieth anniversary, but I’m more interested in the animals themselves.
Are they heroes? Pioneers? Hapless experimental test subjects?
The handful of images including the one above may not suffice to reach a conclusion, but it does give a person a lot to think about.
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.
When a white tigress at the Safari Zoological Park in Kansas, USA suddenly stopped caring for her three newborn cubs, park owner Tom Harvey brought in some special help: a golden retriever who had just finished weaning her own pups.
The plan worked, and the noble pooch adopted the tiger cubs as her own: nursing them. cleaning them and basically picking up where their biological mother left off.