Category: ScienceEveryday (medical imaging is separate)

NASA Mission Patch

Our project on a NASA project finally started. My collaborator said we would get mission patches. I don’t know which patch we are going to get but does it really matter? We are getting for-real mission patches for working on a NASA project.

We are helping determine which strain of mouse shows a change in bone density and fat composition when it’s in a simulated low gravity environment. That strain of mouse will be used in the International Space Station to study the long term effects of weightlessness.

https://www.wired.com/2009/08/nasas-most-awesomely-weird-mission-patches/

Check out this important post by Buddhini Samarasinghe, especially if you’re in the UK

Originally shared by Buddhini Samarasinghe

Scientists behaving badly

Somewhat long ranty post here, so brace yourself. If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is. Stem cells and regenerative medicine have come a long way in the past few decades but we are nowhere near being able to do synthetic organ transplants. If you remember a breathless headline stating that from a few years ago, rest assured that it was a fraud, and many of the patients sadly died from the procedure.

I find stories like this infuriating and frustrating. On the one hand, I don’t have any power here; I am not a prestigious academic with the ability to make or even influence funding decisions, and neither am I a science journalist with a lot of clout. But when scientists do fraudulent shit like this, and worse, it ends up killing people, it’s just…argh. If there is a hell, there is a special place in it for fuckwits like Paolo Macchiarini.

This story came out about a year ago, and many prominent heads at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden rolled as a result. But that was after a documentary-maker exposed this shit show for what it was. Before that? The Karolinska Institute was sooo attached to their superstar surgeon that they simply defended him whenever anyone asked too many questions.

“In the picture that emerges from these reports, we see a doctor persisting with a technique that showed few signs of working and able to take extraordinary risks with his patients, and a medical institution so attached to their star doctor that they ignore mounting evidence of his poor judgement”

I think this is the part that irks me the most. I get that there are shitty individuals in every field, people who have no conscience and are willing to take shortcuts so they can rise to the top. But science is supposed to be self-correcting, and scientists are supposed to be objective; when these biases and flaws, in a field that I love, are made so blatantly obvious, it kinda makes me die a little inside. I wasn’t even sure if I should write about this but then realised how many people didn’t know about Paolo Macchiarini’s shoddy science, so I figured I should.

More links: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-37311038

https://forbetterscience.com/2016/02/21/macchiarini-and-karolinska-the-biomedical-ethics-meltdown/

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/01/celebrity-surgeon-nbc-news-producer-scam

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-37311038

I love it when someone can cut through the hype of science news and give proper perspective.

If you aren’t following John Baez​, you should be.

Originally shared by John Baez

Babylon? Babble on!

Maybe you saw the excited headlines about that clay tablet:

Babylonian tablet Plimpton 322 will make studying maths easier, mathematician says

This mysterious ancient tablet could teach us a thing or two about math

Mathematical secrets of ancient tablet unlocked after nearly a century of study

Australian university scientists solve 3700-year-old mystery

They’re pretty much all wrong! First of all, this tablet was deciphered in 1957. While the tablet is remarkable, it will not teach us a thing or two about math. While its significance is unclear – since it’s hard to know what the Babylonians actually used it for, and no amount of staring at the tablet will reveal that – there are some good theories.

On top of all that, there’s no real news here.

Yes, the scientists at Australian University published a paper on this tablet, but they didn’t really make any progress in understanding it. In fact, their press release spreads some bizarre misinformation! For example, they claim this tablet is “superior in some ways to modern trigonometry”. It’s not.

For a more detailed take-down, read the article below by Evelyn Lamb. And for good information about this remarkable tablet, see:

• Wikipedia, Plimpton 322, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plimpton_322

The article explains exactly what the tablet says. Basically it’s a list of 15 Pythagorean triples a² + b² = c², where each row tells you a, c, and a fraction that’s either a²/b² or c²/b², where b is the short side of the right triangle. It has 6 errors in it, which unfortunately are corrected in the Wikipedia article.

It’s an amazing tablet, but a lot of Babylonian mathematical tablets are amazing, and that’s not news. Check out the article Richard Elwes and I wrote, about a tablet from 1700 BC that shows a very accurate value of the square root of 2:

• John Baez and Richard Elwes, Babylon and the square root of 2, https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2011/12/02/babylon-and-the-square-root-of-2/

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/dont-fall-for-babylonian-trigonometry-hype/

Citizen Science: GMO corn

Remember the citizen science project, testing GMO corn from October 2015? Well the results are done and they are going to publish the results soon.

Here’s info from the original post.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/+ChadHaney/posts/PxyXY83cSxy

https://www.biofortified.org/2017/08/final-steps-gmo-experiment/

Replace your kitchen sponge weekly

Don’t try cleaning your sponge, just replace it weekly.

ETA

A couple of related tidbits:

Washing your hands with cold water (and soap) is as effective as warm water.

news.rutgers.edu – Handwashing: Cool Water as Effective as Hot for Removing Germs | Media Relations

Also, the FDA recommends using “plain” soap rather than antibacterial soap. Soap made with Triclosan is no longer approved.

https://www.fda.gov/ForConsumers/ConsumerUpdates/ucm378393.htm

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/07/your-kitchen-sponge-harbors-zillions-microbes-cleaning-it-could-make-things-worse

Guess what I’m doing.

Here’s some fantastic research we collaborated on. I’ll write a little bit more about it when I have time.

Originally shared by Center For Advanced Molecular Imaging

Our collaborators, Dr. Stupp and Dr. Erin Hsu just published a paper about their research using a nanomaterial to promote bone growth. We did some of the microCT imaging and helped them with analysis. Congratulations to them.

Sulfated glycopeptide nanostructures for multipotent protein activation

S. Lee et al

Nature Nanotechnology (2017) doi:10.1038/nnano.2017.109

Accepted 28 April 2017 Published online 19 June 2017

https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2017/june/sugar-coated-nanomaterial-promote-bone-growth/

https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2017/june/sugar-coated-nanomaterial-promote-bone-growth/

That’s the pits

Did you know cherry pits are poisonous?

http://www.compoundchem.com/2016/07/21/cherries/

Crazy on you

I think it’s interesting that the prelude to this study was the finding that dogs that raise their eyebrows get adopted more than dogs that don’t. Heck yeah, I want a doggo that makes facial expressions with their eyebrows. Cats, not so much. However, the more they rub on furniture or toys was more likely to get a cat adopted.

That means that, compared with dogs, cats haven’t faced as much evolutionary pressure to appeal to humans, the researchers say. In other words, cats are jerks. I keep trying to tell that to my cat friends. 🙂

As usual, ignore the title from Science Mag. The correct title is Crazy-faced cats don’t win the adoption game.

Here’s your earworm.

Crazy on You by Heart.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZuW6BH_Vak

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06/crazy-faced-cats-don-t-win-adoption-game