Science Education & Policy
The global warming debate has focused on carbon dioxide emissions, but scientists at UC Irvine have determined that a lesser-known mechanism -- dirty snow -- can explain one-third or more of the Arctic warming primarily attributed to greenhouse gases.
Snow becomes dirty when soot from tailpipes, smoke stacks and forest fires enters the atmosphere and falls to the ground. Soot-infused snow is darker than natural snow. Dark surfaces absorb sunlight and cause warming, while bright surfaces reflect heat back into space and cause cooling.
Annual mean temperature change due to dirty snow in…
There was quite a spike in our traffic to UsefulChem today.
The fact that Alicia's masters thesis "Synthesis of Diketopiperazines, Possible Malaria Enoyl Reducatase Inhibitors Using Open Source Science" is being written on a wiki was noted by Pharyngula, A Blog around the Clock and Pimm - Partial Immortalization.
I am particularly happy that Attila from Pimm has obtained permission from his supervisor to write at least part of his thesis on his blog. Outside of the sciences, I recall Mark Wagner doing something similar for his thesis on educational gaming. Also see Laura Blankenship's thesis…
The most comprehensive study of its kind has found that violence costs the United States $70 billion annually, a figure that rivals federal education spending and the damage caused by hurricane Katrina.
Phaedra Corso, lead author of study and associate professor of health policy at the University of Georgia College of Public Health and health economist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the study illustrates how much money can be saved by investing in programs that decrease interpersonal violence and self-inflicted violence such as suicide. For comparison, the federal…
A groundbreaking surgical therapy capable of stabilising and restoring vision in the vast majority of patients who currently suffer blindness through Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AMD) is to be taken to clinical trial by scientists and clinicians at the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology, Moorfields Eye Hospital and the University of Sheffield.
The therapy, using cells derived from human embryonic stem cells to replace the faulty retinal cells that cause AMD, will be developed by the London Project to Cure AMD, a collaborative project launched today bringing together some of the leading…
Carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning kills over 200 people every year in the United States. Although inexpensive CO detectors have been available since 1989, their use in hotels, motels and resorts is not widespread. In fact, while every guest room in the U.S. must contain a smoke detector, there is no federal mandate for CO detectors.
Using data collected at the LDS Hospital Hyperbaric Medicine Department and searches of legal databases and online news databanks, the researchers found 68 incidents of CO poisoning occurring at hotels, motels, and resorts between 1989 and 2004. In these incidents,…
In head-to-head trials of two drugs, the one deemed better appears to depend largely on who is funding the study, according to an analysis of nearly 200 statin-drug comparisons carried out between 1999 and 2005.
UCSF researchers examined 192 published results of trials comparing one cholesterol-lowering statin drug to another, or to a non-statin drug.
Their findings found that two links stood out. If the reported results favored the test drug, the trial was about 20 times more likely to be funded by the maker of the statin rather than the comparison drug company. Even more striking, they…
Cash |
As if tortillas weren't already expensive enough because of a ridiculous 2005 enviromental law mandating usage and subsidies for ethanol, now the pesky medical community is in on the take.
Percutaneous ethanol injection (PEI) is an injection of ethanol through the skin directly into a bone tumor to kill cancer cells, which is dangerous enough to picnics all over America due to inflated corn prices, but now it turns out ethanol has value for thyroid cancer patients as well.
She's already angry about high corn prices
"PEI may be a valuable adjunctive or secondary treatment to radioiodine…
Scientists exploring the remote highlands of eastern Suriname discovered 24 species believed to be new to science, including an Atelopus frog with brilliant purple markings, four Eleutherodactylus frog species, six species of fish, 12 dung beetles and an ant species.
The scientists also found 27 species endemic to the Guayana Shield region comprising Suriname and neighboring Guyana, French Guiana and northern Brazil, including a rare armored catfish, Harttiella crassicauda, feared extinct because gold mining activities had contaminated a creek where it was last seen more than 50 years ago.…
Global warming and the destruction of natural habitats will lead to significant declines and extinctions in the world’s 8,750 terrestrial bird species over the next century, according to a study conducted by biologists at the University of California, San Diego and Princeton University.
Their study, the first global assessment of how climate change and habitat destruction may interact to impact the distribution of a large group of vertebrates over the next century, appears in the June 5 issue of the journal PLoS Biology.
The scientists warn in their study that, even under the most optimistic…
Colgate anthropology professor Allan Maca and a team of researchers have found a previously unknown tomb in Copán, Honduras, dating back to the 7th century A.D. that contained the skeleton of an elite member of ancient Maya society in the city.
The unusual characteristics of the tomb’s construction, the human remains, and the artifacts found near the body, according to Maca, paint a picture of an urban state that was more politically complex and culturally diverse than was previously thought.
As reported this month by National Geographic News and the Honduran press, Maca and his group —…