Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Today we have one of the wonderful days without selections recounting the latest outrage from governments.
One of medicine’s biggest worries is bacteria strains that are resistant to antibiotics. Israeli researchers are finding ways to combat this resistance. Can you imagine a story about researchers anywhere in the Islamic world? The story was in ARS Technica.
… So, some researchers at Tel Aviv’s Sackler School of Medicine came up with a clever idea: why not create a virus that gives bacteria something that’s useful to them, but gets rid of antibiotic resistance at the same time? Under normal growth circumstances, the bacteria would readily pick up the virus, because it’s useful. But, when faced with an antibiotic assault, they’d be helpless to resist it.
To create this magical construct, the researchers turned to a virus that infects bacteria called λ (familiar to anyone who’s taken a class in gene regulation). λ has a mode of infection in which it inserts itself into the host genome and resides there, dormant until some point in the future. λ was modified so that it would remain dormant indefinitely.
To give this version of λ something that’s useful to bacteria, the authors equipped it with the CRISPR-Cas9 system along with genes for targeting RNAs that would direct it to other viruses. Now, if those viruses tried to infect a cell with the modified λ already in it, they’d be cut to pieces. In essence, they were using a virus to make bacteria immune to another virus. Viral infections went down by three orders of magnitude.
To make it useful to us, the researchers added a second set of genes for targeting RNAs. These directed the CRISPR-Cas9 system to cut up antibiotic resistance genes. This worked as expected: λ infected cells couldn’t pick up the antibiotic resistance genes and, if they had any before the infection, they were lost. The bacteria remained susceptible to antibiotics. …
Washington Post tells us why there’s so much BS about eating.
Here’s how public thinking on food gets shaped: Every year, researchers publish hundreds of academic studies about the health effects of various foods – chocolate, kale, red wine, anything. Those studies, in turn, become fodder for newspaper articles, books and blog posts.
But how much of this torrent of information is worth the trouble? Surprising little, according to a number of key researchers.
In recent years, these skeptics have caused a stir by poking big holes in the nutritional science behind popular diet advice. Even the findings published in distinguished health journals have come under fire.
Collectively, their work suggests that we know far less than we think we do about what to eat.
“Is everything we eat associated with cancer?” a much noted paper in this vein asked. …
A few weeks ago we had a review of David McCullough’s book about the Wright Brothers. NY Times reviewed it also. Pickerhead has to plead guilty to too much interest in the Wright Bros.. However, it is an interesting story in that these two men spent very little money compared to the government funded efforts of Samuel Langley. Just another example of Pickerhead’s Iron Rule of Government – It always f**ks up.
… The Wrights have been a welcome inspiration to David McCullough, whose last big book, “The Greater Journey” (2011), was about assorted, unrelated Americans venturing to Paris in pursuit of culture and badly needed a better raison d’être. And Mr. McCullough’s primary audience is not kids, though many of them may appreciate “The Wright Brothers.” He writes for fathers, as in Father’s Day, with publication dates usually well timed for that holiday. (Marketing aside, anyone can enjoy them.) So the same dads who got blue-ribbon gifts of “1776,” “John Adams,” “Truman,” “Mornings on Horseback” or other McCullough chestnuts should enjoy the way this author takes the Wrights’ story aloft
Merely by choosing them, Mr. McCullough makes his subjects extra-estimable. And in the case of the Wrights that may be fitting. If Wilbur, the older, bossier and more rigorous brother, ever had an impassioned relationship with any human being who was not a blood relative or fellow aviation enthusiast, this isn’t the book to exhume it. Mr. McCullough appreciates Wilbur’s aloofness, intelligence and austerity, even after he became a celebrity. During the Wrights’ grand, two-day welcome home whoop-de-do in Dayton, a New York Times reporter caught them sneaking off to work in their shop three times on the first day. …
WSJ Essay on some modest looking models on display in a New York museum
Among the treasures in “Sculpture in the Age of Donatello: Renaissance Masterpieces From Florence Cathedral,” on view through June 14 at New York’s Museum of Biblical Art, are two rather plain wooden models. Placed alongside breathtaking sculptures by leading artists of the 15th century, these unadorned representations of the dome and lantern that crown the Florence church seem ordinary by comparison—until one discovers that they were likely crafted by the very genius whose architectural and engineering talents made the construction one of the marvels of the age. …
… It all began when the Commune of Florence in 1294 announced plans to replace a crumbling fifth-century church on the site of Santa Maria del Fiore with “a more beautiful and honorable temple than any in any other part of Tuscany.” It was to be capped with the widest dome that anyone had ever seen. In 1296 a foundation stone was laid. But by 1418, after more than a century of effort had gone into raising the building, a gaping hole remained where the dome had been planned. …
NY Times reports on stone tools found in Kenya.
One morning in July 2011, while exploring arid badlands near the western shore of Lake Turkana in Kenya, a team of archaeologists took a wrong turn and made a big discovery about early human technology: Our hominin ancestors were making stone tools 3.3 million years ago, some 700,000 years earlier than previously thought.
The findings promise to extend knowledge of the first toolmakers even deeper in time, probably before the emergence of the genus Homo, once considered the first to gain an evolutionary edge through stone technology.
“Immediately, I knew that we had found something very special,” said Sonia Harmand, a research associate professor at Stony Brook University in New York, in a telephone interview from Nairobi, Kenya. …