In Hopes of Fixing Faulty Genes One Scientist Starts With the Basics

"Whether they admit it or not, many (if not most) scientists secretly hope to get a call in October informing them they've won a Nobel Prize."

"But I've talked to a lot of Nobel laureates, and they are unanimous on one point: None of them pursued a research topic with the intention of winning the prize."

"That's certainly true for Jennifer Doudna. She hasn't won a Nobel Prize yet, but many are whispering that she's in line to win one for her work on something called CRISPR/Cas9 — a tool for editing genes."

Scientists Coax Human Embryonic Stem Cells Into Making Insulin

"A team of Harvard scientists said Thursday that they had finally found a way to turn human embryonic stem cells into cells that produce insulin. The long-sought advance could eventually lead to new ways to help millions of people with diabetes."

"Right now, many people with diabetes have to regularly check the level of sugar in their blood and inject themselves with insulin to keep the sugar in their blood in check. It's an imperfect treatment."

"'This is kind of a life-support for diabetics,' says Doug Melton, a stem-cell researcher at Harvard Medical School. 'It doesn't cure the disease and leads to devastating complications of the disease.'"

Climate Change Worsens Coastal Flooding From High Tides

"A wave of high tides is expected to hit much of the East Coast this week. These special tides — king tides — occur a few times a year when the moon's orbit brings it close to the Earth."

"But scientists say that lately, even normal tides throughout the year are pushing water higher up onto land. And that's causing headaches for people who live along coastlines."

"As Bob Dylan might have put it, the tides, they are a changin'."

"High tides around the East and Gulf coasts are getting higher, to the point where regular high tides are beginning to look more like the rare king tides hitting the East Coast this week."

Scientists Share Chemistry Nobel For Breakthrough In Microscopy

"Two Americans and a German will share the Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing a new type of microscopy that allows researchers, for the first time, to see individual molecules inside living cells."

"The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded Americans Eric Betzig and William Moerner and German scientist Stefan Hell the prize for "the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy," which "has brought optical microscopy into the nanodimension."

Three Scientists Win Nobel in Physics For Developement of Blue LED

 

"A trio of scientists, two from Japan and one from the U.S., will share the Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention of blue light-emitting diodes (LEDs), leading to a new, environmentally friendly light source."

"Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano of Japan and U.S. scientist Shuji Nakamura were selected by the committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to share the 8 million Swedish Kronor ($1.1 million) prize."

The Forgotten Female Programmers Who Created Modern Tech

"If your image of a computer programmer is a young man, there's a good reason: It's true. Recently, many big tech companies revealed how few of their female employees worked in programming and technical jobs. Google had some of the highest rates: 17 percent of its technical staff is female."

"It wasn't always this way. Decades ago, it was women who pioneered computer programming — but too often, that's a part of history that even the smartest people don't know."

"I took a trip to ground zero for today's computer revolution, Stanford University, and randomly asked over a dozen students if they knew who were the first computer programmers. Almost none knew."

GMOs Are Old Hat: Synthetically Modified Food Is the New Frontier

"Genetically modified organisms are ancient, technologically speaking. Though some consumers may just be discovering that they're in the food system (and getting riled up about labeling them), farmers have had access to them since 1996."

"But there's a new technology on the scene, adding a twist to the already complicated conversation about GMOs in our food: synthetic biology."

"In essence, synthetic biology is about designing and building workhorse organisms that can make things more efficiently than nature (or make things we might need that nature doesn't make at all). According to Todd Kuiken, a senior program associate with the Synthetic Biology Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 'It's the next stage of genetic engineering.'"

Is A Picture Always Worth A Thousand Words?

"The beheadings of journalists, aid workers, tourists and countless soldiers by the group calling itself the Islamic State (or Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant or Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) are noteworthy for their terrifying depravity, but also for the fact that they are staged as acts of political theater or, more accurately, video."

"I've had occasion to write in this space, in a much lighter tone, about the alarming control that pictures seem to have in our lives today. Many of us find it difficult to do anything without documenting not so much the occasion — the trip to be baseball game with your children, or your visit to the Eiffel Tower — but any little event of even the least significance."

Canada Identifies Ship Find From Lost 1846 Artic Expedition

"As we reported last month, Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced that a team of archaeologists had discovered one of two ships from a doomed Arctic expedition 160 years ago. At the time, the searchers weren't sure if they'd found British Capt. Sir John Franklin's HMS Erebus or the HMS Terror."

"Now, Harper says the archaeologists have determined which one: 'I am delighted to confirm that we have identified which ship from the Franklin expedition has been found. It is in fact the HMS Erebus,' he said in Parliament, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corp."

"The ship from the 19th century expedition was found in Nunavut — Canada's northernmost territory. Both the Erebus and Terror were icebound during the expedition that left England in 1845 in an attempt to chart an unnavigated portion of the Northwest Passage."

European Activist Say They Don't Want Any of US-Chlorine Chicken

"Mute Schimpf doesn't want to eat American chicken. That's because most U.S. poultry is chilled in antimicrobial baths that can include chlorine to keep salmonella and other bacteria in check. In Europe, chlorine treatment was banned in the 1990s out of fear that it could cause cancer."

"'In Europe there is definitely a disgust about chlorinated chicken,' says Schimpf, a food activist with Friends of the Earth Europe, an environmental group."

"The chlorine vs. no chlorine debate has come up a lot recently in the context of a massive trans-Atlantic trade agreement. This week, negotiators from Europe and the U.S. are meeting in Washington for a seventh round of talks aimed at creating the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP."

Embracing Deep Time Thinking

"The past two Sundays I reflected, here and here in 13.7, on my anthropological fieldwork among experts developing a Safety Case supporting what might, in Finland in the early 2020s, become the world's first working geological repository for high-level nuclear waste."

"I explored how these experts dealt with geological, ecological and climatological changes that might occur over the coming millennia."

"Now, though, I'm going to take a step back and think about deep time — our very distant future — in a more holistic, speculative and global way. I do this because of my feeling that something about our collective experience of time is now undergoing a profound transformation."

Tiny Spanish Island Nears Its Goal 100% Renewable Energy

"It actually takes quite a lot of fossil fuel power to reach the tiny Spanish island of El  Hierro. You have to catch a commercial jet flight, a propeller plane and then a ferry to reach what was once the end of the known world, before Columbus set sail."

"But once you're there, there's no need for fossil fuels at all. The ancient island off the west coast of Africa is now a model for the future, within months of running on 100 percent renewable energy, which consists of a mix of wind and hydro-power."

"El Hierro, the most remote of Spain's Canary Islands, is now billing itself as the world's first energy self-sufficient island that has never been hooked up to a power grid."

"A Danish island, Samso, is also energy-independent, but was previously hooked up to the Danish grid and didn't make the change in isolation, like El Hierro."

Art Craft Explores How One Forger Duped More Than 45 Museums

"For nearly 30 years, art forger Mark Landis duped dozens of museums into accepting fakes into their collections. His stunts made headlinesaround the world. But Mark Landis never asked for money so he never went to jail. Now his paintings and drawings are in a touring exhibition called Intent to Deceive, and he's the subject of a new documentary called Art & Craft."

"Landis is a paradox. He's a shut-in who craves interaction. His house in Laurel, Miss., is extremely cluttered, but his scams are well-organized. In Art & Craft, we also learn that Landis is a huge fan of old movies and TV shows."

"'Mark has seen almost everything up to a point, maybe the 1970s,' saysArt & Craft producer and director Jennifer Grausman. 'He remembers not only names and titles and actors but lines from all of these movies which do make their way into his vernacular.'"

A Bumpy Ride Airplane Food Through the Decades

"People who fly coach on domestic carriers these days don't expect much from the in-flight service beyond watery soda and maybe a salty snack. Or if they're in the air for a few hours, they might get the option to buy a "meal" that looks like a cross between hospital food and school lunch. But that's not how it used to be."

"Back in the 1920s, just a few adventurers took flight — think Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh — and they usually brought their own sandwiches, according to the History Channel blog, Hungry History."

"As air travel attracted more pleasure passengers in the 1930s, i.e. the wealthy, flight attendants began serving elaborate multicourse meals on real china and with real silver. Airplanes hired teams of cooks and installed brand new heating elements."

Sayonara To Super Size Me Food Companies Cut Calories So Do We

"It just might be the dawn of a new era in American eating. Two-thirds of us are now more likely to go for foods marketed as lower-calorie and "better for you," and that means we're finally eating fewer calories."

"But all this calorie-cutting from our cookies and cupcakes isn't just benevolent behavior on the part of the big food and beverage companies. It's also good for their bottom line."

"As we've reported, 16 companies, including General Mills, Kraft and Nestle, have removed 6.4 trillion calories from the marketplace. The calorie cuts — tracked by the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation — are part of a nationwide effort to tackle the obesity epidemic."

Before You Take A Bite of That Mushroom, Consider This

"If you haven't been DNA-sequencing your dinner lately, you've been missing out. In particular, we suggest examining those spongy, wild fungi before you lay them on your pizza."

"Bryn Dentinger and Laura Suz, mycologists with the Royal Botanic Gardens in Surrey, England, were curious about what was in their marketplace 'shrooms. So they bought a packet of dried Chinese porcini and took it to the lab."

"They picked out 15 pieces and compared sequences of the DNA to a database of known species, creating a phylogenetic tree of Chinese boletes (those are mushrooms with pores rather than gills on the undersides of their caps). What they uncovered, described in PeerJ, were three new species, identified in previous fungi lineages but never before named or described."

Now That's An Artifact: See Mary Cassatt's Pastels At the National Gallery

"Imagine if you could see the pen Beethoven used to write his Symphony No. 5. Or the chisel Michelangelo used to sculpt his David. Art lovers find endless fascination in the materials of artists — a pen, a brush, even a rag can become sacred objects, humanizing a work of art."

"And now, at Washington, D.C.'s National Gallery of Art, visitors can see some of the materials that impressionist Mary Cassatt once used — three well-loved, large wooden boxes of pastels from distinguished Paris art supply stores. Each box is filled with stubby pieces of pastels, some worn down to half an inch, others almost untouched."

Best To Not Sweat the Small Stuff Because It Could Kill You

"Chronic stress is hazardous to health and can lead to early death from heart disease, cancer and of other health problems. But it turns out it doesn't matter whether the stress comes from major events in life or from minor problems. Both can be deadly."

"And it may be that it's not the stress from major life events like divorce, illness and job loss trickled down to everyday life that gets you; it's how you react to the smaller, everyday stress."

"The most stressed-out people have the highest risk of premature death, according to one study that followed 1,293 men for years."

Mammoth On the Move Rare Nearly Intact Skeleton Heads to Dallas

"For tens of thousands of years, the skeleton of a giant mammoth lay in one place: a gravel pit about 50 miles south of Dallas."

"A few months ago, the bones were unearthed — and now they're on the move. Paleontologists are carefully packing them up, preparing them to travel to the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, in Dallas."

"Ethan Beasley, along with his uncle Marty McEwen, discovered the skeleton last May. It was a typical day at the family's sand and gravel company in Ellis County, Texas — until McEwen hit something hard with the excavator. Beasley jumped down from his dump truck and brushed the brown dirt off a few feet of mammoth tusk."

His Camera Takes us to the World We Must Preserve

"They're silvery and stunning — and their beauty bears a message."

"'Genesis' is a new exhibit of more than 200 black-and-white images from the noted Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado. He wants to show us what the world and its peoples look like now, how climate change has already had an impact — and what might be lost if Earth's climate continues changing."

"His pictures will be on view at the International Center of Photography in New York City through Jan. 11. Goats and Soda is featuring four images that show parts of the world that our blog covers. We spoke with Salgado to learn more about his work."