Usually, plants growing in cold regions use special chemicals as anti-freeze. This bacterium, though, secretes Ice Nucleation-active proteins to make ice crystals grow at temperatures as high as -2C. The crystals cause damage to cell walls of plants, and the bacterium vacuums up the nutrients released. So, they use ice crystals as straw, although the name “syringae” doesn’t come from there. Rather, it comes from the plants they were isolated from at first:
It is named after the lilac tree (Syringa vulgaris), from which it was first isolated[2]
It’s in this nice graph, from the latest edition of Nature. Sad to see Italy lagging behind, I did not expect the 4% that Sweden pulls but at least 2%, come on!!!
The latest analysis from the US National Science Board confirms that Israel leads the world in its economic devotion to research and development (R&D). Its civilian R&D spending in 2005 accounted for 4.71% of gross domestic product (GDP), more than twice the average among members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Although US R&D investment was the world’s largest ( $340 billion ) and in 2004, it was more than that of the rest of the G7 nations combined, the report offers some evidence of a slight decline in its standing. Its 2.57% share of GDP is comfortably above the OECD average of 2.25%, but both South Korea and Switzerland have leapfrogged ahead of the United States by this measure since the board’s previous report in 2006. Germany could now be poised to do the same. Most countries are investing more in R&D than they were, says Arden Bement, director of the National Science Foundation, which published the report. For example, although China ranks 23rd in GDP share ( just 1.34% ) it has pulled ahead to third in total R&D investment with an estimated $115 billion in 2005.
I am most surprised at the incredible figure for Israel expenditure: almost 5% of the GDP in R&D. and I thought they had to spend all of their GDP in weapons to keep their many enemies at bay…
Seen yesterday Long Way Down’s Episode where they are in Rwanda. Ewan Mc Gregor goes through Rwanda by Motorbike and stops by the national Park to see the Gorillas.
I am not sure they would let ‘normal people get so close to them, but if they do, I understand why the prices are so high. They will want to keep visits to a minimum (once a day, at dusk) yet have enough money to run the conservation program off it.
All in all, it seemed a pretty well-run operation, and since the experience must be soo fantastic I am reconsidering it. Trouble is, there may be not any ticket left for when we’ll arrive there. Well, in case may be I’ll come back another time.
copy-paste from Null-Hypothesis , which dubs itself as The Journal of Unlikely Science. It came to me through the facebook group We’re scientists AND we’re sexy! Ok, I admit, I am a member of it. Yeah, right. Me. Sexy. Ouch! It Hurts.
I Tawt I Taw A Puddy Tat
By Jamie Lawson
Scientists in California have been busy flashing images at people again. This is a favourite game of psychophysicists the world over, being a nice way of measuring reaction times to… well, Visual Things. This time they’ve been looking to see if people pay more attention to evolutionarily salient objects like lions and impala rather than novelties like cars, tables and lamps.
The result will come as no surprise to the evolutionary psychologists in the crowd. When presented with pairs of images, each flashed rapidly and identical except for a tiny change, participants were much faster and more accurate at identifying changes involving animals (including humans) than those involving your aforementioned inanimate things, even if the animal was hardly visible at all. This also held true when a failure to notice the inanimate object in the scenes would normally be associated with sudden and messy death, such as is the case with cars.
The explanation? Well, back in the day, humans would have benefited from attention to things that they could hunt and eat (like impala) as well as to things that could eat them (like lions) and things that may have filled both categories (like… each other). Humans who ignored these objects moving about would presumably have died from either a) starvation or b) being killed and/or eaten, so a tendency to attend to animate objects became hardwired in to the human visual system. Things like cars, although life threatening, are just far too modern to have been incorporated.
So, the good news is that you are very likely to spot a big cat as it sneaks up on you with every intention of making you its lunch. Sadly, in moving to avoid it, you may just end up being crushed beneath the wheels of a bus you have entirely failed to notice. Ah well, swings and roundabouts, eh?
It happens sometimes that the job done by a single scientist get published with more than his name on it. He’s usually the first author, except in Italy and other third world countries, where some professors pretend them to be on top. He’s relegated to second place, unless the professor above has a favorite pupil who needs a push to get/stay into the tenure track.
Anyway, this post is not about unjust usurpation of authorship at the hand of elder academics. It is rather on the careless co-authorships practiced in some research groups, where all those belonging share authorships to any papers so as to augment their paper count in their CVs. Bad, bad practice indeed, especially when they happen to admit candidly during an interview “Oh, no, I didn’t really know anything about that work, I was in the group so I got my name on it” – then why on earth did you insert it in your CV as relevant qualification, you dumb4$$?
I was shocked when a colleague recently said that after two years of work she had eight publications, plus countless posters and participations to meetings. needless to say, seven of those eight were of the aforementioned kind. And who on earth would care about which meetings and school you attended, unless you presented one at the first or were prized as best-in-class at the latters?
I try to put only first-author papers on my CV. which also implies it is desperately short. But at least I know I can defend that work with my claws, whereas if somebody is mifdly interested in me can always look up the other papers on pubmed or elsewhere and discover which fields I also happened to brush on. I probably know more than the average person in those, but don’t claim nor brag to being an expert about them.
Why am I doing this post, you may ask? Oh, because Nature just came out with a similar theme this weekend. With a wider view than mine, in fact, covering the responsibilities of co-authors on the scientific accuracy of the papers, real-world cases and so on. Go and read it, it’s certainly better than my rants anyway.
Once again, Carl Zimmer surprises us: I thought he was concentrating solely on his soon-to-come book on E. Coli, instead he’s busy on many fronts, the latest of which to come to fruition to us non-paying readers is his NY Times piece on migratory birds sleep. Check it out, as it is certainly worth. I, in my humble ignorance, would never have though that a bird could fly non stop for eight days. now, that’s ENDURANCE.
The new Nature is out, (since a couple of days, in fact) with a nice piece on the difficulties facing the development and approval of biomarkers-based cancer diagnostic assays.
Quickly, they work by taking a broad look at the proteins (or RNA, or else) expressed in your body at the moment, and compare them with similar sample in healthy and sick people. if the fingerprints (protein prints, or RNA-prints, or else-prints) match, then there’s a good chance that you may share the same medical condition.
Trouble is, these tests do not yet seem able to differentiate between different kind of cancer enough to be useful in suggesting a treatment. To do so, large, long, expensive clinical trials are necessary. And the companies that produce those diagnostics do not have that kind of money. Pharmaceutical companies do, and they also have some interest in this: with clear diagnoses and treatment indication,s their drugs could be given only to patients likely to responds. Of course, this means that they would sell more or less drugs than they currently do. It can go both ways.
However, there are good chances. If it is true that the UK government will soon require certainty of effect on drugs before re-imbursing them to the company, then such a test would act as a shield in those cases where the drug were not to work nonetheless. I guess a middle ground will have to be found, with the government accepting a certain rate of failure in the prediction of the treatment and therefore shouldering the price of ineffective drugs rather than unloading it onto an already unstable pharmaceutical complex. Whether you like them (us) or not, the world needs new medicine and that’s the most efficient way to create them.
The new Nature is out. I’ve stolen the time to my paper-writing to read the brief news, if not the real papers, but really can’t discuss them right now. Too damn busy…
Draft is due tomorrow and I am still adding data to the discussion and introductory session!!! Bad bad practice.
Anyway, nature you have to pay for, but you can get the Neglected Disease report for free. So, go and check it out.
