Joined up science
Usually, when the urge to blog comes over me, I can wait until the urge goes away and bothers someone else, or until enough time has passed to make the reason for the blog obsolete. On this occasion, however, the urge hasn’t gone away and I hope you’ll forgive me for alerting your attention to…
Omega-3 fatty acids ā what have we learned?
Animal studies have suggested that a specific fatty acid, docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), plays a role in the development of cognitive abilities. So will taking extra DHA as a child make you cleverer?
The new HIV or just an outbreak of boils?
An aggressive and drug resistant version of the hospital superbug MRSA is spreading through the gay community in San Francisco. The infection rate is doubled in areas with a high gay population compared to the whole of the city. A study in Annals of Internal Medicine raised the alarm but some newspapers were way over…
Biofuel ā the burning issues
It is still an open question whether biofuel can meet a significant proportion of the worldās energy needs, say John Fike and co-authors in a paper in CAB Reviews
Review of 2007
Happy New Year and a big thank you to all those who subscribe or read our blog. It was a good 2007 for the hand picked … and carefully sorted with a full calendar year of blogging under our belt, turning 1 year old on 2nd November. We posted 167 articles on a variety of…
Rudolf the Parasitized Reindeer
I tend to think of Rudolf the red-nosed reindeer as being part of the rather tacky side of Christmas which has never greatly appealed to me, but the other day I came across a reference in a free magazine that came through my door which I thought was worth investigating. A section on ‘festive oddities’…
Kiss – don’t shake hands?
Something to contemplate under the Christmas mistletoe: We could be more at risk of picking up illnesses from shaking hands than from kissing says a press release from experts at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. See their studies in British Medical Journal and American Journal of Infection Control on hand hygiene. Certainly…
Could blue be next year’s green?
Whilst reading the Marine Conservation Biology Institute blog I came across a link to a piece in the Economist entitled Blue in green. The article argued that green is the colour synonymous with environmentalism but isn’t this rather a anthropocentric, terrestrialist viewpoint? I agree, it probably is. We use green to describe groups who monitor…
Wash your handsā¦not your turkey!
Whatever this manās doing with this turkey, itās safer than giving it a bath For those of you tempted to give your Christmas turkey a bath before the big day, STOP. This is madness, what were you thinking?! I don’t want to be a party poo-per, but really there are more entertaining ways to spend…
GREENhouse appeal.
The Living Rainforest, near Newbury in the UK, has launched an appeal to find sponsors for the building of a state-of-the-art āGreen Greenhouseā building prototype. The aim is to raise Ā£900,000 matched funding to complete construction of the Ā£3.5m building. Unsustainable food/crop production and increasing energy costs mean that new methods of production must be…