Northern Circumpolar Soil calendar 2008
Supporting the International Polar Year, March 2007 to March 2009 (two years are needed to cover all the seasons in northern and southern hemispheres), the European Union have published a rather smart 2008 calendar on Northern Cirumpolar Soils (9MB pdf).Each month is dedicated to a different soil type, for example January covers Cryosols (from the…
The Nutrition Delusion
Sorry to harp back to Gary Taubes’ Diet Delusion again. I make no pretence at having read the book, just Taubes’ own ‘teaser’ in New Scientist last week. Rather than be ‘teased’ by the ‘comment & analysis’ piece, I have been left somewhat annoyed. To accuse the nutrition profession of creating ‘a field of clinical…
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 – 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…
Cryptosporidium and Giardia in drinking water: not just a problem for industrialised countries
Dr. Lucy Robertson, a speaker at the 8th Central American and Caribbean Congress on Parasitology and Tropical Medicine 2007, points out that as countries strive to improve their standards of public health, we should find it intolerable to accept the transmission of these infections via drinking water anywhere. Of the parasitic infections with a…
Biofuel – the burning issues
It is still an open question whether biofuel can meet a significant proportion of the world’s 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…