A long overdue apology to any of ScienceHon’s remaining visitors! Since the new year began, I have been extremely busy with bench work (experiments and data analysis) for my dissertation. I do plan to pick back up with blogging when downtime allows! Thanks for your patience and if you would like to receive updates when [...]
Author Archives: Donna Calu
Jan
09
2009
It sure is bright tonight!
When you look out the window at the moon this weekend, you might notice that it seems extra bright. This is because our moon travels in an elliptical orbit around Earth, and will reach its closest distance to our planet, termed the perigee, on Saturday night, which just so happens to be a full moon. [...]
Dec
26
2008
A Boxing Day “Knockout”
In the left corner, wearing the white coat, Dr. Qi-Long Ying!
Call it a Boxing Day breakthrough, research appearing in the December 26th issue of Cell could go down in history as a knockout event! For the first time, a group of scientists have derived rat embryonic stem cells, a finding that is likely to revolutionize [...]
Dec
11
2008
The Brain on Jury Duty
The public reaction to OJ Simpson’s recent sentencing of nine years in prison, seemed to be one of complacent relief. From the news media to the general public, many seemed to share a distinctively dismissive feeling that, finally, justice had been served. For many, the images of OJ back in the courtroom summoned up dusty [...]
Dec
08
2008
The Hadron Hiatus
While Swiss and French residents living upstairs from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), an underground, super-sized subatomic particle smasher, may have feared apocalyptic conditions after an equipment failure, the actual outcome of September’s faulty fuse is merely a sooty, expensive mess that will postpone future collisions until next summer.
A report released Friday by CERN details [...]
Dec
02
2008
Body Swapping
When I was a kid, my dad and I plummeted down Niagara Falls together in a beer barrel. Well, maybe not exactly. In reality, we handed a man five dollars, walked up the steps into a trailer on hydraulic stilts, and sat down in front of a movie screen. The next thing we knew we [...]
Dec
02
2008
Anti-Epilepsy Drug Linked to an Increased Risk for Autism
A study released today in Neurology reports that mothers treated with valproate during pregnancy were seven times more likely than untreated mothers to have a child who developed autism. The study, conducted by the Liverpool and Manchester Neurodevelopment Group, suggests there is a potentially increased risk for autism in children exposed prenatally to valproate, a [...]
Nov
28
2008
Aging is one SIRTainty in life: for uni- and multicelular lifeforms!
In today’s issue of Cell magazine, an evolutionarily conserved protein, SIRT, takes the spotlight in the hit research drama, “Why we Weather with Age”. Researchers from Harvard Medical school demonstrate that the part SIRT plays in DNA damage control during aging may be to blame for some of the ugly symptoms of growing old.
Mammalian protein [...]
Nov
22
2008
Buried Martian Ice Discovered: Clues into the ‘Life on Mars’ Mystery?
Earthling’s obsession with the possibility of life on Mars dates back to the 19th century, when Italian astronomer, Giovanni Schiaparelli believed that he observed long, narrow channels on the red planet. These crevasses were interpreted and popularized by author/astronomer Percival Lowell to be irrigation canals built by ancient civilizations of martians who were struggling to [...]
Nov
21
2008
Fish on Prozac
While a story about mellow, happy fish may sound like a sport-fisherman’s dream, Prozac in the water could prove to be a fish’s worst nightmare. Fish and invertebrates living downstream of urban water and sewage treatment plants around the world have detectable levels of antidepressants in their systems. While actual concentrations in surface waters are [...]
