What constitutes racism? If you have a pool of applicants for a research grant and applications with good scores were likely to be funded, regardless of race or ethnicity, can there be racism? A recent survey of NIH R01 applications found that applications from black investigators were 13.2 % less likely to be awarded than whites while Asian investigators were 3.9 % less likely to...
read moreLook, we all know smoking is bad for you by now. We don't need to spend billions of dollars telling people that but an entire industry has been built around getting people to stop, and it is primarily funded by penalties on tobacco companies and taxes. It's a truly parasitic relationship but it isn't going anywhere and anti-smoking groups need smokers to stay in business....
read moreI have said many times I think people are terrifically smart; they know a lot of science, though they tend to frame it through their politics. The numbers bear me out - science literacy in adults has tripled since I went to college but even that was framed in a "it's not enough" context by some science writers and while there are 65 million people just in the US who are interested in...
read moreFive years into the Science 2.0 experiment I can tell you down to the eyeball how many people are involved in the communication pillar of it - but in the collaboration realm, it's not so easy.Science 2.0 fave Heather A. Piwowar from the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Pitt recently gave it a shot, and the answer was...it's unknown.read...
read moreResearchers in Singapore have re-engineered a harmless strain of bacteria to fight another common, drug-resistant microbe that spreads in hospitals and is deadly to patients with weak immune systems.To fight the Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacterium, the scientists used a strain of the E.coli bacteria that is normally present in the human gut.They inserted into E.coli foreign DNA fragments that...
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