Charles Ebikeme – Australian Science

Weekly Science Picks

Charles Ebikeme — Sun, 01 Dec 2013 08:35:34 +0000

That time of the week again, where we run down some of the more interesting science happenings on the internets.

ISON is dead, long live ISON!

Back at the start of this year, in mapping out what the new year would have in store for the science stories to come, comet ISON topped our list.

“October it will pass very near Mars and possibly be visible to rovers and orbiting spacecraft. The newly discovered comet could develop a spectacular tail, becoming as bright as the full Moon as it passes by our Sun. The comet is currently falling toward the Sun from between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn. There is a chance it won’t survive this encounter. Whatever survives will then pass nearest the Earth in late 2013 December.

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Weekly Science Picks

Charles Ebikeme — Sun, 03 Nov 2013 08:27:18 +0000

Halloween week and we have a collection of scientific goodies for you to dig your teeth into. Some scary, others not, (does not contain smarties).

Halloween’s Debt to a Demonic Virus

“Our demons have their origins in our dread of death and the unknown. Today is Halloween, a time for costuming ourselves and confronting those fears (and, most importantly, for outsized consumption of sweets). For those of us celebrating Halloween disguised as vampires, werewolves and zombies, we owe a great debt to one of the world’s deadliest and most feared zoonotic viruses, rabies. This past summer I wrote about the fascinating microbial origins of some of our most enduring humanoid monsters in “The Bestial Virus: The Infectious Origins of Werewolves, Zombies & Vampires.

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If a bird flies in the forest, does an insect hear it?

Charles Ebikeme — Wed, 23 Oct 2013 00:22:27 +0000

Morpho peleides is a tropical butterfly with a brilliant blue colour. Pilots flying over rainforests have been known to spot large collections of blue morphos above the treetops, warming themselves in the sunshine. The millions of tiny scales on its wings give it a shine and a glean that it uses to scare off predators. In the 115 days of its lifetime, the butterfly will need to fight off predators including birds — who are major predators of many insects including moths, crickets and cicadas. The blue tropical butterfly has ears which researchers believe it uses to avoid predation by birds.

Writing in the journal Biology Letters researchers provide evidence supporting the notion that the ears of an insect can function as “bird detectors

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Weekly Science Picks

Charles Ebikeme — Sun, 06 Oct 2013 10:26:15 +0000

It’s been a slow week, but science never stops. Let’s have a quick look at some of the interesting science-related happenings over the past seven days.

Eileen Pollack, a professor of creative writing at the University of Michigan, is writing a book about women in the sciences, and has a long piece in the New York Times. Worth the read.

Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science?

“Mostly, though, I didn’t go on in physics because not a single professor — not even the adviser who supervised my senior thesis — encouraged me to go to graduate school. Certain this meant I wasn’t talented enough to succeed in physics, I left the rough draft of my senior thesis outside my adviser’s door and slunk away in shame. Pained by the dream I had failed to achieve, I locked my textbooks, lab reports and problem sets in my father’s army footlocker and turned my back on physics and math forever.”

Sciencemag and their “sting” operation that exposed severe lack of even cursory peer review among open-access scientific journals. It seems an alarming number of the publications tested (by submitting a conspicuously flawed paper by a non-existent author from a non-existent third-world institution) seem to be making money at the expense of authors and not even bothering to look at submitted papers.

Who’s Afraid of Peer Review?

“On 4 July, good news arrived in the inbox of Ocorrafoo Cobange, a biologist at the Wassee Institute of Medicine in Asmara. It was the official letter of acceptance for a paper he had submitted 2 months earlier to the Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals, describing the anticancer properties of a chemical that Cobange had extracted from a lichen. In fact, it should have been promptly rejected. Any reviewer with more than a high-school knowledge of chemistry and the ability to understand a basic data plot should have spotted the paper’s short-comings immediately. Its experiments are so hopelessly flawed that the results are meaningless. I know because I wrote the paper. Ocorrafoo Cobange does not exist, nor does the Wassee Institute of Medicine.”

The ever-present, ever-vocal George Monbiot in the pages of the Guardian.

For scientists in a democracy, to dissent is to be reasonable

“It’s as clear and chilling a statement of intent as you’re likely to read. Scientists should be “the voice of reason, rather than dissent, in the public arena”. Vladimir Putin? Kim Jong-un? No, Professor Ian Boyd, chief scientific adviser at the UK’s Department for Environment.”

PopularScience.com will no longer accept comments on new articles. The comments, they feel, are bad for science.

Why We’re Shutting Off Our Comments

“Comments can be bad for science. That’s why, here at PopularScience.com, we’re shutting them off. It wasn’t a decision we made lightly. As the news arm of a 141-year-old science and technology magazine, we are as committed to fostering lively, intellectual debate as we are to spreading the word of science far and wide. The problem is when trolls and spambots overwhelm the former, diminishing our ability to do the latter.”

Until next time…

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Weekly Science Picks

Charles Ebikeme — Sun, 01 Sep 2013 07:40:17 +0000

Sundays. They were meant for science. Without any further ado…

For all those who have always thought about doing what we here at Australian Science do — science blogging — here are some word-shaped pearls of wisdom.

Should you write a science blog?

“I used to think there should really be more scientists blogging. That’s because for me science journalism not so much a source of information but a source of news. It tells me where the action is and points into a direction. If it seems interesting I’ll go and look up the references, but if it’s not a field close to my own I prefer if somebody who actually works on the topic offers an opinion. And I don’t mean a cropped sentence with a carefully chosen adjective and politically correct grammar. In some research areas, quantum gravity one of them, there really aren’t many researchers offering first-hand opinions. Shame on you.

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Red bacteria as astronaut food

Charles Ebikeme — Sat, 17 Aug 2013 00:02:32 +0000

Like something out of Stanley Kubrick’s famed 2001: A Space Odyssey her name is Melissa. Melissa was the first of her kind. Melissa will be there when the first of us touches down on Mars. She will feed and nurture us as we begin our exploration towards the stars. MELiSSA — or Micro-Ecological Life Support System Alternative — is a bioregenerative life-support system designed by the European Space Agency. She uses microorganisms living in interconnected controllable bioreactors to recycle organic waste. Melissa is essentially an artificial ecosystem — one that turns waste into food to feed her crew.

When long space missions start to become commonplace, when we start colonies over the horizon, one of the obstacles will be how to be self-sustaining in space. Within a closed arti

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The language of biofilms

Charles Ebikeme — Tue, 06 Aug 2013 00:01:10 +0000

Every once in awhile, communities form. Collections of similar or diverse things come together, and in unison strive for a common goal. It is the same for mice, men, and bacteria. Humans do it and build nations. Bacteria do it and build biofilms.

Dental plaque, the slimy coating on pipes and tanks, algal mats on a still lake — are all different types of biofilms. Biofilms for us are a nuisance because they colonise medical devices implanted in the human body. They can be used, however, in treating sewage, industrial waste, or contaminated soil.

When a biofilm forms, it is far from random. At its leading edge — the biofilm has purpose and direction. Imagine it as an invading army sending out the vanguards toward an unexplored territory. Highly coherent groups of bacteria migrate across the surface — swarming as one. As they advance, they create furrows for those bacteria at the back to follow. The vanguards carve out a network of trails — one that will eventually guide the exodus — the mass transit of following bacteria towards the leading edges of the biofilm.

Pseudomonas aeruginosa — the bacteria they use to eat up oil spills — is able to colonise many natural and artificial environments. It thrives on most surfaces, and easily causes a problem for implanted medical equipment like catheters. Individual bacteria show distinctive multicellular behaviour. When they grow, patterns and order emerge from seeming chaos. Australian scientists, publishing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, describe the methods they used to visualise movements of individual bacteria, and to characterise the order within. Researchers had to develop sophisticated computer algorithms to visualise, identify and track individual bacteria. Carrying out a time lapse recording of bacteria at one frame every 2 seconds, and visually inspected a 1000-frame time series (download the movie).

As the bio

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Weekly Science Picks

Charles Ebikeme — Sun, 04 Aug 2013 00:27:12 +0000

Science Sunday… our weekly guide and collection of some of the amazing science stories that have caught our eye over the past seven days.

Twelve Months in Two Minutes; Curiosity’s First Year on Mars

Hard to believe Curiosity has been on Mars for twelve short months. Here at Australian Science we’ve covered the tiny rover that could since the start. Now, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab have given us a rover’s eye view of driving, scooping and drilling during Curiosity’s first year on Mars, from August 2012 through July 2013.

Researcher Charged in Wife’s Cyanide Death

Sad and shocking news coming out of the University of Pittsburg where a professor of neurological surgery at the School of Medicine was charged on with criminal homicide in connection with the death of his wife.

“Authorities say that Ferrante poisoned Klein by mixing cyanide with creatine, CBSNews reports. According to Ferrante’s online biography, his work “has provided the basis for human trials” using creatine. Klein consumed the drink because Ferrante told her it would help them conceive a child. Police said that Ferrante had purchased cyanide with a university credit card days before and had it shipped to his lab overnight, and that he had enlisted the assistance of a lab member in buying the cyanide.

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Life of an epidemic: Australian dengue

Charles Ebikeme — Thu, 01 Aug 2013 00:06:40 +0000

It is always a bad sign when crowds gather. On the morning of Wednesday March 21 in the year 1900, a crowd began to gather in Sydney. A thousand people had gathered outside the offices of the Board of Health in Macquarie Street. They had gathered because bubonic plague had broken out. People had already started to die from the Black Death. Panic was the only course of action.

The Government had stockpiled Haffkine’s serum (named after the Russian bacteriologist that developed it in a makeshift laboratory in a corridor of Grant Medical College) — a new plague vaccine, and had used it to inoculate front

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Public Health in the Age of Austerity

Charles Ebikeme — Thu, 25 Jul 2013 00:04:29 +0000

“Care of the public health is the first duty of the statesman

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