Shelly needs your help! Shelly over at Retrospectacle is in the running for a $10,000 scholarship for her blog. There are 10 finalists, the winner being chosen by votes. So go vote! Shelly’s blog is excellent and she deserves every cent of that scholarship (school is expensive!). No excuses, go vote now.

Hilary Clinton is putting on the boxing gloves now, accusing Bush of waging a “war on science”.

Hillary Clinton Thursday accused President George W. Bush of waging a ‘war on science’ in a preview of a looming 2008 election battle over stem cell research, global warming and energy.

“For six-and-a-half years under this president, it’s been open season on open inquiry. By ignoring and manipulating science, the Bush administration is letting our economic competitors get an edge,” Clinton said.

Hat tip to Framing Science.

Don’t worry, I’ll get some real content out soon. This week has been absurdly busy

TED talks are always very interesting. I make a point to watch a few whenever I get a chance. One particularly interesting talk is by Sir Ken Robinson, professional creativity expert. He talks about how the traditional school system destroys creativity in students. Very interesting, give it a watch if you have a few minutes.

Anyone who says evolution isn’t real should take pause at this new study (they won’t, but that is neither her nor there). A study published today in Science demonstrates that a common orchard pest, codling moths, has evolved extremely rapidly to be resistant to current methods of eradication. The resistant gene is sex-linked and grants the moths almost 100,000 fold resistance.

More details after the jump.
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Anyone else think this sounds like a bad idea?

On September 26-27, scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) will host an international, interdisciplinary conference on the proposed “iron fertilization” of the ocean as a means to combat rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Several times over the past century, scientists and environmental engineers have proposed spreading slurries of dissolved iron into the oceans in order to “fertilize” the waters and promote vast blooms of marine plants (phytoplankton). Phytoplankton consume carbon dioxide as they grow, and this growth can be stimulated in certain ocean basins by the addition of iron, a necessary micronutrient.

Of course, thats the point of the symposium, to look into the idea and see if its a bad idea. Still, I can’t get out of my head the image of uncontrolled algae growth strangling all life in the ocean. More information can be found here

Physorg is carrying a report on the Huntington’s disease study I just wrote. I’m still quite new when it comes to writing articles on scientific reports so I find it interesting when a more mainstream, professionally trained journalist writes about the same thing I did.

The article is quite a bit simpler than my report. After reading the article from Physorg and then re-reading my own article, I think both of us missed the target. I feel theirs is a bit too simple, leaving out some important details (although it does accurately portray the main points of the study) while mine was a bit too technical, getting bogged down in little details along the way. Perhaps we just have different audiences, as I like to keep my articles tailored to people that have a decent level of knowledge on the subject of molecular and cellular neuroscience.

Either way, it was interesting to read another perspective of the same article. Writing concise, accurate and interesting reports on scientific material that appeals to a large audience is much more challenging than I originally thought. I’m constantly trying to improve how I write. I think I’ll try to simplify more difficult concepts and avoid smaller, technical details as I continue writing.

That said, this line just made me laugh:

Goldman’s team set up a one-two molecular punch as a recipe for generating new medium spiny neurons, to replace those that had become defective in mice with the disease.

Iraq War Costing $720 Million Each Day. Painful, isn’t it?

The money spent on one day of the Iraq war could buy homes for almost 6,500 families or health care for 423,529 children, or could outfit 1.27 million homes with renewable electricity, according to the American Friends Service Committee, which displayed those statistics on large banners in cities nationwide Thursday and Friday.

The war is costing $720 million a day or $500,000 a minute, according to the group’s analysis of the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard public finance lecturer Linda J. Bilmes.

That works out to $8,000 every second. But hey, its ok. Its for national security! Don’t you feel safer, knowing we turned an entire country into a black-market playground for individuals that hate America? And I’m sure we’ve converted half the population of Iraq from neutral individuals just trying to get by in life to anti-western extremists. Hell, if someone occupied my country I would feel the same way. Good work, US government!

My generation’s classroom has been slowly invaded with technology. Not the good technology like projectors and computers and other useful tools to increase learning. Those are fine with me. Our classrooms have been invaded by obnoxious gadgets and websites that replace good, old fashioned teaching. Frankly, I’m sick of it.

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Seemed apt.

Not a neuroscience article but undeniably cool nonetheless: One species’ entire genome discovered inside another’s

Scientists at the University of Rochester and the J. Craig Venter Institute have discovered a copy of the entire genome of a bacterial parasite residing inside the genome of its host species.

Werren doesn’t believe that the Wolbachia “intentionally” insert their genes into the hosts. Rather, it is a consequence of cells routinely repairing their damaged DNA. As cells go about their regular business, they can accidentally absorb bits of DNA into their nuclei, often sewing those foreign genes into their own DNA.

“Such transfers have happened before in the distant past” notes Werren. “In our very own cells and those of nearly all plants and animals are mitochondria, special structures responsible for generating most of our cells’ supply of chemical energy. These were once bacteria that lived inside cells, much like Wolbachia does today. Mitochondria still retain their own, albeit tiny, DNA, and most of the genes moved into the nucleus in the very distant past. Like wolbachia, they have passively exchanged DNA with their host cells. It’s possible wolbachia may follow in the path of mitochondria, eventually becoming a necessary and useful part of a cell.

“In a way, wolbachia could be the next mitochondria,” says Werren. “A hundred million years from now, everyone may have a wolbachia organelle.”

Edit: Here is a fascinating article looking at the endosymbiotic properties of another small organism. Very interesting.