Basketball brings hope to Kurdish kids in Turkey
In Turkey’s southeast, years of poverty and conflict has meant few opportunities for Kurds. But a basketball training program is turning out top players who are winning national tournaments and challenging stereotypes. There’s an element of tension pervading Diyarbakir, the largest city in Turkey’s Kurdish region. The police and military keep a tight watch on [...]
Read MoreNatural gas: New regs needed to deal with shale
February 16, 2012 – Antiquated regulations originally designed for conventional oil and gas operations need to be redesigned for the newer era of unconventional shale, according to a report released today by the University of Texas, Austin. The report finds that there are relatively few baseline measurements of water quality in an aquifer before drilling [...]
Read MoreBlog: A funeral in Jalay Town, Liberia
We have arrived in Jalay Town, a tiny village in Liberia’s south, right in the middle of 10-day long funeral festivities. The drumming begins late at night, around 11 pm, and continues till sunup. The village usually doesn’t have electricity but generators have been on every night, as though the very act of lighting up [...]
Read MoreNature News: Better biosurveillance could halt disease spread
Germany is still recovering from one of the world’s worst outbreaks of enterohaemorrhagic Escherichia coli, which as of 18 June had sickened more than 3,200 people and caused 39 deaths1. The unusually deadly bacteria moved undetected through the food supply from livestock to agriculture to the dinner table, and the response to the outbreak was branded slow and inefficient by physicians and scientists (see ‘Microbe outbreak panics Europe’).
Now a group of health professionals assembled by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, has called for biosurveillance efforts in the United States and worldwide to be streamlined to help recognize and respond to threats quickly [...]
Read MoreCrack 03.09
March, 2009—Amy Keenan, 25, sat in her faded denim jacket and blue jeans as the cold March wind blew. Her fair skin was pockmarked — red spots surrounded her forehead and mouth. She picked at her face when she smoked crack cocaine sitting on the rooftops of the Van Dyke projects in Brooklyn. As she [...]
Read MoreBLOG: Monkey business in Gorilla Agreement
It has been 3 years since the Year of the Gorilla and host countries – except Rwanda – have not paid up? What does that say about commitment to Gorilla conservation? From March 30, 2011 technical committee meeting: 16. As agreed at the first Meeting of the Parties, each Party is expected to pay an [...]
Read MoreBLOG: Farming (Kenya)
A slight detour brought us to an unpaved road called the “Pipeline”, small holder farmers in the Rift Valley, a Saturday funeral and small children shouting, “Hello! How are you?”
Read MoreBLOG: High expectations for melanoma drug ipilimumab
I wrote about the cancer drug ipilimumab last year, which has been hailed as miraculous by some. The drug has been through Phase 3 clinical trials and results will be presented on June 6 at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO). Meanwhile, following announcements of the miracle cure in three [...]
Read MoreAcademic article: Inhibitors of the enzyme AK
Identification and Biochemical Studies on Novel Non-Nucleoside Inhibitors of the Enzyme Adenosine Kinase Authored by Jae Park, Gayathri Vaidyanathan, Bhag Singh & Radhey Gupta Department of Biochemistry & Biomedical Sciences, McMaster University Adenosine Kinase is an enzyme that adds a phosphate to adenosine. Adenosine is one of four bases in DNA, and when it has [...]
Read MoreIn Search of Chlamydia
The cement trough yawns below me, an abyss filled with streaming sewage hundreds of feet below. The smell is pungent and faintly urine-like as wastewater from streams and rivers mixes with household waste to create a haven for the bacterium that is my nemesis: Chlamydia.
“You know what’s in the sewage?” asks the beefy engineer at the Woodward Avenue water purification plant in Hamilton, a small city in Ontario once famous for its steel. These days, it is more known for its non-achievements: steel mill layoffs, Ti-Cats football fanatics who shout “Oskie-Wee-Wee! Oskie-Wa-Wa! Holy mackinaw! Tigers…ha! Ha! Ha!” even as their team repeatedly loses, and an underdeveloped downtown core with an overdeveloped pigeon problem.
But Hamilton is also a city of waterfalls and streams, rivers and harbors, all a natural home for Chlamydia. As, of course, is sewage.
“Corn,” the engineer answers himself seriously. “Corn doesn’t get digested. It passes through the intestine intact.”
Read MoreRaj Rajarathnam’s Bail
Raj Rajaratnam looked unusually charming in person. Surrounded by a troupe of lawyers inside the magisterial courtroom in Manhattan’s Second District Courthouse, he was calm, unflappable and dressed in a uniform black. A newspaper sketch artist hovered around him like a fly, closely studying his sideburns for exact representation in pastels.
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