Category: Blog
The folks at 3 Quarks Daily are winnowing down the entrants for the best science blog post of the year. They want you to help select the finalists by voting for your favorite post from the 87 nominees. (The Loom makes an appearance at #76 with “The Human Lake.”) You can vote till June 8, 11:59 PM EST.
Originally published June 5, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
During the whole arsenic life kerfuffle, chemist Steven Benner expressed his skepticism early and often. He wrote one of the eight critiques that Science posted last week, six months after the initial paper.
Last night Benner sent me an email:
Carl:
I have now blogged on this, since the cycle of publication at Science is rather slow.
Steve
To which I can only say: Heh. And, Read it!
Originally published June 3, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
One of the most important things that virus-hunters do is “de-discover” links between viruses and diseases. In other words, they follow up on studies that indicate a link and see if it can really hold up. Last year, a team of scientists published a paper in Science in which they reported that 67% of people they studied who suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome carried a virus in their system known as XMRV. Only 3.7% of healthy people did. That association then morphed into the idea that XMRV actually causes chronic fatigue (a condition that afflicts an estimated 60 million people worldwide). Some people with chronic fatigue have sought anti-viral medicines based on the finding, declaring that they’ve felt better as a result. But when a lot of other scientists tried to find XMRV, they failed to do so.
Continue reading “The chronic fatigue virus: de-discovered?”
The blog 3 Quarks Daily awards an annual prize for the best science blog post of the year. This year, Harvard physicist Lisa Randall is judging the entries. The deadline is May 31 11:59 pm EST. If there’s a blog post that has really stood out in your memory from the past year (since May 22, 2010 to be precise), go here to nominate it.
Originally published May 28, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
The World Science Festival is going to kick off on Wednesday in New York (I’ll be speaking Thursday on a panel, on telling the stories of science in print and online.) The festival organizers have been publishing a blog on some of the topics that will be explored next week. Riffing on the session on sleep, I’ve just contributed a piece on some wonderful recent research on what it means for us to be asleep and to be awake–and the surprising porous wall that divides the two states of mind. Check it out.
Originally published May 28, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
