In an annual letter to investors, Google CEO Larry Page said exactly what he was supposed to say. Google is great, but needs to stay focused. Search is awesome, but needs to work better. Tablets are cool. Social is the future, and Google gets social. As a document, the letter is boring and fluffy and not even bold enough to be wrong. Except for that last part: The Google+ Larry Page talks about in this letter is a Google+ that doesn't exist for anyone but him. Google understands social only in that it knows it needs social. Google+ is not working. Here's how Page characterized the network: Well over 100 million users are active on Google+, and we’re seeing a positive impact across the Web, ... Continue reading →
"Plants smell," says botanist David Chamovitz. Yes, they give off odors, but that's not what Chamovitz means. He means plants can smell other plants. "Plants know when their fruit is ripe, when their [plant] neighbor has been cut by a gardener's shears, or when their neighbor is being eaten by a ravenous bug; they smell it," he writes in his new book, What a Plant Knows. They don't have noses or a nervous system, but they still have an olfactory sense, and they can differentiate. He says there's a vine that can smell the difference between a tomato and a stalk of wheat. It will choose one over the other, based on...smell! In a moment I'll show you how. This talented plant is commonly known ... Continue reading →
The chickens that saved Western civilization were discovered, according to legend, by the side of a road in Greece in the first decade of the fifth century B.C. The Athenian general Themistocles, on his way to confront the invading Persian forces, stopped to watch two cocks fighting and summoned his troops, saying: “Behold, these do not fight for their household gods, for the monuments of their ancestors, for glory, for liberty or the safety of their children, but only because one will not give way to the other.” The tale does not describe what happened to the loser, nor explain why the soldiers found this display of instinctive aggression inspirational rather than pointless and depressing. But history records that the Greeks, thus heartened, went on ... Continue reading →
Flukes that parasitize amphibians The enemy of my enemy is my friend—especially if I’m a frog and my enemies are competing parasites. A recent study in PNAS found that frogs populations exposed to a more diverse set of flukes actually had lower rates of infection, with fewer frogs in the group afflicted with tiny hitchhikers. Researchers at the University of Colorado-Boulder bred Pacific chorus frogs in a lab and put their tadpoles in different tanks with anywhere from one to six different types of flukes. On average, 40% of the frogs that came into contact with only a single fluke species developed infections, while 34% of frogs exposed to four flukes and 23% of frogs exposed to six flukes were infected (the numbers for two, ... Continue reading →
Photo: Jaap Scheeren On a bright May afternoon in 2007, a German artist and printmaker named Hans-Jürgen Kuhl took a seat at an outdoor café directly opposite the colossal facade of the Cologne Cathedral. He ordered an espresso and a slice of plum cake, lit a Lucky Strike, and watched for the buyer. She was due any minute. Kuhl, a lanky 65-year-old, had to remind himself that he was in no rush. He’d sold plenty of artwork over the years, but this batch was altogether different. He needed to be patient. Tourists milled about the platz in front of the cathedral, Germany’s most visited landmark, craning their necks to snap pictures of the impossibly intricate spires jutting toward the heavens. Kuhl knew those spires well. ... Continue reading →
The packages that started arriving by FedEx on 12 October last year came with strict instructions: protect the information within and destroy it after review. Inside were two manuscripts showing how the deadly H5N1 avian influenza virus could be made to transmit between mammals. The recipients of these packages — eight members of the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) — faced the unenviable task of deciding whether the research was safe to publish. The group deliberated. Soon, the rest of the NSABB's 22 voting members and two dozen non-voting members and advisers were drawn in. For five-and-a-half weeks, they pored over the data in the papers, weighing the benefits of sharing the information against the risk that doing so might lead to ... Continue reading →
Brian Reid Brian Reid is a former reporter for Bloomberg who’s now a director at PR/communications firm WCG. He’s written three guest posts for Embargo Watch: one on how the embargo system could break, another on what moving science reporting upstream could mean for embargoes, and a third on what would happen if medical and science reporting was more like legal reporting. In this post, he takes a look at the effects of changing embargo policies at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting. Until 4 years ago, late May was a colorful time in the world of biotech. Shares of companies developing cancer drugs would gyrate wildly in advance of the beginning of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting, despite ... Continue reading →
