Huntington’s Disease (HD) is one of those rare diseases for which we know the exact genetic cause. If either of your parents bequeathed to you a huntingtin gene with extra CAG repeats, you will one day succumb to this terrible illness. This means that if you have a family history of HD, you can choose to have yourself tested and thus learn your inevitable fate, at least with regards to HD.Graphic showing the excessive repetitions of the cytosine-adenine-guanine (CAG) nucleotide sequence in a […]

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how quickly penicillin resistance was discovered not long before it was distributed to the public, and how even Alexander Fleming noted his worries over penicillin resistance in the closing of his Nobel prize acceptance speech. But even in the process of researching this article, I realised that I was merely scratching the surface. You see penicillin was not the first antibiotic discovered. If I want to talk about the first discovery of antibiotic […]

Since the last Around the Blogs in 78 hours, we saw some announcements for GraphLab as a company, some calls for SPARC 2013 and GlobalSIP. All of these news in listed below. It even looks like some of you took advantage of the different groups set up for that purpose. Good! To recap, we now have the Google+ Community (384), the CompressiveSensing subreddit (115), the LinkedIn Compressive Sensing group (2273) or the Matrix Factorization (660). With these numbers, it would be a wise choice to […]

    # 7292     Starting yesterday, and running through tomorrow (May 21st), the 113th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology is being held in Denver. The 275 page Final Program provides details on the participants, schedules, scientific sessions, and poster sessions.   As we saw last year (see Webcast: ASM Live San Francisco 2012), for those of us not able to attend the next best thing is ASM’s series of live webcasts (almost […]

This well-constructed and engaging "flap book" is interesting, accurate and highly interactive -- a wonderful introduction to space for young children. Do you like flaps in your books? Even though I am an adult, I really like books with flaps. So knowing that, it's almost a foregone conclusion that I'd really enjoy Rob Lloyd Jones's new children's book, Look inside space [Usborne Publishing, 2012; Amazon UK; Amazon US]. That this is a children's science book makes it even better. Have you […]