Tag: scientists

I get a box full of disease detectives!

Oh, all right, not the actual detectives themselves, but my latest book from Enslow, Disease-Hunting Scientist: Careers Hunting Deadly Disease. That’s the cover at left. Here’s the blurb from the back: Working from high-tech labs in Canada or remote villages in Africa, epedemiologists travel the world trying to keep us safe from deadly diseases. Learn how …

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Disease-Hunting Scientist: Marta Guerra and Ebola

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/06/marta-guerra-and-ebola.mp3[/podcast] Here’s one last column condensed from a chapter in my new children’s book Disease-Hunting Scientist: Careers Hunting Deadly Diseases (Enslow Publishers): In the movie Outbreak, researchers from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have to figure out how to stop a kind …

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The artificial scientist

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/the-artificial-scientist.mp3[/podcast] As I’ve noted before, the very first science column I wrote, ca. 1991, was entitled, “What is a scientist?” Last year I re-ran that column with minor editing: the answer to the question hadn’t changed in 17 years. But it may have changed now. That’s because researchers at Cornell University have created a computer …

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Why flies are so hard to swat

Michael Dickinson is a genius. At least, in 2001 the University of California, Berkeley, professor received one of the $500,000 “genius” grants given annually by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to creative individuals “who provide the imagination and fresh ideas that can improve people’s lives and bring about movement on important issues.” …

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Willett of the Day: Christopher S. Willett, biologist

Today’s Willett of the Day is Christopher S. Willett, Ph.D., Research Assistant Professor in te Department of Biology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. I’ll let him explain his research: My research addresses the nature of genetic variation that underlies speciation and adaptation. Specifically, I attempt to unravel how genetic changes at the …

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"Most research findings are false"?

That’s what John P. A. Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at the University of Ioannina School of Medicine, Ioannina, Greece, and Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies at Tufts University, believes, and has stated in an essay in PLoS Medicine: Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a …

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So you think your job is bad?

Whenever you think you have the worst job in the world, there’s a sure-fire antidote: check out Popular Science‘s annual listing of the Worst Jobs in Science. Tenth on the list this year: whale-feces researcher. Rosalind Rolland, a senior researcher at the New England Aquarium in Boston, combs the Bay of Fundy looking for brown …

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The see-food diet

There’s an old joke that goes, “I’m on a see-food diet. When I see food, I eat it.” Brian Wansink, John S. Dyson Professor of Marketing and of Applied Economics at Cornell, says there’s a lot of truth to that old joke—and he’s done a lot of studies to prove it. (He’s also the author …

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How to add two years to your lifespan:

It’s easy. All you have to do is win a Nobel Prize. OK, maybe not that easy…

You go, professor!

Stephen Hawking is planning a trip into space for 2009, courtesy of Richard Branson at Virgin Galactic. I can’t think of anyone who deserves a free trip more.

The worst jobs in science

Just last week, at the conclusion of the column on the dinosaur extinction debate, I wrote this: “Science is anything but a collection of dull facts: it’s a living, breathing, growing and very human enterprise. That’s what makes it fascinating.” That is, of course, true (would I lie to you?), but the fact is, nothing …

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Dr. Tom Wenaus and the Superconducting Super Collider

A couple of years ago I wrote a column about one of the biggest scientific projects of our time, the Superconducting Super Collider, currently under construction in Texas.  I didn’t know at the time that a Regina man is one of the scientists working on it.   Dr. Torre Wenaus is a staff physicist at …

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