General Science

This article should be of interest to most scientists, it's about alcohol. The authors summarize what's being done to make alcohol less toxic and dangerous. They also mention some alcohol mimetic drugs that are being developed.

The British version of AAAS is having it's annual science week. One of the events is a vote for the nation's favorite science experiment. This site has some pretty funny videos of Brits doing fun science experiments, like mentos in diet coke and a LN2 banana hammer.

This science blogger brings up some intriguing, although purely correlative, studies linking human mammary tumor virus (HMTV) to human breast cancer. This virus could, in theory, jump from mice to humans. As a breast cancer researcher I don't think these data hold a lot of weight, but it can be useful to keep our eyes on what's outside the box.

I haven't looked into the underlying mechanism behind why I can't get a tan, but this article did it for me. Fascinating summary about why some people can't tan, why tanning might be protective for skin cancer, and possible treatments to prevent cancer based on these pathways.

A nice, short NY Times article that summarizes a recent publication on contamination levels in public places. The conclusion, bathrooms are cleaner than playgrounds.

p63 (a p53 family member) has been shown to be necessary for proper epithelial development. This paper elucidates some of the mechanism.

This paper identifies asymmetry in the centrosomes of Drosophila neural stem cells. This asymmetry plays a part in the stem cell divisions.

Barrett's esophagus and its progression to esophageal adenocarcinoma is a great model system to study premalignancy and progression to cancer. It is one of the most well characterized progression systems. This study demonstrates that NSAID use reduces the risk for progression in Barrett's esophagus, most dramatically in high risk individuals.

Many of you have probably heard the debate surrounding the newly discovered tomb that may have been for the biblical Jesus. The TV show that promoted this discovery used the statistic 1:600 to describe the odds that this is the tomb of Jesus. This article talks to the statistician responsible for that number. Very interesting.

This News Focus from Science talks about a number of recent p53 papers and what they mean to cancer treatments. Although p53 has been studied for decades and it may be the most important tumor suppressor gene, very few attempts have been made to target p53 function in cancer therapies. Finally it looks like there may be some p53 specific therapies on the way.