kbonham | February 28, 2012I know something's amiss when my google news alert returns headlines like these:
Why women who lust after Brad Pitt may just fancy his immune system
It's His Immune System That You Actually Want to Sleep With
The key to male sexiness: A powerful immune system?
and my personal favorite
Antibodies, Not Hard Bodies: The Real Reason Women Drool Over Brad Pitt
These snazy headlines are all pointing to a recent paper in Nature Communications. The paper's methodology is pretty simple: They took 74 Latvian men and immunized them against Hepatitis B. Later, they measured the participants' blood for…
kbonham | February 27, 2012If you've been reading science blogs for a while, you probably know about Open Laboratory. It's a yearly anthology of the best science blog writing on the internet. And the submission form is now open (there's a handy little badge in the left sidebar too).
If you appreciate the stuff that I do here, please consider submitting the posts to Open Labs. With so many amazing science bloggers out there, I doubt I'll make it very far, but I've decided to put this out there because I think it will help me strive to work harder. When blogging has to compete with my work at the bench, and with…
kbonham | February 24, 2012Cool:
During the tests, mice were given access to deposits of heroin over an extended period of time. Those given the vaccine showed a huge drop in heroin consumption, giving the institute hope that it could also work on people[...]
Using the immune system's ability to make an immune response against any molecule is awesome, but there are a number of potential problems with this sort of approach. In the article, a scientist is quoted as saying that this might block other opioids that are used as theraputics (like Vicodin), but I don't think it's a good idea to use opioids as pain relievers in…
kbonham | February 21, 2012A little over 300 years ago, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a dry goods seller from Delft in Holland, learned to grind glass into lenses and fashion the best microscopes the world had ever seen. In those days, the idea of being a "scientist" as a profession was ludicrous. Natural philosophy was pastime for nobility or at least those with considerable disposable income. Leeuwenhoek was a successful business man, and in his spare time, he pointed his lenses at pond water (among other things). As Paul de Kruif recounted in his brilliant book Microbe Hunters:
[Leeuwenhoek] peeped into a fantastic sub-…
kbonham | February 15, 2012Back in December, Rees Kassen wrote an editorial for Nature arguing that if scientists want political decisions to reflect good science, they have to get involved.
scientists[...] think too highly of their own view of the world and fail to appreciate the complex, multifarious nature of decision making. Our mistake is to think that science will be given a privileged voice on an issue. This is almost always wrong. From a politician's point of view, science is an interest group like any other.
As if to confirm this point, a response was published in the most recent issue of Nature by Brett…
kbonham | January 26, 2012I grew up on the coast of California, and I loved to surf. At my favorite break, Pleasure Point, the best waves were often at low tide, but low tide also meant seaweed. Lots of seaweed.
[Source]
The giant kelp of Monteray Bay is an astonishing organism. It's not actually a plant, it's a brown algae, and it can grow 12 inches per day. This rapid growth makes it an ideal resource, and a bane of surfers that get their fins caught in thick mats.
You can't tell, but it was definitely kelp that made me fall, not the fact that I was too far forward and unable to turn. No, really...
Brown algae…
kbonham | January 18, 2012I promise, this will be my last semen post for a while.
I've talked about allergy to semen.
I've talked about allergens in semen.
And I've talked about autoimmunity to semen.
All of these are problems, leading to discomfort or infertility. But what if those problems could be leveraged for our benefit?
[Source: These drawings were made by Antonie von Leeuwenhoek - the first man to view sperm cells under a microscope]
Using the immune system as a contraceptive is not a new idea. In 1899, Karl Landsteiner
and Elie Metchnikoff (both of whom would later win Nobel Prizes) independently demonstrated…
kbonham | January 13, 2012"Reading" books on my iPod is usually great. I can download them from audible, and while I'm tending to the daily monotony that comprises much of labwork (tissue culture, prepping protein samples, running back and forth between centrifuges), I can just pop in my earbuds and keep my brain engaged with something interesting. But never have I so regretted listening to rather than reading a book as I did with Public Parts by Jeff Jarvis.
Not because he's a bad narrator - in fact he does better than many authors reading their own work (though he has the first audio typo I think I've ever heard…
kbonham | January 9, 2012The latest issue of the Science in the News "Flash" is out now about the connections between atopic disorders - namely allergies, asthma and eczema.
Itchy, watery eyes, and a drippy nose. Constricted, swollen airways secreting thick mucus. Itchy, red, dry, cracked skin. These symptoms describe three conditions -- allergies, asthma, and eczema, respectively -- that are commonly found together in the same people. Yet, what causes these symptoms and why they are so closely associated with each other is still poorly understood.
The Flash is written and edited by graduate students, an all-…
kbonham | January 6, 2012The thing I like most about this mashup is that it's superficially just a mashup of the most popular music of 2011, but it also manages to be a statement on some of the most important events of 2011: the protests from Egypt and Libya to OWS
Maybe it's hard
We will never be never be broken and scarred
There's no way I'm turning back oh oh oh oh
Here's the situation
Got this feeling that you can't fight
Been to every nation
The city is on fire tonight
Maybe it's hard
We will never be never be broken and scarred
There's no way I'm turning back oh oh oh oh
Here's the situation
Got this feeling…
kbonham | January 5, 2012At the risk of seeming like a one-trick pony, and piggybacking on my recent appearance on the Savage Lovecast, I thought I would close the loop on immune reactions to semen. I've already written about allergens being transmitted in semen, and about women having allergies to seminal plasma itself. In the latter case, I say women having allergies not only because the only examples I found were in women, but also because by definition men cannot have allergic reactions to semen. In response to a comment on that post I wrote:
If a man did get an immune response, it would probably be called "…
kbonham | January 3, 2012In case anyone landed here after listening to this week's Savage Lovecast, I wanted to point you in the right direction. Please be gentle - that was my first time being interviewed for anything like that, so I was a bit of a nervous wreck.
For the uninitiated - a couple of weeks ago on his podcast, Dan Savage fielded a question from a woman that thought a chunk of mushroom managed to make it through her boyfriend's digestive tract untouched and end up in his ejaculate. Dan rightly dismissed this notion, saying that things don't go "from guts to nuts." This is certainly true for solid pieces…
kbonham | December 21, 2011This entry is cross posted from the the SITN Flash, a bimonthly publication written and edited by Harvard graduate students. You can find my piece, as well as archives of previous articles written by many graduate students at the Science in the News website.
In 1985, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) began tracking the prevalence of obesity in the United States. Since then, a clear trend has emerged: obesity is on the rise. The maps below compare obesity levels across the United States in 2004 and 2008:
It's clear that the number of people with obesity is growing, and has been as long we…
kbonham | December 19, 2011I know this post has been a long time coming. In the first part of this series, I told you that allergies are the result of an immune response against an external, but normally not harmful substance. In part 2, I told you that allergies are the result of a specific type of immune response called "Th2," which leads to the production of IgE antibodies, and that this immune response is thought to have evolved to combat infections caused by worms. But what makes your immune system think it's supposed to be battling a worm?
The short answer to the questions is: we don't know. For other types of…
kbonham | December 16, 2011I'm sure that science isn't the only profession that gets misrepresented in popular media. I'm sure lawyers and police cringe when watching crime dramas, and soldiers are uncomfortable when watching war movies. Leaving aside shows like CSI, I think that scientist's main media foil is almost by definition science fiction. On the one hand, I've learned to mostly ignore exaggeration, over-simplification, and implausible technology - I've come to understand (though it was hard) that these things are sometimes necessary to drive a plot, and that it's unrealistic to expect that the writers are all…
kbonham | November 30, 2011Here it is, the last day of Movember - a charity initiative to raise money for men's health.
*1 in 6 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime
*A man is diagnosed with prostate cancer every 2.2 minutes
*1 in 2 men will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime
*Men are 24% less likely to go the doctor compared to women
I'm competing with a few friends to grow awesome mustaches and raise money. I knew getting into this that I wouldn't have much of a chance of winning on merit - this is the result after 30 days without shaving:
So, I need your help. Please consider giving…
kbonham | November 29, 2011Back in October, I wrote about the bittersweet nature of this year's Nobel in Physiology or Medicine.
On the one hand, it was given for early discoveries in the field of innate immunity - my field! On the other hand, it was given to a scientist that many* feel is undeserving of the honor, while at the same time sullying the legacy of my scientific great-grandfather.
Ed Yong rightly called me out for the phrase "many scientists." This term, and another often-used trope, "some scientists," are vague and lazy, since they obscure the details and can mean almost anything. "Many scientists…
kbonham | November 22, 2011I'm a little late with this video:
Yes, I know the actual day has passed, but that doesn't mean you can't make the rest of the month count.
And guys, you don't have to feel left out, even if you don't have a mustache - check out my Movember page, see my luxurious mustache (it's been 3 weeks since I shaved), and make a donation while you're there.
kbonham | November 17, 2011Earlier this week, I wrote a little bit about what causes allergic symptoms - your immune system confuses pollen (or some other allergen) for a worm, and then arms your granulocytic grenades to explode every time you come into contact with it. But why does this confusion happen? This is a bit more complicated.
As I mentioned in the first post, the immune system broadly speaking is geared for 3 types of infections:
1) Intracellular - these pathogens (all viruses and some bacteria like Listeria) live most or all of their life inside our own cells. In order to deal with them, the immune system…