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Edublog awards

Nominations for the 2007 Edublog Awards can be made at:

http://edublogawards.com/2007/2007-nominations/

Health Risk Behaviors on MySpace

It’s not very often I can write a post which is suitable for both Microbiologybytes and Science of the Invisible, but this topic is. MySpace is a popular social networking site where users create individual profiles. A group from the University of Washington examined publicly available MySpace profiles of 16- and 17-year-olds and determined the prevalence of personal risk behavior descriptions and identifiable information. They looked at 142 publicly available MySpace profiles (so not a particularly big study) from the class of 2008 MySpace group. 47% contained indications of risk behavior information: 21% described sexual activity; 25% alcohol use; 9% cigarette use; and 6% drug use.

So are these results surprising?
Not to me. Considering this is a small sample of a self-selecting group who have public MySpace profiles, I’m slightly surprised that the percentages of risk behavior are not higher. Of course this study is flawed in lots of ways, but perhaps the most interesting sentence in the paper is:

Social networking sites may provide a new venue for identification, assessment, and interventions to prevent or reduce health risks.

Watch out teenagers, the health police are after you!

What Are Adolescents Showing the World About Their Health Risk Behaviors on MySpace?
Medscape General Medicine 2007 9: 9 (requires free registration)

Is MicrobiologyBytes useful?

The Scientist is asking readers to have their say in compiling a list of the most popular life science blogs. So if you find MicrobiologyBytes useful and would like to tell others about it, you might like to add your comments to the article.

Gene Genie #14: Bugs and Beyond

Welcome to edition 14 of Gene Genie, the blog carnival of genes and genetic conditions. My hopes for an entirely prokaryotic issue were dashed, but at least thanks to My Biotech Life and a recent paper in Science, we now know that bacterial adaptation is 1000 times faster than previously thought, which has considerable implications with regard to antibiotic resistance and how fast such resistance is gained by bacteria. Genomicron also discusses the role of these beneficial mutations.

Maybe there weren’t more microbiology submissions this time around because microbiologists like to take long summer vacations. When I go on vacation, it’s long walks in a place far away from computers, but Eye on DNA goes on vacation by listing 100 Facts About DNA.

When you come back from vacation, you might be considering your future career, so you’ll want to read the comments at DNA Direct Talk on the suggestion that the hot job of 2012 will be Genetic Counseling, and consider the suggestion that lots more trained genetic counselors need to step up to the plate.

On the technology front, Epidemix is amazed by the annotation of James Watson’s genome, while Discovering Biology… describes some of the practical difficulties of DNA sequencing.

As ever, there has been a lot of activity in terms of gene discovery and inherited diseases. Genetics and Health gives a fragile X syndrome update, the most common cause of inherited mental impairment ranging from learning disabilities, autism or “autistic-like” behaviors to more severe cognitive or intellectual disabilities. Neurophilosophy discusses the recent identification of a gene associated with obsessive compulsive disorder, a distressing psychiatric condition characterized by intrusive thoughts and ritualized and repetitive behaviours such as excessive hand-washing. Pharyngula want us to help save the babies suffering from Hirschsprung’s Disease.

Ethical considerations from an intriguingly personal standpoint are the subject of the description of the Personal Genome Project by GenomeBoy. Sandwalk believes that aside from the safety issue, there doesn’t seem to be any good reason to forbid the cloning of humans. Cancer Genetics considers genetic testing disclosure and when children should be told the results. Terra Sigillata discusses two announcements from the U.S. FDA on genetic issues in drug safety, concerning Coumadin (warfarin) and the metabolic activation of codeine to morphine. ScienceRoll also keeps us up-to-date on personalized medicine.

Evolgen points to the danger of the misuse of the term junk DNA, and The Personal Genome describes a near-death experience for the gene.

The Genetic Genealogist describes what can be done with the results of a Y-DNA test and describes a holdup on GINA, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, a piece of U.S. legislation that would protect individuals from discrimination based upon their genetic information by employers or insurance companies.

Finally, the industry buzz is mostly around Navigenics, and 23andMe, two companies who want you to spit into a cup so they can profile your genome, commented on by business|bytes|genes|molecules, My Biotech Life, and Venture Beat, but Gene Sherpa is bothered by the ethics surrounding the promise to alter your future… by email.
Epigenetics News finishes up the industry theme in describing a new collaboration on epigenetic therapies.

Issue 15 of Gene Genie will be at cancer-genetics.com on 9th September 2007.
You can submit your blog article for the next edition at the carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on the blog carnival index page.

MicrobiologyBytes is the number one microbiology blog (according to Google)

According to Google, MicrobiologyBytes is the number one microbiology blog:

Thank you to the thousands of readers who made this possible. But let’s not stop there. Tell me which microbiology topics you’re most interested in, and let’s keep making MicrobiologyBytes better!

Microbiology Practical Class

Ever wondered what it’s like to be a student stydying microbiology at university? Timothy Leung’s great video gives you a pretty good idea (nice streaking technique guys!):

Link from César.

EpiSPIDER

EpiSPIDER is a new AJAX web service from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and provides a web 2.0 style front end for ProMED, the global electronic reporting system monitoring of emerging diseases.

EpiSPIDER provides Google Maps, Graphs, Treemaps, “Sparklines” (timelines) and RSS feeds of email traffic on ProMED mail, and drags ProMED into the web 2.0 era.

Try it!

Scintilla - recommend your favourite microbiology

Scintilla (Nature’s attempt at web 2.0 science) just launched. The site is a digg/del.icio.us-like recommendation/social network where you can read science stories from a wide range of sources, and if you like them, recommend them to others. Good stories get voted up, and you get to find out what other people think is important knowledge.

Here’s the Scintilla Microbiology group, although there are lots of others to choose from depending on what you’re interested in. Give it a try!

Guest Post: Plus ça change, plus c’est … le same Web, only better?

MicrobiologyBytes is delighted to welcome our first guest blogger:

Ed Rybicki, Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of Cape Town, South Africa.

My, how things do change… I found myself reflecting, while I was looking over the detritus on our Web server of some 13 years of posting pages on the Web. “Orphan” pages, unconnected to anything current; pages with a majority of dead links, because they are so old; pages last updated in 2000; pages left behind by the inexorable onward flow of the river that is the www; pages carried forward through several incarnations of the server… And yet, not to be deleted by the careless press of a key, because there is a sort of history there that is very hard to chronicle. A history of how the Kikwit Ebola outbreak unfolded, for example, post by email post. An account of how an Honours student inadvertently became the Web’s only Ebola expert, for a brief while in 1995… ah, what passing pleasures, now mainly gone.

Consider this: a connected set of Web pages is a network, existing as a linked series of snapshots that reflect the current update. Every single change alters the network - yet where is this recorded? If you are lucky and have a hard drive the size of the Empire State Building, or if you are disciplined enough to actually back things up as successive versions, then perhaps you have an accurate historical record of how things changed - but no-one else will. And given the fact that most normal people are not disciplined enough to do the necessary, you probably don’t either…

So how does one even approach the problem of constructing a history of any particular corpus of web-published material? We are confronted with a situation not dissimilar to the one which confronts would-be chroniclers of any ordinary human life: the only material available for research is the latest version (if still extant), and a mess of isolated snapshots and pages, if we are lucky.

I took a look back over my teaching material the other day, which I started formulating back in mid-1994, round about the time the Web came into existence for us non-professionals. I don’t have a single file dating back to that time, not one: the only thing left is a grandfathered filename (virtut1.html) that it would be too complicated to change. The earliest I can get back to - on a dusty CD-ROM backup unearthed from a bottom drawer, from a PC I gave away at least three upgrades ago - is 1998, and then only for some of the files I actually updated at the time. My first web pages are thus irretrievably gone, vanished into entropy - unless they are fossilised on some long-lived legal or illegal mirror server somewhere, like some of my outdated pages I found quite by accident on a computer in Cambridge, and only got removed by threat of copyright infringement action.

So why bother at all? Of what interest is the history of some half-baked, amateurish attempts at porting teaching material from overhead projection transparencies to the web?

Weelll… it’s not really for me to say, is it? I can’t predict who might be interested in the historiography of virology pedagogics - but it’s just a little sad to think that so much work has vanished into free electrons, wandering the universe until the inevitable heat death stills them all. I mean, look at Alan Cann: his Virology textbook is now in a fourth edition, and all three are available to anyone who wishes to compare them. I can’t even find Versions 1 - n-1 of my material, so all you’re left with is Version n, of 2007 (© Ed Rybicki). It’s paradoxical that in this electronic age, it’s still the traditional medium of print that still has the best potential for survival. I may even still have some of my original hand-printed overheads from 1981, if they survived the last office-cleaning purge!

But be that as it may…my continuous rolling upgrade of the Web pages has reached a 2006 version in most cases, and 2007 in a few - with a lot of visual material still stuck in a dark age. There is actually not that much incentive to do too much about that, frankly, given the wealth of graphics now out there in Webspace: Russell Kightley, for example, has a wealth of thoroughly professional-looking pictures of viruses, cells, and virus life cycles; I use movies of the HIV life cycle filched from Boehringer-Ingelheim’s site (as well as from Alan Cann); there are now some truly stunning cryo-EM 3D image reconstructions of virus particles available…and nearly everything is copyrighted, so putting it up on my site could be courting prosecution. Which is why linking to things via the web is the way to go…if I only had time! Aaaaarrrgghhh!!

Which is why I am impressed by this site: unlike some of us early adopters who are now hopelessly behind, he has aggressively taken on the new medium and is making it work. More power to him - this is one of the best sites I know of for current microbiology education, let alone education about viruses, and long may it live. With no orphan pages; no lost links… and a daily backup, so that a complete history is available to some future webnaut, somewhere out there. Rock on.

If you would like to be a guest blogger on MicrobiologyBytes, click the Guests tab above.