May 17, 2012 10:00 AM
How Carrots Won the Trojan War – a review
You probably knew that some of the vegetables that we eat are, from a botanical perspective, fruits. Did you know that it took a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1893 to define which fruits are vegetables?
If there were a form of analytics on my television, it would discover that I watch a lot of science programs. I don’t know which station gets most of my attention, but I certainly like PBS, Discovery Channel, National Geographic channel and Space. If I’m not watching the science networks, then my television is tuned on to the History network. I also have some favourite shows on Food Network as well. You can imagine my excitement, then, as I found all the elements of science, history, gardening and food in Rebecca Rupp’s How Carrots Won the Trojan War.
In 20 entertaining and informative chapters, Rupp takes us on a journey through history, botany, genetics, culture and cultivation of the vegetables we eat. She lists over a hundred General Sources, and the Notes section contains many pages of specific references and additional information. It is an academically researched book, yet Rupp writes in a very entertaining and engaging fashion. Her sense of humour, suggested in the title, comes through on every page. Almost all chapter titles are alliterations, plus a small series of simple snippets suggesting several sidebars.
Rupp takes us on a historical journey reaching back to Neolithic times and the original cultivation of the vegetables. We visit the gardens and kitchens of ancient civilizations such as the Egyptian, Roman, Aztec and more, and move into modern genomics and the introduction of new crops. As a Canadian, I found some of the cultural and historical references in Rupp’s book may be more familiar to an American reader. That is certainly not a big enough impediment to prevent me from highly recommending this book as a great read.
Click here for a complete list of the books I have reviewed.
May 16, 2012 9:30 AM
Twitter Snips for May 16th, 2012
A day on the Internet sees enough information to fill 168 millions DVDs being sent around the world. We send 294 billion e-mails and you're reading one of the 2 million blog posts written every day.
@GenomeAlberta and
@mikesgene are just two of the 40 million people who view Twitter every day so this collection of Twitter posts is a very, very, very small bit of theinformation available to us each and every day.
However we choose these posts to share with based on the people and organization we have come to know on Twitter and who we feel can inform you and occassionally even entertain you.
The links are safe for you to view so be sure to check out a few of them - or take your chances on randomly choosing from the 200 million tweets posted in a day.
@BloombergTV Facebook will offer 421.2 million shares, meaning the social network could raise as much as $16 billion http://bloom.bg/JG8rZB #FacebookIPO
@bmahersciwriter Jeffrey Taubenberger found a new ORF in the 1918 influenza genome!? Amazing that genes could be hiding in a genome that small for so long.
@boraz All A'Twitter: How Social Media Aids in Science Outreach http://bit.ly/M8hZPp by @CaitlynZim #SITT #scio13
@Cambridge_Uni A new era for personalised medicine. http://bit.ly/K6yp6E
@DKFZ Turning on genes by a circuitous route http://bit.ly/KEWt5s
@dgmacarthur A personal look at the past, present and future of the Personal Genome Project by @genomicslawyer: http://bit.ly/JjOndm
@Disalmanac Today is National Chocolate Chip Day, the day we remember all the chocolate chips that died in the Great Cookie Wars
@GENbio We're all mutants now: http://bit.ly/ITSjQY
@genome_gov New Genome Advance of the Month: Harnessing the full 'omics potential of personalized medicine http://qoo.ly/3tkx
@genomicslawyer Jim Watson on his fav gene: "It’s the only gene I know whose very structure is an implicit biological message": http://onforb.es/IuMJd9
@gwardis Genome of melanoma an aggressive and frequently fatal form of skin cancer, sequenced. http://yhoo.it/JQE2Z9 #scichat
@HollyDunsworth How to rid the world of genetic determinists? DTC for all, imho. http://genotopia.scienceblog.com/151/genetic-determinism-round-up/
@IAmBiotech Ten-Year Study Demonstrates Safety of Retroviral Gene Therapy Using T-Cells http://bit.ly/K6Ttd9
@jranganathan Survey in PLoS ONE: "science outreach is a bleak prospect with limited room for improvement" - #scio13 is solution! http://bit.ly/KNfGiw
@Lynwhit Countdown to #AskPeter TweetChat Join at noon for CEO @PeterASinger on his report @gchallenges progress http://bit.ly/IMCKtv
@mkonnikova Great interview by @BoraZ on promoting the work of young science writers--but equally applicable to non-science http://bit.ly/K26rcb
@sciencemagazine What's a genome worth in the clinic? #SciTM http://scim.ag/Kiqk0r
@wellcometrust Maximising health benefits of genetics & genomics. Includes @WellcomeLibrary's Simon Chaplin on digitisation project. http://wellc.me/KO5fvc
Tweets came to you courtesy of these people and organizations:
May 10, 2012 2:30 PM
Bacon and Eggheads with Steve Larter
On May 3
rd, Stephen Larter presented to the Bacon and Eggheads breakfast in Ottawa. The series brings together Parliamentarians with experts from across science and engineering to show off Canadian research. The prestigious forum is a unique opportunity for scientists to communicate important findings to an influential audience.
The series is organized by the
Partnership Group for Science and Engineering which is an umbrella group of 25 + science and engineering organizations.
Stephen Larter is one of the Co-investigators in our
Hydrocarbon Metagenomics Project.
Stephen spoke about " Alternate futures for the oil sands industry: from the age of steam to the age of biology" and here is an abstract from his presentation.
"Underground steam injection has made in situ recovery of oil sands bitumen possible, but it comes at a high cost. The boiling of water consumes energy and can create significant carbon emissions of its own. In the quest for a better extraction technology, researchers are now drawing inspiration from the abundant microorganisms that produced the bitumen in the first place. Our speaker will introduce Canada’s role in the biotechnological revolution driving this quest, and the likelihood of implications far beyond the oil sector. Stephen Larter will also discuss more generally current Canadian research in technologies to manage better the carbon footprint of the industry.
Dr. Larter is the Canada Research Chair of Petroleum Geology at the University of Calgary and the Scientific Director of Carbon Management Canada Inc.—a federal Network of Centres of Excellence. He has worked extensively on technologies for reduced emission recovery from oil and gas fields and novel schemes for capturing and sequestering carbon. Dr. Larter has co-founded several energy technology companies and has won several academic, commercial and civil awards including the Friendship Medal of the People’s Republic of China. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Foreign Member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters (Det Norske Videnskaps-Akademi)."
May 3, 2012 8:15 PM
Government and Social Media - Arlington
I was speaking at a Government Communications Conference in Arlington, Virginia today and as is often the case, I find the U.S. government take on communications to be more sophisticated than we generally see up here.
A bit of a surprise for Canadians who often see the elephant to the South trying for world domination at any cost. Okay, maybe that is the goal, but they sure won't achieve it with such an enlightened communications community. Whatever they may think of his policies or politics, Obama's call for a more transparent and open government seems to have been embraced at the individual, departmental and agency level. In fact at times my perception is that there was a sigh of relief from many government employees who believe strongly in what they do in their jobs and were just waiting for someone to tell them it was okay to talk about it.
Take the U.S. Department of Transportation IdeaHub for instance. Deb Green (
@Deb_Green) led the development of the DOT IdeaHub program
taps://www.dotideahub.gov or
http://www.nextgov.com/technology-news/wired-workplace/2010/08/dot-launches-online-ideahub/53643/ The goals were to give employees a voice, engage them, acknowledge their efforts, and give them a place to collaborate. What started as a more limited FAA initiative grew into a DOT wide program.
Captain Joseph Smart (
@capster9) from the U.S.Navy Medical Department pointed out that U.S. Navy Medicine is a $6 billion dollar healthcare network covering 63,000 people around the world. They use many aspects of social media for internal and external communication and re-purpose material across print, e-mail, social media and other channels to get the most bang out of every communication buck. He showed that 50 tweets via
@NavyMedicine reached 63,000 people, and as many people in the room picked up on, also noted that content is king in making that happen. I've been on the speaking roster with Captain Smart before (sorry, may never be able to call someone Cappy!) and the openness that the U.S. Navy approaches their communications with never ceases to amaze me. As he also pointed out, they can't control the sea of public opinion but they can at least navigate it.
Donna Berry from the National Institutes of Health walked everyone through how the NIH is using Yammer
http://yammer.com as an internal communications tool. It started as a skunkworks effort led by Donna and Sandra Scarbrough. Though Donna never came right out and said it, there seemed to be an element of do it and ask for forgiveness later if it didn't work. But it has worked and though it is still is considered a pilot project, the Facebook-like interface of Yammer has more than 700 NIH users, 4,000+ messages and 695 search queries.
The 2 day Advanced Learning Institute event also had speakers from the Centers for Disease Control, the FBI (sorry I wasn't able to catch that presentation!), the Smithsonian, the National Cancer Institute and a few more U.S. agencies and departments.
Canadian government organizations have come a long way in the last few years in their use of online tools and some of the efforts at a municipal level can hold their own on the North American stage. In general though we're still in a world where controlling the message is the primary goal. The wheels are turning over slowly but we are moving in the right direction. We'll see if we can catch up to the social media behemoth to the South.
April 30, 2012 10:30 PM
Twitter Snips for May 2nd, 2012
Half a billion registered users who post in the range of 175 million tweets in a single day. It is now safe to say that Twitter has become more than an oddity when it comes to communicating online. It is well established and is probably here for some time to come. It is used in business, public relations, entertainment, education and just about any other sector or interest you can think of including science.
For an introduction to how you can use it in science you should check out
this blog post from the ‘Happy Science’ blog. It will give you some good tips and ideas, and if you want to know what makes for a good tweet, the
Harvard Business Review has some ideas for you.
Every 2 weeks we share some of the Tweets that have come to the attention of
@mikesgene or
@GenomeAlberta .
Check the tweetsm check the links, check the people and organizations behind the posts. Get to know Twitter and how our life science community can start to put it to use.
@agapow Comparing benchtop sequencers - Ion Torrent so-so, MiSeq best (unsurprising): http://bit.ly/IekQzI
@AudacityInc An App Store for Genomic Tools? It's Happening. http://onforb.es/JlFnSJ #genomics #genetics
@bigs I love that @geochurch talks about solving infectious diseases at a time most geneticists only look at 'genetic' disease. #GET2012
@bmahersciwriter Neat MT @Duncande: There are 120 people with complete sequenced genomes in this room at Harvard. A record? #get2012
@C_G_S @MaraHvistendahl's book "unnatural selection" is a finalist for the pulitzer! http://www.biopoliticaltimes.org/article.php?id=6184 #biopolitics
@DNA11 Catch @ChiefSciAdvisor Sir Peter Gluckman's DNA Portrait at the #NewZealand Portrait Gallery's Art of #Science exhibit ! http://ow.ly/avnAu
@DukeIGSP California Genetic Privacy Bill Moves Forward http://bit.ly/Idf1Xq
@IAmBiotech Research & study could be a bit of fun ;) Ice Cream Headaches Might Offer Clues to #Migraines http://bit.ly/I5YiXt
@idtdna Metabolomics: the final frontier? http://ow.ly/aBmEQ #omics
@iihlab How far are we before pharmacists do on site chip enabled tox testing? #get2012
@LIFECorporation Members of the public get a sequencing lesson using Ion technology on the #ionbus in #timessquare. http://ow.ly/i/AryN
@martinwaxman What makes a tweet worth reading? Study findings. http://hbr.org/2012/05/what-makes-a-great-tweet/ar/1
@medethicsandme “Are we extending life or just prolonging the dying process?” http://fb.me/1ScgzrULt
@MountSinai Lunenfeld director Dr. Jim Woodgett awarded Diamond Jubilee medal for his leadership in biomedical research. http://bit.ly/InswTH
@phylogenomics Report: "How hungry microbes could revive old oilfields" Me: A bit skeptical http://shar.es/rFEIu
@ShipLives Interesting findings for those interested in social networks and higher ed: http://bit.ly/JWh1mJ #scio13
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