SCIENCE-NEWS for Commoner.

[gaddeswarup]

A nice summary in The Hindu by D. BALASUBRAMANIAN Coalition dharma and asthma of Bacteria and Asthma: Untangling the Links by Jennifer Couzin-Frankel (the full article needs subscription).

[gaddeswarup]

A nice article on science writing by Ed Yong:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/no...ience-writing/

[gaddeswarup]

This is more than two years old and somebody might have posted this already. It is a bit long but I think it is science writing at its best.

"The Itch" by Atul Gawande in The New Yorker:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2...urrentPage=all

[Shakthiprabha]

Astronomers see a supermassive black hole – known as Sagittarius A – sitting at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. But, could the big black hole, itself, be surrounded by a swarm of small black holes that may have been accumulating nearby for billions of years?


http://www.spacetoday.org/DeepSpace/...lackHoles.html

[Shakthiprabha]

http://www.inquisitr.com/255406/watc...earth-tonight/


A huge asteroid will fly by earth tonight at about 8:00 EST. Asteroid 2012 LZ1 is approximately 1,650 feet wide and will come with in 14 lunar distances (3.35 million miles) of earth. Space.com reports that the asteroid poses no threat to earth tonight but it may be close enough to view with a camera

(june 14th)

[Shakthiprabha]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1595293.html

[Shakthiprabha]

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/h...w/14330703.cms

[gaddeswarup]

Ed Yong explains http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/no...t-taste-bland/
"Ann Powell from the University of California, Davis has found that farmers have inadvertently ruined the taste of tomatoes by selecting for ones that ripen together and look good. That aesthetic appeal has been driven by a single change in a single gene, which also affects how the fruits taste."
Even for the standard varieties, the homegrown ones taste better, may be because as a commenter explains "Tomatoes are also harvested before ripening fully, if at all, to give them better shipping qualities and then exposed to ethylene to bring them to a ripened state. Unfortunately, green tomatoes lack the sugars and, presumably, the nutritional value of vine-ripened varieties."
My experience is that our garden tomaoes taste better than market ones if one can get them before birds do. I started covering them with nets but that does not stop (a problem in Mrlborne) which eat even green tomatoes. There is also a discussion in http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/no...t-taste-bland/. Some of the comments have suggestions about varieties that taste good.

[gaddeswarup]

I have been taking interest in GM seeds and foods for a few years since I believe that the future is is in science and technology. But the topic is getting too complicated just like climate change discussions:
http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.c...imate-and.html
Moreover multinational carporations seems to pushing through various varieties without adequate testing and it is difficult to know whom to believe from news reports. Recently 'GM crops good for environment'
suggests a Guardian article GMcrops good for environment, study finds looking at a recent study by Kongming Wu and collaborators, but see an earlier paper http://www.sciencemag.org/content/328/5982/1151
by the same group. There are names of various British professors enthusiatic about the research. It seems that one has to check GM watch
http://www.gmwatch.org/latest-listin...chinese-fields or lobbywatch http://www.lobbywatch.org/lobbywatch.html even to read what seem to be fairly straightforward science reports.

[Shakthiprabha]

Dear Neil,

"You name would live longer..."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1830343.html