Summer Assignment 8.29

This will be the final week of the summer assignment this year. Great job with all the comments, I hope you found some of the articles I linked to interesting. There are a few things I have for you to do this week.

• To get credit for this week's entry, tell me what your favorite post was over the summer, and what you are most looking forward to learning more about this year.
• If you are registered for Dr. H's class (Block 1 or 2), please visit this website and request access. If you have used PB Works before, you can use your previous account information and will not have to confirm your email. If you are new to PB Works, you DO NOT need to use your school email account to request access. After I accept you, you will receive a confirmation email. 
• If you are registered for Miss Drust's class (Block 3), she will provide you with the course website.
• Once you have access to the wiki, feel free to have a look around. It is still a work in progress, so there is not too much there yet. There are some things on the front page for you to do.

That's it. See you all next week.

Summer Assignment 8.22

Special all audio edition!

No reading this week, just a podcast to listen to. What happens when scientific research leads to more harm than good? What if the self-correcting nature of science is blocked by celebrity and charisma? This is called Pandora's Lab. Examples of this discussed in the episode are opiod-based painkillers and frontal lobotomies.



If you are at all interested in self-delusion, or psychology in general, I highly recommend going through the back catalog of the You Are Not So Smart podcast. The host also has published a few books that are worth checking out if you are interested in finding out why your brain is doing weird things to you.

Summer Assignment 8.15

• Binge-watching leads to poor sleep. Not terribly surprising, but this is one of the first studies that I have seen that investigates what is on your screen while you are in bed rather than just do you have a screen on. 
• To anyone considering a career in the research science: Learn how to fix stuff. Although the story is about working in a physics lab, I feel as though I had very similar experiences. the techniques and equipment that I understood the best were those that I had to constantly tweak in order to get them to work as I needed. 
• Hey, anybody remember Zika virus? That thing that was going to kill us all two summers ago? Turns out, people are still doing research on it, which makes sense, since scientific research does not function on the 24 hour news cycle.

Summer Assignment 8.8

Lots of CRISPR in the news recently, but before that, I just have to say €222,000,000 ($263,000,000) is way too much to pay for one player. There are three companies that were acquired for less. Entire companies. For less than one player.

Anyway, CRISPR...

If you're not sure exactly what CRISPR is, here is a short video to explain the basics.

• CRISPR Fixes Disease Gene in Viable Human Embryos
• CRISPR Screen Identifies Top 100 Essential Genes for Cancer Immunotherapy
• Researchers Used CRISPR to Successfully Increase HIV Resistance in Animals

Let me know what you think is the comments. Is CRISPR the future of health care, or a dangerous first step to designer babies?

Summer Assignment 8.1

• Two things that I got from the first link:
• This could be a major change in thinking about how some antibiotics are prescribed
• Headline writers are really bad at overstating the findings of studies
• Planarians (flatworms) are very cool. So very cool, that they can sense and respond to light without a head. 
• Valid concerns, or  “creating noise & sounding alarms [not] helpful to saving lives"?