photo by angelin.angelini via Flickr
Dear Reader,
Scienceofthetimes.com is on a temporary hiatus while I begin a new job at Nature Publishing Group, the publisher of Nature and Scientific American. If you have enjoyed Science of the Times, please follow my latest work via Twitter.
And as long as you’re here, take a look around…
Eric R. Olson
Reporter/Editor
If you are looking for an exhaustive, comprehensive list of 2009’s best science stories–you have come to the wrong place. If that’s your cup of tea, I’ll direct you to Scientific American’s incredibly complete and insightful slide show of the year’s biggest stories.*
Instead, what follows is a compendium of the ten stories that I personally found interesting, culled from the mysterious depths of my Facebook and Twitter accounts. These are articles that, for one reason or another, I deemed compelling enough to share with my friends and colleagues–and now with you. And just like the seconds counting down to 2010, we’ll start with number ten and work our way down to number one.
Celiac disease, an allergy to gluten, may be the most underdiagnosed health problem in America today. Health officials estimate more than two million Americans suffer from it, but only a small fraction of cases are ever diagnosed.
In the spirit of Celiac Disease Awareness Month, Science of the Times brings you the story of Kelly Courson, a 37-year old receptionist who was confronted with a bewildering array of symptoms in her early twenties. After years of misdiagnosis by doctors, she recognized her illness as Celiac disease and began treating herself.
Now she helps other Celiac sufferers adjust to a gluten-free lifestyle through her website Celiac Chicks.
Based on cases reported in the CSPI Outbreak Alert! database: http://www.cspinet.org/foodsafety/outbreak/pathogen.php
A Seattle Times headline caught my eye on Wednesday, stating that leafy greens are the number one “riskiest” food item in terms of food-borne illness. I found that surprising, as you would expect most food-related illnesses to arise from improper handling of meat and dairy products.
The Times article was based on a “riskiest foods” list compiled by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), a watchdog group that pushes for nutrition and food safety legislation. They compiled the list from their own Outbreak Alert! database, which contains data from outbreaks as far back as the early 1990s . The “riskiest list” was created by looking at the FDA-regulated foods with the largest number of outbreaks and reported cases. The key word here is “FDA-regulated.” The FDA regulates just about every food product–except meat.
Artist's rendition of Ardipithecus ramidus. (credit: J.H. Matternes)
Yesterday saw a blizzard of media surrounding the Ardipithecus paper published in the October 2nd issue of Science. A quick Google search reveals more than 600 articles published on the subject since yesterday morning.
If you don’t know already know, Ardipithecus (affectionately known as Ardi by some) is a hominid fossil discovered in Ethiopia some 15 years ago. However, the buzz is not about the fossil discovery itself, but rather the insight that Ardi is an early ancestor of humans–something that wasn’t entirely clear until now. This revelation is making scientists rewrite the book on early hominid history and also their vision of the last common ancestor we shared with chimps, more than four million years ago.
Somewhat reminiscent of the American Natural History Museum’s “missing link” campaign back in May, Ardi also has its own primetime cable television special that airs October 11th on the Discovery Channel. But if you just can’t wait, there is already a wealth of multimedia on-line to quench your Ardi thirst.
