In today’s world, advances in science and medicine happen almost daily. Few of those discoveries prove to be a revolution in current scientific thought. This is one of those breakthroughs.

Recently, the Nobel Committee announced that it would award the Nobel Prize for Medicine/Physiology to German professor Harald zur Hausen, who discovered the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) was the cause of cervical cancer. According to the Committee, his discovery “went against current dogma,” when in the 70s and 80s he strove to prove that the papillomaviruses were the cause of cervical cancers. “He thus laid the foundations for better prevention and treatment of this form of cancer, which has become the third most common form to affect women,” says Professor Matthias Kleiner, President of the German Research Foundation.

“I am, of course, completely surprised and it is a great pleasure for me,” expressed zur Hausen in an interview with Adam Smith from nobelprize.org. He credits his dedication and personal conviction to his discovery, working in a direction thought to be completely wrong by many of his contemporaries. “I was an unwelcome and lonely voice,” notes zur Hausen.

If there’s one halfway healthy thing that most people do, it’s take a multivitamin pill. My word, taking a little pill with decent amounts of the essential micronutrients and minerals keeps you from getting scurvy, right?

Right. Most people don’t eat sufficient fruits and vegetables. Most people don’t get enough vitamin C over the course of a week to keep them from getting low-grade scurvy, unless you’re one of the smart few who toss back an orange juice shot in the morning.

(Just for the record, I imbibe espresso shooters in the morning. I’m not getting up on my high elliptical strider and being healthier-than-thou. We’re all on the same dusty rowing machine, here.)

Only A Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul

Kenneth R. Miller, Viking 2008

Ken Miller is not preaching to the choir. Although he has a day job as an active research biologist at Brown University, Miller has spent more than two decades on the front lines of the battle over evolution as a writer, lecturer, and expert witness in court. During these two decades of culture war, he has come to realize that, although the stakes are high in this fight, sometimes the best tactic is the non-martial one: don't treat the American public as pawns in a propaganda war.

Miller starts with the assumption that most people will be fairly open-minded about evolution and intelligent design. Before they make a firm judgment on the role of evolution in our public schools, people genuinely want to know what the scientific status of evolution is, and whether intelligent design is truly a scientific challenger. Many previous books debunking evolution have missed people like this. Such books typically fall into two categories: necessary but dense, technical works that provide, in detail, the scientific community's best response to the claims of intelligent design advocates, and scathing, hard-hitting attacks that fire up those who already accept evolution, but turn off readers who are trying hard to understand this issue without being strongly biased either way. Only A Theory is a genuine attempt at persuasion, and its approach is a result of Dr. Miller's years of practice speaking to audiences who want to give both sides a fair shot.

Don't be fooled, however, into thinking that Miller is trying to find some mutually satisfactory middle ground. For those who want to know whether evolution really is good science, his answer is unambiguous - evolution is one of the most successful and important theories we have in biology. And what about intelligent design? Its advocates have not even attempted to make this a real scientific discipline; evolution is the only scientific game in town.

Scientists at Bonn and Düsseldorf Universities investigated over 500,000 positions in the human genome and found a gene variant which occurs clearly more frequently in bald men than in control persons. This means they have found a new hair loss gene, according to their study in Nature Genetics.

In 2005, these scientists had already characterized the first hair-loss gene inherited through the maternal line, which explained why hair-loss in men often reflects that of their maternal grandfathers. This newly discovered gene, on the other hand, may now account for the similarity in cranial hair growth between father and son.

As promised in my previous post, I would like to bring to people’s attention one of the best reviews of scientific investigations of religion as a social phenomenon, a paper published in Science (3 October 2008) by Ara Norenzayan and Azim Shariff of the University of British Columbia.

The article is chock full of fascinating, empirically based, insights into the relationship between religion and prosocial behavior, and is a must read for anyone seriously interested in this topic. Here, I will point to some of the highlights that will hopefully stimulate discussion and direct reading of Norenzayan and Shariff’s paper.

This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes to three scientists responsible for transforming a green-glowing jellyfish protein into a ubiquitous tool in molecular biology. Green fluorescent protein (or GFP in lab jargon) and its various colored relatives have made many previously impossible experiments cheap and easy, and you would be hard-pressed to find any molecular or cell biologists who have never used some variant of GFP. There is no denying the influence of GFP, but was its discovery Nobel-caliber?

San Diego Beach Scene, Fluorescent E. coli on agar, Nathan Shaner, photography by Paul Steinbach, created in the lab of Nobel Prize winner Roger Tsien, posted under the GNU Free Documentation License

Scientists have discovered that a bone infection is caused by a newly described species of bacteria that is related to the tuberculosis pathogen. The discovery may help improve the diagnosis and treatment of similar infections, according to an article published in the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology.

Some rare genetic diseases can make patients susceptible to infections with Mycobacterium species, the bacteria that amongst other diseases, cause tuberculosis and leprosy. These patients often suffer from recurring mycobacterial infections throughout their whole lives. Because of this, researchers are trying to identify unusual species that cause disease in order to improve treatment strategies.

By mopping up excess neurotrophic factor from neuronal synapses, astrocytes may finely tune synaptic transmission to affect processes such as learning and memory, say Bergami et al.

The major cellular events of learning and memory are long-term potentiation (LTP) and long-term depression (LTD), both of which affect neurons' ability to communicate with one another. Neurons that have undergone LTP display a stronger electrical response to the same level of a stimulus, whereas neurons that have gone through LTD display a weaker response. These changes are thought to result from modifications of the neuronal synapses, such as alterations in the density of postsynaptic receptors, or downstream signaling events.

The transportation of antibodies from a mother to her newborn child is vital for the development of that child's nascent immune system.

Those antibodies, donated by transfer across the placenta before birth or via breast milk after birth, help shape a baby's response to foreign pathogens and may influence the later occurrence of autoimmune diseases.

Images from biologists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have revealed for the first time the complicated process by which these antibodies are shuttled from mother's milk, through her baby's gut, and into the bloodstream, and offer new insight into the mammalian immune system.

Chicken soup isn't just good for the common cold and, apparently, our souls, that popular home remedy so ubiquitous it is sometimes known as "Grandma's Penicillin" may also have a new role alongside medication and other medical measures in fighting high blood pressure, scientists in Japan are reporting. Their research is in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Ai Saiga and colleagues cite previous studies indicating that chicken breast contains collagen proteins with effects similar to ACE inhibitors, mainstay medications for treating high blood pressure. But chicken breast contains such small amounts of the proteins that it could not be used to develop food and medical products for high blood pressure. Chicken legs and feet, often discarded as waste products in the U.S. but key soup ingredients elsewhere, appear to be a better source.

Heavy industry takes a lot of blame for greenhouse gas emissions but at least one segment may be able to do something to give a little back. Steelworks around the world emitting large quantities of carbon dioxide but scientists report that a byproduct of steel production could be used to absorb that greenhouse gas and help control global warming. The study is in Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research.

Professor Mourad Kharoune and colleagues point out that production of one ton of steel releases up to one ton of CO2. With global steel production standing at 1.34 billion tons in 2007, that adds up to a substantial contribution of carbon dioxide.

Kharoune suggests a new method to sequester, or capture, carbon dioxide so that it does not contribute to global warming – using steel slags, which are complex mixtures of compounds produced during the separation of the molten steel from impurities.

Scientists have found a new possible explanation for why people who eat more fruit and vegetables may gain protection against the spread of cancers; a fragment released from pectin, found in all fruits and vegetables, that binds to and may inhibit galectin 3 (Gal3), a protein that plays a role in all stages of cancer progression.

Population studies such as EPIC, the European Prospective Investigation of Cancer, identified a strong link between eating lots of fibre and a lower risk of cancers of the gastrointestinal tract. But exactly how fibre exerts a protective effect is unknown.

Pectin is better known for its jam-setting qualities and as being a component of dietary fibre. The present study supports a more exciting and subtle role.