Krishna, milking a cow

Vaccinia virus is a widespread virus whose natural host remains unknown.  It turns out to be pretty good at jumping across species.

Vaccinia, of course, is the vaccine against smallpox.  Even though smallpox is eliminated in the wild,¹ vaccinia is still very widely used in research and even, to some extent, in the clinic, because the broad and deep experience with the virus gained from its importance in vaccination has carried over into other fields.

When Jenner developed his vaccine against smallpox, he used the cowpox virus.  But — in spite of a widespread misconception — vaccinia is not cowpox.  They’re quite distinct viruses, though they are related.  At some point along the centuries of vaccine use cowpox was replaced by vaccinia. (It’s also worth pointing out that the disease Jenner called cowpox, may not have been cowpox as we know it today. ²  It may have been a distinct strain of virus, or it may have been a different virus altogether.)

Remember that for a couple of hundred years, there was no tissue culture to grow the virus in, and it was basically propagated by continually re-infecting animals and collecting virus from their scabs.  At some point, presumably a cow that was being used as a vaccine incubator was infected with vaccinia instead of cowpox, and the vaccinia proved more effective, or perhaps safer or more convenient, as a vaccine, crowding out the vaccine cowpox.

“Cowpox inoculation sites” Douzhen dinglun (Definitive Treatise on Pox Diseases) by Zhu Chunxia, 1888

(By the way, it’s interesting to note that cowpox has an MHC class I immune evasion function,³ whereas vaccinia virus does not.  Obviously this immune evasion doesn’t prevent cowpox from acting as a strong immunogen, because it was an effective  vaccine for decades if not centuries, but perhaps it’s one reason vaccinia was a more popular vaccine.)

Where vaccinia virus came from — what animal it was infecting before it jumped into cattle  — no one knows.  Although vaccinia must have (or have had) a natural host at one point, the true host for the virus is now cultured cells in the lab incubator.

Does that mean vaccinia isn’t …

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• Breeds of Livestock. All of ‘em?
• Happening now! Brussels Briefing on Biodiversity. Wot, no stream?
• The first rice farm in Italy? C’mon.

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Finally, what took them so long? Now you can play games in the palm of your hand.

We present Skinput, a technology that appropriates the human body for acoustic transmission, allowing the skin to be used as a finger input surface. In particular, we resolve the location of finger taps on the arm and hand by analyzing mechanical vibrations that propagate through the body. We collect these signals using a novel array of sensors worn as an armband. This approach provides an always-available, naturally-portable, and on-body interactive surface. To illustrate the potential of our approach, we developed several proof-of-concept applications on top of our sensing and classification system.

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The videos from Science Commons Symposium are now live online!

As many of you know, we recently held an event called Science Commons Symposium at the Microsoft campus in Redmond Washington. It was a day full of presentations from leaders in the fields of Open Science, Open Access and Open Data. The conversations that took place during the breaks and the post-event reception were just as stimulating as the presentations. I was thoroughly exhilarated by the exciting ideas and bright, passionate people discussing them.

One topic that was heavily discussed in both the speaker presentations and in the hallway conversations was Panton Principles. The Panton Principles are a set of best practices for open data, and were official launched at the symposium by Cameron Neylon in the opening talk. Cameron Neylon, Peter Murray-Rust and John Wilbanks were all instrumental in crafting the Panton Principles and all three addressed them in their presentations. You can find links to video of the presentations below.

Though John Wilbanks did address the Panton Principles, he did so with the perspective of a bigger picture. John’s keynote summed up the history and the future goals of the Open Science movement. John said that the real goal is generative science and defined generative with a quote from Jonathan …

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Björn Brembs The unpersuadables: the delusional is no longer marginal – http://bjoern.brembs.net/news… 8 hours ago from bjoern.brembs.blog : a… - Comment - Like Nils Reinton liked this It wasn't ever marginal. – Mr. Gunn

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• Home gardens in Oaxaca, Mexico, conserve diversity and improve resilience. Good to know.
• Seed saving symposium to take place in Hawaii, April 17-18. Good to know.
• Apomixis for plant breeding a step closer in experimental systems. Good to know?

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Who retires gracefully, who adjusts to retirement easily and who doesn’t. Which personality traits play a part in successful retirement?
The five factor model of personality or the Big Five can be used to see how personality traits are linked to how people adjust to retirement. It has been done in the past for other life transitions.

The researchers not only used the Big Five but also the Satisfaction with Life Scale and questionnaires devised to measure reasons for retirement and the quality of experiences in retirement. These questionnaires were all part of an online survey on which 365 individuals responded, of whom 86 were close to retirement and 279 were already retired.

From this research extraversion was found to relate to life satisfaction while still at work but not during retirement. Extraversion seems to be less adaptive when retired. Conscientiousness and Agreeableness promote satisfaction after retirement not before. Neuroticism is the strongest related to life satisfaction both before and after retirement.

Individuals …

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]]> http://sciencereport.tutors-connect.com/1417/personality-and-retirement/feed/ 0 http://sciencereport.tutors-connect.com/1415/language-mathematics-and-programming/ http://sciencereport.tutors-connect.com/1415/language-mathematics-and-programming/#comments Tue, 09 Mar 2010 04:44:02 +0000 admin http://sciencereport.tutors-connect.com/1415/language-mathematics-and-programming/ Daniel Lemire

Even if you have extensive training in Mathematics, the average Mathematics paper is undistinguishable from the ramblings of a madman. Many of these papers seek to solve narrow problems. And yet, we respect Mathematicians.

Software programming is a form of communication, usually between human beings and machines. While different in style, programming is a subset of the language of Mathematics. If you dig into the average source code, it is undistinguishable from ramblings, even if you are an expert developer.

Yet, we denigrate programming. Many will even deny that it is a Mathematical language. But Mathematics and Programming are not so different:

Mathematics	Programming
Building on the previous research papers requires you to dig through endless piles of boring, badly written research papers.	Maintaining millions of lines of codes written by various people over the years is difficult, boring, error-prone.
Inventing new theorems or new mathematical theories requires much creativity.	Coming up with the next best iPhone application requires much creativity.
For most people, mastering even part of Mathematics requires a decade or more.	Please read Teach yourself programming in ten years by Peter Norvig.
The … Go to Publisher to continue reading ]]> http://sciencereport.tutors-connect.com/1415/language-mathematics-and-programming/feed/ 0 http://sciencereport.tutors-connect.com/1414/porcelain-brain-tumor/ http://sciencereport.tutors-connect.com/1414/porcelain-brain-tumor/#comments Tue, 09 Mar 2010 03:48:04 +0000 admin http://sciencereport.tutors-connect.com/1414/porcelain-brain-tumor/ Scienceroll I guess the Street Anatomy blog will like that. Porcelain brain tumor made by Christina Haase. It looks really realistic. (Hat Tip: Idegenszövet) <img alt="" border="0" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/digg/scienceroll.wordpress.com/5385/" … Go to Publisher to continue reading ]]> http://sciencereport.tutors-connect.com/1414/porcelain-brain-tumor/feed/ 0 http://sciencereport.tutors-connect.com/1412/new-agriculturalist-does-agrobiodiversity/ http://sciencereport.tutors-connect.com/1412/new-agriculturalist-does-agrobiodiversity/#comments Mon, 08 Mar 2010 13:50:50 +0000 admin http://sciencereport.tutors-connect.com/1412/new-agriculturalist-does-agrobiodiversity/ Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog The New Agriculturalist has a focus on biodiversity this month, including the agricultural kind. There’s a piece on the crop wild relatives distribution modeling work of our friend and occasional contributor Andy Jarvis. And a couple of things from my old stomping ground in the Pacific. All well worth a read. Go to Publisher to continue reading ]]> http://sciencereport.tutors-connect.com/1412/new-agriculturalist-does-agrobiodiversity/feed/ 0