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This week Zach and Kelly discuss research on how to eliminate certain types of anxiety, and chat about Bisphenol A (BPA).

Links

What are Zach and Kelly up to?

Zach at New York City Comic Con October 11-14th

Final Season of SMBC Theater sketches

Sign-up for Round 3 of the #SciFund Challenge! 

Kelly is excited about genomes. What this video, and you will be too.

Paper: Disruption of reconsolidation erases a fear memory trace in the human amygdala

Amygdala

Bisphenol-A

FDA’s 2010 public statement on BPA

Washington Post article on the difficulties of removing BPA from products

This week Zach and Kelly talk about oxygen injections and exploding termites.

Links

Titanium Physicists podcast

Article 1: Oxygen gas-filled microparticles provide intravenous oxygen delivery

Popular press article

Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees

Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care

Article 2: Explosive backpacks on old termite workers

Eusociality

This week Zach and Kelly talk to Dr. Scott Commins of the University of Virginia about his research on tick-induced meat allergies.

Links

Allergies

IgE and IgG

Interleukins (e.g., IL9)

ImClone and cetuximab

Alpha-gal

Carbohydrates and proteins

Glycosylation

Lone Star ticks (seed ticks)

Endocrine disrupters

Triclosan

Eosinophils

Popular press coverage

CNN

UVA Magazine

This week Zach and Kelly bring back Dr. Michael Munger of Duke University to discuss how people parasitize economies and how parasites economize people.

Links

Malaria

Rent-seeking

X-inefficiency

William Easterly and The White Man’s Burden 

DDT and malaria

Hygiene Hypothesis

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This week Zach and Kelly talk to Dillon McDowell, Josh Marion, and Melissa Loving about nanomagnets. All guests are past or current members of the Lewis Lab at Northeastern University.

Links

Rare-earth magnets

China and rare-earth exports

Anisotropy

Coercivity

Ferromagnetism

Olympus NDT

This week Kelly and Zach talk to Dr. Christian Eggers about whether or not viruses should qualify as being “alive”, and the importance of viruses in evolution.

Links

Zach’s Trail of the Clone Kickstarter

Borrelia burgdorferi

Lyme disease

Plasmids

Virus

Viroids

Transposons

Bacteriophage

Some scientific papers on the topic of whether or not viruses are living:

The not so universal tree of life or the place of viruses in the living world

Defining life: The virus viewpoint

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This week Zach and Kelly are on an immune system kick, and discuss the potential downsides of new drug treatments and a new use for a previously existing drug.

Note: Summer is a crazy time for my research, and for Zach’s convention schedule. We may update every other week rather than every week. Sorry, and have a great summer!

Intro stuff

The Small Dinosaurs Kickstarter page

Episode on slime molds (Episode 12: Slime, slugs, and slutty genes)

Synthetic antimicrobial peptides

Scientific article: Therapeutic antimicrobial peptides may compromise natural immunity

Antimicrobial peptides

Innate immune system

Weekly Weinersmith episode on gut bacteria (Episode 3: Bacteria, Butts, and Brains)

Truvada as a preventative measure for HIV

Truvada

NYT article on Truvada to prevent HIV infection

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This week Zach and Kelly talk to Elise Novitski, a PhD student studying CPT symmetry and the fine-structure constant in Dr. Gerald Gabrielse’s lab at Harvard.

LINKS

Electron

Angular momentum

Positron

Antimatter

Absolute zero

Quantum electrodynamics (QED)

Cyclotron

CPT symmetry

Fine-structure constant

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This week Zach and Kelly talk to Dr. Jennifer Sheridan about her research on the impacts of oil palm farming on amphibian populations in Borneo.

You can support Jen’s research through the #SciFund Challenge here!

LINKS

The Impact of Oil Palm in Borneo

Stability of Altered Forest Ecosystems (SAFE) Project: Collaboration between Sime Darby (the oil palm company) and scientists to determine best practices for oil palm farming

Tropical Conservation and Development: Jen’s SciFund Project

UN-REDD: The United Nations Collaborative Program on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries

E-mail Dr. Sheridan at: jasheridan(@)gmail.com

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This week Zach and Kelly interview Dr. Sanna Sokolow, a post-doc in UCSB’s Ecological Parasitology Lab and Projet Crevette scientist. Sanna talks about her research on the use of freshwater prawns to control schistosomiasis in West Africa.

You can support Project Crevette through the SciFund Challenge here.

Subscribe to The Weekly Weinersmith on iTunes here.

LINKS

Schistosomiasis

Projet Crevette

Biocontrol

Projet Crevette’s SciFund video proposal: