Blue Streak Science Podcast

Alexzander Samuelsson, a listener from Toronto got last week's What The Hell right when he answered with (classified: top secret).

• Minimalist cell whittled down to 473 genes
• Potential mechanism found for 'brain shock' therapy
• Explosive road rage-like anger linked to parasite spread by cats

This weeks winner is Sophie! Have a listen to see if YOU get the right answer!

This episode of Blue Streak Science Podcast comes to you from Sydney, Australia; Cambridge, England; and Santa Rosa, California.

Alexa's scientific background includes experience as a molecular and cellular biologist and training as a molecular neuroscientist. During her time as an undergraduate researcher, she worked to contribute to a better understanding of the role that microglial cells play in ischemic preconditioning. Now, as a Master's student in Space Studies, she is actively combining her experience in neuroscience with the realm of outer space to better understand the impacts of long term spaceflight on neurological systems.

Outside of academia, she writes and produces the Synapse Science Podcast, which has recently wrapped up its first season. Thanks to positive feedback and support for the show, the podcast is gearing up for a second season in the near future. More of her science communication work can be found on her online portfolio.

In this episode Alexa and I discussed her studies in neuroscience and space studies, and how she has applied them to science communication. We talked about the Synapse Science podcast, her personal scicomm project, an excellent science podcast that has remarkably professional production quality.

For a full list of Alexa's publications you can visit her website at Neurons to Nebulae.

Peter is a newly minted Ph.D. from the Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology at Stony Brook University. Peter is an enthusiastic and skilled science communicator and loves everything science.

Our topic today was peer review. We talked about what peer review is and how it works, and why it is fundamental to science. 

List of Peter's publications

Leon Letkeman, a listener from Islamabad, Pakistan got last week's What The Hell right when he answered with "earthquake". In this case, the sound was the horrific earthquake that devastated Fukushima, Japan. The sound was captured on a hydrophone in the Pacific 1,500 kilometers away in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s Vents Program at Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory and Oregon State University recorded the temblor using the U.S. Navy’s Sound Surveillance System. This portion of the recording was 16 times normal speed.

The great majority of guesses and answers were some kind of rocket. The space shuttle getting the top spot in the number of guesses.

Way to go Leon!

First Dengue Fever Vaccine Gets Green Light in Three Countries

Newcomers to Periodic Table!

Virgin births may be common among snakes

Upending daily rhythm triggers fat cell growth

Poachers using science papers to target newly discovered species

Orchids give off human "body odor" to attract mosquitoes

This week"s winner is nobody! Our crack team of science professionals were nil for one when both guessed wrong. Better luck next time!

Gabriel Owen of Los Angeles, California answered correctly with "red fox". Shockingly to everyone, including herself, our esteemed host Sophie McManus answered correctly (guessed) as well! She received a smattering of applause while Gabe received a nod of approval.

Next week's sound? Listen to the podcast or tune in to "Science Sunday" on Blab.im for a live replay of the What The Hell Was That sound! Don't miss it.

• Forgetful male voles are more likely to wander from mate
• Headbanging Aussie bee takes a heavy metal approach to pollination
• Ground control to Major Tim (Peake)
• Prodigal gas cloud was born in Milky Way and is crashing back in
• Update on Zika disease: virus linked to rare birth defect
• COP21 agreement reached!

Martin Shkreli is at it again!

Remember him? He’s the asshole who bumped up the price of a 62 year old drug against toxoplasmosis from $13.50 per pill to $750.

He once again has plans to sharply increase the price of a decades-old drug for a serious infectious disease.

This time it’s a drug that treats Chagas disease, a parasitic infection that can cause potentially lethal heart problems.

The plan also is upsetting some organizations that supply drugs for neglected diseases because Shkreli has said he wants to take advantage of a federal program intended to encourage companies to develop such drugs. The program awards vouchers that can be sold to other companies for hundreds of millions of dollars.

This story comes from the New York Times.

Shkreli has said he hopes to obtain such a voucher by getting the Chagas disease drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration for sale in the United States. Critics say that it would be another case of the system being abused by awarding a voucher not for developing a new drug but merely for obtaining F.D.A. approval of a drug already used in tropical countries.

Mr. Shkreli declined to comment.

Last month, Shkreli led an investor group that took control of a failing California biotechnology company, buying a majority of its shares on the open market at an average price of about $1.50 a share.

As one of his first moves at KaloBios, Shkreli agreed to license the worldwide rights to one version of benznidazole, a standard treatment for Chagas Disease in South and Central America. Benznidazole has never been approved for sale in the United States but is provided free to patients by the CDC on an experimental basis.

Shkreli said on a conference call with KaloBios investors last week that if the company won F.D.A. approval for benznidazole, it would have exclusive rights to sell it in the United States for at least five years. He said the price would be similar to that of hepatitis C drugs, which cost $60,000 to nearly $100,000 for a course of treatment.

In Latin America, benznidazole costs $50 to $100 for the typical two-month course of treatment.

It is estimated that 300,000 people in the United States have Chagas disease, virtually all of them immigrants from Latin America who were infected before they came.

Chagas is caused by a parasite, Trypanosoma cruzi, that is in the feces of an insect called the kissing bug, because it often bites people on the face and lips.

However, few of the cases in the United States are acute cases, and the actual demand for the drug would be very small.

So it seems that the voucher itself could be the real prize. “The only reason for him to do this is to get the voucher and turn around and sell it,” said Dr. Caryn Bern, a Chagas disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco.

Critics say that the award of a voucher for F.D.A. approval of a drug already used in tropical countries is more a get-rich-quick scheme than a benefit to people with neglected diseases.

Martin Shkreli, for your plans to raise the price of benznidazole from $100 per course to over $60,000 per course AND for your intention of stealing money from the taxpayers of the United States, you are the Blue Streak Science A$$**** of the Week!

Kaitlyn Thomas of Cape Town, South Africa correctly answered last week's WTHWT challenge with the answer of: bald eagle

• Round up of the COP21 Summit
• Hundreds of giant dinosaur footprints found in Scottish lagoon

Coca-Cola’s top scientist is stepping down after it was revealed that the company was funding scientific research that minimized the role of their products in the spread of obesity.

Coke’s chief science and health officer, Dr. Rhonda Applebaum, created a group called the Global Energy Balance Network. This group consisted of university scientists, and they encouraged the public to focus on exercise and not so much about how what we eat and drink contributes to the epidemic of obesity.

Coca-Cola spent $1.5 million last year to support the group, which included a $1 million grant to the University of Colorado medical school, where the nonprofit group’s president, James O. Hill, a prominent obesity researcher, is a professor. Coke’s financial ties to the group were first reported in an article in The New York Times in August, which prompted criticism that the soft drink giant was trying to exert undue influence scientific research on sugary drinks.

This story appeared in the New York Times on 24 November, 2015.

The university returned the money to Coca-Cola this month after public health experts raised concerns.

Dr. Applebaum, who is a food scientist with a Ph.D. in microbiology, had been Coke’s chief scientific and regulatory officer since 2004. In that role she helped spearhead the company’s efforts to work with scientists as a way to counter criticism about sugary drinks.

At a food industry conference in 2012, Dr. Applebaum gave a talk about Coca-Cola’s strategy of “cultivating relationships” with top scientists as a way to “balance the debate” about soft drinks.

“Balance the debate”? I call that doing what you can to create the impression of false equivalency...something we often see with climate science deniers, too.

Coca-Cola has said that while it offered financial support for the Global Energy Balance Network, the company had no influence on the group or the scientific research it produced. But reports show that Dr. Applebaum and other executives at Coke helped pick the group’s leaders, create its mission statement and design its website, findings first reported this week by The Associated Press.

The AP also published a series of emails between Dr. Hill and Coke executives that revealed the initial strategy of the Global Energy Balance Network. Dr. Hill proposed publishing research that would help the company fend off criticism about its products by shifting the blame for obesity to physical inactivity. Dr. Hill told executives at Coca-Cola that he wanted to work on the company’s behalf to improve its public reputation. He also wrote to executives at the company that it was “not fair” that Coca-Cola was being singled out as “the No. 1 villain in the obesity world.” He added: “I want to help your company avoid the image of being a problem in people’s lives and back to being a company that brings important and fun things to them.”

In an interview in August, Dr. Hill insisted that Coca-Cola did not speak for him or his organization. “They’re not running the show,” he said. “We’re running the show.”

In a statement on Tuesday, the University of Colorado School of Medicine suggested it did not see any problems with Dr. Hill’s relationship with Coca-Cola. “The school of medicine does not prohibit faculty members from communicating with governmental, for-profit or nonprofit entities that provide funding for initiatives intended to improve individual and public health. The school does expect such efforts to be hypothesis-driven and designed to answer questions and not to advance a specific point of view.”

Michael F. Jacobson, the executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy group, said it was concerning to see “how a major corporation is using a professor to propagate their views.”

It is tempting to give this week’s award to several people in this rogue’s gallery. However, I’m sticking with just one, and it is Dr. James Hill of the University of Colorado.

You are Blue Streak Science A$$#*\& of the Week!

Cody White correctly answered last week's WTHWT challenge with the answer of: baby alligator

• 'Gene drive' mosquitoes engineered to fight malaria
• NIH to retire all research chimpanzees
• New "superbug" gene found in animals and people in China
• African grey parrot numbers plummet in Ghana
• Blue Origin Succeeds in Landing Spent Rocket Back on Earth
• Having parasites can boost fertility
• Snakebite antivenom development stuck in 19th century

Our A$$#*(& of the Week is Jenny McCarthy.

Last week I was scrolling through my Facebook newsfeed. Tucked in among the cat videos and “here’s what I’m having for dinner” pictures was a piece from the Daily Express written by James Delingpole.

James Delingpole is an English columnist who has written for the Daily Mail, the aforementioned Daily Express, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, and The Spectator. He’s also the executive editor for the London branch of the Breitbart News Network, a radical right wing news blog founded by the late Andrew Breitbart.

It seems like every week on the A$$#8(& of the Week I’m talking about some anti-science blowhard who denies that anthropogenic climate change is real. This is becoming not unlike trying to convince people that the earth is a sphere and not as flat as a pizza.

Last week a new NASA study came out that shows there’s been a net increase in land ice in Antarctica in recent years, despite a decline in some parts of the continent.

The study's lead author predicted that climate science deniers would distort this study for their own agenda.

Although the conclusions from this study do nothing to contradict the worldwide scientific consensus on climate change this didn’t stop James Delingpole from doing just that.

In this piece, titled MELTDOWN MYTH: Antarctic ice growing is just the first EVIDENCE global warming is NOT REAL, Delingpole even brings up the instance in 2013 where an Australian research ship was trapped in sea ice. He ignores that this phenomenon of increased sea ice was predicted to occur because of the measurably less saline seas in that region...less saline because of the increased level of meltwater from that part of the Antarctic continent. As most of you know, saltwater has a lower freezing temperature than fresh. Result, increased sea ice for a while.

But don’t let the science get in the way, James Delingpole.

He once wrote, "I am not a scientist and have never claimed to be," and that he does not have a science degree. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. If you read the scientific literature and just follow the evidence, wherever it leads, and look at the entirely of it, then fine.

However, In a BBC Horizon documentary called "Science under Attack", Delingpole responded to a question as to whether he had read any peer-reviewed papers. He replied that as a journalist "it is not my job" to read peer-reviewed papers, but rather to be "an interpreter of interpretations".

That is exactly what he did with this article. He interpreted interpretations and ignored the peer-reviewed science...again.

For this unresearched hit piece, James Delingpole, you are the Blue Streak Science A$$#*(& of the Week.

This week’s Blue Streak Science A$$#*(! of the Week is Pam Bondi, the Attorney General for the state of Florida.

Who is Pam Bondi?

Pam Bondi was appointed to her office by Governor Rick Scott, who is infamous for when he said "I'm not a scientist" in response to questions about climate change prior to his re-election. In the bizarro world of Governor Rick Scott no state employee is permitted to address or say things like “climate change” or “global warming”. Pam Bondi, being the loyal foot soldier in the Rick Scott administration, is doing her part in their war against science and the environment.

In 2014 she legally challenged a Chesapeake Bay water cleanup plan that most of the states around the bay had agreed to but industry and agriculture groups opposed. She also is challenging federal wetlands rules that agricultural groups and stormwater utilities are opposing.

Incidentally, she was the lead state attorney general among 26 in an unsuccessful lawsuit seeking to overturn the Affordable Care Act. She has also fought tooth-and-nail against equal marriage.

What has Pam Bondi done this time?

She's now joined a challenge to President Obama's Clean Power Plan

What’s the Clean Power Plan?

It’s a set of rules implemented by the Environmental Protection Agency that will reduce carbon emissions from power plants for the first time. Previously, power plants were allowed to dump unlimited amounts of carbon pollution into the atmosphere. These regulations have been developed under the Clean Air Act, an act of Congress that requires the EPA to take steps to reduce air pollution.

But Pam Bondi is fighting it!

Bondi told reporters,

Make no mistake about this. She has no interest in protecting consumers. It’s the power companies that matter.

On Tuesday a reporter asked if she believes climate change is man-made, and she replied,

That was a  slight breach of etiquette when she actually used the term “climate change”

Not to worry!

Climate scientists have offered to talk with her about climate change and the damage that could be done if the Clean Power Act were blocked.

Her response was no response. 

Pam Bondi, for fighting against the Clean Power Plan, and for fighting it from a state that will be the first and worst to suffer from climate change...

You are the Blue Streak Science A$$#*(! of the Week!

Our A$$&*(# of the Week is Australian Minister for the Environment, Greg Hunt.

We close the show with a discussion on the recent WHO report on cancer and processed meats; a case of media misunderstanding science once again.

Great article by Ed Yong in The Atlantic regarding the WHO report

Michael Hernsin

Kylie Smith

Peter Chahales

On Monday, 19 October, 4:00PM EDT Blue Streak Science is hosting its first weekly "Blab-up"! Blab is a new platform that enables a public video chat. Viewers come in to watch the livestream and they can participate by leaving comments.

If one of the four seats is open you can join in with the other talking heads. We're having these Blabs to engage with our listeners, and get ideas and suggestions for the next episode. Your input would be greatly appreciated, and we invite you to join in.

Our Jackass of the Week is Geoff Marcy, exoplanet hunter and astronomer of the University of California, Berkeley.

Doomsday Revised: New Prediction Claims World Will End on Oct. 7, or The Continuing Saga of the End of the World.