Now this is much needed if accurate. Science Daily reports that scientists at the University of Manchester, England have changed the surface coat of a class of antibiotics, providing a new array of drugs to battle the so-called superbugs that are highly resistant to standard drugs.

Scientists working in The School of Chemistry and the Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre have paved the way for the development of new types of antibiotics capable of fighting increasingly resistant bacteria.

Micklefield, Smith and colleagues were the first to engineer the biosynthesis of lipopeptide antibiotics of this class back in 2002. They have now developed methodologies for altering the structure of these antibiotics, such as mutating, adding and deleting components.

This innovation provides access to thousands of lipopeptide variants that cannot be produced easily in any other way.

Dr Micklefield said: “The results from this work are essential in the development of the next generation of lipopeptide antibiotics, which are critical to combat emerging super bugs that have acquired resistance to other antibiotics.

“The potent activity of this class of antibiotics against pathogens that are resistant to all current antibiotic treatments makes them one of the most important groups of antibiotics available.

“Our work relies on interdisciplinary chemical-biology, spanning chemistry through to molecular genetics. It follows the tradition of pioneering work in natural product biosynthesis and engineering that has come out of the UK.”

If accurate and workable, this could lead to new drugs against MRSA and many other drug resistant strains.

Wired magazine reports that a Hadrosaur mummy has been found with mineralized skin and possibly muscles and tendons intact.

In an apparently unique series of steps the dino died and its body was preserved in a mineral rich soup that managed to preserve it faster than the body could decay.

Nicknamed Dakota, the hadrosaur is one of only five naturally preserved dinosaur mummies ever discovered. Unlike previous dinosaur mummies, which typically involve skin impressions pressed into bones, Dakota’s entire skin envelope appears to remain largely intact.

“The skin has been mineralized,” said Manning. “It is an actual three-dimensional structure, backfilled with sediment.”

The team believes that the discovery is extremely important to discovering more about how the dinosaurs lived. They’ve brought in the best science and technology that’s available including a specialized CT scanner that Boeing built for NASA to study the creature’s remains. For example:

So far, they have determined that the hadrosaur’s hindquarters are 25 percent larger than previously thought for the species, meaning that it could run up to 28 mph — faster than previously estimated. They have also discovered that the specimen’s vertebrae, which museums commonly stack together, are actually spaced 10 millimeters apart. The result, Manning said, implies that scientists may have been underestimating the size of hadrosaurs and other dinosaurs.

Time will tell and your moderator try to watch this one closely.

“The Million Book Project, an international venture led by Carnegie Mellon University in the United States, Zhejiang University in China, the Indian Institute of Science in India and the Library at Alexandria in Egypt, has completed the digitization of more than 1.5 million books, which are now available online.”

Since it’s inception in 2002, the Universal Library (www.ulib.org) has been busily scanning books and manuscripts, both out-of-print and contemporary. The books are available in 20 different languages and represent about 1% of the worlds books.

One possible problem is that your humble moderator went in for a quick peek and chose to browse their astronomy listings. The listings started with books starting with A of course, but back to 1894. However there are options that allow searching and the are also categorized in 50 year increments to locate the information you’re looking for more easily.

One has to wonder where this will end up in the future. How many times have sci-fi authors dreamed over the years of having the knowledge of humanity’s science and technology computerized and available for instant access.

I guess the moral here is: Beware information overload in 1.5 million books

This one is definitely for everybody whether they get into computers and technology or not. Maybe I should say it’s better for people who aren’t into computers.

I’ve been internetting since 1991 and hate to think of the number of home pages that I’ve had since then. This is before even mentioning getting tired of how tired I get of some of the lousiest sites on the planet blaring out, “MAKE US YOUR HOME PAGE!” Blech.

But I’ve finally found one that I really like. Symbaloo is a wonderfully simplistic site that allows you to organize a basic set of pages with a symbolic interface that boils down to a set of buttons that can be programmed to hit sites of your choice.

Your humble moderator believes he has definitely found his homepage into the indefinite future!

This really doesn’t fit in the SciTech sphere, but one of the nice things about having a blog is being able to dump bookmarks into it so that they don’t get lost

But be that as it may, this looks like a fascinating site. It has a series of links to tutorial sites that can teach you to do most anything through the use of video tutorials. I didn’t realize there were nearly that many video tutorials out there but one of the entries CLAIMS to have links to 49,000 video tutorials from around the web. But some of them are being produced by the sites themselves so the numbers should be growing really quickly.

I haven’t been through the list yet, but surely they have some entries about science and technology or other more specific science like biology, computers, chemistry, medicine etc.

I love scrolling down to the comments sections of sites like this. Not only do you get even more entries to lists like this, but you also find out which ones are the duds and not worth wasting time on

I was flipping through some global bookmarks that other people have found and made public at www.diigo.com and saw that Scientific American magazine has an interesting looking article about raising smart kids.

I haven’t read the whole thing yet but it’s high on my reading list. Some say that intelligence is a result of biology and some that it’s a result of environment. Me? I’ve been a computer geek from way back and have a bit of a different take on what makes someone intelligent.

I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve run across people who, when I tell them that I’m a voracious reader, go “ewwww. I don’t like reading!” I have very few peeves, but I guess this is one of them. I tend to gravitate away from people like this.

Well, for me, that’s half of the intelligence equation. Try operating your computer without a sufficient amount of data. See how short that operation is going to be.

No matter HOW bright your genetics makes you, without the data to operate on, that innate intelligence is going to go to waste, like a rose blooming in a desert and there’s nothing that modern science, technology or medicine can do about it.

So sit back, have a drink and see if you can raise smarter kids and secure their future without them knowing about it

This one from the “Oh brother” department:

New Scientist website notes that Frederic Libersat from Ben-Gurion University in Be’er Sheva, Israel reports having brought cockroaches back from a zombie-like state through the use of a mimic of the neurotransmitter octopamine.

It seems that cockroaches are used as a portable larder by jewel wasps (Ampulex compressa) females, well, non-portable really. The wasp, much smaller than the cockroaches, has evolved the ability to stab with its stinger directly into the roach brain and paralyze it through its venom. The wasp then grabs the roach by its antennae and drags it back to her burrow, implants an egg on it, then the roach, paralyzed but conscious, can watch the young’un eat its way through its stomach and eventually the rest of it, in living color.

But by giving the roach a mimic of the neurotransmitter octopamine, Fredric can restore use of the roaches legs, and unparalyze it, effectively bring it back from its zombie-like state.

Wow. Your humble moderator thinks that Fred needs a hobby and to take the time away from the science, biology and chemistry. Wonder how much of a research grant he got for that. I’m sure roaches around the world are cheering for him, though I’m not sure that it’s contributed much to the human future!

I wanted to find something big and spectacular for my first posting to this blog and this story seems to fit both bills. It’s as big as anything I can think of that science has come up with so far and your humble moderator’s mind keeps trying to wrap itself around it, and of course, failing.

The New Scientist website reported on 24 August 2007 that there’s a void in space, 6 to 10 billion light years from Earth that stretches across a billion empty light years of absolute nothingness from the direction of the constellation Eridanus. According to Lawrence Rudnick and colleagues at the University of Minnesota, there are no radio waves coming from this area of space, meaning no galaxies, no super clusters, stars or even dark matter, though he seems to think that this is confirmation of dark energy in the universe.

But another team at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill suggests that the incredible void may be the imprint of another universe on our own. Also reported in New Scientist, on 24 November 2007, Laura Mersini-Houghton and her team infer that this might also vindicate string theory.

According to the New Scientist article, “In string theory, 10500 universes (or string vacuums) are described, each with unique properties. They contend that the largeness of our universe is due to its vacuum counterbalancing gravity. This counter-gravity of the vacuum keeps our universe very large (rather than shrinking due to gravity)—larger than the other multitude of universes. The team says that smaller universes are positioned at the edge of our universe, and because of this interaction they are seen by us.”

This is one reason to watch astronomy closely in the future and we’ll try to keep a close eye on it on this blog. A billion light years across. wowser.

What can your moderator say? Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proofs.