Microbial geneticists found some really divergent sequences in ocean microbes collected on the Sorcerer II study by Venter and gang. One possible thought is that these microbes are a whole new branch of life.
Interesting.
[via @microbeworld]Bookmarked in Delicious.
"The findings add to the growing understanding of the complex relationship between our health and the bacteria living in and on our bodies. They also add to the growing conviction that it might one day be possible to curb diarrhea, and prevent other diseases, by making sure our guts have the right complement of bacteria."
I saw a Nature paper on how <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v469/n7331/full/nature09646.html">Bifidobacteria can protect from enteropathogenic infection through production of acetate.</a> Both these papers suggest that there may be ways to control bacterial pathogenesis with other bacteria. Can you say probiotics?
Bookmarked in Delicious.
"“Eliminating plastic is one of the greenest actions you can do to lower your eco-footprint,” one noted while participating in a recent online challenge to be plastic-free. Is this true? Shunning plastic may seem key to the ethic of living lightly, but the environmental reality is more complex."
Really clever article questioning anti-plastic trends. The main point is not that plastic is bad but that the most harming uses of plastic have to do with behavior not the plastic (such as single use bags).
This is a good read.
Bookmarked in Delicious.
This review brings together the research that counters the fallacy that proteins need to have a defined structure (as seen in crystal structures) to have a function. There has been a range of interesting findings regarding the requirement of disorder in protein structures. And folks are starting to tease out where and how disorder is useful.
To me, I see proteins as jiggly string with a propensity to have a certain shape. If there's a part that hangs out there, it's not necessarily totally disordered – the stretch has a conformation space it prefers, even if that space is large. And in that sampling of conformational space, that "disordered" stretch is honing in on its function.
So, no, I'm not surprised or worried bout the disorder and this paper does a great job in giving disorder its due.
Bookmarked in Delicious.
“Neomycin-sensitive bacteria naturally present in the mice’s bodies provided a trigger that led to the production of T cells and antibodies that could fight an influenza infection in the lungs. When antibiotics eliminated the bacteria, inflammasomes failed to launch and the virus multiplied.”
Another paper of bacteria modulating the immune response for the whole body. I’ve seen a few that tease out different bacteria with different effects. The key thing that all these papers find is that that gut microbes can modulate immune response. If that’s the case, then we need to not only be mindful of the antibiotics we take, but also what we eat. The flora in your gut could protect you from getting sick from viruses and other nasties.
[As an aside: gotta chuckle at “inflammasome”. Do the ‘omes never end?]Bookmarked in Delicious.
“Ultimately, Smith would like to identify a bacterium or set of bacteria that protects children from kwashiorkor, and add it to the emergency rations handed out to starving children, or give it to them beforehand. “Maybe we can do earlier interventions — before they suffer,” she says.”
Another interesting finding teasing out the importance of gut bacteria in human health. An interesting outcome would be creating a probiotic to prevent or recover from malnutrition.
Bookmarked in Delicious.
"Taxonomy has a reputation as one of science's least glamorous fields, and experts have been sounding an alarm over declining funding and a global dearth of practitioners. With extinctions estimated to outnumber discoveries of new species and many of Earth's most diverse taxa still unaccounted for, they say the effort to identify and catalog organisms is more critical than ever before. Now some researchers are calling for taxonomists to open wide their profession's gates to amateur scientists, as the popular GalaxyZoo Web site has begun to do with citizen astronomers."
Citizen science to the rescue!
Bookmarked in Delicious.
"PepsiCo says it is the world's first bottle of a common type of plastic called PET made entirely of plant-based materials."
Until I learn more, I think this is still PET, meaning plastic, with all the "fun" of PET and recycling. All because the source is some other organic waste shouldn't mean the PET is any different.
Bookmarked in Delicious.
"Researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York have developed a Rat Conscious Animal PET (RatCAP) imager, which allows a rat to wear a scanner even while it moves around."
Quite cool!
Bookmarked in Delicious.
Traditional marketing ain’t dead yet.
Old skool, that’s how we roll
I was in a meeting last month and one marketing manager’s idea of promoting a sponsor was to slap their logo all over the place. I was partially against it because he wanted to slap that logo all over my social marketing channels. But it also struck me as bizarre and I couldn’t put a finger on it as to why it did.
I wrote down at the time that in “old marketing” you slapped your logo around, made sure that you took every opportunity to get your jingle, brand elements, company name, tagline, in front of anyone who would listen or look.
Isn’t this the type of marketing we are trying to change by being more social through blogs, social networks, and the like – socializing around media and stories that emotionally connect people to a product or brand? Isn’t “new marketing” about stories, causes, experience, and action?
Prove it to me, friend
A few weeks back I was browsing the Health Care Social Media EU stream on Twitter (#hcsmeu) and found some great nuggets that were relevant to this brain wave:
@garymonk asks if the EU wants folks to be bombarded by irrelevant un-targeted krap.
In a later message in that discussion, @arbeiza is on to something when asking how we can support evidence in a social context. And @angel189 then coins a great term “social evidence based medicine” that I think has the kernel of what I am trying to get at.
As @angel189 goes on to say: “Stop Marketing. Start Socializing.”
I think the cognitive dissonance I am feeling with all the logo-slapping is that marketing is not just about being social, but about tapping into the “social evidence” that a customer should care about a product or brand.
Social Evidence
We as marketers need to find, promote, reveal, and share stories that contain evidence that can be socialized (with the best evidence coming from our customers’ social network, not us). The only way to get past the noise of all that logo-slapping is to connect with customers with evidence they can understand within a trusted social framework, a social framework that they are part of and create the stories of, a social framework that contains the sources that influence these customers in their choice of brands, causes, belief systems.
What do you think?
Closing
And I could say that this isn’t a big revelation. But while I was at the Mecca of Social Media (aka SXSW) I was appalled (disgusted, shocked, disappointed?) with the complete dominance of old style, slap-the-logos-on-the-boobs-and-any-other-surface-you-can-think-of old marketing that the very hipsters of SXSW are trying to tear down.
As one old pal said, you can spend 40MEur on some big gimmicky marketing campaign or post a great story on a blog (albeit, his influential blog) – you still get one post on Engadget.
Every day, as I reach out to our audience of patients and families, each post is carefully crafted to be relevant, cognizant of the stories readers socially share as evidence of the amazing things our hospital does. This is not how they fit in my brand story, but how I fit in their stories, their evidence of how we are part of their lives.
And when I get that right, I am theirs.