Printer-friendly version

27 February 2004

E-Bulletin Backscatter

Cheers for Ralph Coppola's Wanderings column

SAS,

I especially liked last week's Wanderings, particularly the amateur biochemistry lab and the mesodynamics links.

Excellent work Ralph. Keep 'em coming like that and you will blow us all away!

George Hrabovsky

Poster sessions at scientific conferences

Forrest:

I saw your editorial in the SAS E-Bulletin and agree that posters should always be in the most heavily visited areas of a conference. When you speak to folks at AAAS, be sure you point out that other major conferences - including the highly prestigious Gordon Research Conferences - adopted this approach years ago.

At many of the Gordon conferences, the posters are actually placed in the lounge/bar area where everyone congregates at the end of each day. At other conferences and symposia, I've seen them placed in the main lobby area, near the coffee and snacks, so people see them every time they come out of a seminar. Either approach is far superior to having a dedicated "poster session" in a separate room.

Keep up the good work with the SAS E-Bulletin. It looks great.

Alan W. Dove, Ph.D.

Still more about poster sessions

Dear Forrest:

I enjoyed your article on the poster sessions of the 2004 AAAS meetings.
What a good idea to put the posters where the people are! Last year I made
it my business to visit the high school posters, since I was a judge of
student posters in New York City. I was impressed by the level of the work presented on both occasions.

The professional scientists' poster session was better attended than the
students' last year as well. My own contribution, on the importance of
proteins to evolution, drew more interest than I anticipated. This of
course was welcome even though I had to scurry around looking for a copier
for my hand out.

Dolores Bentham

Infections provide opportunity for citizen scientists

Dear SAS,

I just read about tissue infections in upper ear piercings at /www.cnn.com/2004/HEALTH/02/25/piercing.dangers.ap/index.html.

The infection is caused by Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The article states that Pseudomonas is a common cause of this type of infection, and that it probably occurs more often than public health officials realize. The germ lives in soil, water, plant and animal tissues, and can be found in plumbing fixtures such as shower heads and faucets.

This is perhaps a specific bug that amateur scientists could search for, perhaps in in coordination with local public health officials. A study appears in the 25 February 2004 Journal of the American Medical Association (see William E. Keene, Amy C. Markum and Mansour Samadpour, Outbreak of Pseudomonas aeruginosa Infections Caused by Commercial Piercing of Upper Ear Cartilage, Journal of the American Medical Association 291, 981-985 , 2004).

Tim Davis

Still another microbiology project idea

This article about bacteria in soap scum on shower curtains certainly doesn't surprise me :

www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/science/02/15/microbes.everywhere.ap/index.html.

I'm not a microbiology kind of of guy, so the pink stuff in the corner cracks isn't interesting to me. But it probably is to millions of citizen scientists.

Who in SAS is the king/queen of microbiology? Can somebody put together a program to have thousands of citizen scientists analyze the gook in their showers? Does the bacteria depend on where you are? (Mountains vs plains, coasts vs big cities, etc.) Do the bacteria come from your skin? Your clothes? Does soap kill it very effectively?

Tim Davis

Laboratory culture incubator still wanted

Dear SAS:

Thank you for including my request for a lab incubator in Backscatter. The email address, however, is no longer good. The new one is dbentham@hancock.net.

Dolores Bentham