LINKS - March 15th, 2023
Welcome to LINKS — my attempt to provide Rhapsody readers with five interesting stories that tell us something about what it means to be human. LINKS is published every Wednesday. Have a link you want to share? Drop it in the comments.
Paul Berg obituary
By Georgina Ferry, The Guardian
“In 1972 Paul Berg, who has died aged 96, became the first person to combine the DNA of two organisms in this way. Recombinant DNA has become a fundamental tool of biomedical research and drug discovery, making it possible to grow drugs such as human insulin in bacteria as well as to develop tailor-made vaccines.”
The Most Boring Number in the World Is ...
By Manon Bischoff, Scientific American
“A comprehensive encyclopedia of number sequences provides a means for investigating these two opposing categories. Mathematician Neil Sloane had the idea for such a compilation in 1963, when he was writing his doctoral thesis. At that time, he had to calculate the height of values in a type of graph called a tree network and came across a sequence of numbers: 0, 1, 8, 78, 944,... He did not yet know how to calculate the numbers in this sequence exactly and would have liked to know whether his colleagues had already come across a similar sequence during their research. But unlike logarithms or formulas, there was no registry for sequences of numbers. And so, 10 years later, Sloane published his first encyclopedia, A Handbook of Integer Sequences, which contained about 2,400 sequences that also proved useful in making certain calculations. The book met with enormous approval: ‘There’s the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Handbook of Integer Sequences,’ wrote one enthusiastic reader, according to Sloane.”
Saliva: The next frontier in cancer detection
By Matías A. Loewy, Knowable Magazine
“More than 60 years later, the idea that saliva analysis can be used to detect different types of cancer is gaining traction in the scientific community. In the specialized literature, papers containing the keywords “diagnosis,” “cancer” and “saliva” grew more than tenfold over the past two decades, from 26 in 2001 to 117 in 2011, 183 in 2016 and 319 in 2021, according to the PubMed database, a search engine for biomedical research articles.”
Her Doctor Said Her Illness Was All in Her Head. This Scientist Was Determined to Find the Truth.
By Alice Callahan, The New York Times
“Hyperemesis has long been under-researched and insufficiently recognized, in part because about 70 percent of pregnancies come with some degree of nausea and vomiting, which is usually not dangerous, Dr. Trovik said. Health care providers can be slow to differentiate between the more common ‘morning sickness’ and the rarer but more severe hyperemesis, and to offer treatment, including medications and nutrition, she said.”
Meet the Man Spending 100 Days Underwater for Science
By Teresa Nowakowski, Smithsonian Magazine
“Dituri, who uses the nickname Dr. Deep Sea, is living in Jules’ Undersea Lodge in Key Largo, Florida—the same underwater venue where the previous record was set. The 100-square-foot hotel, which sits 30 feet below the surface, is his intended home until June 9, where he’ll be carrying out research and giving virtual lectures for his students at the University of South Florida.”