Friday Fluff: Cajun for a Crowd

You'll need one of these. Image from Wikimedia commons.

Today is Halloween, and this post has exactly nothing to do with it. Scary! (See what I did there: made a terrible joke, that's what!) Maybe I'll make another post about our first Halloween in the new neighborhood, but that will have to wait until at least tomorrow. So instead I've decided to share a favorite recipe. This makes a lot of food, and it can easily be stretched with more rice or doubled. It's great for a pot luck, having friends over, or getting an early start to training your tummy for Thanksgiving and the unreasonable number of slices of pie you are planning to eat!

I still haven't told you what this is! It's my interpretation of jambalya. I was born in Louisiana, and my parents tell me that in the hospital they put cayenne pepper on the paccies. I doubt that sincerely. I don't even particularly like spicy foods now as an adult. So this recipe is just a little spicy, perfect for serving to a crowd; those who like it hot should add lots of good Louisiana cayenne pepper hot sauce (not Tabasco or Texas Pete, for goodness' sake!) to their bowl after serving. This is not really a traditional jambalya, it's more a hybrid between that and dirty rice. So no one tell me I'm doing it wrong, just try it; it's delicious (and hard to mess up) this way.

Nature News: HIV Vaccine Raised Infection Risk

Or, What Several Failed HIV Vaccine Studies Can Teach Us about the Risks of the Planned Phase III Ebola Vaccine Study.

 

HIV infecting a human T cell. From NIH via Wikimedia commons

Last week I wanted to start an informed discussion about the complications involved in the plan to begin phase 3 trials of at least two Ebola vaccines in response to the current pandemic in west Africa. Particularly regarding the study design, should a control group (who receives inactive placebo shots) be included, or not? As part of my attempt to explain the considerations I mentioned the story of the failed HIV vaccine trials, but I did not go into any detail, as the post was about Ebola and not HIV. I have decided that was a mistake. So today I will tell you about the HIV vaccine trials, as understanding what went wrong has the potential to teach us a lot about how to go forward with both new HIV vaccines and the Ebola vaccine trials scheduled to start early 2015. The news article we are starting with comes from the news desk of the scientific journal Nature, as Nature is edited by scientists for scientists I'm confident in the quality of it's science journalism, this post will focus on breaking down the story they've told.

Medpage Today: Enterovirus infection linked to type 1 diabetes in children?

An insulin pump. Image from Wikimedia Commons

Today's article, published in Medpage Today, is from a few days ago; it is about a paper just published in Diabetologia that shows a possible link between Enteroviruses and type 1 diabetes. Enterovirus has been in the news lately because the US has been suffering an outbreak of EV-D68 since August, putting many children in the hospital. Seven children have died. EV-D68 a nasty virus, a distant cousin of Polio, that causes a respiratory infection with coughing, wheezing, and fever in children. In rare cases the infection causes paralysis, much like Polio. EV-D68, Polio, and Coxsackie A virus, which causes Hand, Foot, and Mouth disease, are all specific types of Enteroviruses. Does this new research show that in addition to respiratory disease and possible paralysis that this viruses cause diabetes?

Friday Fluff: The Search for the Perfect Purple Twinkle Light

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Next Friday will be my Husband's and my very first Halloween in our new home. We're rather excited. Apparently Halloween is a big deal in our new neighborhood. When we first heard this we made plans to buy and carve a pumpkin and bought one big sack of candy from Wal-Mart. As October wore on we saw other houses on the street get decorated and I started feeling we weren't festive enough. Then our neighbor explained that we were laughably under stocked in candy. So I bought more candy (we now have 5 giant bags), some fake spider web, and 10 sparkly plastic spiders. But something was missing, our spooky decorations could only be enjoyed during the day. We needed twinkle lights. Purple twinkle lights.

NY times: Testing for Ebola Vaccines to Start Soon, W.H.O. Says

Ebola virus. Image from Thomas W. Geisbert via WikiMedia Commons

Everyone is very worried about Ebola right now, so it seems like a good choice of topic. The news story I'm going to talk about is from today's NY Times, Testing for Ebola Vaccines to Start Soon, W.H.O. Says.

About Me

Image by Me (CC BY-NC-ND)

Image by Me (CC BY-NC-ND)

 
Everyone remembers what happened in 2008, right? The bottom fell out of our job market. Something else happened that year: I graduated college. So I did the obvious thing, the thing that everyone told me I should do, I went to graduate school for my Ph.D.. Six years, a lot of hard work, one thesis, and one wedding later it was 2014, and I had a Ph.D. in genetics from Clemson University, a wonderful husband, and no serious job prospects.
I decided to start this blog as a way to keep my toes in the scientific community, hopefully while helping other people sort the serious from the sensational in mainstream science journalism. Since my expertise is in biochemistry and genetics, that's the type of science I'll focus on. That includes things like human metabolism and what that tells us about good nutrition, genetic disposition to disease, basic immunology and communicable disease, and agricultural genetics (GMO or no?). I'll find the stories that everyone is seeing on the major news outlets, find the real science behind the story, and break that down right here.