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I am very happy to introduce the newest addition to the Scientific American blog network Unofficial Prognosis , written by Ilana Yurkiewicz ( Twitter ). Ilana is a first-year student at Harvard Medical School who created Unofficial Prognosis to capture her reflections through her medical training. She graduated summa cum laude with a B.S

I’ve written before about the many ways that bacteria can move around. Considering that they’re just one cell long, micro-organisms have a whole range of ways to travel through their little world. Movement is useful for finding food and for changing your environment when all nearby resources have been exhausted

Image courtesy of iStockphoto/lisegagne Those little pursed lips and that tiny crinkled nose might not just mean that your baby isn’t a fan of pureed peas or mashed sweet potatoes.

Anthrax courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Marcus007 The white powder that arrived in envelopes addressed to lawmakers and journalists in 2001 proved to be a deadly delivery for several people. The lethal substance spores commonly known as Anthrax (from the bacterium Bactillus anthracis ) can cause a toxic reaction in a host’s blood stream , killing cells and leading to tissue damage, bleeding and death

Morning After The Morning's Trash In my last post , I focused on flaws in the medical device approval process. The Union of Concerned Scientists FDA at a Crossroads meeting also covered problems with drug approval

Image courtesy of iStockphoto/Yuri_Arcurs Sex might seem like a risky occupation for the more than 27 million Americans who have been diagnosed with heart disease.

The short of it ( covered in depth by Michael Eisen , and Razib tipped me off to the issue ) is that Carolyn Maloney, a congresswoman funded by Elsevier, which is a major for-profit publishing company, is trying to pass the Research Works Act, which would deny Americans free access to research funded by taxpayer money. Currently, any research funded by the National Institute of Health must be made freely available to the public 12 months after publication. You can see why for-profit publishing companies do not like this policy.

Glowing genes: White arrows show hot spots of ADAR activation; courtesy of Reenan Lab/Brown University It’s a long way from gene to protein. The dogmatic scenario is: DNA gets transcribed into RNA, which gets translated into protein . But in real life, and in real living things, the workings aren’t quite that simple.

image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Opa Cigarette maker Philip Morris spent years studying whether additives, such as menthol, added to the toxicity of their smokes . And several published studies conducted by the company have claimed that the additives had no impact on the danger of their products. [More]

image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Opa Cigarette maker Philip Morris spent years studying whether additives, such as menthol, added to the toxicity of their smokes . And several published studies conducted by the company have claimed that the additives had no impact on the danger of their products

Click here for Part One: Carl Zimmer on the Art of Science Writing

Click here for Part One: Carl Zimmer on the Art of Science Writing

Anopheles mosquito; courtesy of iStockphoto/abadonian In the long fight against malaria , progress finally seems to be coming, if incrementally. The number of people who died from malaria in 2010 fell 5 percent from the previous year and has dropped 26 percent from 2000 levels, according to a new World Health Organization (WHO) report . [More]

Paul Farmer: Wikimedia Commons/Billigan PHILADELPHIA Paul Farmer is used to uphill battles. After decades working to fight HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis in impoverished areas of Haiti, the seemingly tireless doctor and anthropologist is now struggling to reassemble a health strategy for the country after last year’s earthquake and subsequent cholera outbreak .

iStockphoto/kali9 More and more physicians are investing in their own imaging equipment. But when a doctor stands to make money on each MRI he or she orders, it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out that they might be inclined to order too many scans. [More]