Science

That's what the city of London spends each year to remove chewing gum from subway trains and stations.  U.K.-based Revolymer is developing a new kind of chewing gum that will wash easily off of any surface.  From an article on TechnologyReview.com:

The gum easily comes off roads, shoes, and hair, and it barely sticks at all to some surfaces.

About 600,000 metric tons of chewing gum are manufactured in the world every year, Pettman says. A large percent of that ends up on streets and pavements, becoming a pollution issue.

I thought this was cute (via Andrew Sullivan). It might be a bit obtuse if you haven't heard Dawkins or read anything from him.

Francis Collins, author of "The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief," was on The Colbert Report last night. The director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, Collins considers DNA "the language of God," the means He used He was profiled in the LA Times a while back. There was a debate of sorts between Collins and prominent atheist Richard Dawkins in a recent issue of Time. It was an interesting read. I'm going to read Collins' book. I certainly don't have all the answers, and I'm sure he doesn't either...but I'm interested in ways to synthesize what we observe in the world with with we observe in the Word. Here are the video clips from Colbert:

From the LA Times article:

He believes in evolution and in the resurrection. He wears a silver ring with a raised cross and works at a dining-room table painted with the double-helix of DNA... Collins considers evolution irrefutable; he has no doubt that all life emerged from a common ancestor over millions of years. But he began to ask himself whether God could have set this amazing process in motion... ...perhaps evolution is a logical, even elegant, way to populate the planet. Maybe God intended mutations in DNA over the millennia to lead to the emergence of Homo sapiens. Once man arrived, maybe God set him apart from the other creatures by endowing him with knowledge of right and wrong, a sense of altruism and a yearning for spiritual nourishment.... Polls have found that 40% of scientists believe, as Collins does, in a God who actively communicates with man. Among elite biologists, however, the figure is much lower, about 5%...

From an article by Ian Sample in The Guardian titled "For first time, doctors communicate with patient in persistent vegetative state":

A 23-year-old woman who has been in a vegetative state since suffering devastating brain damage in a traffic accident has stunned doctors by performing mental tasks for them. Brain scans revealed that the woman, who has shown no outward signs of awareness since the accident in July last year, could understand people talking to her and was able to imagine playing tennis or walking around her home when asked to by doctors. The discovery has astounded neuroscientists who believe it could have dramatic implications for life and death decisions over other patients diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state (PVS)... "This is extremely important. It's the difference between life and death. From cases in the UK and the US, we know that end-of-life decisions are of course extremely important and this will definitely change the way we deal with these patients. When you have signs of consciousness, you cannot decide to stop hydration and nutrition," said Steven Laureys, a neurologist at the University of Liege and co-author of the study which appears in the journal Science today... Persistent vegetative state was first described in 1972 by Scottish and American neurologists and only came to medical attention because of extraordinary advances in keeping severely brain-damaged patients alive for longer. Neurologically, the condition is a slight improvement on a coma. Patients diagnosed as PVS show no signs of consciousness or awareness, but unlike those in a coma, have periods of sleep and wakefulness and periodically open their eyes. The condition is a source of huge controversy in medical and legal fields, largely because of the difficulty in proving a patient is unaware and the extreme difficulty in predicting whether a patient will ever recover. Adults typically have a 50% chance of recovering from a persistent vegetative state within the first six months, but after a year, the chances of recovery drop dramatically. Those who recover after longer periods usually experience serious disabilities. The mysterious condition continues to confound scientists. In May, a team of British and South African doctors announced they had given sleeping pills to a PVS patient to help calm restless movements at night. The patient woke up 15 minutes later and was able to speak and even tell jokes. Doctors have kept the patient on the pills, and believe it works by acting on part of the brain that had been shut down in response to the patient's original trauma.

As a follow-up to recent reports regarding an embryonic stem cell research breakthrough touted to get around the ethical dilemma by leaving the embryo unharmed, from an article of the same title by Rick Weiss in The Washington Post:

A landmark scientific report that was supposed to bridge the gap between proponents and opponents of human embryonic stem cell research has become the focus of an escalating feud, with a prominent critic of the research alleging that scientists were deceptive in presenting their results. At issue is a series of experiments described in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature, in which scientists at Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) in Worcester, Mass., described a method for making stem cells without harming a human embryo. The basic facts of the report remain unchallenged. But in an unusual move yesterday, Nature corrected wording in a lay-language news release it had distributed in advance and posted clarifying data it had asked the scientists to provide. At the core of the battle is a widely distributed e-mail from Richard Doerflinger of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, who raised three issues. First, he said the scientists did not make it clear that no embryos survived their experiments. In fact, data in the paper do make that clear, but Nature's initial release said otherwise. It is well established that a single cell can be removed from an eight-cell human embryo without causing any apparent harm to the embryo, and the new report aimed only to show that such single cells can become stem cells, lead researcher Robert Lanza said yesterday. In the experiments, the scientists took as many cells as they could from each embryo, destroying them in the process, to make the most of the embryos donated for their study.