Two different influenza vaccines will be available in the fall of 2009. Many readers of virology blog have asked why these four virus strains will not be combined into a single, tetravalent formulation. I posed this question to Dr. Ruben Donis, chief of the molecular virology and vaccines branch at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
As expected, the new budget projections from the Office of Management and Budget show an estimated deficit of $1.58 trillion in the current year (which ends on September 30). In their coverage of the dueling budget releases, many members of the media are noting that this estimate is almost identical to the $1.59 trillion estimate released by the Congressional Budget Office.
Over the past 3 decades people of Pittsburgh worked hard together to get a bright future. As a result it has become a model for economic and environmental changes. The life of people has also transformed with great ease and diversity, which lead to a balanced and bouncing economy.
Former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney sent an Email around on Sunday in which she wrote: "[I]t has just now come to my attention that a 'journalist' who suggested that I be lynched was actually being paid by our own government to say that."
One of the most widely-used weed killers in the country is coming under fire. Yesterday the New York Times and my employer, the Huffington Post Investigative Fund, published investigations into the health risks associated with Atrazine.
I make a point of visiting the classrooms of my elementary-school aged children during this month to do a presentation on Islam. Teaching about world religions, including Islam, is a requirement of our state's standards, but because of the contentious nature of teaching about religion in the classroom, it is often avoided by teachers. This fear of teaching about religion doesn't stop our schools from hosting many representations of Christianity.
I really, really don't understand what's going on in the stock market right now. And by that, of course, I mean I do understand, I just don't like it. Today's alleged good news is the decrease in the unemployment rate, from 9.5 percent in June to 9.4 percent in August. Predictably, the markets jumped to '09 highs, capping off a nearly 50 percent run from the March lows.
As far as I can tell the government's proposed "health care reform" can be summarized as "put more money into the existing U.S. system". I'm wondering why we as a society would want to do this.
Yesterday's New York Times has an article on a new trend in search and data gathering technology, called sentiment analysis, which attempts to extract information about public opinion from, for example, postings on social networking sites: An emerging field known as sentiment analysis is taking shape around one of the computer world's unexplored frontiers: translating the vagaries of human emotion into hard data.
In temperate climates, influenza displays distinct seasonality: infections mainly occur from November through March in the northern hemisphere, and from May to September in the southern hemisphere. The results of experiments in guinea pigs have revealed that aerosol transmission of influenza virus is most efficient in cold and dry conditions, and completely blocked at warm or humid conditions.