These are the latest science news links and snippets from Sciencebase:
- That underwater hydrocarbon plume is still there – Things in the Gulf of Mexico may not be cleaning themselves up quite as fast as some had claimed and many had hoped. Surprise, surprise
- Paracetamol use and risk of asthma in teenagers studied – NHS Choices – Health News – It is not possible in a study of this design to determine whether the positive association observed was causal.
- Piped David Bradley – My main science blogs, going down the tubes? Yahoo Pipes pulls in all the feeds from Sciencebase (science), Sciencetext (tech), ReactiveReports (chemistry), SciScoop (forum), and ImagingStorm (scientific photos)
- New colour-change test for melamine contamination of milk products – First pets died in the US, then babies in China succumbed to the scurrilous practice of artificially boosting protein readings in milk products by adding the nitrogen-rich industrial chemical melamine to milk products. Now, researchers in China have published details of a simple test for melamine contamination, in the peer-reviewed journal Talanta.
- Good God! Can’t a Journal Author Have Any Fun Anymore? – Jesus cures case of influenza, gets retracted by scholarly journal
- Drug testing – A simple analytical approach to identifying drugs of abuse would be a boon to forensic scientists and law enforcement agencies. A collaboration between researchers in the US and Europe demonstrates how an assessment of different methods using chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry reveals that multivariate selectivity can take into account the degree of resolution between nominally unresolved peaks due to the presence of various drugs in a forensic sample and so allow quicker identification.