Part of my online life includes editorial duties at ResearchBlogging.org, where I serve as the Social Sciences Editor. Each Thursday, I pick notable posts on research in anthropology, philosophy, social science, and research to share on the ResearchBlogging.org News site. To help highlight this writing, I also share my selections here on AiP. This week: [...]

The panel on global health at the opening ceremony of the 61st Meeting of Nobel Laureates in Lindau well and truly laid the gauntlet down to young researchers from around the world. On the panel was: Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft and co-founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Ada Yonath, Noble Laureate in [...]

This week, the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, is always a time for me for reflection on poverty and justice in America. Katrina brought focus to our country’s disparities and the response—or lack thereof—to disasters. And now, ironically on the anniversary of Katrina, Hurricane Isaac struck New Orleans again. Even prior to the Hurricane, in 2005, [...]

Counterfeit drugs appear to be “all the rage.” For some time there have been problems with counterfeit antimalarials, as I learned when I studied in Bangkok at the Asian Tropical Medicine Course in 2006. The practice was common in Asia, causing serious problems with increasing resistance to antimalarials there, as well as in Africa, where [...]

Your cell phone location information can be used to help you find restaurants or help companies serve you targeted ads. What if all of this data could also play a role in studying and fighting deadly infectious diseases, such as malaria? An international team of researchers has done just that—for an entire country. People can [...]

The emergence of international air travel in the 20th century enabled an unprecedented spread of ideas, cultures and communication. Unfortunately, modern aviation has also proved an effective means of spreading diseases. Air travel didn’t introduce worldwide pandemics, of course, but with tens of millions of scheduled international flights annually and hundreds of millions of passengers [...]

Mosquitoes don’t cause malaria—the disease comes courtesy of the Plasmodium falciparum parasite. Yet mosquitoes do a fine job of spreading Plasmodium to about half a billion people every year. The parasite depends on mosquitoes for more than just transport, however. Plasmodium goes through much of its complex life cycle inside the mosquito, passing through the [...]

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. The decline might seem modest given the [...]

Smart phone apps can help you check your vision, keep tabs on your blood-glucose levels and track your blood pressure. Earlier this year the U.S. Food and Drug Administration even approved an app that allows doctors to view scans on an iPhone or iPad to help them make diagnoses on the go. But fancy apps [...]

By any other name, the Anopheles gambiae mosquito would still bear—with its tiny buzzing wing beats—the deadly threat of malaria, which can be passed to humans in a single blood-sucking bite. But what if this species were to split in twain? Two new studies, published online October 21 in Science, have found evidence that A. [...]

An estimated one million people die each year from malaria, a parasitic infection transmitted by mosquitoes. Current control strategies involve blasting the bugs with insecticides, or using drugs to kill the parasite once it infects humans. Unfortunately, these methods are becoming less effective as both pests evolve ways to resist the toxic treatments, so new [...]

Malaria kills hundreds of thousands of people every year, and the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum is behind a majority of those deaths. Although newer drug combinations (of artemisinins) proved effective after resistance to widely used treatments appeared, hints of resistance to this newer therapy are also beginning to emerge, creating a darkening cloud over a [...]

MIAMI—Malaria continues to be a global scourge, sickening some 300 million to 500 million people annually. Most of the resulting one million to three million malaria deaths occur in regions where it is highly endemic, such as sub-Saharan Africa and parts of south Asia.  Some parts of the world where malaria was once rampant, however—such [...]

NEW YORK—As climatologists weather the IPCC controversy, another storm is brewing, and this one is filled with not with bloggers but with beasts, bugs and bacteria. It is the potential plague of infectious diseases—threatened to be made worse, many scientists propose, by projected changes in the Earth’s climate. At a symposium held yesterday at the [...]

Greetings, and welcome to Day 4 of Plugged In! On behalf of myself, Melissa, Scott, and Robynne, welcome to this shiny new blog of ours. There are so many things to discuss, but to get started, I want explain to you what this blog means to me and what I hope to get out of [...]

Artist Luke Jerram is a UK-based sculptor whose glass sculptures of microscopic life make the invisible visible. I was instantly transfixed by his sculptures’ delicacy and intense beauty. For me, something is captured in these sculptures that is lost in the false-color scanning electron microscope images we typically see of viruses and other extremely small [...]