Isegoria

Guilty Sequence describes how a Louisiana doctor was convicted of attempting to murder his ex-girlfriend, a nurse:

Schmidt arrived at his former girlfriend’s house the night of August 4, 1994, and gave her what he said was a vitamin injection. Six months later, when the victim tested positive for HIV, she accused the doctor of infecting her. Circumstantial evidence indicated that Schmidt had injected the victim with blood drawn at his office from a male patient infected with HIV.

DNA fingerprinting has been widely used to link human suspects to crimes. This trial was different, however, because the virus mutates so rapidly that in a matter of hours its DNA fingerprint can change significantly.

Both the defense and the prosecution enlisted scientists to determine the relatedness of the two HIV strains — the victim’s and the patient’s. A close match between the viral DNA sequences could help prove that the doctor had committed the crime.

The case marks the first time this type of evolutionary analysis, called phylogenetics, has been admitted as evidence in a US criminal court.

If only I knew a phylogeneticist who could explain all this to me…

A recent article from the prestigious Journal of Duh, Mothers Better at Baby Talk Than Men, notes that:

Although infants don’t really understand when their parents speak to them, women seem to be better at baby talk than men.

While that’s not surprising, their evidence seems…odd:

A computer program designed by scientists in the United States to study how voice pitch, rhythm and stress communicate meaning suggests that mother’s coochy-coos are less ambiguous than dad’s.

The program evaluated the properties of speech of six sets of parents who were told to encourage their babies and then to warn them to avoid dangerous objects.

It correctly differentiated between the majority of disapproval and approval tones.

But to the researchers’ surprise, the program correctly identified 12% more of the comments made by the mothers, suggesting that women use less ambiguous sound than men to convey to babies what they mean.

COOING DOES NOT COMPUTE
COOING DOES NOT COMPUTE
COOING DOES NOT COMPUTE

(Thanks, John, for tipping me off to such cutting-edge science!)

I thought it was bad to get a deadly nut allergy from a transplant, but, as Two Patients Got Cancer From Transplant points out, it can be a whole lot worse:

Transfer of cancer from a donated organ to a transplant patient is rare, and the chances of it occurring long after the donor was treated were thought to be extremely unlikely. The longest known interval in a donor-related melanoma was eight years between surgery and transplant.

But in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine, researchers said two patients got cancer from a donor who had a melanoma skin lesion removed 16 years earlier and was thought to be cancer-free.

Melanoma cells had apparently been dormant in the donor’s kidneys until the transplant, explained Dr. Rona M. MacKie, who treated the recipients. The cancer cells flourished because medicines given to the patients to prevent rejection of the transplants had suppressed their disease-fighting immune systems.

The melanoma came back after 16 years.

There’s nothing particularly fascinating about French Family Helps Scientists Uncover Gene Default — except the title. It’s obviously translated from French — where “défaut” means “fault” not “default”. Quel faux ami!