Nobel Prize Awarded for Discover of Bacteria that Cause Ulcers (and other science news)

For many years the cause of ulcers was attributed to stress, spicy food or stomach acid. This week the 2005 Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology was awarded to Australians Barry Marshall and J. Robin Warren, who showed that ulcers are actually caused by the bacterium Helicobacter pylori.
Marshall and Warren pursued their line of research despite raised eyebrows and dismissive head-shaking, even to the point of ingesting a culture of bacteria to show that it could infect the stomach lining. And they were absolutely correct, as the scientific world came to realize.
- Read more about this discovery at "In the Pipeline".
- Read Anthony Daniel's account of how his father's lifelong suffering from ulcers affected his life
If the bacterial cause of duodenal ulcer had been known during my childhood and adolescence, how different would my life have been? My father would not have paced the floor night after night; he would not have been nearly killed by surgery; his temper would have been more equable. There would have been more affection in the household, and we should not have wasted so much of our substance in silent emotional strife. My father would not have died a lonely old man, little mourned because unloved, knowing that he would not be missed.
- Learn about the evolution angle at The Loom.

OTHER SCIENCE NEWS
- Have you every really looked at Intelligent Design? an excellent column in the York Daily Record by Mike Argento (part of their coverage of the Dover Panda Trial)
- Scientific American Science and Technology Web Awards (highlighting excellent web sites in all the sciences, from popular to very technical)
- Non-volatile sexual "pheromone" found in mouse tears may play a role in close-range, face-to-face communication
- Scientists dangle bait for screenwriters
- The evolution of deuterostome gastrulation (technical)
- Evolutionary conservation of a mechanism of longevity from worms to mammals (technical)

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