Author Archives: SergioBPFL

Scientists may have found a way to eliminate antibiotic-resistant infections

by SergioBPFL Posted on May 19, 2015

Scientists may have found a way to eliminate antibiotic-resistant infections

By on 19 May 2015commentsShare

You know how sometimes humans freak out about genetic engineering? It’s time to freak out again! Except this time it’s a good thing: Scientists are figuring out how to use new gene-editing technologies to eliminate antibiotic resistance in bacteria.

The Tel Aviv-based researchers, whose work was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science yesterday, used a new method of gene therapy called CRISPR to selectively slash the DNA of an antibiotic-resistant strain of E. coli. The method uses a virus as its vector to infect the bacteria’s cells (it doesn’t affect human cells at all) and target the exact sequence of genetic base-pairs that confers antibiotic resistance. When it locates that sequence, the virus latches on and excises the offending gene with surgical precision. With the one-two punch of CRISPR and conventional antibiotics, even the toughest infections might soon be easily mopped up.

It’s worth repeating that when it comes to GMO panic, some of that fear is founded while some is a knee-jerk uneasiness with anything that seems “unnatural” — and all of it is a little confused. As Grist’s Nathanael Johnson has pointed out, genetic engineering is a tool, and like any tool — a shovel, a gun, a Facebook post — it can be used for good things or bad ones or just scary sci-fi stuff that we don’t know enough about to start Frankenstein-ing around with.

I happen to believe eliminating antibiotic-resistant infections that infect 2 million people a year would be a very good thing indeed.

Source:
This New Gene Editing Technique Could Turn The Tide on Antibiotic Resistance

, Motherboard.

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Scientists may have found a way to eliminate antibiotic-resistant infections

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The New Mother Jones Homepage, Explained

by SergioBPFL Posted on February 6, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

About a week ago, after many months of planning and executing the new design you see today, I took a journey into the recent past of MotherJones.com via Archive.org’s excellent Wayback Machine. The tool allows you to view websites as they appeared at specific moments in the history of the internet, and I wanted some context for this homepage redesign, my first. We were, after all, the first nongeek magazine to go online way back in 1993, and I was nervous for the launch.

Looking back over the last four designs, they tell a story that you, dear loyal reader, probably know by now. It’s the story of our rapid recent growth, from a great little magazine to a high-powered 24/7 news org. My bosses, Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffrey, recently received a major award and the committee put it rather nicely:

Mother Jones under Jeffery and Bauerlein has been transformed from what was a respected—if under-the-radar—indie publication to an internationally recognized, powerhouse general-interest periodical influencing everything from the gun-control debate to presidential campaigns. In addition to their success on the print side, Jeffery and Bauerlein’s relentless attention to detail, boundless curiosity and embrace of complex subjects are also reflected on the magazine’s increasingly influential website, whose writers and reporters often put more well-known and deep-pocketed news divisions to shame.

We’ve been on a three-year cycle with our redesigns, and a lot has changed around here since the last update in January 2011. The 47 percent video happened, record traffic growth happened, more record traffic growth happened, and we hired a lot of people, expanded collaborations, and won a lot of awards. Our website now has nearly 6 million monthly unique visitors, and we’re on pace to do 150 million pageviews this year, and that’s before factoring in the upcoming midterm elections, which we’ll cover the dickens out of.

Click for larger.

Click for larger.

Close observers of online media are well aware that homepages just don’t matter as much as they used to. Facebook and Twitter send us enormous amounts of traffic, and all those folks skip over the landing pages and go directly to the stories. Nevertheless, 1 out of every 6 pageviews to the desktop version of MotherJones.com is to the homepage. It’s still important.

So what are you getting here, exactly?

Bigger images. Much of the new design is informed by a desire for more, and larger, images on the site. Images are the killer app of the internet and the big boys—Facebook and Twitter and the rest—are becoming increasingly visual media. We now feature much larger images at the top of the homepage, channel pages, and topics pages. We’ve replaced the old five-item slider with a striking new treatment that doesn’t bury stories behind each other and stops autorotating when the reader takes control. The same large images are now displayed at the top in the default layout for our articles and blog posts. They’re also being delivered at a new aspect ratio that’s designed to pop on Twitter and in the Facebook news feed. We’ve also added a very large image to the homepage to promote our high-quality photojournalism.

Better-organized content that reflects the growth of what we do. Scroll down past the new slider and you’ll see that we’ve organized our content in a number of new ways. Established MoJo brands like Kevin Drum, David Corn, Econundrums, and Tom Philpott now have dedicated spaces where readers will always be able to find their latest stories. We’re also choosing to focus on the many different ways we now tell stories. There is a video section, an interactives section, a longreads section, and the new, larger treatment for photojournalism. Lastly, the bottom third of the page is dominated by a rotating selection of topics. Here we’ll present the latest stories from a curated list of nine topics showcasing the breadth and depth of our coverage. You can click through to full verticals, including the archives, for all of these.

Revamped channel pages. Our three main channels of Politics, Environment, and Culture have finally gotten the landing pages they deserve. These pages really serve as alternate portals to Mother Jones for readers with specific interests. In addition to the latest stories from our reporters, we’ve added a column to these pages that highlights our recent visual journalism—charts, maps, interactives, photo essays, video, etc.—in the channel.

A corner for the Climate Desk. This journalistic collaboration (learn more about it here) has really taken off in the last year, and it was high time it got some permanent real estate on our homepage. You’ll see a list of the latest headlines from the Climate Desk, along with the most recent episode of our fast-growing Inquiring Minds podcast and the next event listing in our Climate Desk Live series.

Over the next year, our supertalented tech team will be building an elegant new backend for the site. After that, we’ll do this again, and I promise we won’t wait three years next time. In the meantime, we’d love your feedback on the changes in the comments below.

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The New Mother Jones Homepage, Explained

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It’s Time to Fix the Housing Finance Market

by SergioBPFL Posted on January 15, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Yesterday I mentioned Brad DeLong’s belief that the biggest problem with the economy right now is the weak housing market:

I find it very hard to escape the conclusion that the big bad thing going on in the third millennium is not the excess construction of the mid-2000s housing bubble–a sum of 7.5% points of annual GDP….but rather the additional 20% points of annual GDP of residences not built since 2007 because of the financial crisis, resulting depression, and breaking of housing finance.

The chart above shows what DeLong is talking about. Housing was overbuilt in the aughts, but we’ve more than made up for that. The shortfall in new housing starts since 2008 is far larger than the excess between 2002 and 2007.

So what’s the problem? Felix Salmon, keying off a New York Times piece today, writes that a big reason for the continuing weakness of the housing market is the inability of even people with good credit to get mortgages.

Anecdotally, it’s much harder to get a mortgage now than it used to be. In the NYT article, the Center for American Progress’s Julia Gordon says that “a typical American family” with a credit score in the low 700s is “being left out”: that’s a very long way from subprime, which is what you’re considered to be when your credit score is below 620.

Meanwhile, here in Manhattan, no one in my condo building has been able to sell or refinance for the past couple of years, thanks to an ever-shifting series of rules at various different banks, all of which are clearly designed to just give them a reason to say no.

The chart below shows this dramatically:

Needless to say, mortgages were too easy to get in 2006, and we don’t want to go back to that level. But neither do we want to be where we are now. Salmon believes the problem is fairly simple: it’s not because of new rules about qualified mortgages or anything else regulatory, it’s simply because 30-year fixed mortgage rates are currently running at about 4.5 percent. “Would you lend money fixed for the next 30 years at a rate of less than 5%?” he asks.

The 30-year fixed mortgage is mostly a creature of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who have historically bought up and securitized 30-year fixed mortgages so that banks didn’t have to keep them on their books. They aren’t doing that as energetically as they used to, and this has depressed the entire mortgage market. So what to do? DeLong suggests the answer lies with the government: “Have Mel Watt’s FHFA end policy uncertainty about housing finance and rebalance the construction sector to fill in our current 20%-point of annual GDP housing capital deficit.” Salmon suggests the answer might be the opposite: “Phase out the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage entirely, since it’s a product no private-sector financial institution would ever offer.” But both agree that the mortgage market is a crucial part of getting the economy back on its feet. Here’s Salmon:

One thing is clear: for all that the Fed has been pumping billions of dollars into mortgage securities as part of its quantitative easing campaign, all that liquidity has failed to find its way to new homebuyers. I’m in general a believer in renting rather than buying, but the US is a nation of homeowners, and in such a country, a liquid housing market is a necessary precondition for economic vitality. Right now, we don’t have one — and we don’t have much hope of getting one in the foreseeable future, either.

With household deleveraging having now run its course, this is a good time to start thinking more seriously about the housing market. It’s not a silver bullet, but there are plenty of families out there willing to fund more residential construction if only they could get a mortgage. Not a go-go-no-doc-no-down bubble mortgage, just a normal mortgage for normal people. This is something that President Obama should probably be thinking pretty hard about.

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It’s Time to Fix the Housing Finance Market

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