"...among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters, heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad."
--Moby Dick
Thanks to the many people who left comments on my recent post about some recent work on the intersection of stem cells and human evolution. I noticed that several people expressed variations on the same theme, one which deserves a...
Recently I assisted the folks at Soundprint with an hour-long radio documentary about how humans are driving evolution in new directions. Here's the show, available on Real Player....
Last October, word leaked out that something might be seriously amiss with the embryonic stem cell lines approved by President Bush for federally funded research. Today, the full details were published on line in Nature Medicine. It's an important paper,...
My thanks to Nova for becoming my first blog sponsor. I've always been leery of the random scattershoot of ads you see on many blogs, and so I was relieved that I wound up with a better fit. (Full disclosure:...
The Guardian has a long but disjointed report about the dispute over Homo floresiensis. Articles like these rarely give a very good picture of scientific disputes, since all parties involved only get a couple catchy quotes apiece. I've been particularly...
Unscrewing the Inscrutable has been updating progress of the Huygens probe as it screeches towards the surface of Titan. So far (8:20 am) it still seems to be going well. The first real data will come later this morning. Of...
Scrape off those stickers! AP reports that a judge has ruled that those goofy "Evolution is just a theory" stickers must be taken off of textbooks in Georgia. Now, how about those "Continental drift is just a theory" stickers on...
More to read: The Tangled Bank--The Tangled Bank is a semi-regular banquet of posts from various blogs on biology. Thanks to the powers that be for including one of mine in the latest issue. Go read it for the rest,...
Dinosaur-eating Mammals (You heard me right): Jeff Hecht at New Scientist has a good write-up of the discovery of a dog-sized 130-million year old mammal with dinosaur bones in its gut. Most mammals may have been humble little critters during...
The more time I spend talking to biologists, the more they remind me of detectives. I have two stories in tomorrow's New York Times that make this connection particularly clear. In the first, E.O. Wilson attempts to solve the mystery...