Greg Laden is a biological anthropologist and science communicator. His research has covered North American prehistoric and historic archaeology and African archaeology and human ecology. He is an OpenSource and OpenAccess advocate. Greg's wife, Amanda, is a High School biology teacher, his daughter Julia is a world traveler and his son Huxley is 2.
The main reason that a government shouldn't be run like a business is the profit motive. There is a key point here that the "government should be run like a business" people miss. The goal of government is decidedly not profit. The purpose of government is ...
Mike's post at Quiche Moraine is…
An American scientist studying the origins of Black Death has died from an infection linked to the disease.
Professor Malcolm Casadaban was killed by a strain of the bacteria responsible for millions of deaths over the centuries, officials at the University of Chicago revealed.
An autopsy on the 60…
Erik Klemetti notes that Mt. Rainier has been experiencing increased seismic activity as of late. (details)
Overall activity level is up since the last month and the little earth quakes are a little bigger. No particular explanations are forthcoming yet. Current seismic data are here.
Imagine finding the following quote on the wall of your teenage child's social studies classroom:
"No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered as patriots. This is one nation under God."
- George H.W. Bush
What would you do?
This is yet another in a series of posts on falsehoods. To refresh your memory, a falsehood is a belief held by a number of people that is in some way incorrect. That incorrectness may be blatant, it may be subtle, it may be conditional, it may be simple, it may be complex. But, the unraveling…
Good question. A recent paper in PLoS ONE looks at H1N1 in foreign travelers in order to estimate the incidence of this virus in Mexico.
When a new disease comes on the scene, it is easy to underestimate how widespread it is, and to overestimate its severity. This is because at first the…
If you have not yet read Goldilocks, a Very Cold Winter Night, And a Strange Sense of Empty-ness then please do so now. Only then will you have the background necessary to understand and appreciate The Mystery of the Returned Outboard Motor. As told to us by Jimmy James Watson Bettencourt…
So we arrive at the cabin, and something seems amiss. With each new clue uncovered, we are at first disturbed, then aghast, and finally, astonished. None of it made very much sense until we found the note. Wow. The note.
A repost ... reposted for a reason (see next post)
The reason we were…
First, some important business. If you have a science post, send it to Scientia Pro Publica. . They are due NOW and, I assume owing to the beginning of the school year, there is a shortage.
Second, check this out: Something interesting happened the other day when Almost Diamonds produced this…
It turns out the war of Gog and Magog starts tomorrow, so I'm going to spend the rest of the time before The Rapture cleaning out my father-in-law's Scotch Collection which I happen to be alone with right now. Details here.
KTHXBYE
If you watch a fake hand standing in for your right hand, and it is touched with a brush while at the same time your left hand, hidden from view, is similarly touched, you feel your right hand being touched. This spooky finding is called "phantom touch" and was reported in a recent issue of PLoS…
Nineteen former pilots and government officials ... told reporters their questions can no longer be dismissed ..."We want the US government to stop perpetuating the myth that all UFOs can be explained away in down-to-earth, conventional terms," said Fife Symington, former governor of Arizona... "…
When something goes wrong we fix it, sometimes making a new rule so it does not happen again. After a while we may get a bunch of related rules and they can be, and often are, organized into a system, perhaps a paradigm, maybe a dogma, or even an -ism. Once you've got one of those, it is easy…
The Japanese run everything (does that scare you or delight you?). iTechnology is controlled with eyeMice. Everything he says about human evolution is VERY VERY wrong, just so you know. (E.g. "Mammoths" probably evolved after language. Native Americans do not descend from people who lived in…
