clock | February 8, 2007John McKay is about to become unemployed. I hear political campaigns are hiring bloggers with forceful voices who speak truth to the power. Perhaps anti-mammoth attack-groups will object if he gets hired.
clock | February 8, 2007I and the Bird #42 is up on Neurophilosophy blog. Beautiful rendition, formatted like Charles Darwin's diaries from the "Beagle", which - the ship, I mean - as you know (Day 8), is planned to be rebuilt and sailed again, but only if you help.
clock | February 8, 2007John Edwards: Statement about Campaign Bloggers:
The tone and the sentiment of some of Amanda Marcotte's and Melissa McEwan's posts personally offended me. It's
not how I talk to people, and it's not how I expect the people who work for me to talk to people. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but that kind of intolerant language will not be permitted from anyone on my campaign, whether it's intended as satire, humor, or anything else. But I also believe in giving everyone a fair shake. I've talked to Amanda and Melissa; they have both assured me that it was never their intention to malign…
clock | February 8, 2007
The penultimate installment of lecture notes in the BIO101 series. Help me make it better - point out errors of fact and suggest improvements:
It is impossible to cover all organ systems in detail over the course of just two lectures. Thus, we will stick only to the basics. Still, I want to emphasize how much organ systems work together, in concert, to maintain the homeostasis (and rheostasis) of the body. I'd also like to emphasize how fuzzy are the boundaries between organ systems - many organs are, both anatomically and functionally, simultaneously parts of two or more organ systems…
clock | February 8, 2007Foodblogging, Storyblogging, Healthblogging, Bowlging...this is turning into one busy year in North Carolina online.
But Anton can't do it alone. Please participate and make the local blogosphere matter!
clock | February 8, 2007A cornucopia of interesting science today. As always, check if the press release matches the actual paper...
Adaptation To Global Climate Change Is An Essential Response To A Warming Planet:
Temperatures are rising on Earth, which is heating up the debate over global warming and the future of our planet, but what may be needed most to combat global warming is a greater focus on adapting to our changing planet, says a team of science policy experts writing in this week's Nature magazine. While many consider it taboo, adaptation to global climate change needs to be recognized as just as…
clock | February 8, 2007Episode 64 of the Mindcast is up! Karl J. Mogel of the Innoculated Mind blog interviews Phillip Johnson and my SciBling Ed Brayton. The blogpost also contains a number of useful links to information about the Intelligent Design Creationism political movement. You can download the entire episode here.
clock | February 7, 2007We burn daylight.
William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), "The Merry Wives of Windsor", Act 1 scene 4
clock | February 7, 2007Hwoosh! What a day! Hit-and-run blogging instead of a nice long post about amylase I was getting ready to write....
I went to Raleigh for lunch and to start planning for the next years' edition of the Science Blogging Anthology - stay tuned, there will be more news soon.
Of course, I was following the whole Edwards/Marcotte/McEwen saga every time I had a minute to get on the computer (which was not that much today)
Then, in the evening, we had our first Blogger MeetUp of the month. Apparently there was a game (UNC vs. Duke) going on, so not many people showed up, but we had a great time…
clock | February 7, 2007[Placed on top for updates...]
I think that the whole brouhaha that the extreme wingers are raising about new Edwards bloggers will have a) no effect on Democratic primary voters a year from now, b) no effect on national voters two years from now, and c) negative effect on the wingnutosphere as they are getting more and more obviously unhinged, and thus marginalized.
Edwards did a fantastic scoop with these hires and the outcry from the extreme Right was surely expected. He has now positioned himself as more woman-friendly and more netroots-friendly than Hillary and Obama combined. And the…
clock | February 7, 2007Grand Rounds 3.20 are now up on Tales from the Emergency Room and Beyond...
Change of Shift, Volume 1, Number 17, a Valentine's Day edition, is up on Nurse Ratched's Place
clock | February 7, 2007Two years (January 28, 2005) have passed, but I am still not sure what the correct answer to this question is:
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( Image: Sexism and Creationism , thanks All-Knowing Orac)
Previously, I have made a comparison between the challenges facing the reality-based community in politics and the challenges facing the reality-based community in science (some of it perhaps related to the underlying idea of the image above). Not everyone appeared to have liked it, as this guy who is "a mathematician, a libertarian, and a science-fiction fan" wrote this in response. I…
clock | February 7, 2007Darwin Day - his 198th birthday - is coming up soon, on February 12th. Are you planning on writing a post on that day?
Last year I put together a linkfest of all the notable blogospheric contributions for the Darwin Day. Although the number of science blogs has increased greatly since then, I intend to make this year's linkfest as well. I'll use Technorati and Google Blogsearch to find the posts, but you can make it easier for me by e-mailing me the URL.
Don't forget that two years from now - the 200th birthday - there will be many celebrations around the world. There will be conferences…
clock | February 7, 2007Revere, PZ, Larry and Ed all agree with each other, which means they must all be correct on this story as this does not happen so often. But the extraordinarily stupid and hateful anti-atheist show CNN had the other day is so obviously wrong at every level and from every angle. CNN should suffer for this and made to crawl and apologize and fire a few people involved and cry and plead and promise they'll never do something like this again and made an example for all the other cable and network news shows.
clock | February 7, 2007Just got this exciting news by e-mail:
Data on Equine Genome Freely Available to Researchers Worldwide
BETHESDA, Md., Wed., Feb. 7, 2007 - The first draft of the horse genome sequence has been deposited in public databases and is freely available for use by biomedical and veterinary researchers around the globe, leaders of the international Horse Genome Sequencing Project announced today.
The $15 million effort to sequence the approximately 2.7 billion DNA base pairs in the genome of the horse (Equus caballus) was funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), one…
clock | February 7, 2007Human Proteins Evolving Slowly Thanks To Multitasking Genes:
Many human proteins are not as good as they might be because the gene sequences that code for them have a double role which slows down the rate at which they evolve, according to new research published in PLoS Biology. By tweaking these dual role regions, scientists could develop gene therapy techniques that produce proteins that are even better than those found in nature, and could one day be used to help people recover from genetic disorders.
More....
Sea Creature's Toxin Could Lead To Promising Cancer Treatment:
A toxin derived…
clock | February 7, 2007From today's Quotes Of The Day
Sinclair Lewis was born at Sauk Centre, Minnesota on this day in 1885. He was an avid and somewhat romantic reader as a boy, he attempted to run away from home at age thirteen to be a drummer boy in the Spanish-American War. He graduated from Yale in 1908 and set to work writing romantic poems and stories. He was awarded, but refused, a Pulitzer in 1926. He was the first American to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, a prize he accepted. The Nobel Committee praised "his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humour,…
clock | February 6, 2007It is better to sleep on things beforehand than lie awake about them afterward.
Baltasar Gracian