mikethemadbiologist

More evidence that the U.S. is suffering from a severe epidemic of dumbitude (italics mine): In a country where the discussion of some social and cultural issues, like homosexuality, can be all but taboo, drug addiction has been widely acknowledged as a serious problem. It is talked about openly…

Now that I've crawled out of my grant writing burrow (although I expect a slight relapse soon), I realized I missed two great posts by driftglass. First, on McCain's fundamental problem: This is because McSame doesn't just need The Base; he needs them on fire. He needs them whipped into a peak of…

If the Glouchester teen pregnancy scandal isn't bad enough, now we have to deal with a ninja outbreak. Really: The librarian-in-training was a few minutes early for work at the Barnegat branch of the Ocean County Library on Wednesday morning when she saw a man dressed in what looked like black…

In my response to my post about Maureen Dowd's brief relapse into sanity, PhysioProf writes: Dowd's been on the list of the top ten mainstream shitbag media enablers of the depraved right-wing Democrat-feminizing-gayifying shell game for twenty fucking years. As far as I'm concerned, she can go…

In a Journal of Infectious Diseases commentary about this article, there's a fascinating discussion of the relationship between the HTLV-1 virus, which can cause T-cell leukemia in about one percent of those infected, and gastric cancer caused by the bacterium Helicobacter pylori. And it's not…

Too bad he's one of the few senators actually worth a damn, because he wouldn't be a bad VP. Dodd on telecom immunity during his announcement that he would filibuster FISA: But, we are deceiving ourselves when we talk about the U.S. attorneys issue, the habeas issue, the torture issue, the…

I usually don't read Maureen Dowd (if I want funny, I'll go here), but my eyes wandered and I ended up reading today's column. Either all of the shouting from the bloggysphere did some good, or else she's been replaced with a pod person. About the charge of 'elitism' leveled at Obama by Karl Rove…

If Republicans claim that oil pipelines are good for caribou, I wonder what they'll make of the blackfly outbreak in Maine. About the first half of the previous sentence--that's not hyperbole. Really (by way of Digby): During a radio interview on Wednesday, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) attempted…

There seem to be some problems with the CDC's Q Fever Biohazard level 3 facility: At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's new $214 million infectious disease laboratory in Atlanta, scientists are conducting experiments on bioterror bacteria in a room with a containment door sealed with…

The NY Times editors comment on Louisiana's latest creationist idiocy, supported by Republican governor Bobby Jindal (italics mine): As a biology major at Brown University, Mr. Jindal must know that evolution is the unchallenged central organizing principle for modern biology. As a rising star on…

...and that wasn't the worst part. From Moue Magazine--who deserves much credit for the brilliant description of ID advocates as "self-hating scientists": In 2003, the school district told him to stop teaching ID in the classroom and he refused- but kept his job. He did remove most of the visible…

I expect Republicans to eviscerate the Constitution, but, once again, the Democrats failed to hold the line, and, instead, granted the telecoms immunity in the House legislation. I'll get back to why I emphasized granted, but if you want to know what this is all about, Hilzoy gives the best…

Gimme back my PAUP* menus! One of the most unheralded breakthroughs in DNA sequence analysis--and, in particular, phylogenetics--was PAUP*. PAUP* is software that uses morphology or DNA sequence to construct phylogenies; that is, how organisms are related to another**. Originally, PAUP* was only…

So I emerge from my grant writing burrow only to discover by way of ScienceBlogling PZ that the clowns at Answers in Genesis are pestering National Academy of Sciences member Richard Lenski about the citrate evolution in E. coli paper he co-authored. Fortunately, Gerlach at Off Resonance does a…

ScienceBlogling Bora, in discussing the new release of journal impact factors--an estimation of how widely read journal articles are--writes: One day, hopefully very soon, this will not be news. What I mean by it is that there soon will be better metrics - ways to evaluate individual articles and…

The Washington Mandarins are clutching their pearls over this dastardly Democratic ad: Seriously, some of us were against this war, in part, because we didn't want people we know (and, in some cases, knew) to die. We are not John McCain's (or Michael O'Hanlon's) serfs: he has to justify a long-…

For the last two decades, give or take, charter schools have been a cause celebre for conservatives. Yet they seem to have abandoned them as a political issue. Here's one reason why (italics mine): Bill Burrow, the associate director of the Office on Competitiveness under the first President Bush…

I've noted before how stupid creationists are when they burble things like 'mutation is bad.' Well, a brief story in Nature once again shows just how stupid that whole idea is: Publishing in Chemistry & Biology Truman et al. have identified a single amino acid substitution in the active site…

I've been saying for a while now that the 'piggy MRSA*', known as ST398, is going to be a problem. Always listen to the Mad Biologist. Last week, I was talking to someone who is monitoring MRSA in the New York area, and they've seen two cases of ST398 MRSA in hospitals. This really shouldn't…

I've discussed Republican rising star Bobby Jindal's public support for creationism before. What's galling is that his idiocy can't be laid at cognitive deficiency or ignorance. I was in the same graduating class as Jindal, and I know that every biology major had considerable exposure to…

Last week there was a horrible accident on the T (Boston's subway), with the driver of the train killed. While the driver and others have been cleared of criminal charges, the NTSB is investigating, since it has been reported that the train was going too fast and the signaling system failed to…

So we know Ben Stein lies about evolution. Now, Stein is lying about economics (italics mine): During the June 11 edition of Fox News' Fox Friends, conservative commentator and actor Ben Stein misrepresented Sen. Barack Obama's tax plan to raise the capital gains tax rate on the wealthiest earners…

Wolfrum at Shakesville alerts us to The New Right's attempt to lay our failed energy policies every but at the feet of Republicans: Take the post "How did the GOP get stuck "Defending Big Oil" again?" Now, this post could have been just five words long: "Because that's what they do." But the post…

Here's a letter from the journal Nature from a Mexican author about creationism: In Mexico, there is no creationist movement and the teaching of evolution is encouraged. The Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México has developed high-school programmes based around sequence comparison and…

Or is it pendula? Regardless, one has to work for progress; it is not an indefatigable natural phenomenon. A while ago, I had this to say about racial progress in the U.S.: Racial progress wasn't inevitable; it required a lot of sacrifice. It wasn't that long ago, that publicly saying that you…

The NY Times has an article recapping how Obama defeated Clinton in the Democratic primary. The article is a prime example of the myopia that afflicts our political press. And it's not what's in the article, but what's missing. Iraq. In a story of over 4,000 words purporting to describe the…

There's been a lot of discussion about why women in academia have fewer children than those in medicine or law. Unfortunately, it seems to be veering dangerously close to the 'pro-kids, anti-kids' argument that ultimately breaks out, when instead, I think the problem has less to do with children…

I've been very leary of all of the discussions of Obama as a transformative figure: I remember in Virginia when Doug Wilder was elected as the first black governor since Reconstruction and then...a few years later, a wave of conservatism washed over, well, everything. But, nonetheless, Obama's…

In the midst of every bout of interest in healthcare, there's always mention of primary care physicians who serve as 'gatekeepers' of healthcare. While it makes sense, there's one catch--you have to have enough primary care physicians: But there's one important ingredient missing from that…

So while I was at the American Society for Microbiology meeting this week (and my talk went fine, thanks for asking), I saw a poster by one of ScienceBlogling Tara's students, Abby Harper, about MRSA (methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus) in pigs. In the past, I've talked about how, in…