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Canada's Minister of Science is a creationist?

Remarkable words from Canada''s Parliament Hill: Canada's science minister, the man at the centre of the controversy over federal funding cuts to researchers, won't say if he believes in evolution. "I'm not going to answer that question. I am a Christian, and I don't think anybody asking a question about my religion is appropriate," Gary Goodyear, the federal Minister of State for Science and Technology, said in an interview with The Globe and Mail. A funding crunch, exacerbated by cuts in the January budget, has left many senior researchers across the county scrambling to find the money to…

Short's Algorithm for Factoring Sunshine

Andrew Landahl (who really should have a blog because he is certainly one of the most interesting people I get to talk to when I attend a conference) sends me a note about recent appearances of quantum computing on prime time TV which he has graciously let me post below. I thought you'd be amused to know that quantum information has finally made it to prime time. Using TiVo, I just caught up on back-to-back episodes of CBS's "Big Bang Theory" from the past two weeks that make prominent references to quantum teleportation and Shor's algorithm. The week before last, the episode opened with a…

Tangled Bank.... finally!!!!

Welcome to the latest edition of the Tangled Bank! We appear to have a smaller bank than normal this week, perhaps everybody is exhausted after the Valentine's Day festivities. As for me, well, 2006 ended on an extremely bad series of notes and that has unfortunately spilled over into 2007, but that's a post for another time. Coupled with some lovely computer issues, The Bank is a couple days late. Apologies all around and I'm swearing off hosting any blog carnivals until I get my life (and computer) in order. As a side note, when you submit articles to TB please make a conscious effort…

The Science of Mind-Reading: SVMs Extract Intentions from Neural Activity (video)

For the basics about multivariate fMRI "mind-reading" techniques, see the video below. Some of it is based on this 2007 Haynes et al paper from Current Biology, described in more detail following the video. What Haynes et al have done is to ask 8 subjects to freely decide either to add or subtract two numbers, and to select among 4 options an answer corresponding to the task they chose. After repeating this process many times, the authors ran a pattern classifier on the metabolic activity recorded in the brain. This pattern classifier was run on the unsmoothed fMRI data - smoothing is…

Building Better Armor: Lessons from Combat Shrimp

Mantis shrimp, or stomatopods, are the planet’s most powerful bare-knuckle boxers, armed with dactyl clubs that literally fly faster than a speeding .22 caliber bullet. Each strike boils the surrounding water and creates a tiny cavitation bubble, which then implodes with a sonic pop that can render targets unconscious. Consider that: if the strike itself doesn’t get you, its aftershock will. And that’s just the variety of stomatopod equipped with blunt fists -  others launch their lance-like arms to pierce prey. These little lobster cousins, usually between 4 and 12 inches long, are capable…

The Future We Create - Women in Science and Technology

Source: "Girls As Inventors," The Huffington Post on the MIT Media Lifelong Kindergarten Group. While science and technology may be complex and daunting, one thing is quite clear: we need more women to drive innovation and to provide different insights and perspectives compared to men. Tomorrow, March 1st at 11 am EST, The Dow Chemical Company and Scientific American are hosting a Virtual Conference to Engage Scientific Thought Leaders on the Future of Women in Chemistry. I invite you to listen, learn and add your voice. According to the website: 60 speakers. 60 minutes. 60 insightful…

The bogus stats keep coming

After reviving my first ever online post. I've dug up my first ever post on guns. Phil Ronzone posted this to soc.culture.australian: Of even more interest is the TREMENDOUSLY larger per capita rape numbers in the "non-violent peace loving" European counties. The Unites States at 26.30 is below such countries as Australia (90.82), West Germany (77.49), New Zealand (65.73), Netherlands (56.00), Scotland (44.69), Denmark (41.06), Sweden (40.52), Austria (30.42). Gee, it must be the USA system of mandatory penis registration & control that accounts for our per capita rate of rape being…

Men Just Want Amelie

One of my persistent problems with evolutionary psychology is its consistent lack of interest in the way culture affects human nature. Instead of trying to understand the way pop jingles, political systems and pulp fiction novels influence our behavior, evo psychers prefer to explain away our culture by referencing some innate congitive module or hard-wired habit. In other words, they see culture as just a secretion of our psychology, and only find it interesting when it signifies something about our evolutionary past. Too harsh a judgment? Take this example from Steven Pinker's How the Mind…

Another Week of GW News, November 16, 2008

Sipping from the internet firehose... This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H.E.Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup (skip to bottom) November 16, 2008 Top Stories:Bailout, IEA WEO, Asian Smog, Next Ice Age Arctic Geopolitics, Antarctica, Arnold's Meeting, Permafrost, Carbon Footprint Labels, Late Comments Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Temperatures, Carbon Cycle, Feedbacks, Paleoclimate, Glaciers, Satellites Impacts, Forests, Corals, Climate Refugees, Wildfires, Floods & Droughts Transportation…

The Friday Fermentable: What's Your Favorite Local Wine Shop?

Local wine shops are to wine what ScienceBlogs.com is to science blogs - while perhaps imperfect, they are both good at directing you to unique sources and enriching flavors. With the proliferation of information and winemakers, we can all use some educated filtering guides. And that is how I view outstanding local vendors of wine. People who know a lot more than I spend their careers seeking out and stocking their stores with underrecognized offerings and low volume quality wines while also contributing to public education on this wonderful, life-enriching beverage. So I was delighted the…

August 2009 Scientiae Carnival: Summer Days, Driftin' Away

Welcome to the August 2009 edition of Scientiae, the blog carnival of "stories of and from women in science, engineering, technology, and math." [Apologies at the outset for missing the submission from ScienceWoman, co-blogger at Sciencewomen, entitled, "Unhurried summer mornings"] I'm honored to be the first man invited to host the carnival. The invitation means a great deal to me on a number of levels: my laboratory has run between 75% and 100% women during my years in the business, including all of my PhD students, and I have a brilliant physician-scientist wife who has given us a joyous…

Birds in the News 104

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Lesser flamingo, Phoenicopterus minor, in flight. Lake Natron in Tanzania, Africa, is the only site in East Africa where Lesser Flamingos reliably breed. Image: James Warwick[wallpaper size]. Birds in Science The changing of the seasons finds millions of birds migrating over thousands of kilometres. How they find their way is a question that has perplexed biologists for decades. It is known that birds have built-in compasses attuned to the Earth's magnetic field. But how those compasses work and what they are made of…

Egnor and the Creationists: Partying Like It's 1859

In the previous post, I described how Egnor, like many creationists, refuses to answer serious rebuttals of his foolishness. But what's truly odd is how Egnor argues about natural selection. Egnor repeatedly claims that 'Darwinism' is nothing except self-obvious: bacteria that are more likely to survive and reproduce because they are resistant to an antibiotic are more likely to survive and reproduce in the presence of that antibiotic. It is obvious--today. If I were to give a talk which had as its central thesis the concept that natural selection has given rise to antibiotic resistant…

Around the Web: Is algebra necessary, The challenge for scholarly societies and more links than you can shake a stick at

This is some vacation catch-up... Is Algebra Necessary? Mathematical Illiteracy in the NYT There Are Many Ways to Improve High School Education: Dumbing It Down Is NOT One of Them Does mathematics have a place in higher education? Abandoning Algebra Is Not the Answer It’s Not the Algebra, It’s the Arithmetic The challenge for scholarly societies Concrete Options For A Society Journal To Go OA Re-skilling for Research: An investigation into the role and skills of subject and liaison librarians required to effectively support the evolving information needs of researchers The future of…

Welcome to Yet Another Science Blogging Community: Popular Science Blog Network

Yes, another science blogging community among the many and yet another where an established print magazine enhances its online presence with a blogging network. And a bit more shuffling of the chairs on the deck as people with established blogs switch places or even some people start up whole new blogging personas. The Popular Science Blogging Network! Here's the welcome post and the list of blogs Welcome To The Popular Science Blog Network Today we’re unveiling 13 new blogs on PopularScience.com, each one home to a notable writer covering a specific area of innovation. We live in an era…

Science Documentaries You Can Watch Online to Get in the Mood for the Festival

We have a guest blogger this week. Documentary-log.com offers free online documentaries and wanted to reach out to the science community. Read more about their organization and the many science documentaries available to view below. As the Festival approaches and excitement continues to build we are delighted to present to you a collection of documentaries that tackle some of the scientific questions of our time. You're never too young to become obsessed with science. In fact, Einstein was barely into his twenties when he started working on some of the equations that still influence popular…

The Science Festival is Coming!

COPUS (Coalition on the Public Understanding of Science) organizers are thrilled to be supporting the USA Science and Engineering Festival effort, particularly by helping the scientific community connect to the festival in their own community through satellite events. The 2010 USA Science & Engineering Festival (USASEF), provides a great opportunity for COPUS participants to rally together in support of science. Through making this event truly national in scope, we can continue the great grassroots momentum we started with Year of Science 2009. Many COPUS participants and hubs are…

GOP copyright piracy

The Bush administration and Republicans in general have acted and talked tough about copyright violations. It's not just Republicans, either. Some scumbag Democrats are in bed with the RIAA and MPAA and going at it as much as they can as long as the Johns are paying for their services. But it's another case of "Do as I say, not as I do," for the GOP. The McCain campaign has now been tagged at least three times for using copyrighted material in campaign ads and events without the permission of the artists. Jackson Browne is suing them for $1 million for the unauthorized use of "Running on…

Introducing Confined Space @ TPH

Yesterday, Jordan Barab mothballed his blog Confined Space, and workers and worker advocates lost a powerful online resource. The good news is that weâve gained a political resource, since Jordanâs departure from the blogosphere is due to his new staff position on the US House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor. Still, weâll all miss the combination of up-to-the-minute news, biting commentary, and ceaseless advocacy for worker health and safety that have characterized Confined Space since its inception in 2003. (See Revereâs post yesterday for more on how much Jordan has…

Do you love or hate Cilantro?

If you think that political or religious debates can get nasty, you haven't seen anything until you go online as see how much hate exists between people who love cilantro and those who hate cilantro. What horrible words they use to describe each other!!!! Last weekend, I asked why is this and searched Twitter and FriendFeed for discussions, as well Wikipedia and Google Scholar for information about it. First - cilantro is the US name for the plant that is called coriander in the rest of the world. In the USA, only the seed is called coriander, and the rest of the plant is cilantro. Second -…

Open Access Day - the blog posts

As you know, blog posts about Open Access - What It Means To Me? are in competition today! I will be posting and updating the links of entries throughout the day (until midnight Eastern) for all to see - if I miss yours, send me the URL of your entry. Caveat Lector: My Father the Anthropologist; or, What I Offer Open Access and Why Greg Laden's blog: A poem for Open Access Day A k8, a cat, a mission: Open Access Day Laelaps: Happy Open Access Day! Moneduloides: Why Does Open Access Matter To You? Stuff: Open Access Day - How are we sharing our knowledge? The Parachute: Open Access Day…

Great News!

HOUSE BACKS TAXPAYER-FUNDED RESEARCH ACCESS Final Appropriations Bill Mandates Free Access to NIH Research Findings Washington, D.C. - July 20, 2007 - In what advocates hailed as a major advance for scientific communication, the U.S. House of Representatives yesterday approved a measure directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide free public online access to agency-funded research findings within 12 months of their publication in a peer-reviewed journal. With broad bipartisan support, the House passed the provision as part of the FY2008 Labor, HHS, and Education…

San Francisco - a running commentary #2

Wow - this was (and still is) a very busy week. On most days, I just crashed early, without having the energy to blog very much (at least very much for me). In the last dispatch, I forgot to mention I met Jimmy Wales who came to visit PLoS and we talked about Wikipedia and building online communities. Under the fold are a bunch of new pictures... Professor Steve Steve got to meet the CEO of PLoS: ...and they quickly bonded: Yesterday, I went to lunch with the Editors: Then, after all the work was done, I was exhausted and I had to walk about 1.5 miles during the rush hour to meet…

My Picks From ScienceDaily

Young Meerkats Learn The Emotion Before The Message In Threat Calls: It is well known that human speech can provide listeners with simultaneous information about a person's emotions and objects in the environment. Past research has shown that animal vocalizations can do the same, but little is known about the development of the features that encode such information. Tropical Birds Have Slow Pace Of Life Compared To Northern Species, Study Finds: In the steamy tropics, even the birds find the pace of life a bit more relaxed, research shows. Tropical birds expend less energy at rest than do…

Wednesday morning at Lindau

I'm here for another long session of talks. Unfortunately, this is Big Chemistry day, and I'm struggling to keep up with the unfamiliar. I need more biology for it all to make sense! Rudolph Marcus: From 'On Water' and enzyme caalysis to single molecules and quantum dots. Theory and experiment. I was afraid of this. This Lindau conference has a primary focus on chemistry, and I am not a chemist…and I just knew there would be a talk or two at which I would be all at sea, and that was the case in Marcus's talk, which was all hardcore chemistry. I got the general gist — he's making an argument…

Scott Rosenberg's criteria for evaluating web pages

From this day forward, Scott Rosenberg is an honorary librarian. One of the things that librarians talk about a lot is how to evaluate a random web page -- what signs and signals to look for that will give the unsuspecting student a clue as to whether or not they might want to use a particular web page in an assignment. We talk a lot about the various W's -- who, what, why, when and all the rest. Who created the page, what does it say, does their appear to be any bias, is it current. There has been tons of literature on the subject and a very large number of online tutorials. Scott…

Sub-Genius Social Hedonist

My traffic has been down a little in the past couple of weeks, which of course can't possibly be because I haven't posted anything really interesting in that time. No, clearly, it must be that I'm not playing the game right. Thus, I have performed an extensive study or high-traffic blogs, to determine what it is that they post that I don't, and the answer is clear: Internet personality quizzes. Thus, here are some quiz-type things for your amusement and edification: A timed online IQ test. You get 13 minutes to answer 38 true/false questions, and then it tells you how smart you are. (Via…

University of Qld/Skeptical Science survey of climate research

Well, I got this (some days ago; I got backlogged): As one of the more highly trafficked climate blogs on the web, I’m seeking your assistance in conducting a crowd-sourced online survey of peer-reviewed climate research. I have compiled a database of around 12,000 papers listed in the 'Web Of Science' between 1991 to 2011 matching the topic 'global warming' or 'global climate change'. I am now inviting readers from a diverse range of climate blogs to peruse the abstracts of these climate papers with the purpose of estimating the level of consensus in the literature regarding the proposition…

Parklife

Or rather, Parkrun which D+A introduced me to. Thats me, the one on the right: I wanted to be that dog, at least for the race. It looks so focussed and determined, even if it is just chasing a stuffed electric hare. And the running is good, so I'll tell you all about it so you can play too. It is a series of regular free 5km runs at various places in the UK. You have to pre-register a tag, but from then on you just turn up at the start and run. The Cambridge one is in Milton Country Park which is where I run at lunchtime, though on a different course. The results are now up: I came an…

Pianka and Mims

I'm getting some email requests to state my opinion on some claims by Forrest M. Mims. Mims attended a talk by Eric Pianka, in which he claims Pianka advocated the "slow and torturous death of over five billion human beings." I wasn't there, and I don't know exactly what was said, but I will venture a few opinions and suggestions. Read Wesley Elsberry, who does know Pianka's work and has his own take on the interpretation of the talk. I assure you that biologists do not have a secret plan to deliberately murder nine-tenths of the planet's human beings in order to make room for more bacteria…

Links for 2012-01-30

BOOK REVIEW: How To Teach Relativity To Your Dog By Chad Orzel - Science News It may sound like a strange setup, but the somewhat kooky concept works well for explaining a field of physics that can sound, well, kooky to the uninitiated. Emmy is the stand-in for the everyman (or everydog) who has never quite managed to grasp the idea of spacetime, or why moving clocks tick slower than stationary ones. The imagined back-and-forth banter between author and dog keeps the book engaging while Orzel lays out the theoretical framework of particle physics, explains why neither dogs nor neutrinos can…

Impossible Lyrics Answer

Pretty much all of the songs that I thought anybody might possibly guess were guessed, so I might as well reveal the answers. If you'd still like to try your hand, don't click through to the rest of this post until after you've finished... Those of you who have given up can find the full list of titles below the fold, with commentary on the songs that nobody recognized. "I Don't Like Mondays," The Boomtown Rats "I Wish I Was A Girl," Counting Crows "The Destruction of Lurel Canyon," Youth Group. Off Casino Twilight Dogs. I couldn't find lyrics for this online (though I didn't try all that…

Silly Unconventional Love Songs

Via Kate, a call for love songs. I like most of the songs on Kate's list, but as I tried to think of songs to add, I realized a couple of things: 1) I own more really good kiss-off songs than I do traditional love songs, and 2) even the songs that I like about loving relationships tend to be a little... odd. Make of this what you will. Anyway, as a complement to Kate's list of relatively conventional love songs, here's a list of some odder tracks, mostly by less well-known artists. They're all songs about love or people in love, but not quite the sort of thing you should expect to hear as the…

Hayes on Dembski

Over at Red State Rabble, Pat Hayes has some further thoughts on the Darwin quote I discussed yesterday. Turns out Dembski's even more vile than I thought. After reproducing the quote in question, Hayes writes: And Dembski, of course, drives home the point that these sorts of views, while once popular, are now beyond the pale by adding: "What a great mind, indeed. What a wonderful human being. What a marvelous vision of the human family." Is this what Darwin really believed? Is it true that Darwin's theory of evolution, as the comments to Dembski's post attest, is the basis for racism,…

Why Traditional Publishing Is Better Than Blogging

There's another round of "science blogs will make traditional journalism obsolete!" going on in connection with last week's World Conference of Science Journalists-- see Mad Mike, for example. This wouldn't be interesting except that it happened to collide with my reading Unscientific America, and it struck me that the book is, in many ways, one of the best arguments you could construct for the superiority of the traditional publishing process to doing everything with blogs. As I said in my review of the book, there's really nothing in Unscientific America that will come as a surprise to…

Links for 2010-01-31

Axe Cop He's a cop, with an axe. His partner is a cop with a flute-- no, a dinosaur soldier-- no, an avocado. Can you tell this was written by a five-year-old? (tags: comics silly internet art kid-stuff) Malkin Grey's LiveJournal - Why Writers Go Nuts, Exhibit Number One Million and Something. "Speaking as both a reader and a writer, this sucks. I do not pretend to know what the ideal price point for an e-book might be (though my pocketbook has its own opinions -- I don't mind paying a higher price for an e-book that in its hardcopy form is fresh on the shelves, but I don't want to still…

Best since sliced bread: The Encyclopedia of Life

The new Encyclopedia of Life may be the best new thing since sliced bread, but not necessarily just because a catalog of every living species is a pre-requisite to understanding our planet. By making it clear just how little we actually know about life on Earth, EOL could be just the thing biology needs to spur new interest among students, government funding agencies, and the public at large in basic science. That might be overselling it a tad, but it's hard not to use hyperbole when addressing the enormous gap between what the average person thinks we know and what we actually do know. The…

Time-Reversal

Generally speaking, if you play a movie backwards everything that happens is still physically possible. If I throw you a baseball and you catch it, reversing the video is just the equally plausible situation of you throwing the baseball followed by my catching it. If entropy is changing in the video - e.g., breaking an egg - the time-reversed video will not be especially likely. But it doesn't break the laws of physics. This is called time-reversal symmetry (sometimes T-symmetry for short). If you're looking at planets orbiting in uniform circular motion about the sun, you know from your…

Is Biology Reducible to the Laws of Physics?

Alex Rosenberg, Philosophy Professor at Duke, argues so. John Dupre, Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Exeter, isn't buying it. I'm not either, ever averse to such reductionisms.* Here is Dupre's review of Rosenberg's Darwinian Reductionism: Or, How to Stop Worrying and Love Molecular Biology (University of Chicago Press, 2006), from American Scientist on-line. For your benefit, these are the first few paragraphs of the review: Alex Rosenberg is unusual among philosophers of biology in adhering to the view that everything occurs in accordance with universal laws, and…

Technology and Orgasm on Film

Rachel Maines's book, The Technology of Orgasm: Hysteria, the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction (1999), is an exploration of the intersection of women's health, technology, gender, and broader social mores. It's now been used as the basis for a full-length documentary, Passion & Power: The Technology of Orgasm, which was screened at the recent meeting of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT). (Here is a synopsis of the film.) I dare say this might be the very first mention in the history of the internet about sex or orgasm. Call me naive, but I don't think those key…

How Likely is it that Fox News Falsifies Climate Science?

(updated below) Media Matters is reporting that on December 4th Fox News manipulated the evidence from a poll to suggest that 94% of the US population thinks that scientists falsified evidence to support their beliefs about climate change. As can be seen, however, their numbers added up to 120%. What happened? Well, here's the Rasmussen poll Fox & Friends cited. They asked respondents: "In order to support their own theories and beliefs about global warming, how likely is it that some scientists have falsified research data?" According to the poll, 35 percent thought it very likely,…

Fat makes you healthier!

Ok, my title may be going a bit too far, but new research coming out of Harvard University has found a fat, an omega-7 fatty acid called C16:1n7-palmitoleate, which does just that. The lipid is the first of its kind found to act as a hormone, signaling muscles cells to react better to insulin and reducing levels of inflammatory chemicals produced by the body. The breakthrough came after previous studies led by Gökhan Hotamisligil, a geneticist at Harvard. His team had found that blocking two proteins which normally bind fatty acids actually led to super-mice, who were "almost indestructible…

How Jazz Players Get into the Zone

A jazz player's brain: Brain activation while improvising. Blue areas are deactivated comparable to normal, orange and read are ramped up. From PLOS One. An intriguing finding: While improvising, jazz players seem to turn OFF the part of the brain that (to quote a new study just published in PLOS One) "typically mediate self-monitoring and conscious volitional control of ongoing performance." They're in what athletes call the zone, where they navigate the oncoming musical terrain by a sort of flexible trained instinct, like boulder-hopping downhill: Think about it and you stumble. Lovely…

Congrats, and stuff

One of my two favourite ethicists has just got tenure. Now she can say what she really thinks. [I don't know who started the canard that ethicists are unethical. The two I know are very ethical indeed. Probably a decision theorist.] Language Log gives voice to the oft-repeated but (so far as I can tell, rarely supported) claim that humans are somehow smarter than other animals when children because they can hold a conversation. Still, they are right to be critical of journalistic tropes. I nearly forgot to link to Kate Devitt's latest blog entry on memory. Here she discusses how…

I think Wayne Laugesen believes he's my nemesis — but his only superpower is bad polls

I hate to break the news to him, but he's just so Johnny Snow. I've grated against ol' Wayne a few times before to mock his awful polls, and now I think he has finally snapped, babbling out incoherent mush about how atheists are just like believers, only worse…and he really doesn't like me. I don't think. Hard to tell with mixed messages like this one. Just as James Dobson and other evangelists cultivate audiences in order to spread their beliefs, so do atheist evangelizers. The bigs are Britons Christopher Hitchens, who is battling cancer, and Richard Dawkins, who turns 70 in March. Myers,…

Mah-jong--Induced Seizures

An article in the Honk Kong Medical Journal reports on a seried of cases of Mah-jong Epilepsy.  This is something I had not heard of before: it is considered a subtype of cognition-induced epilepsy. rev="review" href="http://www.hkmj.org/abstracts/v13n4/314.htm">Mah-jong-induced seizures: case reports and review of twenty-three patients Richard SK Chang, Raymond TF Cheung, SL Ho, Windsor Mak Department of Medicine, Queen Mary Hospital, Hong Kong Hong Kong Med J 2007;13:314-8 'Mah-jong epilepsy' is a rare reflex epilepsy syndrome, manifesting as recurrent epileptic seizures triggered…

Lobotomy & young-earth creationists

My recent post on prefrontal lobotomy has been the most popular thing on this blog so far, and the comments on it are worth reading. While searching for more information about lobotomies and the neuroleptic drugs that replaced them, I came across this fantastic webpage at NobelPrize.org, which contains more information about Egas Moniz, the Portugese surgeon who first performed the procedure. That's where I found this diagram of the instrument designed by Moniz for the prefrontal leucotomies he performed with his colleague. From the diagram, one can see how the instrument (called a…

"Brought to Life" today: a new medical history resouce

Wax anatomical figure of reclining woman, Florence, Italy, 1771-1800 Science Museum London Starting today, the Wellcome Trust and sciencemuseum.org.uk open a brand spanking new collection of medical history archives. "Brought to Life: Exploring the History of Medicine" is searchable by people, place, thing, theme, and time. You can view a timeline of medical history in Europe next to similar timelines for the Islamic empire, Egypt and Greece (I do wish China and India were as prominently placed). You can read essays about larger questions, like what "wellness" means, or play with a cool…

Rudy Baum responds to questions about C&E News.

In response to my open letter to the ACS, Rudy Baum, the Editor in Chief of Chemical & Engineering News, emailed me some information which I am posting here with his kind permission: The editorial independence of editors of ACS publications, including C&EN, is guaranteed by the ACS Constitution, Bylaws & Regulations. There are no topics of interest to the general community of chemists that are off limits at C&EN. No one in ACS governance or on the ACS staff has ever suggested that we should or should not cover a topic for any reason. ACS has a clear and consistent policy on…

On my way to ScienceOnline'09

Once again, I'm sitting in my favorite airport with free wifi, bound this time for Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, for ScienceOnline'09. The conference has grown to feature two days of official sessions, plus a third day of semi-official goings on, and the place will be lousy with blogospheric glitterati. I'm going to be leading a session late Saturday afternoon on "Online science for kids (and parents)". I'll be highlighting a selection of the good content that's out there already, and I'm hoping that there will be some folks at the session interested in talking about how to create…