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Bad idea, putting me on a poll

It's just a silly online poll, and I don't have a stake in how it comes out one way or the other, except for one thing: I must defeat Brad Pitt. I like the guy, and I've enjoyed his movies, and I'm happy that he's come out as an atheist, but you know…I'm looking forward to being able to go into the bedroom and tell the Trophy Wife™ that I'm better than Brad Pitt at something. And she will say, "I know, baby, I know," no matter what, but it would just be nice to have some statistical backing for the claim. Atheist of the Year 2009 Richard Dawkins 32% Bill Maher 15% PZ Myers 17% Greg…

Vitamin D deficiency makes you dumb?

Vitamin D Important In Brain Development And Function: McCann & Ames point out that evidence for vitamin D's involvement in brain function includes the wide distribution of vitamin D receptors throughout the brain. They also discuss vitamin D's ability to affect proteins in the brain known to be directly involved in learning and memory, motor control, and possibly even maternal and social behavior. The review also discusses studies in both humans and animals that present suggestive though not definitive evidence of cognitive or behavioral consequences of vitamin D inadequacy. The authors…

Issues in Science & Technology Librarianship, Spring 2011

As usual, a wealth of interesting articles in the latest ISTL: Faculty of 1000 and VIVO: Invisible Colleges and Team Science by John Carey, City University of New York E-book Usage among Chemists, Biochemists and Biologists: Findings of a Survey and Interviews by Yuening Zhang and Roger Beckman, Indiana University, Bloomington Look Beyond Textbooks: Information Literacy for First-Year Science Students by Gabrielle K.W. Wong, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology The Changing Role of Blogs in Science Information Dissemination by Laksamee Putnam, Towson University Life Science…

Around the Scholarly Communications Web: The academic, economic and societal impacts of Open Access and more

The academic, economic and societal impacts of Open Access: an evidence-based review Scholarly Communications: Less of a market, more like general taxation? “We don’t need OA in our field, everything is on arXiv”. Nope. >When is the Library Open? and the PS Scholarly Communication and the Dilemma of Collective Action: Why Academic Journals Cost Too Much Open Access: the beast that no-one could – or should – control? Open access: All human knowledge is there—so why can’t everybody access it? Why embargo periods are bad for academic publishers Infrastructure is Invisible / Infrastructure is…

Betting on summer research for undergraduates

It's not too late. You can do research on cool topics, get paid, and even live in Las Vegas for the summer. If I were a student, I'd go. The University of Nevada, Las Vegas is still taking applications for students to come do research in the desert. The microbiology faculty at UNLV and the Desert Research Institute have received NSF funding for a summer Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program in Environmental Microbiology. This grant will provide students with the opportunity to work on a research project for a 10 week period with a faculty mentor. Students will receive a $…

ScienceOnline2010 - introducing the participants

As you know you can see everyone who's registered for the conference, but I highlight 4-6 participants every day as this may be an easier way for you to digest the list. You can also look at the Program so see who is doing what. Beatrice Lugger is a freelance science journalist and consultant, one of the founders of ScienceBlogs Germany and a twitterer. At the conference, Beatrice will co-moderate the session on Science online talks between generations. Danica Radovanovic is a PhD student at the Oxford Internet Institute, a blogger and a twitterer. I interviewed her a couple of months ago -…

Sunday Night Links

A bunch of new links on the Basic Concepts and Terms in Science list (or my 'enhanced' list, if you prefer). Bitch PhD has a new (paying!) gig at Suicide Girls News Blog and starts out with a post explaining the Plan B: How Does This Plan Work? Revere on Effect Measure: Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: the Edwards blogger dust-up Ezra Klein, in an op-ed in The Guardian (online only): We want a divider, not a uniter, and more on the topic on his own blog: More Shamefaced Obama Skepticism Chuckles1 puts it even better: The OTHER Abraham Lincoln A comment by Elizabeth Edwards - Response to a…

Video Science

You may remember when I mentioned the announcement of the new open-source online journal JoVE, a peer-reviewed journal of scientific methods in which submissions are provided in video form. Pimm, Eva, Jonah and Nick have also commented on it and Pimm prvides a look at the rate at which the news about the journal spread over the internet. I have been thinking about this a little and I am wondering if we can predict what kinds of techniques are most likely to be found there - and what kinds will not. I am assuming that showing how one uses a standard kit with no alterations of the protocol…

Poor Stanley and Terry

Terry Eagleton and Stanley Fish get another drubbing, this time at the hands of Matt Taibbi. I'd almost feel sorry for them, except that I'm still feeling the trauma of being trapped on a plane with Eagleton's book, so I say…sic 'em. This latest salvo is fired by author/professor Stanley Fish, a prominent religion-peddler of the pointy-headed, turtlenecked genus, who made his case in his blog at the New York Times. Fish was mostly riffing on a recent book written by the windily pompous University of Manchester professor Terry Eagleton, a pudgily superior type, physically resembling a giant…

My Picks From ScienceDaily

First Bacterial Genome Transplantation Changes One Species To Another: Researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) have announced the results of work on genome transplantation methods allowing them to transform one type of bacteria into another type dictated by the transplanted chromosome. The work, published online in the journal Science, by JCVI's Carole Lartigue, Ph.D. and colleagues, outlines the methods and techniques used to change one bacterial species, Mycoplasma capricolum into another, Mycoplasma mycoides Large Colony (LC), by replacing one organism's genome with the other…

Science Blogging Conference - who is coming? (Public Scientific Data)

There are 99 days until the Science Blogging Conference. The wiki is looking good, the Program is shaping up nicely, and there is more and more blog and media coverage already. There are already 85 registered participants and if you do not register soon, it may be too late once you decide to do so (we'll cap at about 230). Between now and the conference, I am highlighting some of the people who will be there, for you to meet in person if you register in time. Xan Gregg is local. He works for SAS (in the JMP division - a statistics software I have used a little bit back in the day) and he…

The Morning After

Times Square celebrates Barack Obama's presidential victory. Image: GrrlScientist, 4 November 2008 [larger view]. Well, it's nice to be noticed, and I was noticed today, by Seed Magazine (online). I know this doesn't sound like much since Seed should notice those who write for ScienceBlogs due to our close affiliation, but I am rarely noticed by anyone (including Seed) for any reason and worse, because my moods have been causing me tremendous anxiety and grief recently, I have felt absolutely invisible. Recently, my mood had deteriorated to the point where it was nearly impossible for…

Who Should You Vote For?

This online quiz might explain why I am not very excited about any of the candidates who are running for president this time around; Okay, I've never heard of Mike Gravel until this moment, have you? What were your results? Updated later: Okay, I am working on a beer at the moment and my results have changed -- I am becoming more aligned with the space alien guy, which leads me to ask, what did they put into my beer?? YIKES! Christopher Dodd 80% John Edwards 79% Hillary Clinton 79% Barack Obama 75% Joe Biden 74% Ron Paul 58% Rudy Guiliani 34% Fred Thompson 33% John McCain 30% Mike Huckabee…

Not an “accident”: Rick Simer, 64, suffers fatal work-related injury in Denver, CO

Rick Simer, 64 suffered fatal traumatic injuries on Tuesday, August 9 while working at KBP Coil Coaters. The Denver Post reports: "he was caught in an aluminum splitter machine." The company’s website says: “KBP Coil Coaters, Inc. is a leader in supplying pre-painted aluminum and steel coil, using state of the art coil coating equipment and methods. KBP rigorously tests and certifies every coil before it leaves our coil coating facility.” Using OSHA’s on-line database, I did not find a record of an OSHA inspections at the KBP Coil Coaters, at least dating back to 2006. The AFL-CIO’s 2016…

Not an “accident”: Henry William Gray, 56, suffers fatal work-related injury in Denver, IA

Henry William Gray, 56, suffered fatal traumatic injuries on Monday, May 2 while working at an excavation site in Denver, Iowa. The Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier reports: The incident occurred at about 11:30 am. "Crews were doing excavating work when a wall collapsed.” The location is a “historic two-story brick commercial building…which has been under renovation the past couple of years.” KWWL indicates: "Snelling Construction was excavating a long foundation wall.   ….A portion of the foundation wall tipped over…” Using OSHA’s on-line database, it does not appear that the Iowa State OSHA…

Fatal work injury that killed Alejandro Anguiana was preventable, OSHA cites Markman Peat

Alejandro Anguiana’s work-related death could have been prevented. That’s how I see the findings of Indiana OSHA in the agency’s citations against his employer, Markman Peat. The 41 year-old was working in March 2015 at the company’s operation in Kingsbury, IN. The initial press reports indicated that Anguiana was pulled into a piece of machinery when his sweatshirt got wrapped around the power takeoff shaft. I wrote about the incident shortly after it was reported by local press. Inspectors with Indiana OSHA conducted an inspection at the workplace following the fatal incident. The agency…

Neufeld on Slavery and the Bible

My old friend Henry Neufeld has written a response to all of our discussion of slavery and the Bible, as I actually hoped he would. Henry is a Hebrew scholar, a Christian and the director of the Pacesetter's Bible Institute in Florida. He was among the first people I encountered online about 13 or 14 years ago, in the Compuserve religion forum, and he was a big influence on my thinking about religion. Until I met him, I really thought that all Christians were fundamentalists as that was pretty much all I was raised around. Henry showed me that are other ways to look at things. On the subject…

The Aska Barrow Is A Huge Building Platform

It's been a busy couple of days with a lot of publicity. Monday morning a paper I've co-authored with my friend, geophysics specialist Andreas Viberg, was published in the on-line version of Archaeological Prospection. For reasons of scientific priority (which I myself like to establish by spilling everything I do onto the blog immediately) I've been sitting on this since April of 2013, so it feels real good to finally blog about it. Here's a brief summary. There's a huge weird barrow at Aska in Hagebyhöga near Vadstena in Östergötland. It's oval and flat instead of round and domed. My old…

Hayseed Dixie

Bluegrass music is rootsy acoustic proto-country. 70s heavy metal is bluesy electrified hard rock. Imagine what classic heavy metal songs would sound like if played by a bluegrass band -- banjo, fiddle, mandolin, bass... Imagine that. Imagine Hayseed Dixie! This US quartet has released nine albums in the past eight years. The first one was all AC/DC covers -- thus the name Hayseed Dixie. But they record a lot of their own material too, and they rock. Excellent stuff if you like bluegrass, or classic heavy metal, or both! On Sunday 6 April, at 19:00 hours, the Hayseed Dixie will perform at my…

The Journal of the North Atlantic

The Journal of the North Atlantic is a new on-line archaeology and environmental-history journal published in Maine. You can apply for a login and read it for free until the end of the year. So far, they have three papers up, and they offer some really cool stuff. One is an apparently nature-deterministic GIS study of Medieval property demarcation in the Reykholt area of Iceland where Snorri Sturluson lived. Another one explores the ethno-political situation in Medieval Greenland, where two different eskimo cultures coexisted with Norse settlers. My favourite is an unbelievably exotic paper…

Orsten fossils

Bredocaris admirabilis Ooooh, there's a gorgeous gallery of Orsten fossils online. These are some very pretty SEMs of tiny Cambrian animals, preserved in a kind of rock called Orsten, or stinkstone (apparently, the high sulfur content of the rock makes it smell awful). What are Orsten fossils? Orsten fossils in the strict sense are spectacular minute secondarily phosphatised (apatitic) fossils, among them many Crustacea of different evolutionary levels, but also other arthropods and nemathelminths. The largest fragments we have do not exceed two mm. Orsten-type fossils, on the other hand,…

The Purpling of Blogdom

Williams has long held a dominant position in a number of categories of blogging: Dan Drezner on economics and politics, Marc Lynch on the Middle East, Ethan Zuckerman on the developing world and really cool conferences, Derek Catsam on history and Red Sox fandom, yours truly on canine physics. And I'm sure I'm forgetting several people. The number of blogging fields with prominent Eph contributions has increased this week, with the entire Williams math department making the jump into blogging. It's a bold move, but math blogging has always been more respectable than other types. At this…

Nomadic Mushroom-Eating Ants

Euprenolepis procera (photo by Witte and Maschwitz) This is cool. A new paper by Volker Witte and Ulrich Maschwitz details a previously unknown behavior for ants: nomadic fungivory.  Here's the cite and the abstract: Witte, V. and U. Maschwitz. 2008. Mushroom harvesting ants in the topical rain forest. Naturwissenschaften, online early. Abstract: Ants belong to the most important groups of arthropods, inhabiting and commonly dominating most terrestrial habitats, especially tropical rainforests. Their highly collective behavior enables exploitation of various resources and is viewed as a key…

Something to make Bora smile

Awhile back, I was given a PLoS T-shirt by Bora Zivkovic, science blogger extraordinaire and online community manager for PLoS-ONE, the flagship journal of the Public Library of Science. Every time I wear the dang thing, someone says something to me about the Open Access journal movement. Of course, I live in a rather science-dense town so I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I guess I'm just surprised at the kinds of comments I get. Yesterday I took a brief jaunt to our local indy bookstore. To get some ideas for my Tar Heel Tavern post for this weekend (submit your entries!!!), I was…

NY Times Ends Pay for Premium Content

This e-mail just came in overnight - a great move by the New York Times: Dear TimesSelect Subscriber, We are ending TimesSelect, effective today. The Times's Op-Ed and news columns are now available to everyone free of charge, along with Times File and News Tracker. In addition, The New York Times online Archive is now free back to 1987 for all of our readers. Why the change? Since we launched TimesSelect, the Web has evolved into an increasingly open environment. Readers find more news in a greater number of places and interact with it in more meaningful ways. This decision enhances the free…

City birds struggle to make themselves heard

My first ever feature article has just been published in this week's issue of New Scientist. It's about the ways in which songbirds are coping with the noisy din of cities. Low-frequency urban noises mask the calls that they use to attract mates, defend territories and compete with rivals. The race to adapt to this new soundscape has already seen some losers being forced out and some winners developing some intriguing strategies to cope with the clamour. Robins have started to sing at night when it's quieter, while nightingales just belt out their tunes more loudly (breaking noise safety…

Love and Marriage and Wind

This Saturday I'm getting married! The following week I'll be in Barbados relaxing on my honeymoon. While Barbados is a highly developed Caribbean economy with no shortage of internet access, in the interests of relaxation and matrimonial bliss I shall not be online. Posting will resume the following week. Until then, I'll leave you with this Wired article about a wind-powered car that travels directly downwind faster than the wind. When I first read the idea, I thought "No, that's an obvious violation of the laws of nature and everyone involved is an idiot." Well, the proof is in the pudding…

D-Wave Talk

So did anyone at MIT go to this talk and care to comment: Mohammad Amin (D-Wave) Adiabatic Quantum Computation with Noisy Qubits Adiabatic quantum computation (AQC) is an attractive model of quantum computation as it may naturally possess some degree of fault tolerance. Nonetheless, any practical quantum circuit is noisy and one must answer important questions regarding what level of noise can be tolerated. Gate model quantum computation relies on three important quantum resources: superposition, entanglement, and phase coherence. In this presentation, I will discuss the role of these three…

Two Essays on Expelled, Dawkins, and PZ

Two essays I wrote on Expelled are now in print and I have placed PDFs of the articles online. The first shorter essay appears at Skeptical Inquirer magazine and reviews the impact of the film at the state level, as it has shaped local news coverage and the legislative agenda. I conclude that as a strategic communication campaign, the film's impact has been greatly underestimated. The second longer essay appears at the Kean Review, a new arts and ideas journal sold at Barnes & Noble and other larger bookstores. In this essay I review the impact of the film but also anchor Expelled in the…

Where 'Thin Means AIDS' African Women Become Obese

Note: ScienceBlogs has been following the 16th Annual AIDS Conference, with a special temporary blog reporting on the goings-on. I encourage you to all check it out. ------------- As more and more women are acquiring AIDS in South Africa, a new trend is emerging: in order to not look HIV positive, women are becoming obese in large numbers. According to the Independent Online, half of all women in South Africa are overweight, and almost one-third are severely overweight. More than 5 million of South Africa's 45 million people are infected with HIV/AIDS, and the cultural perception is that if a…

Heading to ICPAPH!

This week I will be heading to the International Congress on Physical Activity and Public Health in Toronto, Ontario.  It should be a terrific conference - the program includes presentations by friends of Obesity Panacea including Drs Jen Kuk and Meghann Lloyd, not to mention other internationally renowned physical activity researchers like Steve Blair, Peter Katzmarzyk and Neville Owen.  There will also be a large number of oral and poster presentations on a variety of topics by my own lab group, including my own poster ("Relationship between daily steps and clustered cardiometabolic risk…

Pink Is For Boys, Blue Is For Girls

A wonderful blog, FairerScience.org, has brought us this delightful piece on our innate biological womanliness. ...last winter, the Times Online published an editorial by Anjana Ahuja suggesting that little girls' preference for "pink fluff" is a biologically determined feature of girlhood. Perhaps Ahuja is not aware that this premise is not universally supported: There has been a great diversity of opinion on the subject, but the generally accepted rule is pink for the boy and blue for the girl. The reason is that pink being a more decided and stronger color is more suitable for the boy…

Silence of the Bees

You may have heard that honeybees in this country are dying off. You may know that scientists have called this epidemic "CCD," or colony collapse disorder, where honeybees seem to lose the ability to find the hive again, and disappear forever. Scientists think CCD may be caused by a virus, or a combination of other factors, such as the presence of pesticides or the poor nutrition and high antibiotic use of commercial bee populations. There are other theories too. Nature on PBS reports that, if the rate of collapse continues, all honeybee populations in the US will die out by 2035. But did…

Silly me, I clearly misread you... didn't I?

I'm going through the training that Purdue requires before I submit any research protocols to the Institutional Review Board. It's good to care about your faculty doing ethical research, but I confess it is taking FOREVER. So I'm reading the part on the problems with peer review, and I come across this chestnut: Gender bias may occur in reviewing. Okay, so far so good, I think. Maybe this is an enlightened group of folks writing this who are aware of the research that says that reviewers are biased against manuscripts authored by people with identifiably female names. I continue to read…

Minnow at the Science Blogging Conference

Minnow's big adventure this weekend was attending the 2nd Annual NC Science Blogging Conference (and staying with one of my college roomies). In the morning she went to the discussion on ethics in science blogging, lead by the incomparable Janet Stemwedel. Afterwards she had a little bonus discussion. Then Minnow participated in a panel on Gender and Race in Science: Online and Offline, moderated by the excellent Zuska. Other panel participants were Karen Ventii of Science to Life and Pat Campbell of Fairer Science. After a great box lunch, Minnow went to Dave Munger's session on Building…

What's Your Internet Importance? (Your QDos Number)

There's a new way to gauge your importance on the 'Net, a little app in beta stage called QDOS. The forumula used to compile your QDOS number (which made me think of Erdos number) is a propriatary blend of Myspace, Facebook, activity, searches, popularity, blogging, online buying, chatting, and more. "We're trying to find a way for the consumer to take ownership of their digital status," said Tom Ilobe, chief executive of Garlik (as in, "powerful stuff," one of its mottoes). "Businesses are doing it pretty well, but the consumer is in danger of being left out of the game. Their information is…

Video Game Addiction Study and Survey

A few months back I wrote a post on the topic of the psychology video game addiction, and today was contacted by a student who trying to study video game addiction in efforts of finding an effective treatment. A survey-based study being conducted by a Southern California university is now seeking anonymous participants to take the 4 minute online survey. This study is sponsored by The Center for Survey Research at an anonymous private university in Southern California. The results will be used to help understand how video game addiction affects the lives and family members of those who are…

The Anecdote of the Murdered Book, continued

Following up on last month's buzz about the Internet killing literacy, this NYT article baldly states, Clearly, reading in print and on the Internet are different. On paper, text has a predetermined beginning, middle and end, where readers focus for a sustained period on one author's vision. On the Internet, readers skate through cyberspace at will and, in effect, compose their own beginnings, middles and ends. Yes, internet reading is nonlinear. Yes, it may be tied to some disturbing trends in youth literacy (the article cites the same National Endowment for the Arts data and Atlantic…

March Madness Links: A Contest, Cabinets, Carl and CSPAN

--A great NYT article on science museums and cabinets of curiosities: This antic miscellany is dizzying. But there are lineaments of sustained conflict in the apparent chaos. Over the last two generations, the science museum has become a place where politics, history and sociology often crowd out physics and the hard sciences. There are museums that believe their mission is to inspire political action, and others that seek to inspire nascent scientists; there are even fundamental disagreements on how humanity itself is to be regarded. The experimentation may be a sign of the science museum's…

Can the Internet be used to treat physiological disorders?

Apparently. In particular, this approach was tried with GAD (Generalized Anxiety Disorder). A current study in PLoS investigated whether iCBT (Internet-based cognitive behavioral therapy) works when the process is guided by a clinician. The research was done in connection with the "VirtualClinic," self described as " ... the Internet-based Research Clinic that develops and evaluates free online education and treatment programs for people with anxiety and depression."*. The study involved 150 GAD participants, who were randomly assigned to three groups: "Clinician-assisted vs. technician-…

Complain to CBS: CBS resident anti-vaccine propagandist Sharyl Attkisson sucks up to anti-vaccine pseudoscientist Andrew Wakefield

Watch CBS News Videos Online A number of you sent me this link. It's to a video (above) of Sharyl Attkisson, CBS News' resident anti-vaccine propagandist, putting on a nauseating display of sucking up to Andrew Wakefield over his recent monkey study, the one that I deconstructed yesterday to show it for the lousy science that it is. Attkisson is a true believer. She's done this sort of thing before, occasionally to unintentionally hilarious effect; she's especially enamored of writing hit pieces on Paul Offit. Even worse, Attkisson is in bed with Generation Rescue and Age of Autism,…

Do the survey dude....

ScienceBlogs wants your help... and is willing to pay. Well sorta... they're giving away some ipod type goodies to some people who complete a short survey. Here's the schtick: Dear Reader, We launched Seed and ScienceBlogs because we believe that science can change the world and science literacy is how we get there. In the pages of our magazine we've tried to capture the ideas and issues fueling this cultural shift. Online we've aimed to foster a lively and spirited conversation about where it's all heading. Now, we invite you to share with us directly your perspective on the state of…

Congratulations, Its a Blog!

Welcome to the birth of a new blog, with Steve and I as the happy and glowing parents! Despite the labor pains and the fears that it wouldn't be perfectly normal, we've decided to love it anyway and do our best to raise it into a healthy, dysfucntional adult. The idea for "Of Two Minds" began when Steve and I went out drinking in Lexington, Kentucky right after the holidays last year. I was bemoaning the amount of time I spent blogging, and Steve had just lost Sandra as a coblogger, so the merger seemed to make sense. Despite being a bit tipsy that night, the idea of a 'superblog' withstood…

Health Care Reform: It's a Matter of Convenience

I recently had the pleasure of writing an op-ed piece about health care reform for my hometown newspaper, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and it ran in the paper today. You can check it out online here. I grew up reading the Star-Telegram, so this was an exciting opportunity. My article discusses the need for robust health care reform in the form of a strong public option, comparing and contrasting my health care experiences in the US and the UK to build my case. For regular readers of my blog, you will note that this is a theme I have often explored. I would have preferred that the Star-…

In the Wake of Science Online (#scio11): Using Prezi

The first proper session I attended at Science Online was I-wish-my-science-teachers-had-been-like Stacy Baker's workshop on Prezi. Despite some issues with the hotel wifi, it was a fantastic session, and I learned quite a bit. Clearly, there are some things better suited to Keynote/Powerpoint, and some presentations perhaps better suited to Prezi (just as they are still some types of presentations best suited to whiteboards or chalkboards). I think Prezi can be really effective for teaching part-whole relationships, and the zooming tool can be really useful for, for example, getting deeper…

PLoS Takes On Science and Nature... and Blogs All About It!

Via Evolving Thoughts comes news that the Public Library of Science (PLoS) is starting a series of blogs to promote its recently announced interdisciplinary PLoS ONE journal. PLoS publishes several prestigious open access scientific journals and is now taking things a step further with a new journal that will, among other things, "empower the scientific community to engage in a discussion on every paper and provide readers with tools to annotate and comment on papers directly." In the stuffy culture of science publishing, this is a pretty big deal. Although PLoS ONE won't use open peer…

A Theory Worth Sharing

Those of you who have been following this blog since the beginning will already have heard about Rutgers Anthropologist Helen Fisher's theory that SSRI's are endangering people's ability to fall in love and stay in love. If you have, the title of the the article I just wrote for Psychology Today online will be familiar: Sex Love, and SSRIs, but this piece delves into the issue far more deeply than my previous posting. I hope you'll take the time to read it. While no long term studies have yet confirmed Fisher's theory, there's enough evidence to warrant further inquiry. Everything we know…

Update on Gender Knot Post Due Today

I promised you the first post on The Gender Knot today, and I still plan to get it up today if at all possible. My plan had been to work on it Monday and Tuesday but most of those days I was plagued with headache and it was difficult to concentrate on writing. So, it's not done yet. Please note Chapter 1 is available online here. In the meantime, perhaps you'd like to listen to fellow Scienceblogger Pal MD's latest Palcast, The Kitchen Edition, which relates to my post On Being A Patient. Or maybe you'd like to read this post by Sheril Kirshenbaum at The Intersection and just puke, puke…

Finding "cousins" through personal genomics

The odds of knowing your cousins: 23andme Part 1: Bizarrely, Jonathan Zittrain turns out to be my cousin -- which is odd because I have known him for some time and he is also very active in the online civil rights world. How we came to learn this will be the first of my postings on the future of DNA sequencing and the company 23andMe. Just read the whole thing. This is really a matter of the humanities, not science. Specifically, the almost mystical significance people seem to put into the finding that they share genetic ancestry with people, even people who they knew and were friendly with…

A presidential debate about science

A bunch of bloggers and some other fancy folks have gotten together to endorse a simple request: Given the many urgent scientific and technological challenges facing America and the rest of the world, the increasing need for accurate scientific information in political decision making, and the vital role scientific innovation plays in spurring economic growth and competitiveness, we, the undersigned, call for a public debate in which the U.S. presidential candidates share their views on the issues of The Environment, Medicine and Health, and Science and Technology Policy. The hope is for a…