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Parasites outweigh top predators and castrators do best of all

To a science-fiction filmmaker, the concept of being controlled by unseen forces is creative gold, but for the rest of us, it's a fairly unsettling prospect. But like it or not, it's clear that parasites - creatures that live off (and often control) the bodies of others - are an integral part of the world we live in and carry an influence that far exceeds their small size. Now, a painstaking survey of the residents of river estuaries shows that parasites do indeed punch above their weight, and they aren't slouches in that department either. Despite their tiny size, their combined mass…

Drugs, abortion, and the Ends that justify the means

The latest example of irrational, Medieval policy-making in Washington to outrage these parts of the blogosphere is a three-week-old story from NPR in which we learn that federal officials oppose the distribution of cheap "overdose-rescue" kits to heroin addicts. Why? Well, according to Dr. Bertha Madras, deputy director of the White House Office on National Drug Control Policy... the rescue programs might take away the drug user's motivation to get into detoxification and drug treatment. "Sometimes having an overdose, being in an emergency room, having that contact with a health care…

After the Warming: a view from 2050 (via 1989)

Eighteen years ago British journalist/historian James Burke wrote and starred in a TV documentary on climate change. After the Warming (downloadable version available at Google Video) was presented in the guise of a future historian's review of the events leading up to a time, in 2050, when the world had come to grips with the consequences of global warming. I gave my copy to a friend in 1994, and have been trying to find another since. This week I finally did. And watching it now is positively eerie. And depressing. Eerie because it begins by describing things like the "full-scale…

Alternative medicine debate

This week's Science includes an interesting "forum" on the value of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), that wing of the U.S. National Institutes of Health charged with checking out whether or not herbal remedies and other medical techniques not sanctioned by MDs are worth taking. The center's been around for about eight years now, and apparently not everyone thinks it's a wise use of $123 million of taxpayers' money every year. My first thought was: isn't it a good idea to apply the scientific method to testing the efficacy of echinacea, St. John's wort…

Unyielding Hierophant

The Constant Fire: Beyond the Science vs. Religion DebateAdam Frank Adam Frank is an astrophysicist and a man on a mission. It's a brave mission, one which cuts strongly against the grain of the science vs. religion zeitgeist. It's probably a mission which won't succeed. Beyond the Science vs. Religion Debate is the book's subtitle, and in fact if you ignore the first word you'll be expecting a very different book. Frank feels that all of the sound and fury behind the debate either misses the point or accomplishes nothing. It is not about the debate, and if you're looking for that kind of…

'Wasabi protein' responsible for the heat-seeking sixth sense of rattlesnakes

Take a whiff of mustard or wasabi and you'll be hit with a familiar burning sensation. That's the result of chemicals in these pungent foods hitting a protein called TRPA1, a molecular alarm that warns us about irritating substances. The same protein does a similar job in other animals, but rattlesnakes and vipers have put their version of TRPA1 to a more impressive and murderous purpose. They use it to sense the body heat of their prey. Pit vipers are famed for their ability to detect the infrared radiation given off by warm-blooded prey, and none more so than the western diamondback…

Envious capuchin monkeys react badly to raw deals

This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. Two years ago, Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center found that brown capuchin monkeys also react badly to receiving raw deals. Forget bananas - capuchins love the taste of grapes and far prefer them over cucumber. If monkeys were rewarded for completing a task with cucumber while their peers were given succulent grapes, they were more likely to shun both task and reward. That suggested that the human ability to compare own efforts and rewards with those of our…

Why people change their minds at the last second

Whether it's a goalkeeper who needs to decide which way to dive, or a motorist who needs to swerve to avoid a pedestrian, people often have to make decisions in a small amount of time, based on a complex onrush of information. But even as their muscles launch them towards one particular fate, there is still room for indecisiveness. Arbora Resulaj from the University of Cambridge has found that people often change their decisions in the split-seconds after making them because of late-arriving information.  Neuroscientists have come up with several possible explanations for what happens in…

The Role of Science in American Environmentalism

The World's Fair sits down with Michael Egan, author of Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival: The Remaking of American Environmentalism (MIT Press, 2007), Assistant Professor of History at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and sometime Bonepony fan. This is the first in a probable series of "Author Meets Bloggers" posts, where we talk to authors about their new work. Read below for Part I. Chime in with questions as they arise - for the author, for other readers, for your id. THE WORLD'S FAIR: Here's a hard-hitting starter: what's your book about? MICHAEL EGAN: I guess the…

Human hunters unwittingly shrink their prey species at incredible rates

As a species, our unflinching obsession with size is just as apparent in our dealings with other animals as it is in our personal lives. Fishermen prize the biggest catches and they're are obliged to throw the smallest specimens back in. Hunters also value the biggest kills; they provide the most food and make the flashiest trophies. This fixation isn't just a harmless one - by acting as a size-obsessed super-predator, humans are reshaping the bodies of the species we hunt, at a remarkable pace and to a dramatic degree. Predators already put a lot of pressure on their prey to evolve new ways…

Hearing The Uncertainty Principle

If you read about science at all, you've heard of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. It's the canonical example of quantum weirdness, the strange idea that you can't simultaneously know the position and momentum of a particle. Pack a particle into a small enough box and your accurate knowledge of position will necessarily cause that particle to have a very uncertain momentum, "bouncing" around crazily inside that box. What you may not have read is that this isn't just quantum weirdness, it happens just as often in the classical world of waves. In fact, the very fact that quantum particles…

Et tu BBC?

Most observers of climate change media coverage long ago stopped wringing their hands every time Fox News reported that global warming has stopped and that humans are responsible anyway, mostly to avoid calluses. A while back it seemed like Fox might be ready to embrace the actual science, but old habits die hard. For example, Fox took a Sky News story back in August that suggested we may be on the verge of returning to record warm years and gave it the headline of "Natural Factors Could Cause Global Warming." Yes, the story was about solar activity, but here's the nub of the science that was…

Defying Gravity (but not the unforgiving reality of the television market)

Just eight episodes into a 13-part first season, ABC has canceled suspended (see update below) Defying Gravity, a flawed but relatively honest attempt at hard-core science fiction. Why is this noteworthy? OK, this is a stretch, but I am reminded of attempts to reform the U.S. health insurance system and climate change legislation. In each case creating something that respects reality seems to be beyond the powers that be. And yet even the watered down compromise product that emerges from the sausage factory can't attract sufficient support. Further evidence that the American public is…

Do mice have empathy?

This article in The Scientist describes a paper where the authors claim to have found empathy in mice. The problem is that what you define as empathy may be more a matter of semantics than of science: There is an "increasingly popular" view that this kind of basic, pre-cognitive response to social cues may be present in all mammals, said Frans de Waal at Emory University and the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, who did not participate in the study. "This "highly significant [paper]...confirms that empathy is an ancient capacity," he told The Scientist in an Email. ... In this study,…

Where Does All the Sulfur Go?

Environmental regulations have greatly reduced the amount of sulfur in gasoline.  This has created many benefits.  But did you ever wonder what happens to all that sulfur?  Perhaps not, if it was never clear to you why you should care. The reason you should care is this:  Sulfur is present in coal and in most liquid fuels.  When it is burned, it oxidized, much as the carbon is oxidized.  Carbon becomes carbon dioxide; sulfur becomes sulfur dioxide.  When sulfur dioxide enters the atmosphere, it becomes a strong acid: sulfuric acid, which is battery acid.  This is one factor that contributes…

Update on Nav1.7

PhysioProf commented about this back in 2006 after Alex Palazzo 's post, href="http://scienceblogs.com/transcript/2006/12/silent_mutations_inactivates_p.php">A silent mutation affects pain perception? That post discussed mutations that affect pain perception.  Now, there is a bit more information available about potential commercial developments stemming from this line of genetic research.   href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aC2haw8NOHW0">Firewalker's Faulty Gene May Shake Up Market for Painkillers By Dermot Doherty June 25 (Bloomberg)      A Pakistani…

Chew On This

Our ancestors branched off from those of chimpanzees some six million years ago. Since then, our lineage became human--and distinctly unlike other apes. Figuring out how that difference evolved is one of the grand challenges of biology. Until now, scientists have gotten most of their clues by looking at the fossils of extinct hominids. These fragments of bones only preserve a little information, but it's not a random smattering of data. It's more like a scaffolding on which other clues can be fixed, so that a picture of how we became human can gradually emerge. That's because the changes…

Publication Up - Reversing the Effect of Salt on Protein-DNA Interactions

Our lab has a new paper coming out this week in the Journal of Molecular Biology (JMB): The Glutamate Effect on DNA Binding by Pol I DNA Polymerases: Osmotic Stress and the Effective Reversal of Salt Linkage I'm going to talk about a few highlights here, but if you actually want the full article, say so in the comments or email me directly and I'll send you a reprint, because unless you or your university has a subscription to the Journal of Molecular Biology, you'll only be able to see the abstract. The paper comes primarily from the Ph.D. dissertation of Daniel Deredge and osmotic stress…

The iPod Zepto: Inconceivably Small

Apple, Inc. joke week continues here during an all star World's-Fair-Scheduled-Posts-While-We're-Away Link Week. This one was originally published here, back in 2005, and remains one of my favorites of technology satire. (Oh, you have one too? What's yours? Is it Vonnegut's Player Piano? Cat's Cradle? No? I'm not even close? It isn't Vonnegut at all? Then what's your point, hombre? What the hell's your point?) Your sample: Q: I hate having to recharge my iPod Zepto every 12 minutes. Is there any way to extend the battery life? A: Yes, if you keep your iPod Zepto's power button in…

Particle Melts Down in Defeat to Darwin. Film at Eleven.

PRESS CENTER | PRINTABLE BRACKETS I don't even know what to say. Darwin won. It was won, how to put this, how to put this, it was won a little more than handily. Particle didn't even score. Darwin won 142 to 0. WF: [speaking to the camera, microphone in hand] Let me step into the press conference. Not many folks left. I should be able to get a good spot. I have no idea what I just saw out there. Particle had been so dominant, so free-flowing in defeating General Relativity. I don't know what happened over these past months, during this game. But what a debacle here today. P: WF…

The Amnesia Drug: Frightening but Interesting

We tend to think of memories in the brain once they are consolidated as relatively stable things. For example, you don't tend to think of any active biochemical process being necessary to maintain long-term memories. This is almost an intuitive conclusion: wouldn't any active process required for memory maintenance be eventually disrupted if expected to operate over a long period? Further, we know that it forgetting is an active rather than a passive process -- such as in fear extinction where activity in certain parts of the brain is necessary to successfully "forget" the fear. However,…

Grand Rounds Vol. 4 #46

It has been a rough month here at Pure Pedantry. At one point last week, I think I trained rats for 8 straight hours. (My job in the lab is training rats.) And let me just tell you, that is not particularly interesting. Visualize getting a repetitive stress injury moving around an pissed off animal with a limited attention span but to whom your entire future is chained. Anyway, in order to entertain myself, I have been playing every episode of South Park in order in the background. (Yes, I know...very, very sad.) Sufficeth to say, this has resulted in me having South Park on the brain…

Creationist FUD refuted

If you're looking for a meaty weekend read, look no further than Paul McBride's thorough dismantling of Science and Human Origins, the new bad book from the Discovery Institute, by Gauger, Axe, and Luskin. It's in 6 parts, taking on each chapter one by one: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, a prediction about what will be in chapter 4 before reading it, Part 4 (prediction confirmed!), and Part 5. The creationists are howling. McBride's evisceration, with Carl Zimmer's detailed description of the evidence for chromosome fusion, all discrediting what they thought would be a hot new text on the scientific…

Tiger moths jam bat sonar

BATS use sonar, or echolocation, to navigate complex environments, and also to forage and then accurately pinpoint the flying insects on which they prey. Insects in turn have evolved various counter-measures to evade capture. Some species have ears which are in tune to the echolocation signals, while others are capable of performing complex evasive flight maneuvers in response to the clicks produced by attacking bats. Tiger moths have evolved the ability to produce ultrasonic clicks in response to attacking bats. However, the function of these clicks was unclear, although decades of research…

Monkeys categorize objects in the same way as humans

Being so closely related to our own species, monkeys serve as important model organisms, and have provided many insights into the workings of the human brain. Research performed on monkeys in the past 30 years or so has, for example, been invaluable in the development of brain-machine interfaces. Monkeys have also contributed a great deal to our understanding of the visual system -  they were the subjects in many of the classic experiments of Hubel and Wiesel, which showed that the primary visual cortex contains neurons that are responsive to edges and bars moving in specific orientations.…

SDB 2011: Patterning before lunch

This session is all about pattern formation, focusing on those earliest, simplest decisions. How doe a mass of identical cells distinguish themselves inti regions with different patterns of gene expression. You might recall that this is the question that so baffles the creationist Paul Nelson. Nobody is going to give a moment's consideration to his concerns, because they aren't at all interesting. 10:30-12:00 Session 2: Pattern Formation (Chair: Vernadeth Alarcon [Univ. Hawaii]) 10:30-11:00 Vernadeth Alarcon (Univ. Hawaii) "Cell polarity and differentiation in the early mouse embryo"…

INDIRECT TRUTHS: Gore Documentary Shaping Attention and Framing of Global Warming

In 2004 when The Day After Tomorrow hit theaters, I wrote this column evaluating its possible impacts. Later, Anthony Leiserowitz followed with a study appearing in Environment magazine assessing the public and media impact of the film. As other studies have shown with films such as Fahrenheit 9/11, and Passion of the Christ, there is a strong self-selection influence, with like-minded citizens attending the film, and coming away with their beliefs reinforced. So, for example, in the case of the Passion of the Christ, the already strongly religious attended the film, and came away with…

Antarctica: Cowboy Science

Hi. Apologies for the radio gap. It turns out that Trish, the co-PI and irresistible force behind this project met with an immovable ice patch and broke her femur a few days ago at the Willy Field airport on the Ross Ice Shelf. She’s “fine” now, and freshly bionic-ized with new hardware pinning together her skeleton. Oh, and we got the shot, out at the airport, while her femur was still in two parts (a shot of one of the C-130 planes framed similarly to a Ponting photograph of the Terra Nova at dock). Trish’s own experience underscores the originally intended topic of this particular post:…

Today's Odd Bedfellows: Spit, Yeast, and Mating Flies

What do human spit, baker's yeast, and fly sex have in common? Together, they illustrate a way in which new kinds of genes evolve. Scientists published a paper in Nature Genetics Sunday in which they studied an enzyme called amylase that's produced in saliva and breaks down starch. Human amylase genes share a common ancestry with the amylase gene found in our close relative, the chimpanzee. But they are different in some important ways. Instead of one amylase gene, we have several. Human amylase genes range from 2 to 15 copies, averaging three times as many as chimpanzees. But our extra…

Yarn Versus Science: Who Wins?

A couple readers have emailed me asking what I think of the recent Nature article on blogs by scientists. I agree with Revere that it's great that Nature (and specifically, Nature reporter Declan Butler) is paying such close attention to blogs in science. The top 50 list they provide is a good launch pad for rocketing off into this realm of the blogosphere. But I've always loathed the newsiness of lists. Put a number on a cover, and you sell copies. There must be some weird psychological weakness we have for lists. I noticed that the headline on the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly is…

Reviewing Ruse

Grrlscientist has a review up of Ruse's book, The Evolution-Creation Struggle (2005), so I thought I'd copy a review I wrote that appeared in Nature Cell Biology (Dec 2005 issue). As an undergraduate in Ireland in the mid-80's I ran across a copy of Ashley Montagu's book Science and Creationism. Frankly, I felt that I was reading some kind of parody â could there actually be people in a technologically literate country like the United States who denied both the fact of evolution and the hypothesis that natural selection was a mechanism for such change? Such opposition was not an issue in…

Undergraduate research changed my life

Lots of talk today about the joys of undergraduate research sparked by a recent study (the results of which can be found here). Chad has a post or two that I like on the matter. I thought I would throw my personal two cents in the ring as well, since undergraduate research has factored heavily into my career choices. When I got to college at a small liberal arts school in Illinois, I was unsure what career plans were. I had some vague interest in being a lawyer or potentially some sort of psychologist, but nothing tickled my fancy. My thoughts turned to science in my first year, and I went…

Do Neural Networks Segregate Information By Frequency?

Can information be directed to different networks in the brain depending on the "transmission frequency", like the channels on a TV? A 2006 Cerebral Cortex paper reveals that this may not be as absurd as it sounds. A relatively new technique in cognitive neuroscience is the use of frequency tagging, where a stimulus (whether visual or auditory) is presented at a certain rapid frequency, perhaps onsetting and offsetting six times per second (6Hz). A second stimulus may be presented at 4.5Hz. The frequencies can then be detected in the brain using magnetic or electric methods (MEG or EEG),…

Learning The Language of Thought: 4 Candidate Neural Codes

How does your brain represent the feelings and thoughts that are a part of conscious experience? Even the simplest aspects of this question are still a matter of heated debate, reflecting science's continuing uncertainty about "the neural code." The fact is that we still don't have a clear picture of the ways in which neurons transmit information. Here's a quick guide to current theories, beginning with well-established theories and moving into ideas that are considered more theoretical. The canonical model: firing rate Clearly, neurons encode some information in the rate of their firing…

When Forgetting Is Good: Control Reductions at Retrieval

What was your 6th birthday party like? If you successfully retrieved that memory, you may now be ever so slightly less able to remember your other childhood birthdays. A variety of behavioral evidence has shown that such "retrieval induced forgetting" of strongly competing memories is fundamental to memory retrieval. In a new article in Nature Neuroscience, Kuhl et al. provide neuroimaging evidence which ties retrieval-induced forgetting to activity in prefrontal cortex. In the study, subjects studied a series of 240 word pairs, for example ATTIC-DUST, ATTIC-JUNK, or MOVIE-REEL. During…

Dopamine to the Rescue: The Binding Problem

The infamous "binding problem" concerns how a coherent subjective experience of the world can emerge from the widely-distributed processing of individual object characteristics (for example, object identity and object spatial locations appear to be processed by independent neural systems). It is clear that binding requires focused attention (at least, according to "Feature Integration Theory"), but the specific mechanism by which attention binds remains elusive. Partly because of this, Baddeley has even revised the standard model of working memory to include an "episodic buffer" for binding…

Science and the Worship of Truth

I am tremendously excited to have David Sloan Wilson as a member of ScienceBlogs, and having had a small role in his decision is extremely gratifying. However, I take serious issue with the thesis of his first entry that bears the subtitle "Science as a Religion that Worships Truth as its God." This sat uncomfortably with me when I first saw it and it's been a persistent irritation ever since. A light went off when I read one of the comments on his inaugural post. It was buried down the list (#54 to be precise), was only two sentences long, and would easily have been overlooked if I didn…

Experiments in Art & Technology

To prepare for a "Book Sprint" I'm participating in at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie-Mellon University next week, I've been doing lots of research about notable historical interactions between art, science, and technology. In suit, Universe fringe benefits! First, I'd like to tell you about "9 Evenings," organized in 1966 by a very interesting engineer named Billy Klüver with the help of the great American artist, Robert Rauschenberg. Klüver is a fascinating character, a brilliant engineer who saw the potential in the integration of art and technology, and noticed an absence…

Bogus pro-gun factoids

Diederich Andrew Richard said: According to a 1986 survey of 2,000 imprisoned felons: 57% believed encountering an armed victim is the worst thing that could happen. False. The closest thing I could find in Wright and Rossi [1] to this is 57% agreed that "Most criminals are more worried about meeting an armed victim than they are about running into the police", which is hardly the same thing at all. When asked what THEY (rather than others) regularly worried about, the results were: Might get caught 34 Might have to go to prison 30 Family might look down on you 30 Might…

Friday Weird Science: Sex: the good, the bad, and the ugly

We know that a lot of organisms, from humans to bacteria to birds to bees, have lots of sex. But what has mystified scientists for years is WHY. I mean, it's fun and all (unless you're a poor beetle girl stuck with this), but what purpose does it serve? On the face of it, in fact, sex seems to be pretty BAD for about half of the population: the women. For example, there's a lizard out there than can reproduce both asexually and sexually. When it reproduces asexually, it producing nothing but girls, all of whom can reproduce both asexually and sexually. Net win. But when it reproduces…

Billy Bragg follow-up

Thanks, all, for sharing in my initial disappointment with missing Stetson Kennedy's 90th b'day party and then the happy accident of being home to take the call from Billy Bragg yesterday afternoon. My response to the comments began to grow so lengthy that I felt it necessary to create a whole new blog post. Here is the original post and here is the beginning of the comments - my responses: Sweetpea: The only think I can think of that would be better than sharing wine with you and Erleichda would be to strum a real Martin - I've only been able to afford a couple of Taylors, myself. We will…

The Price of Bias

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports California legislators plan to look into whether there is widespread gender bias in the California State University system following a lawsuit that resulted in a multi-million dollar award to Cal State-Fresno's former women's volleyball coach. State Sen. Don Perata, a Democrat and chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, said lawmakers were alarmed by the cost of the case to taxpayers, and also want to find out whether Cal State had turned a blind eye to gender discrimination elsewhere in the system, the AP reported...Fresno State said it would…

SciAm Reports: ScienceBlogger Is Attractive!!!

You'll recall I posted about fellow Scibling Shelley Batts's run-in with Wiley over fair use of a figure and graph from a journal article. This incident created quite a firestorm in the blogosphere. You'll find a good summary and a nice link roundup provided by Bora over at A Blog Around The Clock. It's a big deal because it gets to the heart of science blogging and science reporting. It generated enough attention that both Nature and Scientific American posted about it. Now Nature's blogger reported on the issue as follows: A few days ago Shelley Batts at Retrospectacle reviewed a…

Global Warming In The Right World

Today marks the debut of guest-blogger Cynthia Burack at TSZ. A professor at the Ohio State University, Cynthia is a political scientist who tools are feminist political theory and political psychology. We have worked together in the past on several projects, including work on group dynamics and resistance to diversity (see sidebar, NWSA Journal article) and on evaluating STEM department websites for diversity. What follows, however, is entirely Cynthia's work. I am grateful that she has allowed me to present it here. I think it is very important for all scientists to hear. Zuska has…

Who's a Leader?

This entry is sparked by a recent comment from Markk: Quit yelling about men -in engineering- and yell about men -in authority- especially academics, abusing their position. While it is unrealistic to think that I will ever quit yelling about men in engineering, at least until the revolution comes, I do like to think that I also do a fair amount of yelling about men in authority who abuse their position as well. Is Markk perhaps not familiar with my earlier writings on Dr. Toadygawa of MIT, and Rollins President Lewis Duncan (regarding the latter, I have been promising you an update entry…

Historical Figure Meme - Reading Rocks

Wilkins just tagged me with one of those blog meme things. Apparently, he thinks that I've nothing better to do with my time (and, unfortunately, he's totally correct about that). This particular meme involves historical figures. The rules are simple: 1) Link to the person who tagged you. 2) List 7 random/weird things about your favorite historical figure. 3) Tag seven more people at the end of your blog and link to theirs. 4) Let the person know they have been tagged by leaving a note on their blog. I'm going to do what both Wilkins and Myers did, and pick someone who probably wouldn't…

McCain: Just when you thought he couldn't go any further around the bend

It's hard to believe, but there was once a time when I had some respect - even admiration - for John McCain. Now, all I have is pity. The guy sold his soul to the Christian Right, but they haven't paid up. So what does he do? He tries to get them to take the last pitiful shreds of his intellectual integrity, too. He just did an interview with Beliefnet, and tried his best to make sure that he said all of the things that they wanted to hear. I just hope - more for his sake than anyone else's - that he doesn't actually believe them himself. Beliefnet questions are in bold; McCain's drivel is…

The Unholy Wars: Back into the Trenches

Yet another round of the unholy wars has broken out again here at Scienceblogs. Matt Nisbet and PZ Myers are at each others' throats. Again. If you read the other blogs here, you know that this isn't anything that's exactly novel. The two have some fundamental differences, and every so often those differences brush up against each other. When Matt and Paul's differences interact, we usually see something that chemists and science geeks like to refer to as a "highly exothermic" reaction. (In other words, things go "Boom!") I don't always get involved when these disputes come up, and when I…

Ward Churchill, Free Speech, and Academic Integrity

A few of you might remember Ward Churchill. He's the University of Colorado professor who caused a stink a few years ago with an essay that compared 9/11 victims in the World Trade Center to Nazis. His remarks generated a surge of demands that he be fired. Yesterday, he finally was - but not for the 9/11 essay. And there's the rub. Ward Churchill was dismissed for cause by the Board of Regents for academic misconduct that was unearthed when people began to examine his record more closely when the offensive essay came to light. They found repeated cases of academic misconduct, and filed a…

Santorum on Science and Scientists

Over at Pharyngula, PZ highlights a recent comment by Rick Santorum, the best-dressed man in the Senate, regarding Santorum's opinion on scientists and morality: Most scientists unfortunately, those that certainly are advocating for this [embryonic stem cell research], and many others feel very little moral compulsion. It's a utilitarian, materialistic view of doing whatever they can do to pursue their desired goals. After following the links back and watching the video clip of Santorum's comment, I discovered something that was almost shocking: he actually said other things in response to…