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Flea talks reason, and the antivax hordes descend

Dr. Flea's a guy after my own heart. He's been blogging about vaccines, and now he's getting into specific diseases. He's posted an installment about the vaccine against Haemophilus influenza type B: The first American children to receive the Hib vaccine are turning 20 years old this year. Flea wasn't practicing medicine in the pre-Hib era, so I asked an older nurse what office-based Pediatrics was like before the vaccine. "About once a year, a kid would come in with an ear infection. They'd write him a prescription for antibiotics, then he'd go home and die." Haemophilus influenzae type b (…

Congratulations to the IPCC and Al Gore

Joint winners of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize: The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 is to be shared, in two equal parts, between the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr. for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change. Indications of changes in the earth's future climate must be treated with the utmost seriousness, and with the precautionary principle uppermost in our minds.…

The crumbs that fall from Instapundit's table

If I summarized Glenn Reynold's response to my post on his hyping of a small correction to GISS data, you would not believe me, so I'm quoting the whole thing: Lamberted! But no Instalanche. Later: In an update: "Matthew Yglesias links to Tim Lambert, obviously deeming him a reputable source. Hey, this is about politics; not accuracy." Yglesias has been off his game lately. More: Brad Plumer has been fooled, too. Yes, Reynolds is enough of an egomaniac to think that I wrote my post because I was hoping to get an Instalanche. In fact, I wrote it to correct his hype. The change meant that…

How many Iraqis have to die before it is front page news?

The Washington Post buried the story of 650,000 excess deaths in Iraq on page A12. I don't know what inside page the story appeared on in the New York Times, but look what they had on their website (image to right). Three American deaths are much more important than 600,000 Iraqi ones. Gee, New York Times, you could at least pretend to care. Mind you, there's worse things than burying the study. Malcolm Ritter in the Associated Press did a hatchet job on the study. A controversial new study contends nearly 655,000 Iraqis have died because of the war, suggesting a far higher death toll…

The Australian's War on Science 40

Malcolm Colless, writing in The Australian declares that human-caused global warming is a beat-up, just like human-caused ozone depletion. I swear I'm not making this up. Look: Remember, it was not so long ago that we were confronted with the unnerving prospect of being fried like eggs on a hotplate as a result of a widening hole in the ozone layer of the atmosphere. The hole is apparently still there, although it has stopped expanding and has, in fact, started shrinking. Coincidentally, it is now playing second fiddle to global warming in the climate change debate. Apparently Colless is…

Roger Bate, in depth

Adam Sarvana of the Natural Resources News Service has written a detailed story on the career of Roger Bate: Call major mainstream environmental groups and ask them for comment on Roger Bate. The reply is always: Who? Like most policy wonks at conservative think tanks, few have ever heard of him. That is why he wins. Anyone who wants to understand the policy battles that lie ahead in this country - not to mention those already past - should study his career carefully. This is true for Republicans looking for an antidote to President Obama, environmental advocates he has consistently outwitted…

Sales of Heaven and Earth

Ben McNeil investigates Andrew Bolts claim that Ian Plimer's error-filled Heaven and Earth has 25,000 copies sold or ordered: Indeed, if a non-fiction book has 25 000 copies sold in Australia it is a massive blockbuster. I was suspicious when reading through the SMH book section the last couple of weeks and 'Heaven and Earth' not being listed in their top-seller list for non-fiction. Being a little more rigorous, Bookscan, which track book sales in Australia doesn't list it in the top 10 for non-fiction for the month as of the time of this blog entry . Seem a little odd to you? Further…

The Pinata Strikes Back

On the essential Missing Link, Ken Parish links to my post of yesterday: Tim Lambert ably defends himself on scientific grounds against a concerted attack by anti-science RWDB "heavyweights". And explains the scare quotes: I wrote that extract. Blair and Bolt might be heavyweights in audience size terms, but in intellectual terms neither of them could power a flashlight globe. Or perhaps it's more wilful stupidity than lack of capacity. Certainly that's how Harry Clarke explains it on climate change: The science on climate change is overwhelmingly accepted. Why are the right so vehemently…

A Nazi Santa?

As much as I detest Holocaust denial, neo-Nazis, and all they stand for, I can still understand why there is a certain sensitivity to emblems of Nazi-ism in Germany and Austria, although I have pointed out that sometimes Germans and Austrians go a bit too far, all too often stomping on free speech in the process, in their efforts to prevent the resurgence of Nazi-ism. However, even 61 years later, there may be a reason these governments act the way they do. There is still a large contingent of people in Germany who see Nazi symbolism where none is there or intended: BERLIN (Reuters) - A…

Are there no depths to which these people won't sink?

Apparently not. The Westboro Baptist Church is at it again: A Kansas church group that planned to demonstrate at the funerals of five Amish girls killed in an attack on their one-room schoolhouse has dropped the picket plans, a reversal that came hours after Pennsylvania's governor offered the Amish police protection. Members of the Westboro Baptist Church issued a statement saying a representative will appear on a nationally syndicated radio talk show hosted by Mike Gallagher instead of picketing the funerals. Gallagher's website indicated the group was offered an hour of airtime in exchange…

Another day, another death threat

Lanai Vasek in The Australian reports: In the latest incident, Federation of Australian Science and Technological Societies executive director Anna-Maria Arabia received an email today saying she would be "strung-up by the neck" and killed for her promotion of mainstream climate science. The threat was emailed to her this morning before a "Respect the Science" campaign at Parliament House in Canberra today. Shortly after before [see correction] she got the death threat, Arabia was attacked by Andrew Bolt: At its annual gathering in Canberra today, the Federation of Australian Science and…

Fred Singer's latest whopper

S. Fred Singer isn't pleased with Merchants of Doubt, so tries to play gotcha!: Oreskes' and Conway's science is as poor as their historical expertise. To cite just one example, their book blames lung cancer from cigarette smoking on the radioactive oxygen-15 isotope. They cannot explain, of course, how O-15 gets into cigarettes, or how it is created. They seem to be unaware that its half-life is only 122 seconds. In other words, they have no clue about the science, and apparently, they assume that the burning of tobacco creates isotopes -- a remarkable discovery worthy of alchemists.…

Judith Curry and the hockey stick

Last month Judith Curry challenged folks to respond to Bishop Hill/Montford's book The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science So I am laying down the gauntlet, this really needs to discussed and rebutted by the paleo researchers and the IPCC defenders. and In the context of the hockey stick wars, Montford clearly describes the three main critiques that MM had of MBH98,99: i) inappropriate use of centering in the principal component analysis; ii) stripbark bristlecones are not reliable as a proxy; iii) the R2 statistic needs to be used in the assessment of…

Inside the DDT Propaganda Machine

The Tyee has published an extract from a book by Donald Gutstein on corporate propaganda in Canada: In the years since the Stockholm Treaty was signed, readers of Canadian newspapers have not had an opportunity for Greenpeace's position on DDT to be explained to them by Greenpeace itself. The only information they received about this environmental organization's position on DDT was conveyed by the organization's foes. National Post readers learned, for instance, courtesy of then columnist Elizabeth Nickson, that "groups like Greenpeace... serve their own ideological agenda, and want to keep…

We don't need any of those steeenkin' college-educated doctors

Via The Onion (of course), Dr. Mike Ruddy proclaims: 'm a doctor, and I'm damn good at it. Why? Because I learned to be a doctor the old-fashioned way: gumption, elbow grease, and trial and error. I'm not one of these blowhards in a white coat who'll wear your ears out with 10 hours of mumbo-jumbo technical jargon about "diagnosis" this and "prognosis" that, just because he loves the sound of his own voice. No sir. I just get the job done. Those fancy-pants college-boy doctors are always making a big deal about their "credentials." But I'm no show-off phony with a lot of framed pieces of…

Hell's the place to be today

Hell, Michigan, that is. The "Hellions" are planning one hell of a party today, 6/6/06, a.k.a. the Day of the Beast: HELL, Mich. - They're planning a hot time in Hell on Tuesday. The day bears the date of 6-6-06, or abbreviated as 666 - a number that carries hellish significance. And there's not a snowball's chance in Hell that the day will go unnoticed in the unincorporated hamlet 60 miles west of Detroit. Nobody is more fired up than John Colone, the town's self-styled mayor and owner of a souvenir shop. "I've got `666' T-shirts and mugs. I'm only ordering 666 (of the items) so once they're…

George Lucas has apparently finally come to his senses!

He's actually finally going to release the original, unaltered, un-"improved" trilogy on DVD: Fans can look forward to a September filled with classic Star Wars nostalgia, led by the premiere of LEGO Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy video game and the long-awaited DVD release of the original theatrical incarnations of the classic Star Wars trilogy. In response to overwhelming demand, Lucasfilm Ltd. and Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment will release attractively priced individual two-disc releases of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Each release includes the…

Slate on Lott

Atrios points us to Tim Noah's article at Slate. After the Washington Times whitewash, and the US News and Washington Post completely ignoring Lott's survey, we at last have a mainstream media article that gets to the heart of the matter. One interesting feature that bears repeating because it is hard for it to sink in because it seems so unlikely: Lott will not admit that he attributed the 98% figure to "national surveys". Look at what he tells Slate: "A lot of those discussions could have been written more clearly." Lott is saying that this sentence does not…

Natural does not equal safe: "You should remove that wort" edition

A study this month ($) in Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety (just rolls off the tongue doesn't it?), looked at poison control data during 2001 for two herbal supplements: St. John's wort and Echinacea. There were 356 contacts for SJW and 406 contacts for Echinacea. That's not what interests me; we know the compounds are bioactive and have toxicities associated with their use (See here for the adverse effects seen from these contacts). SJW is even implicated in suicidal and aggressive thoughts (Nanayakkara et al. 2004. Ned Tijdschr Geneeskd. 149; 1347-1349) and interferes with many…

I Can Take the Pain - But Should I?

"Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional." Most all of us like to receive sound medical advice, even if we have no intention of following it. Perhaps this is why some experts relay information in a style reminiscent of filling the lifeboats of the Titanic. By trumpeting alarums for diseases deemed potentially life-threatening, doctors forget how easy it is to spook the general public. Hey, I'm scared enough as it is - God help my physician if I read a list of symptoms followed by the words "See Your Doctor Immediately!" I might just defenestrate myself to get to the emergency room…

The Dead Shall Rise Again!

Just when you thought the highly evolved hominids occupying this planet have reached the nadir of lunacy, often described as a point so low no living being could go any further without drawing comparisons to a Monty Python sketch, comes this report: A Venezuelan man who had been declared dead woke up in the morgue in excruciating pain after medical examiners began their autopsy. Those of you who watch the late, late show on television might recall that the beginning of an autopsy usually involves carving the front of the body from chin to groin like a jack-o-lantern, which makes the lead…

A Schmaltzy Story

"Boob job with your hot dog, ma'am?" "Patient's Own Body Fat Used in Breast Remodeling" These two headlines have something in common. Did you decipher what it is? That's right - they both refer to the same news release about an advance in reconstructive surgery for breast cancer patients, and I might add they prove the theorem that many headline composers are nothing more than unemployed comedy writers. Let's parse this news by first reading the copy below each headline. Here is story number one: A scientific journal says that women could be having breast-enhancement procedures during…

The Hidden Lives of Doctors, Part V: The Big Lie

[Editor's Note: this is an entry in an occasional series; parts I-IV can be found here.] If one needs a bit of cheering up these days, say after inadvertantly watching one of those cable talk shows, here's a suggestion: read about the medical advances made since the end of World War II. They are numerous and impressive. Despite the well-documented inequalities in disseminating proper care to the world's unhealthy one forgets that just a few decades ago there were no effective treatments for a multitude of diseases. Only a nihilist would refuse to acknowledge that we are living longer and…

Your Friday Dose of Woo on Saturday: Friday woo in the news

Sometimes, woo makes the news. Does anyone remember "Professor" Bill Nelson, the cross-dressing "inventor" who created a most amazing woo machine? I've written about it three times before: Your Friday Dose of Woo: Miraculous quest for the quantum Your Friday Dose of Woo: Serious woo from Down Under The SCIO, Quantum Xrroid Consciousness Interface, and Bill Nelson: Better late than never--or maybe not This guy sells his device for $20,000 a pop and claims he sells 40 machines a month. Now, check out this Marketplace episode, Miracle Makers or Money Takers? Watch the whole thing. It never…

Lose, Lions, lose

I rarely blog about sports, but I'll make an exception for today, given that football history is likely to be made later this afternoon. I'm not much of a football fan, at least not of professional football. These days, the games take even longer than a baseball game and all too often lack the excitement of even that. Especially when it's the Detroit Lions playing. Of course, even though my interest in pro football is relatively weak, I do take in a game from time to time, and I still have a soft spot in my heart for my hometown team, despite their two decades of futility and never having…

Lady Pirate Science Bloggers

Ahoy there, mehearties! Since it be Talk Like a Pirate day, I know yer probably wantin’ to be off ridin’ the waves, plundering the countryside, drinkin’ rum by the gallon and other piratey tasks, but first, there be a battle brewin here that I’d like to tell ye about. Arrrrgh! Who says a woman can’t be a pirate? Er, wait, I mean, who says that a woman can’t be an A-list science blogger? No, wait... why can’t a woman be a pirate AND an A-list science blogger? Anyone who assumes she can’t ought to be walkin’ the plank. So, who ought to be walkin’ the plank, then? Try The Scientist, who recently…

Friday Fractal XLIV

Tracking wildlife in my neighborhood wetlands this week made me reflect on the complex network of organisms in a habitat. Everything in an ecosystem is so intimately tied together, that a single species can have drastic effects on the entire habitat. The ecosystem, like all systems containing that elusive chaotic aspect, has sensitive dependence on the initial conditions... like a fractal. In the fractal or in nature, one small change can ripple through the entire set. For an example, I took two copies of the classic Mandelbrot set, and laid one atop the other. Then, I used slightly…

Puzzling at a Simple-Minded Creationist and Creating a Complexity Puzzle

Casey Luskin, please come out of your box, or stop trying to stick your opinions through the keyhole without taking a look. Luskin, a mouthpiece for the Discovery Institute, recently tried to attack Carl Zimmer's National Geographic article on complexity. (Zimmer's article is, as usual, an incredibly fascinating read, accompanied by a beautiful gallery of images that I was tempted to "borrow" for a fractal.) Sufficed to say, Luskin failed miserably in attacking Zimmer's work, resorting to using the Ford Pinto as an example. (I won't bother to try to explain how; my fellow SciBlings have done…

Sign a petition to save the future of stem cell research

The following letter, by House Representative Diana Degette, was sent to 25,000 Coloradans, urging them to show their support for science by signing this petition. I'd like to forward this request on to the scientific community at large. I hope that every ScienceBlogs reader can take a moment to sign. You'll only need to take a minute to enter your name, email, and zipcode. (Apparently, this also signs up for the ProgressNow.org mailing list. They occasionally send out calls to action in other progressive areas. If you aren't interested, it's very easy to unsubscribe.) Dear…

Lott/Mustard Debate

[Originally posted to firearmsreg Aug 19 1996] Daniel Polsby writes: McDowall very freely interprets his five-county study as suggestive of causation. I tend to share the view that one should be slow to change public policy on the basis of a single study, though one might say of Lott-Mustard that it amounts to at least 610 McDowall-Loftin-Wiersema studies, as it covers that many times more counties, to say nothing of controlling for a lot more variables. I should say, however, that ordinarily the heavy lifting of causation involves the existence of a theory which models how the world works…

Pleasurable sensations serve as habitual guides

Succinct and spot-on. This is Darwin speculating that he thinks the prevalent feeling of the world is happiness rather than pain. Some writers indeed are so much impressed with the amount of suffering in the world, that they doubt if we look to all sentient beings, whether there is more of misery or of happiness;--whether the world as a whole is a good or a bad one. According to my judgement happiness decidedly prevails, though this would be very difficult to prove. If the truth of this conclusion be granted, it harmonises well with the effects which we might expect from natural selection. If…

Office pools suck and make people unhappy

I never quite understood the whole NCAA pool thing, or fantasy leagues for that matter. In a non-professional gambling environment the chances of you winning are pretty much chance. You've all heard about the girl picking her teams based on what colors she likes and winning. In any case... there is an interesting study from Naomi Mandel and Stephen M. Nowlis or Arizona State University demonstrating that Office pools make people pretty unhappy. Well except the winner - but there's only one of them (except in my department where there is one for the worst bracket - which I can't even win…

Smart kids

It's October 1st (well it was yesterday, anyway), and I'm pretty excited, because this means it's the start of another DonorsChoose challenge. For those of you who weren't around at this time last year, DonorsChoose is an organization that pairs up your ka$hmoney with educational projects in public schools. You get to choose the project your money goes to fund from an enormous range of schools, subjects, and students. It's sort of like what tax dollars are supposed to do, only it actually works. Last year, I set what I thought was an ambitious fundraising goal for Signout's readership, and…

The rest of it

About a year ago, when I was an intern in the throes of my first medicine ward rotations, I got a compliment that shone in my memory for weeks. We had a rather complicated patient on our team. Her case was such that she often required several family meetings a day, and because I was busy with checkyboxen, those meetings were usually attended by my senior resident, Dr. Tremble. Of a certain afternoon, Dr. Tremble was in clinic, and I attended a meeting in his place. Afterward, the patient's husband followed me out of the room, and asked me--in front of the medical students, no less!--whether…

Why Do I Blog?

My fellow Scibling (cute, huh?) Bora is an incredibly friendly, warm, and funny blogger. He's also incredibly proficient: in addition to blogging at A Blog around the Clock, he's put together an anthology of science blogging, and a freaking conference of science bloggers. The man has the energy of a toddler on crank. Bora just tagged me with the "Why Do I Blog?" meme, wherein I am meant to tell my volumes of readers why I blog. That's easy: 1) I love to write. 2) I love to be read. As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be a writer. I never pursued writing seriously because my folks…

Thinkers and writers

Yesterday, I got tagged with a meme by the inimitable Dr. Flea, of whose recognition I am totally not worthy. Although normally, memes, meh, this "Thinking Blogs" meme gives me the opportunity to give props to several excellent thinkers and writers who routinely send my tiny brain into spasms of glee. I'd have tagged Flea himself if it hadn't been he who tagged me. That not being an option, here are five other bloggers I adore: 1. I Blame the Patriarchy. My daily dose of radical feminism since 2004, this blog has done nothing less than give me a new vocabulary for thinking about human rights…

No triumph today

I got a spot of blood on my dress today. It happened as I was on my way out of the hospital and heard the code bells ring. I ran, cursing, past two women clutching each other in a hallway, into a room where a man was lying unconscious in a chair, blood trickling from his mouth. He was a pre-transplant patient-a man about to get a new liver. Ideally, a code is a carefully choreographed disaster. No one expects the outcome to be good, but everyone expects the process to be organized. This code was a disastrous disaster. I didn't participate this time-just tried to stay out of the way. The…

What's the point of general education requirements?

Advising and registration for summer and fall semesters has just finished, so I've been spending a lot of time talking and thinking about general education requirements. In particular, I've been thinking about one question: why? What's the point of general education requirements? What are they good for? What should students get out of them? In the US, most colleges (up to four-year schools) and universities (schools with graduate programs) require that all students take some classes spread across a range of disciplines. These general education programs vary from school to school - some are…

Signs of spring

I know it doesn't feel like spring on the East Coast of the US, what with the big snow day yesterday. But it's been in the 60's here for the past three days, and in the 50's before that. At my elevation (6800 feet), the snow is gone except in the shade and on north-facing slopes. It's nice, but worrisome: my mountains are the headwaters of the Rio Grande and part of the Colorado, and our snow is the water supply for cities and farms from Texas to California. March is supposed to be the big snow month here. We'll see. In the meantime, I'm watching spring arrive. And this year, I'm going to try…

A Short History of the Eastern Hemlock I

About 16,000 years ago, glaciation from the last ice age finally began to retreat after millennia of occupation. As the glaciers melted and filled scrapes in the landscape with fresh water, the animals and plants followed, once only able to live in the temperate climes of southern North America. The eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadenis) was one of these pioneers, albeit a slow, steady one. Spreading north at about 100 - 400 meters per year (incidentally about the same rate of large ungulates like elk), the hemlocks wouldn't reach the extent of their expansion, around the glacier-crafted Great…

CEOs See Global Warming as a Threat to Business

But not in the way you might think. Bay Area CEOs think global warming is a threat to local business, according to a survey from the Bay Area Council. The survey, released Thursday, said 77 percent of Bay Area chief executives who responded think that environmental warming is a serious threat to the local economy and to the region's quality of life. Just 6 percent of CEOs in the study said it wasn't at all a serious problem. The council polled 510 Bay Area CEOs and top executives for the study. Those who responded overwhelmingly supported legislation to require cuts in pollution that could…

Sexism at Scientific American

Zuska blasted some moron at SciAm for referring to our own Shelley Batts as "attractive" during his summary of Shelley's recent run in with the lawyers at Wiley over the reproduction of a research figure: Excuse me? "Seems to be attractive"? WTF??? I mean, what the f*ck does that have to do with anything in the story? Why the gratuitous mention of Shelley's appearance? Oh, I know why. Because she's a WOMAN. And women, at all times, you must remember that you are women first and foremost. Your appearance is ever and always an issue, and no matter what the hell you are ever doing - be it…

Diagnosing the Endangered Murrelet

The ESA blog posted a thoughtful contribution about the philosophy of and a possible solution to "diagnosing" the ecology of endangered species, the author presenting his own work with the endangered Marbled Murrelet as an example: It's a simple question that I often get asked about an endangered species: "What caused it to decline?" but I find it to be one of the hardest to answer without giving a hand-waiving response. Determining causes of decline for a species based on data-driven conclusions rather than informed opinion is challenging because it first requires figuring out which…

Methoxsalen (We knew the world would never be the same...)

People did a lot of goofy stuff with regard to chemistry in the gee-whiz days of the 1940s and 1950s. In some ways it's great we've come past that, in a lot of ways it's terrible. The same generation that gave us thalidomide also gave us Chuck Yaeger. I am all for small cell phones and $10 digital cameras, but it's hard to beat the dizzying highs and lows of realizing mass-energy equivalence. Forty years after its realization as theory by Einstein, it was realized in practice in the form of a bomb, which ended a global war, the end of which started a singularly unique era of tension.…

Nitromethane (Rocket fuel, explosive, or synthetic intermediate?)

Nitromethane has some odd properties, due to the singular weirdness of the nitro group. The electron-withdrawing nature of the group makes it a decent acid; in neutral (i.e., pH 7) water, about 1 in 1000 molecules of nitromethane will have a formal negative charge on the carbon and exist as CH2NO2-. There aren't many of these "carbon acids," and their properties make them useful in organic synthesis. The "nitro" part of nitromethane doesn't disappoint if you associate the prefix/word with nitrous oxide and TNT, either; nitromethane is a very energetic compound and can be explosive (it was…

Re: Cook & Ludwig paper on gun ownership being *positively* correlate d with burglary rates

Joseph Olson writes: Ask any gun dealer about women buying handguns for self protection. A dealer friend tells me that over =BD of his handgun purschasers are women but also tells me that most of them are very concerned that NO ONE will know that they have a gun. It's his opinion, after talking with these REAL buyers, that none of them would admit gun ownership to a surveyor. None of them subscribe to "gun magazines." And, if they commit suicide, I'll bet $10 they don't use the gun. So there is a HUGH hole in the information base. None of these women kill baby animals either. And none…

Homicides in NSW and gun control

Charles Scripter wrote: Here we fit the NSW "before" region to a slope + constant background, while the "after" region is fit only to a slope (chance resulted in this slope passing through, or very close to zero, eliminating the need for a constant, 4th parameter). The origin is located at year 1900. Data for years 1919 and 1920 were rejected as "anomalous" and the "before" region was extended back to 1907 to offset this loss of data. It is amazing what you can show if you pick the right subset of the data. In particular, if you want to "find" a decreasing trend, just follow Charles'…

Delicious Internet Noms

Thoughts on Tuli v. Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Inc., et al. « Feminist Law Professors -- On the rewards of a sexual harassment lawsuit: "So, the bonus payoff here is, she gets to work in an environment where she is ostracized, despised, feared, and hated - barred from any leadership position - and will never be taken seriously as a decision-maker or policy-maker - for the rest of her professional life. And that’s because she WON!" The Open Laboratory 2008 is here! -- Woot, I'm an author! Also, OpenLab 2009 submissions are now open. Quick, nominate all the fantastic science posts you'…

Delicious Internet Noms

Avalanches on Mars Caught on Camera! -- You can see the dust cloud. If that's not enough for you, the HiRISE team has just released 75 pages of droolworthy new Mars pix. Whoever is in charge of cropping these things has a good eye for composition. This is your official time-waster for the week. NOVA Geoblog: Mineralogy of the atmosphere -- Will we eventually see an "urban varnish", like desert varnish but with more coal fumes? Welcome two new geoblogs: Looking For Detachment and Geology Happens! Wanted: Gray Literature on Women of Color in Science -- Please pass your hidden gems to Mia Ong…

Holding on to cells with DNA

Mammalian cells need something to hold on to before they can stick to each other and form tissues. The plastic dishes that cells grow on in the lab need to be first coated with special chemicals that grab the cells and convince them to stick. Once the first batch of cells is down they start forming their own matrix of proteins and fibers that can grab new cells as they are formed, slowly creating a dense layer of cells. Tissue engineering aims to make three dimensional, biodegradable scaffolds that cultured cells can grow on to form body parts, like the ear-shaped bit of cow cartilage that…