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Humanizing the Hordes: Anthropomorphism and Science Photography

Are these two ants sharing an intimate moment? No. This is just one of a long series of Azteca ant-plant ants I shot while they were coming and going from their nest. The ants were running every which way, sweeping their antennae about, and I just happened to push the shutter when two of them chanced to have passed each other in an anthropomorphic arrangement. Yet this image, no more or less representative of the ants' actual behavior than the dozens of other images in the series, generates far more attention that any of the others. This is the one people like. It taps into something in…

Mini iGEM 2010!

I've been co-teaching a short class on synthetic biology this spring through the MIT High School Studies Program (HSSP). The program is awesome, I took classes through a similar MIT program as a nerdy middle schooler and have had a great time teaching the past few weeks (if you're in the Boston area I highly recommend checking it out as a student or as a volunteer teacher!). My students were terrific--smart, open to new and crazy ideas, thoughtful about bioethics issues, and enthusiastic about thinking about what biology can do and designing new biological species. Today was our last day of…

It's the same old story

Denialists claiming to be pro-science. Politicians insisting on a balanced treatment. A population ignorant of the science indignantly rejecting a clear and well-established, evidence-based conclusion. I'm not talking about creationism, although it's exactly the same story. It's the anti-vax position now. That dishonest weasel, Chris Christie, is now talking about respecting the choice of anti-vax parents. Mary Pat and I have had our children vaccinated and we think that it’s an important part of being sure we protect their health and the public health, Christie told reporters here Monday.…

Frauds through and through

Perhaps you've heard of these absurd creationist challenges: Kent Hovind challenge of $250,000 for scientific evidence of evolution; Joseph Mastropaolo's challenge of $10,000 to "prove evolution"; Ray Comfort's challenge of $10,000 to show him a transitional fossil. They all sound like easy money, but don't try: they've loaded the dice in every case. Dana Hunter gives a 19th century example I did not know about before. Alfred Russel Wallace accepted a bet to show the curvature of the earth by a flat-earther, and he did it, too, with a simple and clever observation. You'd think he'd be…

AMP Announces 2009 Michael D. Hayre Fellows in Public Outreach

Yesterday, Americans for Medical Progress revealed the three recipients of its 2009 Hayre Fellowship in Public Outreach. Applicants submitted proposals for programs aimed at spreading awareness about the role of animal research in medicine, and the three fellows will receive a $5,000 stipend each, plus an addition $2,000 to fund their proposals. This year's fellows are Gillian Braden-Weiss and Breanna Caltagarone, who are veterinary students at the University of Pennsylvania, and Megan Wyeth, a graduate student at UCLA. Here's a summary of the projects they are going to be working on: As…

The NHS Improves Still Further by Decreasing Waiting Lists to Record Low

The UK's National Health Service (NHS) is a matter of British pride, despite some minor shortcomings. Strong on preventative and routine medical care, the NHS has on the other hand been criticized for its long waiting lists required for more involved procedures. The BBC reports today, though, that the NHS is making progress in this area, as waiting lists are now at an all-time low: Between October and November 2006, NHS inpatient waiting lists dropped by 8,000 to 769,000. This meant the number of patients waiting for treatment was the lowest since the records began in 1987.... Mr Burnham…

23andMe research article finally published

In October last year I reported on a presentation by direct-to-consumer genetic testing company 23andMe at the American Society of Human Genetics meeting in Honolulu, in which the company described results of genetic association studies performed using combined genetic and survey data from their customers. The results of their study include replication of several known associations for traits like hair colour, eye colour and freckling, as well as the discovery of previously unpublished associations for things like asparagus anosmia (the ability to smell urinary breakdown products after eating…

Science and the European Elections: The Environment

This entry is part of the Science and the European Election series, a collaboration between SciencePunk and the Lay Scientist blog to encourage public discussion of the science policies of the major parties standing at the forthcoming European elections. Recently a ship chartered by the British offices of a Dutch petroleum company illegally dumped tonnes of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast. The European Commission has proposed the creation of criminal sentences for "ecological crimes" - do you support this action? Tim Worstall, UKIP: Absolutely not. We've been told endlessly that the European…

BlogCast: How Useful is Self-Report?

If you're a regular reader of Peter and Travis's blog, Obesity Panacea, you may have heard one of their semi-regular blogcasts. Well, since Peter is traveling the world (read about it here), Travis asked me to join him for a blogcast. While discussing topics that we could discuss, a sent a few links and papers his way, and he was like "ugh, self-report." And I was like, "dude, self-report makes the world go around." Okay, so the conversation may not have gone exactly like that, but the outcome was we decided to go ahead and talk about the relative merits of self-report data in science. As he…

The End of Theory?

Wired Magazine has published an article by Chris Anderson arguing that theory is dead (The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete). The argument: with our ability to generate vast amounts of data, there is no need for theory. Now, it's hard to parse what Anderson means by "theory" from the article. But he seems to be arguing that scientists are merely looking for correlations between various parameters, and claiming that's a sufficient analysis. Is it? Well, sometimes, yes, if it's based on a sound theoretical framework. Deepak Singh has already called out…

Good-bye Frank!

Francis Collins, head of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), will be stepping down from that position in August. Collins has overseen the sequencing of the human genome, the HapMap project, the ENCODE project, and many other large advances in genomics. The NHGRI has had a major impact in the field of genetics while Collins was at its helm. Collins also has a history of putting his foot in his mouth -- not that it's a bad thing to do so (lord knows my foot's spent more time lodged in my face than on the ground). He's been incorrect about morality and human evolution, to name…

Promoting Intelligence

A new article in Nature Genetics brings together two themes that I've blogged about before: human brains and King and Wilson. In fact, I've even already blogged about the article, but this post contains a more thorough treatment of the science. The long and short of it is that some people think that differences in protein coding sequences can't explain the morphological differences between humans and chimps. Additionally, there are other phenotypes that differ between the species, including cognitive abilities and dietary preferences. There is evidence for adaptive evolution in protein…

Is Sean Carroll Wrong?

One of the primary hypotheses of Sean Carroll's model of evo-devo is that cis-regulatory elements (CREs) are the primary drivers of morphological evolution (see here). This hypothesis is controversial in the evolutionary genetics community. Because it's hard to examine the effect of CREs on phenotypes at a genome-wide scale, the problem must be reduced into smaller elements. One such element that has been the subject of previous studies is the role of cis and trans mutations in the evolution of gene expression. I have previously discussed some results that shed light on this issue. The basic…

Phylogeny Friday - 30 March 2007

Mammals did not rapidly radiate after the K/T boundary. That's the punch line of a paper published in this week's issue of Nature. This has been all over the news, including the New York Times twice (#1 and #2). You see, there's this idea that when the dinosaurs (technically, the non-avian dinosaurs) disappeared, mammals quickly filled in the vacated niches. That means there should have been a rapid radiation of mammalian lineages following the dinosaur mass extinction -- marked by the boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods (known as the K/T boundary). The new study reveals that…

"Jaw-dropping" verdict against Myriad in BRCA patent case

One of the major potential stumbling blocks for the field of genome-based diagnostics - particularly as we begin to move into the whole-genome sequencing era - is the unresolved issue of gene patents.  Currently somewhere in the order of 20% of the protein-coding genes in the human genome are covered by some kind of patent protection. However, the legal status of gene patents remains contentious. Yesterday's astonishing defeat of Myriad Genetics in an ACLU-led case before a United States District Court is unexpected, and potentially a positive outcome for companies seeking to offer large-…

Monstrous Hope: Reply to Coturnix

This is my reply to a post by Coturnix called The Hopeless Monster? Not so fast! First, the phylogeny of the discussion. Olivia Judson wrote this: The Monster Is Back, and It's Hopeful Which was responded to here: Hopeless Monsters--A Guest Post from Dr. Jerry Coyne That dyad of posts was passed around by Carl Zimmer, who asked for commentary. This is the set of posts of which I'm aware that resulted: Why wither Goldschmidt? Nature makes no leaps... Jerry Coyne smacks down Olivia Judson Coyne is on the Loom Macromutations and Punctuated Equilibria Hopeful Monsters and Hopeful Models Then…

Saudi Rape Victim Pardoned; Slave Couple Convicted

You will recall this story about a woman raped in Saudi Arabia and convicted of her crime of being a victim. There is an update. Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah has pardoned the victim of a gang-rape whose sentencing to 200 lashes caused an international outcry, a Saudi newspaper said on Monday. The victim's husband welcomed the news, but said he had not been informed officially of the pardon decree. "I'm happy and my wife is happy and it will of course help lift some of her psychological and social suffering," he told Reuters. "We thank the king for his generous attention and fatherly spirit…

Ohio School District: WTF????

This is an amazing story, and unfortunately, it is probably being repeated again and again across the country. It begins with a parent who does not want his daugther exposed to science, which is pretty common, but leads to a startling revelation about the local school board. Startling, but I'm afraid, probably not at all uncommon either. In Pymatuning Valley Local School District, in Andover, Ohio, a "concerned" parent, Frank Piper, questioned the school board about the teaching of science in the middle school, where his daughter is enrolled. Specifically, he is concerned because the…

Missing protein may be key to autism

From an MIT press release: A missing brain protein may be one of the culprits behind autism and other brain disorders, according to researchers at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. The protein, called CASK, helps in the development of synapses, which neurons use to communicate with one another and which underlie our ability to learn and remember. Improperly formed synapses could lead to mental retardation, and mutations in genes encoding certain synaptic proteins are associated with autism. In work published in the Dec. 6 issue of Neuron, Li-Huei Tsai, Picower Professor of…

Form Field Woes

A form field is one of those boxes on a web page (or elsewhere) that you can fill in with information. Your web browser may try to "auto complete" an entry that you are trying to type in. For example, when I try to type my name into a box that that I've visited before, when I type the first letter ... "G" ... my browser suggests several different options, remembering the various pseudonyms I use, giving me a list like this: Greg Laden Grog Stevenson Greeb Miller and so on. That's convenient, but it can be annoying when things go wrong... For instance, for a long time, when I started to…

If you are reading this, you must not be a Christian

Well, I've been wrong all this time. It's always been my opinion that if someone says they're a Christian, they're a Christian — I'm not going to nit-pick fine theological distinctions with someone, and if they want to claim the soiled and tattered title of Christianity, they're welcome to it. An important figure in American religion and politics, James Dobson, has shown me to be wrong. He has his own special definition of "Christian". "Everyone knows he's conservative and has come out strongly for the things that the pro-family movement stands for," Dobson said of Thompson. "[But] I don't…

California Science Center Strikes Back against Discovery Institute/AFA Conspiracy

Last year, the American Freedom Alliance, a California based Don't Think Tank, attempted to insert, Trojan style,* a creationist film called Darwin's Dilemma into the repertoire of films shown at the California Science Center. The film is a pro-Intelligent Design film, and behind this insulting and immature ruse was, you guessed it, the Discovery Institute. When the California Science Center reviewed the film, they found its science content lacking in accuracy, truth, integrity, and stuff and canceled the showing. In so doing, the CSC was carrying out its obligation to promote excellent…

Atlantic Storminess and Minnesota Weather Woes

I think we are having a land hurricane here in Minnesota. The tree in front of my daughter's other house (her mom's place) that was topped by a tornado the week after we bought it has lost a big dead branch, a bunch of firs at the junction of 10 and 35W are down, a colleague of my wife lost a fence, traffic lights have been knocked out on University in Blaine, Monica lost power in the cities last night, all sorts of things like that happening as we experience a steady drum of 35 mph winds with gusts reaching 80 now and then, but more commonly, about 55 mph. The precip is horizontal, but it…

American Legion Post holds student funding hostage over religion

Today as I was driving into the city, I passed under a bridge, on which stood an older man with a big huge American Flag waving to the passing cars. "Oh," I said to Julia. "Veteran's day." It was too late to honk or flash my lights at the old Legionnaire in appreciation for his service. But then later on I heard about a story that made me glad I didn't. I've had a long and ambivalent relationship with both the VFW and the American Legion. And for the most part, they can kiss my ass. Here's the latest reason why: American Legion Post 550, of Bloomington, Minnesota, has been carrying out…

Cell Signals and Creationism

Lately, creationist rhetoric seems to increasingly mention the idea that if scientists really understood evolution, life, and biology, then why don't they just create it themselves, as a kind of proof of concept? This rhetoric usually includes a statement like: "They can't even create a simple cell ... " A repost This is very annoying, and displays either creationists' excellent ability to frame their arguments or their utter stupidity. In fact, a cell is the most complicated thing going in biology. A cell is more complicated than an organism that is made up of cells, assuming that you don…

A worthy recipient of a Darwin Award

Yesterday's post sucked all the blogging life out of me for the moment, so here's a quickie. If there's anyone who deserves a Darwin Award, it's this guy here: AUBURN -- A man talking on a cell phone while walking Wednesday on railroad tracks was hit by a train and killed. He was the second person in the area to be killed by a train while talking on a cell phone in the past two weeks. Auburn Police spokesman Scott Near said the man killed just after noon was walking on the tracks between the 1200 and 1400 blocks of C Street Northwest, where the rails parallel the street and there are no signs…

AT&T: A brief rant

I love my iPhone. I really do. However, I don't love AT&T so much, and unfortunately the iPhone is yoked to AT&T exclusively for the foreseeable future. I used to think Sprint was bad, and indeed it was and is in many markets. During my frequent trips to Chicago I found that the service was at times almost worthless, with dropped calls, crappy signal areas, and dead zones aplenty. However, I had to admit that it got better over the years to the point where I rarely had a problem making a call. Eventually it had nationwide plans at reasonable prices with promiscuous roaming plans that…

Best line about David Kirby I've heard in a long time

A couple of days ago, I wrote about a particularly deceptive and idiotic article by David Kirby about the settling of a case of vaccine injury by the U.S. government. Fellow skeptical physician Steve Novella couldn't resist taking a shot at Kirby as well and in doing so came up with one of the best lines about Kirby that I've ever heard in reference to Kirby's attempt to bring AZT into the discussion: Among stiff competition, this is perhaps the most absurd and scientifically ignorant thing Kirby has every written. Damn. I wish I had thought of that line. However, I would say to Steve that he…

Duncan on the "Lott is revenge for Bellisiles" theory

Otis Dudley Duncan has sent me some comments on the attempts by pro-gun folks to dismiss criticism of Lott as some sort of payback for Bellesiles: I have gone out of my way to remark that the Bellesiles case is not helpful for evaluating Lott's work. My statement is in section 4 of the essay on Lott and surveys on your site. Moreover, while I may have heard rumors about Bellesiles' writing earlier, I am willing to testify under oath that the first thing of his I read was his article in Guns in America: A Reader, ed. by Jan E. Dizard et al. (1999). This was after my…

Autism Speaks - Open Access Policy

The good people at Autism Speaks have announced a major policy shift on open access. Basically they're saying if you take their money, you have to make the research open. I love this for all sorts of reasons. First, it's smart. Opening up research to more readers means you increase the chances of someone innovating on top of that research. Second, it's a good market indicator. Legislation and mandates are all well and good, but there's nothing as powerful as the customer standing up and changing the deal in the market... I guess I delayed my post on this for personal reasons. Autism is a…

Carved in Sand: When Attention Fails and Memory Fades in Midlife

I was recently sent a book for review-Carved in Sand: When Attention Fails and Memory Fades in Midlife. It's an informative book by Cathryn Jakobson Ramin chronicling her struggle with memory loss and subsequent journey to explore drug and non-drug treatments. I found it a good read and even witty at times. It highlights a condition that many people struggle with as they age: memory loss and attention failure. When signs of memory loss and attention failure manifest in midlife most people fear an onset of Alzheimer's disease is at hand. Alzheimer's is a complex disease afflicting more…

The basic carrot: usage statistics

BMC Bioinformatics published this article describing a "data publishing framework" for biodiversity data. Stripped to its essentials, this article is about carrots for data sharing. Acknowledging that cultural inertia (some of it well-founded) militates against spontaneous data sharing, the authors suggest a way forward. I'm calling this one out because it has implications for storage-system design. The authors want three things for their public data: persistent identifiers, citation mechanisms, and data usage information. (For once, I feel good about institutional repositories: they swing…

Does successful age reversal in mice mean the same for humans?

Mice get all the interesting experiments! A new study released on Nov. 28 explained how Harvard researchers reversed the aging process in genetically altered mice. Now, I don't know about you, but the first question I asked was, "What kind of physiological changes need to happen for that to even be a possibility?" While mice are known to be good indications of how humans may react to treatments for disease, or alterations to our body's physiological system, it still makes me hesitate a little bit. However, mice have, in the words of the study's lead author Dr. Ronald DePinho, "illuminated a…

Lott caught cherrypicking again?

Lott has an article which purports to show that Rush Limbaugh was right when he claimed that Donovan McNabb was overrated because the media wanted to see a black quarterback do well. Lott looked at whether media coverage was more favourable to black quarterbacks than to white quarterbacks and found that stories about black quarterbacks were slightly more likely to be positive (67% to 61%). He then did a multivariate analysis controlling for factors like the whether the quarterback's team won and finds that after doing this, black quarterbacks are 27 percentage points more…

Health care workers and torture

The Times is reporting that health care workers actively assisted in the torture of CIA detainees overseas. This, as you might imagine, sickens me. Many of us have seen movies or read spy novels where a doctor stands by as someone is tortured, monitoring their condition and telling the interrogator when they need to back off. It turns out this really happens. I don't have that much to say about this that isn't obvious, i.e., it's never acceptable for health care workers (HCWs) to participate in activities designed to cause their patients intentional discomfort or injury. That's a no-…

One more time

Wow, but this post has inspired so many misconceptions. I do not think Muslims should be insulated from satire. I do not think there is parity between a cartoonist drawing a picture someone doesn't like and a Muslim calling for the execution of the cartoonist. I am not on the Muslim's side here, and I am uncompromising in condemning rioting and destruction as criminal. I do think religion needs to be thoroughly criticized—you haven't been reading Pharyngula for long if you think otherwise, and I thought I'd been quite careful to spell out that religion was a hate-amplifier in this situation—…

What is it with blokes named John and sock puppets anyway?

Embarrassing Correction: I screwed up. Somehow I pasted the wrong IP into a query. I thought I was checking Brignell's IP, but it was actually Per's. Per and "James Brown" are the same person, but his real name is David Bell, not John Brignell. I apologize to John Brignell and to Per/David Bell. After I criticized John Brignell for an innumerate criticism of the Lancet study in this post, a commenter named Per showed up to defend Brignell and attack me. Those of you familiar with the Mary Rosh story can guess the rest---it seems that "Per" is a sock puppet…

Holy anti-vaccine radio hormones, Batman!

You might have noticed that I'm a bit late today. There's a reason, and I bet you know what it is. Yep, yet another grant deadline. As usual, that means I didn't have time to produce my usual dose of not-so-Respectful Insolence. That doesn't mean I can't do some good, though, as yesterday the Bat Signal went up with a call for help. Remember SANEVax? (Oh, no. Not them again!) In case you've forgotten, SANEVax is the anti-vaccine group that specializes in Gardasil fear mongering, having come to my attention with an incredibly silly variation of the toxin gambit in which they tried to scare…

A change is gonna come. Respectful Insolence is moving.

Well, QEDCon is over, and this box of blinky lights is on its way back across the pond to its home in the US, having had an excellent time imbibing skepticism from its (mostly) British and European partners in skepticism. Before I left, I made a somewhat cryptic remark about "major changes" to this blog coming up. Well, the cat's out of the bag, so to speak. Basically, Scienceblogs is shutting down at the end of the month. I still remain grateful for the opportunity Scienceblogs offered me. I wouldn't be as prominent as I am now without it. However, unfortunately, Scienceblogs has barely…

Cartoon Contest

I just got this email from the Union of Concerned Scientists. Editorial Cartoon Contest Will Draw Attention to the Misuse and Abuse of Science Top Cartoonists Will Judge Amateur, Professional Talent in "Science Idol" WASHINGTON, DC - Teaming up with leading editorial and strip cartoonists, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) today announced an editorial cartoon contest to draw attention to political interference in science. Science Idol: the Scientific Integrity Editorial Cartoon Contest will bring together aspiring cartoonists to compete to win a number of prizes, including an all-…

A Protein Complex; The Overused Abbreviation

(from my old blog) Every subject has its lingo and its share of strange terms. Add abbreviations and acronyms, and certain areas of expertise can be almost incomprehensible. Then there is Biology. Life has a diversification machine, evolution. Thus those who study life (i.e. Biologists) have lots of proteins and genes to name and to investigate. Humans have about 23,000 to 30,000 conventional genes, and many other non-conventional genetic elements such as small RNAs. On top of that these same 23,000+ genes are also found in other vertebrates and many are found in almost every eukaryotic cell…

Explorers & Crusaders

You can clearly divide scientists into two categories, those who build new models and those who prove old models. The explorers and the crusaders. Usually the former are seeking the truth, or something close to it, while the latter are trying to confirm their own theories as if the idea was more important than reality. As you can guess, I do not have a high regard for the latter group. Unfortunately there are a lot of crusaders around. In some way we all are part of this second group to some extent, but inevitably it's always the first group, the explorers, who win in the end. The problem…

Twilight Zone... the Expedition

100 m deep on Flower Garden Banks. Photo credit FGBNMS/NURC. Like many marine protected areas around the world, most of the seafloor in the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary (FGBNMS) is deeper than the depth limit for recreational and scientific diving (50 m). We call this the "twilight zone", a poorly known depth zone considered too deep for divers, and too shallow for manned submersibles. Some marine biologists call this a new frontier. So, four years ago, I asked myself...why not make a dissertation out of it? Join the HRI Biodiversity and Conservation Laboratory as we embark…

Weapons of Mass Deception

In the latest news from the planet the Republicans wish we lived on, weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq. This news comes to us courtesy of a couple of Congresscritters - Representative Peter Hoekstra, Republican of Michigan , and Senator Rick Santorum, Theocrat of Pennsylvania. Supporting their bold statement, these exemplary members of the surreality-based community have - wait for it - a newly declassified intelligence report, courtesy of Bush appointee John Negroponte. I am shocked, shocked I say, to find the Republicans resorting to selective declassification of…

Is Total Cholesterol Misleading?

Under 200. That's the usual target for total cholesterol as reported in popular media. But are all 200s the same? I just received my profile from a recent blood test. Here's what it said. Total cholesterol: 204 LDL (bad cholesterol): 131.6 HDL (good cholesterol): 57 Triglycerides: 77 The total is computed as LDL+HDL+Tri/5. These are fairly typical numbers for me as compared to the last half dozen years, although my HDL usually is a few points higher and my LDL and tri usually are a few points lower. This 204 would normally place me at borderline high. However, my doctor is not very…

Things You Learn Via a Radio Quiz

It's amazing the things you can learn from a simple quiz on a morning radio show. But not the item that was intended, that is. A station that my wife listens to while getting ready for work often has one of those "Seventh caller who gets this question correct wins free tickets to the phone polishers convention" or some such crazy event. Usually, the questions are very easy. Things like "What color was the brick road that Dorothy followed in The Wizard of Oz". Something you could answer in your sleep (which is probably appropriate as I'd venture that most listeners ARE half asleep at that…

Hot or Not?

Wait! Don't answer that just yet. Please allow me to give myself a little Q&A pertaining to issue of "proportionately fewer hot women read sci-fi and fantasy." Q1. So tell me, Me, do you read sci-fi & fantasy? A1. Well, not so much lately. Q2: How about your past flirtations with the genre? A2: I burned through my older brother's Analogs and other pulpy sci-fi mags when I was a kid. I went on to read Poul Anderson, Harlon Ellison, Roger Zelazny, Larry Niven (my husband for whatever reason likes to call me Teela Brown), Anne McCaffrey, Ursula K. LeGuin, Julian May, Marion Zimmer…

Things Are Getting Better All The Time...

Female Science Professor has posted a checklist - "Kind of like Sexism Bingo, but in list form." - and asked for additions. I was going to offer a few additions, but I thought "all that crap happened a thousand years ago, when I was an undergrad/grad student. I'll just read this list of new stuff to see what teh wimminz are whining about these days." Because things are getting better all the time. Alyssa at 6/17/2010 10:03:00 AM said: Someone asks why you bothered getting a PhD if you're "just going to have children" and DRo at 6/17/2010 10:36:00 AM said: You are told that you won't…

Belated Friday Find: Exploring deep sea sinks off of New Zealand

SAn international team of scientists has gotten the first look ever at deep sea communities off the coast of New Zealand. The project, part of a larger effort to survey all the major areas where such communities exist, turned up new species and new problems. The area surveyed has four types of chemosynthetic habitats, including the sorts of hydrothermal vents we've become familiar with, and less familiar cold seeps. At the hydrothermal vents, molten rock provides energy and nutrients to communities of bacteria, worms, crabs and other odd creatures. At the cold seeps, methane or hydrogen…

Conservative paper backs Weiss for Board of Ed

The Johnson County Sun is a fairly Republican paper, and its endorsements of incumbent Republicans as Insurance Commissioner, Treasurer and Secretary of State are pro forma. It's endorsement of Don Weiss over John Bacon is far from automatic. The editors clearly thought hard, and came down behind Don Weiss, calling him "by far, the more qualified candidate": [incumbent John] Bacon is part of the notorious 6-4 Christian conservative majority that has enmeshed the board in distracting controversies such as evolution instruction, sex education and hiring Bob Corkins as education commissioner.…