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I love careless stupidity

Sometimes things just fall into your lap. This evening I was working on a different piece, and not getting very far, when an email arrived in my in-box. You see, when you write for the 21st most influential science blog, you get a lot of unsolicited mail (OK, fine...I get spam in my blog-related inbox. But my spam is cool.) What's great about a lot of this spam is that it is usually written by an actual person, and directed at me by name, which means they had to at least glance at the blog. In this case, a "glance" was all, or perhaps the writer simply suffers from poor reading…

The Huskvarna Drug

Recently while reading Mats Keyet's 2000 biography of Swedish beat novelist Sture Dahlström, I came across the sad story of the Huskvarna drug. It killed Dahlström's father and many others. In 1961 Dr. Hjorton's powder was made a prescription drug. This measure was of no great consequence anywhere except in Huskvarna, a small single-company industrial town on Lake Vättern. To Americans, it's probably mostly known for the old Husqvarna motor bike brand. In the mid-1950s the company doctor realised that Dr. Hjorton's powder was not only dependency-forming but in fact caused lethal kidney damage…

The Old Tunes Experiment

So, in our last installment, I had purchased a bunch of classical music off iTunes, and pledged to listen to it while away at DAMOP last week. I was pretty good about it, too-- I kept the classical playlist going on the iPod all the way through the flights down there, and for listening during the week. I did abandon it for the trip back up, but only because I found myself seated in the Squalling Infant Section of the plane, and needed the more even volume distribution provided by pop music to cover the noise. So, what were the results of the experiment? Look below the fold for details... The…

Dinosaurs Are Too Easy

Earlier this week, there was some interesting discussion of science communication in the UK branch of the science blogosphere. I found it via Alun Salt's "Moving beyond the 'One-dinosaur-fits-all' model of science communication" which is too good a phrase not to quote, and he spun off two posts from Alice Bell, at the Guardian blog and her own blog, and the proximate cause of all this is a dopey remark by a UK government official that has come in for some justifiable mockery. Bell and Salt both focus on the narrowness of the "dinosaurs and space" approach-- a reasonably representative quote…

Bits In The House: Organizing The Audible Bits

Let's talk music and software for a moment. Shall we? This post is about the software I use at home to organize the audible bits I have accumulated and keep accumulating everyday. You must remember that I am not an expert on any of the software applications discussed below. If you have technical questions, try the forums of the software you are curious about. For the past one month I have begun to regularly use three OSes at home (Mac OSX, Ubuntu Dapper, Windows XP). Ubuntu and Windows are new to my home. Like all new arrivals, they've given me both joy and pain. Ubuntu's Disk Manager can be…

Friday Bookshelf: Woman: An Intimate Geography

Many of my Sciblings have a regular Friday feature of one sort or another. For example, Dr. Free-Ride's got her Friday sprog-blogging, and there's Orac's Friday Dose of Woo over at Respectful Insolence. Karmen has Friday Fractals at Chaotic Utopia, which are particularly fun. So I'm thinking of trying out my own Friday feature, which I am boringly calling "Friday Bookshelf". I've spent years collecting a mini-library of books on gender and science & engineering. Some of my readers will be familiar with more or less all of them; some may know of relatively few of them. I thought I…

Nursing at 14 months (Mommy Monday)

As I head into each weekend, I start to think about possible topics for Mommy Monday. What will inspire me? What will my readers be interested in? What do I feel comfortable writing about? I debated a couple of topics this weekend, but I think I've settled on an update on breast-feeding a toddler. This post is inspired by ScienceMama's bittersweet post as she approaches the one year mark of breast-feeding Bean. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends breast-feeding for at least one year in healthy infants where there is no contra-indication. ("Breastfeeding should be continued for at…

Block African witchcraft curses against McCain and Palin NOW!

This is one of those things that take a minute to figure out if it is serious, or a parody.   href="http://www.injesus.com/index.php?module=message&task=view&MID=CB007FA2&GroupID=2A004N9G&label=&paging=all">Block African witchcraft curses against McCain and Palin NOW! Jim Bramlett Sep 28 2008 04:12PM Dear friends: THIS IS EXTREMELY SERIOUS. Minutes ago I spoke with friend Dr. Norman G. Marvin, M.D. and he is so concerned at what he has learned about Barack Obama's family in Kenya that he is calling a special prayer meeting in his home to pray…

Cabrini-Green

My father was a housing authority executive director during much of the 1970s and 1980s. He was fairly well known, having established one or two of the main housing authority directors' professional associations, and having developed the shared risk pool insurance system which reduced the cost of running public housing projects buy tens of percent. Jimmy Carter offered him the HUD directorship, but he asked to be relieved of that request but reconsidered when Carter was re-elected. Which he wasn't, else we may have spent a few years in Washington. Anyway, it was not terribly unlikely for…

Scientists behaving badly . . . "As a scientist whose papers have been rejected by top journals in many different fields, I think I can offer a useful perspective . . ."

Steven Levitt writes: My view is that the emails [extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia] aren't that damaging. Is it surprising that scientists would try to keep work that disagrees with their findings out of journals? When I told my father that I was sending my work saying car seats are not that effective to medical journals, he laughed and said they would never publish it because of the result, no matter how well done the analysis was. (As is so often the case, he was right, and I eventually published it in an economics journal.) Within the…

How To Become A Biologist

This post is kinda personal. I wrote it first on July 27, 2005 on Science And Politics. Later, it was professionally edited and published on LabLit.com on March 3, 2006. Here is the unedited version: I was just thinking today what a long and winding route I took in becoming a biologist. So, why not write a blog post about it? As long as I can remember I loved animals. I have no idea where that came from. My family mostly had to do with theater, art, language and literature. I think they thought I was going to become an actor. My grandfather was a famous architect and I certainly have…

Cultural Cataclysms in Lucky Little Iceland

My cousin got a beer bottle smashed over his head last month. He was traveling in Europe with a friend, and some british lads found out they were Icelandic and decided to take out some interest on them. So, the Icelandic banking system imploded over a few days, recently. The collateral damage from that is rippling through western Europe and was in small part a trigger for the ongoing banking crisis worldwide. All (three) of Iceland's commercial banks were nationalized, the stock exchange was closed and fell about 3/4 when it re-opened, as a consequence of financial stocks reopening at zero.…

Classic Edition: Seventeen Books

Over at A Blog Around the Clock, Bora has reposted an old article written in response to a list of "must-read" SF books, in which he sets out to generate his own list. Never one to shy away from excess, he ends up with a nearly complete list of genre novels since about 1890. Steinn points out a few that he missed. This would be a great point for me to respond with my own list, and rail against the tendency to draw up lists full of books that are historically Important, without considering readability for modern audiences, and all that sort of thing. I'm still being bothered by the "too much…

Al Gore is part of the problem -- new survey

Not only is Al Gore -- and by extension every member of his Climate Project army of slide-show presenters, including me -- wasting everyone's time trying to wake up the world to the perils of climate change, but the whole mission could actually be making things worse. That's what you'd have to conclude if you buy the results of a study of public attitudes that just appears in the journal Risk Analysis. The authors of the study, "Personal Efficacy, the Information Environment, and Attitudes Toward Global Warming and Climate Change in the United States," work at Texas A&M. (Two of the three…

Women, Ramadan, and Food

It's Ask a Science Blogger time again.... ...A reader asks: Is severely regulating your diet for a month each year, as Muslims do during Ramadan, good for you? Here's hoping my doctor and pharmacist SiBlings will take on this question and give us a medical perspective. I'm going to approach "is it good for you?" from some other directions. In this Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article, ten women share memories of Ramadan, traditions from their home countries, and offer up a few family recipes. Ramadan and fasting sounds like it is very good for them. In Istanbul, women embroider handkerchiefs…

Scholar, Historian, American Legend: Dr John Hope Franklin (1915-2009)

Dr John Hope Franklin was a 1935 A.B. graduate of Fisk University in Nashville, TN, then earned his M.A. (1936) and Ph.D. (1939) from Harvard University. [For reference, W.E.B. DuBois also graduated from Fisk (1888) and was the first Black to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard (1895).] Franklin's doctoral dissertation, The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790-1860, planted the seed for his classic 1947 work, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans (subtitle later changed to "A History of African-Americans"). This book, now in its eighth edition, was written originally during his four-…

The Perils of Predictions: Future of Physical Media

SciBling Walt Crawford indulges himself in some prognosticating about the (non)demise of various physical means of delivering information: music, films, magazine, newspapers and books. He takes a cautious, conservative tack there, for the most part. I am supposed to be the wide-eyed digi-evangelists around here, but I was nodding along and, surprising to me, agreeing with much of what he wrote. But I'd like to follow-up on this with some additional caveats and thoughts of my own. You may have to read Walt's post first for the context, as this will be a direct riff off of him. Regarded as some…

Yes, The Gold Standard Is Dead

Roger Lowenstein discusses the problem with the 'goldbugs', those who want to return to the gold standard (italics mine): Let us interject that in any monetary system, some authority must fix either the price of money or the supply. McDonald's can either set the price of a hamburger and let the market consume the quantity it will -- or, it can insist on selling a specified quantity, in which case consumer demand will determine the price. The Fed has a similar choice with money. The Bernanke Fed, which is trying to stimulate the economy, regulates the price of money -- the interest rate --…

Why 'Good People' Should (Sometimes) Walk Away from Their Mortgages

The whole CDO binge (aka Big Shitpile) led to a whole slew of perverse incentives to not help a borrower who is having difficultly paying the mortgage, even though, in the era before mortgages were treated as commodities to be sold, banks routinely went out of their way to avoid foreclosure--usually the costs were too great to make foreclosure a routine act. I've argued that if banks aren't willing to work with homeowners due to financial reasons, then homeowners should also act in their best interests: if that means walking away ('strategic default'), so be it. Nicholas Carroll runs the…

A Very Ghoulish Example of How Financial Speculation Hurts Everyone but the Speculators

I bet you didn't think life insurance policies could be securitized. You would be very wrong: The bankers plan to buy "life settlements," life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash -- $400,000 for a $1 million policy, say, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to "securitize" these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds or thousands together into bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors, like big pension funds, who will receive the payouts when people with the insurance die. The earlier the policyholder dies…

Dover Trial, Final Day

Today is the final day of testimony in the Dover trial. Scott Minnich is scheduled to finish up his cross examination, and likely already has, and then we'll move on to closing arguments this afternoon. Expect a ruling in the next 6-8 weeks, give or take. On another note, the New York Times has an interesting article today about the Thomas More Law Center that includes information I did not know. The TMLC, it turns out, has been going around the country trying to find a school board to adopt a policy like this so they could take it to court. They've gone in and lobbied for it, offering to…

Should you drink tap water or bottled water?

This is the time of year, spring, when a lot of people switch to drinking bottled water instead of tap water. They do this because in their particular area the tap water seems to "go bad" ... usually it is a mild smell or a slightly icky taste. This makes people fear their tap water, so they go to the store and buy bottled water. What has happened in many cases is that the local municipal water supply has done everything it can reasonably do to clean up and make nice the water that comes out of your tap, but there is this slight taste or smell because in the spring, that is what water does…

What Halloween Costume Is Best...

Arrrrrrgh. ... for science-oriented secular skeptical people like you? Halloween is when the really scary things make their appearance, mostly in the form of the Halloween Costume Industry. This is when we learn about all those latent adult sexual fantasies involving school children, for example. But more insidious and damaging, if not just plain annoying, is the janus-faced monster of jack-booted gender policing and Disney/Pixar marketing. Little girls should be princesses or some other girly thing, and little boys should be race cars or some other boyish thing. Huxley will be…

My First Review!

Update, 10:27 pm: It turns out the book is available for sale right now! So go buy one right this very second! Don't know what that June 4 date was all about... And it's a good one! The official release date for the Big Monty Hall Book (BMHB) is June 4, but some review copies have already gone out. One of those went to Peter Flom, who is a diarist for Daily Kos. You can find the full review here. Flom writes: I'll mention right up front that the book was sent to me by Oxford University Press, it's called the Monty Hall Problem, the author is Jason Rosenhouse, it's due out in…

How can universities get lean? and green?

Like many other public universities around the country, Mystery U has been hit hard by the economic hard times. Most of this year, we heard ominous rumblings that (at some point) there would be a budget reversion, i.e., we'd have to send some portion of our budget back to the state coffers. But all was pretty much business as usual until a few weeks ago when the axe fell. Instantaneously our whole university budget and we were under strict orders to conserve the precious resources we still had...you know, things like copier paper. Because we have no money to buy any more. I've been biting my…

Oriental Trading Co. Face Paint Recall - Colors Expanded

The US Food and Drug Administration is usually the first federal authority to take action on adverse event reports for any health product. But few appreciate that the FDA is also responsible for regulation of cosmetic products: pretty much anything applied to the skin. So, it was no surprise when I was trolling the FDA adverse event reports and news releases to find their announcement of a recall of a number of children's face paints due to rashes and undue skin irritation. The products are manufactured by Shanghai Color Art Stationery Company Limited, Shanghai, China. The original recall…

Justice rolls along in the case of Dr. Roy Kerry, negligent chelation killer

It may take a long time, but sometimes justice does eventually move to act against a wrong: A Butler County doctor will stand trial on charges he caused the death of a 5-year-old autistic boy by negligently ordering a controversial treatment, a district judge ordered Thursday. Dr. Roy Kerry of Portersville ordered chelation therapy - which the federal Food and Drug Administration approves for treating acute heavy-metal poisoning, but not for autism - on Abubakar Tariq Nadama in 2005. During a third treatment, on Aug. 23, the boy went into cardiac arrest and died. Kerry, 69, is charged with…

Tap Water's Low Blow?

Most cities and towns use chlorine or bromine to disinfect water. When the water is polluted, chlorine or bromine reacts with the pollution (agricultural runoff is probably a bigger problem here than traditional industrial pollution) to create what are called disinfection by-products (DBPs). DBPs are associated in humans with adverse pregnancy outcomes (usually miscarriage)*. Since DBPs damage DNA and are considered carcinogens at some level, researchers thought that it was likely that DBPs would affect sperm as well. Rodent studies show that some DBPs do harm sperm quality; however, there…

Law firm doing dirty work for coal industry?

The Charleston Gazette's Ken Ward Jr. reports that one of West Virginia's oldest and largest law firms, Jackson Kelly PLLC, is being sued for hiding evidence of coal miners' black lung disease.  Ward writes: "Earlier this year, an investigative panel of the state's Lawyer Disciplinary Board filed misconduct charges against Douglas A. Smoot.  Smoot hid a key portion of coal miner Elmer Daugherty's medical examination report during a 2001 case, a board investigative panel alleged.  A hearing on those allegations is scheduled to start June 18.  And two lawsuits filed last month in Raleigh…

Stealthy zombie vampire librarians

And I mean zombie vampire in the best way, as a comment on how hard it seems to be to kill my Stealth Librarianship Manifesto. It's even been translated into French! (Merci, Marléne!) For a post I mostly wrote in an hour of white hot typing from midnight to 1 a.m. some weeknight when I should have been sleeping it sure has some legs. There have been three posts about the manifesto fairly recently, mostly more critical than complimentary but with a lot of input that I really value. Let's take a look. Identity crisis? No. Or why I think we need to move beyond "stealth librarianship." by…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 17 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Adult-Young Ratio, a Major Factor Regulating Social Behaviour of Young: A Horse Study: Adults play an important role in regulating the social behaviour of young individuals. However, a few pioneer studies suggest…

Course redesign part 3: goal? I need goals?

I'm rethinking one of my courses, an upper level general education course called "The Control of Nature." I've been blogging my way through the course redesign process, starting with past problems with the course and with my various practical constraints (class schedule, physical space, student background). I'm using an online tutorial to guide me through the process, and now I'm finally moving towards thinking about the course itself. Before I actually start redesigning lectures and in-class exercises and assignments, I need to figure out what I want students to be able to do when they get…

Scientists and Supporters Rally Against Animal Rights Extremism at UCLA

By all accounts, yesterday's UCLA Pro-Test rally in support of animal research was a great success. Up to 800 people showed up for the Pro-Test rally, but only 30-40 people showed up for a concurrent anti-research rally These numbers are particularly notable for two reasons. Firstly, the number of supporters of animal researchers greatly dwarfed the number of detractors, an excellent illustration of how large this hitherto silent majority is compared to the fringe but vocal animal rights activists. Secondly, the number of participants at the UCLA rally was similar to the number that showed…

The best objective herbal medicine information for less than $100 per year

For several years, various media outlets have asked my opinion about herbal medicine and dietary supplement issues. I've generally written several pages of responses only to find a few key quotes mined from my paragraphs of wisdom (in my mind). No problem at all; I just have trouble with churning out sound bites. So, I'd like to share with you stuff that never makes it to the so-called mainstream media. This is a repost of classic Terra Sigillata that first appeared on the old site on 8 May 2006. Recently, I was asked by a US television network to comment on the value of the release of…

News flash--condoms do help prevent HPV

Especially in religious circles, much has been made about the "uselessness" of condoms for the prevention of infection with the human papilloma virus (HPV). This is the virus that is responsible for almost all cases of cervical cancer, against which a new vaccine was recently approved (for more background, see this post). Approximately 20 million Americans are currently infected with HPV, and over their lifetime, about half of sexually active adults will be infected at one point. Though most strains of the virus are harmless, a small portion of them cause cervical cancer in women, a…

Occupational Health News Roundup

Last November, a roof section larger than a football field collapsed at the Woodgrain Millwork in Prineville, Oregon. Luckily, no one was harmed. However, mill workers, who spoke of a variety of workplace hazards, say they had alerted management to the leaky roof long before the collapse, reported Amanda Peacher for Oregon Public Broadcasting. In 2004, Woodgrain, a global company with manufacturing facilities across the U.S., bought the 14-acre Prineville mill. Noting that each of the 23 former mill workers interviewed for the story described a “roof riddled with leaks,” Peacher writes: Peggy…

Links for 2010-07-23

slacktivist: Credit scoring and unemployment "Say you're unemployed and you decide to work your tail off to land a new job, so you send out 40 résumés a week. Half of the companies might decide to do a credit-check before getting back to you. This sets off alarm-bells at the credit-rating agencies. Twenty credit-checks in one week? There goes your credit score. And there goes your hope of landing a new job. This is what the use of credit scoring in employment decisions means: Looking for a job disqualifies you from being hired." (tags: politics economics class-war blogs slacktivist US…

Godwin's Law

Wikipedia states: Godwin's Law (also Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies) is an adage in Internet culture that was originated by Mike Godwin in 1990. The law states that: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one. There is a tradition in many Usenet newsgroups that once such a comparison is made in a thread the thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress. The point of the tradition is that such comparisons are so offensive that further…

Three uneaten ears of corn

While I'm away communing with fellow skeptics at TAM7, I'm reposting some classic insolence from the month of July in years past. For today, there was really no other choice for what bit of Classic Insolence to repost, except that, today, there's no insolence whatsoever. The reason is that today is a very sad day. It is the one year anniversary of the death of our beloved dog Echo. In 2008, about about three weeks before the day for which this is the one year anniversary, we noticed that Echo was favoring her hind leg. When I looked her over, I noticed a lump, which, thanks to the power of…

Reprogramming adult cells into embryonic stem cells

As promised, I'm going through the three papers from last week about the re-programming of adult cells into an embryonic-like phenotype. Since it is three papers I'll go through first what's common to all three, and then what each group did special. First of all, let's summarize the method one more time. Background All of these papers are based on the "rational identification" of 4 critical transcription factors by Yamanaka in 2006. What they did was take 20 proteins that drive the expression of other genes that were known to be in embryonic stem cells, and added them to adult cells to…

Entelev, CanCell, and Cantron: Not curing cancer since the 1930s

A couple of months ago, a reader sent me an article that really disturbed me. In fact, I had originally been planning to write about it not long after I received it. However, as I've mentioned before, when it comes to blogging, I'm a bit like Dug the Talking Dog from the movie Up in that I'm easily distracted. Unlike Dug, what distracts me aren't squirrels, but rather bright, shiney pieces of pseudoscience, quackery, paranormal, or otherwise weird nonsense. Sometimes after I'm distracted I come back to the topic I had originally wanted to blog about. Sometimes I don't. Or, sometimes (like…

Birds in the News 94 (v3n21)

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter A male Henslow's Sparrow, Ammodramus henslowii, photographed in July on the Konza Prairie [song]. [This is a] species in decline, probably partially due to habitat loss, since they are obligate grassland birds, and grasslands are disappearing. Additionally they require grasslands that have been unburnt or unhayed during the last season, since they only nest in "standing dead" vegetation left over from the last growing season. The current practice of annual burning here in the Flint Hills means that these birds are very…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 32 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Novel Weapons Testing: Are Invasive Plants More Chemically Defended than Native Plants?: Exotic species have been hypothesized to successfully invade new habitats by virtue of possessing novel biochemistry…

Skeptical About Skeptics

This is an adaptation of the talk I gave at Westminster Skeptics in the Pub on Monday 2nd August. You can hear an audio transcript of the talk at the Pod Delusion website. I was invited to stage the talk again at the Winchester SITP, a recording of which is here. I'm very much a child of the skeptical community. I started writing about bad science in 2004, in a scissors-and-glue zine titled War On Error (a very droll play on words at the time, and a lot easier than coming up with a twist on Overseas Contingency Operation). Eventually this moved online, morphing into SciencePunk. Over…

I love it when an antivax "study" meant to show how "dirty" vaccines are backfires so spectacularly

I've frequently written about what I like to refer to as the "toxins gambit" with respect to vaccines. Basically, in the hard core (and even soft core) antivaccine crowd, vaccines are feared as being loaded with all sorts of "toxins," such as aluminum, formaldehyde, mercury, and various chemicals that are dangerous enough separately, but, when combined, "poison" young babies, resulting in their becoming autistic, acquiring asthma and autoimmune diseases, or even dying of sudden infant death syndrome. Of course, many of the scary-sounding chemicals to which antivaccinationists point actually…

Butterflies, Beetles Bees, Bugs... Insects Rule! ISO Entomology Contributors, Sponsors and Volunteers at the Expo!

Insects make up the largest and most diverse group of organisms on the planet, with the over 1 million described and 4-30 estimated species all playing a crucial role in biodiversity of the ecosystem. They are also critical for a wide variety of science and technology fields including agriculture, environmental and even biomedical science, and are even being explored as a vital source of food. "Insects are much too important to leave out of an event like the USA Science & Engineering Festival," says Dr. Aaron T. Dossey, a Ph.D. biochemist and postdoctoral research entomologist, currently…

Poppy seed tea can kill you

A little over a week ago, we posted on the very sad story of the accidental death of a University of Colorado sophomore from ingesting poppy seed tea. The poppy, Papaver somniferum, is the commercial source for prescription narcotic painkillers such as morphine and codeine. The seeds can be had online and in retail stores. The plants can often be grown if these seeds are not roasted or otherwise sterilized. I had originally suspected that the CU-Boulder student had not used poppy seed tea but rather some other decoction of the plant itself. I had always contended that the seeds did not…

Low-Resveratrol Muscadine Grape Skin Extract (MSKE) Inhibits Prostate Cancer Cell Growth

A press release came in from the US NIH before the weekend noting that NCI's Dr Jeffrey Green has identified potential anticancer activities from a grape skin extract that is not dependent on the presence of the well-known compound, resveratrol. The report is to appear in the 1 September issue of Cancer Research, but the article is not yet online. Green's group investigated a skin extract from muscadine grapes (Vitis rotundifolia) that was apparently nearly devoid of resveratrol but contained high levels of compunds called anthocyanins (they called it MSKE for "muscadine skin extract"). The…

Framing Science - the Dialogue of the Deaf

My SciBlings Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbet just published an article in 'Science' (which, considering its topic is, ironically, behind the subscription wall, but you can check the short press release) about "Framing Science" Carl Zimmer, PZ Myers, Mike Dunford (also check the comments here), John Fleck, Larry Moran, Dietram Scheufele, Kristina Chew, Randy Olson, James Hrynyshyn, Paul Sunstone and Alan Boyle have, so far, responded and their responses (and the comment threads) are worth your time to read. Chris and Matt respond to some of them. Matt has more in-depth explanations here, here and…

Implications of the immune response

I started writing this post before I read ERV dissecting some "the immune system is perfect" BS. Go read hers, then come back if you want more. Now that I've gone through the basics of a typical immune response, I think it's necessary to point out some of its many flaws. In many of the immunology courses I've taken, the mammalian immune system is presented almost as the pinnacle of evolution, but it is far from perfect. In fact, in many ways, we might be better off if it had never evolved at all. First up - Autoimmunity. T-cells and B-cells generate random receptors that can in principal see…