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The President's Plan to help the uninsured: tax cuts for the rich

In his State of the Union Address tonight, Bush will announce a new "plan" to address the need for more affordable health care insurance. After reading the White House "Fact Sheet" on the plan, a phrase quickly jumps to mind - "dead on arrival." That one is quickly joined by others - "smoking crack," "bloody stupid," "give me a break," and "what mentally defective chimpanzee came up with this one?" The funniest thing about this particular proposal is exactly how stereotypically Bush it really is. Stripped down to its bearest essentials, there are two parts to this health care plan. One part…

Quacks everywhere

David Colquhoun has posted an excellent series of posts on the Steiner Waldorf schools, 19th century crackpottery that persists even now, by hiding their fundamentally pseudoscientific basis under a fog of fancy invented terms. He discusses their goofy philosophy of anthroposophistry, their devious efforts to get state funding, and their unfortunate buy unsurprising history of racism. It's wild and crazy stuff, and it's been sidling under the radar for a while. What initially drew me to DC's site was his article on quackery in retreat: the University of Westminster has discarded some of…

The Mona Lisa, Genes, and Money

One of the questions an artist hates most is what is your artwork worth? Price is a subjective, unsatisfactory proxy for emotional angst, frustration, eyestrain, and time. Sometimes I find that NO (reasonable) value can compensate for the emotional investment I've made - in which case I either keep the thing myself, give it away, or throw a tantrum and rip it up. Other variables also influence price - the artist's fame and skill, obviously, but also whether the work has been copied. People are willing to pay a premium to own original art, even if a reproduction is virtually identical in…

Ka-BOOM! (A few words on fireworks.)

It's the 4th of July, and here in the U.S., that usually means fireworks.* What could be better than explosions in pretty colors? Maybe a few details of how firework makers get those colors into the fireworks. If you've taken a chemistry course with a lab, you may remember having done "flame tests" of compounds. You dipped you little wire loop in the compound you were characterizing, stuck it in the Bunsen burner flame, and watched what color the flame turned. (You had to pay attention; if you missed the color your compound burned, you were left looking at the plain old Bunsen burner flame…

Money Illusion

Here's a question: Consider two individuals, Ann and Barbara, who graudated from the same college a year apart. Upon graduation, both took similar jobs with publishing firms. Ann started with a yearly salary of $30,000. During her first year on the job there was no inflation, and in her second year Ann recieved a 2% ($600) raise in salary. Barbara also started with a yearly salary of $30,000. During her first year on the job, there was 4% inflation, and in her second year Barbara received a 5% ($1500) raise in salary. As they entered their second year on the job, who was doing better in…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Lots of good stuff today - hard to pick favourites: Human Preference For Other Species Could Determine Whether They Survive: As humans exert ever-greater influence on the Earth, their preferences will play a substantial role in determining which other species survive. New research shows that, in some cases, those preferences could be governed by factors as subtle as small color highlights a creature displays. In the case of penguins, mostly black-and-white flightless birds that live predominantly in the Southern Hemisphere, those most popular with humans appear to be the ones that display…

How I discovered Holocaust denial

While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) These will appear at least twice a day while I'm gone (and that will probably leave some leftover for Christmas vacation, even). Enjoy, and please feel free to comment. I will be checking in from time to time when I have Internet access to see if the reaction…

Melissa Hussain committed Thought Crime!

And she may be fired for it. Hussain is an eighth grade science teacher in North Carolina who was getting harrassed by bible-thumping students in her classroom — harrassment that was apparently encouraged by their red-necked ignorant parents. The kids were giving her Bibles and Jesus postcards and reading Bibles instead of doing their classwork, and seemed to have enjoyed flaunting their dumb-ass religiosity at her. So she vented on Facebook. The parents got indignant that she would dare to express her unhappiness with their darling little children, and are pressing to have her fired — but…

Patriot Bible University has a website!

Kent Hovind's infamous alma mater has put together a collection of responses because they are "under attack!" Only they aren't—they're being laughed at. And whoa, these pages are even more hilarious. (Warning: all of the links below go to pages that fire up some tedious piano music on autoplay…that you can't turn off.) The first one is offended at the falsehoods their critics promulgate. For instance, people have passed around this photo, claiming it is a picture of the Patriot University facilities: It is a filthy lie! That is the minister's house. To show how wrong this portrayal is, the…

Experimental Heart: A Novel

tags: Experimental Heart, cancer research thriller, Jennifer L. Rohn, book review Reading science fiction books about scientific research inevitably inspire me to claw my eyes out from sheer frustration with the many shocking inaccuracies before I reach page 100 -- Michael Crichton's truly stupid books crammed with scientific faux pas scream immediately to mind. So I was skeptical about reading and possibly reviewing another such book. But this novel, which is part of the newly identified reality-based genre known as laboratory literature or "LabLit", pleasantly surprised me: I truly enjoyed…

First Experiment to Attempt Prevention of Homosexuality in Womb? Really? [Culture Dish]

A press release landed in my inbox today with this headline, which raised my eyebrows (as it was obviously intended to do): "First Experiment to Attempt Prevention of Homosexuality in Womb."  It starts with this quote from Alice Dreger, a Northwestern University bioethicist: "This is the first we know in the history of medicine that clinicians are actively trying to prevent homosexuality." The release was announcing the publication of a piece at the Hastings Center Bioethics Forum titled, "Preventing Homosexuality (and Uppity Women) in the Womb? -- it was written by the same authors that…

The power of blogs, or #OccupyScholComm

I've long been a believer in the power of blogs to drive and aggregate conversations at every level. Frivolous, for sure. But also serious and scholarly. The rise of science blogs over the last few years has certainly demonstrated that. In librarianship as well, blogs are a powerful source of comment, theory and practical advice. I've always thought that the practical side of the library world was ripe to be the first field to truly leave journals behind and embrace blogging as a kind of replacement. It would be messy, sure, but it would be democratizing and re-invigorating. The kinds of…

From the Archives: Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams

I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here. This one, of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, is from May 18, 2008. ======= It seems that at least half the time I mention this book to someone interested in the way the web is changing social patterns the…

Using Bioinformatics to Study Evolution, intro

An introduction to our Alaskan NSF Chautauqua course and a pre-course assignment. I don't know how well this will work, but I thought it might be interesting this year to experiment with blogging about our course and sharing some of our experiences with the rest of the world. Here's your chance readers, if you'd like to do some of the assignments, you are very welcome to follow along and give it a try. tags: plants, Alaska, NSF Chautauqua courses, bioinformatics, sequence analysis, evolution, wound inducible genes, moose I'm not likely to get all the assignments or course info posted on-…

Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: the answer, my friend . . .

Newsweek's Editor, Jon Meacham, himself a "liberal Episcopalian" and author of a book on the religious views of the Founders (American Gospel), has raised a large cloud of dust with a Newsweek cover story, "The Decline and Fall of Christian America." I saw Chritopher Hitchens on TV refer to it as "thoughtful." I read it. It's OK. I guess anything in the mass media that takes a relatively clear-eyed look at the state of religion in the US would have to look relatively thoughtful, but I don't see much depth. My yawn isn't typical, however, as the declining and falling Christian talking heads…

Happy that the Common Ancestor is Common

As we age, our sleep gets less well consolidated: we take more naps during the day and wake up more oftenduring the night. This happens to other mammals as their age. Now we know that it also happens in Drosophila: "As humans age, so I'm told, they tend not to sleep as well. There are all sorts of reasons -- aches and pains, worries about work and lifelong accumulations of sins that pretty much rule out the sweet sleep of innocence. But what about fruit flies? Not as a cause of insomnia. What about the problems fruit flies have sleeping? Yes, Drosophila melanogaster also suffer sleep…

Seed Dreaming

Sorry for the extended radio silence. A combination of Apprentice Weekend, followed by Fellowship Application due, followed by ice storm related power outage, followed by internet outage of indeterminate cause, followed by visitor, followed by a series of family administrative things put off because of all the previous means that I'm just now online, and my email is still down, so if you've tried to contact me, please be patient! I'm not ignoring you, just discombobulated. I apologize for the difficulties - especially if you have tried to register for the garden design class and been…

JPANDS and HIV denialsim

This entry needed migrating from the old blog. Thank you for your indulgence. --PalMD JPANDS, the mouthpiece of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, is a well-known organ or quackery, so it seemed like a good idea to see what they've been up to lately. It's not good. The most recent issue publishes a screed on HIV denial that is so blindingly stupid, I developed a cluster headache on reading it. Now that I've recovered, let's risk a closer look. The Author Henry Bauer is a chemist, or at least I think so. He doesn't have a CV on his website. He says that he is the…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 15 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: A Principal Component Analysis of 39 Scientific Impact Measures: The impact of scientific publications has traditionally been expressed in terms of citation counts. However, scientific activity has moved…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Ecologists Report Quantifiable Measures Of Nature's Services To Humans: The idea of ecosystem services is a promising conservation concept but has been rarely put into practice. In a special issue of the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, researchers use novel tools to report some of the first quantifiable results that place values on nature's services to humans. 15-year-old Theory About The Nervous System Disproved: A delay in traffic may cause a headache, but a delay in the nervous system can cause much more. University of Missouri researchers have uncovered clues identifying…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 62 articles published this week in PLoS ONE. There are also two Journal Clubs going on right now - here and here. Here are some of my picks for the week - go read, rate, comment and send trackbacks: A Comparison of Wood Density between Classical Cremonese and Modern Violins: Classical violins created by Cremonese masters, such as Antonio Stradivari and Giuseppe Guarneri Del Gesu, have become the benchmark to which the sound of all violins are compared in terms of their abilities of expressiveness and projection. By general consensus, no luthier since that time has been able to…

Holocaust Children, part I (guest post by Mom)

A few weeks ago, my mother took a long trip to Israel to attend a conference of Holocaust Child Survivors. She wrote a diary of her trip and it was, in a slightly edited form (omitting most of the recounts of family gatherings), published in the Serbian newspaper Danas (Today) in its popular weekend column. If you click on the link, you can read the diary in Serbian language. She then translated her travelogue into English and asked me to publish it here, on my blog, for everyone to see. I will do this in a few installments, starting with the first one today and the rest will appear here…

Scott Huler - 'On The Grid' at Quail Ridge Books

As I alerted you before, last night Scott Huler (blog, Twitter, SIT interview) did a reading from his latest book On The Grid (amazon.com) at the Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh. The store was packed. The store sold out all the books before Scott was even done talking. The C-Span Book TV crew was there filming so the event will be on TV some day soon. Scott was also, earlier yesterday, on WUNC's The State Of Things (the podcast will soon be online here) and the day before that he was on KERA's Think with Krys Boyd (download MP3 podcast by clicking here). Scott's energy and enthusiasm are…

Urgent: Call Louisiana, their science is getting away!

Barbara Forrest is sending this message out everywhere — they need concerted public action to forestall a dreadful legislative disaster that is looming large in the state of Louisiana. You can help! We in the LA Coalition for Science have reached the point at which the only possible measure we have left is to raise an outcry from around the country that Gov. Jindal has to hear. What is happening in Louisiana has national implications, much to the delight of the Discovery Institute, which is blogging the daylights out of the Louisiana situation. SB 733, the LA Science Education Act, has passed…

Post-conference wrap-up

I just got back from the American Atheists conference, so here's my summary of the weekend. Best talk of the conference: Lawrence Krauss wins hands-down. It was a meaty, informative, and lively lecture that summarized what we know about dark matter and dark energy so that even a non-physicist could follow it. Just that one talk alone made the whole weekend worthwhile. Dawkins gave a good talk, but to be honest, it got a little unfocused in a few places — he tried to include some of the recent events at the last minute, and it lost some of its coherence as a result. Still a good lecture,…

January Pieces Of My Mind #2

Rare religion sighting: we put up two charming Iraqi ladies for the night because of a friend's birthday party, and they turned out to be Mandaeans, Gnostic believers in John the Baptist as Messiah. One of my best old friends calls me, grieving, and tells me his old roomie died this morning of cancer. Age 37, leaving a wife and two small kids. I'm glad I don't have to reconcile shit like this with any idea about a good lord directing things from behind the scenes. The universe isn't trying to please us or mess with us, it's just one big indifferent randomiser. Last night I went to bed early…

World Wide Mind (and Culture)

World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity, Machines, and the Internet is a new book by Michael Chorost. I've not thoroughly read it yet but I've looked through it and I've listened to an interview with Chorost. Here's the book description from Amazon to give you an idea what it is about: What if digital communication felt as real as being touched? This question led Michael Chorost to explore profound new ideas triggered by lab research around the world, and the result is the book you now hold. Marvelous and momentous, World Wide Mind takes mind-to-mind communication out of the…

Welcome to the Wikipedia of the alt-right?

Meh; not to spoil the tension but it is, as you've already guessed, just another dull clone of wiki a-la Conservapedia. I found it via Wired via fb; you certainly won't find it via people referring to it2. Other than me; sorry about that. This one is called "Infogalactic" which seems to hint that it is a joke. They have two, no make that three, obvious problems. The first is, who would bother read it. The second, is who would bother write it. If I look at the recent changes on wiki, the last 500 changes cover 6 minutes. On IG, they cover 5 days1. They are also heavily slanted to only a few…

I seem to be on the Twin Cities Creation Science Association mailing list

Just in case anyone sensible in the Minneapolis/St Paul area feels like exposing yourself to the wild and crazy world of Minnesota creationism, here are the events coming up in February. On the 17th, you can attend the creation science fair in the Har Mar Mall, and you can drop in to the Christian bookstore there (with a great selection of creationist claptrap in stock) to listen to a DVD debate. I think "DVD debate" just means they'll be playing some noise from Ken Ham and Hugh Ross, and you can watch. Young Earth Creationists vs. Old Earth Creationists: frickin' loons vs. nutty…

On Fooling People With Numbers

One thing I have learned from more than a decade of teaching mathematics is that it is very easy to bamboozle people with numbers and equations. I do it all the time in my calculus classes, and that is when I am bending over backward to be as clear as I possibly can. Creationists are especially unscrupulous about exploiting this fact about mathematics. At one creationist conference I attended, the speaker went on for close to an hour spouting the sheerest nonsense about information theory and probability. He received a standing ovation for his troubles. Another time, in a small,…

Ongoing witch-hunt against Oklahoma scientists

Though only a handful of ERV readers are from Oklahoma, I know all of you are familiar with the handiwork of Senator Randy Brogdon. He was the fellow who recently tried to get Creationism taught in Oklahoma public schools (FAIL). Dude is a fucking IDiot (and just plain old idiot) who hates science: I am also disgusted with the yearlong one-sided celebration of Darwinism that OU is sponsoring on their campus. Disgusted? Really? Not 'disappointed', or 'dismayed', or 'intrigued, so Im going to check it out', but disgusted? Fantastic. So what happens when you combine: 1. Anti-science 2. New…

Links for 2010-01-12

Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: Neutrino Telescope Measures Temperature of the Ozone Layer "The IceCube neutrino observatory is a kilometre-scale array of photon detectors buried under the ice at the South Pole. When neutrinos pass through the ice, they occasionally bump into atoms creating particles called muons. These muons then generate light as they pass through the ice which is then picked up by the detector allowing scientists to determine the direction of the incoming neutrino. The trouble is that most of the muons that IceCube sees are not generated by neutrinos at all but by…

Thank you, readers: reflections on Dad's belated eulogy

I am truly humbled by reader response to my Thursday post on the 12th anniversary of my father's death. What began as a simple journaling exercise interspersed with some great photos provided by my sister has become one of my most highly-read and most-commented posts. I don't want to comment too much lest I take away what this post has meant to me and others. But for background, this is something that I had intended to write for the 10th anniversary of Dad's passing. However, I had only been with ScienceBlogs for a few months and wasn't yet in a position to write so frankly and personally…

"God helmet"?...yeah...right...

A Christmas present, maybe? Maybe not. A "neurotheology" researcher called Dr Michael Persinger has developed something called the "God Helmet" lined with magnets to help you in your quest: it sounds like typical bad science fodder, but it's much more interesting than that. Persinger is a proper scientist. The temporal lobes have long been implicated in religious experiences: epileptic seizures in that part of the brain, for example, can produce mystical experiences and visions. Persinger's helmet stimulates these temporal lobes with weak electromagnetic fields through the skull, and in…

Love Darts in the Backyard

Spring is finally slinking into the northeast, and the backyard wildlife here is shaking off the winter torpor. Our oldest daughter, Charlotte, is now old enough to be curious about this biological exuberence. She likes to tell stories about little subterranean families of earthworm mommies and grub daddies, cram grapes in her cheeks in imitation of the chipmunks, and ask again and again about where the birds spend Christmas. This is, of course, hog heaven for a geeky science-writer father like myself, but there is one subject that I hope she doesn't ask me about: how the garden snails have…

ID and Fine Art ... well, it's all relative I suppose

One of the twenty-year goals of the Discovery Institute's Wedge was to see the influence of "design theory" in the fine arts. I've often wondered what that could possible mean. And now, thanks to Access Research Network's "ID Arts Initiative" I now know. In today's ARN Announce (it's not online yet), Dennis Wagner presents his vision of "the Right-Brain approach to intelligent design": Our worldview impacts all areas of life including the arts. The arts also reflect philosophical and cultural trends in human societies. If intelligent design philosophical and scientific concepts are valid, we…

First Experiment to Attempt Prevention of Homosexuality in Womb? Really?

A press release landed in my inbox today with this headline, which raised my eyebrows (as it was obviously intended to do): "First Experiment to Attempt Prevention of Homosexuality in Womb."  It starts with this quote from Alice Dreger, a Northwestern University bioethicist: "This is the first we know in the history of medicine that clinicians are actively trying to prevent homosexuality." The release was announcing the publication of a piece at the Hastings Center Bioethics Forum titled, "Preventing Homosexuality (and Uppity Women) in the Womb? -- it was written by the same authors that…

Am I a Liberal?

This is a repost of something I wrote on my old blog back in April. With the general election rapidly approaching, it seems like a good one to put back out there. The election season is starting to heat up. Scandals rock DC on what seems like a daily basis. The public is split, at least according to the polls, on many major issues. We are heading toward a political (and probably historical) crossroad. Now is the time for people to stand up for what they believe, and to help move the country in the right direction. But where do I stand? Sometimes I have a hard time figuring that out. I think…

Q: If a mountaintop is intentionally blown up and only the surrounding ecosystems hear it, does it make a sound?

A: Probably. * * * DN: So Ben, what's up with those mountain tops? BRC: They're fewer than there used to be, that's what I know. DN: Less places to ski and stuff? BRC: But many more places to golf, apparently. DN: Ben, is that for real? Mountain top removal for coal, for golf, for kicks, apparently? When I first asked, I was actually referring to a scene in the new Superman movie, but this I'm guessing is non-fiction. Why on earth are they doing this? It seems like an awful lot of effort. BRC: It is, my Canadian co-blogger, for real. But it's less work than hiring a bunch of West…

More Hurricane Publications; Off to Conference

Tomorrow I am off to New York for this meeting on hurricanes and climate, sponsored by Columbia University's International Research Institute for Climate and Society. I'm very appreciative that Columbia-IRI has allowed me to attend the event, which will feature presentations from Kerry Emanuel, Chris Landsea, Roger Pielke, Jr., Thomas Knutson, and numerous others. I will be back late Wednesday; blogging will probably be impaired during the trip. So let me leave you with something substantive before I go: It turns out that another presenter at the Columbia meeting will be Johnny C.L. Chan, an…

Communicating Science To Congress â The Office of Technology Assessment Got It Right (Sort Of)

by Philip H. DISCLAIMER - The opinions expressed in this blog post are those of the author alone. They do NOT represent the official opinion, policy, or action of any governmental agency the author may work for or have ever worked for at the county, state or federal level. If you do not like the content or opinions, contact the author, not your Congressmen. In my last post for the Intersection, I mentioned the Office of Technology Assessment and its place in the history of communicating science to Congress. I also asked the questions as to whether, in the increasingly complex Information…

Casual Fridays: Generation gap for "sour grapes"

Last week's Casual Fridays study was inspired by an event in Greta's classroom. She had assumed that most of her students would be familiar with the story of the Fox and the Grapes, which goes as follows: ONE hot summer's day a Fox was strolling through an orchard till he came to a bunch of Grapes just ripening on a vine which had been trained over a lofty branch. "Just the things to quench my thirst," quoth he. Drawing back a few paces, he took a run and a jump, and just missed the bunch. Turning round again with a One, Two, Three, he jumped up, but with no greater success. Again and again…

Violent video games and desensitization

Although not all games are equal, there's plenty of evidence that playing some violent video games can cause aggressive real-world behavior. Sites like addictinggames.com offer popular games whose sole point is to play the role of a hit-man or even to torture animals. Over 85 percent of video games include violence. When these statistics are combined with the results of studies showing that aggressive attitudes and even actions can be increased after playing violent games for as little as 20 minutes, it's possible that we have a major problem on our hands. Another potential problem of video…

Ireland stands up to the Catholic Church

Last week, the Cloyne report was released. This document describes patterns of child abuse and in particular the willful intransigence of the Catholic church in correcting the problems in Ireland, and it's pretty damned damning. One significant detail: the Church's defense in recent months consists of claiming priestly pedophilia was a thing of the past, a product of the laxity and corruption of the general social atmosphere in the 60s and 70s, pushing the blame onto that awful liberal culture, not the church. Unfortunately, the Cloyne report assesses policies in the late 1990s, so we're…

Dennis Markuze/David Mabus must have uttered a straw ...

Dennis Markuze aka David Mabus on a Television News Story ... the story is inaccurate in a number of minor ways that obscures an interesting truth, but it is a moment in time worth savoring: The story is inaccurate in the following ways: There has not been a "recent escalation" of threats. The threats come in cycles. He's on an average up-swing. It is true that there are a few new people are on his list, and they are making a stink about it. That, however, has happened before. Why did this cycle of threats cause the police to actually do something? See below for a guess. It is also not…

What comes after a big flood?

The tsunami and Katrina both left behind pools of stagnant water in which things have swarmed and multiplied and emerged to infect humanity. I'm referring, of cause, to clueless articles extolling the virtues of DDT. The latest is by Henry Miller in the National Review Online. The six-year old U.S. outbreak of West Nile virus is a significant threat to public health and shows no signs of abating. ... As of September 6, Louisiana ranked fourth in the nation in human West Nile virus infections; but with most of New Orleans still under water and a perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes, there…

Fentanyl as An Agent of Bioterrorism

At the beginning of my adventures in blogging (circa 2006) I wrote a short piece for the news site "Mixeye" about the drug fentanyl, and was reminded of it after having a discussion about the drug with some friends. Fentanyl is an extremely potent painkiller, which has unsurprisingly led to its widespread abuse (especially in my neck of the woods, towards Detroit). However, after re-reading my write-up, I was reminded of why I thought this drug was particularly interesting: it has been used in some high-profile bioterrorism strikes and was, for a while, pursued as a chemical weapon by…

American Journal of Bioethics special issue on personal genomics

A reader has pointed me to the latest issue of the American Journal of Bioethics, which is devoted to social networking and personal genomics. I'm still working my way through the many interesting articles, but for now I wanted to cover some useful points in the editorial (entitled "A Pragmatic Consideration of Ethical Issues Relating to Personal Genomics"), which was written by a series of big names from personal genomics company 23andMe, including both co-founders. The article is designed to address some of the more popular misconceptions surrounding personal genomics; here's a quick run-…

"Designer baby" doctor no longer offering embryo screening for cosmetic traits

Last month I mentioned a US fertility clinic that was offering couples undergoing IVF the opportunity to screen their embryos for sex, and for genes associated with "cosmetic" traits such as eye and hair colour. I used this as an opportunity to note that the genetic complexity of many traits (e.g. height, also discussed yesterday) would make it highly unlikely that embryo screening would be effective for these, although for hair and eye colour such screening is certainly feasible. The media coverage of this fertility clinic - run by reproductive endocrinologist Jeff Steinberg (pictured) -…

Find Out Where They Stand on the Issues that Really Matter

As the 2008 elections swing into full gear, Scientists and Engineers for America (SEA) today launched a new resource--the Science, Health And Related Policies (SHARP) Network--which allows you to track how various elected officials and candidates stack up on a variety of science and health policy issues. SEA was formed a couple of months before the 2006 election in order to support science-friendly candidates, advocate for the proper use of science in formulating government policy, and to oppose political interference in science. SEA made quite a splash then, but its newest endeavor looks…