Search Content

Displaying results 12801 - 12850 of 87950

Welcoming the New Neighbours

I think we should take some pie over, in person. Discovery of a Binary Brown Dwarf at 2 Parsecs from the Sun - Kevin Luhman, ApJLetters in press. That is just over 6 light years away, making it the third closest system from the Sun, and the closest known substellar system, only the α Cen triple system, and Barnard's Star, an old red dwarf, are closer. Detection images for our new neighbour. The WISE discovery image is middle bottom, the Gemini image at the bottom right shows the resolved pair clearly. This is a spectacular and somewhat surprising discovery, that something could be this…

Inky-winky-binky-pinky

Via TW (who says Inflation's a tricky thing you know) this interesting inflation calculator. From the Torygraph, the Jetlev flyer. A ridiculous boys-toy, but it did cause my daughter to say "I must have one". Did I mention that reading the Torygraph in the Waitrose cafe is one of my guilty pleasures? Its not quite as good as it looks, because not only do you have a huge hosepipe trailing after you, there is also the jetski-like boat you're tied to (that's the Jetlev, not reading the TG). Also from the TG a delightful story about Empty wine bottles sell for £300 in China because, of course,…

It's Not Science Without Graphs

After months and months of nothing, behold! Signal! Explanation below the fold. What you're looking at here is a graph showing the signal from our optically excited metastable krypton source prototype. The red dots are fluorescence detected by a photomultiplier tube (PMT) from metastable atoms created in the source, and excited by a probe laser passing through the source region. The black dots show the intensity of another beam from the same laser passing through a plasma discharge in a vapor cell, which creates metastbles that absorb the light when the laser is at the right frequency. The…

PZ Myers Car Wrecked in Accident: Myers Suffers Minor Injuries (updated)

UPDATE: Read it in his own words! Relive the horror of the road! Cringe as you hear all the gory details of near death and automotive crunchiness, here at Pharyngula! Myers, trapped in remote region, unable to blog. UPDATE: Myers has been picked up from the scene by rescue vehicle dispatched from Morris, and is now en route to Saint Cloud airport. where he will take flight to Michigan. Pharyngula readers await direct word from Myers, who may be able to blog from airport. Approximate Location of Car Wreck University of Minnesota, Morris, Biology Professor and Science Blogger (…

Casual Fridays: Buffet-style restaurants -- Results are in!

Last week we asked readers how often they eat at buffet-style restaurants, where diners serve themselves unlimited portions of food from heated serving tables. The question was inspired by a post by ScienceBlogs editor Virginia Hughes, which was inspired by an innocuous comment I made as we were heading to our hotel restaurant table: "People in North Carolina are really into buffets." So, is North Carolina the champion state for buffets? Nope. In fact, North Carolina ranked 20th on our list. The number one state for buffets was Kansas, averaging 6 visits per month. Second on the list was New…

Postmortem sleeping beauties

Through the end of May, UMBC's Albin O Kuhn gallery is hosting a large exhibition of postmortem daguerreotypes, death masks, coffin plates, etc. from the collection of Dr. Stanley Burns. Medical ephemera always have an emotional valence, because they represent patients who suffered, struggled and eventually lost their physical battles. But this collection of memorials are about the survivors' needs, not the dead, and are thus particularly eerie and wrenching. From the curator: Trace the evolution of postmortem photography through 19th-century daguerreotypes and prints from Sleeping Beauty…

Energy Equivalents (Not a molecule at all)

I've been thinking more about energy sources since oil was at $50/barrel . Since we reached the staggering heights of the last few months, I've been puzzling even more over what people will move to next. Key to understanding this stuff is how much energy it takes to get your source in a useful form. A paper from the 1980's is illustrative: oil cost more than 10 times less energy to get from discovery to usable energy in the 40's than in the 70's. A lot of technologies barely broke even. If anyone has a newer version of this work, I'm interested. For better or worse, I think you're going to…

Fresh Video from the Moon

Are you aware of Kaguya (Selene)? The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency(JAXA) launched "KAGUYA (SELENE)" by the H-IIA Launch Vehicle at 10:31:01 a.m. on September 14, 2007 (JST) from Tanegashima Space Center. The major objectives of the "KAGUYA" mission are to obtain scientific data of the lunar origin and evolution and to develop the technology for the future lunar exploration. "KAGUYA" consists of a main orbiting satellite at about 100km altitude and two small satellites (Relay Satellite and VRAD Satellite) in polar orbit. The orbiters will carry instruments for scientific investigation…

Bringing phytosaurs back to life

The reconstructions of Brachysuchus and Rhytiodon compared. From Case 1931. In the winter of 1931, University of Michigan paleontologist E.C. Case commissioned artist Carleton W. Angell to bring two phytosaurs to life. Even though phytosaurs as a group were still poorly defined, Case recognized that there seemed to be at least two morphotypes represented by different skull reconstruction. According to Case's summary, Rhytiodon (now called Rutiodon) represented a more lightly-built form that probably fed upon fish, while the more massive Brachysuchus (now often called Angistorhinus)…

The genetics of Fenno-Scandinavia

Population substructure in Finland and Sweden revealed by the use of spatial coordinates and a small number of unlinked autosomal SNPs: We genotyped 34 unlinked autosomal single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), originally designed for zygosity testing, from 2044 samples from Sweden and 657 samples from Finland, and 30 short tandem repeats (STRs) from 465 Finnish samples. We saw significant population structure within Finland but not between the countries or within Sweden, and isolation by distance within Finland and between the countries. In Sweden, we found a deficit of heterozygotes that we…

Hispanics more religious, not that zealous

A few months ago I pointed out that minorities don't oppose gay marriage, blacks do. Specifically, there are sometimes assumptions that Hispanics are extremely religious Roman Catholics characterized by very socially conservative views. From what I have seen the data are of much more modest magnitude than what characterizations would suggest, but I thought it would be useful to put some numbers from the General Social Survey up. The years are from 2000-2008, when the "Hispanic" variable was being collected. First I separated into three categories, Non-Hispanics who were not black, which was a…

Comments of the Week #91: From Santa science to lonely galaxies

“This whole Santa Claus thing just doesn't make sense. Why all the secrecy? Why all the mystery? If the guy exists why doesn't he ever show himself and prove it? And if he doesn't exist what's the meaning of all this?” -Calvin, via Bill Watterson This is our last comments of the week for 2015, and Starts With A Bang can't wait for the new year! All the great things we've worked so hard for this year promise to bring about an even better one in 2016. But that said, there's still more science for this year! This past week saw the following: When a photon gets redshifted, where does its energy…

The Inner Asian gap: the Afanasievo breakthrough

If you read this weblog you are aware that I have a fascination with the intersection of human history and human evolutionary genetics. There are many questions I have about the finding from evolutionary genomic studies that light skin evolved at least twice independently in Eurasia within the last 20,000 years or so at the extremities. The selection coefficients are large, so I am confused as to why even minimal gene flow did not result in equilibration and homogenization of the allelic profiles of the populations. I have posited that the answer has to do with very low population densities…

Stem cells on the radio

How do you think the Rabid Right is reacting to Obama's enlightened stem cell policies? This comic isn't far from the truth. Here's Glenn Beck, always the representative of Idiot America. So here you have Barack Obama going in and spending the money on embryonic stem cell research, and then some, fundamentally changing - remember, those great progressive doctors are the ones who brought us Eugenics. It was the progressive movement and it was science. Let's put science truly in her place. If evolution is right, why don't we just help out evolution? That was the idea. And sane people agreed…

Lonesome George Not so Lonesome After All

Eleven species of giant tortoise are found throughout the Galapagos Islands. The (Lonesome George) Pinta tortoise is one of the smaller species. Image: BBC News. Do you remember "Lonesome George"; the male giant Galapagos tortoise from the island of Pinta? Well, it appears that he is not so lonesome afterall, since researchers discovered a first-generation hybrid between a Pinta tortoise and a tortoise from Isabela isle. This hybrid, which shares half of its genes with George, was discovered on Isabela. Because of this hybrid's parentage, it is possible that a more thorough sampling of…

American Academy of Pediatrics on the Delta Airline Video (and a petition for you to sign)

Below is a letter from the Amerian Academy of Pediatrics to the President of Delta Airlines. Apparently, Delta Airlines has decided to continue to show the video in question. Dear Mr. Anderson, The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) objects to the paid advertisement/public service message from the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) being shown throughout the month of November on Delta's in-flight programming. The ad urges viewers to become informed about influenza and how to stay well during the flu season without resorting to the influenza vaccine. While hand washing and covering…

Obligatory Book Hype: Five Months to Go

The ScienceBlogs upgrade put a bit of a kink in my plans for monthly book hype, but I didn't want to let the day pass without noting that the official release date for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is five months from today. (You can pre-order it from Amazon, where they're offering to pair it with a book by some theorist guy). I don't have any splashy announcements to roll out for the five-month countdown. I have, however, updated dogphysics.com, adding a page for the recent contest winners, and updating the book information page with blurb quotes (actually, three of the four so far-- I…

How the Aphid got its Pink

A pleasingly pink pea aphid (Acrythosiphon pisum) A long time ago, on a host plant far, far away, an aphid became infected with a fungus. And then it did something unusual: it incorporated some fungal genes into its own genome. New research by Nancy Moran and Tyler Jarvik, published yesterday in the journal Science, used the newly-published pea aphid genome to demonstrate that the genes the aphids use to make pink carotenoid pigments are derived not from insects but from a gene lineage nested well within the fungi. This observation is interesting for two points. First, most animals with…

How to game Google Scholar

I've heard back from a few people now who contacted Google about the issue of indexing creationist sites in Google Scholar; these are informal remarks from the team, not an official policy statement, but they're still interesting. And revealing. And useful. They'll change your perspective on Google Scholar. The premise of the petition to Google to stop serving up creationist claptrap is a misconception. Google Scholar does not index on content; it can't, it's just a dumb machine sorting text. Google Scholar does not, and this is the surprise to me, index on the source — it makes no decision…

Hacking Vision?

An interesting idea from Mark Changizi from RPI: can one design pictures which, when interpreted by your vision, perform a computation? Press release here (note to RPI public relations department: you should probably make it so that the webpage address of your press releases can be copied from the browser address bar. Somewhere a web designer should be shot.) and paper in Perception published here. The basic idea is to use the orientation information we glean from looking at objects to perform computations. Thus for example, Changizi suggest that we can represent zeros and ones via the two…

To Understand and Protect our Home Planet

This is upsetting. NASA has deleted from its mission statement the phrase "to understand and protect our home planet." This edit was made in conjunction with the Bush administration's new Vision for Space Exploration, whose primary objective is to shift NASA's emphasis (and public attention) away from Earth-bound issues (ie, global warming) and towards flashy manned Moon and Mars missions. From the New York Times article on the subject: "...the change comes as an unwelcome surprise to many NASA scientists, who say the 'understand and protect' phrase was not merely window dressing but…

Letters from Nietzsche

OK, the last two posts with quotes from philosophers were at least remotely relevant to recent discussions on this blog. These quotes will be completely irrelevant, but they've stuck with me since I first read them at least a decade ago, and have been on my mind recently, so I thought I'd post them. They're from letters by Nietzsche to friends Cosima Wagner, Richard Wagner's widow, and Jacob Burckhardt, a historian, written in January, 1889, soon after his "psychotic break." The translations are from here (where you an read other January, 1889 letters). Letter from January 3, 1889 to Cosima…

Shark Cartilage In the Water

I just love the title; it's from a href="http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/333/7578/1129">recent editorial (link to abstract; subscription required for full access) in the British Medical Journal.  The author, Jonathan Waxman, argues that the medical profession should protect patients from exploitation from the alternative medicine industry.  He points out the potential down side to some alternative treatment, particularly in the area of his specialty, oncology: It is estimated that up to 80% of all patients with cancer take a complementary treatment or follow a dietary programme…

Yes, the Voting Rights Act Is Still Relevant

From today's New York Times: WASHINGTON -- A special three-judge court ruled Friday that Congress acted constitutionally when it extended the law requiring sections of the country with a history of racial discrimination to get federal approval for any changes in voting procedures. The unanimous decision upheld a central provision of the Voting Rights Act, which Congress initially passed in 1965 and has extended several times since, most recently for 25 years in 2006. Section 5 of the law prohibits several states, mostly in the South, and some local government agencies from changing their…

Creationist Myths

Via this press release I learned about this book: The Top Ten Myths About Evolution. The book deconstructs ten myths that creationists propagate while spreading misinformation. It also gives me an excuse to post cute pictures of furry primates. The official website lists the ten myths: 1) Survival of the Fittest; 2) It's Just a Theory; 3) The Ladder of Progress; 4) The Missing Link; 5) Evolution is Random; 6) People Come from Monkeys; 7) Nature's Perfect Balance; 8) Creationism Disproves Evolution; 9) Intelligent Design is Science; 10) Evolution is Immoral It sounds like a good treatment of…

NASA Earth Observatory images of Cleveland (not the city) and Nyiragongo

The NASA Earth Observatory has been dazzling us with images from the Eyjafjallajökull eruption for months - but they have been dazzling us with volcanoes images for years! Here are two more images for those of you who love seeing volcanoes from above: Cleveland, Alaska As I mentioned earlier this week, Cleveland volcano likely had a small eruption over the weekend producing a small ash cloud. Cleveland is already known as an extremely picturesque volcano, both from the ground for its highly conical shape - a textbook andesitic stratocone - and from space. This new June 1 image is from almost…

Tripoli falls to rebels; Benghazi, capitol of a free Libya, celebrates

Early last month, I quoted a dispatch from a checkpoint between rebel-controlled Libya and Qaddafi's Tripoli: The refugees say that Tripoliâs rebels defiantly paint their flags on anything that will spread their message, including pigeons, cats and balloons. Today, the rebel flags are flying from buildings across the city, and rumors of Col. Qaddafi's death or flight from the city abound. The author of that poetic line from early July, Kareem Fahim, reports: âWe are coordinating the attacks inside [Tripoli], and our forces from outside are ready to enter Tripoli,â said Anwar Fekini, a rebel…

Hybrid image: Albert Einstein or Harry Potter?

How you perceive the image depends on the distance from which you are viewing it. From up close, you'll see Albert Einstein, but if you move further back from the screen, you'll see Harry Potter. This is one of a series of hybrid images created by Aude Oliva of the Computational Visual Cognition Lab at MIT. Here's an explanation of how these images work, and here's the spinning silhouette illusion from yesterday. [Original image uploaded to Flickr by Jeremiah Owyang]

On Why Deep-Sea Archaen Are Better

[The Archaen] was collected at Axial Volcano on the Juan de Fuca Ridge off the coast of Washington and Oregon. Fixing nitrogen at 92 C [198F] smashes the previous record by 28 C [82F], a record held by Methanothermococcus thermolithotrophicus, an archaeon that was isolated from geothermally heated sand near an Italian beach and fixes nitrogen at temperatures up to 64 C [116 F]. The critter is also from close to the good ol' U S of A as opposed to eurotrash from an Italian beach. Story from Newswise.

In my mailbox

Checking my mail today, I discovered one curiosity, one holiday card, and one piece of Very Official Stationery from the University that employs me. The curiosity: I actually got a reprint request. Those are very strange — it used to be that you'd always get a flurry of these after publishing something, and you'd be sure to order lots of extra copies of your paper so you could send them out, but nowadays they are going the way of the dodo. It's so much easier to download the paper from the journal's electronic archives, and even when I get a request because of limited access, I can just email…

Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys

From the Regulator Bookshop: Time: Tuesday, February 3, 2009 7:00 p.m. Location: Regulator Bookshop Title of Event: Rob Dunn NCSU ecology professor Rob Dunn will discuss and sign copies of his new book, Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys. Dunn, an engaging science popularizer, tells the exhilarating story of humanity's quest to discover everything about our natural world from the unimaginably small in the most inhospitable of places on earth to the unimaginably far away in the unexplored canals on Mars. For more information see the…

listening to elves

Alda explains how some people might have come to believe in elves... happy partying elves, inside the mountains My Iceland: the glamorous opulence of the hidden people "...When we were about halfway along the full stretch of the rock face to our right, we suddenly heard this amazing sound. It was a huge party going on somewhere, a banquet, with hundreds of people laughing and talking, classes clinking, cutlery scraping on dinnerware - a cacophony of merriment coming from somewhere beyond the cliffs. We stopped dead in our tracks, looked at each other with bewildered expressions, then…

The Importance of Connotations in Headline Writing

The Washington Post has an article this morning headlined Navy Wins Exemption From Bush to Continue Sonar Exercises in Calif.: The White House has exempted the Navy from two major environmental laws in an effort to free the service from a federal court's decision limiting the Navy's use of sonar in training exercises. Environmentalists who had sued successfully to limit the Navy's use of loud, mid-frequency sonar -- which can be harmful to whales and other marine mammals -- said yesterday that the exemptions were unprecedented and could lead to a larger legal battle over the extent to which…

The Sun Kills and It Must Be Stopped

The WHO reports that the Sun kills as many as 60,000: As many as 60,000 people a year die from too much sun, mostly from malignant skin cancer, the World Health Organization has reported. It found that 48,000 deaths every year are caused by malignant melanomas, and 12,000 by other kinds of skin cancer. About 90 percent of such cancers are caused by ultraviolet light from the sun. Radiation from the sun also causes often serious sunburn, skin aging, eye cataracts, pterygium -- a fleshy growth on the surface of the eye, cold sores and other ills, according to the report, the first to detail…

Which "foreign bidder"?

The tagline from a new ad by Wichita-area Congressman Todd Tiahrt is "The safety of American ports must never be sold off to a foreign bidder." It ends a spot that seems aimed at distancing himself from the White House over the Dubai ports deal. The entire enterprise is bizarre, not least because Tiahrt is as much a rubber stamp as anyone else. Better than that, though, is that “There is probably no other critical infrastructure—besides port security—in the U.S., where so much of it is in foreign hands,” according to Stephen E. Flynn, the Jeanne J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National…

Renewed activity at Soufriere Hills causing power problems on Montserrat

An ash plume from Soufriere Hills on Montserrat, taken from the ISS on October 11, 2009. If you ever wonder what might happen to the U.S. if a large volcanic eruption, lets say from Rainier or Long Valley or Shasta, occurred, you can look at the island of Montserrat for some of the potentials problems. The renewed activity at Soufriere Hills (video link) that started in October is causing problems with the power infrastructure of the island - specifically the ash from the eruption is falling on power lines and damaging them. Ash has a minor electrical charge, so it will coat anything with a…

Chaiten Eruption, Day 7

Another day, another development at Chaiten. Military stationed near the volcano helping with evacuations reported "booming noises" and saw incandescent blocks getting hurled from the vent area. This suggests that lava is at the surface and potentially that the edifice itself is beginning to crack/strain from the loss of material from the eruption. Remember, when you erupt all this volcanic material, you leave a void under the volcano where that magma used to be, so suddenly you have a volcano with no foundation. Sometimes they can founder into that space, forming a caldera. We already…

From The Desk of Zelnio: Alviniconcha hessleri

Alviniconcha hessleri (Mollusca: Mesogastropoda: Provannidae) When you think of hydrothermal vents, what comes to mind first? Is it the gushing black smoke out of a chimney? Perhaps you envision the enormous tubeworms with their red velvety plumes sticking out of their white tubes. Some may even be familiar with the dense swarms of blind shrimp. What may not come to mind are big hairy snails! Description Alviniconcha hessleri was discovered and described almost 20 years ago (7) and is a mesogastropod in the family Provannidae (14). It is named both after the submersible Alvin ("Alvin's…

Evolution & Creationism in Christian colleges

Interesting article about the teaching of evolution in a United Methodist affiliated college, and Creationism in a Baptist one. From the Creationist: "At the time of the Big Bang, evolutionists believe there was all this matter out there, where did that matter come from? At the time of the Big Bang, how did the Earth end up getting all of the water and the air and the life-forms? Everything from as simple as bacteria to as complicated as people -- no life-forms have ever been found anywhere else," Wilbanks said. "We hear that all life-forms are progressing from one life-form to another, but…

Scientists at Sea

One of our scientists, Dr. Assaf Vardi, is off on a month-long cruise. He is on the Knorr, a research vessel operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, with a team from the Weizmann Institute and another four research teams on a route that will take them from the Azores to Iceland. On the way, they will be sampling the plankton; among other things they want to understand how the molecular processes that take place in these single-celled organisms affect everything from the ocean's food chain to the oxygen in the atmosphere. Rose Eveleth is posting from the ship daily on the…

Re-engaging boys in learning

From lack of role models in the elementary classroom to a learning culture that isn't engaging boys in the learning process, meet Nifty Fifty Speaker Ali Carr-Chellman who talks about how to change these things. --For every 100 girls suspended from school there are 250 boys suspended from school. --For every 200 girls expelled from school there are 350 boys expelled --For every 100 girls in special education there are 217 boys in special ed --For every 100 girls with a learning disability there are 276 boys with such a disability (Boys are four times as likely as girls to be diagnosed with…

Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: terrorists, religious and otherwise

The world has had its fill of religion-inspired terrorists. But exactly who is a "terrorist"? In my book, a terrorist is someone who knowingly kills, maims or creates terror in innocent people for a political purpose. The political purpose might be to change a government (from secular to theocratic, from one economic system to another, from colonial rule to nation state, etc.) or change a policy (stop a war, stop abortion) or to take revenge. Most people only want to employ the term to those who kill, maim or create terror for reasons they disapprove of. I'm not in that camp. If you knowingly…

'Blogs firmly established as means of scientific communication'

A voice from Latin America: Many scientists use science blogs to post information on their work and receive comments from other scientists and from people outside the usual circle of readers. Some authors even suggest posting in blogs part of their works before publishing them, in order to exchange ideas and bring new perspectives. Scientists who use blogs consider them a complement to - not a replacement of - scientific journals, since they represent documents that do not substitute articles, but that establish a maturing stage of scientific work preparation, which is static and limited in…

JWST hanging out there

Savage article on JWST history and funding from Ron Cowen at Science News. ""It's a game of you lie and I'll swear to it," says Michael Griffin, NASA's administrator from April 2005 to January 2009. "The whole community talks itself into unrealistic cost estimates.... Everyone knows it's wrong. Every engineer knows it's utterly without foundation, but engineers aren't making the decisions."" If only an experienced engineer had headed NASA at the critical time, ensuring realistic cost estimates and funding profiles with guidance from HQ... This is going back to the Casani report on JWST -…

Great Observatories View of the Milky Way Centre

Awesome combined image from Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra, showing deep view of the centre of the Milky Way, in celebration of the International Year of Astronomy. From Hubblesite.org Annotated image (click for larger version) Full image collection at Hubblesite.org Tricolore (click for larger version): the images combines near-infrared imaging from the Wide Field Camera (3) Ye Olde Near-Infrared Camera (really, NIC mosaic - ouch - see comments) on Hubble, mid/near-infrared images from Spitzer, and soft x-ray images from Chandra, mosaic'd into a gorgeous false colour close up of the inner…

Ray Bradbury has died...

One of my favorite books of all time-- 'The Martian Chronicles'. It doesnt matter how many times I read it... The same stories, the same lines cause me to sob uncontrollably, from awe of humanitys potential, from mourning humanitys lost potential, from thinking about the great things we have achieved, from thinking about The End and how we will End It All... Ray Bradbury has died. *sigh* One of my favorite lines, from anything, book/movie/song, anything: “Garrett?” called Stendahl softly. Garrett silenced himself. “Garrett,” said Stendahl, “do you know why I’ve done this to you? Because you…

Meet DOD/CDMRP Cancer Research Grants Officials at AACR Tomorrow

Never pass up an opportunity to get face-to-face time with grants officials from any research funding agency. This from the Department of Defense for those of you in Denver tomorrow: To all individuals attending the 100th Annual Meeting of the AACR in Denver, Colorado: The Department of Defense's Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs (CDMRP) will be presenting a series of short talks on CDMRP and its cancer research funding programs on Wednesday, April 22, from 8:30-10:30 a.m., in Room 607 of the Colorado Convention Center. Scheduled to speak from the CDMRP are the Director, a…

Ancient Horse Genome Sequenced

Bone fragments used for sequencing the ancient horse genome. Image credit: LUDOVIC ORLANDO as published in The Scientist. Researchers have successfully created a draft sequence of the complete genome of a 700,000 year old horse from a bone fragment extracted from permafrost in the Yukon Territory (Canada). This is the oldest specimen ever sequenced by almost 10-fold. Prior sequencing of the whole genome from a hominid from Siberia who lived 80,000 years ago was the prior record holder. It is amazing to me that they were able to recover the entire genome from such an old specimen! These…

Rumblings and worries about Obama's FDA options

As Obama solidifies his teams on science, education, and environment, attention -- and not a little worry from the drug industry -- is turning toward his hunt for a new FDA commissioner. The WSJ Health Blog reports that the FDA Commissioner Coalition, which is heavy with groups financed by the drug industry, appears increasingly concerned that Obama will appoint outspoken critics of drugmakers and the FDA, such as Cleveland Clinic cardiologist Steven Nissen or Baltimore health commissioner Joshua Sharfstein, who is heading Obama's FDA assessment team. While the coalition prominently talks…

The cultural destruction of Iraq

Erasing Memory: The Cultural Destruction of Iraq is a 28-minute film from the Archaeology Channel which documents the plundering of Iraqi archaeological sites and looting and destruction of priceless artifacts. This destruction of Iraq's heritage has been going on since the U.S. invaded the country in March 2003, and continues to this day. The looting of artifacts from the Iraq museum in Baghdad, which took place soon after the U.S. began its military action, was widely publicized, but the mass media now makes no mention of the subject. In the last few years, many objects looted from various…