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Demand is the Real Issue, Right?

The always-brillliant and funny Christine Patton aka The Peak Oil Hausfrau, in the latest Peak Oil Review Commentary, has turned her sights to the IEA's recent predictions, managing to properly skewer both the IEA's predictions and the predictive value of economic modelling (two great tastes that taste great together!): The International Economics Agency today released its World Income Outlook, which predicts a 564 percent increase in the median world income over the next three months. IEA Chief Economics Officer Brandon Blighted explains, "Our meticulous research clearly shows that an…

Will BP Pay for the Spill's Toll on Mental Health?

BP's well in the Gulf of Mexico has been capped and may soon be "killed" for good, but fixing the widespread damage from the disaster will take years. The National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health has has released a report (supported by the Children's Health Fund) based on a survey of 1,200 residents of coastal Louisiana and Mississippi. Their findings give a sense of how widespread the spill's impacts are on physical, mental, and financial health: Over one-third of parents reported that their children had experienced either physical…

Psychic Sent to Prison for 5 years for Fraud - So can we jail them all now?

Via Ed I find out about a Psychic in Colorado sentenced to 5 years for fraud. BOULDER, Colo. (CBS4)- A woman claiming to be a psychic has been sentenced to five years behind bars for stealing more than $300,000 from her clients. Nancy Marks told her victims she needed their cash and credit card numbers to "draw out bad energy." In Dec. 2010, a jury in Boulder found Marks guilty on 14 counts of fraud and tax evasion. Now here is what I find confusing. How is this woman different (other than the tax evasion) from other psychics who claim to be able to predict the future, talk to ghosts, or…

Detachable wing-daggers. Amazing waterfowl facts part III

Another waterfowl fact. This one is gonna be brief. In the previous article we looked at the wing spurs of Plectropterus. They're pretty cool, but they're far from unique, and even more incredible are the much larger, dagger-like spikes seen in screamers... Screamers (Anhimidae) are a small group (three species) of South American* waterfowl... well, they're not referred to as 'waterfowl' as often as are other members of Anseriformes, but I think they should be. One species (Horned screamer Anhima cornuta: shown in adjacent illustration) has - as you might guess - a horn! (though, technically…

Friday Random Ten, Feb 16

Frameshift, "Walking through Genetic Space": a track from an album inspired by the writings of Steven Jay Gould about genetics and evolution. The leader of the project is the lead singer of Dream Theater; the end result has a very DT like feeling to it. The album overall is quite good; bit this track is a slow ballad, and a ballad about genetics just doesn't really work. Robert Fripp and David Sylvian, "Jean the Birdman": Fun, interesting piece of work, from a project that David Sylvian and Robert Fripp did a few years back. Sylvian's usual crooning voice, over his and Fripp's guitar work.…

Last day in San Francisco

A month has passed. It was a steep learning curve, but I think I have climbed high enough on it to be confident that I'll be fine on my own back in Chapel Hill. Being a part of the PLoS team is such an exhillarating experience - there is so much energy and optimism around the office, everybody from CEO to the newest intern living, breathing and dreaming Open Access 24/7. Not to bore you about the job any more - you will be hearing about PLoS over and over again here - let me, for now, just show you some pictures (under the fold) from the farewell party last night at Jupiter in downtown…

279-283/366: Week in Photos

Shortened "week" this week, because I did the last photo dump on Tuesday. 80% of these are also from a single day, this Friday, when I decided to call a Mental Health Day and get away from stuff that was annoying me by driving down to Scoharie County to hike up Vroman's Nose. 279/366: Road Rt. 30 from the top of Vroman's Nose. Vroman's Nose is a huge rock outcrop in the middle of a valley, with a moderately steep trail going up through woods to a dramatic cliff with views over the valley. These are very cool when you're there, but the camera really dilutes the impact of those kind of…

Weekend Diversion: Making it Count!

"The time will not be taken from the sum of your life. Instead of shortening it, it will indefinitely lengthen it and make you truly immortal. Nevermore will time seem short or long, and cares will never again fall heavily on you, but gently and kindly as gifts from heaven." -John Muir, on Glacier National Park It's always hard to tear yourself away from your day-to-day life, from the things you work hard at building, and remember that there's a whole wide world -- and a whole Universe -- to experience and enjoy. Perhaps the best times in my life involve going off to explore some new and, at…

When I make an assumption...

Yesterday, I talked about why we should look for a history of life on Mars, and had an article for SEED magazine to that effect. After all, we've made some recent geological finds that are surefire indicators of past liquid water on Mars, and possible indicators of past life. While most of the article was about Mars' history as a planet and the argument that in the past, it was much more Earth-like than it is today, I had one sentence that appears to have touched off a firestorm in the comments: I don't know whether there was life on Mars or not, but based on what I know about abiogenesis…

DAMOP Day 1

Tuesday at DAMOP was dominated by my talk. Well, in my mind, at least. I suppose people who aren't me saw other interesting things. OK, fine, I did go to some other sessions. I would link to the abstracts, but the APS web site is having Issues this morning. In the Prize Session that always opens the meeting, Gerry Gabrielse from Harvard gave a really nice talk about his work on measuring the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron. This is the "g-factor" that I've cited before in calling quantum physics the most precisely tested theory in the history of science. Gabrielse is the guy behind…

Hospital city

I don't have a lot of experience with small hospitals. My medical school's hospital was about two square blocks of buildings, all of them attached, ranging in age from 100 years to 10 years. The were connected by irregular bridges and linked (ex)-fire escapes, and by miles of dim tunnels. During my residency, the campus covered several square blocks, with buildings linked by more airy bridges (a la Minneapolis) and "secret" tunnels that you could find if you just knew where to look---although getting lost underground was the rule. My current hospital is---by number of admissions---one of…

My New Book: High Frontiers!

Writing for the Internet is like yelling into the void: freeing, probably more than a little cathartic, but ultimately lonely. That's not to say that I haven't made profound connections out here, but like most writers I long for a little thing with my name on it that fits in the hand, that can be passed around and earmarked, tossed away and re-discovered. Which is why I'm so pleased to announce the existence of precisely such a little thing: my brand-new collection of essays and arcana, High Frontiers, fresh from the presses of Publication Studio: High Frontiers brings together disparate…

Rep. Joe Barton: Not Smarter Than A 6th Grader

Representative Joe Barton is feeling very good about himself right now. He's convinced that he "baffled" a Nobel Laureate with a "basic question." During a congressional hearing earlier today, he asked Energy Secretary Stephen Chu how the oil got to Alaska. Here's the YouTube clip of the exchange. For your convenience, I've done a quick transcript. Barton: Dr. Chu, I don't wanna leave you out, you're our... you're our scientist. I have one simple question for you in the last six seconds. How did all the oil and gas get to Alaska and under the Arctic Ocean? Chu: [Nervous-sounding…

Other-race faces: Why do they seem different?

This is a guest post by Rivka Ihejirika, one of Greta's top student writers for Spring 2007 Do you find it harder to recognize the face of someone from a race other than your own? Does it take you longer to recall the face of someone from an unfamiliar race? Some researchers believe that we are born with a predisposition to process faces of those from our own race better than faces from other races. Other researchers believe that the own-race face bias is not innate, but we develop a preference for the race of those in our immediate environment. People of all ages demonstrate the bias to…

Ants secrete aphid tranquilizer from their feet

Ants and aphids have a symbiotic (or mutually beneficial) relationship. The aphids provide the ants with a food-source - the sugar-rich honeydew they excrete when eating plants - and, in return, the ants protect the aphids from ladybirds and other insects that prey on them. To ensure a constant supply of honeydew, some ant species cultivate large numbers of aphids, and prevent them from straying too far from the colony by biting and damaging, or even completely removing, their wings. The ants also secrete a chemical from their mandibles which inhibits wing development in juvenile aphids.…

Friday Sprog Blogging: Air and Space highlights.

Younger offspring: (climbing on a bed) Let's launch a mission to space! Dr. Free-Ride: OK. Younger offspring: (using a blanket and a pillow to fashion a helmet) I'm going to put on a space-suit. Dr. Free-Ride: Are you planning a space-walk on this mission? Younger offspring: Yep. If astronauts need to pee in the middle of a space-walk, they can go right in their space-suits. But we're just playing, so I won't do that. Dr. Free-Ride: Imagine my relief. The Free-Ride offspring share some of their thoughts in the aftermath of their visit to the Air and Space Museum: Elder offspring: I really…

"You can't spray Jesus with RoundUp"

Regular readers know that I'm a bit of a connoisseur of pareidolia, so much so that I even have a category devoted to it. For those not familiar with the concept, pareidolia is nothing more than seeing patterns in things. One of the most famous examples is seeing faces, animals, or other objects in clouds. Among the religious, a particularly common strain of pareidolia is to see Jesus or Mary in patterns on anything from pancakes, to sheet metal, to windows, to trees, to doors, to MRIs. Even Ikea isn't immune. I've even seen a story of Satan appearing on a bathroom tile and wondered if it…

The best snark at Oprah Winfrey...

...comes, from of all places, Gawker: Oh, good, Oprah is going to give Jenny McCarthy a talk show, because she wants your kid to die of the measles. McCarthy, a famous celebrity from the long-defunct Playboy magazine and much missed MTV channel, has been on a crusade to find an evildoer responsible for her son's autism. She settled on vaccines, because why not. And now she spends a great deal of time on TV explaining that the mercury that has not been vaccines since 1999 is giving all the kids autism, but it can be cured with Chelation therapy, which has so far only killed one or two autistic…

I get e-mail, too

I realize that PZ seems to have all the fun when it comes to entertaining e-mails from cranks, but that doesn't mean I don't sometimes get my share of such amusement. For example, yesterday, waiting for me in the morning in my e-mail in box was this delightful gem: From: jockdoubleday@hotmail.com Subject: the dark force behind the global crisis Date: February 23, 2009 12:29:07 AM GMT-05:00 To: jockdoubleday@hotmail.com To friends of life on Earth, There is a dark force working to undermine all ecosystems on Earth. This force is a trans-century cult that calls itself the Illuminati -- because…

The IgNobels winners have been announced

Ah, yes, it's that time of year again. The winners of the 2007 IgNobel Prize have been announced. There have been several "worthy" winners, for example: Mayu Yamamoto from Japan won the Ig Nobel prize in chemistry for her development of a novel way to extract vanillin, the main component in vanilla bean extract, from cow dung. In tribute to Yamamoto's achievement, Toscanni's imitated her achievement and distributed samples of the resulting ice cream to Nobel laureates seated on the stage. Loud chants of "Eat it! Eat it!" from the audience finally persuaded the skeptical Nobel laureates to try…

Rachel Pinker on Monckton's testimony to Congress

On top of the 21 climate scientists correcting the numerous errors in Christopher Monckton testimony to Congress, we also have Rachel Pinker and Ellsworth Dutton correcting Monckton's misunderstanding of Pinker, Zhang and Dutton (2005): 1 Viscount Monckton attempts to directly link the change in surface solar radiation to a change in temperature. He states: "What, then, caused the third period of warming? Most of that third and most recent period of rapid warming fell within the satellite era, and the satellites confirmed measurements from ground stations showing a considerable, and naturally…

Ion Torrent bought by Life Technologies

More huge news in the sequencing industry, following on from the public share offer from Pacific Biosciences - relative newcomer to the field, Ion Torrent, has just been bought by Life Technologies for an impressive US$375 million in cash and stock, with an option to increase by a further US$350 million if "certain technical and time-based milestones" are met by the end of 2012. Ion Torrent made a splash with its launch at this year's Advances in Genome Biology and Technology meeting in February (here's my coverage from the meeting). The company has developed a sequencing technology based on…

On the Trail of Physiology: Arizona

The last stop on our trail of physiology this Fall is Arizona. The Arizona Physiological Society held their annual meeting on the Medical Campus of the University of Arizona in Tucson on November 11-12. The meeting opened with a special session for future (and current) physiologists interested in careers outside of academia. With academic jobs being so hard to come by, it is great that this chapter is supporting future scientists by suggesting alternate career options. Dr. Douglas C. Eaton, from Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, presented the Keynote Lecture for the meeting…

Monday Musings: Kilauea, Pacaya, Eyjafjallajökull and more!

Looking for some volcano news - you've found it. A shot of volcano "tourists" near the erupting Pacaya. Photo by the Associated Press. Eruptions reader Dr. Boris Behncke dropped a note that Kilauea has not one but two active lava lakes right now. The lava lakes can be seen on the webcams for the Halema`uma`u Crater and the Pu`u O`o flank vent. The latest status update from June 6th by the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory talks about both the summit and rift activity (video) on Kilauea as well. Meanwhile, Hawaii 24/7 has a piece in the Volcano Watch series about whether residents of Maui…

Submarine volcano off Italy may be a tsunami threat

Map showing the location of submarine volcano Marsili, near the Italian coast. Image from INGV. The subject of submarine volcanism near Italy has come up before here on Eruptions but now it has made the jump into the worldwide media after some claims made by Enzo Boschi, president of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV). The long and short of what I can tell from the articles is that Marsili, a submarine volcano in the Tyrrhenian Sea, could be a threat to create a significant tsunami that would hit Italy (amongst other Mediterranean countries). The volcano lies only…

CORRECTED: Erta Ale(?) erupts ... and more?

In one of the most oddly worded articles I've seen from the BBC, a lava flow from Erta Ale an unidentified volcano in the Erte Ale range in Ethiopia has erupted a significant amount of lava. The headline states "Ethiopia volcano sets lava record", which is strange on multiple counts, but mostly because I'm not familiar with any "lava records", who might keep track of them and what, exactly, this "lava record" is. In fact, they don't even mention it in the article itself. They do, however, point out that lava from this eruption has covered 300 square kilometers, which is a decent chunk of…

Testable Creation Model, part 2

In this entry, I will deal only with the brief note that Rusty Lopez made in reference to a testable creation model. In the next few days, I'll post a longer and more detailed critique of the model presented by Hugh Ross that Rusty referenced in his note. I'll put his statements in italic and my own responses in plain type. A Scientifically Testable Creation Model...How is this possible? Are we saying that science can prove creation? No. Reasons to Believe is saying that we can test the predictions made by competing scientific models. We can at least begin with an area of agreement. Testing a…

Comments of the Week #36: The Nuclear Option

"Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living." -Omar N. Bradley There are some words that, seemingly, you can't utter without inflaming people's passions in one way or another, and nuclear seems to fall squarely in that category. This week, we touched on a number of remarkable topics over on Starts With A Bang, including: The biggest spiral galaxy (for Ask Ethan), Norway vs. Kenya (for our Weekend Diversion), An all-season cluster, M35 (for Messier Monday), The chameleon in the vacuum…

Listeria sandwiches

(Source unknown) It's a lousy disease, but Radio New Zealand's headline has to be one of the more amusing headlines I've seen in ages: "Listeria sandwiches on sale at hospital cafe": Listeria has been found in packaged sandwiches sold by a cafe at Middlemore Hospital, Auckland. Food contractors to Counties Manukau District Health Board, Spotless Services, informed the DHB of the situation on Friday. The contamination was found in Naturezone Thai chicken sandwiches, sold by the Aviary Cafe on Monday, 3 March. (Radio New Zealand) So what's this Listeria stuff about, anyway? This material is…

The Cretaceous birds and pterosaurs of Cornet: part II, the pterosaurs

It's always been clear that pterosaurs were present in the Cornet assemblage (for the background on Cornet and its archosaur fossils, you need to have read part I). However, exactly what sort of pterosaurs are present at Cornet has been somewhat uncertain: the Late Jurassic ctenochasmatoid Cycnorhamphus, ornithocheirids and the Early Cretaceous Asian dsungaripterid Dsungaripterus were all reported from the assemblage during the 1980s (e.g., Jurcsák & Popa 1984) but, as with the birds, the remains on which these identification were based (currently housed at the Tarii Crisurilor Museum…

Arboreal alligator lizards - yes, really

As you might guess from the following article, I still have a bit of a thing going on with anguid lizards (the family that includes slow-worms, glass lizards, alligator lizards and galliwasps). This is despite the fact that I spent a lot of time over the last few days talking about new tupuxuarid pterosaurs, the behaviour of hadrosaurs, and the discovery of multiple (yes, multiple) new large mammal species in the Amazon... If you live in a northern place where anguids occur, you might regard these lizards as denizens of predominantly subtropical or temperate climates. The vast majority of…

Ocular Dominance Columns in Humans and the Limits of fMRI

Functional MRI (fMRI) is a very useful technique, but it lacks in resolution making some systems difficult to study. Adams et al. show in a study of ocular dominance columns in humans why good old staining is still useful when we reach the limits of imaging. Ocular Dominance Columns Ocular dominance columns are areas in the primary visual cortex (V1) of mammals that show a preference in activity to one eye over the other. (I think this applies to reptiles and amphibians as well, but I don't know that for sure). Here is a brief schematic of the visual system. The primary visual cortex is…

On the peculiarities of the Negro brain

Black peoples' brains are, of course, no more or less peculiar than those of any other people. The human brain is an extraordinarily complex organ, and there are just as many differences between the brains of people from the same ethnic group as there between the brains of people from different groups. Some racial peculiarities of the Negro brain is the title of a long and technical paper by the anthropologist Robert Bennett Bean, published in the American Journal of Anatomy in 1906. It is one of a series of scientific papers written by Bean in the early 20th Century, in which he tried to…

My mouse has two daddies

This is awesome news. Biologists have figured out how to enable two male mice to have babies together, with no genetic contribution from a female mouse. I, for one, look forward to our future gay rodent overlords. It was a clever piece of work. Getting progeny from two male parents has a couple of difficulties. One is that you need an oocyte, which is a large, specialized, complex cell type, and males don't make them. Not at all. You can tear a boy mouse to pieces looking for one, and you won't find a single example—they're a cell found exclusively in female ovaries. Now you might think that…

Human population structure, part n

I still remember when L. L. Cavalli-Sforza's The History and Geography of Human Genes was a candle in the dark, illuminating human history with slivers of genetic data laboriously gathered and analyzed over decades. We've come a long way. Dienekes points me to a new paper, Fine-scaled human genetic structure revealed by SNP microarrays: We report an analysis of more than 240,000 loci genotyped using the Affymetrix SNP microarray in 554 individuals from 27 worldwide populations in Africa, Asia, and Europe. To provide a more extensive and complete sampling of human genetic variation, we have…

Excellent GMO debate hosted at Intelligence Squared - a summary

The GMO debate hosted by Intelligent Squared was excellent and informative. I admit I learned things from listening and that's always a bonus, but it's worth watching to see the "respectable" arguments against GMO posed and dealt with very effectively by the pro-side in this debate. Spoiler alert, the pro-GMO side spanked the anti-GMO, going from 30% pre-debate in support of GMO (~30% against and 38% undecided) to 60% in support of GMO post-debate with anti-GMO only climbing 1% to 31. While voting on points of science and data is largely irrelevant, science is not democratic, it is reassuring…

King Björn Invited Me To His Mead-Hall

Yesterday Jrette, her buddy and I went down to Ströja in Kvillinge outside Norrköping and had a look at the mead-hall excavation I've blogged about. Arkeologikonsult's Björn Hjulström very kindly showed us around. The site will become an Östergötland classic, not only for the 6th century manor hall but also because of its long habitation continuity and for the keen appreciation its excavators have for stratigraphy. I saw hachured plans that would make British urban archaeologists proud. The excavation is caused by and funded through a planned road widening and railroad improvement which are…

The Universe is Alive

"Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again." -Antoine de Saint-Exupery When you look out into the Universe, what is it that you typically think of? Do you think of reliable, fixed stars and constellations? The vast expanse of the Milky Way, with its memorable dust lanes and amorphous shapes? Image credit: Wally Pacholka of http://www.astropics.com/. The unchanging nature of the points of light in the sky? Image credit: Roth Ritter (Dark Atmospheres), of the double cluster in…

Southern Colorado Science Update #1: Alamosa Salmonella outbreak report released

The region of southern Colorado on either side of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains is quite special to the Pharmboy family. The high plains to the east and San Luis Valley to the west are sparsely populated, stunningly beautiful with a veritable mine of geological treasures, and are unlikely to be built up in the PharmKid's lifetime. In fact, most counties down there have fewer people now than they did in 1900. It is also rugged and you can easily die out there. Which gets you in touch with what matters. Bighorn sheep and West Spanish Peak outside of La Veta, Colorado, about 60 miles east…

Hobbits again

Finally: more bones. Last October the world marveled at the announcement of the discovery of a new species of hominid, Homo floresiensis, in a cave called Liang Bua on the Indonesian island of Flores. One conclusion was more shocking than the next. First, this hominid stood only three feet high, earning it the nickname The Hobbit. Second, it lived as recently as 18,000 years ago, which was some 30,000 years after our own species had already been in southeast Asia for 30,000 years or more. The scientists argued that Homo floresiensis was a separate species that might have descended from Homo…

Disembodied Cognition, or Putting Your Self Out There

According to many theories of embodied cognition (particularly type 5), perception is designed to facilitate bodily action, and therefore perception and movement are deeply connected. Much of the evidence for this position comes from research on the relationship between attitudes and movements. For example, Cacioppo, Priester, and Berntson1 showed that if people were presented with objects while they moved their arm in a way that mimicked pulling something towards them (an approach movement), they liked them more than if those same objects were presented while they moved their arm as though…

AMPA receptors & synaptic plasticity Part 2

Following on from the introduction, I now discuss a number of recent studies which demonstrate that synaptic strengthening in different regions of the mammalian brain requires the incorporation of Ca2+-permeable GluR2-lacking AMPA receptors into the postsynaptic membrane of active or newly-potentiated synapses. Neurotransmitter release regulates GluR1 levels at the postsynaptic membrane Harms et al (2005) inhibited neurotransmitter release from specific subsets of cultured hippocampal neurons by transfecting individual cells with the tetanus toxin light chain tagged with cyan fluorescent…

Pterosaurs alive in, like, the modern day!

One last thing before Tet Zoo closes down for Christmas but, don't worry, this isn't anything I've knocked up specially... due to an unfortunate series of misunderstandings it's something I produced 'by mistake' and have since decided to recycle. Hey, why not. Ironically, I post it just when I'm in the middle of two other pterosaury bits of work (more on those soon). So I never did get to finish the anuran series before Christmas, nor post about that big, personally-relevant publication which has just appeared, nor get through the titan-hawks, monster pigeons and whatnot. And what about all…

Therizinosauroids and Altangerel Perle

A story of cheeks, beaks, feathers, bizarre theropod dinosaurs, and truly, truly amazing fossils.... Yesterday I made a special visit to the University of Portsmouth's School of Earth and Environmental Sciences in order to attend a talk by, and meet, Professor Altangerel Perle, the famous Mongolian palaeontologist and finder of awesome Cretaceous dinosaur fossils. From the 1970s onwards, Perle has personally excavated and described such incredible fossils as the fighting Velociraptor and Protoceratops, the alvarezsaurid Mononykus, the unusual giant dromaeosaurid Achillobator, and the…

Comments of the Week #56: From dark energy's existence to fine-tuning

“Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.” -Laurence J. Peter This past week was a super busy one on Starts With A Bang, from dark energy to stars to a fabulous book review and more! Just in the last seven days, we’ve looked at: What if dark energy isn't real? (for Ask Ethan), The great yogurt tragedy (for our Weekend Diversion), The cosmic sombrero (for Mostly Mute Monday), Einstein, Schrödinger, and the story you never heard (a review of Paul Halpern's new book), What the hell are baryon acoustic oscillations?, and Is the Universe fine-…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: It's a marvelous night for a moondance...

I have to confess, the ol' Folder of Woo was looking a little thin this week. No, it's not that I'm running out of topics (a.k.a. targets) for my usual Friday jaunt into the wacky world of woo. Far from it. It's just that, in the run-up to writing this, perusing the odd stuff therein just wasn't getting me fired up to do the feature the way that it usually does. There just wasn't anything there that was grabbing my attention and refusing to let it go, as has happened so often in weeks past. I began to worry whether Your Friday Dose of Woo has been going on too long (it's approaching a year…

Update on the Housing Post

My thanks to the readers who noted that I accidentally used adjusted income in my calculations of the ratio of the median house price to the median wage. Below are the updated figures: Below, on the Y-axis, is the ratio of the median house price (not adjusted for inflation; from here) to the median income (not adjusted for inflation; from here). So a value of 1.0 means that the median house costs as much as the median income, a value of 2.0 means that the median house costs twice as much as the median income: Here are the underlying numbers; obviously, median housing price is the higher…

Culture Dish Doesn't Live Here Anymore [Culture Dish]

As I said  yesterday on Twitter, a big conflict of interest and transparency problem has arisen on ScienceBlogs. Like several other bloggers here, I'm now on a hiatus, however like like David Dobb's and Blake Stacy's, my hiatus from ScienceBlogs will be permanent. I've been contemplating a move from ScienceBlogs for a while for several reasons, but PepsiGate has sealed the deal for me. Several of my ScienceBlogs colleagues have summed up the situation well, including PZ Myers, GrrlScientist, and Brian over at Laelaps. For a full recap of the issue and other ScienceBloggers' responses, see…

I'm Ready For My Close-Up!

If you're thinking about pollen much and you're not a farmer or a beekeeper, chances are you probably suffer from wicked seasonal allergies. Then again, you could be an artist. Kysa Johnson, a painter whose work explores microcosmic and macrocosmic natural phenomena, opens a show this weekend at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut. The paintings depict magnified versions of the tiny particles that populate the air around the museum. The opening reception for "Kysa Johnson: Blow Ups--Spores, Pollen, and Pollutants" will be held on Sunday, March 11 from 3 to 5pm;…

Match the trace with the sample

DNA sequence traces are often used in cases where: We want to identify the source of the nucleic acid. We want to detect drug-resistant variants of human immune deficiency virus. We want to know which base is located at which position, especially where we might be able to diagnose a human disease or determine the best dose of a therapeutic drug. In the future, these assays will likely rely more on automation. Currently, (at least outside of genome centers) many of these results are assessed by human technicians in clinical research labs, or DNA testing companies, who review these data by…