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Muvmuv Brewer calls her cancer Theo, asbestos is the culprit

[Update below, June 2013] Phillip Northmore worked for the UK's Ministry of Defense in Plymouth, England from 1963 to 1966. His job as a lagger meant he spent his day repairing and applying asbestos insulation around pipes and ductwork in the bowels of buildings. His wife recalled him coming home from work covered in dust. It would take three washings to get his work clothes clean because the water would turn white from the thick dust. Debbie "Muvmuv" Brewer is Phillip Northmore's eldest daughter. She was a pre-schooler when her dad worked as a lagger. Four decades later in 2006, Northmore…

Trial of Mining CEO Blankenship: Quotes from Week 5

The criminal trial of former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship went into its fifth week. Among others, the jurors heard from a veteran federal mine safety inspector, and a former Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) ventilation expert who went to work for Blankenship at Massey Energy following his retirement from the agency. Thanks to the reporting by the Charleston Gazette’s Ken Ward Jr. and Joel Ebert, I present some of my favorite quotes from this week’s proceeding in the federal courtroom: The prosecution put veteran mine safety inspector Harold Hayhurst on the witness stand to…

Sanity Claws

I seem to be on a poetry roll here, kids. When I was 14, Citadel Miniatures put out a small run of a novelty pewter miniature named Sanity Claws: a tentacled menacing monstrosity for the festive season. And now Norm Sherman of the Drabblecast, whom I do not hesitate to call a genius and an Elder God, has written a Lovecraftian poem on the same theme (in all likelihood quite independently of that 1986 pewter giggle-shudder item). Hear Norm perform the poem on the Drabblecast's Christmas Special! 'Twas the Night By Norm Sherman 'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the edifice…

What might you make of it?

Suppose you read a press release that started... Bleak first results from the world's largest climate change experiment and continued Greenhouse gases could cause global temperatures to rise by more than double the maximum warming so far considered likely by the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), according to results from the world's largest climate prediction experiment, published in the journal Nature this week. and went on The first results from climateprediction.net, a global experiment using computing time donated by the general public, show that average temperatures…

A New Life Awaits You in the Off-World Colonies

Some interesting astrophysics news this week, from Nature: scientists have used "microlensing" to discover a extrasolar planet only five times Earth's mass: Planet OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb looks much more like home. It lies about 390 million kilometres from its star: if it were inside our Solar System, the planet would sit between Mars and Jupiter. It takes ten years for the planet to orbit its parent star, a common-or-garden red dwarf that lies about 28,000 light years from Earth, close to the centre of our Galaxy. Of course, it's not quite time to start buying tickets for the colony ships: at…

Top Blogging of 2010, Then and Now

The final bit of meta-blogging I'll do this weekend is another look at what survives from past years. Unfortunately, when National Geographic took over, they broke our Google Analytics access, so I can't see blog stats from before mid-2012 any more. I do, however, have this old post listing the top posts of 2010, traffic-wise, which serves as a snapshot of what was popular at the time. It's interesting to see how this compares to the current list of top posts from 2010-- the approximate rank of 2010 posts based on traffic in 2014 is in parentheses: A Lot of Knowledge Is a Dangerous Thing (…

The Golden Age of Blogging Was 2010

When I was writing up the state of blogging post last weekend, I thought about pulling together a Top Ten Posts thing, but didn't have time. also, Google analytics moved a bunch of stuff since the last time I used it, so I had a hard time locating the right options. Having tracked it down, though, I give you the ten highest-traffic blog posts from 2014, with the year of posting in parentheses, and the fraction of the total pageviews for the year that the post racked up, according to Google Analytics: How Do I Kill the Squirrels who Are Eating My Car? (2010) 15.2% Why Does Excel Suck so Much…

The Original Donald Trump

From the early days of Trump: Trump: The response to my candidacy out here [in Los Angeles] has been incredible! Off the charts! The polls are unbelievable! Everybody loves me here -- loves me! My hotel phone is ringing off the hoo from major actresses! Major! Question shouted from the audience: Any of them voters? Trump: Who cares? They're huge! Not Pamela Lee, but that ballpark. A lot of people have been asking what this election is really about. Well, it's not about the economy, stupid! And it's not character, stupid! And it's not authenticity, Stupid! It's not even about the issues,…

Badly Argued Article on Religious Liberty

Rusty of the New Covenant Blog put up a post that included a link to this article by James Hitchcock, entitled "The Enemies of Religious Liberty". In this article, Hitchcock argues that numerous academics, including such prominent legal scholars as Cass Sunstein and Kathleen Sullivan, are opposed to the very idea of religious liberty, a negation that he refers to as "a radically comprehensive and even imperial version of liberal ideology." On a cursory reading, it seems to me that Hitchcock is misrepresenting the views of at least some of these scholars, building a straw man to destroy. His…

Alan Sokal on the Nature and Use of Science

I just got home from Alan Sokal's talk at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on the outskirts of Stockholm. He was on the same stage where astronaut Christer Fuglesang spoke a year ago. The headline was "What is Science and Why Should We Care?". Sokal's reply to his first question was, briefly, that science is to use reason and observation when approaching factual matters pertaining to any aspect of the single real world we live in. It's thinking clearly and respecting the evidence. Not only natural scientists proceed in this manner. Sokal also mentioned historians, plumbers and detectives…

Update on Ten Commandments Case

So most reports are saying that the justices appeared fairly hostile to the idea of removing the Ten Commandments displays. Judge for yourself by reading the transcript of the oral arguments. I was right that Douglas Laycock did not argue the Van Orden case, it was Erwin Chemerinsky of Duke University Law School. One statement sticks out to me, from Scalia: You know, I think probably 90 percent of the American people believe in the Ten Commandments, and I'll bet you that 85 percent of them couldn't tell you what the ten are. And when somebody goes by that monument, I don't think they're…

Tortured Canadian on No Fly List

The outrage for Maher Arar continues. Arar is the Canadian man who was captured by American authorities on a false tip from Canadian law enforcement, sent to Syria and tortured for 10 months before being released. He is completely innocent, as a Canadian board of inquiry showed recently. And to add insult to injury, quite literally, he could not fly to the United States recently to accept a human rights award because he's still on the government's no-fly list. He accepted by videotape instead: He broke down in tears during a videotaped acceptance speech at the National Press Club, when he was…

Cross-Linking and Statistics

Henry Farrell is doing some substantive political science blogging over at the Monkey Cage, looking at a paper by his co-blogger Eszter Hargittai and her colleagues. They did a really imprssive amount of work to look at the linking habits of liberal and conservative bloggers, and Henry zeroes in on one of the findings in particular: Straw-man arguments account for 43% of the 42 links from conservative blogs to liberals in our sample, and 54% of the 63 links from liberal blogs to conservatives in our group of entries that include cross-ideological linkages. ...Posts that concretely address the…

You dont have to be an HIV Denier to be an HIV Kook

Im going to have to add a 'C' to 'How kooks are made'-- The easy answers are rarely the right answers. Heres what I mean-- Lets say scientists do a high-throughput screening on a whole bunch of compounds and find a protein made in bananas inhibits HIV-1 infection. The 'easy' conclusions you make from this finding are not correct. You cannot eat bananas and be protected from HIV-1. You cannot eat bananas and get a therapeutic effect of this protein in already HIV+ individuals. You cannot apply bananas 'topically' and be protected from HIV-1. You cannot give people IV bananas as an anti-HIV…

There is no such thing as a godless family?

John and Cynthia Burke have adopted two children. By all accounts so far, they were a decent couple of an appropriate age and financially able to take care of the kids. The first was from the Children's Aid and Adoption Society in East Orange, New Jersey. They recently adopted a second child from the same agency — strangely, the article says their first son is now 31, which would put them in their mid-50s at the earliest, and I might see some grounds for objecting to the adoption on the basis of age…but no, a judge has ruled that they may not adopt on the basis of a rather interesting legal…

Specimen Request: Polyergus with Formica Hosts

James Trager writes in this week with a request and a photo: I have been interested in Polyergus (âAmazon antsâ, see here) since childhood, when I first had the good fortune to observe them on summer afternoons in northern New Mexico. After decades of intermittent field observations and microscopic examination of specimens of these ants from various parts of the USA and Eurasia, and various interactions with other researchers on this group, I came to the conclusion that a taxonomic revision of the group is necessary. Some background: Linda Goodloe, in her 1986 City University of NY…

The virophage - a virus that infects other viruses

Viruses may cause disease but some can fall ill themselves. For the first time, a group of scientists have discovered a virus that targets other viruses. This new virus-of-viruses was discovered by Bernard La Scola and Christelle Desnues at the University of the Mediterranean, who have playfully named it Sputnik, after the Russian for "fellow traveller". It is so unique that they have classified it in an entirely new family - the "virophages" - in honour of the similarities it shares with the bacteriophage viruses that use bacteria as hosts. The story of Sputnik started in 1992 with some…

Boy howdy! We've hooked Superbug's Maryn McKenna!

On the heels of the recruitment of Deborah Blum to ScienceBlogs, I am happy to welcome journalist Maryn McKenna to our neck of the ether. Her inaugural post can be read here. McKenna's blog is called Superbug, reflecting the title of her most recent book, SUPERBUG: The Fatal Menace of MRSA, and her general interests in infectious diseases and food safety. Her 2004 book, BEATING BACK THE DEVIL: On The Front Lines with the Disease Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service (of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), named among Top Science Books of 2004 by Amazon.com and an "…

Temperature of a Microwave

What's the temperature inside a microwave oven? I've seen some thermodynamics textbooks start off with a preliminary definition of temperature that amounts to "The temperature is what a thermometer says it is", since temperature is really a concept that fundamentally is derived from energy and entropy. So the books like to discuss those at length before talking about the real definition of temperature despite the fact that temperature is what people are accustomed to seeing. So let's put a thermometer in the microwave. If it's a mercury thermometer it will probably rocket up to off-scale…

Snails get sexy when parasites are around

In Lake Alexandrina, New Zealand, a population of snails is under threat from a parasitic flatworm, a fluke aptly known as Microphallus. The fluke chemically castrates its snail host and uses its body as a living incubator for its larvae. But the snails have a weapon against these body-snatching foes - sex. The New Zealand mud snail Potamopyrgus antipodarum is found throughout island's freshwater habitats. They breed either sexually or asexually through cloning, and the two strategies vary in prevalence throughout the lake. In the shallower waters round its margins, sex is the name of the…

Termite queen avoids inbreeding by leaving a legacy of clones

Termite colonies are families - millions of individual workers all descended from one king and one queen. But the colony itself tends to outlast this initial royal couple. When they die, new kings and queens rise to take their place. These secondary royals are a common feature of some families of termites, and they will often mate with each other for many generations. But there is more to this system than meets the eye. Kenji Matsuura from Okayama University has found that the secondary queens are all genetically identical clones of the original. There are many copies, and they have no…

Elephants crave companionship in unfamiliar stomping grounds

Moving to a new area can be a daunting experience, especially if you don't know anyone. At first, you might cling to any friends who do live nearby but eventually, you meet new people and start to integrate. As it is with humans, so it is with elephants. Noa Pinter-Wollman and colleagues from the University of California, Davis wanted to study how African elephants behave when they move to new environments. This happens quite naturally as elephants live in dynamic societies where small family groups continuously merge with, and separate from, each other. But they also face new territories…

Tuesday: Grand Challenges in Physiology

Image from the American Physiological Society's website.http://www.the-aps.org/mm/Conferences/APS-Conferences/2014-Conferences/… Tuesday was no less exciting than Monday! Here are some highlights: I thoroughly enjoyed a session called "Overcoming a Major Physiological Barrier: Adaptation from Saline to Freshwater Habitats" which highlighted the need for several species to shift how they regulate ion balance when they migrate between fresh water (ion absorption from the water) and salt water (ion secretion to the water). Clements K, Bojarski L, Johnson K, McMillan S, White L, Angert E (Univ…

Crof on selective (panic) attention - to flu and otherwise

In a post titled "Dead, Your Majesty," H5N1, Crof ponders why we scramble to deal with swine flu while ignoring other problems ranging from cancer to the 3000 children a day who die of malaria in Africa : Most of us are comfortably settled in rich industrial countries where problems like TB and AIDS are rarely in the news. Zimbabwe, like our own homeless, is a deplorable problem...but not our problem. We'd prefer to focus, via high-speed internet connections, on a conjectural disaster instead of the many real disasters killing people somewhere else. If a thousand people died in the US…

Review of "Math Doesn't Suck": Because Smart is Sexy

When I had the opportunity to review Danica McKellar's new book Math Doesn't Suck, I was excited on two levels. First and foremost, it's aimed at getting girls interested in math. I've always been flummoxed as to why the subject is such a male dominated field and curious to find out how Danica would take it on. Second, there's a more personal issue of having been nicknamed Winnie Cooper since elementary school because most everyone seemed to think we look an awful lot alike. (You can judge after the jump). And now it turns out we do indeed have something very real in common aside from…

The Truth about Climate Change

"You can't handle the truth!"  ranted Jack Nicholson in href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Few_Good_Men#Trivia">A Few Good Men.  I never saw the movie, but I saw the commercials.   Several months ago, Seed Magazine (a darn good publication) published an article entitled href="http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2006/09/free_dscovr.php">Free DSCOVR!.  The article informs us that a fully functional, paid-for satellite is sitting in storage, not used. At a time when the Earth's climate is at the top of practically every nation's agenda, it might seem perplexing that there's a $100…

Time to institutionalize Dennis Markuze

Every morning when I get up and get on the computer, the first thing I do is delete the pile of spam from Dennis Markuze, each of which is usually cross-posted to 50 to 100 other people. Every time I fire up Twitter, the first thing I do is clear the garbage Dennis Markuze has left there; yesterday I blocked and reported spam from over 25 Markuze accounts, amounting to several hundred messages. You know what? This is wrong. I shouldn't have to do this. Over the years — I've been getting these threats from Markuze since 1993 — it's gradually grown from an occasional deranged message on usenet…

The most precious jewelry in the world

It's not the Koh-I-Noor or the Empress Eugenie Brooch or whatever my wife is wearing right now, it's this: It's a small, broken fossil shell, collected from a fossil outcrop and transported 110 kilometers to a hole in the ground in Italy. Close inspection reveals that before it was broken, there was a pattern of abrasion in one spot that suggests a hole had been drilled in it and a loop of sinew threaded through it. Although most of it has been worn away by time, bits of material in microscopic pits on its surface reveal that once, this shell had been painted with red ochre. It doesn't sound…

Bob Carter, yet again

On June 7, the national science academies of the G8 nations and Brazil, China and India issued a joint statement saying: Increasing greenhouse gases are causing temperatures to rise; the Earth's surface warmed by approximately 0.6 centigrade degrees over the twentieth century. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projected that the average global surface temperatures will continue to increase to between 1.4 centigrade degrees and 5.8 centigrade degrees above 1990 levels, by 2100. The scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking…

Best of the Cheerful Oncologist: "The Days Dwindle Down to a Precious Few"

[Editor's note: this essay is adapted from a post written on September 7, 2005] Oh it's a long, long while, from May to December, But the days grow short when you reach September... After a dozen weeks of heat, of searching for green canopies of shade, of donning wet bathing suits and dodging buzzing bugs, summer is coming to a close. Now as the earth has done for more cycles than can be fathomed, it will begin to lean away from our sun like a 6th-grader avoiding a kiss and produce the second of the two seasons of change. Now is the time for dreamers to reflect on the annual shedding of…

Lott misrepresents the facts in the Merced murders

In chapter 7 of The Bias Against Guns, where Lott argues that "safe storage" laws cause increases in violent crime, he quotes from an op-ed: Jessica Lynne Carpenter is 14 years old. She knows how to shoot ... Under the new "safe storage" laws being enacted in California and elsewhere, parents can be held criminally liable unless they lock up their guns when their children are home alone ... so that's just what law-abiding parents John and Tephanie Carpenter had done.... [The killer], who was armed with a pitchfork ... had apparently cut the phone lines. So when he forced his way into…

Phylogeny Friday - 27 April 2007

This week's phylogeny comes from this paper on molecular dating of speciation events. I won't be addressing molecular dating per se, but I will be dealing with what molecular clocks tell us. Like, do they actually reveal the speciation time of a pair of species? The divergence date of a pair of species can refer to two things: when the two populations became two species (no longer exchanging alleles) or when the two genetic lineages split. The splitting of genetic lineages happens prior to the speciation event. That's because within a population there is variation throughout the genome. It's…

The Control of Nature

(here is a nice post from my old blog back in early December '05 - one of the least scientific ones you'll get from me) While my column is washing, and my brain is fried, I should finally write this entry ... A while back, right around the time of Katrina, I read a spectacular book, The Control of Nature by John McAfee (Amazon site). When man's interests conflict with an ever changing environment, what does man do? He/she fights change. (All images were hijacked from maps.google.com.) Part 1 The Army Corps of Engineers vs the Mississippi River. As time goes on rivers carry sediment from…

Hitchens, Prager, and Ten Men in a Dark Alley

Thanks to commenter Derelict from my Summer Reading entry, I listened to a talk with Christopher Hitchens on the Dennis Prager show. There was one particular item that caught my ear. Prager posed the following question: "If you were in a strange city in the USA at night and you saw ten men coming toward you, would you or would you not be relieved to know that they had just come from a bible study class?" Apparently, Hitchens mentioned this question in his book God Is Not Great, but generalized it to "religious study" and any city in the world. Hitchens then recounted a number of instances…

Malfelis, the "bad cat" from Wyoming

The extinct "saber-toothed" creodont Hyaenodon. During the middle Eocene, about 49 to 37 million years ago, the largest meat-eating mammal from what would become of the Wind River Formation of Wyoming was Malfelis badwaterensis. Although a cursory glance at the fossil remains of this animal might suggest it was related to dogs or cats (which are living carnivorans), Malfelis was actually a creodont, belonging to an extinct group of meat-eating mammals that may have shared a common ancestor with the carnivorans (see the comment by johannes below). Although people who are not actively…

How much would "free" energy cost you?

This was on my 'to do' list, but Tom at Swans on Tea beat me to it. Basically, this grocery store has these plates that when depressed produce electrical energy. Tom does a good job pointing out that this is not free energy (the original article says this also). Clearly, the energy comes from the cars. How much would this cost the cars? As always, let me start with some assumptions. The original article says that the bumps will generate 30 kW of energy every hour. That is an odd thing to say. I am going to interpret that as 30 kW of power for all hours (every hour). They couldn't have…

Ooga begat Booga...lots of begats...Robert begat Charles

In my discussion with Eliezer I referred to "recreational genetics." Basically, "for entertainment purposes only" genetics. For example, someone with blue eyes confirming that they have the alleles on OCA2 & HERC2 associated with blue eyes. Or a man with the surname O'Neill discovers that he has the Uà Néill Y chromosomal marker. Yes, people will pay money to find out these facts which are already highly probable. I think the news that Charles Darwin was likely of the R1b Y chromosomal haplogroup falls into the recreational category, though due to Darwin's fame the media has really been…

Subglacial eruption underway at Eyjafjallajökull-Fimmvörduháls in Iceland

The steam and ash plume from the Eyjafjallajökull subglacial eruption that started early morning, April 14, 2010. Well, after the brief respite when there was speculation Eyjafjallajökull-Fimmvörduháls eruption might be over, we now know what was going on. After the original fissures ceased activity, the magma found a new route to the surface, this time underneath the Eyjafjallajökull glacier. Eruptions readers last night watched as an earthquake swarm arrived underneath the icecap, which prompted Icelandic officials to start evacuating people from the area around the volcano (photo…

Genetic structure of Eastern European populations

A few months ago I relayed preliminary data which suggested that Estonians are not like Finns. Now a new paper, Genetic Structure of Europeans: A View from the North-East: Using principal component (PC) analysis, we studied the genetic constitution of 3,112 individuals from Europe as portrayed by more than 270,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) genotyped with the Illumina Infinium platform. In cohorts where the sample size was >100, one hundred randomly chosen samples were used for analysis to minimize the sample size effect, resulting in a total of 1,564 samples. This analysis…

The Buzz: ScienceOnline'09: A Communication Convention

The annual ScienceOnline convention held in North Carolina concluded on Sunday after a weekend of rousing conversations on a variety of science- and blogging-related topics, and the blogosphere is abuzz in reflection. As pioneers in the science blogging comunity, ScienceBlogs 'Sciblings' were quite a presence at the event with 20 in attendance—many of whom led sessions on topics ranging from anonymity and pseudonymity to gender in science. Feedback from the conference, as gathered by ScienceOnline founder Bora from A Blog Around the Clock, is "very positive."

New Crocodile Fossil in Oregon

Jurassic Crocodile Is Unearthed From Blue Mountains In Eastern Oregon: An ancient sea-going crocodile has surfaced from the rocks of Crook County in eastern Oregon. Really. It's discovery by the North American Research Group (NARG), whose members were digging for Jurassic-age mollusks known as ammonites, is another confirmation that the Blue Mountains consist of rocks that traveled from somewhere in the Far East, says retired University of Oregon geologist William Orr, who was called in to examine the find for the state.

Digital Biology Friday: A DNA sequencing data puzzle

I know some of you enjoy looking at data and seeing if you can figure out what's going on. For this Friday's puzzler, I'm going to send you to FinchTalk, our company blog, to take a look at lots of data from a resequencing experiment that was done to look for SNPs and count alleles. The graph is at the end of the post. The graph shows data from 4608 reads (sequenced from both strands, forward and reverse). And there are some interesting patterns. Can you figure them out?

Norwegian Ghost Mine

[More blog entries about mining, Norway, abandonedbuildings, photography; gruvor, Norge, övergivnahus, foto.] From my buddy Claes Pettersson, pix he took in July at the abandoned Christian VI mine of Røros, Norway, at 62°N. It's a copper mine that was worked from 1723 until shortly after 1945. Located near the Swedish border and far from the sea, this is one of the coldest parts of Norway, which means that the wooden structures don't decay much through microbial action -- they mainly just erode.

No Recording of Radio Show

I just found out from Jim Babka that things were not properly set up to archive the internet stream from yesterday's show, so there is no mp3 of the show available. A couple of people said they were going to try and record it off the web, but one of them couldn't get it set up in time. The other I have not heard from yet. So it's looking like there is no recording of the show available for those who didn't get to listen to it live.

La Niña cannot erase decades of warming

A great and substantive post up at Skeptical Science on La Nina and what we should expect (and not expect) in terms of its impact on global temperatures. Read it all! (image borrowed from Skeptical Science) La Ninas typically redistribute the global heat budget in such a way as average surface temperatures are depressed from where they might otherwise have been, and we are several months into a strong one now. (image borrowed from Skeptical Science) Be on the lookout for lots more "global warming stopped!" bull.

No glaciers left in Glacier National Park soon

A video story from ABC news here tells how Glacier National Park has gone from somewhere between 120 and 150 glaciers 100 years ago to a couple of dozen today. Yikes! And a scientist they interview who has spent years monitoring them has gone from predicting they will be completely gone by 2050 to they will be completely gone by 2020. It's an interesting video with some compelling before/after shots of some of the glaciers. Then again, maybe it's just a side effect of NASA's fudging the temperature record....

Fair & balanced…and a sign of the apocalypse

Dang. Now I'm quoted on the Fox News website, as the guy who called the bacteria from outer space "garbage". Yay, me. Unfortunately, most of the story there is an acceptance of the excuses from the crackpot Journal of Cosmology, with "more measured" responses from a collection of sources apparently vetted by the journal. It's "he said, she said" journalism again, with me on one side and Frank Tipler on the other. Sorry, people. Brace yourself for Murdoch's minions to show up in the comments.

Some ID links

Busy here so here are a few things to keep you amused: Larry Arnhart asks whether Michael Behe has fallen from favor at the Discovery Institute. Dembski (a pseudo-mathematician) wonders what a pseudo-documentary is and in so doing naturally calls folks names. Stay classy, Bill. Jeffrey Shallit (a real-mathematician) fisks Robert Marks. And while I’m at it ... sample size of one analysis from Dembski. Ed on the Week 2 performance of Expelled. Here in the Phoenix metro area they’re down to seven screens (from nineteen).

Michelle Obama Shines at DNC

It should come as no surprise to regular readers that I am a tremendous fan of Michelle Obama. She just gave, as Andrew Sullivan describes: One of the best, most moving, intimate, rousing, humble, and beautiful speeches I've heard from a convention platform. Maybe she should be running for president. You don't need any commentary from me. This was a home-run. And sincere. Thank God that in the end, the truth struggles out there. Just look at her mother's face. Listen to Michelle's inspiring words from Denver:

Brain MRI Animation

This is a brain MRI animation, showing sequential slices of the brain, from top to bottom.  It was a featured image at href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:User-FastFission-brain.gif">Wikipedia.   This was created by a Wikipedia user, href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fastfission" title="User:Fastfission">Fastfission.  The explanation follows: Made from an href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/fMRI" class="extiw" title="w:fMRI">fMRI scan I had done. Goes from the top of my brain straight through to the bottom. That little dot that appears for a second on the…