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Just how long does the Ebola virus linger in semen?

The 2013-2016 West African Ebola virus outbreak altered our perception of just what an Ebola outbreak could look like. While none of the three primary affected countries--Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea-have had a case since April 2016, the outbreak resulted in a total of over 28,000 cases of Ebola virus disease (EVD)--65 times higher than the previous largest EVD outbreak, and more than 15 times the total number of cases of all prior EVD outbreaks combined, from the virus's discovery in 1976 to a concurrent (but unrelated) outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2014. In March 2016…

The long shadow of smallpox

Smallpox is, without a doubt, the biggest success story in all of vaccination. The practice of variolation, or the purposeful inoculation of naïve individuals with material from scabs of smallpox victims, was practiced for years prior to Edward Jenner's substitution of cowpox for the smallpox (Variola) virus. The vaccinia virus, thought to be a derivative of cowpox, has been used in the 20th century in smallpox vaccination campaigns. Vaccina elicits antibodies that protect from smallpox infection, yet typically causes an asymptomatic or only mildly symptomatic infection. This…

Measles vaccine doesn't cause SSPE

[From the archives; originally posted October 20, 2005] Measles is one of those diseases that we don't give much thought to in the United States anymore. Following an incubation period of about 10 days, flu-like symptoms appear: fever, malaise, cough, congestion, conjunctivitis. Soon, the rash appears, first near the ears, then the forehead, the face, and over the rest of the body. Complications were common. These could include a seconary bacterial pneumonia, encephalitis, myocarditis, miscarriage, and a condition called subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE). (Continued below...) SSPE…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Molecule Helps Sleep-deprived Rebound Mentally: Sleep experts know that the mental clarity lost because of a few sleepless nights can often be restored with a good night's rest. Now, UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers have identified a key molecular mechanism that regulates the brain's ability to mentally compensate for sleep deprivation. Working with mice, they found that a molecule called an adenosine receptor is necessary for sleep-restricted animals to attain adequate levels of slow-wave activity in the brain once normal sleep resumes. It is this increase in slow-wave activity, or…

New and Exciting on PLoS ONE

There are 19 new papers on ONE that were published this week (thus breaking the 600 papers number). Here are a couple that caught my eye (apart from those I already blogged about or will soon): Imitation as Faithful Copying of a Novel Technique in Marmoset Monkeys: This evidence of imitation in non-human primates questions the dominant opinion that imitation is a human-specific ability. Furthermore, the high matching degree suggests that marmosets possess the neuronal mechanism to code the actions of others and to map them onto their own motor repertoire, rather than priming existing motor-…

The Slow Loris: Too Cute To Live

tags: slow loris, endangered species, conservation, CITES The Slow Loris, from the genus Nycticebus, is a nocturnal animal endemic to Asia. This animal's cuteness could very well be its undoing. Image: Anna Nekaris, Oxford Brookes University, UK. Aww, isn't this cuddly little creature simply adorable?? Apparently thousands of people from around the world agree with you because the slow loris, a small nocturnal and arboreal animal that is endemic to much of Asia, is experiencing population declines due to habitat destruction and trapping for the pet trade. They certainly make ideal pets…

Migrating Sandhill Cranes on the Platte River, Nebraska

tags: migrating sandhill cranes, Grus canadensis, Platte River, birds, birding, bird watching Sign about the Platte River in Nebraska. Image: GrrlScientist, 2008. [wallpaper size]. This past weekend, Dave, Elizabeth and I drove from Manhattan, Kansas to the Platte River in next-door Nebraska to see the migrating sandhill cranes, Grus canadensis. These flocks of migratory cranes are a mixture of greater and lesser sandhill cranes along with some hybrids between these two subspecies, often referred to as intermediate sandhill cranes. (There also are sedentary subspecies of sandhill cranes,…

Using Workers’ Compensation Data for Occupational Safety and Health: A Work in Progress

By Anthony Robbins On 19 June, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health and other Federal agencies and private sector groups concerned with worker health convened a two-day workshop at the Department of Labor’s Frances Perkins Building in Washington.  About 100 researchers gathered to discuss how workers compensation data could be analyzed and used to study worker safety and health. NIOSH asked me to moderate the first session. I was flattered, but for all my roles in public health since leaving NIOSH’s directorship in 1981, I was surely not an expert in workers’ compensation…

Congressman blames US coal miners for having black lung disease

Freshman Congressman Larry D. Bucshon (R) of Evansville, Indiana is a cardiothoracic surgeon. His father was an underground coal miner and a member of the United Mine Workers Union for 37 years. Both his grandparents were coal miners. But, Republican-controlled Capitol Hill is now the Twilight Zone when I heard him say the following last week at a congressional hearing: "I see a lot of patients with workplace related respiratory problems, some of which, to put it bluntly, are their own issue because they refuse to wear safety equipment regardless of whether there are regulations in place…

Ground Beef Recall Highlights Persistent Food-Safety Problems

Liz and Celeste are on vacation, so we're re-posting some content from our old site. By Liz Borkowski, originally posted 11/3/09 New York-based Fairbank Farms is recalling more than 500,000 pounds of ground beef products that may be contaminated with E. coli O157:H7. Gardiner Harris reports in the New York Times that two people - one from New Hampshire and one from New York - have died after eating the ground beef suspected of contamination, and more than two dozen people have fallen ill. [Note: This is a re-post from 2009, so don't go running to look for this beef in your fridge. Up-to-date…

Gay Marriage Gaining Support

The Pew Research Center has released the results of a national survey with some very good news for advocates of gay marriage. The good thing is that it's a tracking survey that has been done since 2003, so you can measure how attitudes have changed. The findings are very positive: Public acceptance of homosexuality has increased in a number of ways in recent years, though it remains a deeply divisive issue. Half of Americans (51%) continue to oppose legalizing gay marriage, but this number has declined significantly from 63% in February 2004, when opposition spiked following the Massachusetts…

The Scores Are Falling?

The science story of the day is probably the Department of Education Report on science test scores, cited in this morning's New York Times. They administered a test to fourth, eight, and twelfth-graders nationwide, aking basic science questions, and compared the scores to similar tests given in 1996 and 2000. (Update: John Lynch has some thoughts, and includes a couple of the questions.) The headline-grabbing result is that the twelfth-grade scroes are down over the last ten years, while the fourth-grade scores rose. The educational system of the nation is clearly in free-fall, and we'll all…

Advent Calendar of Science Stories 5: Philosophers in the Sun

"More wine?" "Hmm? Oh, yes, thank you. Sorry, I was--" "Thinking about mathematics, I wager. Prime numbers was it?" "No, just distracted. It's this blasted heat." "It is the longest day of the year." "Yes, but normally not so hot." "Especially here. You think this is hot, visit me in Syene sometime. You think it gets hot here... You would melt in Syene in the summer." "So I hear. I suppose it's the moderating influence of the ocean that keeps us cooler." "That, and we're closer to the Sun." "What?" "It's true. Today in Syene, the Sun will be directly overhead at mid-day, while you still have…

The Astrophysicist's Alphabet

"When I was having that alphabet soup, I never thought that it would pay off." -Vanna White Ever want an A-to-Z illustrated alphabet of astrophysics? Turns out that -- other than writing your own via Galaxy Zoo -- it doesn't yet exist. So I thought it would be delightful to make one for you... right now! Image credit: Flickr user Image Editor / 11304375@N07. A is for Aurora, polar lights fast and slow, the Sun's hot electrons make the atmosphere glow. Image credit: Andrew Hamilton of JILA / Colorado, http://jila.colorado.edu/~ajsh/insidebh/schw.html. B is for Black hole, a star's…

Climate change: up close and personal in Missouri

This is a guest post by Larry Lazar. If you have had the news on the last day or two you may have seen stories and images about the Missouri floods. Many of those images are from Eureka (where we live), Pacific (where my wife Kellie works) and Valley Park (which is on my commute to work). That picture of the submerged McDonald's you may have seen on the news is in Union, Missouri, about 20 miles to the southwest of Eureka We are dry, mostly, and doing okay. The basement was flooded during the initial 3 day rain event due to a failed sump pump and a couple downspouts that came unattached from…

Q & A: How is the Universe so big, given its age?

"The size of the universe is no more depressing than the size of a cow." -David Deutsch But it is bizarre, I'll give you that. The most common scientific question I get asked is how, if the Universe is 13.7 billion years old, and the speed limit of the Universe is the speed of light, why do I say the observable Universe is 93 billion light years across? In other words, why is this picture of the Universe wrong? I've tried to answer this before, and so have others, but perhaps it's time for another -- more conceptual -- attempt. This is one of the most mind-boggling things about relativity.…

Conservative Originalism in Crisis?

David Bernstein and Randy Barnett have interesting posts up at Volokh about the growing split among conservative originalists. Barnett's post came first and he notes that when conservatives today invoke the idea of "judicial restraint" in opposition to judges "legislating from the bench", they are in fact buying in to a New Deal era concept that spawned the idea of a presumption of constitutionality. He quotes from an endorsement of Alito's nomination in the Weekly Standard pointing out that Alito is not a Thomas-style originalist but a pragmatist who defers to government greatly: More…

I reject your reality and I substitute my own

I don't know if this phrase ... ... originally from Adam Savage or if he's quoting someone. I think it might be his. Today, I was in an internet argument with someone (can you believe how many people on the internet are WRONG???) and I used a phrase like that. Then I instantly lost the argument. Here's how it went: We were arguing about whether or not JFK was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald shooting from the sixth floor of the Book Repository. This guy was claiming that the evidence was pretty clear that something else was going on, and I was challenging him with facts. He told me that my…

Battle of the graphs

The battle of the graphs provides a learning opportunity says "American Elephants", and indeed it does, though possibly not in the way they're thinking. I haven't been able to clearly identify the source of this image (which is the reason for this post: I'll show you how far back I've managed to go, and your job is to go further, or find a reason why my answer is right). The top pane is clear enough; its a borked-up version of MBH from IPCC 2001 or similar. The lower pane is similar to the famous fig 7.1.c from the FAR in 1990. Wiki's [[Description of the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice…

Two Cultures Divided by Scheduling

We had our annual undergraduate research symposium this past weekend, which included presentations from students doing work in all different disciplines. We have enough physics and astronomy majors these days that I spent most of the day Friday listening to them talk, but I did have a break in the morning when I saw a few engineering talks, and it's always nice to see work in other fields. At lunchtime, there were two things I wanted to do: see the dance performances (which included a couple of physics students), and have lunch at the student-run organic food cafe, which I really enjoy, but…

Ike Update

I have a much larger post coming out about Ike and hurricanes in general, but for now here is a quick update: Ike is going to come ashore between Seven PM tongight and Seven AM tomorrow morning. Since it is a very large storm, the most severe winds will be affecting a very large area. You can already see bands of rain off Galveston in this radar image from ten minutes ago (as I write this): click for most current radar The estimate for the storm surge is such that if Ike comes ashore at just the right place and at just the right time and intensifies just enough, Galveston Texas will be…

Infectious ERV particles in cat and dog vaccines

I hesitate to write about this, as Im sure its going to be taken and amplified by Teh Crazy... but I suppose I better just get a head start... Isolation of an Infectious Endogenous Retrovirus in a Proportion of Live Attenuated Vaccines for Pets Well shit. Researchers took a dozen cat/dog vaccines from manufacturers in Japan and Britain, and looked for a specific cat endogenous retrovirus, RD-114. Why this cat ERV? Cause the viruses in these vaccines are passaged in cat cell lines to attenuate them. Cat cell lines that contain and can produce ERV RD-114. Whats RD-114? Welp, um, its…

Karl Schroeder, The Sunless Countries [Library of Babel]

Jo Walton has a very nice review of Karl Schroeder's Permanence over at Tor.com, which contains a terrific summary of what makes Schroeder great: The problem with talking about Permanence (2002), or any of Schroeder's work really, is that it's too easy to get caught up in talking about the wonderful ideas and backgrounds and not pay enough attention to the characters and stories. I think Schroeder's one of the best writers to emerge in this century, and his work seems to me to belong to this century, to be using newly discovered science and extrapolating from present technology, not just…

The Four Percent Universe by Richard Panek

Back in the fall, I got an email from my UK publisher asking me if I'd be willing to read and possibly blurb a forthcoming book, The Four Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality by Richard Panek. The book isn't exactly in my field, but there really wasn't any way I'd turn down a request like that. Coincidentally, I received an ARC of the book a few days later from the US publisher. They weren't asking for a blurb, but I'm always happy to get free books. From the title, I expected this to be another book laying out the now-standard model (if not…

Uncomfortable Question: Creationist Theology

In the uncomfortable questions thread, David White asks: Ever entertained the notion that attacks on true science from the muscular political creationism/ID lobby might be vitiated by exposure of their great and inexplicable theological flaw (gasp!) dating all the way back to William Paley? Not really, no. Because, you know, there are only so many hours in the day. I don't mean to be rudely dismissive of David's thesis, which is laid out at length on his own blog, and is detailed and well argued. The thing is, though, the political problem of creationism has relatively little to do with…

What Kind of Blogging Brings the Most Traffic?

A little while back, there was some discussion of what science blogging should be, where the question of what draws the most traffic came up. A couple of people said they see more traffic from "real" science posts than from other trivia, in contrast to my claim that I see more traffic from other stuff. It occurs to me that I have inadvertently run the experiment to test this over the past week: This week, I posted five hard-core physics posts, one each week day, and three of them were also tagged for ResearchBlogging.org. I also posted a bunch of frivolous things-- animal pictures, FutureBaby…

Attack of the killer tomato fungus driven by mobile weapons package

In Robert Louis Stevenson's classic story, Dr Henry Jekyll drinks a mysterious potion that transforms him from an upstanding citizen into the violent, murderous Edward Hyde. We might think that such an easy transformation would be confined to the pages of fiction, but a similar fate regularly befalls a common fungus called Fusarium oxysporum. A team of scientists led by Li-Jun Ma and Charlotte van der Does have found that the fungus can swap four entire chromosomes form one individual to another. This package is the genetic equivalent of Stevenson's potion. It has everything a humble, Jekyll…

Create Your Own Thomas Friedman Op-Ed Column

Continuing our mid-summer reflection on the work of others, from long ago, elsewhere, not ours, you get that right? We didn't write this? It's as if we loaded up a bunch of throw-backs in the queue and just set them up on a schedule to run at the blog every other day or so. We must be at the beach. Or pool. Or cabin in the woods. Take your pick. Yes, continuing our posts from the vault (like the Death Star, and the Dolphin guy interview), here is the inestimable Michael Ward's "Create Your Own Thomas Friedman Op-Ed Column" (originally here, from 2004). We recalled this one while…

Photo-recognition software catches tigers by their stripes

Tigers can no more change their stripes than leopards can change their spots. That's a good thing too, for their unchanging patterns, as individually distinct as a human fingerprint, make it easier to track any single tiger over time. That process is about to become even simpler with a computer programme that creates a three-dimensional model of a tiger's skin and can compare different shots of an animal taken at different times or angles. The programme is the brainchild of Lex Hilby from an organisation called Conservation Research and it could allow conservationists to track surviving…

Black Holes & Sound

Reader Abby Normal(!) writes in with an excellent question: Something in your post about Physics in Star Trek, May 18, 2009, has been bouncing around my brain. You stated that a black hole has the same mass, and therefore gravitational pull, as it's parent body. That makes perfect sense. But as I understand it a typical black hole is formed by a collapsing star. (Ignoring supermassive black holes, which I know form differently.) So why then does a star emit light prior to it's collapse but afterward, assuming it becomes a black hole, can light no longer escape? Does it have to do with the…

Secrets of the Teeth

Probing the origins of humanity is actually a lot like being a dentist. The bones of our hominid ancestors tend to fall apart, leaving behind a smattering of shards. But teeth, made of enamel, can do a better job of withstanding the ravages of time. And teeth--particularly those of mammals--are not just tough but interesting. Mammals--us included--have several kinds of teeth, each of which is covered with distinctive bumps, cusps, and roots. All those details vary from one species to another. So even if you find a fragment of a tooth, you may be able to figure out what species it belongs to.…

Does Advanced Science Education "Kill Off" Your Faith?

In Expelled, Richard Dawkins recounts how learning about science "killed off" his faith. And PZ Myers tells us that the more science literacy we have in society, the less religion we will have, and the more science, resulting in a nice feedback loop. Their comments reflect conventional wisdom among atheists that the more you learn about science, the less religious you will become. In fact, it's the working assumption as to why in comparison to the American public, scientists are less likely to be religious. But as I have mentioned in several comment threads, it turns out that the linear…

Follow-up to the "Problems of the One Laptop Per Child Program"

This is a follow-up to a post a few weeks back about the One Laptop Per Child program. I had offered that post by way of summary to a class exercise about technology in cultural context. In part, it was an exercise about discussing the place of technology in global development efforts; at the same time it was an effort to take the history of technology discussions we'd been having and place them into a kind of global history context. For example, we needed to see more of the prior history of Western aid in the non-western world--the patterns of high modernist development, environmental…

Elsewhere on the Web (8/22/07)

Megan McArdle on the morality -- not the economics -- of a single-payer healthcare system: As a class, are the young and healthy more responsible for the bad health of the old and sick? Quite the reverse. Many people in the old and sick category did nothing at all to deserve their fate; they just aged or were victims of fate. But some members of the "old and sick" class contributed to their fate. Contra many of my interlocutors, there are a lot of very expensive diseases that have a substantial lifestyle component: high blood pressure, coronary artery disease, diabetes, lung cancer, emphysema…

Antarctica: Cape Evans: Robert F. Scott's Base

Our most recent helo trip out from McMurdo on our NSF Artists & Writers Project took us to Cape Evans, the site of Robert Scott’s Terra Nova Hut, where they based their 1910-1913 trip to the South Pole. We went with Anthony Powell (the filmmaker from Scott Base who made the movie “Antarctica: A Year on Ice”. He has an engineering/tech “day job” at Scott Base and is a moviemaker in his off time). The Terra Nova Hut is the most elaborate and extensive of the 3 main historic huts in the McMurdo-ish area (the other 2 are Discovery Hut, right at McMurdo, and the Shackleton Nimrod Hut at Royds…

Footprints on the Moon

Yesterday we lost Neil Armstrong, an accidental hero, thrust by fate onto a rock in the sky. Many dreamt of walking on the moon before he did, and a few men did after him. He happened to be the first. Hopefully many more men, and women too, will echo his iconic footsteps in the future. Perhaps even future space tourists will huddle around Tranquility base, laying nostalgic 60s filters over their high-resolution snapshots of an upended American flag from a long-ago mission. We can only hope. A lot of my favorite humans have died this year: Armstrong, Sally Ride, Ray Bradbury, all people who…

The Ig Nobels are out! And the winners are....

If you haven't heard, the 2009 Ig Nobels have been given. The Ig Nobels are one of my favorite yearly treats. They are given to research that "first make people laugh, and then make them think." The prizes "celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative - and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology." And the winners are... Veterinary medicine: Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson of Newcastle University, UK, for showing that cows with names give more milk than cows that are nameless. Hear that, Bessie?Reference:Bertenshaw, C., & Rowlinson, P. (2009). Exploring Stock…

Good Topics for Future Research - And How You Find Them

It drives me nuts that there are so many great articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education - behind a paywall, where you can't see them unless you have a subscription. The December 19th issue had a great essay, In Search of New Frontiers: How Scholars Generate Ideas. If you have a subscription, that link will be useful for you. If not, try to rustle up a print copy somewhere on your campus. The author, Robert L. Hampel, talked about how one selects a Good Topic for Future Research (GTFR). He came to question the advice he'd been giving to first year PhD students: Fill a gap in the…

God and the Natural History of Religion

Once upon a time, there was a village that lived on the side of a large mountain. Just above them was a cloud cover that never moved, obscuring what lay above. Below them were dotted many other villages all the way down to the bottom of the valley. The villagers did not know where they came from. Well, that is not quite right, for there were two opposing schools of thought, both of whom said they knew. One group, the Ascenders, said they came from the villages below, or trekked past them from the valley, where there were many other groups, some quite similar in their languages, dress and…

Your Friday Dose of Weird: Male pipefish show the dark side of male pregnancy

At almost every aquarium I have ever visited with a seahorse exhibit, the plaque in front of the tank says the same thing: in seahorses and their relatives, males, not females, carry the babies. It is always interesting to watch the reactions of visitors to this curious fact. Adult men, for instance, sometimes seem unsettled by the thought of male pregnancy, but the reproductive reversal among the fish is often seen as kinda cute ("How sweet. A fishy dad taking care of his kids!"). As shown by a study by Kimberly Paczolt and Adam Jones published this week in Nature, however, there can be…

The Mammoths in Spain Lived Mainly on the Plains

As strange as it might seem, the living African and Asian elephants are only the remnants of what was once a very diverse array of proboscideans. In the not-too-distant past elephants and their closest relatives occupied Africa, Europe, Asia, North America, Central America, and South America, but almost all of them had perished by about 10,000 years ago.* Of these recently-extinct forms the most iconic was the woolly mammoth, Mammuthus primigenius, which was covered in long coats of shaggy hair. They were cold-weather mammoths, inhabiting chillier regions than their North American cousin the…

ISEF 2008: Nobel Laureates Panel

A cool feature of ISEF is the science star power. This afternoon the judges were treated to a panel full of science luminaries: Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Robert Curl, Rich Roberts, Dudley Herschbach, H. Robert Horvitz, and Leon Lederman. I walked in a few minutes late, so I didn't catch the introductions, but the moderators voice sounded so familiar. At the end of the session, I discovered the reason...our panel was moderated by Joe Palca, from Science Friday. The session had an open microphone on the floor for questions from the audience. Both the questions and answers were incredibly thought-…

Encephalon 26

Welcome to the 26th edition of Encephalon, the neuroscience blogging carnival. Encephalon #1 was posted almost exactly a year ago at my WordPress blog, so this edition marks the carnival's first anniversary. First, let me draw your attention to two new neuroscience blogs. Both authors are researchers who use neuroimaging. Jon Bardin, from the fMRI Laboratory at Columbia University, has a nice post about neuroaesthetics and conceptual art at The Third Culture, and Brad Buchsbaum, of the University of California at Berkeley, has posted parts 1 and 2 of a 4-part series called the four ages…

Challenges of placebo-controlled trials.

Back in November, at the Philosophy of Science Association meeting in Pittsburgh, I heard a really interesting talk by Jeremy Howick of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford University about the challenges of double-blind trials in medical research. I'm not going to reconstruct his talk here (since it's his research, not mine), but I wanted to give him the credit for bringing some tantalizing details to my attention before I share them with you here. First, he noted that "blinding" might not be as apt a description of what actually happens in medical trials as "masking". A double…

Are you a locavore?

I only heard this term recently, as one of my students is beginning a research project on the topic. The idea, of course, is that the more food you eat from local sources, the better your impact, or lack there of, on the environment. (Well, I had heard of this concept before, but not that particular term.) "Buying local is like a hippie movement of 2008, but is it really a good use of a college graduate's time," asked food science professor Joe Regenstein. Indeed, is it not "indulgent and hedonistic?" He had just heard Cornell nutrition expert Jennifer Wilkins analyze claims made by "…

IPCC AR4 leaks wrong

Now that the new IPCC report has been released it's time to revisit the inaccurate leaks that appeared in The Australian and in The Sunday Telegraph. Both reporters made the same two errors: they reported the value for climate sensitivity (the eventual warming from doubling CO2) as the IPCC projection for warming by 2100 they reported the maximum sea level rise for scenario B2 (43 cm) as the maximum rise, ignoring the other scenarios and the fact that the rise does not include any increase from accelerating ice flow. The false reports generated erroneous commentary like this nonsense from…

Pythons were the oldest gods?

Given the interest in questions of religion, faith, and atheism among so many of my fellow ScienceBloggers, I'm a bit surprised that none of them picked up on this interesting tidbit of a story: Pythons were probably the first idols to be worshipped by man, archaeologists said after unearthing evidence of a ritual dating back 70,000 years. A rock shaped like an enormous python's head, discovered in a cave in the Tsodilo hills of Botswana, puts back the date of the first known human ritual by 30,000 years, they say. Behind the rock, which was covered in man-made indentations, was a chamber…

The Discovery Institute drops a bomb of an argument

Here we go again. The "scientists" at the Discovery Institute seldom miss an opportunity to shoot themselves in the foot by making specious arguments that anyone with a reasonable understanding of evolution can shoot down. It doesn't take an evolutionary biologist to thoroughly dismantle most of the "scholarship" that flows from the DI (which is indeed fortunate for me, given that I am not an evolutionary biologist). Leave it to the North Koreans, with their recent apparently successful test of a nuclear explosive device, to give the intrepid Don Quixotes over in Seattle the excuse to tilt at…

Re: Are guns the most effective means for self defence?

Lowell Savage writes: Sorry, Ron. Much as I agree with your position, I have to say that you haven't addressed Tim's issue: why is it that 37% of non-gun defenders were injured before they began self-defensive actions while only 13% of gun defenders were injured before they began self-defense actions? Perhaps an anecdote from a column by Ann Coulter could illuminate a possible explanation. Ann said that she was walking alone over a bridge toward her apartment (or is it a condo? And no I don't remember why she was doing this alone, at that time.) when she saw a man coming toward her from…

We, Beasties Sporulates

A little over 4 years ago, I joined up with three friends from grad school and launched a brand new science blog, "We, Beasties!" The name was meant to be a play on a phrase from Paul de Kruif's somewhat tongue-in-cheak translation of the first-ever microbiologist Antonie von Leeuwenhoek's term "Animacules." von Leeuwenhoek was the first human being to glimpse the world of life invisible to the naked eye, and de Kruif, 400 years later, dubbed those minuscule replicators "wee beasties." Of course, we now know much more about our microbial companions, including their immeasurable impact on our…