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Jurist

This word is from the 29 October 2006 New York Times Magazine's feature, entitled "Islam and the Bomb" by Noah Feldman (print; not yet online). This week's issue is particularly good because, in addition to the article that I cite (below), it also contains a piece about the Taliban, several articles about bipolar disorder, an interview with a psychiatrist about depression and an piece about Alzheimer's disease. Jurist (JOOR-ist) [French juriste from Medieval Latin jurista, from Latin jur- jus law] n. a legal scholar versed in civil law or the law of nations. a public official…

Joseph Oehmen, MIT Research Scientist: "there was and will *not* be any significant release of radioactivity from the damaged Japanese reactors"

I assume by now you've seen this: "You Can Stop Worrying About A Radiation Disaster In Japan -- Here's Why". I repeat, there was and will *not* be any significant release of radioactivity from the damaged Japanese reactors. By "significant" I mean a level of radiation of more than what you would receive on - say - a long distance flight, or drinking a glass of beer that comes from certain areas with high levels of natural background radiation.... I'm so glad to hear the situation is under control. And that Business Insider, an online journal, is getting us this important information in a…

Human/Chimp difference

From EurekaAlert: Approximately 6 percent of human and chimp genes are unique to those species, report scientists from Indiana University Bloomington and three other institutions. The new estimate, reported in the inaugural issue of Public Library of Science ONE (Dec. 2006), takes into account something other measures of genetic difference do not -- the genes that aren't there. That isn't to say the commonly reported 1.5 percent nucleotide-by-nucleotide difference between humans and chimps is wrong, said IUB computational biologist Matthew Hahn, who led the research. IUB postdoctoral…

Michael Gazzaniga & Tom Wolfe in the Seed Salon

The latest Seed Salon features highlights from an interesting discussion between Tom Wolfe and Michael Gazzaniga, one of the founders of cognitive neuroscience, who is best known for the work he carried out with Roger Sperry on split brain patients. Gazzaniga and Wolfe discuss, among other things, the implications of neuroscience for our concept of free will. The transcript of the whole discussion has just been published in the current issue of Seed, and is now available online. I love this anecdote from the transcript, about how Jose Delgado controlled an angry bull by electrical…

Barriers to Eating Sustainably, Real and Imagined

During the period of my life when I was a professional smart-ass (ie, my adolescence), I used to complain to my mother that even the day after she went grocery shopping, there was never any food in the house, only the component ingredients of food. As I teenager I wanted to eat like my peers who seemed to have an endless supply of chips and soda around. To have to come home from school and actually scramble eggs or make a sandwich seemed horribly unfair. My mother and step-mother expressed little sympathy. It was only later that I realized how central this "buying the ingredients of food…

How computers can make humans like them

More and more human conversations are taking place online. While I don't do instant messaging the way my kids like to, I'm much more likely to contact a friend via e-mail than to pick up the phone. Here at Cognitive Daily and at other online discussion forums, I've built relationships with commenters who I've never seen or even e-mailed. While the next leap in online communications—videoconferencing—is in its infancy, an intermediate form is beginning to show promise. Called a Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE), it enables people to have a virtual online conference by creating digital…

You are what you eat

This is pretty common knowledge, but it's nice to see it supported by data: In `food deserts' of city, healthy eating a mirage: For African-Americans who live in "food deserts" on Chicago's South and West Sides, where fast-food restaurants are plentiful and grocery stores are scarce, a lack of choices is more than an inconvenience. A provocative new study concludes that residents are more likely to die prematurely from diabetes, cancer and other ailments. ----------snip----------- Starting with the fundamental premise that the well-being of urban communities is a block-by-block phenomenon,…

My picks from ScienceDaily

'Mafia' Behavior In Cowbirds? Study First To Document Evidence: Cowbirds have long been known to lay eggs in the nests of other birds, which then raise the cowbirds' young as their own. Sneaky, perhaps, but not Scarface. Now, however, a University of Florida study finds that cowbirds actually ransack and destroy the nests of warblers that don't buy into the ruse and raise their young. Man's Best Friend Lends Insight Into Human Evolution: Flexibly drawing inferences about the intentions of other individuals in order to cooperate in complex tasks is a basic part of everyday life that we humans…

Occupational Health News Roundup

The most prominent occupational health news this week is the tragic deaths of 29 workers from New Zealand's Pike River coal mine. Celeste has already written about this, so I'll just add my encourgement to visit the New Zealand Herald's photos and short profiles of the 29 miners: Conrad Adams, Malcolm Campbell, Glen Cruse, Allan Dixon, Zen Drew, Christopher Duggan, Joseph Dunbar, John Hale, Daniel Herk, David Hoggart, Richard Holling, Andrew Hurren, Koos Jonker, William Joynson, Riki Keane, Terry Kitchin, Francis Marden, Samuel Mackie, Michael Monk, Stuart Mudge, Kane Nieper, Peter O'Neill,…

Deep Thoughts from Pop Culture II

Here's the other quote from Chuck Klosterman IV that I mentioned earlier, this one from an essay in Esquire on people who feel betrayed by pop culture: Do you want to be happy? I suspect that you do. Well, here's the first step to happiness: don't get pissed off that people who aren't you happen to think Paris Hilton is interesting and deserves to be on TV every other day; the fame surrounding Paris Hilton is not a reflection on your life (unless you want it to be). Don't get pissed off because the Yeah Yeah Yeahs aren't on the radio enough; you can buy the goddamn album and play "Maps" all…

Launch Pad for Quantum Physics

Over at Jeff Vandemeer's blog, Rachel Swirsky has a series ofm guest posts (start here if you prefer direct post links) about the recently completed Launch Pad workshop. this is a NASA funded workshop bringing a group of writers together for six days of lectures on modern astronomy from working astronomers. From the workshop web site: Launch Pad is a NASA-funded education/public outreach effort supplementing Mike Brotherton's space-based astronomical research. Our budget allows us to provide a workshop that is essentially free to participants. Our primary goal is to teach writers of all…

Hey do you believe in reincarnation? Remember that money you owe me?!

Actually, more appropriately, "Hey do you believe in past lives, aliens or CIA mind control?" "yes!" "Do get the feeling that you owe someone money?" "yes!" "Yeah, you owe me some money" There's an interesting article in the March issue of Consciousness and Cognition about the link between false memories and the totally out there belief of reincarnation. Here's the basic design and results of the study from Live Science/MSNBC Subjects were asked to read aloud a list of 40 non-famous names, and then, after a two-hour wait, told that they were going to see a list consisting of three types of…

How deep is your love for the Caribbean?

You have to respect The Nature Conservancy (TNC) because they put their money where there mouth is. While some other organizations have a tendency to turn "conservation" into "conversation", TNC has a tendency to purchase property and throw up a no trespassing sign. Sure, it gets them into trouble sometimes, but privatizing a resource is a great way to avoid the Tragedy of the Commons. Eventually, these properties are absorbed into state of federal park lands, often in better shape than they would have been otherwise. But what to do about the oceans? In some states, submerged lands in bays…

Extremophiles, Volcanoes and You

Folks have been suggesting that life on Earth started near volcanic vents for a long time now (and of course, some people don't buy it). Whether or not life sprung forth near hydrothermal vents, undersea black smokers or from the head of Zeus, it doesn't really change the fact that we find organisms living in these places today, expanding what we might consider "habitable" by leaps and bounds. Case and point, researchers from CU-Boulder have recently found a community of micro-organisms happily living near the summit of Volcán Socompa (above) in Chile in the hydrothermal vents. Now, having…

Clock Interview: John Hogenesch - genes, clocks, Web and ScienceOnline'09

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January. This is also the first in what I hope will be a long series of interviews with researchers in my field of Chronobiology. Today, I asked John Hogenesch, my chronobiologist colleague who moderated the 'Community intelligence applied to gene annotation' session at ScienceOnline'09, to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock.…

Reading Diary: Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

There's kind of two theories of the web. The first theory is that it's the best thing ever, the culmination of human civilization, incapable of being anything negative in anyone's lives. Proponents of this theory can't stand it when anyone says anything mean about the web (or usually any technology) in public or especially online. The other theory is the chicken little theory. According to this theory, the web (and usually any technology) is the reason the world is going to hell in a hand basket. All the bad things in the world are because the web is disrupting science and art and culture.…

Nah, don't believe it

Science (the mag, not the concept) sez: Science is driven by data. New technologies... blah... publishers, including Science, have increasingly assumed more responsibility for ensuring that data are archived and available after publication... blah... Science's policy for some time has been that "all data necessary to understand, assess, and extend the conclusions of the manuscript must be available to any reader of Science" (see www.sciencemag.org/site/feature/contribinfo/)... blah... Science is extending our data access requirement listed above to include computer codes involved in the…

ScienceOnline09 - more individual session pages

Now that the registration is closed (you can still get on the waitlist if you send an e-mail to info@scienceonline09.com), it's time to start preparing for the sessions. Here are some more sessions you may be interested in: Not just text - image, sound and video in peer-reviewed literature Alternative careers: how to become a journal editor Providing public health and medical information to all Art and science -- online and offline Anonymity, Pseudonymity - building reputation online Open Access in the networked world: experience of developing and transition countries Social networking for…

More geology!

Not long ago, we had a story about the University of Wyoming shutting down their geology museum. Now the issue has become…an online poll! We know what to do with online polls, don't we, boys and girls? Should UW put funds into keeping the Geological Museum open? Yes, it needs to be open all the time. (935 Votes, 60%) Yes, but they were right to open it part-time to save money. (516 Votes, 33%) No, they need to close whatever keeps them financially sound. (72 Votes, 5%) They should turn the museum into a skate park and make some cash instead. (29 Votes, 2%)

Hey There, Berghs Students

Every once in a blue cheese, a son of Ming the Merciless invites me to speak at an advertising school in Stockholm, Berghs School of Communication. (Yes, they have adopted an English name to sound cooler. No, they didn't put the genitive apostrophe in. I find that really painful.) I talk about cyberculture, on-line communities and what advertising people need to know about the web. As this entry comes on-line, I am standing in front of 30 fresh-faced Macbook-toting hipsters who will soon learn, to their horror, that Firefox allows you to kill all ad banners and flash clips. During my talk, I…

Second Life Q&A on the Accelerating Universe

Following the talk I gave in Second Life about the discovery of the accelerating Universe, we held a couple of Q&A sessions. The original plan was to have questions right after the talk, but the Second Life main grid crashed right at that moment. We all got online about half an hour later, and I held one Q&A session for the people who came back. There was another one the next day. Troy McLuhan (his Second Life avatar name) logged the session, and has done the hard work of formatting and lightly editing it for web publication. You can find the transcript of the Q&A session…

Wales: Wikipedia OK for Students

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has said teachers who refuse younger students access to the site are "bad educators". Speaking at the Online Information conference at London's Olympia, he played down the long-running controversy over the site's authority. He said young students should be able to reference the online encyclopaedia in their work. Mr Wales said the site, which is edited by users, should be seen as a "stepping stone" to other sources. As long as an article included accurate citations, he said he had "no problem" with it being used as a reference for younger students, although…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Jeremy Yoder

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009. Today, I asked Jeremy Yoder from University of Idaho and the Denim and Tweed blog to answer a few questions. Jeremy came to ScienceOnline2010 as one of the two winners of the NESCent blogging contest. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my…

Why I left Facebook, and then went back

It's rare that I blog off topic - there's so much cool science in the world that I don't have much time for anything else. But my departure from Facebook has co-incided with something of a global trend, so I thought I may as well explore what people thought. In case you've been wrapped in roofing felt for the last few weeks, here's the scoop. After a series of embarrassing security flaws and anger over the company's attitude toward privacy, Facebook users are leaving in droves. Or at least, that's the claim - the reality is that there's no viable alternative yet, although some bright…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Robin Ann Smith

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009. Today, I asked Robin Ann Smith from NESCent to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (…

From the Archives: Interview with Bora Zivkovic, Crazy Uncle of the Science Blogging Community

What with the recent blogospheric developments, I thought it would be a great idea to reprint a post from a couple of years ago where I turned the tables on Bora and interviewed him about science blogging, science and ScienceOnline. The original post is from March 13, 2008. I'd also like to point you to the interview Bora did with my son Sam after the 2009 conference. And yes, I think "Crazy Uncle" is perfect. Science blogging is like family and I think Bora fits perfectly not as our father or our brother or our cousin, but as our uncle. ============================== Welcome to the…

Iraq, the homefront, and Doonesbury

In the Doonesbury storyline that began on Monday, Garry Trudeau managed to capture what modern technology has done for deployed families far, far better than anyone I've seen before. With many of the American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan operating from more-or-less permanent bases, communications between the front lines and those left at home are a hell of a lot better than they've ever been. In many ways, this is a mixed blessing. At the camp my wife is based out of in Iraq, she has easy access to a payphone and can buy phone cards that allow her to call home at reasonable rates. She…

I conquered! Now try a poll that I am not on

I sicced you on this poll to identify the most vocal atheist of 2009: don't be surprised, I won. Of course, the real problem there was that the winner was determined in an open online poll — if it had been a poll to determine the most vocal Christian of the year, I also would have smashed into it hard. Now try something a little less biased: a poll to determine the most influential female atheist. My name is not on it, so I'm safe from messing this one up. Ophelia Benson 7% (76 votes) Greta Christina 21% (237 votes) Annie Laurie Gaylor 6% (68 votes) Tracie Harris & Jen Peeples 3% (29…

Science Haiku 2

Since the haiku post was well received, and since we have another three pieces online today – each on a different finding and each interesting in its own right – I have decided to return to the haiku format. Among other things, there is something quite satisfying about distilling complex scientific findings down to 17 little syllables – like writing the perfect tweet, but more so. In any case, follow the links to read more:   A burst of enzymes: A transcription traffic jam Watch for gene speed bumps   Genetics can rid The poison from potatoes Or add it elsewhere image: Thinkstock To raise…

Sciencewomen Take a Bow

After nearly five years online and two years with us here at ScienceBlogs, ScienceWoman is stepping away from the fray to focus on "Peace and Joy" for 2010. This will be my last post as SciWo or ScienceWoman. I've come to peace with the realization that blogging as SciWo is no longer a source of joy for me. I treasure the true friendships I share with many of you, but I know that we can continue to revel in and grow those friendships even without this blog. Alice Pawley is also hanging up her blogging shoes, so Sciencewomen will go dark. Stop by and say goodbye, wish well and carry on.

Circadian Rhythms in Human Mating

A short-but-sweet study (March 18, 2006): -------------------------------------------- I remember from an old review that John Palmer did a study on the diurnal pattern of copulation in humans some years ago. You can see the abstract here. Now, Roberto Reffinetti repeated the study and published it in the online open-source Journal of Circadian Rhythms here. The two studies agree: The peak copulatory activity in people living in a modern society is around midnight (or, really, around bedtime) with a smaller secondary peak in the morning around wake-time. Dig through the papers yourself for…

When will they learn? Another internet poll

The town of Frankenmuth, Michigan likes to flaunt their crosses — they've put them up on signs, and they've got one on the city logo. I suspect the town contains a Christian majority, so their local news probably felt safe putting up an online poll asking, Should Frankenmuth remove its cross from the city shield? They don't expect a horde of ravening godless atheists to descend on them and vote "YES!" — they never do. Mount up, internet warriors, and assault their poll with fire and sword and level it until they reel back crying for mercy. Frankenmuth won't know what hit them.* *Literally;…

The Hovind Scale

This will be handy around here: The Hovind Scale. It's a metric for calculating the craziness of a creationist's comment from 0 (scientific and honest) to 100 (dishonest insanity). There's even an online calculator to simplify it for you! I did a quick spot check on a few of our local loony commenters, and found that 16s were pretty common, and a few of the egregious old trolls who've been banned got up into the 40s. Unfortunately, the scale is flawed by one subjective measure: you have to interpret whether the kook is knowingly lying or not. I tend to view most of them as stupid but sincere…

Connections in Science

Web usage data outline map of knowledge: When users click from one page to another while looking through online scientific journals, they generate a chain of connections between things they think belong together. Now a billion such 'clickstream events' have been analysed by researchers to map these connections on a grand scale. The work provides a fascinating snapshot of the web of interconnections between disciplines, which some data-mining experts believe reveals the degree to which work that is not often cited -- including work in the social sciences and humanities -- is widely consulted…

Kevin Zelnio in Seed

Kevin Zelnio published an article in Seed Magazine, which was placed online yesterday - On the allure of the ocean's novelty: That is what the deep sea is like. Almost every collection brings up something that I have never seen; that few, if any, have ever found. It is an immense task, in an immense place, cataloging life in the planet's largest ecosystem and trying to understand what drives its diversity. But its constant novelty and rewards keep me sorting through the muck even as my vision starts to blur with sweat and tears and my nostrils burn from the stench that hangs in the salt-…

Laboratory Web Site and Video Awards

You may remember, from several months ago, that Attila started a contest for the best designed lab web page. Soon, the project became too big for a lone blogger to tackle. Especially after an article about this appeared on the online pages of Nature. So, as Attila announced today, the contest goes Big Time. The Scientist is now hosting the official contest. Of course, Attila is one of the judges. Several web-pages have already been nominated and now it is your job to think of the best-designed, prettiest, most-functional and most up-to-date laboratory homepages and nominate them for the…

Good wine

Last Wednesday I went to Wine Authorities, the new wine store in Durham, for our monthly Durham Blogger Meetup. Afterwards, I could not help it but go home with three new bottles of wine. The best is the one I tried from the Enomatic machine at the back of the store - 2005 Fleurie, Granits des Moriers (Jacky Piret), a gorgeous Spanish version of a Burgundy. Since Thursday and Friday were crazy (on Thursday I spent 12 hours online monitoring the media and blog responses to the Nigersaurus paper and unveiling) and I was teaching on Saturday morning, we finally managed to have a nice dinner…

NAS Assessment of NAI

The NAS Assessment of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, 2008, is out and available The National Academy of Sciences did an assessment of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, at the request of NASA, over the last year. The report is out and available on the web From the Executive Summary: FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS Overall, the committee is unanimous in finding that the NAI has fulfilled its original mandate. The NAI has played a key role in supporting the development of astrobiology and has positively affected NASA's current and future missions. The committee recommends that the NAI should…

Volcano from space

I like this one. It is from NASA though I've heavily hacked it around (I saw it today in a copy of Wired at Mr Polito's; oh yes, it is online too: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/08/gallery_volcanoes/3/, but I don't recommend visiting, the site is mindbogglingly slow, lord knows how much Javash*t they load up). Anyway, it's the Sarychev volcano (Russia's Kuril Islands, northeast of Japan) in an early stage of eruption on June 12, 2009. I'm not entirely sure what I'm seeing here - real Met Men should comment - or how tall the plume is. Is it hitting the stratosphere? [Sorry folks -…

'Sense About Science' slaughters celebrity silliness

Oh my gawd this is so fun! You know how we are always screaming online about some stupid thing Jenny McCarthy or Bill O'Reilly has said/done? A group of folks at Sense About Science have gotten together some of the stupid, if not outright dangerous 'potentially misleading' things celebrities have said about earth science/heath/diet/etc and matched them up with real explanations from real scientists/educated people within the appropriate field. PDF-- Celebrities and Science 2011 It includes a couple of my pet-peeves-- 'boosting' your immune system and mega-dosing on vitamins in the absence of…

Them Doggone Carnies

Blog carnivals! The twenty-eighth Four Stone Hearth is on-line at Hot Cup of Joe. Archaeology and anthropology to a most awe-inspiring extent. The next open 4SH hosting slot is already on 5 29 December. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me. No need to be an anthro pro -- come as you are. And do it NOW. A very fine Skeptics' Circle may be found at Med Journal Watch. So fine, in fact, that I am on it despite forgetting to submit! Thanks Chris! And all you biology types, check out the latest Tangled Bank at From Archaea to Zeaxanthol.

Notability Discussion on Wikipedia

There is a discussion going on at Wikipedia regarding certain facets of the on-line encyclopedia's controversial notability policy. At heart, it's about where the line should be drawn between notable subjects (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and non-notable ones (Shitty Arnie, my wife's cat), articles about which should be deleted. There are two main issues with WP:Notability that need clarification by the community. Does every article need reliable third-party sources to prove it is notable, or can notability be inherited from another article? To what extent can the General Notability Guideline be…

Giving a bad review is getting risky

The latest round of indignant lawsuits by those irked at negative reviews: Left Behind Games isn't too happy with their game's reception in the blogosphere, so they've started sending out threats of lawsuits to silence the critics. One of the letters is online, another target is Daily Kos, and most amusingly of all, the CEO of the company tried to plead for Christian charity from on critic before deciding to wave a lawyer at him. It's an awfully silly strategy. Bloggers have loud mouths, but don't have deep pockets. These attempts at legal harrassment are only going to win them negative…

Scientific Inequalities: Publications and Populations

This is a visualization of scientific productivity and population. It's from the online edition of the German "Spiegel." The top map illustrates the number of scientific publications per year. Contrast this to the population map, shown underneath it. I've copied the map below. Read on to see... Here's the caption, in German: "Wissenschaftliche Forschung gemessen an der Zahl der Publikationen im Jahr 2001 (oben) gegenuber dem Kartogramm der Bevolkerungszahl der Lander der Welt (unten)." Make of it what you will. In fact, I wonder what you do make of it. (And with apologies to our…

This year's Scifi Contest

I've received a couple of emails from folks who wanted to know when this year's contest would be announced. Shortly, folks. Meanwhile, get going with your story. If I may, I'd suggest mulling over the story idea, setting, characters, tone, etc obsessively and making notes before you actually begin to write the story. Try and get hold of Writing Fiction by Alan Wall and give it your undivided attention for a few days. The rules this year would be pretty much the same as before. There will be an exciting new addition to what we'll do with this year's (and past year's stories) - besides…

Shifting Baselines and Marriage

Marriage is nothing like it used to be. That's true. But lots of things we consider to be new and unprecedented are actually traditional (e.g., adultery, single parenting, politicians having affairs). And the things we consider to be old-fashioned are actually new (e.g., marrying for love, the expectation of fidelity). Historian Stephanie Coontz spoke about the warped view of marriage's past at Seattle's Town Hall last month: Courting Disaster: The Worldwide Revolution in Love, Sex, and Marriage, which NPR made available online. Listening to Coontz reminds us of the marital baselines…

Why I Regret My New Toilet Seat

I recently bought a new wooden toilet seat at Target for five dollars. Five dollars! It wasn't even on sale and I thought to myself, "What a steal!" I should have known that was probably, literally the case. My toilet seat was probably illegally logged in Russia. In this week's issue of The New Yorker, Raffi Khatchadourian (who also wrote the great profile of Paul Watson) writes about the illegal logging market. The article is not quite online yet, but check out this short video where he discusses how a tree illegally logged from halfway around the world becomes a toilet seat at your…

Chat Rooms

Context is everything: Sana Klaric and husband Adnan, who used the names "Sweetie" and "Prince of Joy" in an online chatroom, spent hours telling each other about their marriage troubles, Metro.co.uk reported. The truth emerged when the two turned up for a date. Now the pair, from Zenica in central Bosnia, are divorcing after accusing each other of being unfaithful. "I was suddenly in love. It was amazing. We seemed to be stuck in the same kind of miserable marriage. How right that turned out to be," Sana, 27, said. Someone should teach these people about the fundamental attribution error…

Harvard bookstore calls the cops

I thought the saga of The Harvard Coop would be over once the inanity of its claim that the ISBN numbers of books used in Harvard courses were their intellectual property. The ISBN, or International Standard Book Number, is a 13 digit number and barcode used by publishers to identify books uniquely. Harvard students were going to the text book section of the Coop (the original name of the Harvard Cooperative, later bought by the Barnes and Noble College Division), copying down the ISBN numbers and then making them available online via CrimsonReading.org, a service that automates comparison…

Journal Scan: A Little Lead is Too Much

A quick look at Blood Lead Concentrations Less than 10 Micrograms per Deciliter and Child Intelligence at 6 Years of Age by Todd A. Jusko, Charles R. Henderson, Jr., Bruce P. Lanphear et al., published online in Environmental Health Perspectives. The current CDC definition of elevated blood lead in a child is 10 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood (written as 10 μg/dL). However, there is increasingly compelling evidence that lower blood lead levels are associated with decreased performance on intelligence testing. At the same time, it has just been reported that the EPA has just…