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The Perils of Competence

Day four of the power outage, with the added angry-making twist that the people across the street from us have their power back. Staring across the road at their warm, shiny lights, I could feel the beginning of the sort of rage that fuels torch-and-pitchfork mobs storming medieval castles. Only, you know, there was just me, so I retreated back to the hotel room for another uncomfortable night. I spent most of the day in my office on campus, which, mirabile dictu never lost power. This is a first-- normally, the power in our building goes out at the faintest hint of a power line falling…

Ask a ScienceBlogger: Why Do Academics Blog?

The Corporate Masters have posted a new Ask a ScienceBlogger question: The question (submitted by a reader) is this: There are many, many academic bloggers out there feverishly blogging about their areas of interest. Still, there are many, many more academics who don't. So, why do you blog and how does blogging help with your research? Taking these in the opposite order, how does blogging help with my research? The answer is simple: it doesn't. Not one bit. I am an experimental physicist, so my research is done in the lab, not in my office (well, data analysis, when I have data to analyze…

Non-Dorky Poll: Drinking Songs

I'm feeling pretty harried this week, because I'm teaching using a new curriculum, which requires all-new lecture slides and notes and homework assignments. I'm also going away this weekend, to Williamstown for the celebration marking the 50th anniversary of the founding of my college rugby club. As a result, I've been losing more mental processor cycles than usual to thinking about my own college days, and remembering the lyrics to the dozens and dozens of songs I used to know. So, because it's on my mind anyway, and because the mixing of college sports and alcohol would really cheese off…

Single-Payer Universal Health Coverage

Yes! magazine is one of my favorite progressive publications.  The reason is that they tend to take a positive view of everything.  That is unlike a lot of politically-oriented publications, most of which somehow manage to make everything sound dire. The latest issue has several articles on health care.  Specifically, they examine the case for single-payer, universal coverage. On the right is a graphic from one of the articles, href="http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=1503">Has Canada Got the Cure? by Holly Dressel.   The article was adapted from Holly Dressel’s book God Save…

Optimal class schedules depend on institutional and program mission

Yesterday I wrote a post where I laid out reasons why I am opposed to night school courses in my graduate program. As I said yesterday, "I am against accommodating our full-time worker, part-time graduate student students by moving a significant number of our classes to evening hours." That post sparked a number of wonderful comments providing a variety of valuable perspectives on the role of night classes in serving various student populations. I didn't mean to come across as down on part-time grad students or the over all concept of night school. Let's see if I can lay out a more general…

The Friday Fermentable: Beer Y'all: "Craft brewing, original music, and entrepreneurial righteousness"

In this special Saturday edition of The Friday Fermentable, here's just a quick plug for a great North Carolina documentary that is screening here this evening in the City-That-Tobacco-Built: Beer. Rock & Roll. North Carolina. In July 2008, seven friends assembled from across North Carolina to tour 27 microbreweries and brewpubs from the mountains to the coast in a seatless cargo van. Beer Y'all follows their nine days of hanging out with brewers, partying at rock shows, and drinking many, many beers as they celebrate friendship, music, and a Southern microbrewing explosion. Beer Y'all…

Duke Nicholas School and Key West High School 2008 projects at Botanical Garden

I wrote at length the other day about my visit and talk at the Key West Tropical Forest & Botanical Garden, noting that Duke students and their Key West High School mentees would be presenting the results of their 2008 projects yesterday afternoon. Well, we were sadly flying out about the time of the presentations but one of them captured all of the results. In fact, one project chronicled all the projects dating back to 2002 - kind of like looking in a mirror's reflection of a mirror. This project established the Science Corner for the garden website, hosted at Duke but linked on the…

The Friday Fermentable: A Mentor Gets A Well-Deserved Break

This morning our dear friend and colleague whose wine escapades often fill this spot awoke to the rewards of retirement. My senior cancer research colleague, Erleichda, has just closed the book on 30 years with a single pharmaceutical company, unheard of in today's climate of layoffs and jumping from one company to the next. My friend began in this industry when it was still considered a noble pursuit and continued to be an ambassador for all that is good about pharmaceutical research & development, with his primary concern the welfare of those stricken with cancer and the cultivation…

NCAA hoops tournament: great time for vasectomy

Your Humble Blogger has suddenly become the go-to guy in the blogosphere for all things vasectomy. I don't know why. So I've embraced becoming an ambassador for the double-snip and bring you a clever radio marketing campaign from the Oregon Urology Institute in Springfield: Guys, what would you endure for a weekend in paradise? To not only be able to watch a potential of 48 first- and second- round games of the NCAA men's basketball tournament on TV, but to do so with free pizza and total sympathy from your spouse? Together with Justin Myers of the ESPN Radio "Sports Idol" radio show, the…

Grand Rounds 4.22 at Science Roll

I was remiss in noting that Hungarian medical student and Medical Web 2.0 guru Berci Meskó has hosted the current and rather large Grand Rounds medical blog carnival at his excellent blog, Science Roll. Fresh off his US tour that included a presentation at the Medicine Meets Virtual Reality conference and a talk at Yale University, Doctor-to-be Meskó returns in stride with the week's wide spectrum of medical blogging. For those new readers, blog carnivals are periodic compilations of posts organized around general topical areas. For example, Grand Rounds is a general medicine carnival begun…

Source of Muscadine Grape Skin Extract (MSKE)

A few days ago, I posted about a 1 September Cancer Research paper showing that a muscadine grape skin extract (MSKE) lacking resveratrol had activity in killing prostate cancer cells. I've finally had a chance to look at the paper. The study was very well-done by Dr Jeffrey Green's group at the US National Cancer Institute with colleagues at Georgia, Texas, USDA, and George Washington University. The studies showed that the grape skin extract (at 10-20 μg/mL) had cytotoxic activity against progressively tumorigenic prostate cell lines but had no effect on normal prostatic epithelial cells…

No constitutional right to unapproved drugs

A federal appeals court has denied the right of patients to the use of cancer drugs prior to their complete assessment of safety and efficacy. The case was filed against the US FDA in 2003 by the Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs, who argued that patients have a constitutional right to any drug in clinical trials. The 8-to-2 decision by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit came in a closely watched and emotional case that pitted desperate patients willing to try unproven, even risky, therapies against those arguing that drugs should be proved safe…

Former Chinese FDA director sentenced to death

From today's New York Times, The 62-year-old former commissioner [Zheng Xiaoyu] received the unusually harsh sentence amid growing concerns about the quality and safety of China's food and drug system following several scandals here involving tainted food and phony drugs. China is now under mounting pressure to overhaul its food export controls after two Chinese companies were accused earlier this year of shipping contaminated pet food ingredients to the United States, resulting in one of the largest pet food recalls in American history. The government is also investigating how diethylene…

Nature remains the source of 70% of prescription drugs

So say the American elder statesmen of natural products in the 2007 update of their periodic review of the subject to be published in the 23 March issue of the Journal of Natural Products. (Details are in this Reuters article with by Julie Steenhuysen). I will post more about the article when I get my hands on it, but it comes from NCI's Dr David Newman and recently-retired Dr Gordon Cragg. Cragg had led the NCI Natural Products Branch, a position that Newman now holds. Newman and colleague Gordon Cragg reviewed the origins of new drugs developed in the past quarter-century and found that…

Guinea pigs, please line up here

I have received a request for volunteers to assist as subjects in a research project. I was disappointed; there are no exotic drugs, no catheters, no insane experimental surgeries that will turn you into a super-being with surprising powers beyond all mortal ken, but the fellow did manage to spell my name correctly, so it must be on the up-and-up. Contact Ben Myers (hey! That's how he got the spelling correct — he cheated!) if you're interested. Dr. Myers, I am an assistant professor of communication studies at USC Upstate. I am in the process of starting a research project and I was…

Shell says 7 years before oil demand outstrips supply

The CEO of Royal Dutch Shell says "after 2015 supplies of easy-to-access oil and gas will no longer keep up with demand." This in an email from Jeroen van der Veer to his staff. Hmmm. That means two things: even more demand for the expensive stuff, like Alberta's tar sands, and really expensive gasoline. Unless, that is, van der Veer's more optimistic scenario comes to pass: The other route to the future is less painful, even if the start is more disorderly. This Blueprints scenario sees numerous coalitions emerging to take on the challenges of economic development, energy security and…

Secular hooligans?

I have no idea if the staff at ScienceBlogs anticipated just how popular the religion vs. atheism debate would be on these pages, but it would seem we're not the only home of passionate and often thoughtful argument over the God Question. Over at the Washington Post's "On Faith" blog, there a fascinating example of what sets a science-oriented forums apart from those that appeal to a more general audience. Jacques Berlinerblau, an associate professor and program director at Georgetown University, recently complained that secularists are boring, and argued that atheists haven't come up with a…

NASA speaks out boldly on the ‘bacteria from space’ claims

That was sarcasm in the title, everyone. NASA has released a public statement in which they gingerly edge away from Hoover's paper. NASA is a scientific and technical agency committed to a culture of openness with the media and public. While we value the free exchange of ideas, data, and information as part of scientific and technical inquiry, NASA cannot stand behind or support a scientific claim unless it has been peer-reviewed or thoroughly examined by other qualified experts. This paper was submitted in 2007 to the International Journal of Astrobiology. However, the peer review process…

The passing of an enemy of science

Pity the poor rationalist, who won't have Jerry Falwell to kick around any more. Gone is one of the leading opponents of reasoned debate, a man who seemed to devote every waking hour to turning the clock back on the Enlightenment. I have no idea how good a family man he was, but his public persona was one of open hostility to tolerance, diversity and science. Just how significant he was -- and therefore how significant is his death -- is far from clear, but I suspect that this morning's eulogies greatly exaggerate his lasting influence. What's consuming the nation's obituarists today is the…

Greatest Physicists #6 - Ernest Rutherford

#6 - Ernest Rutherford The New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford was an incubator of genius, and a genius himself. His position on this list is probably a little unorthodox as he wasn't a very flashy scientist and he wasn't a theoretical wizard. He just happened to be a surpassingly great physicist anyway. When Rutherford started his work in the late 1800s, modern physics was still quite new. Classical mechanics had been fleshed out reasonably well, but relativity and quantum mechanics didn't exist, and the world of the microscopic was very poorly understood. The very concept that…

Failout.

Update: I seriously feel guilty for writing politics in a physics blog. I personally sometimes get annoyed at reading politics on other non-political blogs, and I imagine you do too. That's why I happily encourage you not to read anything I write tagged with politics unless you like that sort of thing. The election's only a month or so off. I promise after that the politics will be few and far between, and until then I'll still try to keep it to only an occasional thing. The bailout is dead. As congressional acts often do, it may come back to life at a later date. But for the moment, it…

Christians are morbid ghouls. No one is surprised.

How tasteless, tacky, and dishonest can a Christian get? This will do: selling fictional fantasies about what will happen to people when they're dead. What's going on? Are all universally saved, after all? Did Richard Dawkins become a Christian? Did he... remain an atheist, and STILL go to heaven? Such questions leap to mind when presented with title of the newest short story collection released by author and Christian apologist Anthony Horvath: "Richard Dawkins, Antony Flew, and Mother Teresa Go to Heaven." Written over a span of two years, these three short stories detail what happens as…

The Simpsons, naturally

Obviously, when a movie comes out by the best show television ever created (at least if we count the first 6, maybe 7 seasons, as that show, and maybe we don't even keep Season 1 in the mix, and we say humor show, not any show, and we admit The Wire and Arrested Development and Blossom are also up there and we stop caveating because this could go on for a while...), so when The Simpsons Movie is out, there's a lot of buzz about the show and the movie. A media blitz, let's admit. Matt Groening on The Daily Show; Groening on NPR; long-time show big guy Al Jean on Fresh Air; season 4 DVDs…

An urban experiment: Does beauty and talent out of context, mean less beauty and talent?

I just finished reading an interesting piece from the Washington Post (thanks Steve), which basically asked whether "objective" beauty and talent from one of the world's finest musicians, playing one of the world's most expensive instruments, can be demonstrated when seen out of context. More specifically, this was Joshua Bell performing with his Stradivarius posing as a street musician in a busy DC metro station. It's quite an intriguing experiment, whereby the central question posed is philosophical (and ancient) at heart. It's an old epistemological debate, older, actually, than the koan…

Truth experiment convergence: Wiki, Google and moving on up.

So, looks like the truth experiment is holding it's own at #19 (we were at #18 yesterday). This despite a whole series of strange happenings that seem to converge around what we're trying to do here. For starters, a few days ago, Google finally demonstrated that it had tweaked its search algorithm to deal with google bombing. After just over two years, Google has finally defused the "Google Bomb" that has returned US President George W. Bush at the top of its results in a search on "miserable failure." The move wasn't a post-State Of The Union Address gift for Bush. Instead, it's part of…

This, I think, is a thing of beauty: Others, not so much.

And the object in question is this Lego ad, which to me almost represents the exact opposite sentiment to the "talking science" avenue raised in Ben's previous post. Why do I think this is a thing of beauty. Maybe, it's because I'm in the know. Maybe, because the tag-line ("Make Anything") is something clever enough to make my heart sing. Maybe, because there's no even the slightest mention of ubiquitination here. Or maybe, because I think Lego is just freakin' cool anyway. What's especially interesting, is you go to the referring post at ADVERTISING/DESIGN GOODNESS, there is a…

About them snowflakes (or now you too can practically barf out snowflake trivia)

So like Vancouver had a major dump of snow last week, which is just not west coast at all. Predictably, all hell broke loose, and UBC even experienced a campus wide power outage at one point. Anyway, whilst looking for some things for the FILTER, I came across a really cool website that looked at snowflake morphology, called snowcrystals.com It's pretty amazing really, how convoluted the categories are - and all, of course, are dictated by the hexagonal lattice that water crystallizes at. Essentially, due to the polar "V" like structure of H2O, the most energetically favorable way of…

Dr. Octopus' freakingly huge new arms, or alternate energy source?

Let's hope it's the latter, or we'll for sure need some Superhero action, and certainly not the kind that the Wonder Twins espouse (hands down, lamest superheroes if you ask me). Anyway, what do you think? These would be pretty grand in the Spiderman villain mayhem and destruction category. Except that these are actually a newish technology designed to harness "wave energy." This being the kinetic energy stored by the movement of water, which itself was initiated via the wind blowing on the water itself. Here's quote taken from Ocean Power Delivery Ltd, a company about to launch a 5 arm…

Why Teaching a Dog Physics is Important

Ok, back from Christmas hiatus which I, uh, forgot to announce. But I am pleased that I survived a full 96+ hours with exactly zero internet access. Didn't even miss it. Much. Over that break, I happened to be in a bookstore in exurban Atlanta. Gravitating as I tend to do toward the science section, I saw this book: It is of course How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, by ScienceBlogs' own Chad Orzel. I can't review it yet because I haven't sat down and read it yet (I have a copy in the mail), though based on my bookstore perusing I am certain it will be as brilliant as expected, which is…

Light Bulbs, Improved.

A quick and simple way to roughly check the calibration of a spectrometer is to point it at the ceiling. Fluorescent lights put out a particular spectrum, and by comparing the colors the spectrometer senses to the colors you know the light emits, you can see if your spectrometer is accurate to a first approximation. I did this very thing yesterday, with the following result: This is about what we expect to see. Fluorescent lighting consists of a relatively discrete set of colors compared to the broad Planck's law emission of a hot incandescent bulb. The central peak in the florescent…

More Potential Universes

All right, time for an actual example of this gravitational force law I've been ruminating on for the last two days. Today we'll look at an alternate version of the gravitational potential that's truly screwy: The first thing to notice is that it's not finite as r becomes very large. Among other things, that means there's no such thing as an escape velocity in a universe with this kind of gravity. What goes up really must come down. To say more, we ought to take a look at the effective potential, which takes into account the angular momentum of the orbiting object. We'll write that…

The NAS and Geoengineering

Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, Jonathan Adler notes that the NAS is starting to look into the possibility of geoengineering to roll back human changes in the climate. For those of you who haven't heard, geoengineering is the process of deliberately changing the climate to compensate for the effects of greenhouse gases. There's no shortage of reasons it might not work. The most obvious is that climate is not fully understood as it is, and so massive alterations may have unintended consequences and make things worse. Especially if the methods of geoengineering result in permanent changes,…

Ropes, Fences, and Polarization

A few days ago we had an interesting discussion about the actual nature of light waves with respect to the informal qualitative presentation of light waves found in intro textbooks. Because I have the best set of physics blog readers in the world, a fascinating discussion ensued with CC and Neil among others. One of the points that was brought up was polarization, by more than one commenter: How do polarized lenses work then? I was always under the impression that they worked on the fact that light waves had a physical 'up and down' movement. And I'm not at all surprised that this…

Sunday Function

The quadratic formula. With the exception of the Pythagorean Theorem, it's probably the single most common mathematical formula people carry from high school. It's not a function as such, it's something that solves a function. Let me give an example: Pick a number x, square it, add twice x to that, subtract 3 from that. You might want to figure out what x makes the answer equal to zero. It's the kind of thing we have to do in physics all the time. In this case, the answers (and you can find them by several methods) happen to be -3 and 1. Plug them in and you'll see that you end up…

Drift velocity

Driving in my car for five hours today, I had plenty of time to think about velocity. There's not much you can do about it, speeding doesn't take much time off the trip but it does add the risk of an expensive ticket. We single classical particles don't have a lot of options for getting from place to place very quickly. The situation is a little more interesting with flows of current. If you want to fill a large bucket with water from a garden hose at one cubic foot per second, the hose is going to have to be turned on very high. Water will be flying out of the end of the hose at some…

Best Picture

Today I'm going to soapbox about something utterly inconsequential and only tangentially related to science. Apologies all around. It's the weekend though, so I trust you'll forgive a bit of a deviation from the usual! The nominations for the Oscars are out, and generally it's a pretty mundane lot. Take the Best Picture nominees, for instance: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Frost/Nixon Milk The Reader Slumdog Millionaire To be perfectly honest I've seen none of these. I'm sure they all have their charms, but no one I've talked to (and my friends have good taste) really painted them…

Back to the future (at last)

O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't! The Tempest is not only one of Shakespeare last plays, but arguably his most profound. No longer content with mere comedy or historical tragedy, he explores the changes rocking the Western world in the 17th century as superstition gave way to reason. By the closing of the fifth act, the sorcerer Prosper laments that "Now my charms are all o'erthrown, And what strength I have's mine own." And yet, four hundred years later, faith in magic and and distrust of science…

Palin slips into jeans, disses genes

It's almost not worth the bother of taking another swipe at Sarah Palin's anti-intellectual bigotry this late in a game that's pretty much over. I mean, the coverage of her speech in Asheville, N.C., last night couldn't find anything newsworthy to mention beyond her decision to eschew the $150,000 wardrobe in favor of good ol' common-sense jeans. But Christopher Hitchens' way with words makes it all worthwhile. The Hitch begins by lamenting Palin's empty-headed criticism of fruit fly genetics research: "...where does a lot of that earmark money end up? It goes to projects having little or…

Palin-esque earmarks you can love

By now, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's hypocritical position on budget "earmarks" is a part of the American political landscape. The former earmark champion is now the ostensible earmark slayer. Whatever. Unfortunately, a lot of science is funded through earmarks, so we should be careful what we wish for when it comes to reforming government. For example, Politico's Ben Smith has produced a list of scientific research earmarks that Palin recently requested, including $1 million for rockfish research along with: ⢠$400,000: Alaska Invasive Species Program: Continues to comprehensively prevent,…

Various and Sundry

Two notes from Caltech of interest: Michael L. Roukes' group at Caltech has produced a NEMS (nanoelectromechanical system) device which can (almost) measure the mass of a single molecule (as opposed to the many tens of thousands (is this the correct amount?) needed in mass spectrometry.) Build a 2 micrometer by 100 nanometer NEMS resonator. Drop a molecule on it. The frequency of vibration of the NEMS resonator changes. Detect this frequency change. Of course vibration frequency also depends on where the molecule lands. So run the experiment about 500 times to get good estimate of the…

ArXiview 1.2 for iPhone OS 3.0 Out

ArXiview, my arXiv browsing iPhone app, has been updated for the new iPhone OS 3.0. New features include: Search fields now accept boolean queries and exact phrase queries. Touch the little (i) icon to get info on this feature from the search page. Search by identifier has been added. There is now an in application emailer. So when you want to email yourself a reference the program doesn't quit out of the app. Added the cond-mat category for quantum gases. The app now sorts resorts in reverse chronological order. A bunch of bug fixes (search by category in particular was acting buggy.)…

Climate Wars: National Security Focus To Widen Support?

The New York Times led their Sunday edition with an article by John Broder focusing on recent Defense department conclusions on the national security risks of climate change. Here's the key takeaway from the article on what it could mean for re-framing the debate over cap and trade legislation for fence-sitters in the Senate: Much of the public and political debate on global warming has focused on finding substitutes for fossil fuels, reducing emissions that contribute to greenhouse gases and furthering negotiations toward an international climate treaty -- not potential security challenges…

Do Roughly 40% of Americans Agree with Palin on Abortion?

While many Democrats and women find Palin's support for criminalizing abortion to be outrageous, a recent survey by the Pew organization finds that roughly 40% of Americans generally agree with her views. Combined, 41% of Americans answer that abortion should be outlawed in either in all cases (15%) or most cases (26%). Among White evangelicals, who Pew measures at roughly 30% of the American public, this support shoots up to a combined 62% (19% all cases, 43% most cases). UPDATE: One problem in comparing this poll to Palin's specific views is the unclear nature of what counts as "most…

Gov. Tim Pawlenty on Why He Supports Creationism

The McCain choice of Sarah Palin has made creationism a topic that various GOP spokespeople are now being asked by the press to weigh in on. From the interviews, an emerging talking point appears to be that "it's a local decision." On Sunday, Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty was asked by Tom Brokaw about Palin's position and his personal views on the issue. Video above and transcript below. MR. BROKAW: Okay. In the governor's race, she refused to be specific about her views on Creationism versus evolution. But, as I understand it, she did say that she thought that the two subjects should be…

Before Reagan, Only Nixon Said "God Bless America"

In an op-ed at the Seattle Times, communication scholars Dave Domke and Kevin Coe note the absurd God & Country tests that have been applied to Barack Obama, ranging from the "Give Praise to God" test to the "Flag Lapel Pin" test and most recently the "God Bless America" test. As it turns out, the tradition of saying "God Bless America" by political leaders is a manufactured illusion that has been turned into a patriotic sales pitch, only dating to Ronald Reagan and applied strategically in the post-9/11 Bush presidency. Here's what Domke and Coe report: Consider this reality: The…

Sessions and Talks from the Upcoming 2010 Astrobiology Science Conference

Astrobiology is an amazingly interesting, highly interdisciplinary, and relative new field of science. Basically, it's both the search for life elsewhere in the universe, and it's the study of how to sustain human life in space and on other planets (and how to protect other planets from Earth life). Our lab works on several different astrobiological projects. Given both the amazing breadth of science that falls under the heading of "astrobiology," and the fact that it is a branch of "space exploration", some of the titles of talks and papers in this field can seem rather bizarre when seen…

Happy New Year everyone, and Happy International Year of Biodiversity!

Hope everyone had a nice holiday, but I guess it's now back to the grind with a brand new year. For myself, I'm pretty stoked with a number of things coming up that will focus on this thing we call "Biodiversity." And why is this? Well, basically, 2010 has been declared by the United Nations as the International Year of Biodiversity. I also think it's going to be an interesting year for me coming up, because of the following: 1. Yesterday, whilst driving home from work and going a good 50 or so clicks on the road, a squirrel ran out in front of me in such a way that it entered somehow in…

Aluminum versus Aluminium: Where did that come from?

Science scout twitter feed The reason why there were two ways of saying the element aluminum/aluminium has always been one of the those things that made me go "hmmm" But by the same token, it's also always been one of those things that never stuck around in my consciousness long enough for me to look it up. Well, lucky for all us, Michael Quinion over at World Wide Words does an awesome job of going into the lexicon of these words, paying particular attention to why two forms exist - specifically, why the Brits say "Alumininium" and why Americans say "Aluminum." It's actually quite…

Imagining a basketball game between acids and d-orbitals: Destruction, mayhem and beauty.

Science scout twitter feed Since we're in the thick of NCAA action, remember this? Anyway, I'm reminded of one of favourite battles in the science showdown. That is the battle between "acids" and "d orbitals." Here's how it went... - - - Welcome folks, to this here what we'll call the beautiful game (at least we'll say that for the molecular level). This game really had it all, it was dynamic, it had equilibrium, it had fluid transition, and it was catalytic. It involved freakishly large chemical sounding words, and also a wierd scoreboard that looked something like this: But hey,…

The 1% difference between chimps and humans is wrong

Actually that isn't fair. It isn't wrong. The percentage of difference just depends heavily on what you define as a difference. So argues an editorial by Jon Cohen in the latest issue of Science: Using novel yardsticks and the flood of sequence data now available for several species, researchers have uncovered a wide range of genomic features that may help explain why we walk upright and have bigger brains--and why chimps remain resistant to AIDS and rarely miscarry. Researchers are finding that on top of the 1% distinction, chunks of missing DNA, extra genes, altered connections in gene…