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Reality check on USDA’s claims about its plan to privatize poultry inspection

Several recent newspaper editorials have gotten under USDA’s skin. Editors at the Charlotte Observer, Raleigh News Observer, Bellingham (WA) Herald and Gaston (NC) Gazette are skeptical that the USDA’s plan to “modernize” the poultry slaughter inspection process is a wise move. In “Fed's proposed shift in poultry rules troubling,” the Charlotte Observer’s  editorial board wrote this on January 20: “Warning horns should blast full force around the Obama administration approving a change in federal law to replace most federal inspectors on poultry processing lines with company workers who would…

The Affordable Care Act: It’s a survivor

With so much pressure on the Affordable Care Act to immediately live up to high expectations, and with opponents who seem gleeful at the news that Americans are having a hard time signing up for affordable health care, it’s reassuring to read that the health reform law can readily take a few blows and keep moving forward. In a December analysis released by the Urban Institute, authors Linda Blumberg and John Holahan write that the “Affordable Care Act is unlikely to suffer long-term damage even if the marketplaces experience low enrollment and some adverse selection in the first year.” (…

Will Tom Vilsack's USDA keep its promise to poultry plant workers about their grueling, disabling work?

USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack seems determined to implement a new poultry slaughter inspection system, despite strong calls from the food safety and public health communities for him to withdraw it.   At an April 17 congressional hearing before the House Appropriations Subcommittees on Agriculture, Rural Development, FDA and Related Agencies, Vilsack indicated that the new regulation would be completed soon, according to Congressional Quarterly. Opponents say the proposal will do little to improve food safety, at the same time reducing USDA's ranks of poultry inspectors and shifting their food-…

Taking the Next Steps on an Education of Limits

Well, the astrophysicist and I finally managed to write something together. More than a year and a half ago when I moved to Scienceblogs I promised that Eric would be my sometime- collaborator. I promise I did not realize was a total lie. You see, the way we've managed over the years to raise four kids, run a farm and work several jobs is that we trade off responsibilities - when I'm working in front of the computer, he's with the kids or working the farm. When he's at work teaching, I'm home doing the same. Yes, we do have evenings together after the kids go to bed, but what we found is…

Are Bean Sprouts the End of Organic Farming? Nah.

My current favorite news story is one by Reuters about an outbreak of e,coli in Germany attributed to organically grown bean sprouts with the ridiculous headline "E. Coli Outbreak Poses Questions for Organic Farming." Now it is absolutely true that there is a nasty outbreak of e.coli in Germany that has made thousands of of people sick, and caused 22 deaths. This is awful. But Reuters has a little accuracy problem as it leaps to attack organic agriculture: The warm, watery, organic growing environment suspected as the source of a deadly E.coli outbreak in Germany may produce delicious,…

Geometric Progressions: What You *Will* Learn From an Oil Shock

The phrase "oil shock" is being thrown around a lot in the national news, and events in Tripoli at the moment seem to be reinforcing the idea that we're facing an extended period of instability, and possibly a new cycle of oil price increases and the stress on personal and public economies that accompany rising prices. Is this a given? No, but there are similarities here to prior experience. The most important point is that while everyone notes that Libyan oil is less than 2% of world consumption, that supply constraints don't have to be significant, or even present in order to cause a…

Should Americans Cut and Run?

An anonymous guest poster at ClubOrlov makes the case that America isn't a place you want to live - and that Americans should get out of Dodge: Americans, I have some bad news for you: You have the worst quality of life in the developed world--by a wide margin. If you had any idea of how people really lived in Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and many parts of Asia, you'd be rioting in the streets calling for a better life. In fact, the average Australian or Singaporean taxi driver has a much better standard of living than the typical American white-collar worker. I know this…

OSHA agrees to give advance notice of enforcement actions against BP?

I noticed today on OSHA's website a new memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the US Coast Guard (USCG). Under the heading "Information Sharing: Enforcement," OSHA says it: "will notify the Federal On Scene Coordinator (FOSC) when it intends to take any enforcement action against BP, BP's contractors, or any other employer engaged in response activities." I must be missing something here because the OSH Act is pretty darn explicit in prohibiting advance notice of an enforcement action. It's a big no-no, punishable with as much as a $1,000 fine or as much as 6 months in jail. The statute…

Dust to dust

by revere, cross-posted at Effect Measure As we noted two days ago in a post about how the produce industry is now interested in tracking regulations they previously opposed after being whacked with billions of dollars in losses because of a protracted Salmonella outbreak whose source was presumably produce but couldn't be easily traced, the sugar industry is now also interested in OSHA regulations for combustible dusts. All it took was the deaths of 13 workers at the Imperial Sugar Refinery in Savannah, Georgia. That and the thrid largest fine in OSHA history, $8.7 million. The facts suggest…

New Ozone Standard Leaves Smog in the Air

EPA has set the limit for pollution-forming ozone in the air to 75 ppb, despite the unanimous advice of the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee to set it between 60-70 ppb (more here on the health effects of ozone). This is hardly a surprise, given the Bush Administrationâs record. But in this case, itâs apparently not enough to make a single standard insufficiently protective; administration officials have decided to take on the rulemaking requirements of the Clean Air Act. The Washington Postâs Juliet Eilperin explains: Administrator Stephen L. Johnson also said he would push Congress…

Fed Up With Pollution in China

Environmentalism sometimes gets treated as a luxury, something that countries can pursue once theyâve attained a certain GDP. In China, though, galloping economic growth has created an unprecedented environmental crisis, and citizens are organizing to stop industrial pollution, even though they know it might mean fewer jobs. In todayâs Washington Post, Edward Coody reports that residents of southern Chinese fishing towns are protesting a planned chemical facility that has already been rejected by residents of another city:   Violent protests erupted in several southern Chinese fishing towns…

The Wrong Approach to Meat

If you havenât heard yet, USDA has ordered the largest meat recall in U.S. history â 143 million pounds of beef from the Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Company. USDA officials believe that the meat distributed by the company poses little or no hazard to consumers, which is fortunate, because much of it has been eaten already. Itâs being recalled because the company failed to follow procedures necessary to prevent sick cows from entering the food supply. Violations at the Hallmark meat packing facility came to light a few weeks ago, when an undercover Humane Society investigator released video…

Swine flu: what did you expect?

by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure Usually "What did you expect?" is a rhetorical question, but we have a more serious point to make. Let's start with the familiar and move on to the less familiar. Many of you are coming here to find the latest news about swine flu. It's an imprecise term that covers two different things: what has happened that is new, in the sense of surprising and we didn't already know it would happen; and what is the current situation. Overnight (in the US) Europe (Spain) registered its first confirmed case. That's additional data but not surprising. We know this…

Rotavirus vaccine: fingers crossed

by revere, cross-posted at Effect Measure Earaches, respiratory infections and diarrhea are the bane of existence for young parents. All are potentially the result of contagious agents. The most common agent for diarrhea in infants and children is rotavirus, a double-stranded DNA virus, that CDC estimates causes 400,000 doctor visits, 200,000 emergency room visits and 55.000 to 70,000 hospitalizations each year in the under 5 year old age group. Infection produces significant immunity, and while there are seven different serotypes (A through G), 90% of infections are serotype A. In addition…

Jacksonville T2 Site Still Too Dangerous for Investigators

It's been three weeks since the deadly explosion at the Jacksonville, Florida T2 laboratory which claimed the lives of four workers and injured others on and off the site.  The US Chemical Safety Board (CSB), along with OSHA and other agencies, is investigating the disaster and lead CSB official, Robert Hall, offered the following information on Jan 3 about the event: "The blast at T2 was among the most powerful ever examined by the CSB." "...There are several steps in the process [of producing the gasoline additive MMT]; the first step involved heating and reacting organic materials with…

Eulogy

My father-in-law wore his nickname without irony. His was the kind of nickname that would be tough to bear on the playground, but despite being a teacher for decades, any juvenile thoughts wouldn't have crossed his mind. I don't think he knew how to be insulted. And while he may not have been easy to insult, he did have pride, and as he became more and more disabled by chronic illness, his frustration grew. His attitude and that of his wife was remarkable. Sure, he complained about being dependent on others, but when he needed to start dialysis, he took it in stride. When he became…

[UPDATED] GG Bridge Suicide Net: Nanny State or Smart Intervention? (Or Both?)

It seems as though officials have been arguing forever about whether to erect an anti-suicide net along the Golden Gate Bridge. On Friday, the bridge directors voted 14-1 in favor of creating such a net: ...the stainless-steel net system, which would be placed 20 feet below the deck, and would collapse around anyone who jumped into it, making it difficult, if not impossible, for anyone to leap to their death... This has been a fairly divisive issue in San Francisco. Anti-netters argue that that the net will just cause people to kill themselves elsewhere (perhaps by jumping from a building…

Obesity and health---a quick primer

Still coughing and tired, so here's another one I'm migrating from the old blog. --PalMD There has been much talk in the media over the last few years about the "obesity epidemic" in the U.S. This has led to a bit of a backlash among a small but vocal group of critics who don't believe the evidence linking obesity and poor health. The reasons for their disbelief are not all that clear to me, given the overwhelming amount of evidence linking obesity with both serious health conditions such as diabetes and heart disease, and adverse outcomes, such as premature death. When their arguments…

Cult medicine vs. professional medicine

So-called alternative medicine beliefs are an interesting and perhaps inevitable phenomenon. They make use of uniquely human qualities such as our intelligence, our pattern-recognition abilities, and our tendency to over-estimate how well we understand things. Most "science", including medicine, relies on similar human qualities, but modern science has made some improvements. Medicine used to be based on observation mixed with superstition and other non-evidence based ways of understanding the world. Many of these systems were internally consistent, but ultimately failed to accurately…

Michael Gerson is taking cues from the ID cranks

Or is unintentionally channeling them is my conclusion from reading his latest WaPo Op-Ed entitled, "The Eugenics Temptation". This Watson nonsense has somehow convinced all these conservatives that lurking beneath the surface of every scientist is a seething eugenicist, biting at the bit to escape and kill off all we see who are inferior. I've agreed with Gerson on a thing or two, but this essay is a real stinker. "If you really are stupid," Watson once contended, "I would call that a disease." What is the name for the disease of a missing conscience? Watson is not typical of the…

Will Global Warming Increase Heart Disease?

I was surprised to see this article in the International Herald Tribune suggest that global warming might cause increased incidence of cardiovascular death. In particular one statement struck me as being somewhat absurd. On the sidelines of the European Society of Cardiology's annual meeting in Vienna this week, some experts said that the issue deserved more attention. It's well-known that people have more heart problems when it's hot. During the European heat wave in 2003, there were an estimated 35,000 deaths above expected levels in the first two weeks of August. In France alone, nearly…

Flies disprove evolution!

Or at least "Darwinism" whatever the hell that means these days. I guess they couldn't keep quiet all day. UD's new argument is an easily dismissed straw man. It goes like this. Scientists discover fruit flies put in a sensory-deprivation chamber,instead of flying around randomly, or in a rigid pattern, fly in a pattern with both random and non-random properties. (PLoS one article) Uncommon Descent which should have its RSS feeds revoked, says it's proof of design! Darwinism requires there is no free will! This is apparently based on a stunning misunderstanding of Dawkin's ideas by…

The Pap smear is no panacea, Katie Couric

Regular readers keeping up on infectious disease issues might have seen Seth Mnookin's post yesterday, warning of an upcoming episode of the Katie Couric show  focusing on the HPV vaccine. Even though Mnookin previously spoke with a producer at length regarding this topic, the promo for the show certainly did not look promising: "The HPV vaccine is considered a life-saving cancer preventer … but is it a potentially deadly dose for girls? Meet a mom who claims her daughter died after getting the HPV vaccine, and hear all sides of the HPV vaccine controversy." And indeed, reviews thus far show…

Aspirin for Heart Attack: What's Next, Tylenol for Alzheimer's Disease?

Student guest post by Ron Bedford The NYT (Kolata, 2010) recently published a story we'd all like to believe in. After their "lab's usual end-of-the-week beer hour," two Harvard neurology researchers noticed similarities between not only genes associated with both the innate immune system and Alzheimer's disease (AD), but structures, characteristics, and actions of selected proteins as well. Dr. Rudolph E. Tanzi, Dr. Robert D. Moir, and their team found "striking similarities" between the well-known innate immune system protein, LL-37, and amyloid β-protein (Aβ), long considered a waste…

Follow-up on "Math doesn't suck" discussion

The Danica McKellar posts (review; interview) have sparked some discussion that I want to address here. It largely centers on the issue of McKellar's approach: is it a good one? Or is it trying to replace one Bad Thing (girls' dislike of math) with another Bad Thing (encouraging them to be, as one commenter put it, "consumerist tools of the patriarchy"?) More below... Here at Aetiology, for example, Katie commented: One of the reasons I liked science classes was because they were an oasis from the prevailing shopping/shoes/makeup ethic at my school. Not every girl likes the same things. I…

The gulf coast--one year after Katrina

Tomorrow marks the first anniversary of the landfall of Hurricane Katrina. coturnix and others are collecting strories from around the blogosphere on the aftermath in New Orleans and elsewhere; the cleanup effort (still ongoing, barely begun in some areas); rebuilding (likewise; lagging far behind where even many pessimists thought it would be by this time); and moving back into the area (not an option for many). The area, it seems, will never be the same. I've discussed problems with disaster preparedness previously on this blog; therefore, I won't use this as another soapbox to discuss…

Parliamentary Maneuvers Derail Californiaâs Diacetyl Legislation

California often takes the lead in responding to public health issues, so itâs not surprising that their state legislature was the first to take up a bill to ban the artificial butter flavoring chemical diacetyl from California workplaces by 2010. California is home to 29 flavoring plants, and state health officials have diagnosed several flavoring workers with bronchiolitis obliterans, the debilitating lung disease that strikes many young, otherwise healthy workers who are exposed to diacetyl on the job.   State Assemblywoman Sally Lieber introduced the diacetyl legislation in February, and…

Whoâs an Employee?

If you have a job, do you know who your employer is? The answer isnât always straightforward, César Cuauhtémoc GarcÃa Hernández points out in a recent Boston College Third World Law Journal article, and the implications can be profound. In âFeeble, Circular, and Unpredictable: OSHAâs Failure to Protect Temporary Workers,â GarcÃa details the disadvantages temporary workers face. Temporary work is unstable, and few of the workers â who tend to be women, blacks, and Latinos â receive health insurance, paid vacation days, sick leave, or pension plans. The fact that many temporary workers are…

The ecology of dengue virus

The name "dengue" means "breakbone fever" due to the extreme bone pain it causes. The virus is a member of the flavivirus family, which includes the virus that causes yellow fever. Both viruses are arboviruses--viruses that are transmitted by arthropods. In the case of dengue and YF, the arthropod in question is the mosquito; specifically, the Aedes aegypti, an urban mosquito that lives in close contact with humans. Dengue infections cause an enormous amount of morbidity and mortality in areas where the virus is endemic. It's estimated to infect 50-100 million people each year. Though…

Thieves and liars

Most of you have probably already seen this: David Bolinsky accuses Expelled of theft. Bolinski is the professional who invested a great deal of time and money in generating the "Inner Life of the Cell" video, only to see it misappropriated, misinterpreted, and misused by creationists to promote their absurdity. You can tell that Bolinski might be a little bit angry about this, but of course there's not much that a few poorly paid college professors can do against the huge buckets of money from unscrupulous fat cat investors and bloated right wing 'institutes'. To Mr. Dembski: The only…

If this holds up Obama will be my hero

Slate has a story by John Dickerson about how Obama has rejected the weasel tactic invented, or at least perfected, by Bush for avoiding questions. To hide the fact that they're hiding something, candidates elevate their refusal to a virtue. "One of the jobs of a president is being very reasoned in approaching these issues," Hillary Clinton said to a hypothetical question about sending ground troops to Darfur. "And I don't think it's useful to be talking in these kinds of abstract hypothetical terms." Two days later, Mitt Romney cried hypothetical when asked in a debate whether, in…

Again with the Marijuana

What is it about reporting on pot that makes people so Puritanical? Today I read in the Guardian Cannabis joints damage lungs more than tobacco - study. A single cannabis joint may cause as much damage to the lungs as five chain-smoked cigarettes, research has found. Is that so? Let's take a look at the data. The authors of the article compared smokers to fairly heavy marijuana users - based on the mean smoking exposure of the groups (54.2 joint years compared to 23 pack-years for the smokers both with a mean age ~42-46) the group was clearly smoking multiple joints a day over decades…

Are metrics in medicine a good thing?

The Washington post reports on new efforts by insurance companies to rate doctors performance and their policies that penalize doctors for performing poorly according to their metrics. After 26 years of a successful medical practice, Alan Berkenwald took for granted that he had a good reputation. But last month he was told he didn't measure up -- by a new computerized rating system. A patient said an insurance company had added $10 to the cost of seeing Berkenwald instead of other physicians in his western Massachusetts town because the system had demoted him to its Tier 2 for quality. ... In…

Inia: gnarly, heterodont, carries rocks for fun

More on weird odontocete skulls. This time, another river dolphin: this is the skull of the Amazon river dolphin or Boto Inia geoffrensis, also known as the tonina, bufeo or pink dolphin. Three generally recognised Inia taxa exist, and views differ as to whether these are subspecies or species. I. g. humboldtiana inhabits the Orinoco basin, I. g. geoffrensis inhabits the better part of the Amazon basin, and I. g. boliviensis (or I. boliviensis) inhabits the Amazon tributaries of Bolivia. A few recent studies have supported species status for I. boliviensis (Banguera-Hinestroza et al. 2002,…

Topological Subspaces

Just like you can define a sub-set of a set, or a sub-object of an object in a category, you can define a sub-*space* of a topological space. It's a pretty easy thing to understand; interestingly, a sub-space of a topological space works in pretty much exactly the same way as a sub-sets and sub-object. In fact, the topological definition of a sub-space is *identical* to the categorical definition of a sub-object when we're looking at the category of topologies, **Top**. Today, I'm going to explain what a subspace is, and show you how the categorical sub-object corresponds to the topological…

Ron Numbers—Anti-evolution in America, from creation science to Intelligent Design

Ron Numbers gave a brief history of creationism, reminding us that perhaps a majority of the people in the world reject Darwin, and he also emphasized a few facts in that history that many would find surprising. There was no organized opposition to evolution until the 1920s, when it was marshalled by William Jennings Bryan, who was most concerned about the ethical implications of evolution. He made the point that the popular movie about the Scopes trial, Inherit the Wind, was historically inaccurate. One of the most memorable moments in the movie was when Darrow pinned Bryan down on the date…

Q&A: What is information?

I received an email from someone with some questions about information theory; they relate to some sufficiently common questions/misunderstandings of information theory that I thought it was worth turning the answer into a post. There are two parts here: my correspondent started with a question; and then after I answered it, he asked a followup. The original question: ------------------------ >Recently in a discussion group, a member posted a series of symbols, numbers, >and letters: > >`+ > >The question was what is its meaning and whether this has information or not. >…

Strange Loops: Ken Thompson and the Self-referencing C Compiler

I'm currently reading "I am a Strange Loop" by Douglas Hofstadter. I'll be posting a review of it after I finish it. A "strange loop" is Hofstadter's term for a Gödel-esque self-referential cycle. A strange loop doesn't have to involve Gödel style problems - any self-referential cycle is a strange loop. Reading this book reminded me of my favorite strange-loop story. It's actually a story about software security, and the kinds of stunts you can play with software if you're clever and subtle. It's the story of the Unix C compiler, and the virtually invisible back-door security hole inserted…

Giving IDists too much credit: the Pandas Thumb and CSI

Being a Nice Jewish BoyTM, Christmas is one of the most boring days of the entire year. So yesterday, I was sitting with my laptop, looking for something interesting to read. I try to regularly read the [Panda's Thumb][pt], but sometimes when I don't have time, I just drop a bookmark in my "to read" folder; so on a boring Christmas afternoon, my PT backlog seemed like exactly what I needed. [One of the articles in my backlog caught my interest.][pt-sc] (I turned out to be short enough that I should have just read it instead of dropping it into the backlog, but hey, that's how things go…

Stuffed megamammal week, day 1: Khama

I said the other day that I was going to have go all 'text lite' for a while. Here is my solution: a series of short posts, one per day, each of which features a different stuffed megamammal. Yes, welcome to day 1 of stuffed megamammal week. All of the stuffed megamammals you're going to see were photographed in the excellent collection at the National Museum of Ireland, Dublin. So here we go. This remarkable creature is a Hartebeest Alcelaphus buselaphus, and, specifically, it's a female hartebeest belonging to the subspecies known as the Khama, Cape or Red hartebeest A. b. caama. Like so…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Fossil Teeth Of Three-toed Browsing Horse Found In Panama Canal Earthworks: Rushing to salvage fossils from the Panama Canal earthworks, Aldo Rincon, paleontology intern at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, unearthed a set of fossil teeth. Bruce J. MacFadden, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida in Gainesville, describes the fossil as Anchitherium clarencei, a three-toed browsing horse, in the May 2009 issue of the Journal of Paleontology. Why Do We Choose Our Mates? Ask Charles Darwin, Prof Says: Charles Darwin wrote…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Teenagers Are Becoming Increasingly Logical, Swedish Study Finds: A research project at the University of Gothenburg has been testing large groups of 13-year-olds in Sweden since the early 1960s using the same intelligence test. The tests have taken place at approximately five year intervals and consist of an inductive-logic test, a verbal test and a spatial test. Landmark Study Reveals Significant Genetic Variation Between Mexico's Population And World's Other Known Genetic Subgroups: Could genetic differences explain why some people and not others have died of H1N1 Influenza A? That is…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Male-specific Neurons Directly Linked To Gender-specific Behaviors: New research identifies a few critical neurons that initiate sex-specific behaviors in fruit flies and, when masculinized, can elicit male-typical courtship behaviors from females. The study, published by Cell Press in the September 11th issue of the journal Neuron, demonstrates a direct link between sexual dimorphism in the brain and gender differences in behavior. My, What Big Teeth You Had! Extinct Species Had Huge Teeth On Roof Of Mouth: When the world's land was congealed in one supercontinent 240 million years ago,…

New and Exciting in PLoS this week

So, let's see what's new in PLoS Genetics, PLoS Computational Biology and PLoS Pathogens this week. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Social Contact Networks and Disease Eradicability under Voluntary Vaccination: Interest in infectious disease models that incorporate the effects of human behavior has been growing in recent years. However, most of these models predict that it should never be possible to eradicate a disease under…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 19 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Leptin Affects Life History Decisions in a Passerine Bird: A Field Experiment: Organisms face trade-offs regarding their life-history strategies, such as decisions of single or multiple broods within a year. In…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Jurassic Turtles Could Swim: Around 164 million years ago the earliest aquatic turtles lived in lakes and lagoons on the Isle of Skye, Scotland, according to new research. Recent scientific fieldwork led by researchers from UCL and the Natural History Museum on Skye, an island off the north-western coast of Scotland, discovered a block of rock containing fossils that have been recognised as a new species of primitive turtle Eileanchelys waldmani. 'Gray's Paradox' Solved: Researchers Discover Secret Of Speedy Dolphins: There was something peculiar about dolphins that stumped prolific British…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 57 new articles in PLoS ONE this week, and it is hard to choose which ones to highlight! Superfast Vocal Muscles Control Song Production in Songbirds: Birdsong is a widely used model for vocal learning and human speech, which exhibits high temporal and acoustic diversity. Rapid acoustic modulations are thought to arise from the vocal organ, the syrinx, by passive interactions between the two independent sound generators or intrinsic nonlinear dynamics of sound generating structures. Additionally, direct neuromuscular control could produce such rapid and precisely timed acoustic…

Communicating Genomics: Interview with Kendall Morgan

Kendall Morgan is the new Communications Director for the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy. We first met at the second Science Blogging Conference back in January, but, being neighbors, hope to continue communication and collaboration in the future. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your scientific background? Hmmm. Where to start? I'm originally from Wheeling, W. Va. I went to a small Quaker college in Indiana and from there directly to graduate school at the University of Oregon…

Cool Animal Meme

This was Anton's idea, at the dinner the other night, but I will get it started here anyway. An interesting animal I had I never owned an unusual species of animal. As a little kid I had small turtle named Aeschillus. Later I had two horses, half-brothers, whose names meant the same in two different languages - Meraklija in Serbian and Kefli in Hebrew both mean "one who truly enjoys life and good things in life". My wife was a better namer of horses - her last one, the one she brought into the marriage, she named Double Helix and his barn nickname was Watson. A cat and a dog also became "…

New on....

Well, just too busy for something original, so it's time for a little linkfest of notable stuff I saw in the blogosphere over the past couple of days: Carl, Brian, Anne-Marie and PZ report on the Indohyus, a close relative of the whales that lived 48 million years ago in Kashmir. Barbara Sahakian and Sharon Morein-Zamir wrote a provocative commentary about the mind-enhancing drugs - would you use them or not? A discussion is ongoing on Nature Network. Shelley, Janet, Anne-Marie, Vaughan and PZ offer some quite different answers. I think that these drugs, especially as they get perfected and…