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Wages of Sin (Greed, To Be Precise)

The NY Times has an article about how real wages are not keeping pace with productivity increases. Quoth the Grey Lady: With the economy beginning to slow, the current expansion has a chance to become the first sustained period of economic growth since World War II that fails to offer a prolonged increase in real wages for most workers. That situation is adding to fears among Republicans that the economy will hurt vulnerable incumbents in this year's midterm elections even though overall growth has been healthy for much of the last five years. The median hourly wage for American workers…

You Don't Need a Fence to Protect Western Civilization

I'm not the only one bothered by Mudcat Saunders' article about the Metropolitan Opera Wing of the Democratic Party; maha is too. That post is worth a read, but at the end of the post she makes a very good point about preserving culture (italics mine): Mudcat has slandered opera fans by implying they are elitist snobs. The fiercest opera fans I have ever met have been regular working-class folks -- construction workers, plumbers, clerks. I used to know a lady who worked the counter in a Paramus, New Jersey, department store and who saw every production at the Met. It was her religion. She…

The Political Consequences of Self-Projection

Matt Stoller makes a very interesting observation about Senator Obama, although I think it could apply to most of the presidential candidates in both parties. Stoller writes: But I think a lot of this kind of nonsense has to do with a basic lack of responsibility among citizens. Last week, I spoke to a friend who graduated from Harvard Law and just got done clerking for a high level judge. He's smart and highly credentialled, and he supports Obama because he thinks Obama doesn't believe in American exceptionalism and will decolonize our foreign policy. I walked him through the rhetoric…

Republican Rhetoric and the War on Science

Tristero makes an excellent point about Republican rhetoric, and I think it partially explains why so many scientists are opposed to the Bush Administration. Tristero compares the Niger 'evidence' for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq with the rhetoric opposing the HPV vaccination (italics mine): Why were we positive Bush was lying? Because no one who is telling the truth talks like this about such a serious subject. Notice the first five words. It's not that Saddam recently sought significant quantities yadda yadda, but only that "the Briitish government has learned." If there was any…

Breaking the Silence

A story in the NY Times about a very interesting Israeli group, Breaking the Silence (Shovrim Shtika), finally got me motivated to blog about it (I've been meaning to for a while). Here's one bit from the article that was interesting (italics mine): At the recent talk and discussion session, one man stood and said Mr. Manekin and his friends were hurting Israel, especially its image abroad, in order to salve their own consciences. Many in the audience nodded in agreement. Tall and dignified, about 45, the man said that he, too, had served in the West Bank, "and I'm proud of what I did there…

Expelled was OK...

...as a piece of propaganda. I noticed that the local "art house" theater was screening Expelled, so I decided to check it out. There weren't many people there. It started off very heavy-handed, a montage of archetypical scenes from the Communist and Nazi regimes, but the production values & execution of the first half of the documentary wasn't half bad. I assume the producers were pitching this to a sympathetic autidence, so the intent was glamorize and present the argument effectively, not convert anyone to the message. The interviews with the eminences of the Intelligent Design…

A Case for Increased Public Works Spending...

...that's pretty good, even if you're not a wackaloon Chartalist like the Mad Biologist. Andrew Samwick writes: The right reasoning is that with aggregate demand lower by hundreds of billions of dollars a year, there are unemployed and underemployed workers and underutilized capital whose services could be purchased on the cheap. If we have projects that add long-term value, this is the right time to be undertaking them. Plenty of those projects are to repair and maintain our seriously degraded infrastructure. Others are to make the upgrades necessary to plan for a future with different…

Viability selection and genetic screening

Just a quick follow up to my post about genetic screening of embryos and subsequent implantation. The spontaneous abortion rate for humans is very high. Probably on the order of 50% of fertilized ova implant and complete to term. I've seen numbers all over the place. In any case, I assume many of these are chromosomal abnormalities. But I've also posted to data which strongly suggests that immunological incompatibilities between mother & fetus also play a role in spontaneous abortions and may result in natural selection which we're not too well aware of. In The Cooperative Gene the…

Two new pigmentation papers

A Genome-Wide Association Study Identifies Novel Alleles Associated with Hair Color and Skin Pigmentation: It has been a longstanding hypothesis that human pigmentation is tightly regulated by genetic variation. However, very few genes have been identified that contain common genetic variants associated with human pigmentation. We scanned the genome for genetic variants associated with natural hair color and other pigmentary characteristics in a multi-stage study of more than 10,000 men and women of European ancestry from the United States and Australia. We identified IRF4 and SLC24A4 as loci…

Imprinted gene undergoing accelerated evolution in humans?

From PLOS Genetics Identification of the Imprinted KLF14 Transcription Factor Undergoing Human-Specific Accelerated Evolution: Imprinted genes are expressed in a parent-of-origin manner and are located in clusters throughout the genome...By sequence analysis of numerous species, we place the timing of this event after the divergence of Marsupialia, yet prior to the divergence of the Xenarthra superclade. We identify a large number of sequence variants in KLF14 and, using several measures of diversity, we determine that there is greater variability in the human-lineage with a significantly…

Neandertal DNA & human evolution

Update: Hawks responds. John Hawks has not commented on this feature in Wired titled Code of the Caveman. But I'm sure he will, and when he does, I will point you to it because what he says on this topic is worth listening to. But, until then, here are a few points. 1) This extraction of ancient autosomal DNA, not just the copious mtDNA, from Neandertals by the Paabo group and its associates has been talked about for a year or so now. So within the scientific community this isn't a big surprise. 2) The new bioinformatically flavored techniques offer up the possibility to "learn more about…

Biology is what you study, not how you study

Chad's response to Dave Ng's meme attempt asking people about their own field and relationship to other fields included this: I'm particularly not envious of biology, in which every result seems to be messy and contingent. Everything has a hundred confounding factors, and all the results seem to be statistical. Clean and unambiguous results are rare, and that would drive me absolutely crazy. They're one small step removed from social science. Chad admitted in the comments that he was just trying to foment some conflict for entertainment value. But I'll bite because this is a "teachable…

Modernization = religion in South Korea?

In my post Why the gods will never be defeated I made many references to the rise in religiosity concomitant with modernization in South Korean. Here is an article which illustrates what I'm talking about: As recently as 1964, only a little over 3.5 million South Koreans, out of a total population of almost 28.2 million, noted a religious affiliation on government census forms. In other words, less than four decades ago, only a little more than 12% of the South Korean people declared themselves to be Buddhist, Catholic, Protestant, or a follower of one of Korea's many other organized…

No Free Pass for Ideologies That Happen to Be Religious

While this letter I found at AmericaBlog.com deals with religiously-motivated intolerance towards gays and lesbians, I think it's going to be germane (at least tangentially so) to the current stem cell discussion over at What's New in Life Science: We as a group have become tolerant of intolerance. Whenever anyone justifies their bigotry with what I call DHRB (deeply held religious beliefs) we roll over as if that were the end of the discussion. We have confused respecting a persons right to hold whatever religious beliefs they chose with respecting those beliefs. The truth is there are…

Picking the Hive Mind's Brain: Any Good, Fast Genetic Distance Calculators?

I suppose I'll have to start at the beginning. One of the things we do in the microbiome project is analyze microbial communities by assessing the diversity of 16S DNA sequences*. In other words, we want to know what species or 'operational taxonomic units'--OTUs--are present and how many of that OTU are there. Operationally, we are taking a bunch of DNA sequences and placing them in categories. This, of course, is more difficult than it sounds. One of the issues with 16S is that many (nine to be exact) regions of the gene are hypervariable--they evolve so quickly that these regions can't…

The Real Impetus Behind the Republican War on Science

Admittedly, this isn't anything regular ScienceBlogs readers haven't seen before, but it's nice to see it enter the mainstream media (albeit eight years too late). Sharon Begley: The truly poisonous legacy of the past eight years is one that spread to much of society and will therefore be much harder to undo: the utter contempt with which those in power viewed inconvenient facts, empiricism and science in general. Look at how Bush justified inaction on greenhouse gases. Not by arguing that cuts would have cost too much, a stance that would at least have been intellectually honest, albeit…

How Companies Price Drugs

Since it's election season, it's pretty much guaranteed that the price of medical drugs will come up. While I'm on vacation, this post from the archives is pretty interesting. Keep in mind, the person making this claim is a former CEO of Pfizer, so he might know what he's talking about... This is a headline from the June 1st, 2005 edition of ScripNews (subscription only; so I'm a little behind in my reading-what scientist isn't?). Here's the punchline for lazy stupids that don't like to read: the head of Pfizer has admitted that the cost of making a drug has nothing to do with how much drug…

Finally, the Scientific Issues with the Anthrax Investigation Are Entering the Discussion

I realize science is hard and stuff, but there are serious problems with the evidence in the anthrax investigation. I'm not the only who thinks so: ScienceBloglings Tara and Revere think so too, along with most of the commentors. Thankfully, these problems are finally starting to enter the discussion. First, from Glenn Greenwald: The NYT today has an excellent Op-Ed from a microbiologist (the former Chief of Fort Detrick's bacteriology division) pointing out the numerous deficiencies in the FBI's scientific assertions. Critically, that Op-Ed describes the properties of the high-grade…

The Bestest Political Science Theory EVAH! (Arseh-les as a Strategic Entity)

At D-squared Digest, some ruminations about Egypt lead to the bestest political science theory EVAH! (italics original; boldface mine): ...so that brings me to a useful piece of advice for any readers who are aspiring dictators, one that the Communists knew, Suharto knew, but that some modern day tyrants seem to have forgotten. There is always a level of civil unrest that outstrips the capability of even the most loyal and largest regular armed forces to deal with. In all likelihood, as a medium sized emerging market, you will have a capital city with a population of about five or six million…

Women: If You Attend Vet School, Plan on Either Not Having Sex or...

...getting an abortion. Because that seems to be the message from the presidents of the third-year class of the UC Davis veterinary school--with the apparent approval of the Chair of the Department of Medicine & Epidemiology. By way of ScienceBlogling Dr. Isis, the enlightened solons: Dear Colleagues, One of our classmates recently gave birth and will be out of class for an unknown period of time. This means she will undoubtedly miss one, or more, or all quizzes in VMD 444. Dr. Feldman is not sure how to handle this and has requested the class give input and vote. He has provided us…

I Wonder Why Most Workers Want to Quit Their Jobs....

I can't figure it, myself. By way of driftglass, we come across this report indicating massive employee dissatisfaction: Workers can't wait to dump their employers: 84 percent of respondents to a survey say they plan to actively look for a new job this year. That's up from 60 percent who said they planned to do so last year. Only 5 percent said they intend to stay in their current position. The survey was done by Manpower subsidiary Right Management. "It's staggering," said Joanne Stroud of Right Management. Senior leadership within organizations is largely to blame, Stroud said. While many…

Caitlin Flanagan Is "Thoughtful"?

By way of Kathy G, I see that Caitlin Flannagan won an award for being "thoughtful and bracingly honest, filled with humor and empathy, and free of cliches and political correctness." This gives me an excuse to rescue from the Google cache an old post, "Hell, I'll Pile on Flanagan Too", illustrating some of Flannagan's thoughtfulness: I'll leave to these fine people to criticize Caitlin Flanagan's efforts to bemoan her sorry lot as a faux stay-at-home mom. What honked me off in the Time article was this: The Democrats made a huge tactical error a few decades ago. In the middle of doing the…

Punishing Bush Dog Democrats for FISA Capitulation

Things look better on the FISA front: the Democrats, in an uncharacteristic fit of intelligence, agreed to compromise by attaching provisions that allow telecommunications companies to present evidence to a FISA court that they did not break the law even if the president classifies the information, thereby getting around the argument that they need retroactive immunity because they can't defend themselves in court. Amazingly, the Democrats appear to have gotten the policy and the politics right on this. That being said, the 'Bush Dog' Democrats (who roll over and let Bush rub their tummies…

Obama: Sound and Fury, Signifying Romneycare

Needless to say, I'm not happy with Obama's healthcare proposal. Before I get into this, I want to make something clear: my opposition is due to experience, not ideology. If it appeared (or better, if there were evidence) that putting on a pink mumu, whirling a rubber chicken around our heads, and singing the Star Spangled Banner would make a good healthcare system, then rubber chickens, mumus, and singing lessons all around. But what Obama proposed is what we're living through in Massachusetts. And it's, at best, a modest improvement--it's more 'chang-iness' than significant change.…

Two Boston Area Zoos to Close Due to State Budget Cuts

I know I'm going to sound like a broken record, but, once again, a major part of the stimulus should have been to make up state budget shortfalls, which stemmed from the economic recession. Not only is it good economic policy (what's the point of the federal government putting people to work, only to have state governments fire other people), but those state budget cuts reduce services: Franklin Park Zoo, a Boston institution that has drawn generations of city and suburban families, may be forced to close its doors and possibly euthanize some of its animals as a result of the deep budget…

A Question for Doctors and Public Health Experts: Why Don't Patients Take Their Medication?

Or more precisely, why do some patients not follow their doctors' orders even when it is blindingly obvious that they should do so? In Monday's NY Times there was an interesting article about patients who are being paid to take their medicine in a reliable manner. I was going to write about the payment issue as it raises all sorts of questions, but I've become fixated on something in the article: ignoring obvious incentives to take care of yourself. For example, once a juvenile diabetic (someone who can't manufacture his or her own insulin) takes a lot of insulin before eating a meal,…

The Banality of Health Insurance Executives

By way of Echidne, I came across this article about WellPoint's cancellation of insurance policies belonging to women with breast cancer (italics mine): Shortly after they were diagnosed with breast cancer, each of the women learned that her health insurance had been canceled. There was Yenny Hsu, who lived and worked in Los Angeles. And there was Patricia Reilling, a successful art gallery owner and interior designer from Louisville, Kentucky.... The women paid their premiums on time. Before they fell ill, neither had any problems with their insurance. Initially, they believed their policies…

Federal Judge Rules Against Patenting the Sun

A while ago, I described how previous decisions allowing the patenting of human genes--and thereby making cheap, affordable diagnostics impossible--flew in the face of the goal of federally-funded research. There's no reason to patent something and charge thousands of dollars for something a high school student could do (PCR and sequencing). From The NY Times (italics mine): Judge Sweet, however, ruled that the patents were "improperly granted" because they involved a "law of nature." He said that many critics of gene patents considered the idea that isolating a gene made it patentable "a '…

What Is Driving the College Tuition Bubble?

It's not a failure of monetary policy, but fiscal policy. Over at The Quantum Pontiff, ScienceBlogling Dave Bacon asks if college tuition is a bubble: But what I find interesting, and what I've never been able to figure out, is the larger trend (ignore the last two years, please). Why are tuition prices increasing at such a fast rate for four year colleges? For example, see slide 5 of this presentation where one sees that over the last three decades, the inflation adjusted price of college has more than tripled at public four year universities and gone up nearly as much a private four year…

Sunday Sermon: Defense Spending's Crowding Out Effect

While I'm glad we will spend more money on medical research in 2010 (although what about basic research? It needs help too.), until he confronts the massive amount of defense spending in the U.S.--$872 billion proposed for 2010 ($133 billion of which is for the Afghanistan and Iraqi wars)--it will be very hard to get funding for other things anything else. Matthew Yglesias explains (italics mine): Preble says that this enormous expenditure "flows directly from our foreign policy." But it's worth also saying that our foreign policy flows from the vast scope of our defense spending. My…

The Easter Bunny, Deep Capture, and Short Selling

Currently, I'm working on a post about funding and how it's led to employment problem in science.... Meanwhile, this bit about illegal short selling is jaw dropping. I have no idea of this very long article (pdf) is in tinfoil helmet territory or not, but, if it's at all accurate, it looks like Jim Cramer of CNBC is using his media perch to help friends profit from short selling stocks: The story begins when a very highly respected journalist and business editor for the Columbia Journalism Review, Mark Mitchell, decides to look into allegations made by the CEO of Overstock.com, that some…

If the Global Banking System Nearly Collapses and Nobody Reports It...

...does it make a sound? On Sept. 18, 2008, the banking system almost collapsed--no, really. A while back, I noted that there are at least two classes of media bias: one involves the interpretation of a set of agreed upon facts, while the other involves decisions as to what those facts are, or, even if something happened (an aside: while this was not controversial to the science-oriented commenters, this distinction is apparently beyond the ken of at least one journalism professor). Anyway, this story, unearthed by C-SPAN, falls into the latter category (in the video, go to the 2:05 mark…

The Great Epizootic of 1873, Stimulus, and the Big Sh-tpile of 2008-2009

Before I get to the ongoing calamity, the economic impact of a nation-wide viral epidemic in horses in 1872 is worth considering (italics mine): During the late 19th century, the American economy relied on horses the way it depends on gas today. Horses unloaded cargo from ports, transported goods from city to city, worked the farms, supported the army, and served as the emergency vehicles of choice. Without them, the American workforce would have ground to a halt. And that's exactly what happened in 1872, when an estimated 99 percent of all horses in America contracted equine influenza. The…

MR-CoNS: A Reservoir of Resistance for MRSA?

No, MR-CoNS isn't some kind of crazy new conservative, it stands for methicillin resistant coagulase-negative staphylococci. CoNS are relatives of the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus (the 'SA' in MRSA), and are common human commensals--they typically live on us and in us without causing disease. One of the important things, from a health perspective, about CoNS is that many are resistant to methicillin (methicillin resistance is the "MR" in MRSA). In fact, the resistance mechanism, known as the SCCmec gene cassette, is similar to those found in MRSA (SCCmec is a class of similar, yet…

Mystery Bird: Franklin's Gull, Leucophaeus pipixcan, and Laughing Gulls, Larus atricilla

tags: Franklin's Gull, Leucophaeus pipixcan, Laughing Gull, Larus atricilla, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz [Mystery birds] Franklin's Gull, Leucophaeus pipixcan, and Laughing Gulls, Larus atricilla, photographed the Quintana Beach and Jetty area, Texas. [I will identify these birds for you tomorrow] Image: Joseph Kennedy, 18 November 2008 [larger view]. Nikon D200 1/800s f/8.0 at 1000.0mm iso400. Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification. Rick Wright, Managing Director of WINGS Birding Tours Worldwide, writes: Let's begin with the bird just right of…

Sad Thoughts upon my Return

tags: Helsinki, Finland, Espoo, Finland, photography, nature Sun setting behind a rocky ridge somewhere near the border between Espoo and Helsinki in Finland. Image: GrrlScientist, 18 November 2008 [larger view]. The flight back to NYC from Helsinki was fine; long, but uneventful. The crew were great and the plane wasn't as jam-packed as the flight leaving NYC was .. I wonder why? Perhaps the children of Finnish immigrants are doing the same thing as the children of Polish and Indian immigrants are reportedly doing: leaving this country and going to their ancestral homes because the…

AAI: evening award ceremony

Can I call it a ceremony? It wasn't very ceremonious at all. We sat down first to watch a live video stream of Bill Maher's show, with special guest Richard Dawkins. It was good, it was funny, it was abrasive, and Maher didn't say anything crazy at all. Dawkins did not get much of an opportunity to say much, again; that's a problem with some of these shows, like Colbert, where the personality of the host leaves little room for the guests. Dawkins acquitted himself well, though. After the Maher show, we got to listen to Mr Deity. This was pretty darned cool; not only did he show video clips,…

Hedwig the Owl Gives a Hoot!

tags: DonorsChoose, science education, teaching, fund-raising, poverty How many of you are Harry Potter fans, or know someone who is? How about all those millions of kids in the United States who are crazy about Harry Potter and his amazing owl, Hedwig? So don't you think this makes owls a special bridge between kids and the worlds of imagination and literature and nature and science? I certainly think it does, so of course, I think this wonderful DonorsChoose project, Who Gives a "Hoot" About Owls! is a superb classroom lesson to interest this high-poverty classroom of 120 third graders in…

Calling All My DonorsChoose Donors!

tags: DonorsChoose, science education, teaching, fund-raising, poverty I thought DonorsChoose would send me all my donors' contact information, but apparently they don't, so I need you to send me a copy of the email receipt you received from DonorsChoose so I can enter you in as many prize drawings as possible. Of course, I also need your mailing address along with this receipt because I am leaving the country two weeks after this fund raising effort has ended, so I want to get everything mailed to you as soon as possible because I can't afford to mail prizes from Germany! (especially since…

Mystery Bird: Red-Winged Blackbird, Agelaius phoeniceus

tags: Red-Winged Blackbird, Agelaius phoeniceus, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz [Mystery birds] Red-Winged Blackbird, Agelaius phoeniceus, photographed at San Bernard Refuge, Texas. [I will identify this bird for you tomorrow] Image: Joseph Kennedy, 20 March 2009 [larger view]. Nikon D200, Kowa 883 telescope with tsn-pz camera eyepiece 1/320s f/8.0 at 1000.0mm iso400. Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification. Rick Wright, author of Aimophila Adventures and Managing Director of WINGS Birding Tours Worldwide, writes: A couple of years ago I was leading a…

Update: Antarctic Vote Count

The current Antarctic Trip Vote count is as follows; 3877 - 1741 - 1441 - 1165 - 1114 out of 498 candidates registered. I am in third place and sloooowly creeping up on second place. With only 6 weeks remaining, voting is changing rapidly as previous voters reassign their votes and new voters cast theirs for the first time. The top four vote-getters are receiving most of these votes, so I need your votes more than ever to recapture first place, so please ask your friends and relatives to vote for me now! According to Prisca Campbell, the marketing manager for Quark, there is an interview for…

High tech stethoscope

I had to laugh when I saw this piece in New Scientist. It's about a new high tech ultrasound stethoscope supposedly immune to background noise. The stethoscope is a useful tool for quickly diagnosing damage to the heart or lungs, which many victims of traumatic injuries can suffer. But they can be difficult to use when background noise reaches about 80 decibels ? the same as a busy street. These surrounding sounds can then drown out audio information that is crucial to an accurate diagnosis. Street noise, nothing. How about the ground floor of an inner city hospital of some repute in a ward…

Nature takes on the Bush administration

The world's leading science journal, Nature, has been hitting editorial home runs lately. This week it's a real prize, "Safety catch." The subject is the Bush administration's proposals for how the government should go about conducting risk assessments. Risk assessments are a sensitive topic with many consumer and community groups who have experienced them as elaborate exercises in government decision justification. There is so much latitude to how the knobs of the risk assessment machine can be tweaked to make the output come out right, that many people see the process as one where the risk…

The puzzle of chemotherapy resistance

What is a breakthrough in cancer research? It is a new piece of a puzzle made up of a million pieces. It may, however, be a piece that allows a picture to start emerging – one that lets us see the shape of the next piece needed to fill in more of the puzzle, or start making changes to rearrange the picture from one of cancerous growth to one of normalcy. The Institute’s Prof. Yosef Yarden’s recent research provides a vital piece for the puzzle of resistance – how cancer cells, especially those in recurring cancers, stop responding to chemotherapy. His answer is specific to a kind of lung…

Best Science Books 2011: Cryptomundo

Another list for your reading, gift-giving and collection development pleasure. Every year for the last bunch of years I've been linking to and posting about all the "year's best sciencey books" lists that appear in various media outlets and shining a bit of light on the best of the year. All the previous 2011 lists are here. This post includes the following: The Top Cryptozoology Books of 2011. The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth by Richard Conniff When Bigfoot Attacks by Michael Newton Tracking Bigfoot by Donald Wallace and Lori Simmons In Search of…

Twenty (Plus One) Questions for The Scientific Indian's Selvakumar Ganesan

The "Proust Questionnaire" refers to a nineteenth-century parlor game involving a list of personal questions about the respondent's values and preferences, to be answered in rapid-fire succession. Marcel Proust didn't invent it, but he may be the most famous person ever to have played. These days, a certain venerable magazine prints an adapted version of the question-and-answer game in their back pages each month. And now we, in turn, have shamelessly re-adapted the well-known Q & A for the purpose of introducing you, dear reader, to the personalities behind the blogs here at Sb. This…

How can publishers help academic librarians? Let's all count the ways!

The STM Publishing News Group is a professional news site for the publishing industry which bring together a range of science, technology and medicine publishing stakeholders with the idea that they'll be able to share news amongst themselves as well as beyond the publishing world to the broader constituency of academics and librarians and others. You can imagine how thrilled I was to see a post with the words, "How can publishers help librarians?" in the title? I was a little disappointed to find the entire title of the post is "How can publishers help librarians? Cambridge University Press…

Best Science Books 2014: io9

As you all have no doubt noticed over the years, I love highlighting the best science books every year via the various end of year lists that newspapers, web sites, etc. publish. I've done it so far in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013. And here we are in 2014! As in previous years, my definition of "science books" is pretty inclusive, including books on technology, engineering, nature, the environment, science policy, history & philosophy of science, geek culture and whatever else seems to be relevant in my opinion. Today's list is io9 The Best Science Books of 2014. Me, Myself and…

A Worm Free World

Check out this great post by Mary M on biofortifed. In it she reviews a new research paper that describes how the use of Bt could potentially save the lives of millions. You can download a video about the researchers and their work here. From Mary's post: "For some people, a great deal of the conflama around genetically-engineered (GE) crops has to do with the presence of a pesticide in the plant material--mainly the Bacillus thuringiensis or Bt protein--rather than coating the surface of the plant as organic Bt sprays or chemical-style pesticides would. No matter how many times I explain…

Meat-Eating And Other Lessons From Our Ancestors: Explore Our Evolutionary Past With Anthropologist Briana Pobiner

The ‘Nifty Fifty (times 4)’, a program of Science Spark, presented by InfoComm International, are a group of 200 noted science and engineering professionals who will fan out across the Washington, D.C. area in the 2014-2015 school year to speak about their work and careers at various middle and high schools. Meet Nifty Fifty Speaker Dr. Briana Pobiner  What does it mean to be human? Like other scientists in the field of anthropology, Briana Pobiner, a paleoanthropologist and science educator at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, uses this question as an important framework as…