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Dawkins and the religion bug-a-boo

There was an annoying interview with Richard Dawkins in Salon yesterday, which, unfortunately, I wasn't able to read until today because… …I was getting the story straight from the horse's mouth. The interview is annoying, not because of Dawkins, but because of the interviewer. It leads in with this comment: "Why are we here on earth? To Richard Dawkins, that's a remarkably stupid question. In a heated interview, the famous biologist insists that religion is evil and God might as well be a children's fantasy." It also biases the argument in infuriating ways. Not surprisingly, these kinds of…

In which I attempt to influence events in Iowa

If I were living in Iowa, I'd be caucusing for Barack Obama. It'll be a month before my primary, and by then it may all be academic, so I may as well talk about it now. I'll start out by saying that I wouldn't feel bad about caucusing for John Edwards, and I won't have any problem campaigning hard on behalf of whoever emerges as the Democratic nominee. I think every one of them is competent to lead, has good ideas that will improve the nation, and would do vastly better than any Republican in the field could imagine doing. That's why it's taken me this long to settle down behind a…

Millions saved in Japan by good engineering and government building codes

@Dave Ewing: The headline you won't be reading: "Millions saved in Japan by good engineering and government building codes". But it's the truth. My heart goes out to all the people affected the earthquake in Japan, and by the resulting tsunamis which have hit much of the Pacific basin. Heck, we even saw tsunami surge in the San Francisco Bay. The damage and deaths are still being tallied, but it's worth noting that the 5th largest earthquake on record hit near the densely populated coast of Japan, and so far there are a mere 400 deaths reported. The earthquake in Haiti last year, which was…

"Balancing the views of Jesus ⦠with those of Judas"

Ed Yong has a great blog post up asking Should science journalists take sides? He rightly answers: yes, "a commitment to the view from nowhere has many problems." Among those problems, this opinions-on-shape-of-earth-differ style is "a disservice to journalism," reflective of "laziness" and "a poor understanding of one's audience," and a sign of "naiveté" among journalists who adopt the pose. It can force writers to make "ethical breaches." Lastly, he notes that it derives from â and more importantly contributes to â a "failure to understand the nature of science." Other bloggers have…

ScienceOnline'09 - interview with Christian Casper

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January. Today, I asked Christian Casper to answer a few questions. 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? My name is Christian Casper, and I recently finished a Ph.D. at North Carolina State University, in their program in…

What kinds of posts bring traffic?

Chad did an interesting analysis the other day - looking at the traffic attracted by science posts vs. non-science stuff (e.g., pretty pictures, politics, etc.). This made me look at my all-time traffic here (I know some of the posts are re-posts from the old blogs where they got lots of traffic as well, but I can ignore that for the purpose of this exercise). I rarely ever check Google Analytics, so the first surprise was my 6th place in overall traffic for the past month! And then I looked at the Clock content to see what have been the greatest hits over the past two years. Considering I…

Co-Researching spaces for Freelance Scientists?

Pawel tried, for a year, to be a freelance scientist. While the experiment did not work, in a sense that it had to end, he has learned a lot from the experience. And all of us following his experience also learned a lot about the current state of the world. And I do not think this has anything to do with Pawel living in Poland - I doubt this would have been any different if he was in the USA or elsewhere. You all know that I am a big fan of telecommuting and coworking and one of the doomsayers about the future existence of the institution of 'The Office'. And you also know that I am a…

Wikipedia and Charity

Ethan Zuckerman (who is on the Wikimedia Advisory Board) has a post discussing Wikipedia's recent fundraising drive, with some comparative numbers: In the past 17 days, the [Wikimedia] Foundation has raised over $478,000 in online gifts. That's a pretty amazing number, on the one hand, and a concerning one, on the other hand. If Global Voices could raise that much money online in a month, I'd be out of a job, as our annual budget is not much higher than that sum, and I spend far too much of my time convincing generous individuals, corporations and foundations to support our efforts. On the…

Channelrhodopsin restores vision in blind mice

New research shows that a protein found in green algae can partially restore visual function when delivered into the retina of blind mice, taking us one step further towards genetic therapy for various conditions in which the degeneration of retinal cells leads to imapired vision or complete blindness. Normally, light entering the eye falls upon the rods and cones at the back of the retina. These are the photoreceptors: they are packed with a light-sensitive protein called rhodopsin, which initiates an electrical signal when struck by photons (the particles which carry light). The signals…

#scio10 aftermath: Continuing thoughts on what civil engagement could mean, online or offline.

Back in January, at ScienceOnline2010, Sheril Kirshenbaum, Dr. Isis, and I led a session called "Online Civility and Its (Muppethugging) Discontents". Shortly after the session, I posted my first thoughts on how it went and on the lessons I was trying to take away from it. Almost two months later, I'm ready to say some more about the session and the issues I think it raised. My space, your space, our space. To my mind, civil engagement is only an issue if you are engaging with other people. If you are conducting a soliloquy, rather than a colloquy, it's hard to imagine where you'd run into…

Riding the Dinosaurs toward Science Literacy: Interview with Gabrielle Lyon

Gabrielle Lyon is the Executive Director and Cofounder of Project Exploration. But the story is much longer. She went to grad school (U. of Chicago) with my brother and he thought that Gabe and I would be interesting to each other due to our shared interest in dinosaurs. So we got in touch and kept it over e-mail over many years. She sent me a vial of Sahara sand and a small plant fossil from the trip, Project Exploration materials and t-shirts, etc. and I promoted PE here at my blog. We finally met in person at Scifoo last summer and conversations we had there, led, through some…

The Indonesia vaccine stand-off

The stand-off between Indonesia and the rest of the world over sharing of viral isolates obtained within its borders continues. Indonesia has identified a problem, but in our opinion, has no standing to impose its proffered unworkable solution. Everyone tends to see this from their own particular perspective, so we'll give you ours. We aren't WHO (and have had no contact with them on this matter) and we aren't citizens of Indonesia or any other developing country. We are citizens of a rich, developed country. But we are also long time, committed public health professionals. I think we have…

Getting sick for science (and money)

I went to medical school at a time when it was still affordable. Even though it was a private Ivy League university, tuition was only $1200/yr at the start and I had a half scholarship. Room was $33/month. Still, it was a long time ago and that was still real money for some of us, so I ate dinner in the cafeteria and often made lunch by heating up a 19 cent can of Spaghetti-O's on a hot plate in my room across from the hospital. Medical school classes didn't allow much time for part time jobs, so I supplemented my income working as a guinea pig and blood donor. Whenever open heart surgery was…

Study finds farmers markets can increase healthy food access among the most disadvantaged

In the last few years, the residents of Flint, Michigan, and its surrounding suburbs lost five grocery stores. Today, within the city limits, there's just one large chain grocery store, about 10 small and often-pricier groceries, and 150 liquor stores, convenience stores and gas stations. People who have a car often travel out to the suburbs for more variety and better prices. Much of Flint is a food desert — a place where accessing healthy, affordable food is a very real challenge. But thankfully, a recent study in Flint found that simply relocating an area farmers market is making a…

243-249/366: Cute-Kids Cruise Photo Dump

As promised/threatened in the previous post, here's a big collection of shots from our cruise vacation featuring the sillyheads. 243/366: Bunk Beds: SteelyKid and The Pip like the bunk beds in the stateroom. The sleeping arrangements in the stateroom were pretty slick. We had a double bed that was there all the time, and during the day a sitting area with a couch. While we were at dinner, the housekeeping staff came in and flipped the couch over to become a bed, then lowered a top bunk from a hatch in the ceiling. The kids have never slept in bunk beds before, so this was considered highly…

How Good Are Polarized Sunglasses?

A while back, I explained how polarized sunglasses work, the short version of which is that light reflected off the ground in front of you tends to be polarized, and by blocking that light, they reduce the effects of glare. This is why fishermen wear polarized sunglasses (they make it easier to see through the surface of water) and why they're good for driving (they cut down on glare off the road ahead). I almost exclusively buy polarized sunglasses, because I like this feature. But let's say you have a pair of polarized sunglasses that broke, because they were cheap to begin with (such as…

Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks FAQ#1: How did Skloot learn about HeLa cells? [Culture Dish]

I mentioned a while ago that I'll be posting answers to FAQs about my book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, as an ongoing series on this blog. I thought I'd start the FAQs with one of the most commonly asked questions: How did you learn about Henrietta and the HeLa cells, and why did they grab you the way they did? Here is the answer, which I also posted about over on Powells.com's book blog this last week as part of a little guest blogging stint: I first learned about Henrietta Lacks in the late 80s, when I was 16 and sitting in a basic biology class at Portland Community College (…

Game Changers

Geneticist Dr. Maya Schuldiner has a lab full of the latest, shiniest robotic equipment. So why is she showing us pictures of socks? What she and her lab group mean to illustrate is that they have trained their research robots to find pairs – not of socks, alas, but of proteins. The team and their robots entered an area of research in which protein matches had previously been painstakingly identified one at time – and discovered hundreds of new pairs in one fell swoop. Scientists are interested in these pairs because they are necessary for transporting signaling molecules – a group that…

Two New Directions in Synthetic Biology

New online articles this week highlight two forays into the world of synthetic biology. Each, in its own way, gives a different perspective on how sophisticated the field has become in the past few years, since smiley-face DNA was first introduced. Prof. Benjamin Geiger of the Weizmann Institute and Prof. Joachim Spatz of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Germany are leading an unusual collaboration. One is a biologist, the other a materials scientist. Together, they are working on models that incorporate the whole gamut from completely man-made materials to 100% biological…

An Interview with Bora Zivkovic of A Blog Around the Clock

This time around, we're talking to Bora Zivkovic of A Blog Around The Clock. What's your name? Bora Zivkovic, better known online as "Coturnix" (the Latin name of the genus of my favourite lab animal model). What do you do when you're not blogging? I am a stay-at-home Dad and also an adjunct biology teacher in adult college education. I am also writing my dissertation incredibly slowly. Sometimes I sleep, too. What is your blog called? A Blog Around the Clock What's up with that name? I am a chronobiologist so I often write about circadian clocks. I also write all the time and post at…

Not more scientists, but more science-literate citizens

A short but good article by my schools' President (April 25, 2006, also here). ------------------------------------------------------- James Oblinger, the new President of North Carolina State University (promoted from within after many years as the Dean of the School Of Agriculture And Life Sciences), has a good editorial in today's News and Observer: Nurturing success in the sciences: We've all heard the line from President Bush: We need more students to join the "nerd patrol." It's an overly simple solution for a complex problem that imperils the traditions of invention and innovation that…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Bird Sex Is Something Else: We've all heard about the birds and the bees. But apparently when it comes to birds, they have an unusual take on his and hers -- and the difference is genetic. Species with differentiated sex chromosomes (X and Y in humans, for example) get around the fact that males and females get different-sized portions of sex chromosome genes with a balancing act geneticists call dosage compensation. But research published today in the Journal of Biology shows that birds are extraordinary, because some bird genomes can live with an apparent overdose of sex-related genes. Why…

Garden and Farm Design Class February - March

I'll be offline until Tuesday of next week, running my winter apprentice weekend (or Goat Camp as one attendee called it ;-)). The next one will be offered in May, and will be a family-friendly long weekend (tentatively Memorial Day weekend - I'll confirm that in the next week). You can bring the kids, stay with us or camp, and we'll have baby goats and chicks along with a chance to do herb growing, milking, dairying, tree fodder crops, and many other projects! If you are interested in a spot email me at jewishfarmer@gmail.com. In the meantime, Aaron Newton and I will be running our annual…

Occupational Health News Roundup

Last week, a jury in Chicago awarded $30.4 million to chemical-flavoring plant worker Gerardo Solis, 45, who suffers from the disabling lung disease bronchiolitis obliterans. Solis had worked at the Flavorchem Corp plant from 1998 to 2006 and was exposed to the butter-flavoring chemical diacetyl, which is associated with severe respiratory illnesses. Solis's attorney, Ken McClain, told the jury that Solis is totally disabled, with 25% of normal lung capcity; he will likely need a lung transplant within the next 10 years. The jury awarded the verdict against diacetyl supplier BASF Corp. Jeff…

Goodbye, Mr. Russert

Tim Russert died suddenly today. I admired his journalism, his ability to press questions that has become so rare. He didn't seem to suffer from the "two-side-ism" that has become so common in today's journalism; he realized that some issues don't have two valid opposing views. But others will eulogize him. I'd like to talk about why he died. Of course, we don't know very much at this point. What we do know is that it was sudden. There are a number of reasons for someone to suddenly drop dead, the most common having to do with the cardiovascular system. Pulmonary embolism and massive…

AIDS and the SB question of the week

As y'all may or may not be aware, the XVI International AIDS Conference begins this weekend in Toronto. For those of you who read Seed magazine, you've seen that the current issue focuses on "AIDS at 25," and they also have an online summary here. As a matter of fact, myself, a Seed journalist, and a freelance science writer will be blogging the conference at a temporary blog this coming week; myself remotely from Iowa, and the others live from Toronto. So while AIDS will be at the forefront of this blog for a few days, I also have some posts on tap about other issues in infectious disease…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Be Your Best Friend If You'll Be Mine: Alliance Hypothesis For Human Friendship: University of Pennsylvania psychologists studying the cognitive mechanisms behind human friendship have determined that how you rank your best friends is closely related to how you think your friends rank you. The results are consistent with a new theory called the Alliance Hypothesis for Human Friendship, distinct from traditional explanations for human friendship that focused on wealth, popularity or similarity. Easily Grossed Out? You Might Be A Conservative!: Are you someone who squirms when confronted with…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Political Views Affect Firms' Corporate Social Responsibility, Study Finds: A new study in The Financial Review establishes a relationship between political beliefs of corporate stakeholders and the corporate social responsibility (CSR) of their firms. Companies with a high CSR rating tend to be located in Democratic states, while companies with a low CSR rating tend to be located in Republican states. Finger Lengths Linked To Voluntary Exercise: If you find yourself lacking in motivation to go for a run or hit the gym, you may want to check your fingers. According to a joint University of…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Hamsters On Treadmills Provide Electricity Through Use Of Nanogenerators: Could hamsters help solve the world's energy crisis? Probably not, but a hamster wearing a power-generating jacket is doing its own small part to provide a new and renewable source of electricity. And using the same nanotechnology, Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have also generated electrical current from a tapping finger - moving the users of BlackBerry devices, cell phones and other handhelds one step closer to powering them with their own typing. Cupid's Arrow May Cause More Than Just Sparks To Fly This…

My Picks From ScienceDaily

Big Brains Arose Twice In Higher Primates: After taking a fresh look at an old fossil, John Flynn, Frick Curator of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, and colleagues determined that the brains of the ancestors of modern Neotropical primates were as small as those of their early fossil simian counterparts in the Old World. This means one of the hallmarks of primate biology, increased brain size, arose independently in isolated groups--the platyrrhines of the Americas and the catarrhines of Africa and Eurasia. Fossil Feathers Preserve Evidence Of Color, Say Scientists: The…

Weekend in NY City

Too busy all week to write about this, but last weekend we went on a family trip to NYC. Old-timers here may remember that we took the kids there two years ago, so they were eager to visit again. We spent four days there, flying JetBlue (always happy with their service), and generally having great fun. We did touristy things, mainly whatever the kids wanted to do. No online access at all! So we shopped at F.A.O.Schwartz and at Macy's: We ate a chocolate-based lunch at Max Brenner: We traveled by Underground, where I tried to do what Grrrl does and took pictures of the subway art: We…

Drug information for ordinary people in PubMed

PubMed is an on-line database at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) that contains information from scientific literature. Most of the information is related to medical research. To search PubMed, you use a program called Entrez. You go to the NCBI, select PubMed from the menu, type words into the text box, and start the search. Sometimes that's all you need to do. Sometimes you get several million results and need to use more specific words to limit the results the ones that you really want. Many scientists use PubMed on a daily basis. But the NCBI has noticed that…

Spring & summer conference schedule

I have a few conferences coming up and I thought I'd share my schedule just in case any of you out there in sciencelibrarianblogland will also be attending. I'll list them in order, along with whatever I'll be presenting. BookCamp Toronto, May 15, Toronto 9:30: eBooks in Education and Academia -- the glacial revolution John Dupuis (York University) Evan Leibovitch (York University) Description: Despite growing public acceptance of eBooks, two areas in which they could offer the most benefit -- education and academia -- are far behind the eBook mainstream. This session will discuss issues…

Computer Engineer Barbie!

Yesterday was International Women's Day and since I'm a firm believer in International Better Late Than Never Day, I thought I thought I'd add my little contribution to the celebration. Or at least highlight a great post from someone else. Computer Scientist Amy Csizmar Dalal's recent blog post Does Barbie's career matter? has some great things to say about the importance of role models and positive examples for girls who might be interested in scientific or technical careers: I was a somewhat normal (don't laugh too hard) but nerdy kid growing up who loved math and science. And while I had…

Not an “accident”: Emilio Dodd, 55, suffers fatal work-related injury in Lewisville, TX

Emilio Dodd, 55, suffered fatal traumatic injuries on Tuesday, September 6, while working at the Waste Management landfill on Railroad Street. The Lewisville Texan reports: the incident occurred at about 3:30 pm according to Lewisville police, “a resident with an F-350 pickup and dual-axle trailer had brought in a load of demolition debris to dump. Dodd was directing the driver as he backed the trailer up in the dumping area” ”a handle protruding from the trailer became entangled in Dodd’s clothing, causing Dodd to be pulled down. The 9,000 pound trailer drove over Dodd’s chest.” Federal…

Food banks use technology to fight hunger

As many of us indulged in Thanksgiving meals last week, NPR’s Planet Money podcast and WAMU’s Metro Connection shared stories on ways food banks are using technology to improve food distribution. The Planet Money story focuses on how Feeding America, a nationwide network of food banks, distributes the donated food it gets from farmers, manufacturers, retailers, and government organizations. Until a few years ago, the headquarters staff didn’t know enough about what kinds of food local organizations most needed or could arrange to get – which is why a food bank in Alaska missed out on a…

Do you want an imp under your desk? If it runs Ubuntu?

I might. This is a preliminary look, based just on the web site and some tweets with the developer, of the imp (all lower case), a small computer somewhere in technology and power, perhaps, between a Raspberry pi (which is mainly a hobbiest toy) and the Intel Nuk (which is sort of a non-Mac Mac Mini). It is called by its makers "The Open Source Computer: Made for consumers." It is a Linux-installed device, as is your smart phone and, well, the entire Internet. So the technology is well tested at that level. The imp team describes it this way: imp is a small, yet powerful computer designed…

Go Fund David Weinlick

Some of you may know David Weinlick, especially if you are active in politics in the Twin Cities, or associated with the University of Minnesota. He is well known around these parts for his political activism and important role in the DFL (that’s how Minnesotans spell “Democratic Party”). He was the Party Affairs Director for the Minnesota DFL until 2014, and until recently the Vice Chair of the Fourth Congressional District for the Minnesota DFL. If that does not ring a bell, this might: David Weinlick essentially invented a new kind of TV (now known as reality TV) when he asked his friends…

Putting the Yellow in your Urine

Let me give you a little back story. As many of you know, I'm new to scienceblogs, and one of the first things we get to do is join a message board full of all the bloggers (sciblings) here. Well, suffice it to say, a contentious discussion took place between me and another scibling, which resulted in my being called a total n00b in front of the entire world. So, what better way to make peace than by having me -- an astrophysicist -- answer a question about physiology?! Let's take a look at what I've got, since I'm a frequent solicitor of questions: Why is my pee yellow in the morning, but…

An 'alternative' course of 'treatment' for a kid with CFS. You know where this is going.

There has been a ton of hilarious drama going on with the XMRV fiasco, but I havent been writing about it because I dont actually care.  I 'cared' about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome because it was associated with a retrovirus.  Turns out it was all a mirage-- The retrovirus known as XMRV is not infecting humans, and wouldnt be able to even if it wanted to. So Judy Mikovits hiding on a boat and the Whittemores pissing of the Feds and the Mob, while fun for day-time soaps, is not real interesting for me as a science blogger (Note to Mikovits-- your shit was contaminated by XMRV plasmid or…

Four Stone Hearth 7

Dear Reader, welcome to the Four Stone Hearth blog carnival -- in science land! 4SH is about anthropology in the widest (American) sense: nothing human is alien to us, from Homo habilis bones via Early Medieval metalworking debris to on-line gaming subcultures. Aardvarchaeology is my new blog, started only a few weeks ago. Before, I blogged at Salto sobrius, where you may have read entries about archaeology during 2006. Anthro scholars are rare here at Scienceblogs, most of the others being specialised in natural sciences like biology. But I feel at home here. For one thing, my opinion is…

The Right Admits to Anti-gay Bias?

Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan for catching this article in the National Review Online, containing this quote: Fox News contributor Mort Kondracke put it best when he said last night, "I think it was totally underhanded -- the outing of Dick Cheney's lesbian daughter.... And it struck me as a low blow designed to weaken the Bush-Cheney team with right-wingers who might not know that Dick Cheney has a lesbian daughter." While the Democrats have been hurling specious and unsubstantiated charges about Republicans suppressing the African-American vote, Kerry and Edwards are leading their party's…

Links for 2009-12-01

A Good Author Is Hard to Find - Books - The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper "Mention the word "slush" to anyone who's worked in publishing for longer than five minutes, and you're likely to get an expression of sheer horror. Slush pile is a term used to refer to the collective mass of unsolicited manuscripts and query letters--novel or nonfiction synopses with a few sample pages attached--that daily deluges the offices of agents and editors throughout the industry. Occasional hits emerge from the morass: Twilight began as an unsolicited query. But far, far more often, the slush pile's…

Montel Williams' blow-up: a symptom of multiple sclerosis or bad judgment?

I was way behind on this story relative to the pharma blogosphere (John Mack's Pharma Marketing Blog, Ed Silverman's Pharmalot, and the WSJ Health Blog), but Montel Williams has created a PR disaster for Partnership for Prescription Assistance of the industry group, PhRMA (Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America). While promoting prescription assistance programs in Savannah on Friday, Williams blew up, as it were, at a Savannah Morning News high school intern. The intern, Courtney Scott, asked Williams, "Do you think pharmaceutical companies would be discouraged from research…

More on FDA risk aversion

Ronald Bailey at Reason has an article about the costs of the FDA black box warning on antidepressants: Excessive caution is risky, too. Back in 1992, Congress, worried about the slow rate of approvals, passed legislation imposing FDA user fees on pharmaceutical companies. Flush with these new funds the agency hired 1000 additional drug reviewers and slashed new drug review time from 30 months to 15 months. Now critics claim that the FDA is in the thrall of drug companies and is endangering the public's health by rushing dangerous new drugs onto the market. As evidence they cite the dangerous…

Breaking the Tyranny of the News Peg in Hurricane Coverage

The NY Times' Andrew Revkin details a study at Nature that finds that in the Caribbean there have been centuries where strong hurricanes occurred frequently even though ocean temperatures were cooler than those measured today. Revkin reports that although the new study does not necessarily conflict with other recent research connecting global warming to more intense hurricanes, it does show that factors other than ocean temperatures can shape trends in the power of storms. Revkin quotes climate scientist Judith Curry, ending the article with an important focus on the policy implications of…

Chimpanzee study reveals genome variation hotspots

Interesting research coming out of Arizona State University: Researchers believe that dynamic regions of the human genome -- "hotspots" in terms of duplications and deletions -- are potentially involved in the rapid evolution of morphological and behavioral characteristics that are genetically determined. Now, an international team of researchers, including a graduate student and an associate professor from Arizona State University, are finding similar hotspots in chimpanzees, which has implications for the understanding of genomic evolution in all species. "We found that chimpanzees have…

4S Day Three

On day three I only made two sessions - and the second was incredibly disappointing (I have serious problems with the study design) so I'll just briefly chat about the first, which was pretty awesome. Monitoring, Modeling, and Memory (II): Methods for the Study of Cyberinfrastructure (and Other Large Distributed Phenomena) This is a pretty big project that stretches over maybe about 10 schools. Christine Borgman is a/the lead for it. David Ribes talked about his work with a large hydrology project. It was interesting how the technical support folks had to negotiate the needs of both engineers…

Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks FAQ#1: How did Skloot learn about HeLa cells?

I mentioned a while ago that I'll be posting answers to FAQs about my book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, as an ongoing series on this blog. I thought I'd start the FAQs with one of the most commonly asked questions: How did you learn about Henrietta and the HeLa cells, and why did they grab you the way they did? Here is the answer, which I also posted about over on Powells.com's book blog this last week as part of a little guest blogging stint: I first learned about Henrietta Lacks in the late 80s, when I was 16 and sitting in a basic biology class at Portland Community College (…

Exploring Oahu: Camping at Malaekahana

This weekend, Barry, Brian, Aziem and I headed up the windward coast to go camping. We went online and got a permit for a site on Malaekahana State Recreation Area, a 37 acre gated park just north of La'ie. Camping is one of my favorite things that I rarely seem to find the time to do, and since Barry and I have our hearts set on hiking out to Kalalau Beach at some point, we figured we'd better try out the new small tent we bought and get some practice roughing it a little. More importantly, I figured I'd give my brand new Canon EOS Rebel T2i a spin. Here are some shots from the trip: Here…