Search Content

Displaying results 10051 - 10100 of 87947

Finding disease mutations in a sea of noise

Jones et al. (2009). Exomic Sequencing Identifies PALB2 as a Pancreatic Cancer Susceptibility Gene. Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1171202 A paper published online today in Science illustrates both the potential and the challenges of using large-scale DNA sequencing to identify rare genetic variants underlying disease risk. Traditionally, geneticists have pinned down such variants using large family studies. By using these families to track which parts of the genome tend to be co-inherited with the disease, it's possible to zoom in on the region of DNA that harbours the disease-causing mutation…

America's Next Religion!!!

On Sunday, I was stuck on a long boring drive — there is no scenery between Winnipeg and Morris, only a pale gray void with wisps of snow blowing through it — and was thinking about some of the conversations I'd had the night before. I was a bit envious. My own upbringing in religion was rather tepid, an exposure to bland liberal Lutheranism of the Scandinavian Phlegmatic sect, and had no drama at all to it, and was more like a Unitarian Universalist church with a historical creed attached to it that no one cared much about. Yet here I'd been talking with ex-fundamentalist ex-Mennonites,…

Serious Things Day II: Why I'm Not Bright Green

A reader of mine named Aaron emailed me to ask if I'd respond to Alex Steffen's latest piece at Worldchanging. Aaron writes: I'd be interested to hear what you have to say about Alex Steffen's recent post over at worldchanging.com. I think that it is a well considered and well informed post that addresses many of the things that make me uncomfortable in your writing. I'm really not interested in criticizing your work, or anything of that sort; I believe that the sustainability movement as a whole needs to have a strong and well reasoned message if it is to take root with the public at large…

On Heffernan: For Me, ScienceBlogs Isn't Supposed to Be a Newspaper's Science Section

I had been considering, over the weekend to write a navel gazing post about The State of ScienceBlogs and Its Relationship to the Mad Biologist. And then Virginia Heffernan of the NY Times wrote a quote picking article about ScienceBlogs, thereby screwing up my weekend blogging (so much stupid, so little Mad Biologist). At the end of the post, I'll describe how I see ScienceBlogs, but, first, let's talk about Heffernan's arrogance. From Heffernan: I was nonplussed by the high dudgeon of the so-called SciBlings. The bloggers evidently write often enough for ad-free academic journals that…

A Coast-to-Coast Festival Infused with Innovation

Shout out to ieee-usa today's engineer for their post on the Festival!! By Robin Peress What happens when you combine the best minds in STEM education with best practices in entrepreneurship? One striking result is the forthcoming USA Science & Engineering Festival, whose special events will blanket the country in October and culminate in a two-day exhibition bash on Washington, D.C.'s National Mall. The human comet behind this tour-de-force is Lawrence A. Bock, a San Diego-based serial entrepreneur (by his own description), who said he took many of the rules for launching a successful…

Modeling antiviral resistance, X: ready to run the model

[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post.] Now we are almost ready to run the model described in the paper, "Antiviral resistance and the control of pandemic influenza," by Lipsitch et al., published in PLoS Medicine. If you have been following up to this point, you will know the model described in the Methods section is a homogeneous…

Flu biology: receptors, I

The need for better information about the science of avian influenza is urgent. But science is a slow process, or at least slow relative to an urgent time scale, even in times of rapid advances in technology. Even so, while we are waiting for the other shoe to drop, we continue to learn and unlearn about the influenza virus. One major gap has been understanding where humans have cells with receptors for bird flu viruses. A new paper published online last week in The FASEB Journal is finally providing some information. As usual, it is both informative and confusing. To understand what it is…

Sci-Fi And Building Blogging Communities

Some musings from February 13, 2005... At the Triangle Blogger Conference yesterday, somebody mentioned Vernon Vinge's Fire Upon The Deep, as an example of a sci-fi novel describing future consequences of Usenet (at the time) or blog communities. Someone else suggested another book, Bloom. Another blogger (sorry, can't find it again right now, so many people blogged their impressions of the conference afterwards) thought of Terry Pratchett's The Truth as a parable of the way journalism works. I have not yet read "Fire Upon The Deep" (surprisingly, as I own a copy and generally like Vinge a…

Safe haven laws, hidden pregnancies, and the tragedy of Ashley Truitt

My office in the epidemiology department is located within the hospital. Therefore, every day when I walk into work, I pass by a sign like the one on the left. Like most states, Iowa has a safe haven law--a law that allows parents to leave a newborn infant at a designated site, no questions asked, without any threat of prosecution. These sorts of laws were developed in response to cases where babies had been left on doorsteps, or thrown in trash dumpsters, etc. Safe Haven laws, in theory, should prevent those kinds of abuses--the parents abdicate responsibility for the infant, who can…

Occupational Health News Roundup

At the Center for Public Integrity, Jim Morris reports on working conditions at the nation’s oil refineries, writing that more than 500 refinery incidents have been reported to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency since 1994, calling into question the adequacy of EPA and federal labor rules designed to protect workers as well as the public. Morris begins the story with John Moore, who in 2010 was working at a Tesoro Corporation oil refinery north of Seattle — he writes: Up the hill from Moore, in the Naphtha Hydrotreater unit, seven workers were restoring to service a bank of heat…

800 Years Of Human Sacrifice In Kent

British Archaeology #131 (July/August) has a feature by Pippa Bradley that caught my interest. It's about a Wessex Archaeology dig in 2004-05 at Cliffs End farm in Thanet, a piece of north-east Kent that was an island up until the 16th century when silting finished connecting it to mainland England. What we're dealing with here is ritual murder, some pretty strange disposal of the dead and ancient Scandinavian migrants. Use of the site begins in earnest with six ring-ditch barrows during the Early Bronze Age (2200-1500 cal BC). These were poorly preserved and yielded few interesting finds.…

Blog Table Discussion with Puff the Mutant Dragon (Part I)

My post post Faster Than a Speeding Photon, doing a Q&A explainer of the OPERA fast-neutrino measurement was picked for inclusion in The Best Science Writing Online 2012 (confusingly published in late 2012, featuring blog posts from 2011...). As promotion for the book, it was suggested that pairs of authors from the collection "interview" each other about their posts, blogging, and whatever else, and I was paired with Puff the Mutant Dragon. We exchanged several emails over a week or so, and thought about cutting them up into typical Q&A type "interview" posts. That seemed like it…

A Lot of Knowledge Is a Dangerous Thing

I was looking at some polling about science over the weekend, and discovered that they helpfully provide an online quiz consisting of the factual questions asked of the general public as part of the survey. Amusingly, one of them is actually more difficult to answer correctly if you know a lot about the field than if you only know a little. I'll reproduce it here first, if you would like to take a crack at it, and then I'll explain why it's tricky below the fold. The global positioning system, or GPS, relies on which of these to work?(answers) Choose only one answer-- this is being recorded…

Comparative Effectiveness Research: Priorities for Mental Health

Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) has been controversial, as href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/16/AR2009031602913.html">noted in the Washington Post.  Admittedly, most of the controversy has been contrived.  Fortunately, the process is moving forward; there is no meaningful opposition at this point. A good summary of the objections of this was posted by Hilzoy at href="http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_05/018133.php">Political Animal.  I'll deal with the objections simply by posting the link, as refuting them is not the…

When Scientists Go All Bloggy

It's getting harder and harder to remember what it was like to write about science in the pre-Web 2.0 days. Back then (i.e., 2004), I'd come across an intriguing paper, I'd interview the authors, I'd get comments--supportive or nasty--from other experts in the field, and then publish an article distilling everything I'd learned. It would take months or years for the authors to follow up on their work or for other scientists to publish their own papers attacking or supporting the original research. How quaint. Let's take a look at an experience I had yesterday. I was reading a blog called The…

Will Google censor its digital library?

I promised you some updates on the Google Books Settlement, so here you go. Things are definitely getting interesting. First, I mentioned earlier that I was going to attend a panel on the Google Book Search Settlement here in DC, featuring representatives of Google, the publishers, and the Internet Archive. ITIF, which organized the panel, has made the entire thing available online; I've linked to it at the bottom of the post, because it's over an hour long. Anyway, it was interesting to hear the (very civil) differences of opinion between Dan Clancy, the Engineering Director for Google Book…

DVD review: Ethics in Biomedical Research

On this blog I occasionally note a major motion picture that is (tangentially) related to ethics in science, not to mention seeking your advice on my movie-viewing decisions (the votes are running 2 to 1 in favor of my watching Flash Gordon; if I do, I may have to live-blog it). Today, I'm going to give you an actual review* of a DVD whose subject is ethical scientific research. Because you ought to have options when planning your weekend! A member of the Adventures in Ethics and Science Field Team brought me a DVD to review, "Ethics in Biomedical Research". This is a DVD produced by the…

Curtsinger on creationism

Kristine Harley attended James Curtsinger's lecture at UMTC last night, and passed along an abbreviated copy of her notes. I wish I could have gone—it sounds like it was an informative evening—but living out here in the wilderness, I have to plan those long drives into the Big City with some care. Curtsinger's talk was only very loosely organized around the theme of "ten things," and was mostly a comprehensive overview of the various forms of creationism from Archbishop Ussher (1581-1656) to Michael Behe's embarrassing performance at the Dover trial. I would say that there were around 20-25…

On Promoting Science Bloggers Who Happen To Be Female

If you're plugged into the science blogtwitosphere, then you surely know that the topic of women science bloggers has been written about extensively. Rather than re-hash what many others have said, I'll direct you to these posts by Kate Clancy and Daniel Lende. Then, late last night, Ed Yong wrote a post highlighting a handful of blogs he reads that happen to be penned (typed?) by science writers who happen to possess two X chromosomes. I also noticed that of all the names and blogs that Ed listed, only one was new to me. Perhaps this is because I'm well-plugged-in to the sciblogtwitosphere,…

290-299/366: Offbeat Rome

Kate and I spent last week in Rome, to attend the wedding of a friend of mine from college, who was marrying an Italian woman. I've always wanted to see Rome, so this was a great excuse, and of course I took a lot of pictures-- over 1,600 all told. This happens in part because when I'm visiting a major tourist site with a camera, I'm trying to do two things at the same time. One, of course, is to get good photos of the big attractions, to supplement my memories of the actual sites. But this is always constrained a bit by the knowledge that, you know, major tourist destinations have plenty of…

Digital Assets Librarian, York University Libraries

A terrific new opportunity at my institution. I'm not in the reporting department or on the search committee, but I'd be happy to answer general questions about York and the environment. My email is jdupuis at yorku dot ca. The online job posting is here. Position Rank: Full Time Tenure Stream - Assistant Librarian Discipline/Field: Digital Assets Librarian Home Faculty: Libraries Home Department/Area/Division: Scott Library Affiliation/Union: YUFA Position Start Date: June 1, 2012 Digital Assets Librarian - York University Libraries York University Libraries are seeking an innovative and…

The impact of HIV on Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis

Second of five student guest posts by Nai-Chung N. Chang Tuberculosis (TB) is a major disease burden in many areas of the world. As such, it was declared a global public health emergency in 1993 by the World Health Organization (WHO). It is a bacterial disease that is transmitted through the air when an infected individual coughs, sneezes, speaks, or sings. However, not all individuals who contract the disease will display symptoms. This separates the infected into two categories, latent and active. Latent individuals are non-infectious and will not transmit the disease, whereas active…

Global cooling awareness in the 60's?

I apologise for the brief intrusion of something vaguely related to climate science on this rowing-n-wiki blog; we'll return you to your usual programming shortly. Maurizio Morabito attempts to establish that there was a consensus for global cooling in the 1960's (this is all part of a rather dull campaign to discredit the mighty number one climate paper "The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus"; generally he appears to have failed to understand what we said, so I won't bore you by attacking it further). Evidence is apparently found in a 1961 UNESCO / WMO conference…

April Pieces Of My Mind #3

Happy archaeo-dad pastime: Jrette helped me enter the humongous tables of stats on rock art from Mats Malmer's 1981 book into a computer spreadsheet, and we checked his sums, finding them all to be correct. Funny how common it is even for educated people to believe that the Vikings would send their dead out to sea in a (sometimes burning) boat. Have they never considered what would happen two hours later when the boat landed on the other side of the fjord? I'm measuring stuff on my computer screen with a ruler to get the relative scales right on two shots of an ard tip. Trying to convince…

Magnetic manipulation of the sense of morality

WHEN making moral judgements, we rely on our ability to make inferences about the beliefs and intentions of others. With this so-called "theory of mind", we can meaningfully interpret their behaviour, and decide whether it is right or wrong. The legal system also places great emphasis on one's intentions: a "guilty act" only produces criminal liability when it is proven to have been performed in combination with a "guilty mind", and this, too, depends on the ability to make reasoned moral judgements. MIT researchers now show that this moral compass can be very easily skewed. In a new study…

Court Upholds Rights of Scientists and Patients to Challenge Gene Patents

Some interesting news about the breast cancer patent lawsuit I wrote about for Slate's Double X Magazine a few months ago:  A federal district court has just agreed to hear the case. When the lawsuit was first filed, many legal experts I talked to said they were sure the case would get thrown out of court for it's unusual approach, namely that it claims that the practice of patenting genes is unconstitutional See my story about the case here. Filings and other documents related to the case available here.  And see below for the full press release about today's news: Court Upholds Right…

Rebooting (and Funding) Science Journalism

At the ScienceOnline 2010 conference next month, I'm going to be on a panel about "Rebooting Science Journaiism," in which I'll join Carl Zimmer, Ed Yong, and John Timmer in pondering the future of science journalism. God knows what will come of it, as none of us have the sure answers. But that session, as well as the entanglement of my own future with that of science journalism, has me focused on the subject. And two recent online discussions about it have piqued my interest. One was the reaction, on a science writer's email-list I'm on, to a recent Poynter interview with Times science…

How to stop arrogant egotists from getting violent

We've written a lot about video games and aggression here on CogDaily, and typically there has been heated discussion about the results. Why, commenters ask, aren't you talking about aggression in football players, or road rage, or in any of a thousand other situations? The most important reason is simply that we have a teenage son who loves video games, so we want to know if there's a negative impact of playing these games all the time. But our commenters do have a point: a larger understanding of aggressive behavior and violence clearly goes beyond simply playing video games. There was…

ScienceOnline09: Gender'n'science'n'blogging'n'allies, down to the wire and needing your stories!

So, we may have mentioned we're going to ScienceOnline 2009, which starts on Friday; ScienceWoman and I have our respective sessions on Saturday with our respective co-facilitators. I've been snowed under with the start of classes, some papers due, some abstracts due, a meeting last week, and, of course, this upcoming event. But I'm getting a little caught up (even if this is a scrambled post), and saw discussion of being a blogging ally at a couple of places of note: In particular, Samia blogged about how others could be good allies within her post about race and science blogging (before…

A reckless proposal, or "Scientists are people too, and it's time we started treating them that way."

After my experiences a few weeks ago, and the ensuing discussion, I haven't been able to get the topic of childcare and professional travel out of my head. So here's a reckless proposal on the topic. For everybody: 1) We need to recognize that to be successful, scientists, engineers, or academics need to engage in some amount of overnight travel to professional conferences, workshops, short courses, etc. Sure you might be able to go a year or two or even three without leaving your hometown, but at some point, in order to be successful at your current job or to advance professionally, you…

The Other Causes of Obesity

The most commonly cited causes of the obesity epidemic over the last 30 years are decreases in physical activity and increased consumption of unhealthy foods: the Big Two. For these as causes, we have what can only be described as an overwhelming quantity of evidence. However, many other causes of increased obesity have been suggested such as environmental endocrine disruptors or chronic sleep deprivation. In an editorial in the International Journal of Obesity, Keith et al. argue that for some of them the evidence is quite solid -- meriting further study and possibly public health…

Friday Sprog Blogging: revisiting Pluto.

There's been a continuing discussion, in various online venues (including this blog), of Unscientific America, a book which notes the "demotion" of Pluto as an instance where the lessons the American public drew from the scientists' decisions may have diverged widely from the lessons the scientists would want the public to draw -- if they even thought about the possibility that the public was paying attention. So, since the Free-Ride offspring were paying attention as the Pluto saga unfolded, I thought I should double back and see what their current thinking about it is. If you've forgotten…

RP 6: Throwing a fooball, Part II

In part I of this post, I talked about the basics of projectile motion with no air resistance. Also in that post, I showed that (without air resistance) the angle to throw a ball for maximum range is 45 degrees. When throwing a football, there is some air resistance this means that 45 degree is not necessarily the angle for the greatest range. Well, can't I just do the same thing as before? It turns out that it is a significantly different problem when air resistance is added. Without air resistance, the acceleration was constant. Not so now, my friend. The problem is that air…

Physics of the Water Rocket

I said I would come back to this, and I am. I am a man of my word. Yesterday, I posted a link to a video of this really cool water rocket thingy. How does this work? What is the physics going on here? I think this can be best explained with the momentum principle. Let me start by pretending like I have some object that shoots out a piece of water (or really it could be anything). Also, let me pretend like this is in space ore something where there are no external forces. Above is a before and after picture. Initially, there is something (the box) with water inside. Through some process…

Throwing a football, Part II

In part I of this post, I talked about the basics of projectile motion with no air resistance. Also in that post, I showed that (without air resistance) the angle to throw a ball for maximum range is 45 degrees. When throwing a football, there is some air resistance this means that 45 degree is not necessarily the angle for the greatest range. Well, can't I just do the same thing as before? It turns out that it is a significantly different problem when air resistance is added. Without air resistance, the acceleration was constant. Not so now, my friend. The problem is that air…

Smart Babies

Over at Sciam's Mind Matters, Melody Dye has a great post on the surprising advantages of thinking like a baby. At first glance, this might seem like a ridiculous conjecture: A baby, after all, is missing most of the capabilities that define the human mind, such as language and the ability to reason or focus. Rene Descartes argued that the young child was entirely bound by sensation, hopelessly trapped in the confusing rush of the here and now. A newborn, in this sense, is just a lump of need, a bundle of reflexes that can only eat and cry. To think like a baby is to not think at all. And yet…

Effect Measure's second blogiversary: still crazy after all these years

This weekend is Effect Measure's Second Blogiversary and it coincides with two other events: the new Flu Wiki Forum and the incipient debut of a new progressive public health blog, The Pump Handle, to which The Reveres will be occasional contributors (some original posts, some cross posts). We are semi-thrilled to still be around after two years. Semi-thrilled, because two years is a long-time in the blogosphere, especially if you blogged all 730 days of it. Just a few under 1500 posts all told. We know there are a lot of blogs more prolific than ours and older. Our hats are off to them,…

Isis the Scientist Says... [The Rightful Place Project]

If you've been browsing the new, redesigned, fancy-pants ScienceBlogs front page lately, you may have noticed the announcement for The Rightful Place Project. In his inaugural address, President Obama vowed to restore "science to its rightful place." In response, The Seed Media Group, through SeedMagazine and ScienceBlogs, are looking to begin a dialog about how to do this by asking for responses to the following question: What is science's rightful place? Earlier in the week, Dr. Isis and the rest of the Sciencebloggers received an email from the highest of high overlordz telling us…

Great Short Stories III: “The Nine Mile Walk” by Harry Kemelman

Time now for the third installment in my series about great short stories. (Previous installments can be found here: Part One and Part Two.) Today we focus on “The Nine Mile Walk,” by Harry Kemelman. If you are familiar with Kemelman it is probably because of his series of detective novels featuring Rabbi David Small. Kemelman originally wanted to write books about Judaism, but found it too difficult to get such things published. So he embedded discussions of Jewish thought into his mystery novels. The Rabbi novels were also memorable for their subplots, which typically involved the…

Unscientific America by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future is the new book by Chris and Sheril of The Intersection (formerly on ScienceBlogs, now at Discover), and they were kind enough to include me on the list of people getting review copies. It turned up on Friday (after I'd already started Newton and the Counterfeiter). I read it this afternoon, partly at lunch with SteelyKid (who, alas, was woken up by somebody else's ill-mannered child), but mostly in the back yard on a surprisingly pleasant afternoon. It's a quick read-- only 132 pages of text, plus 65 pages of (unmarked)…

Why blog? The Meme returns...

For some reason, I've only just discovered the navel-gazing blogger meme that started at Nature Network a few weeks ago. But I've written up a shed-load of science this week and I'm feeling lazy and introspective. So better late than never... 1. What is your blog about? Not Exactly Rocket Science is a news site crossed with a popular science book crossed with an excitable, precocious and eloquent child jumping up and down and pointing at things that are cool. I care about making science understandable and interesting to non-scientists and about good writing. Any topic is fair game, but…

Remarks at AAAS Conference on Climate Change Literacy

Last week I presented at a workshop hosted by AAAS on "Promoting Climate Literacy Through Informal Science." There were a number of outstanding presentations and themes discussed including a plenary talk by historian Naomi Oreskes detailing the central arguments of her forthcoming book on the origins of the climate skeptic movement. There are plans to make available online the various presentation materials, so I will post again when those are ready. In the meantime, I have pasted below the text from remarks I gave as part of a panel on framing. These remarks also follow closely some of…

Synapse proteomics & brain evolution

When it comes to human brain evolution, it is often said that size matters. The human cerebral cortex is much larger than that of other primates, and therefore its expansion must have been a vital feature of human evolution. Researchers have therefore emphasized the importance of encephalization, the process by which brain mass increased dramatically in relation to total body mass that occurred in the human lineage. However, a new study which used bioinformatics to compare the synapses of distantly related species suggests that size may not be the most important factor in human brain…

Grand Rounds

At about this time last week, I asked for bloggers' thoughts on the interface of scientific evidence with health and health care. In an unscientific poll of the blogosphere, about 40% of you gave this theme the finger, while about 60% of you found it interesting to the point of arousal. To the first group, I say, I hope we can still be friends. Meanwhile, the second group should sit quietly and think about what it has done. I sure have. There's great variety, great thought, and great effort evident (heh) among the entries in this week's collection. I hope you will find it as thought-provoking…

Adding to my teaching toolbox: the gallery walk

While I was teaching my reworked upper division gen ed class earlier this summer, I decided to use a discussion technique that I hadn't used before: the "http://serc.carleton.edu/introgeo/gallerywalk/index.html">gallery walk. It worked so well that I'm trying to figure out where else it might be useful. The idea behind the gallery walk is pretty simple: students are divided into several groups, and work their way around a series of stations at which they add to a list of answers to a question (or whatever the task at each station involves). I had used the technique as a participant in a…

Oekologie #5: Looking Back at Ancient Arabic Ecological Writings

Welcome to the 5th edition of Oekologie, the 'sphere's only blog carnival focusing on ecology and environmental science. We are always looking for hosts (especially for October) and contributors, so please check out those tabs if you're interested in either. Some of you may know that I have a tendency to mix in some history when hosting science carnivals. So, for the first themed edition of Oekologie, we will be using ancient and medieval Arabic nature writing to frame our moving monthly mag of biological interactions in the environment. Zoology One of the most famous Arabic zoological…

Isis the Scientist Says...

If you've been browsing the new, redesigned, fancy-pants ScienceBlogs front page lately, you may have noticed the announcement for The Rightful Place Project. In his inaugural address, President Obama vowed to restore "science to its rightful place." In response, The Seed Media Group, through SeedMagazine and ScienceBlogs, are looking to begin a dialog about how to do this by asking for responses to the following question: What is science's rightful place? Earlier in the week, Dr. Isis and the rest of the Sciencebloggers received an email from the highest of high overlordz telling us…

Jindal's genetics professor speaks out

In a press release from the Louisiana Coalition for Science, Governor Bobby Jindal's college genetics professor asks him not to "hold back the next generation of Louisiana's doctors." The press release introduces an open letter from the group calling for Jindal to veto SB 733, a bill which opens the door to creationism in the classroom, Professor Arthur Landy, University Professor at Brown University who teaches in the medical school, taught the then-premed. Landy says "Without evolution, modern biology, including medicine and biotechnology, wouldn't make sense. In order for today's…

Our patients don't practice evidence-based medicine? That doesn't justify doctors embracing quackery!

One of the most annoying phenomena when it comes to “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), which its advocates are more and more insistent on calling “integrative medicine” is how little the average doctor cares that pseudoscience is infiltrating medicine. The reason, of course, is that CAM advocates don’t like the “alternative” part of the term CAM. Come to think of it, they don’t like the “complementary” part, either, because it implies that conventional science-based medicine (what I like to refer to as “real” medicine) is the main treatment and what they do is just “…

Ann Coulter: No evidence for evolution?

I've now read all of the science-related (that's applying the term "related" very generously) stuff in Ann Coulter's awful, ghastly, ignorant book, Godless, and it's a bit overwhelming. This far right-wing political pundit with no knowledge of science at all has written a lengthy tract that is wall-to-wall error: To cover it all would require a sentence-by-sentence dissection that would generate another book, ten times longer than Coulter's, all merely to point out that her book is pure garbage. So I'm stumped. I'm not interested in writing such a lengthy rebuttal, and I'm sure this is…