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Welcome Maryn McKenna and her blog Superbug to Sb! And, in case I forgot to mention it before, make sure to check out Deborah Blum's blog Speakeasy Science, too! Wildlife experts use civetone-containing cologne to lure big cats In a scene reminiscent of the ending of Kingdom of the Spiders, caterpillars blanket the English countryside with webs. Coming soon, Inside Nature's Giants, series two. John Lynch shares the introduction to Follies of the Present Day: Scriptural Geology from 1817 to 1857. So you want to be a scientist? Learn to write! How to make a blockbuster - the…
One of my colleagues has a two part series on FinchTalk (starting today) that discusses uncertainty in measurement and what that uncertainty means for the present and Next Generation DNA sequencing technologies. I've been running into this uncertainty myself lately. I have always known that DNA sequencing errors occur. This is why people build tools for measuring the error rate and why quality measurements are so useful for determining which data to use and which data to believe. But, some of the downstream consequences didn't really hit home for me until a recent project. This project…