Anisotropic Perspectives

Bravo, ladies.  I expect we’ll see more projects using increasingly powerful and affordable genetic testing technologies in the future.
They found that one-fourth of the fish samples with identifiable DNA were mislabeled…  Seven of nine samples that were called red snapper were mislabeled, and they turned out to be anything from Atlantic cod to Acadian redfish, an endangered [...]

[Read more →]

From the Phoenix Mars Lander…
“We have water,” said William Boynton of the University of Arizona, lead scientist for the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, or TEGA. “We’ve seen evidence for this water ice before in observations by the Mars Odyssey orbiter and in disappearing chunks observed by Phoenix last month, but this is the first time [...]

[Read more →]

Olivia Judson asks us to move beyond the obsession with Darwin.
Darwin was an amazing man, and the principal founder of evolutionary biology. But his was the first major statement on the subject, not the last. Calling evolutionary biology “Darwinism,” and evolution by natural selection “Darwinian” evolution, is like calling aeronautical engineering “Wrightism,” and fixed-wing aircraft [...]

[Read more →]

From the National Human Genome Research Institute, reported in the NYT…
Dr. Segre and colleagues report their discovery of the six tribes in a paper being published online on Friday in Genome Research. The research is part of the human microbiome project, microbiome meaning the entourage of all microbes that live in people.
The project is an [...]

[Read more →]

This census data analyzed by the Houston Chronicle alongside Rice’s annual Houston survey reveals the excellent cultural emphasis on education…
“The typical saying in a Nigerian household is that the best inheritance that a parent can give you is not jewelry or cash or material things, it is a good education,” he said. “It is expected.”

[Read more →]

Doctors are flooding into the Lone Star State after dramatic tort reform earlier this decade.  From the WSJ…

The result is an influx of doctors so great that recently the State Board of Medical Examiners couldn’t process all the new medical-license applications quickly enough. The board faced a backlog of 3,000 applications. To handle the extra [...]

[Read more →]

Amazing story.
At the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa has four positions. He is a neurosurgeon who teaches oncology and neurosurgery, directs a neurosurgery clinic and heads a laboratory studying brain tumors. He also performs nearly 250 brain operations a year. Twenty years ago, Dr. Quiñones-Hinojosa, now 40, was an illegal immigrant working in [...]

[Read more →]

The National Evolutionary Synthesis Center and UC-Berkeley’s wonderful Understanding Evolution website (which had a lawsuit against it dismissed today) are collaborating to produce a cute series of video podcasts about evolution in the news.

[Read more →]

Here’s an “initiative now cosponsored by the AAAS, the Council on Competitiveness, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine” to get the U.S. presidential candidates to debate issues relating to the environment, health/medicine, and science & technology policy.  The consortium led by PBS (and supported by a veritable [...]

[Read more →]

The Age has an interesting report on the activist group Prayer at the Pump…
“Lord, the prices at this pump have gone up since last week. We know that you are able, that you have all the power in the world,” he prayed, before former beauty queen Rashida Jolley led the group in a modified version [...]

[Read more →]