amillikan

Johnson and Horgan are back on this week's Science Saturday diavlog on Bloggingheads.tv: From BHTV: In this week's episode of Science Saturday, John Horgan and George Johnson explain how the latest Jarmusch film, "The Limits of Control," conveys a message of significance for struggling science…

The billionaire media icon Oprah Winfrey sealed a contractual deal with notorious anti-vaccination supporter Jenny McCarthy Monday that will enable McCarthy to spread her belief that vaccines cause autism across several platforms. This viewpoint is vehemently opposed in the scientific community,…

The Scientist revealed Thursday that pharmaceutical company Merck, Sharp & Dohme paid Elsevier—the world's largest publisher of medical and scientific literature—to produce a publication that gave the appearance of being a medical journal, but was actually a marketing promotion for Merck. The…

Correction appended: This post incorrectly stated the Center for Disease Control as the organization responsible for raising the pandemic threat level. This is the duty of the World Health Organization. Swine flu outbreaks are raising alarm across the globe and prompting the World Health…

Related ScienceBlogs Posts: Jake on genetics and obesity Razib on obesity and heritability

Swiss astronomers recently discovered the small exoplanet, Gliese 581 e, calculated to have a minium mass less than twice that of our own dear planet. This planet resides within the same solar system as Gliese 581 d, which scientists speculate could be capable of supporting life. "With a minimum…

Hundreds of research supporters rallied on UCLA's campus Wednesday to protest acts of terrorism directed at scientists by animal rights activists. The event, organized by the UCLA chapter of Pro-Test, a group founded in Oxford, England to support animal testing for the pursuit of science, drew an…

Today is Earth Day, and here on ScienceBlogs our bloggers are observing it by sharing their reasons for caring about our planet and its environment. ScienceBlogs' newest blog, Guilty Planet, launched today in timing with the occasion. Written by Jennifer Jacquet, formerly of Shifting Baselines,…

With news headlines prompting readers to question if Twitter causes a decay in one's moral fabric, ScienceBloggers are attempting to set the record straight. As Jessica Palmer from Bioephemera explains, the mainstream media got wind of a press release from the University of Southern California,…

Following through with President Obama's executive order issued March 9, Removing Barriers to Responsible Scientific Research Involving Human Stem Cells (link to PDF), the NIH has released a draft of guidelines revising the NIH's position on how it may fund "responsible, scientifically worthy…

As apex organisms in the scope of Earth's multi-tiered web of life, most of us go about our day-to-day activities oblivious to the fact that bacteria are literally everywhere. Microorganisms can thrive in the most surprising locales—places totally inhospitable to human life. Recently, scientists…

While historical accounts of the Spanish Hapsburgs dynasty have suggested that prevalent inbreeding likely contributed to the family's downfall, such suspicions weren't supported by genetic data--until now. In a new paper in PLoS One, researchers traced the genes of the Hapsburgs through more than…

A proposed law to protect native species and habitats from invasion by nonnative animals is scheduled to be heard April 23 in the U.S. House of Representatives, and ScienceBloggers are voicing strong--and contending--sentiments about the bill. House Resolution 669, the Nonnative Wildlife Invasion…

Researchers in Canada are contemplating a recent report that suggests it is more expensive to review and reject applications for small baseline grants than to simply provide the grant without conducting a review. According to this study, if the review process was eliminated, the Canadian…

How accurately can medical professionals distinguish post-traumatic stress disorder from related conditions? Is it better to be safe than sorry, or is overdiagnosis hurting patients rather than helping them? These are some questions that ScienceBlogger and freelance journalist David Dobbs addressed…

In the wake of Monday's earthquake in the L'Aquila region of Italy that killed over 200 people, news emerged that one Italian scientist had predicted the earthquake less than two weeks earlier. Giampaolo Giuliani's predictions were broadcast on March 28 but was dismissed by Italian authorities--and…

The more moral you believe yourself to be, the less moral you may be inclined to act, according to a new study in Psychological Science. Psychologists evaluated the moral self-image of subject participants and then presented them with a variety of scenarios in which they were asked to donate money…

While the rumor that Google is in "late stage negotiations" to acquire Twitter, the social networking website based on text message-style entries of 140 characters, hasn't been confirmed, the feasibility of such a notion says volumes about Twitter's massive rise in popularity over the past years.…

While the robotic title character in WALL-E inhabited an Earth of the future, robots are here now, in our labs, factories, and even art galleries. At Aberystwyth University in Wales, a robot named Adam is designing and carrying out genetic tests on yeast, modifying the experiments on its own as it…

In an article in The New York Times Magazine Sunday, Freeman Dyson—best known for his work in theoretical physics—discussed his belief that climate change is an issue that should be approached with skepticism. ScienceBloggers responded with thoughtful consideration. Dyson stated in the Times piece…

Animal control units are flocking to North Carolina's Research Triangle Park to aide in the struggle to contain a herd of approximately 50 'Dinochickens,' the dinosaur-like creatures constructed using chicken embryos and reverse evolution techniques. According to one of the researchers in the…

Geologists have been keeping a close watch on the volcanic activity brewing at Mount Redoubt, the 9,000 foot (2,700 m) volcano found in Alaska's Aleutian Range. In response to the eruption at Redoubt on Thursday morning that released a 65,000 foot (20,000 m) ash column, the Alaska Volcano…

Over the past three days, the Texas State Board of Education has heard over 50 testimonies debating a proposed amendment to reinstate the requirement of teaching the "strengths and weaknesses" of the theory of evolution in the statewide science curriculum. The proposed regulation, which has…

A new paper published in Genome Research provides the most comprehensive scan to date of the genetic signatures of natural selection resulting from the last 10-40,000 years of human evolution, with some intriguing results. The results show strikingly different patterns of selection in distantly…

Jane Lubchenco and John Holdren were confirmed unanimously by the U.S. Senate Thursday night after being stalled since March 3, when their nominations were blocked by anonymous holds in the Senate for unrelated reasons. Lubchenco will serve as the administrator of the National Oceanic and…

Pope Benedict XVI provoked outrage amongst health officials last week when he stated that condoms were not the answer to Africa's fight against HIV and Aids, and could even worsen the problem. His comments came during the Pope's first visit to Africa, highlighting the Catholic Church's…

Saturday, March 22, ScienceBlogs contributors reached the notable number of 100,000 blog entries on ScienceBlogs.com! Congrats to all of them for their hard work and dedication. Onward to one million!

ScienceBloggers Peter Lipson, AKA Dr. Pal from White Coat Underground, and Janet Stemwedel, AKA Dr. Free-Ride from Adventures in Ethics and Science, return for another episode of BhTV's Science Saturday this week. They discuss Senator Tom Harkin's worrisome crusade to "validate" alternative…

With print publications in crisis, the issue of how scientific information will be disseminated in the future has become a recurrent topic of discussion here on ScienceBlogs and all over the web. Recently, Ed Brayton of Dispatches from the Culture Wars criticized National Geographic and the "sorry…

A recent influx of geobloggers on ScienceBlogs has brought rocks, mountains, and their fiery relatives volcanoes into the spotlight. Whether they're talking about unusual uses of earthquake jargon, volcanic eruptions in the South Pacific, or their fantasy geology curriculum for undergraduates,…