Brandon Keim

SciAm ponders evidence that fish hatcheries are watering down the trout and salmon gene pool. Matt Yglesias looks at one of many lies being told by those opposing health-care reform â confirming Salon's prediction that the opponents of reform are not going to play nice. See also The American Prospect on How Big Pharma Intends to Kill the Public Option. I should add this campaign is having an effect: On the radio this morning I heard NPR Steve Insky Inskeep vigorously press the "public plan as trojan horse" attack on Kathleen Sibelius; I can only hope he'll as vigorously ask people such as…

Brandon Keim, who is part of Wired's ace science writing crew also keeps a blog, Earthlab Notes, where he recently put this nice post on The Language of Horses: In a few slender leg bones and fragments of milk-stained pottery, archaeologists recently found evidence of one of the more important developments in human history: the domestication of horses. Unearthed from a windswept plain in Kazakhstan, the remains were about 5500 years old, and suggested that a nomadic people now called the Botai had learned to ride a creature that had captured mankind's imagination thousands of years earlier.…