News
cagapakis | May 26, 2010There is an interesting and very thoughtful piece by Craig Venter and Daniel Gibson in today's Wall Street Journal going through what their breakthrough is and what it isn't, where they see the project going in the future, and why public discussion is important:
[Previous genetic engineers] did not create life in a test tube, nor did we create life from scratch. We transformed existing life into new life. We also did not design and build a new chromosome from nothing. Rather, using only digitized information, we synthesized a modified version of the naturally occurring Mycoplasma mycoides…
illconsidered | May 24, 2010 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsThis weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another week of Climate Instability News Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsMay 23, 2010 Chuckles, IPCC-5, COP16+, Figueres, Cochabamba, NAS-ACC, Lyman, Ocean Volume Lake Tanganyika, Anthropocene, Carbon Tariffs, Subsidies, TEEB, Malaria, Hartwell, Post CRU Melting Arctic, Geopolitics Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Carbon Cycle, Temperatures…
grrlscientist | May 22, 2010tags: Scientology, SeaOrg, cults, religion, mind control, offbeat, weird, L Ron Hubbard, Scarlett Hanna, Australian Broadcasting Company, streaming video
Scarlett Hanna, the daughter of the president of the Church of Scientology in Australia, speaks out against the organization in this eye-opening interview with the Australian Broadcasting Company.
cagapakis | May 20, 2010The J. Craig Venter Institute has just announced the creation of the first bacterial cell controlled by a genome that is entirely chemically synthesized (PDF). The group has been working towards this goal for several years now, first working out how to synthesize and assemble such large pieces of DNA and how to transplant a genome from one organism to another. This result puts it all together, a synthetic version of the genome of the bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides and transplantation into a Mycoplasma capricolum cell. This synthetic cell is almost identical to a natural M. mycoides, but also…
illconsidered | May 17, 2010 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsThis weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another week of Climate Instability News Information overload is pattern recognitionMay 16, 2010 Chuckles, Shiva, COP15, COP16, Cochabamba, Oh Oh, Sinervo, GBO-3, Hartwell, QUB Subsidies, Eli's Retirement, Open Letter, Pro-IPCC, IAC Review, Post CRU Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, CCD, IP Issues, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Temperatures, Aerosols,…
sb admin | May 13, 2010Things have been a bit quiet here as I finished up my crazy
four-month-long book tour, and there's much to catch up on. First, some big news just in: Oprah,
Alan Ball, and HBO are going to be making a movie version of my book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. This news has gotten quite a bit ofcoverage on Twitter and elsewhere, with me fielding questions about the movie,
and various folks voting on who should play which character in the film (not
that I have any control over such things, but it's still fun to think about).
The combination of Oprah, Alan Ball, and HBO is nothing
short…
illconsidered | May 13, 2010This is very interesting!
It was only after returning to shore and closely examining the photographs they had taken that the researchers allowed themselves to acknowledge that what they had seen was, in fact, a gray whale.
There was only one problem.
There are no gray whales off Israel.
There are no gray whales in the Mediterranean.
There are, in fact, no gray whales in the Atlantic
The prevailing hypothesis is this whale got lost in the Northwest Passage and confused the east west coast of Europe with the east west coast of North America. (oops)
Added Dr. Aviad Scheinin of IMMRAC:
Due to the…
cagapakis | May 11, 2010Unlike many of my colleagues, I'm not really interested in the whole "science vs. religion" thing, but I do want to point out the very thoughtful analysis of genetic engineering and synthetic biology by the Church of Scotland's Society, Religion, and Technology Project. On GM food, they write:
The official scientific and economic reports support the view of the 1999 Assembly, that GM is not a simple 'yes or no' issue and must be taken case-by-case, weighing up many different factors. Theologically, SRT has found no convincing reason to say it is a wrong act to transfer genes into a crop from…
illconsidered | May 10, 2010 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsThis weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another week of Climate Instability News Sipping from the internet firehose...May 9, 2010 Chuckles, COP15 Leak, Bonn, COP16, Cochabamba, IPCC Review, EPO, Rabett, Beck Bottom Line, Carbon Tariffs, Per Capita Quotas, Open Letter, Post CRU Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Colony Collapse, Land Grabs, IP Issues, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Nitrogen Cycle,…
drorzel | May 6, 2010There's a minor kerfuffle at the moment over the XENON experiment's early data (arxiv paper) which did not detect any dark matter in 11 days of data acquisition. This conflicts with earlier claims by the DAMA experiment and recent maybe-kinda-sorta detections by the CoGeNT and CDMA experiments.
As a result, a couple of members of other collaborations have posted a response on the arxiv saying, basically, that they don't believe the sensitivity claimed for the XENON detector in the energy range in question, and that their result can't really be said to rule out the possibility of dark matter…
illconsidered | May 3, 2010 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsThis weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another week of Climate Instability News Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsMay 2, 2010 Chuckles, COP15, COP16, Cochabamba, SAARC, BASIC, Mediterranean 5+5, Melting Icebergs, Economists Bottom Line, Medupi, Subsidies, Aus ETS, Per-person Quotas, Post CRU, Anthropocene, Volcano, Earth Day Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Land Grabs, Patent…
illconsidered | April 30, 2010I always marvel at the scientist-government conspiracy theories the more wacky members of the climate denial machine toss around so confidently.
How do they fit this into their world view?
In papers sent to UVA April 23, Cuccinelli's office commands the university to produce a sweeping swath of documents relating to Mann's receipt of nearly half a million dollars in state grant-funded climate research conducted while Mann-- now director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State-- was at UVA between 1999 and 2005.
...
Among the documents Cuccinelli demands are any and all emailed or…
cagapakis | April 29, 2010I got the chance to attend a panel discussion about science and the media presented by the UK-based charity Sense About Science. The audience was primarily scientists, many of whom were angry about how science is presented in the media: the outlandish claims, the hype, presenting "both sides" of stories where there is clear scientific consensus. The panel included a professional scientist who teaches about communicating with the public, an editor at the journal Cell, and a science reporter for the Boston Globe.
The panel was mostly about "traditional" media, with a little shout-out to blogs…
cevans | April 15, 2010
A large part of my affection for science comes from the thrill of terror I get when a particularly insane piece of science news hits the presses. When an article begins with a sentence like, "there is something strange in the cosmic neighborhood," or "all the black holes found so far in our universe may be doorways into alternate realities," my pulse quickens and a dormant paranoia is roused from deep within my breast: a sensation of joyful panic. I used to call this the "fourth-grade nightmare fantasy." This might be because as a long-time science fiction adept, I tend to read science news…
cagapakis | April 6, 2010Last week's issue of Nature focused on the progress (or lack thereof) in genomics and related fields since the Human Genome Project (HGP) was completed ten years ago. In many ways, the era of genomics has yet to fulfill many of the promises made twenty years ago, but the investment in science and technology has at the same time made a valuable impact on many fields in basic science. Understanding this recent history of the genomics bubble is crucial to how we approach current science and technology investments in areas such as personal genomics and importantly, synthetic biology.
In a…
sb admin | April 4, 2010I mentioned a while ago that I'll be posting answers to FAQs about my book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, as an ongoing series on this blog.
I thought I'd start the FAQs with one of the most commonly asked questions: How did you learn about Henrietta and the HeLa cells, and why did they grab you the way they did? Here is the answer, which I also posted about over on Powells.com's book blog this last week as part of a little guest blogging stint:
I first learned about Henrietta Lacks in the late 80s, when I was 16 and sitting in a basic biology class at Portland Community College
(…
grrlscientist | April 2, 2010tags: marshmallow peeps, peep store, First Peep: Marshmallow Peeps Get Own Store, easter, news, humor, funny, silly, video, streaming video
Marshmallow Peeps get their own STORE!! Yes, just in time for Easter! This raises all sorts of possibilities as far as sweet jobs that are available ..
illconsidered | April 2, 2010One thing the blogosphere is good for is spirited discussion and fast dissemination of news stories. One thing it is not good for is the old addage "where there's smoke, there's fire".
The recent "swifthacking" of CRU email (aka "climategate") is a great example of tremendous amounts of smoke being created out of something statistically indistinguishable from bupkus.
The UK's House of Commons has released a report after weeks of careful investigation into the details and implications of the illegally obtained and distributed emails to and from a handful of East Anglia University climate…
illconsidered | March 8, 2010 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsThis weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Sipping from the internet firehose... March 7, 2010 Chuckle, Copenhagen, Yvo de Boer, COP-16, UN-CFG, Anthony's Question, Precautionary Principle, Greenhouse Effect Bottom Line, Carbon Tariffs, World Bank, AAAS, IPCC Review, Interpreting Polls, Pushback, CRU Inquiry Melting Arctic, Polar Bears, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Land Grabs, Food…
illconsidered | March 5, 2010From up north, we have some more troubling news. Actually very troubling. Catastophic release of methane hydrates is a prime suspect in a few events dramatic enough to show in the earth's geological records, coarse and obscured as that record may be. (Our actions today will be featured prominently in that record for anyone looking back a million years from now.) It has been a worry for many years that humanity is running the risk of triggering such a release again, which would truly pile disaster on top of calamity.
New research coming out in Science today indicates that this most dire of…