NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 28th October 2005 11:17 PM GMT] Comment on this blog
NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 28th October 2005 03:35 PM GMT] It?s important to recognize that consumer-friendly news reports about a promising new technology that?s years away can be somewhat torturous for people with conditions that need that technology now.
Case in point: I know someone with a progressive and debilitating neurological disease who asked me the other day to contact a researcher she read about in Newsweek, who implanted a silicon chip into the brain of a person paralyzed from the neck down. The chip enabled the participant to direct a... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 27th October 2005 11:46 PM GMT] In a previous post, I said that the Dover school system needs more than a bake sale to get over its issues. I was referring to a fundraiser set up by the political action committee Dover CARES (Citizens Actively Reviewing Educational Strategies). This group is trying to displace the school board that introduced intelligent design into the science curricula thereby dragging the small town through a knock-down, drag-out, First... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 25th October 2005 06:50 PM GMT] A research team at Los Alamos National Laboratory has topped a world record for biological simulations, and given us a taste of reducto ad absurdum.
As reported in the Nov. 1 issue of PNAS the LANL team, led by Kevin Sanbonmatsu, used 768 of the 8,192 CPUs in LANL's ASCI Q supercomputer to model the motion of 2.64 million atoms in a ribosome complex -- 250,000 in the ribosome itself, and most of the rest from water... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 24th October 2005 03:05 PM GMT] We?ve finally seen the first full week of witnesses for the defense in Kitzmiller vs. the Dover area school board. Lawyers defending the board called intelligent design shogun, Michael Behe. The biochemist, unsupported by his Lehigh University employers, argued for three days that ID is not creationism ? that ID doesn?t specify a creator, leaving room for a god or gods, past or present, that must have gotten this whole crazy thing... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 20th October 2005 06:58 PM GMT] Everyone?s had the frustration of reading something is good for you one day, then bad for you the next. The same mixed message is now being circulated about fish. On Friday, I participated in a panel discussion in Washington DC hosted by the National Consumer?s League about how to resolve this situation. We, the panelists, were asked to explore the responsibilities of journalists, researchers, and policymakers in disseminating the Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 19th October 2005 06:22 PM GMT] It should be hard to complain in Hilton Head when the weather?s this nice, but a few folks have found a reason.
J. Craig Venter voiced his discontent, yesterday evening at this year?s GSAC (a.k.a. Genomes Medicine and the Environment 2005). Groups aren?t moving fast enough toward the $1000 genome. So, to grease the wheels he?s upping the ante on the $500,000 prize he promised to the first group to achieve a human genome for a... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 18th October 2005 01:14 PM GMT] GSAC is back, although the annual genomics meeting this year goes by the name Genomes, Medicine and the Environment Conference 2005. Now under the purview of the J. Craig Venter Institute rather than the institute for genome research (TIGR), it has returned to Hilton Head, and is slightly smaller than it?s been in past years. But that?s not a bad thing. ?It?s good to see things going back to science as usual,? said J. Craig Venter in the opening session yesterday. Sporting a black t-shirt... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 17th October 2005 05:21 PM GMT] Chris Mooney's "The Republican War on Science" showed up on my desk recently. The book traces the rise of the Republican Party's split with science, from its roots in the supersonic transport debate in the Nixon administration, to George W. Bush's assault on science today, covering science issues from Reagan's "Star Wars" initiative to "intelligent design," global warming to stem... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 13th October 2005 07:49 PM GMT] A nice thing about being a blogging journalist is that it gives me a place to put selected juicy bits and ruminations that there?s no space for in the "real" article. So here is some Supplementary Information on my most recent piece about the Hobbits, those minuscule possible-humans who seem to have survived on the Indonesian island of Flores nearly into the Holocene.
Where did the Hobbits (officially designated Homo... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 10th October 2005 02:57 PM GMT] What if the 20-somethings on Friends were scientists? Columbia biology professor Darcy Kelley insists it could work. ?We?re just like regular people,? added Nobel laureate and Memorial Sloan Kettering director Harold Varmus. But does the rest of the country, perspectives shaped largely by the lenses of filmmakers, see scientists this way? Or are we pegged as either absent-minded superheroes or evil manipulators of human fate?
Such was the topic of debate this week at the... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 6th October 2005 11:03 PM GMT] Barbara Forrest, Southeastern Louisiana University philosophy professor testified in the case against Dover?s school board adding intelligent design to the science curriculum yesterday and today. School district attorneys had opposed the testimony, and possibly for good reason. She outlined the Discovery Institute?s ?wedge strategy? and presented a substantial smoking gun in early versions of the book Of Pandas and People to... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 5th October 2005 06:38 PM GMT] The latest e-TOC from the journal Bioinformatics contains an application note on a really cool tool.
ProTag is a Microsoft Office extension that uses biological name and markup services called ProThesaurus and LiMB to find protein names and database identifiers in Word, Excel, and Powerpoint documents. From there, you can... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 1st October 2005 05:58 PM GMT] Yesterday marked the conclusion of the first full week of trials over the Dover, PA School Board?s decision to include intelligent design in the science curriculum. This week was devoted to the plaintiffs? witnesses. Lawyers questioned Drs. Kenneth Miller, a Brown University cell and molecular biologist, Robert Pennock, professor of science and philosophy at Michigan State, and Jack Haught, professor of theology at Georgetown University. The professors ? presumably picked from hundreds of... Click to continue
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