David Shukman Science and environment correspondent, BBC News China is on course to overtake the US in scientific output possibly as soon as 2013 – far earlier than expected. That is the conclusion of a major new study by the Royal Society, the UK’s national science academy. The country [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Biology’
April 1st, 2011 - 12:52 pm § in Religion
Feynman Besmirched, Scientific Community Bemused
Craig Venter misquotes Feynman in DNA Craig Venter Image: Wikipedia, PLoS Having singlehandedly sequenced the human genome, in a heric effort to prove the superiority of the capitalist system, Craig ventor has now taken the next step on the road pioneered by the Deity, Venter has created life itself[...]
The Wedge: A Chilling Tale of a Possible Future
The sun shone on another day of Summer Session on campus in a small college town. In a large yet somewhat stuffy lecture hall in one of the oldest buildings, the professor had reached a favorite part of his lecture on this period in European history. His voice didn’t drone on—it rose as [...]
March 11th, 2011 - 6:22 am § in Science
Biology: Origins of us.
Ed. for the non biologist … one of the REAL missing links is understanding how single cells come together to form a multicellular organisms … from The Scientist: The results, published this week in Science, add to a growing body of evidence that the genetic toolkit for multicellularity e[...]
March 9th, 2011 - 12:07 pm § in Uncategorized
UPDATE: Supreme Court Decision May Have Huge Affect on Faculty Governance
Ed. My concerns about Stanford v. Roche may have been understated now that I have read more about the new patent law passed by the US Senate. That law would award patents to the first to file rather than, as present, the first to invent. This conflicts with the way things are done at universit[...]
Religion on Campus.
Religious apologists like Dr. Ecklund fail to understand that the problem is not intolerance of faith. In my experience, even though most of my colleagues are likely atheists, those that are religious … Hindu, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Mormon mix perfectly well. The problem on cam[...]
March 1st, 2011 - 6:06 am § in Uncategorized
HUMOR: Medical Breakthrough
Investigators at the Impulse Institute at Columbia and Pfizer quietly celebrated the FDA approval of Despondex, the first of a new generation of drugs growing out of the “new thinking” movement. NTM builds on success and counteracts excess of all kinds. NTM drugs treat anti-syndromes[...]
February 20th, 2011 - 2:03 pm § in Environment, Misc.
History Cafe Invades Cap Hill
More and more Seattleites identify themselves as "Locovores". At the most recent History Cafe, we were regaled by tales of urban agriculture past and present in the comfortable, living-room atmosphere of Capitol Hill's Roy St. Coffee. [...]
February 17th, 2011 - 1:39 pm § in Misc.
Biotech and Madoff:the decline and fall of American Pharma.
There are some real reasons that health care in America costs more than anywhere else. One difficult part of this is that we Americans have been subsidizing the entire world because our market model is unique. The American drug market is open to free competition with little in the way of price c[...]
Do Short Sephardim Have The Immortality Gene?
from the NY Times The villagers are very small, generally less than three and a half feet tall, and have a rare condition known as Laron syndrome or Laron-type dwarfism. They are probably the descendants of conversos, Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal who were forced to convert to Christianity [...]