Now on ScienceBlogs: ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Eric Roston
Editor's Selections: Decisions, Creativity, and Tylenol Here are my ResearchBlogging Editor's Selections for this week. Today's selections will appear in haiku form. How hungry are you? Hunger affects decisions, says Christian Jarrett. Touch and texture, too, at Neurophilosophy, alter decisions. Science and Reason explores creativity and...
Why Gay Marriage Is Good for Everyone Gay people may choose each other from love, from the same emotions that motivate heterosexual couples, may live together from love, may care deeply about the religious institution of their marriage (and any discussion of religion and gay marriage cannot ignore the fact that many gay people were married, as my parents were, in their churches and synagogues and covens before they could marry in their states) but they have not had the luxury of pretending that the economic, family and legal ties of marriage are not central to the institution.
World Cup Update and Poll The dogphysics karma joke is pretty much dead, as countries with current or future editions of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog have gone a dismal 1-3-0 in the first round of elimination play. I'm surprised it lasted as...
Bye Bye Mississippi Flyway? Other Unintended (but predictable) Consequences of the Oil Spill? Tweet, tweet, glug, glug, - Aaagggg, it burns, it burns! Tweet.
The Woman Problem It's an odd way to put it, I know, but it gets your attention. I could have called this the Atheist and Skeptic Problem, which is more accurate, but leads people to start listing all of our problems, starting...
The Dynamics of Deathly Drool (With BONUS LOL Komodo Dragons!) Discussing dragon drool. With LOLs.
Today's Mystery Bird for you to Identify Newly-hatched baby birds of this mystery bird species have a remarkable ability, can you tell me what that is?
How Not to be a Network-Theory n00b Ah, complex networks: manufacturing centre for the textbook cardboard of tomorrow! When you work in the corner of science where I do, you hear a lot of "sales talk" — claims that, thanks to the innovative research of so-and-so, the...
Hayworth's Fake Apology Tea party wannabe JD Hayworth is scrambling after it came to light that he starred in an infomercial telling people how to get "free money" from the government, something that is obviously at odds with his sudden anti-government stance to...
Sharron Angle's Anti-Gay Bigotry As I discussed with Bruce Wilson on my show last week, Sharron Angle, the Republican challenging Harry Reid for his Senate seat, was one of the people who founded the Independent American Party in Nevada in the 1990s. She circulated...
Dumbass Quote of the Day From Thomas Sowell, who says the BP reimbursement fund is just like Nazism: "[D]uring the worldwide Great Depression, the German Reichstag passed a law "for the relief of the German people." That law gave Hitler dictatorial powers that were used...
Badass Quote of the Day Julian Sanchez, speaking in defense of Dave Weigel: If the Princess-and-the-Pea brigade now cheering his departure would bracket their persecution complex for five minutes, they'd realize that he was consistently delivering coverage about as fair and sympathetic as could reasonably...
The Copenhagen Declaration on Religion in Public Life One of the outcomes of the Copenhagen gathering of atheists was the formulation of a set of principles. It has now been posted on the web, so it's time for everyone to discuss, comment, and criticize…have at it! The recent...
Jon Stewart on McChrystal and the Media A great riff by Jon Stewart about the mainstream media's hand-wringing over the Rolling Stone article that ended Gen. Stanley McChrystal's time in charge of the Afghanistan campaign....
Lizards, carcasses and bacteria Do Komodo dragons kill their prey by making them sick with the bacteria from their dirty mouths? Or do they kill with strength, speed and venom while bacteria are just incidental? Or is it bacteria who hitch a ride on...
Big News in Tiny Physics A couple of significant news items from the world of particle physics: There was a conference on neutrino physics recently, and the big news from there is that two experiments measure something funny with neutrino oscillations, namely that the oscillations...
IGERT meeting: what do grown-up interdisciplinary scientists do for a living? One of the most interesting sessions at the NSF IGERT 2010 Project Meeting was a panel of men and women who participated in the IGERT program as students and are now working in a variety of different careers. The point...
Change in Plans Leaves the New Jersey State Museum in Limbo After months of uncertainty, the short-term fate of the New Jersey State Museum has finally been announced.
Neandertals were Nephilim Hold onto your hats, don't be too shocked, but a creationist has lied about science. I'm constantly getting email from fundagelical groups insisting that I must obey and join their One True Faith, and I got one from the...
How not to do "personalized medicine" to treat Alzheimer's disease With the aging of the population, one of the most feared potential manners by which more and more of us will leave this earth is through Alzheimer's disease or other forms of dementia. And it is a scary thing, too....
Sexy Beasts at Seed Magazine Author's Note: The following is an excerpt from my review of Sex At Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality. For additional information see my posts Reexamining Ardipithecus ramidus in Light of Human Origins, Those Cheating Testicles, or Who's Your...
Links for 2010-06-29 slacktivist: Rendering unto Krugman "But knowing their hypocrisy, he said unto them, "Why are you putting me to the test? Bring me a dime and let me see it." And they brought one. Then he said to them, "Whose...
Real Guys Immunize Last week I went to Philadelphia to a very interesting meeting - a Social Media Summit on Immunization. Sponsored by Immunization Action Coalition, this was a second annual meeting for health-care non-profits, organized (amazingly well, with great attention to detail)...
Of Venom and Silk Spider biologist Norman Platnick, from the American Museum of Natural History, has traveled the world cataloguing some of these creatures, many for the first time ever. World renowned for his work, he hopes to find as many as species as possible before some disappear.
Do arrogant, condescending, and dismissive attitudes contribute to the journalism crisis? If we are arguing about whether mainstream print media can add a single primary literature citation to a story, traditional journalism is in bigger trouble than I thought.
PZ Myers 06.28.2010
PZ Myers 06.28.2010
Orac 06.28.2010
Tim Lambert 06.23.2010
Greg Laden 06.26.2010
Page 3.14 05.11.2010
The ScienceBlogs Book Club 06.22.2010
Neuron Culture 06.22.2010
Brookhaven Bits & Bytes 06.22.2010
The Weizmann Wave 06.22.2010
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Some engineers use cranes and steel to make their designs reality, but synthetic biologists engineer using tools on a different scale: DNA and the other molecular components of living cells. Synthetic biology uses cellular systems and structures to produce artificial models based on natural order. Read these posts from the ScienceBlogs archives for more:
Pharyngula May 30, 2007
The Loom January 31, 2008
Discovering Biology in a Digital World July 2, 2006