Follow up reposted from ScienceDebate: Several people have emailed asking about the cuts to the proposed increases to DOE/Office of Science, and what about NIH, USGS and other agencies we didn't mention.  Some clarifications are in order. 1. These are...

click to enlargeWelcome to Thoughtful House"Thoughtful House is fighting to recover children with developmental disorders (autism, PDD, Aspergers syndrome, ADD, ADHD and NLD) through the unique combination of medical care, education, and research."+++++++++++It...

Tonight, an AP article reports that senate “moderates” are working on a compromise stimulus package that cuts $88B from the nominal senate version. Doesn’t sound so bad, until you read the fine print. Here’s what they plan on cutting:Nearly...

click to enlargeWelcome to Thoughtful House"Thoughtful House is fighting to recover children with developmental disorders (autism, PDD, Aspergers syndrome, ADD, ADHD and NLD) through the unique combination of medical care, education, and research."+++++++++++It...

From its earliest conception, gene therapy held the promise of correcting inherited diseases by inserting a normal copy of the relevant gene into somatic cells.(Donald B. Kohn and Fabio Candotti)This beautiful concept was working perfectly fine in many animal...

Feb. 12, 1809 April 19, 1882Find out what's going on in your city to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth HEREFrom the AMNH introduction to their exhibit on Darwin:Keenly observing nature in all its formsfrom fossil sloths to mockingbirds,...

I strongly disagree with the arguments of this essay by Carl Safina, "Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live", even while I think there is a germ of truth to its premise. It reads more like a contrarian backlash to all the attention being given to Darwin...

A couple hours ago I posted a quick poll, in what might be construed as an unbiased fashion. I simply asked respondents for their sexual orientation, offering a wide array of choices ranging from "straight" to "mostly gay" to "gay" to "other."In fact, my poll...

Reuters has a little story about CT scans of Lucy, done at the University of Texas by John Kappelman and colleagues:Scientists hope studying a "virtual" Lucy will offer further clues about the human ancestor's lifestyle. Lucy, found in Ethiopia in 1974, is...

Some time ago I pointed out that Bayer Healthcare Pharmaceuticals pulled its 60-second "Goodbye to You" ad for birth-control pill Yaz after the FDA "expressed concerns" that the ad went too far in suggesting the drug could help overcome PMS and acne. I criticized...

Astronomers using NASA's Swift satellite and Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope are seeing frequent blasts from a stellar remnant 30,000 light-years away.read more...

Very nearly everything you ever read about nutrition and diet is absolute nonsense. This has always been so. I read an article the other day which argued that society had become less hung up about sex but more hung up about food. I found it unconvincing since...

As the annual meeting of the world's largest scientific society kicks off in Chicago, Illinois, this morning, there's an atmosphere of celebration despite the chilly temperatures outside. It's not just the double anniversary of both Darwin's and Lincoln's birth....

Hulton Archive / Getty Images fileAn engraving shows the HMS Beagle being greeted by Fuegian natives as it sails through the Strait of Magellan in 1834 with naturalist Charles Darwin aboard.Evolutionary biology isn't just something you do in the lab or the...

On this auspicious occasion - the 200th birthday of English naturalist Charles Darwin - hundreds of groups around the world are pausing to celebrate his accomplishments and his impact upon science and society. Darwin has been featured in numerous magazine ,...

Well, as you've read here and elsewhere, this is a big year for (among other things) Darwin celebration. There are all sorts of wonderful essays, documentaries, discussions, lectures and so forth all around. Be sure to look at some of this work, and get involved....

Two hundred years ago today, Robert Charles Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, England. Over his 73 years of life, he was an ardent observer of nature and a prolific writer who published tracts on Pollination of Orchids, Formation of Volcanic and Coral Islands,...

From its earliest conception, gene therapy held the promise of correcting inherited diseases by inserting a normal copy of the relevant gene into somatic cells.(Donald B. Kohn and Fabio Candotti)This beautiful concept was working perfectly fine in many animal...

Get out and celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of one of the most important scientists of all time, Charles Darwin, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of one of the most important books in biology, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural...

Tomorrow, 12th February, is Darwin Day. As it happens, this is the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth (and "On the Origin of Species" was published 150 years ago in 24 November 1859). Sadly there are no dawin Day evnts in Adelaide, but there are in several...

The financial crisis started out as a credit crunch–a lesson not lost on Aetna. The company today reported a loss of $130 million in the fourth quarter, and a total of $326.5 million last year, related to “other-than-temporary impairments of debt...

Today is Darwin Day, celebrating the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species. If you prefer your classics in modern Web 2.0 form, check out John Whitfield’s Blogging the Origin, or Discover’s...

Here is a meme that I was tagged with recently by the good peeps at Science on Tap. The author writes;Imagine: YOU are asked to assign a half-dozen-or-so books as required reading for ALL science majors at a college as part of their 4-year degree; NOT technical...

February 12, 2009 marks the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, and 2009 also marks the susquecentennial of his most famous work, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. There are a ton of posts, projects, and events celebrating these facts all over...

The worst fears of the satellite community have been realised. Two satellites, Kosmos 2251 and Iridium 33 crashed into each other approximately 800 km over northern Siberia. How this happened is unclear as the orbits of these satellites were pretty well known,...

My sciblings at Scienceblogs have done a pretty thorough fisking of the Andrew Wakefield affair.To recap breifly, a paper by Wakefield and others in The Lancet in 1998 raised an alarm that the widely used measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine was the cause of...

Humans display significant differences in behaviour and mental aptitude from their closest relatives -- the great apes. How did those differences come about? Could a similar branching off take place in the near future, with the arrival of a new species that...

According to theaberrant salience account of schizophrenia, the positive symptoms of the condition - the hallucinations and delusions - come about because patients see meaning where there is none. The neurotransmitter dopamine, associated with learning and...

Now, usually if I were to say "anti-Darwinists", I'd be talking about some kind of creationism or intelligent design. But noooooo. This week, the anti-Darwinists are all otherwise respectable evolutionary biologists using the occasion of Darwin's bicentennial...

Yesterday, the United State's Vaccine Court Omnibus Autism Proceeding delivered its ruling to three families who claimed that vaccines were the cause of their children's autism. The courts ruled that "the evidence does not support the general proposition that...

Two years ago I used the combined Higgs search limits produced by the D0 experiment to evaluate how well the Tevatron was doing if compared with the predictions that had been put together by the 1999 SUSY-HIGGS working group, and later by the 2003 Higgs Sensitivity...

Spain suspended a batch of Sanofi-Aventis' and Mercks cervical-cancer vaccine Gardasil after two teenagers who received the shot suffered from convulsions.More at Bloomberg...

At its simplest, fertility medicine is about helping couples have children. But, as the old phrase “test-tube baby” suggests, the field is full of possibilities for sliding into ethical gray zones. This week brings a few reminders of that fact.A...

Today, Bioclipse2.0 beta2 was released. The status was unfortunately not good enough so that a release candidate could be made available this week. Anyway, the beta2 version is packed with new features, like a completely new Welcome page, SMILES files support,...

Yesterday I used the NMR game in Second Life during our 2-hour Friday workshop in CHEM242. (We used a new location on Drexel island SLURL) The students who attended had looked at little or no material prior to the workshop. By the end I ended up explaining...

I recently came across this astonishing quotation, also referred to as the F-twist:Truly important and significant hypotheses will be found to have assumptions that are wildly inaccurate descriptive representations of reality, and, in general, the more significant...

At least according to most Americans. The full report of the Pew Religious Landscape Survey has some data not available on the website. There is a question of the form: When it comes to questions of right and wrong, which of the following do you look to most...

As the annual meeting of the world's largest scientific society kicks off in Chicago, Illinois, this morning, there's an atmosphere of celebration despite the chilly temperatures outside. It's not just the double anniversary of both Darwin's and Lincoln's birth....

Happy Valentine's Day! Another nod to the wondrous Kea, who has also shown great patience with the world. She points out a new paper by Spanish physicists Antonio Ranada and Alfredo Tiemblo, The Pioneer Anomaly as a Quantum Cosmological Effect. See the post...

Sarah Boseley, Drug giant GlaxoSmithKline pledges cheap medicine for world's poor, The Guardian, February 13, 2009.The world's second biggest pharmaceutical company is to radically shift its attitude to providing cheap drugs to millions of people in the developing...