Denim and Tweed

Carlos DeLuna

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Yoder) — Thu, 24 May 2012 14:58:00 +0000

I've been trying to come up with something profound to say about this ever since I first saw it on Slog, but I don't know what more to add to the statement: in 1989, the State of Texas executed Carlos DeLuna for a murder he very clearly didn't commit.

The Columbia Human Rights Law Review has devoted an entire issue—available online, in completion, with exhaustively detailed supporting information—to an investigative report on DeLuna's case. At the Guardian, Ed Pilkington picks out the most important details.

Carlos DeLuna was arrested, aged 20, on 4 February 1983 for the brutal murder of a young woman, Wanda Lopez. She had been stabbed once through the left breast with an 8in lock-blade buck knife which had cut an artery causing her to bleed to death.

From the moment of his arrest until the day of his death by lethal injection six years later, DeLuna consistently protested he was innocent. He went further – he said that though he hadn't committed the murder, he knew who had. He even named the culprit: a notoriously violent criminal called Carlos Hernandez.

The two Carloses were not just namesakes – or tocayos in Spanish, as referenced in the title of the Columbia book. They were the same height and weight, and looked so alike that they were sometimes mistaken for twins. When Carlos Hernandez's lawyer saw pictures of the two men, he confused one for the other, as did DeLuna's sister Rose.

What happened was: Carlos DeLuna was unfortunate enough to witness Carlos Hernandez attacking Wanda Lopez, and ran off. The police found him near the crime scene, hiding under a truck, and almost immediately confirmed that he matched witness descriptions of Hernandez. Having a suspect, the police barely conducted any further investigation into the murder. More from Pilkington:

Detectives failed to carry out or bungled basic forensic procedures that might have revealed information about the killer. No blood samples were collected and tested for the culprit's blood type.

Fingerprinting was so badly handled that no useable fingerprints were taken. None of the items found on the floor of the Shamrock – a cigarette stub, chewing gum, a button, comb and beer cans – were forensically examined for saliva or blood.

There was no scraping of the victim's fingernails for traces of the attacker's skin. When Liebman and his students [the authors of the investigative report] studied digitally enhanced copies of crime scene photographs, they were amazed to find the footprint from a man's shoe imprinted in a pool of Lopez's blood on the floor – yet no effort was made to measure it.

People interviewed for the investigation even confirmed that Hernandez repeatedly confessed to the murder. But it was Carlos DeLuna who was executed by lethal injection on the 8th of December, 1989.

The U.S. legal system is, at the most fundamental level, people. People can get things wrong. When the legal system is able to punish people by killing them, that means that the legal system can kill the wrong person. And now, if you need an example of someone who was wrongfully put to death in our country, you have a name: Carlos DeLuna, sacrificed to our society's insistence that we should be able to punish death with death.◼

Ecological complexity breeds evolutionary complication

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Yoder) — Tue, 22 May 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Cross-posted from Nothing in Biology Makes Sense!

It is a truth universally acknowledged in evolutionary biology, that one species interacting with another species, must be having some effect on that other species' evolution.

Actually, that's not really true. Biologists generally agree that predators, prey, parasites, and competitors can exert natural selection on the other species they encounter, but we're still not sure how much those interactions matter over millions of years of evolutionary history.

On the one hand, groups of species that are engaged in tight coevolutionary relationships are also very diverse, which could mean that coevolution causes diversity. But it could be that the other way around: diversity could create coevolutionary specificity, if larger groups of closely-related species are forced into narower interactions to avoid competing with each other.

Part of the problem is that it's hard to study a species evolving over time without interacting with any other species—how can we identify the effect of coevolution if we can't see what happens in its absence? If only we could force some critters to evolve with and without other critters, and compare the results after many generations ...

Oh, wait. That is totally possible. And the results have just been published.

Read more ...

Tell the White House: Make government-funded research open-access

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Yoder) — Mon, 21 May 2012 13:00:00 +0000

As J.B.S. Haldane put it, "I think ... that the public has a right to know what is going on inside the laboratories, for some of which it pays." He was referring to the need for scientists to explain their work in popular media—which, amen, brother Jack!—but the point holds with regard to access to original scientific articles, too.

It doesn't make much sense that U.S. citizens, whose taxes fund most of the basic science in this country, are then expected to pay upwards of $50 for a single PDF copy of a journal article presenting government-funded research results. The National Institutes of Health already requires that research it funds be archived online and accessible to the general public free of charge—why not expand that to all government-funded research? And hey, there's a way to suggest exactly that out to the man in charge: a petition on WhiteHouse.gov.

We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would provide access to patients and caregivers, students and their teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other taxpayers who paid for the research. Expanding access would speed the research process and increase the return on our investment in scientific research.

The highly successful Public Access Policy of the National Institutes of Health proves that this can be done without disrupting the research process, and we urge President Obama to act now to implement open access policies for all federal agencies that fund scientific research.

It needs 25,000 virtual signatures within 30 days before it'll get any meaningful attention, so sign this thing and then start badgering all your online "friends" about it, why don't you? Especially the jerks who keep filling your update stream with branded product promotions and/or time-sucking adorable cat videos and/or news about how they've just spent real money for a virtual cow—post this directly on their "walls," if those are even still a thing, with or without a witty and/or pleading comment appended.

I mean, it's Monday morning; it's not like you're going to get do anything else for the benefit of humanity in the next minute or two, you slacker.◼

Science online, AC/DC edition

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Yoder) — Fri, 18 May 2012 13:05:00 +0000

The Best Science Writing Online 2012. Now available for pre-order.
Radar. Remote controls. Artificial ball lightning. Even if you already knew Niccola Tesla was pretty cool, you probably don't know how cool he was.
Because high school biology is worth it. Why it's worth fighting for specific content in high school biology classes.
The science-blogging snake cites its own tail. The first systematic survey of science blogs published in PLoS ONE; one author blogs about it; and science bloggers weigh in.
Mainly because terrorists aren't completely stupid. Why profiling passengers wouldn't make airport security more effective.
Show us the p-values. A new genome-wide scan for genes associated with I.Q. gets the genetics right, but still screws up the science.
Nowhere to go but up, fast. The emergence of faster predators gave prehistoric aquatic reptiles the bends.
Heh: "the Kennedys of anthropology." Maggie Koerth-Baker interviews two members of the Leakey family.
It's no so much what happens, but what doesn't happen. The trouble with replicating studies in psychology. (See also.)
Except with kids. The "golden age" of NASA space exploration wasn't all that popular at the time.
Putting the planet on chemotherapy. Proposals to "geo-engineer" a fix for climate change are kinda scary.

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The living rainbow: "Masculine" is actually "territorial" in electric fish

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Yoder) — Wed, 16 May 2012 13:05:00 +0000

One of the most interesting ideas in Joan Roughgarden's book Evolution's Rainbow is that across the animal kingdom, many behaviors that we associate with gender—aggressiveness in males, nurturing of young by females—do not line up with biological sex as cleanly as we might think. One good example I've discussed before is white-throated sparrows, a species in which either the male or the female in a mated pair can take the aggressive role of defending the pair's nesting territory.

That principle is echoed in a paper recently published in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociology. This time the subject is not birds, but electric fish. Electric fish generate, and can sense, weak electric fields, which they use to navigate their environment—and for social signalling.

Read more ...

The Best Online Science Writing 2012 is now available for pre-order

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Yoder) — Mon, 14 May 2012 17:41:00 +0000

For instance, over at Powell's Books.

This edition includes my long piece on natural selection and human sexual minorities, alongside many other, arguably more worthy, selections from last year's crop of online science writing, including top-notch work by Crystal D'Kosta, Kate Clancy, Carl Zimmer, Deborah Blum, and Steve Silberman, among many others.

Thanks to Eric M. Johnson, whose great and timely essay "Freedom to Riot" is included in the collection, for the head's up!◼

Required listening: Armistead Maupin on the President's marriage statement

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Yoder) — Sat, 12 May 2012 15:14:00 +0000

Woke up to this on NPR this morning: Writer and activist Armistead Maupin, discussing President Obama's big statement on marriage equality with "Weekend Edition Saturday" host Scott Simon.

Well, we talk about bullying a lot in this country as if it's something that's generated in schoolyards, but in fact it's generated in churches, and by politicians—by parents, even, who don't even consider the fact that their own children might be gay. So when something like this comes from the top, from the very top, it's gonna filter down. It can't help but filter down.

We can certainly hope it will. Maupin also touches on his relationship with a conservative, Republican-voting brother in North Carolina.◼

Terry Gross after hours

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Yoder) — Fri, 11 May 2012 14:29:00 +0000

Yesterday I saw the latest live presentation of "This American Life," as broadcast to a multiplex in Minneapolis. Jealous? You should be. Because it was awesome.

But fortunately, one of the best segments, a short film by the comedian Mike Birbiglia, is now freely available online. It's ... probably not describable without spoiling it. Just watch, already.

Birbiglia's upcoming movie looks pretty good, too.◼

Science online, colony collapsing crocodiles edition

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Yoder) — Fri, 11 May 2012 13:05:00 +0000

This week at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! The evolutionary origins of polar bears.
Fanning the flames. How industry lobbying has created regulations that made flame retardants ubiquitous in American home, even though the chemicals are hazardous, and don't actually prevent fires.
There's a TREE paper somewhere in this blog post. The distinction between genes and environments is not as sharp as you might think.
Nanotubes—in—space! A new drug delivery method developed by NASA will help more than astronauts.
Good point, actually. Without randomized controlled trials, how do we know that parachutes work?
It's networking, not self-promotion. Why scientists are (still) suspicious of blogging, and why they shouldn't be.
And we still don't know everything responsible. Honeybees are still in trouble.
Omigod you guys, we're surrounded by chemicals! The many things Nick Kristof's crusade against "chemicals" gets wrong.
Also, kinda gross. These caterpillars may have the prettiest anti-predator defense ever.
And by "coexisted with," I mean "eaten." A giant prehistoric crocodile could've coexisted with early humans.
As anyone who's been computer-matched to a college roommate could tell you. "Scientific" dating services aren't actually very good at match-making.
Teeny-tiny transmitters! To track orchid-visiting bees.

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Nothing in Biology Makes Sense: Making sense of polar bears' origins

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Yoder) — Thu, 10 May 2012 13:05:00 +0000

This week at the collaborative blog Nothing in Biology Makes Sense, contributor Noah Reid goes in-depth on the recent study pinpointing the historical origins of polar bears, and why it's taken the most recent systematic methods to correctly pinpoint them.

From 2008 to 2010, a series of algorithms were published that could take data from multiple genes and infer the history of whole populations, a drastic improvement over previous methods that could only identify the history of single genes (e.g. mtDNA). With these methods in mind, a group of researchers gathered data from 14 nuclear genes for multiple extant brown and polar bear populations (Hailer 2012). ... the new data analyzed with the new method suggested that polar bears diverged far earlier than previously thought (around 600 thousand years ago) and that they were no longer closely related to the southeast Alaska population, but rather to the common ancestor of all brown bear populations.

For more details, including a nice brief explanation of why it can be important to use multiple genes in reconstructing relationships among species, go read the whole thing.◼

And then eventually ...

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Yoder) — Wed, 09 May 2012 19:07:00 +0000

... the winding, inefficient, undirected trajectory of evolution lands on a new selective optimum. Video via ABC:

video platform video management video solutions video player

Well said, Mr. President. Welcome to the majority.◼

The Three Laws of Mitt Romnics

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Yoder) — Wed, 09 May 2012 14:49:00 +0000

Following up on my tweet from yesterday, here's my best guess at the Three Laws of Mitt Romnics. (With deepest apologies to the memory of Isaac Asimov.)

(1) Mitt Romney may not injure a corporation or, through inaction, allow a corporation to come to harm.
(2) Mitt Romney must obey the orders given to him by conservative Christians, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
(3) Mitt Romney must protect his own integrity as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

In the spirit of nerdy completeism, the Zeroth Law of Mitt Romnics is, of course: Do whatever it takes to get elected President.◼

Evolution is undirected, political evolution doubly so

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Yoder) — Tue, 08 May 2012 15:19:00 +0000

To everyone wringing their hands over the Obama Administration's weird collective dance around the question of marriage equality: You do know that evolution is an inherently undirected, frequently random, ultimately goal-less process, right? In which case, the President's description of his position as "evolving" is an exceptionally apt fit for the inefficient waffling, contradictory signals, and even reversal of previous positions that we've observed over the last several years.

See, doesn't that make you feel better?

Yeah, me neither.

How about this as a kicker instead: evolutionary changes that appear to be directionless over short periods of time may eventually turn out to be part of much longer-term trends.◼

And another thing ...

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Yoder) — Tue, 08 May 2012 01:26:00 +0000

Regarding that adaptive fairytale about the "runner's high"—over at Distributed Ecology, Ted Hart points out that it doesn't make much sense in phylogenetic context, either.

What would be really interesting is to see where this trait maps across the phylogeny. Is it a conserved trait that was selected for in some ancestor? That would point to the fact that maybe it has nothing to do with running. The authors are mute about phylogeny, but eCB's could alternatively be the ancestral character state, and really the interesting question is why did ferrets evolve the loss of this state? On the other hand maybe the trait evolved multiple times, and that also is really interesting to ask how that happened. But either phylogenetic scenario undermine the central thesis of Raichlen.

You'll want to read the whole thing, natch.◼

Dr. Pangloss runs a marathon

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Yoder) — Mon, 07 May 2012 15:12:00 +0000

This just came over Twitter (hat tip to @DLiancourt): NPR is running a story claiming that the "runner's high" some of us feel after a good workout is an adaptation to prompt us to keep fit, or something.

When people exercise aerobically, their bodies can actually make drugs—cannabinoids, the same kind of chemicals in marijuana. [University of Ariona anthropologist David] Raichlen wondered if other distance-running animals also produced those drugs. If so, maybe runner's high is not some peculiar thing with humans. Maybe it's an evolutionary payoff for doing something hard and painful, that also helps them survive better, be healthier, hunt better or have more offspring.

So, in a study [$a] pubished in The Journal of Experimental Biology, Raichlen tested this adaptive hypothesis by comparing the levels of these "endogenous cannabinoids" in the blood of humans, dogs, and ferrets after running on a treadmill. The idea being that the ancestors of dogs, like ours, made a living by running—chasing down prey—while ferrets don't.

Read more ...

The living rainbow: The selective benefit of a fa'afafine in the family

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Yoder) — Mon, 07 May 2012 13:05:00 +0000

One of the key evolutionary puzzles of same-sex sexuality, as it manifests in modern, Western human societies, is that those of us attracted to members of our own biological sex don't make a lot of babies. I've already spent a lot of pixels on the question of how genes for same-sex attraction might persist in human populations in the face of that selective cost—but a paper just published in PLoS ONE adds some evidence in favor of one popular hypothesis: that gene variants that make men more likely to be gay could also make their straight relatives more fertile.

The new paper presents data from Samoa, where the traditional culture has long had a place for men who are attracted to other men, in the role of fa'afafine—literally, men who "live in the manner of women." Samoan boys who show interest in feminine activities are recognized by their families as members of this "third gender," which is more like the modern Western conception of transgender identity than what we call "gay." Fa'afafine often present and dress like straight women, and as adults, they generally have relationships with straight-identified men. But fa'afafine aren't exactly "transgendered" as we understand that concept in the West—they don't have the sense that their bodies don't match their gender identity.

The fact that Samoan culture accommodates and accepts same-sex sexuality makes it an especially interesting context for testing hypotheses about the evolution of queer sexuality, including the idea that relatives of fa'afafine might be more fertile than people with no fa'afafine in the family. The study's coauthors surveyed Samoan fa’afafine and straight men, asking how many children their grandmothers, aunts, and uncles had had. And they found that grandmothers of fa’afafine—both maternal and paternal grandmothers—had more children than grandmothers of the straight-identified men they interviewed.◼

Reference

VanderLaan, D., Forrester, D., Petterson, L., & Vasey, P. (2012). Offspring production among the extended relatives of Samoan men and fa'afafine. PLoS ONE, 7 (4) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0036088

Science online, diverse botanical evolution edition

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Yoder) — Fri, 04 May 2012 13:05:00 +0000

Big week for blog carnivals. Fresh editions of Diversity in Science, Berry-Go-Round, and the Carnival of Evolution are online.
Big fleas have little fleas ... Fossils of giant fleas date from, yes, the age of dinosaurs.
Or, more crowd-funded science than currently, anyway. What will a world of crowd-funded science look like?
Why so blue, John Carter? On Mars, the sunsets are not like ours on Earth.
Bonus? Widespread wind turbines might moderate temperature extremes.
Caveat lector. Advice for reading popular science writing. See also.
Immune stress, apparently. New evidence for the reason Pygmies are short.

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Carnival of Evolution, May 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Yoder) — Wed, 02 May 2012 14:44:00 +0000

This month's issue of the Carnival of Evolution, which collects online writing about Darwin's dangerous idea and all its variously modified descendents, is online over at John S. Wilkins's blog Evolving Thoughts. Highlights include, but are not limited to, an attempt to trace the origin of the phrase "social Darwinism," discussion of how sloths and turtles evolved to move slowly, and whether the diet of early humans was more healthy than ours. Go now and read the whole thing.◼

Be advised

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Yoder) — Wed, 02 May 2012 04:22:00 +0000

It is mean and insulting and completely outside of the realm of polite behavior to ask that fundamentalist Christians explain why the "plain text" of the book they use to justify treating queer people as second-class citizens is different from the plain text of the same book that enthusiastically endorses slavery, genocide, and apalling mistreatment of women.

Especially when, as Dan Savage did, you have the nerve to call that hateful interpretive double-standard "bullshit."

Dan's apologized exactly to the extent he ought (which isn't much) and come out with guns a-blazing against the fundamentalist fish in the theological barrel that is modern "Biblical literalism."

Of course, the point of all this is not that it was rude for him to use the word "bullshit," or even to describe those poor, defenseless Christian teenagers who walked out rather than engage with a perfectly legitimate theological question as "pansy-assed." It was rude of Dan to confront those kids—and, now, the universe of fundamentalist offense-addicts who are giving him their undivided attention—with the fact that no matter what they claim, their "literalism" is a tangled mess of specific interpretive decisions that have nothing to do with the "plain text" of the Bible. It's never been about adhering to the superficial meaning of the King James (or any other) text; it's about putting their own mean little prejudices in the mouth of an unassailable, inaccessible, invisible Creator.

In other words, Dan told those kids that if they've been mean to gay people, it's because they wanted to be mean to gay people. And they didn't have a word to say in their own defense.◼

Almost immediately updated to add of course Fred Clark and John Shore are all over this.

Nothing in Biology Makes Sense: The link between science and religious (un)belief

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Yoder) — Tue, 01 May 2012 15:04:00 +0000

This week at the collaborative science blog Nothing in Biology Makes Sense, guest contributor Amy Dapper takes on a recent psychological study showing that people prompted to think analytically were subsequently reported less likely to report religious belief.

Their first study establishes a correlational relationship between analytic thinking and religious belief by asking participants to answer three clever questions that have an immediate intuitive, but incorrect, answer and a correct answer that requires deeper analytical processing. These questions, and their answers, can be found in the table below. The study participants then answered a survey about their religious beliefs. The results show that participants that arrive at the correct, analytical answers to the first set of questions also tend to exhibit more religious disbelief in their responses to the survey.

The results would seem to confirm the experiences of many of us working in science: when you think analytically Monday through Friday, it can be difficult to stop thinking that way on Sunday morning. For more detail on the experiments, go read the whole thing.◼

Carnival roundup: Berry-go-Round and Diversity in Science

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Yoder) — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 16:12:00 +0000

On the last day of April, two blog carnivals—collections of links to posts on a given topic—are freshy posted, and both are worth some of your surfing time.

First, over at Seeds Aside, is a double March/April edition of Berry-go-Round, which rounds up online writing about all things botanical, with everything from peppers to savannah treetops to electrical signalling within the tissues of carnivorous plants.

And then over at her blog on Scientopia, Scicurious is hosting an edition of the Diversity in Science Carnival devoted to "imposter syndrome," the nagging fear of secret inferiority that almost everyone seems to feel at some point in a scientific career. In science, imposter syndrome can be especially troublesome for women and members of minority groups, who may not see many folks that look like them amongst their colleagues.◼

Science online, this does not follow edition

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Yoder) — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 13:05:00 +0000

Oy. A study of high fructose corn syrup and mineral deficiency doesn't mean that corn syrup causes autism. It really, really doesn't.
Double oy. A study finding that politically conservative undergraduates take less time to read essays on scientific topics doesn't mean they're refusing to comprehend the content.
Triple oy. A study of online dating profiles doesn't mean that we've evolved to find red clothing sexy.
Hmmm. The recently-publicized study showing an association between unacknowledged same-sex attraction and homophobia doesn't support the idea that most gay-hating is actually externalized self-hatred.
Quadruple oy, with a backflip. A male OB-GYN's discovery of previously unseen structures in a female cadaver's vaginal wall—in a search prompted by his misreading of an unrelated journal article—doesn't mean he's found the G-spot.
It all depends on the numbers. Growing meat tissue in Petri dishes probably won't be cheaper than growing it in cows.
BP et al. could've done a lot better. Two years after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, Christie Wilcox returns to a conversation with her grandfather, an expert in oil spill cleanup.
Enjoy that last cup. Climate change and increasing worldwide demand mean that coffee is about to get a lot more expensive.
A good bower needs landscaping. Spotted bowerbirds use "bush tomato" fruit to decorate their nests, and end up planting more bush tomatoes.
They're ... stubby. Maggie Koerth-Baker tracks down the next trend in bananas.
Seventy years later. Two of Alan Turing's original cryptography papers have just been declassified.
Excuse me while I put in a quick eight miles. Emerging evidence that exercise makes you smarter.
Taking it one small step at a time. A new startup proposes to mine asteroids, and it might just work.

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The living rainbow: In budgies, same-sex courting isn't practice for wooing the ladies

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Yoder) — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 19:39:00 +0000

I've just set myself up a Google Scholar alert for papers on the evolution of same-sex mating behavior. The plan is, I'll post some brief notes on anything interesting that shows up in my inbox. First up: bisexual budgies!

Male budgerigars—or parakeets, to those of us in the States—live in female-dominated social groups when they're not caged in a petstore. In these groups, apparently, it's quite common for pairs of males to engage in behaviors that look a lot like what males do when courting female budiges. It's been hypothesized that this same-sex courting is practice for the real, reproductive deal. If that were the case you'd expect that male budgies who put in more time practicing with other males would have better luck with females later on.

However, when Puya Abbassi and Nancy Tyler Burley of the University of California Irivine compared the frequency with which individual male budgies engage in same-sex courting to their later success with females, they found a negative relationship—males that had more same-sex interactions were less likely to find female mates [$a]. The authors propose that the same-sex interactions are actually males assessing each others' social status. That would square with Abbassi and Burley's observations if low-status males, who are less likely to get lucky in the mating game, spend a lot more time sorting out relative rankings amongst themselves—and this is what the authors suggest may be going on.◼

Reference

Abbassi, P., & Burley, N. (2012). Nice guys finish last: same-sex sexual behavior and pairing success in male budgerigars Behavioral Ecology DOI: 10.1093/beheco/ars030

Nothing in Biology Makes Sense: What's in my traditional medecine?

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Yoder) — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 13:05:00 +0000

This week at the collaborative blog Nothing in Biology Makes Sense, Sarah Hird explains how to identify the ingredients in traditional Chinese medecines—with a whole pile of sequence data.

[Coghlan et al.] target one animal and one plant marker and “genetically audit” the samples by sequencing the heck out of them using a bench-top HTS, the Roche GS Junior. Their protocol produced 49,000 sequence fragments. They then compare their sequences to large databases containing sequences of known origin and thus, identify what’s in the TCM.

To learn what the group found, go read the whole thing.◼

Science online, overlooked life on Mars edition

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy Yoder) — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 13:00:00 +0000

And by "equity," I mean "inequity." For the week of Equal Pay Day, here are some notes on pay equity in academia.
Which is all of us. Excellent advice for scientists who write.
Whee! 80% cut rate. A report from inside NSF's new pre-proposal review system.
Whoops? Re-analysis of decades-old data suggests that the Viking landers may have found evidence of life on Mars back in 1976.
Follow the leader. Voters follow the gaze of politicians from their own party.
They're just worried about everyone else. College students opposed to gay marriage don't think it would hurt their own marriage.
Travel distance, for instance. The added cost of eating healthy isn't just about the price of food. See also.
Especially in the, ahem, biomedical field. Scientific journals are retracting a lot more papers lately, which doesn't look good for science. See also, and also.
Love is: two guys and a girl, and also when one of the guys is pretending to be a girl. The diversity of gender roles in the animal kingdom, adorably anthropomorphized.

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