The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), the branch of the NIH which funds the majority of academic genome research in the US, is trying to lay out its next big road map, and…

John Hawks discusses how messy the abuse of genetic testing results could get: Imagine a custody battle, in which the father hires a private investigator to get a mother's genome. With two variants…

 A new book, "Poisoned Profits: The Toxic Assault on Our Children" by Philip and Alice Shabecoff is praised for its competent journalism in January 5, 2009 issue of…

What?  Republicans getting a mention on the eve of a scientific Golden Age due to the presence of Democrats in both Congress and the Oval Office, a time when the heavens themselves shall burst…

Sound familiar? If you find yourself saying, "No matter how hard I try and try, I can't make my kid do X ..." or "No matter how hard I try, I can't make my kid understand Y ..." it's usually a clear…

In an article for the Journal of Theoretical Biology, Herbert Gintis provides a model that shows that: “if an internal norm is fitnessenhancing, then for plausible patterns of socialization, the…

Bacteria often provide vivid examples ofhow powerful the forces of evolution can be.  In keeping with that,Hershberg, et al., in a paper published in PLoS, show that evolutionary forces may…

Two posts in one weekend?  I am such a science blogger. But this one doesn't count because it is just an update on some new features we have added in.  Slowly, but surely, we are creating…

A group of researchers did an analysis of the personalities of Wikipedia members and apparently don't think they are all that great.   By not great, I mean they fared less well on scales of…

Keeping track of time is hard. Not only in terms of remembering meetings and be on time at the train station. Actually measuring time is a scientific art. Most of us find it logical to use the Earth…

The periodic table goes well with many things, including, apparently, wine. This month's issue of Wired (with plenty of fodder for blogging and articles, so more to come) includes a nugget of…

The combination of a very pleasant but busy holiday visit with my In-laws and feeling a bit under the weather has caused my blogging to drop precipitously this past week. I'm back, ready to start off…

First, a neat little toy:  build your own squid! I won't give anything else away... Second, in the spirit of ending the old year and beginning the new, I like this synopsis of the best science…

Clichés are soft.. they leave it to your imagination.  Clichés are hard.. they leave it to your imagination. Embedded in the clichés are stereotypes. A new cliché: "2009 is years-old." P.S.…

Nature recently provided a list of "15 evolutionary gems". ...the document summarizes 15 lines of evidence from papers published in Nature over the past 10 years. The evidence is drawn from the…

I won't get into this in detail, in part because I wrote about it in my paper The evolution of complex organs in the special issue of Evolution: Education and Outreach about eyes. It seems the most…

Even on this side of the Atlantic, we have noticed: Burris, standing at the governor’s side, said he’s eager to get to work in Washington “to face a convergence of parallel crises.”  One’s…

The 12th edition of Berry Go Round, the botanical blog carnival, is now online at Foothills Fancies.  Lots of good reading to be had.

I have received this request from a friend roughly 5,000 miles away: My maternal cousin has to prepare a write up for her school.  She needs to write something on 'fun physics'. Alas, I am…

There's a discussion going on over at Wikipedia regarding the naming convention for articles about plants.  In general, article titles are supposed to be the "most common" name for the thing in…