This is the third installment explaining in plain language the promise and pitfalls of the new modern Enlightenment. In this essay the practical exemplification of the power of paradigm begins to…

This essay is the second in the series concerning Assignee's Prerogative, the new Enlightenment's promise and shortcomings in an easy to understand empirical precis. This essay hopes to illumine the…

“The larger a society or confederacy, the greater the amalgamation of collusive factors - which is typical of every large organization - the more aggravated the moral and spiritual degeneration of…

(Repost from one year ago on the older Genomicron -- this got a niceresponse from readers and family, so I am posting it once again.) In Canada, as in many countries around the world, November 11 is…

Record-breaking accomplishments confuse people about durability. In facing the frailty of humans and their machines, a 'sea of safety' is a comforting notion. Failures…

There are no coincidences...yup, I had to laugh after signing up for this blog a couple minutes ago. In my description I wrote that curiosity killed the cat and that's why they have nine lives. To…

Craig Venter and James Watson have won this year's Cold Spring Harbor 'Double Helix Medal For Scientific Research'. Venter deserves it, but what's the deal with Watson? He hasn't done much for…

As Adaptive Complexity writes, last week's issue of Nature  included the publication of  West-African and Han Chinese individual genomes.  The ability to sequence and analyze…

As a brief follow up to the post about Dr. Andras Pellionisz's Google seminar, I cannot help but quote from his website: Since a US Government-mandated (and taxpayer paid) 4-year study (ENCODE, led…

OK, so you all know that Spore isn't based on how evolution actually works. There has been some concern that playing the game would cause players to develop a faulty understanding of evolution. So I…

Around 10,000 years ago, in the region of the United States now known as the Appalachians, lived one of the most impressive mammals ever to inhabit North American. With a height of over 8 feet, and…

Planet formation, as we all know (and don't know), is chaotic. It is like a lorenz Attractor constructable in computational astrophysics labs. When I was working on my astronomy project at Harvard…

So says a Daily Telegraph news item, reporting on a recent article in Journal of Clinical Nursing [1].  This brought to mind a programme from 2004 on Channel 4 (nicate?) called Sex Before 16:…

Two observations are remarkable today about ozone-hole measurements. Both have been in the books for a while. First, the peak of 2008 is larger than 2007's. Second, NOAA…

I had lunch today with Jim Anderson, a Professor in the Department of Cell and Systems Biology at the University of Toronto.  Jim asks questions about how genetic changes over time (evolution)…

What I would have been reading over coffee in the lab, if I actually drank coffee in the lab (and of course I scrupulously follow the university Environmental Health&Safety rules and never drink…

Those of you who read Genomicon v1 or other blogs that discuss non-coding DNA will, for better or worse, be familiar with regular commenter Andras Pellionisz. Many people have concluded that Dr.…

I don't get too concerned about things such as titles, but I have noticed that this year a more substantial number of students has been sending emails addressed to "Mr. Gregory". I don't know if the…

If you're looking for genome news, the Nov. 6 issue of Nature is chock full. A news feature (subscription only) goes after why genome-wide association studies are failing to find genetic variants…

National Nanotech Conference To Be Held At U of Albany On November 7th The University of Albany’s College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering, along with Empire State Science and Technology, will…