You've probably heard widely varying estimates for the number of protein-coding genes in the human genome. Back before the genome sequence came out, many scientists guessed that the number was around…

Nerdy comics don't get any funnier than xkcd:

In the 1960s, Steven Halpern began experimenting with music for de-stressing, relaxation and meditation. Friends, colleagues and fans pleaded for recordings but the record industry could not…

May 10, 2008 is Pangea Day, when Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro will be linked live to present a program of 24 international short films, visionary speakers, and…

Hillary Clinton has gone off the deep end: This morning, George Stephanopoulos began his televised interview with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton by asking if she could name a single economist who…

Bottlerocket in New York City, the coolest wine store on the planet, is having a book signing with the coolest futurist on the planet (and Scientific Blogging fave) David Houle. Meanwhile, Howard…

"No Child Left Behind" is controversial because it pointed out something everyone knows but the people being blamed didn't actually like hearing - education in the US was not all that great at the…

Among the five Nobel Laureates who have endorsed the book, "Thank God for Evolution," Craig Mello, recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine. Mello, offers, "The science vs. religion…

I missed this interesting discussion at Larry Moran's Sandwalk: Are biochemistry programs too hard compared to other biology majors? Larry says his biochemistry program is losing students to other…

Science writer Carl Zimmer is building anticipation for his new book, Microcosm: E. coli and The New Science of Life. His latest hype-building piece is up at Wired. It's short and worth checking out…

It's not easy understanding all the nuances of particular disciplines in science even if you are in the field - science has gotten pretty precise. I have a good grasp of Maxwell's equations, for…

Always on the lookout for new ways to motivate graduate students to get their work finished, I took note of this handy item while flipping through the Fisher catalogue in search of a flammables…

Ethical debates over cloning are confusing enough, but even without the ethics issues the terminology of cloning is extremely confusing. Scientists bat around the word in many different contexts,…

In case you have missed them, two issues are now available for each of the new evolution journals: Evolutionary Applications Evolution: Education and Outreach Both are accessible online…

I had mentioned GraphJam on the old Genomicron. It's like LOLcats for nerds. Erm, for even bigger nerds. This one seems highly apt, though ALL CAPS alone is usually sufficient.  …

Why would a professor in Denver examine one county in Texas and conclude there is a race issue in death penalty cases? It's hard to say. There is extrapolation and then there is just a question…

Well, the move to the new site has gone ok, though it seems some old readers are a bit unhappy. All I can say is that the site is a work in progress and that some exciting changes are in the works.…

We're working on connecting the feed from this new Genomicron to the Feedburner feed so that everyone gets counted, but obviously there's something funny going on in the meanwhile. Here is how my…

Interested in being a scientist? Then you had better get used to rejection and failure, because the truth is that most of your experiments will fail, most of your original ideas will be wrong, and…

There was a disturbance in the force of the blogosphere earlier when it appeared that ERV was no longer accessible . But you know what they say, if you strike her down she will become more powerful…