Not a bad way to end a paper:

The past is difficult to recover because it was built on the foundation of its own history, one irrevocably different from that of the present and its many possible futures.

From "An epistatic ratchet constrains the direction of glucocorticoid receptor evolution", Jamie T. Bridgham, Eric A. Ortlund&Joseph W. Thornton.


Thanks to the Redneck Geneticist for finding this paper and not emailing me about it.

Read the feed:

CDC officials are anticipating a wave a vaccine horror stories, and reminding folks that by sheer coincidence bad things will happen after some people get their flu shots:

As soon as swine flu vaccinations start next month, some people getting them will drop dead of heart attacks or strokes, some children will have seizures and some pregnant women will miscarry.

But those events will not necessarily have anything to do with the vaccine. That poses a public relations challenge for federal officials, who remember how sensational reports of deaths and illnesses derailed the large-scale flu vaccine drive of 1976...

I don't doubt for an instant that there are millions of guys (including myself) out there who would go see this if it was real: h/t to Andrew Sullivan. Read the feed:

The principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following: The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific "truth." But what is the source of knowledge? Where do the laws that are to be tested come from? Experiment itself helps to produce these laws, in the sense that it gives us hints. But also needed is imagination to create from these hints the great generalizations - to guess at the wonderful, simple, but very strange patterns beneath them all, and then to experiment to check again whether we have made the right guess.

- Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, 1-1

The NIH has made public how often they fund grants below the payline. 18% of R01s scored below the nominal cutoff get funded anyway. A good chunk of those are grants from new investigators.