Science & Society

Tenure at Last!

This morning I signed a contract with INFN, the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics, which grants me tenure in the role of research scientist. Start date: 05/04/2009. End of penalty: never. Am I happy about it? Maybe I should, but I have to confess I fee ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - May 4 2009 - 5:55am

What Spore should have been

The evolution game Spore was somewhat of a critical flop- especially among scientists. The game has glitzy graphics, but, for a game billed as being somehow connected to science, the science sucked.  What's more important, many of us thought the game ...

Blog Post - Michael White - May 11 2009 - 4:48pm

The ACLU, Myriad Genetics And The Future Of Biotechnology

The American Civil Liberties Union action in filing a lawsuit yesterday against Myriad Genetics is going to lead to one of the most important legal battles in the history of biotechnology, asserts Genetic Engineering&Biotechnology News(GEN).   The ACLU ...

Article - News Staff - May 14 2009 - 9:03pm

Pushing Science To Extreme Openness

Georg, over at Lattice Points noted a piece about open science in Physics World: The adoption and growth of scientific journals has created a body of shared knowledge for our civilization, a collective long-term memory that is the basis for much of human p ...

Article - Michael White - May 19 2009 - 12:55pm

What is Language?

What is Language? We are tool-using social  animals. The most powerful tool known is the one we use to build every other tool: language- spoken or written. But tools can be used with little or no skill to turn out mundane artifacts and garbage. By honing ...

Blog Post - Patrick Lockerby - Jun 8 2009 - 4:09am

"Angels & Demons"- No Laughing Antimatter

What happens when a guy married to an art historian who dislikes religion writes a book using science?   "Angels&Demons", that's what.   It's the book Dan Brown wrote that made even less sense than "The DaVinci Code", beca ...

Article - Hank Campbell - Aug 17 2009 - 1:18pm

Twins: One Mom, Two Dads- Uh oh, Someone Has Some S'plainin' To Do

The birth of twins is a genetic oddity in itself- only happening in about one out of  every 90 births.  But adding a large twist of unexpected to an already unlikely event- this week it was announced that a mother in Dallas, Texas gave birth to a set of tw ...

Blog Post - Mad Scientist - May 21 2009 - 6:39pm

Harry Benjamin Syndrome Revealed: The naked bigotry of some transwomen against others.

Harry Benjamin Syndrome, at first a uncontroversial and innocuous idea that transsexual brains are different from other brains, has morphed into a platform for some to denigrate others under a cloak of true pseudoscience proposed by laypeople and supporte ...

Blog Post - Hontas Farmer - Jun 20 2009 - 4:25pm

Major Histocompatibility Complexes- A Genetic Clue To Why Opposites Attract In Human Mate Selection

Professor Maria da Graça Bicalho, head of the Immunogenetics and Histocompatibility Laboratory at the University of Parana, Brazil, told the annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics that people with diverse major histocompatibility compl ...

Article - News Staff - May 24 2009 - 7:55pm

Genetic Fitness- Biological Bias, Not Societal, Explains Promiscuous Men And Chaste Women

In general, science is like an episode of "LOST"; one question gets answered but that answer raises two more questions. The discovery of DNA and genes has answered many questions about who we are and why we are, but to what degree remains a myste ...

Article - Erin Richards - May 26 2009 - 2:27pm