Society of Systematic Biologists

Backreaction: Singularities in your Kitchen"I was fascinated most by what I've learned since then about singularities in fluid dynamics - singularities that actually occur in the kitchen, every time a drop of water falls off the tap."(tags: science

links for 2009-02-10 at Uncertain Principles : Backreaction: Singularities in your Kitchen"I was fascinated most by what I've learned since then about singularities in fluid dynamics - singularities that actually occur in the kitchen, every time a drop of water falls off the tap."(tags: science

So, heres a question for you: just how long is Roche going to keep their offer open for Genentech? They left their friendly-in-retrospect offer on the table for quite a while, until it was clear that nothing was going to happen. So how long are they prepared

How Long Will Roche Wait for Genentech? at SeekingAlpha Biotech Stocks : So, here’s a question for you: just how long is Roche (RHHBY.PK) going to keep their offer open for Genentech (DNA)? They left their friendly-in-retrospect offer on the table for quite a while, until it was clear that nothing was going to happen. So how

Viropharma has announced that their Phase III trial of maribavir, a compound targeting cytomegalovirus, failed big-time. Well, they didn't used the term "big-time", but they might as well have. The treatment group (patients with recent bone marrow transplants)

Viropharma's Antiviral Bombs: Here We Go Again at SeekingAlpha Biotech Stocks : Viropharma (VPHM) has announced that their Phase III trial of maribavir, a compound targeting cytomegalovirus, failed big-time. Well, they didn't use the term "big-time", but they might as well have. The treatment group (patients with recent bone

AstraZeneca said today that it’s partnering with the Mayo Clinic and Virginia Tech to work on an experimental class of antidepressants known as triple reuptake inhibitors, or TRIs. The drugs target three brain chemicals believed to be involved in depression

Health News of the Day at Clinical Cases and Images - Blog : Health News of the Day is a daily summary made from the selected links I post on Twitter. It is in a bullet points format with links to the original sources which include 350 RSS feeds that produce about 2,500 items per day.People who said they slept "rather

Chad is complaining that The Best American Science Writing 2008 is too focused on biomedical science. He finds it especially lame that there's no physics when this was the year of the LHC. Here's what I found in the contents....Read the rest of this post...

Physics Gets No Respect at Uncertain Principles : Kind of a belated gripe, but something I was reminded of today that I forgot to blog when I first noticed it. I griped last year about the fomulaic nature of the "Best Science Writing" anthology, but I had no idea that the 2008 version would be worse.OK, I

A decade or so ago I spent a year consulting to a Big 3 automaker in Detroit. I was surprised by the level of complacency I observed toward quality and styling. (Shouldn’t a company that’s made cars for 100 years be able to build a reliable engine

Nadeem Esmail Says Nationalized Health Care Will Cost Us Pain and Suffering - WSJ.com at GruntDoc : Nadeem Esmail Says Nationalized Health Care Will Cost Us Pain and Suffering - WSJ.com ‘Too Old’ for Hip Surgery As we inch towards nationalized health care, important lessons from north of the border.By NADEEM ESMAILPresident Obama and Congressional

I'm not in a very good mood at the moment, so when Bishop Tom Frame, professor of Theology at Charles Sturt University says this unmitigated nonsense:A dedicated Darwinian would welcome imperialism, genocide, mass deportation, ethnic cleansing, eugenics, euthanasia,

The other side of the coin at Pharyngula : The other problem with media coverage is that certifiable idiots get to open their mouths and their noise goes unquestioned in print. Here's a regrettable example of an ignorant opinion piece, one so egregiously stupid that even Ian Musgrave is reduced to indignant

A big chunk of Australia is on fire — over 700 homes have been burned, and it's estimated that over 300 people have been killed. We know the cause: a drought that dried tons of brush to tinder, lightning strikes, and deplorably, apparently a number of

Media Release - Abortion Laws To Blame For Bush Fires? at RichardDawkins.net : The Latest Updates : [Pastor Danny Nalliah] said these bushfires have come as a result of the incendiary abortion laws which decimate life in the womb.

After the much hyped fraud case of Hwang Woo-suk in 2005 who claimed to have developed human embryos by cloning embryonic stem cells , the National Bioethics Committee of Korea decided to postpone the approval of Cha Medical Center’s application. This

Gearhart Gets the Stem Cell Research Discussion On Point at Science Progress : Human embryonic stem cell research may be the path to remarkable disease treatments and cures in the near future. While it is important to be realistic about the science and resist overly optimistic expectations that stem cells are a panacea, lifting the ban

CERNWorkers prepare to lower a magnet into the Large Hadron Collider's tunnel.The restart of the world's biggest particle-smasher is being postponed until late September at the earliest, to allow for the installation of a safety system that would have reduced

LHC 2009 Restart at Cosmic Variance : After the devastating quench incident on September 19 of last year, resulting in the rupture of the cryogenic vessels within the LHC magnets , CERN has worked furiously to repair the damage, prevent any future similar failure, and get the LHC back to its commissioning

Italy is experiencing its own version of the Terry Schiavo case. A woman, Eluana Englaro, was in a car crash 17 years ago that caused catastrophic brain damage — she's been in a vegetative state ever since, and the family has been engaged in a legal fight

Italy's Terry Schiavo at Pure Pedantry : There was a case like Terry Schiavo's in Italy that is triggering a genuine constitutional crisis. Eluana Englaro, who had been on a feeding tube in a persistent vegetative state, for 17 years passed away last night after her father ordered her feeding tube

[bpsdb] This is hosted on Wikileaks, so if I'm asked to take this link down, you can find it there, safe from the lawyers (I am not hosting it on layscience.net). This forty-odd minute mp3 was originally hosted on Ben Goldacre's Bad Science, but has since been

Did the founder of the antivax movement fake autism-vaccine link? at Bad Astronomy Blog : The UK-based Sunday Times has a potential bombshell on their site; they claim Dr. Andrew Wakefield, who started the whole "vaccines cause autism" garbage, faked his data to make that claim.About 10 years ago, Wakefield published a study dealing with

The Evil That Men Do Lives After Them at Live Granades : When I’ve written about the non-existent link between vaccines and autism before, I’ve done so without a lot of anger. I can understand how parents would be worried enough about the effects of vaccines to not have their kids vaccinated, even though

Wakefield changed and misreported results at Black Triangle : Brian Deer has been investigating Andrew Wakefield, again. THE doctor who sparked the scare over the safety of the MMR vaccine for children changed and misreported results in his research, creating the appearance of a possible link with autism, a Sunday Times

Vaccines and autism--can we stick a fork in it now, please? at Aetiology : Last fall, I wrote about a new research paper which tried to replicate some of Andrew Wakefield's original results, which not only claimed a correlation between MMR vaccination and autism, but also the presence of measles virus in intestinal tissue. Wakefield

Anti-vaccine child deaths based on lies at Mystery Rays from Outer Space : Just in case anyone hasn’t heard about this already:THE doctor who sparked the scare over the safety of the MMR vaccine for children changed and misreported results in his research, creating the appearance of a possible link with autism, a Sunday Times

Why am I not surprised? It looks as though Andrew Wakefield probably falsified his data at Respectful Insolence : Pity Andrew Wakefield.Actually, on second thought, Wakefield deserves no pity. After all, he is the man who almost single-handedly launched the scare over the MMR vaccine in Britain when he published his infamous Lancet paper in 1998 in which he claimed to

Anti-vax study a case of scientific fraud? at Pharyngula : If you want to know where the current ridiculous anti-vaccination scare came from, there's one well known source: Andrew Wakefield. He published a paper in 1998 that claimed there was a link between vaccination and autism that was a popular sensation, and had

Scientific Misconduct and the Autism-MMR Vaccine Link at The Questionable Authority : A series of articles just published in The Sunday Times reports that it appears likely that Andrew Wakefield falsified much of the data that was used in the 1998 Lancet article that first identified the MMR vaccine as a potential cause of autism. If the charges

A Quick Note to Huffington Post at A Blog Around The Clock : If Huffington Post wants to have credibility and gain its vaunted #1 spot as the most trusted online new source, there is only one thing it needs to do - ditch the woomeisters Chopra and RFK Jr., and get in their place some people from the reality-based community.People

UK in trouble? Measles, antivax garbage on the rise at Bad Astronomy Blog : More bad news from the UK: Measles cases rose 36% in 2008 over the previous year, from 990 to 1348.Health Protection Agency experts said most of the cases had been in children not fully vaccinated with combined MMR and so could have been prevented.Immunisation

Jeni Barnett on MMR - The Complete Show at The Lay Scientist - Where science and the public collide... : [bpsdb] This is hosted on Wikileaks, so if I'm asked to take this link down, you can find it there, safe from the lawyers (I am not hosting it on layscience.net). This forty-odd minute mp3 was originally hosted on Ben Goldacre's Bad Science, but has since been

Fellow Canadians,If you're wondering about the broader impression of the challenges facing Canadian science, you can see these stories from the prestigious UK journal Nature over the past year or so.By the way, I haven't found a colleague yet who isn't a) glad

Canadian Conservatives Just Don't Get It at The Daily Transcript : As you know, I'll be leaving the US in the middle of the year to head up north to my native land where I'll be setting up my new lab. Having lived in both the US and Canada, I am in a good position to evaluate both societies. My basic conclusion? America you

Nature tells the world scientific community about Canada's lack of support for science at Sandwalk : The latest issue of Nature reports on Prime Minister Stephen Harper's plan to slash the budgets of the major granting agencies [Cash concerns for Canadian scientists]. Billions of dollars in science infrastructure investments have been overshadowed by cuts

Find out in today's Toronto Star [Darwin still spurs tributes, debates].

Larry Moran is doing Darwin Day in Toronto at Pharyngula : Read all about it: he's featured in the Toronto Star, and there's even a nice picture of him.In case you are unsure, I think he's the one on the left.Read the comments on this post...

There is an interesting meta-discussion going on in a variety of places at the moment which touch very strongly on my post and talk (slides, screencast) from last week about “web native” lab notebooks. Over at Depth First, Rich Apodaca has a post

Chemical Informatics Guys Don't Get It at Depth-First : During my time as a synthetic organic chemist and later, a medicinal chemist, there were many times when I wondered why certain chemical information tools were built, why they were built the way they were - especially when they hindered my ability to use them,

Dont consolidate, distribute at business|bytes|genes|molecules : Image via WikipediaThe Realm of Organic Synthesis talks about the creation of a knowledge database in a recent blog post throwing down the gauntlet to fellow geeks (thanks to Egon for the pointer). My own biases are more along the lines of Egon’s thoughts,

Dont consolidate, distribute at business|bytes|genes|molecules : Image via WikipediaThe Realm of Organic Synthesis talks about the creation of a knowledge database in a recent blog post throwing down the gauntlet to fellow geeks (thanks to Egon for the pointer). My own biases are more along the lines of Egon’s thoughts,

What are the services we really want for recording science online? at Science in the open : There is an interesting meta-discussion going on in a variety of places at the moment which touch very strongly on my post and talk (slides, screencast) from last week about “web native” lab notebooks. Over at Depth First, Rich Apodaca has a post

India's Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR) has recommended that each of its 40+ laboratories adopt an OA mandate.  From the memorandum of Naresh Kumar, Head of CSIR's R&D Planning Division, to the directors of all CSIR labs (and

Open Evolution: Kudos to SMBE for creating a new Open Access publication - Genome Biology and Evolution at The Tree of Life : Another sign that Open Access is spreading. SMBE, which publishes the journal MBE (Molecular Biology and Evolution) is announcing the creation of a new journal - Genome Biology and Evolution (GBE). And happily it will be an Open Access journal being published

Last week, Casey Luskin posted a fairly pathetic attempt to explain why the remains of the famous fossil Lucy are not evidence for the common descent of humans and apes. I saw the Lucy exhibit last year, and was going to write a response to Caseys latest tripe,

Casey Luskin Visits Lucy at Afarensis : I always get a great deal of amusement when Luskin writes about paleoanthropology.His latest effort is no exception. Casey, you see, has been studying about Lucy and of fossils pertaining to human evolution for years, and even links to the dreck he published

Tonight, an AP article reports that senate “moderates” are working on a compromise stimulus package that cuts $88B from the nominal senate version. Doesn’t sound so bad, until you read the fine print. Here’s what they plan on cutting:Nearly

Update on research funding in the US at Open Access News : Here are three recent developments on US research funding.  The OA connection is indirect:  where we have OA mandates in place, such as the NIH, then higher funding translates into new OA literature and lower funding reminds us of the need to maximize

Science and the Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Act at THE ART OF TEACHING SCIENCE : The US Senate is working on the Economic Recovery and Reinvestment bill, and as of today, it appears that it will be approved in the Senate, perhaps on Tuesday.However, Shawn Otto has been in contact with citizens that are members of the ScienceDebate2008.

AP Newsflash at Cosmic Variance : Tonight, an AP article reports that senate “moderates” are working on a compromise stimulus package that cuts $88B from the nominal senate version. Doesn’t sound so bad, until you read the fine print. Here’s what they plan on cutting:Nearly

Feb. 6, 1913 Dec. 9, 1996From the Minnesota State University site:Mary Douglas Nicol Leakey was in London, England. She meet her future husband, Louis Leakey, when he asked her to illustrate his book, 'Adams Ancestors'. Mary and Louis spent from 1935 to 1959

Singularly silly singularity at Pharyngula : Since I had the effrontery to critize futurism and especially Ray Kurzweil, here's a repost of something I wrote on the subject a while back…and I'll expand on it at the end.Kevin Drum picks at Kurzweil—a very good thing, I think—and expresses

State senator Stephen Wise plans to introduce a bill requiring balanced treatment for intelligent design whenever evolutionary science is taught in Floridas science classrooms.Of course, balanced treatment and equal time bills for creation science led to the

Here we go again — Florida's turn! at Pharyngula : How do these yahoos get elected? We've got another dumb-ass bill about to emerge from the state of Florida:State Sen. Stephen Wise of Jacksonville announced through an article in the Florida Times Union that he plans to file a bill this legislative session