Every once in a while, PZ Myers stops beating the drum and remembers he’s a scientist: We miss something important when we just look at the genome as a string of nucleotides with scattered bits that will get translated into proteins — we miss the fact that the genome is a dynamically modified and expressed… Continue reading

Jane Friedman and Larry Kirshbaum, both former CEOs of major publishing houses, discuss the future of the industry.

Larry Moran has encouraging news for those of us sick of the “organic” label: There was never a good reason for assuming that organically grown foods would be more healthy than conventionally grown food and now we have scientific evidence to support that assumption. From now on, whenever you hear someone say that “organic” foods… Continue reading

When Stars Explode Interesting new study on how the explosion of a star influences its leftover pulsar. “In 2007, computer simulations suggested that the stars don’t explode in perfectly smooth spheres (J. M. Blondin and A. Mezzacappa Nature 445, 58–60; 2007). This latest visualization, created by Hongfeng Yu, a computer scientist at Sandia National Laboratories… Continue reading

I’m not a fan of the Argument from Design as it’s defended today by ‘think tanks’ on the right. Brandon Watson takes a close look at one of Hume’s dialogues and beautifully clarifies why the Argument, at least as it is espoused today, is too easily open to attack.