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Thanks to Scientific American for awarding one of its Science & Technology Web Awards to the Loom as one of their 25 favorite sites on the web, for “enchanting readers with every post.”
Continue reading “Okay, It’s Not A Nobel, But It’s Still Nice”
This year’s Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology was announced this morning. Barry Marshall and J. Robin Warren won for discovering that ulcers can be caused not by stress or genes but by a bacterium called Helicobacter pylori (shown here). As my fellow Corantean, Derek Lowe, observes, this story follows the classic arc from, “You’re completely bonkers” to “You’re going to Stockholm.” But it also illustrates a point that I madewhen last year’s Nobelists were announced: it demonstrates how intimately woven evolutionary biology is becoming with medicine.
Just a technical note: Corante has been upgrading to a new version of Movable Type, and they’re still working out a few glitches. Some readers have already reported trouble posting comments. You can vent any other sort of frustration in my direction, and I’ll let the powers that be know. I assume everything will be sorted out shortly.
This Wednesday, I’ll be coming to Swarthmore Collegeto give a public lecture about human evolution. I had originally planned to focus on some of the cutting-edge discoveries I include in my upcoming book, from brain genes to enigmatic hobbits. But now that the big creationism trialis scheduled to get underway a couple hours away in Dover, Pa., on Monday, I’ll talk about that as well–in particular how scientists continue to find evidence of human evolution, despite what some op-ed writing politiciansmay claim.