Jennifer Jacquet at SB blog Shifting Baselines just returned from the Galapagos, where she got the feeling that blogging has not made much of an impact, even among the scientists at the research stations. It left her wondering if science blogging is mainly restricted to the so-called “First World”–i.e., affluent places such as the US, Europe, Australia, and Japan. If true, that would be a shame, since it is potentially such a powerful tool for getting scientific information, no matter where you are in the world.

Continue reading “A Call to Bloggers Around the World: How First-World-O-Centric Are We?” →

Why don’t I blog more? In part because I’m busy reading other blogs. I finally got around to adding some of my favorite science blogs outside the scienceblogs.com empire to the blogroll over on the left side. Allow me to take a moment to introduce you to them.

The Anti-Toxo: A blog about every new paper or article on Toxoplasma, the resident parasite here at the Loom. If you want to understand our parasitic overlords, this is a must read.

Center for Science Writings Blog. John Horgan, veteran science writer, now runs the Center for Science Writing at Stevens Institute of Technology. Lots of good stuff on the blog.

Continue reading “You’re My Favorite Waste of Time” →

I just wanted to take a moment to reiterate my longstanding policy on comments. I reserve the right to delete comments that are slanderous, obscene, or glaringly off-topic. I also reserve the right to ban commenters who do not follow these rules even after being reminded of them. Anyone who accepts these simple rules is welcome to tell me why I am utterly wrong about the topic at hand, even if you think the world is six thousand years old. (And I am entitled to comment on why you are wrong, too.) But this is not the place for spam-like manifestos.

Let the conversation resume.

Continue reading “A Comment on Comments” →

Our culture wars make for strange ironies. The fight over the cervical cancer vaccine is a case in point.

Yesterday news broke that a vaccine for cervical cancer might not be all it’s cracked up to be. Cervical cancer is caused by a virus known as human papillomavirus. It infects epithelial cells in the skin and other surface layers of the body, including the vagina and throat. On rare occasion it causes its host cells to start replicating madly, creating growths that sometimes progress into full-blown tumors. It’s a major menace: the American Cancer Society estimates that it causes 17 percent of all cancer cases–more than 1.8 million a year.

Continue reading “Texas, Where The Living Is Contradictory” →

There was a time when the publication of the entire sequence of a genome–any genome–was exciting news. I don’t have any particular passion about Haemophilus influenzae, a microbe that can cause the flu various infections. But in 1997 it was the first species to have its genome sequenced. It became immensely fascinating, simply because we could now, for the first time, scan all of its genes. Now the global genome factory is cranking away so quickly–with over five hundred sequences published and over two thousand in the pipeline–that a new genome is not necessarily news. There has to be something striking, biologically speaking, for it to light up the radar.

Continue reading “Did Grandma Have A Pouch? (And Other Thoughts on the Opossum’s Genome)” →