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)” →

A bit of journalistic irony. Last week I groused that a new paper on methane from plants was getting very little attention in the press, despite the fact that it refutes a 2006 paper published in Nature that got lots of press. I wished aloud that the situation would be set right. Well, five days later, a few more sites have published the press release, but I’ve only seen one new piece of original reporting.

It appears in the news section of today’s issue of Nature. Hats off to Nature for making room for some uncomfortable news.

Continue reading “Methane News: Not Quite So Missing” →