Thanks to Drudge, all the right-wing blogs have been touting a story alleging the American Physical Society has reversed its stance on global warming. Joe Romm has the sordid details. The basis for the story is an article published in an APS newsletter (not...

Thanks to Drudge, all the right-wing blogs have been touting a story alleging the American Physical Society has reversed its stance on global warming. Joe Romm has the sordid details. The basis for the story is an article published in an APS newsletter (not...

While many earnings reports these days are disconcerting to investors as fuel prices weigh on the economy, we think it is important to note those companies that are beating expectations. Beating estimates amidst tough circumstances is a sign of solid management,...

The buyout offer from Swiss drug giant Roche (RHHBY.PK) has shares of Genentech (DNA) trading at their highest level in about two-and-a-half years and according to CNBC stock-stat maven, Robert Hum, it closed at its biggest one-day percentage gain since April...

Roche are offering $43.7 billion to take over the remaining shares of Genentech.Roche, which already owns 55.9 percent of the San Francisco-based drug maker, said it was offering $89 per share, 8.8 percent above the closing price Friday and 19 percent above...

"The drug companies are making the same drugs. They are being used by the same beneficiaries. Yet because the drugs are being bought through Medicare Part D instead of Medicaid, the prices paid by the taxpayers have ballooned by billions of dollars," House...

The Register published an entertaining article about the funny story involving Christopher Monckton and the American Physical Society.Recall that Jeff Marque, an APS editor, wrote in their recent newsletter that a considerable fraction of the scientific community...

The Poliner case generated much attention and concern when a jury awarded $366 million in damages to a Texas cardiologist who challenged a peer review action. (The damages were later reduced to $22 million.)On July 23rd the Fifth Circuit Court...

In the aftermath of Sizzle Tuesday, Orac wrote a post posing a challenge to the science communicators: How would you deal with antivaccinationism? What "frames" would you use to combat the likes of Jenny McCarthy? In the comments on Orac's post, Matthew C....

Remember last summer when a bunch of sciencebloggers all snuck into NYC under the cover of the night for a weekend of frolicking and karaoke? We kept it too secret last time, so very few of our readers had enough time to show up and meet us at short notice.This...

I’ve been looking into violent deaths lately. And now I understand a few things. Mostly, I understand what we don’t know about violent death in the United States. For instance, consider one of the most horrific kinds of violent death — mass...

Grunt Doc hosts Grand Rounds today: his 6th time hosting and it’s the 200th edition of this blog carnival....

Merck took the unusual step of delaying its earnings release yesterday until after the close of the market. A report on another clinical study of Vytorin (ezetimibe), their drug with Schering-Plough, was coming out, so they put the numbers on hold until after...

(Via William Connolley). Ofcom, the UK media regulator has ruled that The Great Global Warming Swindle was unfair to the IPCC, David King, and Carl Wunsch and breached a requirement of impartiality about global warming policy. The full report is here. The complaint...

Paul Smaglik, in a Prospects article for NatureJobs, (Nature 454, 131; 2008) discussed a survey of 109 UK universities by Hampshire-based Incomes Data Services for the Universities and Colleges Employers Association, which concludes that academics are contracted...

Interior of wind tunnel at Ames Research Center. Thanks to Rich for reminding us of the value of wind tunnelsThe Lunar Science Conference at NASA Ames was a huge success. Twice as many people showed up as the organizers expected. Wednesday morning Mario Livio...

In the aftermath of Sizzle Tuesday, Orac wrote a post posing a challenge to the science communicators: How would you deal with antivaccinationism? What "frames" would you use to combat the likes of Jenny McCarthy? In the comments on Orac's post, Matthew C....

I’ve been the manager of two blog carnivals for almost 2 years now. Gene Genie is about clinical genetics and personalized medicine; while Medicine 2.0 focuses on web 2.0’s impact on medical education and healthcare. It’s extremely hard to...

In a recent Science magazine article, Lytynoja-Goldman showed that all current Multiple Sequence Alignment algorithms the bread-and-butter algorithm for biologists studying similarities in genes across different species completely fail to detect independent...

Once upon a time, a Roman author named Quintus Ennius wrote: "how like us is that very ugly beast, the ape!" It was quoted by Cicero, and from him Bacon, Montaigne and various others. But always it was thought that apes (simia, literally "the similar ones"),...

[From Sizzle: No caption needed.]On Saturday night, along with Molly and two friends, I attended the opening of Sizzle at the Fairfax theater here in Los Angeles. The movie was airing at Outfest, a gay and lesbian film festival, and the woman introducing the...

John Baez After the workshop on categorical groups in Barcelona, I went to Granada - the world capital of categorical groups! Pilar Carrasco, an expert on this subject, had kindly invited me to spend a week there and give some talks. Even more kindly, she put...

For both men and women, sexual problems are a common side effect of antidepressants. Viagra and similar drugs have long been prescribed to men in this situation. Now a study suggests Viagra may help women as well.The study looked at 98 premenopausal women with...

[From Sizzle: No caption needed.]On Saturday night, along with Molly and two friends, I attended the opening of Sizzle at the Fairfax theater here in Los Angeles. The movie was airing at Outfest, a gay and lesbian film festival, and the woman introducing the...

Life has two contradictory properties that any theory explaining its origin must encompass: similarities everywhere, and differences separating species. So far, the only theory that covers both beautifully and explains how one is the consequence of the other...

Chad torments me with another book meme, where I can show the gaps in my education. Those in bold I have read, those in italics I started but didn't finish. I highly recommend A Confederacy of Dunces and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, two...

Maybe it's just that I'm pessimistic. Or a weather nerd. Or someone who has been paying far too much money to drive around Los Angeles lately. But as I've watched Hurricane Dolly form in the Gulf of Mexico and careen towards the Texas-Mexico borderrapidly intensifying...

A new paper in one of my favorite journals, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, tries to reverse-engineer the tricks of magicians to learn about the blind spots of the brain. Wired Science explains:Magic tricks may look simple, but they exploit cognitive patterns...

Image via WikipediaIn my opinion the best aspect of the so-called Web 2.0 (a catchy name) is the interaction we get from tools such FriendFeed and Twitter. Accessing these sites, one can be overwhelmed by the amount of information, all kinds of information,...

In the day all farmers used livestock to help them get in crops and get maximum benefit from their farming efforts. Even though their main cash crop might be grain, such as wheat, they also raised cattle or at least fed some cattle in winter for ranchers. After...

You will probably have heard about research suggesting that men who regularly eat soya have lower sperm counts.This has caused some concern in the office amongst some of the men, but there's no need to throw away those veggie burgers quite yet, according to...

By anywhere from 10:1 to 1000:1, and, collectively, outweigh the biggest predators in the food web. NewScientist reports:Put together, the parasites in each estuary weighed as much as the local fish and between 3 and 9 times more than the local birds. Parasites...

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has made a strategic alliance with Aspen PharmaCare, a South African generic drug company, as a means of penetrating emerging markets such as China. GSK noted that 40% of the expected growth in pharmaceutical markets worldwide will be...

Regular readers of this blog know that I'm an Apple geek. The Macintosh is my preferred axe and has been, with few interruptions, since the late 1980s. Indeed, the only time I've used anything other than a Mac is when I've had no choice. The first time I saw...

RevWaldo contributes a link to an AP story carried by Google, according to which "The head of a prominent cancer research institute issued an unprecedented warning to his faculty and staff Wednesday: Limit cell phone use because of the possible risk of cancer....

Wow. I’m not even sure where to start.There is an article in Slate today regarding emergency room care. “Waiting Doom: How Hospitals are Killing E.R. Patients” was written by Dr. Zachary F. Meisel and Dr. Jesse M. Pines. They are emergency...

The skeleton of a young Tarbosaurus. From the LiveScience article.Poor Tarbosaurus. Even though it was a top predator during the Cretaceous most people have never heard about it, the theropod from Asia being a poor man's Tyrannosaurus. (Some people think that...

This month has seen the centenary of the first liquefaction of helium, the lightest noble gas: On July 10, 1908, a complicated apparatus working in the laboratory of Heike Kamerlingh Onnes in Leiden, Holland, managed to produce 60 ml of liquid helium, at a...

We didn't know but it turns out that knowledge has two units, "knol" and "edge". Edge.org has been registered by John Brockman's foundation for quite some time butKnol.google.com (click!),Google's competitor to Wikipedia and/or an alternative arena for formal...

The buyout offer from Swiss drug giant Roche (RHHBY.PK) has shares of Genentech (DNA) trading at their highest level in about two-and-a-half years and according to CNBC stock-stat maven, Robert Hum, it closed at its biggest one-day percentage gain since April...

'Last lecture' professor dies of cancer Randy Pausch, famed for his life-affirming message, passes at 47 The Associated Press, updated 10:13 a.m. CT, Fri., July. 25, 2008PITTSBURGH - Randy Pausch, a computer science professor whose "last lecture" about facing...

An online medical encyclopedia launching later this year aims to have have the open-source, ever-evolving, comprehensive nature of Wikipedia. But — in a key departure from Wikipedia’s all-comers sensibility — the new encyclopedia will be edited...

Jake Doelling from Freethought Fort Wayne’s The Enlightenment Show interviews biblical scholar and acclaimed author Robert M. Price. In this special annotated audio episode, Price talks about his new book Top Secret: The Truth Behind Todays Pop Mysticisms....

Robotic sea bream from researchers at the University of Kitakyushu, Japan. Go to the Pink Tentacle to get the full story!Read the comments on this post......

Bob Park in today’s What’s New newsletter has an interesting perspective on the recent global warming kerfluffle that echoes an idea I’ve had for a long time now.Suppose, I asked myself, that the deniers are right and the CO2 thing is a mistake?...

You know, it really annoys me when I see idiocy as idiotic as the in New Jersey:In a lawsuit filed yesterday, a Camden County woman accused her orthopedic surgeon of "rubbing a temporary tattoo of a red rose" on her belly while she was under anesthesia. The...