I missed this interesting discussion at Larry Moran's Sandwalk: Are biochemistry programs too hard compared to other biology majors? Larry says his biochemistry program is losing students to other biology majors that don't require as much physics and chemistry - hard subjects by any standard. Is this a problem? If you want a career in biology, I think the answer is yes.

Science writer Carl Zimmer is building anticipation for his new book, Microcosm: E. coli and The New Science of Life. His latest hype-building piece is up at Wired. It's short and worth checking out.

It's not easy understanding all the nuances of particular disciplines in science even if you are in the field - science has gotten pretty precise. I have a good grasp of Maxwell's equations, for example, but I am not going to understand interplane capacitance and noise in the same way that a simulation guy at Intel will. That's why journalism is something of a thankless job. If you're a journalist you have multiple people triangulating on your defects. People with a political bent will find a political motivation (1), scientists in the field will find it either too simple or too exaggerated and people reading are likely to tune it out if it's too complex. We had an interesting example of how difficult a task it is to do clean stories that get the point across today.

Always on the lookout for new ways to motivate graduate students to get their work finished, I took note of this handy item while flipping through the Fisher catalogue in search of a flammables cabinet for the lab.

 

 

The shoe, which is conveniently located at butt-height, would need to be on a spring, and it would be better if the gun were pointed outward and on a remote control turret or lack-of-motion sensor, but perhaps it could do the job just by its menacing presence.

Ethical debates over cloning are confusing enough, but even without the ethics issues the terminology of cloning is extremely confusing. Scientists bat around the word in many different contexts, often with subtly different meanings; if you don't know the biological background, it's easy to become disoriented. The most common use of the word cloning (in science, although maybe not in politics) has nothing to do with embryos, stem cells, or 10,000 copies of Jango Fett on the planet Kamino. It essentially means this (we'll call this definition 1): to make a copy of a piece of DNA, usually in order to put it into some form that's useful in the lab.

In case you have missed them, two issues are now available for each of the new evolution journals:

Evolutionary Applications

Evolution: Education and Outreach

I had mentioned GraphJam on the old Genomicron. It's like LOLcats for nerds. Erm, for even bigger nerds. This one seems highly apt, though ALL CAPS alone is usually sufficient.

 

 

Why would a professor in Denver examine one county in Texas and conclude there is a race issue in death penalty cases? It's hard to say. There is extrapolation and then there is just a question of methodology. Scott Phillips, associate professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Denver says that the District Attorney (DA) in Harris County, TX pursued the death penalty when the defendant was African American more often than when the victim was African American. Harris County, TX, is the capital of capital punishment, executing more people than every state - except Texas itself.

Well, the move to the new site has gone ok, though it seems some old readers are a bit unhappy. All I can say is that the site is a work in progress and that some exciting changes are in the works. So why did I move Genomicron to this site? The simple reason is: the readership. Genomicron did reasonably well in the blogosphere, but it was never going to be one of the major blogs like Pharyngula or Sandwalk. PZ and Larry have already done a great job filling that niche, and I have always been focused primarily on science (with some discussion of media reporting thereof and a bit of humour thrown in).

We're working on connecting the feed from this new Genomicron to the Feedburner feed so that everyone gets counted, but obviously there's something funny going on in the meanwhile. Here is how my Feedburner subscriber totals have fared since the move.

I had hoped that the transition would be smooth, but evidently there are lots of people who either a) bailed, b) were using the old Blogger feed (which no longer forwards on to Feedburner), or c) have subscribed to the feed from this site directly and it doesn't count at Feedburner. Anyway, this is the feed that will be counted: