Science & Society

I've often joked that residents of New York City have little knowledge of the culture and lifestyle of people beyond the Hudson River. Some seem to think the "Fallout" games are actually happening in all that land they fly over between Manhattan and San Francisco.

What is ENCODE ?

ENCODE, an acronym for Encyclopedia of DNA Elements, is a publicly funded research project
initiated in 2003 by National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). Results of the pilot phase was published in June 2007 in Nature.

After the success of pilot phase, ENCODE was given a go ahead to scale up and analyze the entire genome. 

It has extended our learnings from work completed in 2001 by the Human Genome Project to sequence all 3 billion chemical base pairs in human DNA.

Opinion surveys used by researchers from the Guttmacher Institute show overestimated figures of abortion in the Federal District of Mexico (Mexico DF) by as much as 10-fold, according to a paper in the International Journal of Women's Health, which highlights that the actual figure of induced abortion in Mexico DF has not surpassed 15,000 per year according to the official registry.

 The research group directly compared the estimations of induced abortion reported by the Guttmacher Institute and the actual figures reported by the GIRE (from the Spanish acronym Grupo de Información en Reproducción Electiva), institution that maintains epidemiological surveillance of abortion in Mexico DF since its decriminalization in 2007. 


As many times as your mother said your behavior would be 'the death of' her, the reverse seems to be true, according to a large study of childless couples. The prevalence of mental illness was also halved in couples who became adoptive parents, the study shows.

It's not the first time that childlessness has been linked with higher than expected death rates, say the authors, but the link has traditionally been attributed to unhealthy behaviors and poor mental and physical health, and few studies have differentiated between voluntary and involuntary childlessness, they say. This work focused on couples treated for infertility.


The announcement that Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge (and, despite our title, not a princess, like Diana was, for arcane reasons that only experts in Teutonic monarchy understand) is expecting her first child is also bringing attention to a little-known pregnancy condition known as hyperemesis gravidarum (HG), a severe form of nausea and vomiting in pregnancy that can be debilitating because it causes serious dehydration and malnutrition. 


Next to Science 2.0, one of my most frequently visited websites is Telegraph Blogs.  Among those issues which most raise the hackles of the readership is that of Climate Change.  Many of them regard Anthropogenic Global Warming as a religion based on spurious science.  It is very tedious even to contend with a single one of them.  The latest thing to arouse their ire is

Good Morning America is doing its part for scare journalism, this time telling us that if one computer prediction about global warming is correct, there won't be any wild coffee beans left.

Relax, GMA, your guy already won the election, you don't need to drum up hysteria any more.  With four more years in office, he can go back to ignoring climate change, just like every other politician and focus on important stuff in the upcoming holiday season, like taxing Christmas tree farmers so the government can promote Christmas trees.
One of the silliest tropes in the hyped-up 'controversy' over evolution is that all religious people should be conflated with 'Young Earth Creationists'.  

In California, there is mandatory smog testing.  It isn't really meaningful, the worst polluters are actually exempt and the system has even led to a special class of smog testing company - test only shops - which means they won't be able to fix the problem so it will pass the test, but drivers may still be required by law to use one by law but then take their car somewhere else to get fixed if it does not pass

Smog testing companies know these things are dumb and a bad test result can be caused by various issues and the employees at those companies are in the people business, not the arbitrary law business, so they sometimes take pity on the customer because they would like for people to return.