When I was a lad, we were taught that carbon had two allotropes, graphite and diamond. Although they’re both covalently connected, in neither of these is there anything that one would regard as a ‘molecule’.
Among environmental activists and their supporters, the use of genetic modification is a bad thing. Obviously, tomatoes would be the size of our thumbs if our ancestors did not genetically modify plants so research continues. A group of researchers has announced that plants have for the first time been cloned as seeds, a major step toward making hybrid crop plants that can retain favorable traits from generation to generation - something to which even the most anti-science people can object.
A study just published in the journal Nature by researchers in France, Portugal and Spain looks for the first time at the effects of climate change on the tree of life (that aggregates species according to their evolution/genetic similarity) to find that the whole of it will be affected.
But this is not all bad news because even if the tree is to become “thinner” it keeps its structure as there will be no major losses of biodiversity contrary to what other studies had suggested (this would occur if localized “branches” were totally eliminated).
Some of the most naturally appealing stories in the autism world (and our wider world) are those stories that reinforce the myth of the self-made man (a concept I coincidentally taught this week in American Literature). We like movies like Rudy, All the Right Moves, and the Mighty Ducks series because they feed the myth, the feel-good notion that no matter how far behind one is, how disadvantaged, that plucky teamwork, determined effort, and good fortune will be enough to overcome all obstacles, make the team, win the game, and the woman (or man), and get out of the miserable situation you were originally in.
