INTRO:  On September 14, 2012, I served as the guest speaker at the grand opening and dedication of the new Structural/ Materials Engineering Building at UC San Diego (UCSD).  Present also and offering remarks were Frieder Seible, Dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering; Pradeep Khosla, the new Chancellor of UCSD; Nathan Fletcher, State Assemblyman; Seth Lerer, dean of UCSD's Division of Arts and Humanities; and Karl Beucke, President of Weimar's famed Bauhaus Universit

The Society for Neuroscience recently hosted a webinar for all of its members on the topic of the budget sequestration event that will happen next year without some kind of positive action by Congress. The presentation was a call to action backed by a sense of urgency to protect American scientific research funding from a brutal, policy-induced beat-down.

The Gallic War showed Julius Caesar as a great military leader, proof that even 2070 years ago politicians who get stuff done got farther ahead than politicians people simply liked. It is also the first instance of a military commander documenting a campaign, so we know quite a bit. 

Is your decision-making suspect?  Do you continually date strippers or bad boys who are 'getting their band together' and wish you could instead replace your own judgment with a prosthesis?

Maybe one day.  Researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have created a prosthetic device which is capable of restoring decision-making due to reduced capacity due from brain disease or injury - in non-human primates, anyway.

Variation in facial shape is an easy way to explain phenotypes in humans to people who don't understand biology all that well. Monozygotic twins have almost identical faces and siblings usually have more similar faces than unrelated people, implying our facial morphology is under genetic regulation - but still little has been known about the genetic basis of normal human facial morphology. 

In a recent ScienceDebate questionnaire response, speechwriters for Candidate Mitt Romney tried to distinguish themselves from speechwriters for President Obama on education(1), and then proceeded to say the exact same thing Candidate Obama said in 2008 about education - that the union system of protecting the teachers who have been around the longest rather than rewarding the ones who are the best is a big mistake.
 

Here is a diet plan that requires no special meal purchases or even exercise, it just requires a willingness to believe that correlation-causation arrows fly backwards.  People, especially women, who read food labels are thinner.

The results of surveys on the relationship between reading food labels and obesity indicated that the body mass index of those consumers who read the label is 1.49 points lower than those who don't read food labels when shopping for food. This translates as a reduction of almost 9 lbs. for an American woman 5 feet 3 inches tall weighing 163 lbs - already obese.

The idea that we are inside a simulation is true anyway (if we define “simulation” as being described as emergent from a computational substrate). Nick Bostrom, director of Oxford University’s 'Future of Humanity Institute', and others became famous with such more than 2000 years old ideas warmed up in fashionably modern lingo, see Simulation Hypothesis on Wikipedia.

The holographic universe: A “simulation” anyway!

What would the world look like with 7 billion people and no way to scientifically have created better ways of producing food?  

A lot of poor vegetarians, that's what.  And only rich people eating meat.

Organic food corporations love to claim that their process is 'sustainable'. Vegetarians love to claim that meat is both unethical and bad for the planet.  It makes them happy partners ... as long as science is ignored.

The publication of the complete human genome sequence in 2007 made the genetic code readily accessible to researchers and served as a platform for the countless advances in science,medicine, and sequencing technology which were to follow.

Following the completion of the human genome project, researchers set out to develop a comprehensive ‘map’ of which genes coded for which gene products, or proteins.This allowed researchers to track how a protein was affected when a gene sequence was altered and the resulting changes within the cell. Subsequently, a number of diseases and disorders were linked to changes-or mutations- within protein coding genes.