Little is known of the ancestry of Africans captured and transported by Europeans and Arabs during the trans-Atlantic slave trade.   A new website launched at Emory University this week,  African-Origins, provides some of the identities of Africans aboard early nineteenth-century slaving vessels.  This information might make it possible to trace the the origins of Africans forcibly transported to North America before President Thomas Jefferson signed the law banning importation of slaves in 1807, and to other countries well after that.   Public participation will be critical to piecing together the missing history.   

I have once before put down some thoughts about computing devices and the situation for scientific use of computer technology, hoping to get some response and start some fruitful discussion. It remained with the hopes, some comments appeared there, but not really in the direction I think is important.

In his recent blog post "The World Is Not Woven From Real Stuff", Sascha Vongehr wrote:

Some merely claim that we need quantum mechanics so that the electron does not fall into the atom’s nucleus. Any classical electric charge would spiral into the atom's nucleus. The material that they make up would collapse.... Well, how convincing is this argument? Does it convince you? It would not convince me without a severe dose of already knowing at least a bunch of electromagnetism. Why could there not be some other, more intuitive explanation of why atoms do not collapse?

The last flight of the space shuttle Endeavour will be both manned and squidded.

If you are in science and you have heard the name Paul Feyerabend, it is likely because you have heard the term "post-modernist" and, if you know about post-modernism, you likely do not think much of deconstructionist silliness like that evolution and creationism are both 'cultural traditions' because sociology and psychology play a role in how science is done.

Last night on PBS's NewsHour, Robert MacNeil answered viewers' questions.

ROBERT MACNEIL: Well, perhaps he's right.
We tried to concentrate on what we thought were urgent issues, urgent problems. And a lot of adults with autism, particularly those who describe themselves as a kind of neurodiversity community, are high-functioning people with autism, who have busy and productive lives in the world, who serve a wonderful purpose of helping the community at large to understand and witness autism and be tolerant of it.

It's not exactly news--the Navy's decision to fund a huge, interdisciplinary research project on squid skin is so last year--but the topic cropped up again and started me wondering: why do squid use different techniques to make different colors?

Here's an explanatory bit from MSNBC:

A new study of electroencephalography (EEG) readings published in the Journal of Neuroscience says that despite the major neural overhaul underway during adolescence, most teens maintained a unique and consistent pattern of underlying brain oscillations.  They say this lends a new level of support to the idea that people produce a kind of brainwave "fingerprint."

They recruited 19 volunteers who were 9 or 10 years old and 26 who were 15 or 16 years old to sleep for two consecutive nights in the lab while EEG electrodes recorded oscillations in their brains during both REM and non-REM sleep. For each child she repeated the measurements about two years later.

BNK Petroleum announced today that the Lebork S-1 well, on the Slupsk concession in Poland has been drilled, cased and cemented to its total depth of 3,590 meters. The well was originally drilled to 3,517 meters and 223 meters of whole core were recovered. At that time a full suite of logs were run. After evaluation of the logs it was decided to deepen the well to its final depth of 3,590 meters, after which another full suite of logs were run and 113 sidewall cores were taken over the additional interval drilled. 

According to 2010 World Health Organization data, almost 1 billion people in the world lack access to safe drinking water. Diarrheal disease is the second leading cause of death in children under five years old, and is responsible for killing 1.5 million children every year. Children who are malnourished or have impaired immunity are most at risk of life-threatening diarrhea.