The American Academy of Pediatrics recently recommended that screening for autism be incorporated into routine
physician check-ups, even if no concern has been raised by the parents.

Such routine screening of all children for autism gets a thumbs down from researchers at McMaster University in a Pediatrics study.  The researchers say there is "not enough sound evidence to support the implementation of a routine population-based screening program for autism."

Lasers (acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation) were invented roughly half a century ago, and in that time, they have found their way to industry, medicine, all kinds of research, consumer electronics, and much more. Pervading modern day western society, several media can be used to generate lasers. But up until now, all these media were inanimate. Not any longer. Research published online on June 12th, 2011 in Nature Photonics (Gather and Yun, 2011) used a living cell to generate a laser (see figure 1).

Figure 1: Illustration of a single-celled laser. (Source: Gather and Yun, 2011)

Germany shortens school ("turbo abi") and abolishes mandatory military training at the same time! This year, those that otherwise would have marched to the shooting range instead squeeze in between the seats taken by immigrants and the standing space occupied by usual graduates wrestling the new “turbo” graduates. The icing on the cake is how the universities deal with it.

You may have heard of Germany’s Thilo Sarrazin and his book “Germany Abolishes Itself: How We Are Risking the Future of Our Nation”. It focuses on the influx of Islamic culture that makes it almost impossible for immigrants to integrate into modern society. It also mentions intelligence being linked to genes, so it is controversial and criticized by people who never read it.

Recombination, the process by which a molecule of (usually) DNA is broken and joined to another one, is one of the main sources of genetic diversity in sexual organisms. Meiotic recombination takes place during the meiotic division (which gives rise to the gametes), and through the process chromosomes show crossover (see figure 1).

Figure 1: An illustration of crossing over during the meiotic division. 

We’ve just finished a documentary on Stephen Hawking and I hand Bobby the dvd and ask him to put it in. “What now, Mama?”  

“Wait and see,” I tell them.

As  the  film starts, my three children, all at various points in the spectrum, all engaged in their own private worlds, perk up and stop to look at the tv where sounds of a person humming begin spontaneously upon the dvd loading.

All three set aside their cards or books and watch. Lily peppers me with questions as music plays and a child(?) draws people in vibrant markers.

Everyone is a journalist due to the modern Internet, we are told.   Not so, says a University of Georgia analysis.    Instead, 2 percent of people who start discussions attract about 50 percent of the replies and that is good news for traditional journalism.

The downside is they used Internet newsgroups to validate this belief - if you aren't familiar with newsgroups, that's because Web-based interfaces killed their popularity but throughout much of the 1990s newsgroups were popular and even Google makes the newsgroup interface more attractive.

And here they come. Much awaited (and anticipated), today the DZERO collaboration presents their findings in the search of the same dijet resonance which made it to the New York Times as well as to several physics blogs around the web, and which brought frantic theorists back to the blackboard to try and figure out a model that could allocate the cumbersome new find.

Did science in newspapers die?  By 2009, USA Today, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal ended their Science sections, leaving just the New York Times as a major paper with a dedicated science section.  CNN cut their entire science and tech team.

Dana Topousis of the NSF discussed the role of the National Science Foundation in the new media landscape at a DCSWA workshop in 2009.  She noted that the NSF.gov's "Discoveries" gets the most traffic of the NSF site.  NSF sees its role as protecting scientist's free speech.  One venture they launched is Science360.gov, as a 1-stop shop for any science news.

Before getting to the review, I thought I'd share some of the lighter side of what comes from actively engaging people who think vaccines are responsible for all of today's ills. 

You know you've spent too much time on the internet when you dream that  Seth Mnookinborg (fascinating combination, no idea why, except for anti-vaccine folks linking all of the science-based writers together in various combinations that have me as a minion, an accolyte, or even Orac-in-a-skirt) is advising you on something related to blogging about vaccines.

Most people know that we have tried to judge what may happen during global warming by creating gigantic models of the Earth system, and see how it responds to forcing from different factors.

Another way that we approach the problem, is, (in my opinion) a much more interesting line of research, and that is looking in the geological record to see how the Earth responded in the past to global warming events, and to use these to inform us about what may happen now.