Diverse perspectives on science and medicine
LIZARDS AND GLOBAL WARMING Been reading about how the warming planet could affect the gut microbes of lizards. Well, strictly speaking, how ambient temperature affects lizard cloacal microbes, apparently the lizardly equivalent. A recent study,
VIRAL DISEASES: H7N9 BIRD FLU China is undergoing its worst epidemic of human cases of H7N9 bird flu since the virus’s discovery in 2013, some 460 cases between last October and February of this year.
SCIENCE ADVISERS AND SCIENCE ADVICE The new Administration hardly lacks for Fake News, but surely one of the best such items is the rumor that Trump planned to appoint 2008 Vice-Presidential candidate (and climate-change denier)
ONCE MORE, LIFE ON MARS Let’s take a deep hopeful breath and look forward, shall we? People have discovered that it’s pretty difficult to move to Canada. So there’s a lot of talk about going
NO MORE DISEASE BY CENTURY’S END? Pediatrician Priscilla Chan and her husband, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, “believe we can cure, prevent or manage all diseases within our children’s lifetime.” Their one child so far, a
THE MORAL MEANING OF MOM AND DAD AND MITOMOM It’s not clear to me why there are so many headlines about the birth of the latest so-called “three-parent baby.” It’s not as if this is
TOM WOLFE ON EVOLUTION AND DARWIN AND CHOMSKY Bango! The famed New Journalist Tom Wolfe’s takedown of Charles Darwin and evolution is apparently his usual over-the-top hoot. This I relay second-hand because I haven’t read
DANCING IN THE STREETS OVER NEARBY PLANET PROXIMA B It’s now perfectly respectable to talk about interstellar travel, says Cornell astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger. She’s coauthor of an unpublished paper speculating about how life could survive
TRAVELING WITH THE ZIKA VIRUS TO MIAMI AND RIO The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued its first-ever travel advisory in the United States. It says pregnant women (and women planning conception
BREAKING NEWS ON EPIGENETICS: AN UPDATE ON MUKHERJEE’S NEW YORKER PIECE As I wrote here at On Science Blogs in May, the excerpt from Siddhartha Mukherjee’s history of genetics The Gene that the New