Tracker: April 2012

As one generally mystified by the blanket opposition in many quarters - legally enacted in some nations - to genetically modified crops, I figured I'd hate an SF Chronicle story this morning by its DC-based reporter Carolyn Lochhead. The hed is Genetically modified crops' results raise concern. It remains off-base, but not as much as I feared and not because of factual error in describing the evolutionary idiocy (my humble opinion) in some of the biggest money-makers within industry's Genetically Modified Organism portfolio.

Briefly, the article reports that terrible things have...

PloS Genetics has just published a new study identifying genes that could provide a partial explanation for why pygmies are so short. It's a fascinating question: Haven't we all been intrigued by pygmies since we first came across pictures of them in the National Geographic when we were kids?

The researchers used a gene chip to analyze the genes of three pygmy groups and three neighboring groups of Bantu-speaking people--who are taller, and with whom the pygmies have sometimes had children, leading to some mixing of genetic traits. They found regions in the genome that seemed related to the pygmies' adaptation to their environments. Genes in these regions are related to insulin and...

Ho boy, I take a few days off (thank you so much Paul Raeburn, Deb Blum, and Boyce Rensberger for stepping up) and come back to worlds of Uh-oh. Not trouble , really,  but worldly news of the alien kind for sure.

#1 )   First up is the blip of news that is not news. Which is that scientists do not know if there is other intelligent life in the universe, or even alien life period, and that what we all want is star-spanning civilizations, or at least communities talking to each other by radio or laser or something.But maybe we're alone.

The specific event in play is that two men in Princeton, Edwin Turner at the Univ. and David Spiegel at the Institute of Advanced...

Let me begin here by acknowledging that I am big fan of Matthew Herper's medical reporting at Forbes, enough so that any day now I may charter a Madison, Wisconsin based fan club and start passing out leaflets and lapel pins.

His work on the business of big pharma and how it works, his insights into the actual pharmaceutical products are clear, rational,...

Asteroid mining: It's a science-fiction staple you can find in Star Trek (the search for dilithium crystals) or in the Asteroid Wars series of novels by Ben Bova.

Now, however, a group of entrepreneurs, including Avatar director James Cameron, Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page, and other Silicon Valley luminaries, say they plan to do it. Planetary Resources, Inc. says it will mine near-Earth asteroids for substances ranging from water to precious metals. "A single 500-meter platinum-rich asteroid contains the equivalent of all the Platinum Group Metals mined in history," says the company's supercharged ...

Last week, I wrote a piece here, On the Corn Syrup Theory of Autism, which took a critical look at a Grist story concerning a scientific paper proposing that high fructose corn syrup consumption was responsible for the rise in autism cases in the United States. My point was that the author, Tom Laskaway, was...

Once, while striding across Harvard Yard with the biologist and Harvard professor E.O. Wilson, I said something about the history of the place, which bears the memory of the footprints of hundreds of thousands of Harvard students, including some who later became presidents or great scholars and thinkers. (Or had less exalted careers; let's be honest.) Wilson raised an arm, swept it across the landscape before us and said the yard's dank, black soil, even after centuries of human habitation, almost certainly harbored species unknown to science.

I thought of that while reading Carol Kaesuk Yoon's lead piece in today...