Last night, a Soyuz TMA-21 capsule carrying three members of the space station’s Expedition 28 crew landed safely in Kazakhstan: Among them was American Ron Garan, who has been taking devastating pictures of the Earth from the station. I mentioned this in an earlier post, but it bears repeating: the Russian space agency says they [...]

Metaphors are essential to writing about science. Even scientists themselves use metaphors all the time, drawing from their familiar experiences to describe the unfamiliar. Building proteins is known as translation, for example, because the sequences of DNA and proteins are akin to words written in different languages. The cell has to translate one language into [...]

Observing Saturn through even a small telescope is amazing. The rings are so obvious and clear that sometimes, when I would show people the planet through my own ‘scope, they thought I was faking the view! But it really is that easy to see them. Well, usually. Saturn, like the Earth, is tilted. That is, [...]

Dan MacArthur points me to this story on the sequencing of the West family. You can read the full paper in PLoS Genetics. When the price point for a full genome comes down to $1,000 or so I plan on getting the code for everyone in my immediate family, just like I got everyone genotyped [...]

I have long had a problem with projections of the racial makeup of the USA which implicitly neglect the complexities inherent in the identity of someone of mixed origin. A new study analyzing Census data on interracial marriages between 1980 and 2008 highlights some of the subtleties: The study also examined trends in biracial and [...]

Astronaut Ron Garan has been on board the International Space Station since April 2011. Tonight, at midnight Eastern (US) time, he will land back on Earth with two of his crewmates. While on the ISS he took a huge number of breath-taking photos of the Earth. One of the very last he shot was this [...]

The antiscience stance of the Republican candidates for President is getting so chaotic I swear I need a scorecard to keep it all straight. The latest: Michele Bachmann goes antivax. No, seriously. Generally associated with the far left, antivaccination rhetoric reared its head at the latest Republican candidate debate. In 2007, Governor Rick Perry of [...]

TechCrunch has a post up on the declining public usage of Google+. It’s been several months since I’ve been “using” Google+. I put usage in quotes because I am not a big active poster on twitter, Facebook, or Google+. But I do participate passively a fair amount. At this point for me I can say [...]

If there’s a bright center to the Universe, astronomers have found the planet it’s farthest from. Called Kepler-16b, it’s a Saturn-like world which has the distinction of being the first discovered to orbit both Sun-like stars in a binary system. OK, Star Wars references aside, this is pretty cool. Most of the planets being found [...]

Yesterday, the Senate subcommittee that funds the NSF, NASA, and research agencies in the Department of Commerce announced that they could see no way out of startlingly drastic budget cuts. The National Institute of Standards and Technology, which develops and curates technical standards for science and industry, will see a 10% drop in its budget, [...]

What’s the News: A new thumbnail-sized microscope will give researchers a way to see what’s happening in the brain of a mouse as it moves around and goes about its business. The microscope, described earlier this week in Nature Methods, weighs less than 2 grams—little enough that it can be fitted atop a rodent’s head—and tracks [...]

[This slideshow may not appear in Google Reader or on mobiles] Reference: McKellar, Chattertton, Wolfe & Currie. 2011. A Diverse Assemblage of Late Cretaceous Dinosaur and Bird Feathers from Canadian Amber. Science http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1203344 Images courtesy of Science/AAAS More on feathered dinosaurs: Earliest bird was not a bird? New fossil muddles the Archaeopteryx story Dramatic restructuring [...]

Biologist George Church, examining a molecular model. George Church, the geneticist behind the Personal Genome Project, is envisioning a package deal: get your genome sequenced, and he and his collaborators will develop a line of induced pluripotent stem cells (IPS) from your tissue, so in the future, you’ll be able upgrade your system with organs [...]

Yesterday, the Senate subcommittee for Commerce, Justice, and Science — the group that initially sets the budget for NASA, among other agencies — issued a press release stating that they had produced a draft bill for the fiscal year 2012 appropriations. In the section on NASA, this release stated simply: The bill provides funds to [...]

New blog URL is here.

I’ve written an introductory post, telling readers what to expect, here.

And I’ve done a first real post over there, entitled “Could Personality Differences Help Explain the Reality Gap on Climate Change?” I have never seen anyone take a crack at it from this angle before, so response should be interesting.

Those of you who have bookmarked will want to redirect to http://www.scienceprogress.org/intersection

Commenting over there is by Facebook, btw, so that will also be something to get used to.

See you!

Imagine you’re living off the coast of California, and you want to get to sunny Florida. That sounds easy enough, but there are three big problems in this imaginary scenario. First, you are a snail, so crossing even a small distance takes a lot of time. Second, there is a continent in the way. Third, [...]

Astronomers working with Fermi — a mission that is mapping the sky in gamma rays — have just released a new catalog of objects detected by the spacecraft. They’ve re-analyzed two years worth of data and have found nearly 2000 objects blasting out this super-high-energy form of light. Here is the all-sky map they made [...]

Genomes Unzipped points me to a Nature survey on personal genomics for scientific researchers. With price points down to $200 or so many scientists have been at least genotyped. Though it varies by domain. Many molecular biologists seem intrigued by the novelty of personal genotyping services. In contrast, in a room of a dozen or [...]

Dienekes relays that Ötzi the Iceman carried the G2a4 male haplogroup. He goes on to observe: We now have G2a3 from Neolithic Linearbandkeramik in Derenburg and G2a in Treilles in addition to Ötzi from the Alps. G2a folk got around. He joins Stalin and Louis XVI as a famous G2a. It was already clear with [...]

I’ve been chewing on the modern human range expansion into Neandertal territory paper for a few days now. But I haven’t been able to bring myself to say much. There are two reasons. First, it’s a simulation paper, and I don’t exactly know what I can say besides being skeptical of the plausibility of some [...]