The NOAA reports that “we are currently tied with 1998 as the warmest January–September period on record.”
Having now experienced a near-record-breakingly warm summer and fall, I can now report what the effect of global warming will be in St. Louis, Missouri: the normally irritating plague of backyard mosquitos will become an insatiable horde that renders our backyard thoroughly uninhabitable well into October and possibly November.
‘Copy Number Variants’ (CNVs) are hot. A CNV is a sizeable chunk of DNA that’s either missing from your genome or present in extra copies. Chunks of DNA get copied or deleted on a surprisingly frequent basis. We’ve all got CNVs, most cases they are probably benign, but CNVs are becoming an increasingly appreciated as a significant source of medically important genetic variation. ‘Recently appreciated’ because we now have the technology to detect CVNVs reliably.
A recent paper in The Lancet links CNVs with attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder, and find that genetic variants in ADHD occur in the same genes linked with autism and schizophrenia. What this suggests is that CNVs are the reason my ADHD child unfailingly neglects to turn in her completed homework. Continue reading “Why CNVs Explain My Kid’s Grades”
There will be no survivors
Exactly what nuclear world war would look like was a matter of diverse opinion in the nuclear apocalypse novels of the 1950‘s. Many post-apocalyptic novels of this decade portrayed World War III as an essentially known if more extreme extension of the destructive experience of World War II, much the way that World War II was like World War I jacked up a notch. At worst, large swaths of land would be rendered permanently uninhabitable for decades (The Long Tomorrow), centuries (The Chrysalids), or even millennia (Pebble in the Sky); nevertheless, the destruction of nuclear bombs was fundamentally the same as what came before. Death occurrs on a massive but not extinctive scale, and while there is some danger from fallout, the worst damage is primarily in those areas of direct hits. This was a logical view at the time – after all, the results of the bombing of Hiroshima, at first glance, weren’t much different from the firebombing of Tokyo.
Along comes Nevil Shute in 1957 with a shocking book that thoroughly rejects the conventional picture of nuclear destruction. Continue reading “Apocalypse 1957: On The Beach”
This is even more true than when this was written was 50 years ago, especially w.r.t. iPods, smartphones, and other silicon-based accessories.
‘Preamble to the Instructions on How To Wind a Watch’:
Think of this: When they present you with a watch they are gifting you with a tiny flowering hell, a wreath of roses, a dungeon of air. They aren’t simply wishing the watch on you, and many more, and we hope it will last you, it’s a good brand, Swiss, seventeen rubies; they aren’t just giving you this minute stonecutter which will bind you by the wrist and walk along with you. They are giving you – they don’t know it, it’s terrible that they don’t know it – they are gifting you with a new, fragile, and precarious piece of yourself, something that’s yours but not a part of your body, that you have to strap on like your body like your belt, like a tiny, furious bit of something hanging onto your wrist. They gift you with the job of having to wind it every day, Continue reading “Why technology makes us miserable”
Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance recently commented that the recent history of dramatic revolutions in physics, together with the incomprehensible but widely covered debates over string theory and other physical theories at the frontier, tend to make people think that the foundations of everyday physics are much more volatile than they really are.
He makes a fairly basic point, one that I would guess is accepted by the vast majority of scientists, and yet this point is surprisingly controversial in popular science discussions:
Continue reading “The Distorting Effect of Scientific Revolutions”
The Finch and Pea 