Probably the stupidest quote I have seen in recent memory. From a participant at Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” church rally in Washington, DC:
Asked what had inspired her to fly to the capital from Colorado, Andrea Carrasco started with God and ended with light bulbs.
She came, Carrasco said, to “ask God to restore the country. Our freedom is lost. My freedoms are lost. To be able to preach anywhere we want, to have God in our schools, to drive any kind of car we want and if I want to drive a gas guzzler I can, if I want to eat a lot of sugar and salt, and I shouldn’t be forced to buy medical care.”
Carrasco paused, but only briefly. “To be able to burn the kind of light bulb I want,” she added. “The list goes on.”
Source: Toronto Star
You can’t go for a month without seeing a claim that some new discovery has rewritten evolutionary history. If headlines are to be believed, phylogeny – the business of drawing family trees between different species – is an etch-a-sketch science. No sooner are family trees drawn before they’re rearranged. It’s easy to rile against these seemingly sensationalist claims, but James Tarver from the University of Bristol has found that the reality is more complex.
In case you haven’t been following the series of posts by evolutionary biologist Dr. Arlin Stoltzfus posted on Sandwalk, here is a list hosted at his own site:
The Mutationism Myth, 6. Back to the Future (August 31, 2010) wrap ups the Mutationism Myth series and sets the stage for the future by locating the primary weakness of the 20th century neo-Darwinian consensus in its theory of variation.
Arlin is contemplating starting a new blog where this kind of topic could be explored and discussed, so stay tuned.
Over at the Evolver Zone store, there is an exciting new line of T-shirts featuring a “word cloud” of the most common gene products in nature — the most abundant of which is transposase encoded by transposable elements. If you’re a TE Geek, check them out.
Click here to check out the new shirts. They were created in Wordle using data and the layout idea from Aziz et al. (2010), with design input from my graduate student Tyler Elliott.
Here is a video posted by the Centre For Inquiry Canada of a talk I gave in Toronto a few months ago. Larry Moran was my gracious host, and there were some good discussions over beer not captured on camera. :-)
For some time, I have wanted a new term for the broad category of DNA otherwise commonly referred to as “junk DNA”, i.e., everything other than genes and gene regulatory elements. “Non-coding DNA” is about the best option I have seen, in that it refers to DNA that does not encode a protein relevant to organismal biology, but this doesn’t quite work because some transposable elements do encode enzymes used in reverse transcription. Plus, this is a bit of an ungainly term that isn’t very catchy at all.
One that I think is somewhat catchy and encompasses most of what we need it to, is “DN/A“. Now, “n/a” can stand for either “not available” or “not applicable”, and in this case it would be in reference to organism-level functions for the majority of DNA in the genome. In other words, it does not distinguish between sequences that have an unknown function, no gene-related function, or no function at all, which is what we want.
The only question is, how to pronounce it so that it is distinguished from DNA when spoken? Give us your suggestions in the comments.
If you have alternative suggestions, let us hear them too.
I love Dropbox. I use it to back up and synchronize all my important files, and it has pretty much replaced my need for external hard drives and USB keys. I also use it to share specific folders with co-authors or students so that any changes they make or files they add are synchronized automatically across everyone’s computer. I also don’t have to worry about updating all the files on my laptop before traveling — as long as I will have an internet connection while away, all my files will be updated.
If you haven’t tried Dropbox yet, you really should. And, if you decide to, go ahead and use this referral link — it will give both of us some bonus storage space free.
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