Monthly Archives: April 2008

One year of Genomicron.

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As hard as it is to believe, it has now been exactly one year since I launched this blog more or less on a lark. Since then, I have come to view blogs as a legitimate apparatus for public outreach, and have found participating in the blogosphere useful not only for conveying information to readers about my area of study but also for keeping me updated on interesting new research in fields peripheral to my own. I have made some new friends, learned a great deal, and, I hope, delivered some interesting and useful posts. I am grateful to all of you for reading the blog (especially those of you who visit frequently or have subscribed to the feed) and to my fellow bloggers who have linked here. I think the fact that people are reading the blog shows that there is demand for scientific information, and that people are eager for interaction with those who spend their time generating it. I hope that other professional researchers will continue to adopt blogging as a supplement to publishing in the far less accessible scientific literature.


I intend to continue with this experiment in blogospheric outreach, and I hope that Genomicron continues to evolve as it has over the past year — I hope you will continue to read along.


What can be done about press releases?

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Maybe I was a little slow out of the gate on that one, but it dawned on me a while ago that press releases are one of the main problems when it comes to undermining the reliability of science reporting. This is especially relevant because sites like ScienceDaily, LiveScience, PhysOrg, and EurekAlert repost them with few or no changes, and this ends up being the only information about the study that many people read. In the most recent case, RPM and Larry point to a press release about an interesting article in PLoS Biology. Now, I am all for having accessible summaries of new articles, but inaccurate ones or those that play on common misconceptions are worse than nothing. So, what can be done about this? Can we require approval of press releases by the authors of the paper? (Not that this will help if the authors choose to partake in irresponsible hype). Are scientific blogs the only hope?

Expelled Exposed.

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I have not seen Ben Stein’s movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, but the reviews and interviews with Stein strongly indicate that it is nonsense. For a growing collection of material relating to the movie, see Expelled Exposed, provided by the National Center for Science Education. Recent highlights include reviews by Michael Shermer and Richard Dawkins, who are in the movie, the PZ Myers expulsion episode, and a panning by none other than Fox News.


Genome size and complexity (again).

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Some time ago, I wrote about the (non-)relationship between genome size and gene number, which also included some discussion of the obvious decoupling of DNA content and “morphological complexity” (however defined). Now, Steve Matheson of Quintessence of Dust has a fun way of demonstrating this, by asking readers to guess which animals have larger genomes than which others based on intuitive concepts of complexity. Even I have to think about it for some of them, and I actually measured some of those genome sizes! (In part, this is because there is often significant diversity in genome size within groups of morphologically similar species, which in itself shows the disconnect between complexity and DNA amount). The first two installments of the quiz are here and here. Have fun.


Dr. Genome in Okinawa.

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Although I have brought an inordinate amount of work to do, I am supposed to be on vacation here in Japan. We are staying with my brother and his wife and baby near Osaka and doing trips to various places from here. For the first one we all went to visit Okinawa for a few days. Okinawa is a wonderful place, though there is much to find tragic and frustrating about its history and current situation. I won’t get into anything political as this is not the blog for that (useful phrase: “Watashi wa America-jin ja arimasen. Kanada-jin desu.”). On a fun note, check out the name of the spa and their skin care product line in the hotel where we stayed in Okinawa City.