We had a blizzard this week. It’s bitterly cold right now. I was trying hard to think of good reasons to have left the Pacific Northwest, and this is about the only thing I came up with: Devil’s Club.
At 5pm Pacific time tonight, BlogTalkRadio will have a discussion between Alan Boyle, Seth Shostak, and Don Lincoln on Aliens! Shostak is the SETI guy, whose latest book is Confessions of an Alien Hunter: A Scientist’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
According to Malcolm Gladwell, that means I can do open heart surgery! Any volunteers?
Apparently, I missed the big noise raised about the color of this dress.
Some people see it as blue and black. Others (including me) see it as white and gold.
He tried to argue that global warming is a hoax, because it snows in February.
New Scientist has an article titled 5 things you're dying to ask about head transplants. Yeah, someone said we can expect to be able to do head transplants in a few years, so the media are all wound up and asking stupid questions. Here are the questions New Scientist thought were really important.
What’s the difference between brain and head transplants?
Could the transplant technique work for a cryogenically frozen head?
Would the surgery be psychologically damaging?
I’m a registered organ donor. Could my body be used for this?
There’s one more. It’s so stupid and misleading that I had to single it out.
This child was born prematurely (not good), but was born with the amniotic sac intact (kind of awesome). I’m having flashbacks to The Prisoner.
Two households, both alike in dignity,
On fair Earth, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
(From that great classic play, Romeo and Juliet and an Unnamed Egg Donor)
Let’s compare the scientific relevance of the British House of Lords and the Republican party of the United States.
There are currently concerns about nuclear transfer procedures in human fertility treatments — you may have heard some of the noise in the news about babies with three parents. Cases of mitochondrial disease are passed on from mothers to all of their children, but one way around it is to use donor mitochondria, so woman #1 provides the cytoplasm for a healthy egg, woman #2 provides the nuclear DNA, and a man provides the sperm that fertilizes the genetic material provided by woman #2. That’s three parents, one child.
