DefCon Blog has put up a video clip of an unused embryo’s fate.
Watch it get eliminated. It sounds horrific, but it’s a matter of pulling a tube out of a flask of liquid nitrogen and putting it in the trash. That’s what the Religious Right is getting all worked up about.
In a surprising discovery, reading the Wall Street Journal opinion pages will make you 57% dumber, will kill 8,945,562,241 neurons, and will force you to invent ridiculous statistics. Don’t follow that link! The article will make you cry as you go through a Flowers for Algernon experience.
I’ve been a bit sex-obsessed lately. No, no, not that way—it’s all innocent, and the objects of my obsessions are all fish.
A little background explanation: one of my current research projects is on the genetics of behavior. This is a difficult area, because behavior is incredibly complex with multiple levels of causation, and one has to be very careful when trying to tease apart all the tangled factors that contribute to it. It takes numbers and lots of controls to sort out the various contributors to a behavior.
It’s really not that hard to understand, but what’s blocking acceptance are the amazing lies people say about Plan B emergency contraception. Ema found a ghastly op-ed that got everything wrong; try reading my summary of Plan B, then the op-ed by Abby Wisse Schachter, and see if you can spot all the errors. You won’t be as thorough as Ema, though, who has posted a wonderfully detailed, complete annihilation of Schachter’s article.
If you’re at work, I hope you have headphones; if you don’t, check in once you get home. Here are a couple of audio recordings of good science.
Suddenly, the FDA has decided to allow over-the-counter sales of the Plan B contraceptive. They’ve imposed an age restriction—you must be 18 or over to buy it—but it’s a smart move in the right direction, and it’s about time.
DarkSyde is on the stem cell story, and he uses Neurotopia’s summary of the biology.
I just don’t understand the other side’s argument. Adult stem cells are not a substitute for embryonic stem cells, at least not yet. The anti-stem cell research crowd wants to claim that we don’t need ES cells, that AS cells will do everything we need, but they don’t think it through. If we want to make AS cells that are functionally equivalent to ES cells, we need to understand ES cells—but they want to deny us the ability to look at ES cells. Furthermore, if we could convert an AS cell line to totipotency what we’d have is…millions of cells we could replicate in the lab, each of which has the potential to become a human being. We’d go from a few “snowflakes” to a blizzard. Then what?
Despite Brownback’s snowflake stunt and Santorum’s insistence that zygotes are persons, the House stem cell bill, HR810, has passed, as have the two inconsequential smokescreen bills that Santorum tossed up. It’s going to be interesting to hear Bush’s stammered excuses when he vetos it; I’d figure he’d be reluctant to do the veto because it would mean taking undeniable responsibility for an action, something he doesn’t like to do, but then I realized he has another out. He’s going to blame God for telling him to kill the bill.
I predict that he will make some pious excuse like that when he vetoes it. That’s our George: he didn’t do it, it’s not his fault, the buck stops somewhere else, he’s a delegater, not a responsibility-taker.
