Jennifer Barfield, a professor of assisted reproductive technologies at Colorado State University, clearly explains how it can come about and what led to the development of the technology that has made it possible. The key point is that in addition to the DNA that comes from the father and the mother, the fertilized egg also contains mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) that plays a vital role in producing energy.
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Albert Einstein’s travel diaries that he maintained on his travels in China and Japan and Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in 1922-1923 have just been published and they contain descriptions of what he saw that are deeply at odds with the enlightened views we normally associate with him. He makes statements that can at best are described as xenophobic and at worst as racist.
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Ever since the Islamic revolution in 1979, Iran’s women are required to wear at least a headscarf when out in public and this rule apparently applies even to visitors to that country. Now an Indian woman chess grandmaster has withdrawn from the Asian chess championship to be held in that country because she refuses to follow the rule.
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Here’s another of Galifianakis’s passive-aggressive interviews with famous people. And because I am so clueless about contemporary pop culture, I have no idea who Cardib is.
No doubt many of you would have heard of this story about a raccoon that climbed up the outside of a 23-story building while people looked on aghast and afraid of a slip that would send it to its death. Fortunately, after many hours of suspense that lasted almost a day with the raccoon occasionally pausing for rest on window ledges, the story has a happy ending.
In 2016, Maine voters in a referendum chose to institute preferential (also called ranked choice) voting in their state for all elections, something that I have long advocated as the most democratic way of voting. Naturally the two main party establishments dislike the idea because it lessens their control over who should be the party nominee for general elections and also because it enables third party candidates to show their true strength since their supporters need no longer fear that their vote will be ‘wasted’ by going to a candidate who was unlikely to win.
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Readers may recall my post from back in February about the mysterious sounds that were causing headaches (literally) to US embassy personnel in Cuba. It led to all manner of speculations about the Cubans themselves unleashing, or allowing some other nation to unleash, some high tech Cold War-type sonar devices on them. The fact that the evidence produced was highly vague and that the Cubans had no motive for doing such things did not stop the wild speculations.
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Seth Meyers gave his take on the recent summit in Canada. In it he shows a puppy named Baxter.
But that Baxter is an imposter. Here is the real Baxter the Wonder Dog, taken in my backyard a few days ago.
Lost in the fuss over the G7 and Singapore summits was the other big news of the week, that the Miss America pageant had decided to eliminate that portion of the competition that had the contestants posing in swimsuits, which apparently now consists exclusively of skimpy bikinis. This has given media the chance to run photographs of women in bikinis with double-entendre headlines like the one above. So I thought, why not me too?
I have been reading the reactions to the Singapore summit meetings and have been bemused by the hostile reactions to it almost across the board. What struck me was that many of them were extremely irate about one particular aspect, that Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un were shown as equals, in that they had equal numbers of flags of the two nations, stood and sat side by side, and in every other way the two leaders were treated as if they were of equal standing.
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