Huge news, and hat tip to excellent food-policy writer Monica Eng at the Chicago Tribune: In a piece published Tuesday, she details that 300 hospitals in the Chicago area and nationwide have begun preferentially buying and serving meat that is raised without the use of antibiotics….
Huh. This is interesting. Read the rest here.
Bora continues his interview tradition on his new site.
You won’t believe this photograph, as usual.
I’m one of those dreadful animal-centric zoologically inclined biologists. Plants? What are those? Fungi? They’re related to metazoans somehow. Lichens? Not even on the radar. The first step in fixing a problem, though, is recognizing that you have one. So I confess to you, O Readers, that my name is PZ, and I am a metazoaphile. But I can get better. …
…Let’s talk about sex. And let’s talk about stress. And then let’s talk about how increases in glucocorticoids are not the be all end all of psychiatric pathology….
Sometimes a whole bunch of stories on the BBC amuse me all at once, even when they are not necessarily funny. Is it because I read them in a British Accent? Or because of the quaint bits that can only happen in an Old World news story? Or is it just that the British are different yet the same enough for me to see behind a curtain that might otherwise appear as a wall?
So let’s review the BBC morning news.
By the Quantum Pontiff. Interesting list. Could be an internet meme.
…The park encompasses the giant caldera of a hotspot-fuelled ‘supervolcano’ that last exploded 630,000 years ago, and is famous as the place to see geysers, hot springs and other hydrothermal activity, all powered by that same hotspot. …
In surveying the diversity of living organisms, the 20th century evolutionary theorist Theodosius Dobzhansky did not see “a formless mass of randomly combining genes and traits.” Instead he perceived pockets of discontinuity organized around available ecological niches – clusters of occupied “adaptive peaks” separated by rifts and valleys representing vacant spots in the natural world. Big cats, for example, formed their own mountain chain distinct from the cluster of dog species, and dog species were likewise separated from bears. By looking at the ecological and evolutionary topography of species, life’s pattern would emerge.
The anti-Darwin industry among fundamentalist Christians has produced thousands of pages of misinformation in their attempt to tar and feather the theory of evolution. I have responded to many of these false claims previously. However, one assertion that is especially outlandish is that the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was a devoted Darwinian who funded a program to create “ape-man Superwarriors” in his goal for world domination. As Creation Ministries, publisher of the Journal of Creation and advocate of a young Earth literal interpretation of the Bible, insisted in 2006…
Tomorrow we begin the obstetric countdown to goat birthing. This is only our second time ’round with this, and while I’m less nervous than last time (way more nervous than the actual goats, though), I’m still a little worried. Mostly about Selene, who after her bout with meningeal parasite last year has some residual weakness in her back legs. Although she gets along great, can still jump on the stanchion, etc… and is a fine milker, I’m worried she’ll have trouble delivering.
Science After Sunclipse rants about Google Books. Here.
As many of you know, I moved my blog Culture Dish yesterday from ScienceBlogs, where it’s been the past few years. As Carl Zimmer pointed out in his post about PepsiGate and the many bloggers who relocated, moving a blog is no small undertaking. Fortunately, I have a rockstar web designer who created this blog here yesterday and transferred my old Culture Dish archives to this site. …
I think the strike is still on. One of the problems we have around here is communication, and it is not just between management and bloggers. Nobody tells me anything. But another problem we have around here is patience. So I’ll try to be patient.
In the meantime, I continue to blog at my old site, and here are a few recent non-trivial installments you may find interesting:
Can you train an adult brain? (An actual science post!)
Web Reactions to #SbSTRIKE (Humor, tragedy)
Learning the Bash Shell (A repost to keep you amused, if you are into this sort of thing)
… or something. I’ll be here, on strike.
Continue reading Adam …. call me #SbSTRIKE