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Acts of Cruelty

Edythe London is a professor of psychiatry at UCLA, specializing in what happens in the brains of drug addicts. "Dr. London's research has advanced the study of substance abuse and the development of new approaches and probes for studies of...

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October 30, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (17)

This Space for Rent

There's an old bit of snarkiness that comes up whenever some entrepreneur talks of challenging NASA for the heavens: "The way to make a small fortune in space is to spend a large one." John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace is the...

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October 29, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (7)

James Watson Steps Down

James Dewey Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, seems to concede he brought this on himself. Last week, as you'll recall, he was quoted as suggesting that Africans were generally less intelliigent than westerners. The explosion that followed was...

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October 25, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (51)

Why do People Choose to Live in Harm's Way?

Maybe the wind is shifting, the air is cooling, and the fires are coming under control. Still plenty of pain to go around. In the meantime, some of you have posted a difficult question in the last couple of days:...

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October 24, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (5)

Fire From Above

The numbers, as you've seen elsewhere on our site, are staggering--a quarter of a million people evacuated from the fire zones in California. And the fires flared up from almost nothing. The fires are large enough that they're visible from...

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October 22, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (35)

Not Long Ago, in this Very Galaxy

Gina Sunseri has sent this from Houston: "Luke Skywalker's original Jedi lightsaber is now aboard the space shuttle Discovery, ready for the scheduled Oct. 23 launch with the STS-120 astronauts. Star Wars fans from around the world are invited to...

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October 19, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (2)

Watson Apologizes

James D. Watson, quoted in Sunday's Times of London as suggesting black Africans had inferior intelligence, has now put out a statement of apology: "I cannot understand how I could have said what I am quoted as having said," Watson,...

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October 18, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (40)

James Watson: Pushback

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on New York's Long Island, home base to James D. Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, has posted a response to his quoted words about race and intelligence: "Statement by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory...

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October 18, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (7)

James Watson, DNA Decoder, on Race and Intelligence

James Watson, who shared a Nobel Prize in 1962 for the structure of DNA, has, ever since, been both an eminence-grise and bete-noir of the science world. Sunday's Times of London ran a lengthy profile of him by Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe,...

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October 17, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (143)

The Poplar Field

Prof. Sharon Doty, an environmental scientist at the University of Washington, leads a team that has created a sort of super tree. They take poplar trees, insert a gene from rabbits--and the result is a plant that soaks up and...

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October 16, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (14)