My Own Thoughts

Live Science has an article entitled “Grammar May Help Fight Bacteria.” Supposedly, thinking of peptide chains like sentences and replacing the nouns gave the scientists “new artificial bacteria-fighters.” Hah! And you thought grammar was only to get you out of English class. If you read the post, you’ll see they think they’ve got something that [...]

or end up in jail. That seems to be the bottom line for research Clayton Cramer reported on. The UK prison trial at Aylesbury jail showed that when young men there were fed multivitamins, minerals and essential fatty acids, the number of violent offences they committed in the prison fell by 37%. Although no one [...]

National Geographic has a post about going to the doctor and getting your genome checked to find out what is wrong with you. A couple of thoughts. One: Do I want the doctors to have my genome? Two: How would checking my genome have fixed the problem the doctors had diagnosing the excessive scarring inside [...]

Iraq Body Count discussion of the Lancet study. IBC does NOT support the war in Iraq. A survey researcher who worked in Iraq for two years refutes the Lancet study in the WSJ. Both of these excellent additional sources were pointed out by Stop the ACLU, one of my daily blog reads. Another daily read, [...]

and the Boy Scouts are an indication of how. The Boy Scouts are a nonprofit and had access to certain places. Now they no longer have that access because they don’t admit gays and atheists. Other nonprofits do have that access. So religious groups can believe what they want to, but there will be a [...]

Reuter’s Health says, “Good early family life may counter depression gene.” I like that.

this article from Wired is something you might want to read. It’s about how sexual predators are on MySpace but that MySpace says they can’t find them. “The automated script searched MySpace’s 1 million-plus profiles for registered sex offenders — and soon found one that was back on the prowl for seriously underage boys. That’s [...]

Another great article on discrimination, this time from Uncle Jimbo at Black Five, highlights some problems for the people who are getting the goodies via discrimination. Again the discrimination is against whites and Asians and for blacks and Hispanics. A previous post of mine on this subject can be found here.

A cool article from Reuter’s. Lots of their stuff goes away, so I copied what I was interested in. … discovered two winged creatures carved on a basalt slab dating from the Hittite period in the second millennium BC…. …unique carvings of, among others, sparring lions, bull men, and a figure of a half man [...]

New Scientist says that “Facial expressions appear to be at least partially inherited, according to a study of blind people and their relatives.” Good. Now I can quit being upset that the big smile with the eyes almost closed that my husband doesn’t like is also smiled by my eldest son. It’s genetics, so I [...]

That’s a new word made up by someone (linguists) to mean “green-blue.” Apparently many groups don’t differentiate the color(s). Read about it at Nature. I wrote about the number of colors in a language varying, blue is green II, and language coloring vision earlier in my blogging career. I keep coming back to it because [...]

No, not me. But one of my best friends, who is one month younger than I am, is going to be a grandmother in six weeks. Yes, I know I ought to have known before now… But I wrote the mother a few weeks ago and she didn’t tell me, so I am not sure [...]