Category Archives: Science And Society

General Science, Popular Culture, Science And Society

Sagan Memories

12 Comments

I was never a big fan of Cosmos, though I think that it did a lot of good in interesting people in space. I’m listening to a rerun on the SCIHD channel, and I recall why.

Sagan’s voice is too pompous, too arrogant, and the ubiquitous sonorous tone, and pauses, which lent themselves to parody (“billions and billions”) are really arrogant. I wish that he had written it, and someone else narrated.

Education, General Science, Science And Society

Losing His Marbles

31 Comments

I have to agree with Derb:

I’ve always liked Ben’s stuff — used to read his diary in The American Spectator way back in the 1970s. Smart, funny, worldly guy, with just that endearing streak of eccentricity. I’m sorry to see he’s lost his marbles.

Me, too. Some conservatives have this very strange blind spot when it comes to evolution.

[Update a few minutes later]

Derb eviscerates Stein’s thesis. As is usually the case, his attack on evolution (or as he calls it, “Darwinism”) is founded on a profound ignorance of the subject.

[Late afternoon update]

Well, this is a heck of a way to celebrate the old man’s 199th birthday:

Florida’s department of education will vote next week on a new science curriculum that could be in jeopardy, because some conservative counties oppose it.

Nine of Florida’s 64 counties have passed resolutions over the last two months condemning the new curriculum that explicitly calls for teaching evolution. The resolutions, passed in heavily Christian counties in the state’s northern reaches, demand that evolution be “balanced” with alternative theories, mainly creationist.

That’s not really Florida. It’s more like deep southern Georgia, culturally…

Science And Society, Technology and Society

More Stem Cell Advances

This stuff really is moving along at a good clip:

“Our reprogrammed human skin cells were virtually indistinguishable from human embryonic stem cells,” said Plath, an assistant professor of biological chemistry, a researcher with the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research and lead author of the study. “Our findings are an important step towards manipulating differentiated human cells to generate an unlimited supply of patient specific pluripotent stem cells. We are very excited about the potential implications.”

The UCLA work was completed at about the same time the Yamanaka and Thomson reports were published. Taken together, the studies demonstrate that human iPS cells can be easily created by different laboratories and are likely to mark a milestone in stem cell-based regenerative medicine, Plath said.

Repeatability–one of the hallmarks of solid science. Of course, they always have the standard caveat:

“It is important to remember that our research does not eliminate the need for embryo-based human embryonic stem cell research, but rather provides another avenue of worthwhile investigation.”

I think that, at some point, the embryo work will be abandoned, because even for many researchers, it’s ethically problematic. But they will have to do a lot of correlation and validation before they can get to that point.

In any event, stuff like this brings us much closer to escape velocity.

[Via Fight Aging]