Burt Humberg at The Panda's Thumb writes: Section 1: Evolution is a Vital Basic Science for Medicine I’ll start off my fisking by criticizing an aspect of medical practice and, to make sense of it, those who aren’t physicians need to know that there’s a great divide in the practice of medicine...

By Lauren Wissot [Bandaged will have its world premiere at the London Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, April 3rd and 5th. Maria Beatty’s Belle de Nature , Strap On Motel , and Post-Apocalyptic Cowgirls , and Lauren Wissot and Roxanne Kapitsa’s Un Piede di Roman Polanski will all be screening at th...

Confession #2801 When we watched "P.S. I Love You" and you cried along with me, I was unbelievably touched! I can't even imagine how I would cope with losing you, and to know that you feel the same about me is a wonderful, exhilarating feeling. I won't tell anyone that you cried (except maybe my mom...

My degree is going to be in biochemistry & molecular biology, and not in chemistry.  This is primarily because the curriculum was more appealing to me (I wanted to take biology classes as well, and it's hard to do that electively as a chemistry major), and I really didn't discover my intere...

So, I'm shopping for a few groceries this evening at Safeway and as always am jetting right past the organic foods, and as I shove my cart I muse a bit about my resistance to purchasing and eating organics. It's partly the expense in these treacherous economic times, but that's kind of a...

Poor Jeremy Piven. First, the Emmy-award-winning Entourage star made headlines in December after he bowed out of the Broadway run of David Mamet's Speed the Plow, less than two months after it opened to strong reviews, citing high mercury levels in his system -- ostensibly from eating too much s...

This community I think is fairly biology-focused, I seem to have noticed, but this post is written in hopes of reaching some chemists, perhaps of the physical type. :] I'm a senior in college, and I've finally figured out what I might possibly be interested in: physical inorganic chemistry. And I fe...

Specific strength and toughness (i.e., properties normalized by density) for a wide range of materials systems, showing that the bio-inspired ceramic (hierarchical Al2O3/PMMA ) composites (in red), some containing 80 vol.% alumina ceramic, have strength/toughness properties comparable with that of m...

If we humans are to grow up, we must first understand our role in the scheme of living systems. ... From the SynEARTH Archives. Classes of Life Alfred Korzybski THE problems to be dealt with in this chapter are not easy, but they are exceedingly important. To classify phenomena correctly, they must ...

I have precious little time for the next 60 days or so, and for this reason will be doing a somewhat boilerplate blog update each week until I have more time.  I am encouraged by everyone's performance last week and I even think a invented a slight rule change. See you on Wednesday. Overall Win...