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I’m as fond of animals as the next guy. Maybe even, as I contemplate the exorbitant cost of transporting my seven year old dog to Australia, a little fonder than most. Like most folks, I love little furry creatures and would be personally loathe to do them any harm. Like most people, I ignore the […]

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Science Tuesday is running a day behind this week, but better late than never. Those of you who know me will realize how difficult it is for me to report this research. I am a carnivore. I find any meal that lacks a large flesh component as unsatisfying. I am extremely suspicious of people who […]

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“Breathe in all the diesel fumes
Admire the concrete landscaping
And doesn’t it feel free?”
-Jay Farrar - “Feel Free”
There is nothing to induce a simmering fury in me on my morning bicycle commute like following a diesel exhaust spewing, and inconsiderately piloted, bus. The narrow streets of Oxford barely allow for two cars to pass side-by-side - […]

 

 Jay Farrar - "Feel Free" [3:14m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Today at A Free Man: The Real Deal
One of the several things that I will miss about working in academia is unfettered access to academic journals. The cliche of academics locked away in ivory towers is reinforced by the unfortunate fact that many, and certainly the most important, of our journals are protected by a […]

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I feel a little bit like a traitor writing this post. I was trained as a maize geneticist and the recent interest, scientific and financial, in corn-based ethanol as a biofuel has been a boon to anyone in the corn business.
The problem is that an increasing number of scientific studies are indicating that corn-based ethanol […]

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Great Interview Week continues in a scientific vein today. In last week’s Nature, a paper coming out of Dee Carter’s lab at the University of Sydney described the discovery of a previously unknown marine species. That, in itself, is noteworthy. However, the organism they found - an unremarkable unicellular brown alga - turns out […]

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“Your oldest brother was away at a home
and you didn’t meet him ’til you was nineteen years old
Old enough to know better, old enough to know better
but you took to his jaw line and long sandy hair…”
The Drive-By Truckers - “The Deeper In”
Geneticists love nothing more than a good inbred organism with which to work […]

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“Thought of you as my mountain top,
Thought of you as my peak.
Thought of you as everything,
I’ve had but couldn’t keep.
Linger on, your pale blue eyes.”
-The Velvet Underground - “Pale Blue Eyes”
The instant that my blue-eyed son Zach was born - to a green-eyed mother and brown-eyed father - I became interested in the genetics of […]

 

 The Velvet Underground - "Pale Blue Eyes" [5:53m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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The human genome, and most others for that matter, is a massive and complex template containing the written instructions for life. Those instructions, our complement of protein coding genes, make up only about 1.5 percent of the genome and are nestled among billions of base pairs of so-called junk DNA. This is a misnomer, however, […]

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The discovery of the New World in the 15th century presented a novel opportunity for exchange of culture, society and biology between two geographically isolated worlds. It did not go particularly well. At the human level, it has been generally accepted that the New Worlders got the short end of the stick as Europeans rained […]

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