Science and Discovery

A Nobel Prize Well-Deserved

by Michael Cook October 10, 2012

Two stem cell researchers have shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine for 2012, an elderly Briton, Sir John B. Gurdon, and a younger Japanese, Shinya Yamanaka. By a serendipitous coincidence, Sir John made his discovery in 1962 — the year…

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Not Much Difference Between a Human and an Octopus?

by Michael Cook September 17, 2012

Here’s something we missed about the uniqueness of human beings. In July the Francis Crick Memorial Conference, at Cambridge University, decided that we aren’t as exceptional as we once believed. At the conference a group of people, mostly experimental neuroscientists,…

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Why Aren’t We Talking About Stem Cells Anymore?

by Michael Cook August 28, 2012

Stem cell research has hardly been mentioned in 2012, unlike the last two US election campaigns. Salon’s political reporter, Alex Seitz-Wald, points out that strongly-worded opposition is still part of the Republican platform: “We oppose the killing of embryos for…

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What Can We Learn from the Stem Cell Debates?

by Brendan Foht August 14, 2012

The stem cell debates of the past decade and a half were among the most heated controversies about science and politics in recent memory, raising important questions about how to promote and fund scientific research while protecting human life at…

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Man Invents Immortality!

by Michael Cook August 6, 2012

The dream of achieving biological immortality may have taken a big step forward. A 31-year-old Russian billionaire, Dmitry Itskov, claims that his research team will be able to transplant a human brain into an artificial body by 2020, And by…

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Stem Cell Institute Hits Jackpot…With Adult Stem Cells

by Michael Cook July 19, 2012

The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine is rejoicing. For “the first time … research by a CIRM-funded Disease Team has resulted in an Investigational New Drug (IND) approval from the FDA, a critical step in testing promising therapies in patients,”…

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Not a ‘God Particle’–But What Is It?

by Mark Wyman July 11, 2012

The Fourth of July announcement that the long-sought Higgs Boson had been found has led physicists – professional and armchair — around the world to celebrate. The Higgs, often (bizarrely and unhelpfully) referred to as the ‘God particle’, was the…

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The Battle to Reclaim Free Will

by Andrew Mullins July 9, 2012

In a recent issue of Scientific American, Christof Koch, a prominent neuroscientist based at the California Institute of Technology, gives free will a qualified thumbs-down. His approach demonstrates the uneasiness that his colleagues have about the prevailing materialistic interpretations of…

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Does Porn Prevent Rape?

by Darwin June 29, 2012

People will often go to great length to convince themselves that their vices are actually virtues or, short of that, at least that their vices are somehow a bulwark against worse vices.  Sometimes pseudoscience is utilized to lend an empirical…

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Our Very Human Ancestors

by Carolyn Moynihan June 25, 2012

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To one who has seldom given a thought to cavemen as a popular category, let alone to their proper scientific classification, last week’s news that they were painting pictures on cave walls more than 40,000 years ago required some intensive…

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