23andMe are offering free lifetime access to their personal genome service to people who have been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease for their participation in their Parkinson’s disease research initiative. Below is a promotional video for the project that highlights Muhammad Ali’s struggle with Parkinson’s disease and his participation in 23andMe’s research program. If you or [...]

The following is an e-mail I received from the ACS Kids & Chemistry Program Manager. I’m re-posting it here to spread the word. If you know any chemistry school teachers who might benefit from this program, please forward them the relevant info. With the support of a grant from the National Science Foundation and the [...]

Many of us, especially the current or former graduate students among us, are addicted to our breakfast caffeinated beverage of choice. Mine is tea, but if I had to guess, I’d wager that the most popular option is coffee. We chug it down in the morning to get ready for our day, we sip it [...]

Physiology The wonderful quail… and what Sen. Coburn should learn about it and Cocaine and the sexual habits of quail, or, why does NIH fund what it does? Bora and Scicurious tackle the topic of another study that came under fire in Senator Coburn’s Wastebook. What’s Inside: Enzyte Male Enhancer. It’s mainly just a bunch [...]

I like video games (I will rip up some Assassin’s Creed whenever I get a long weekend, do NOT get me started). My cat likes video games too, even though she doesn’t understand that she’s playing them. On a whim not too long ago, I downloaded a “games for cats” app on my iPad that [...]

The short of it (covered in depth by Michael Eisen, and Razib tipped me off to the issue) is that Carolyn Maloney, a congresswoman funded by Elsevier, which is a major for-profit publishing company, is trying to pass the Research Works Act, which would deny Americans free access to research funded by taxpayer money. Currently, [...]

As I expected, this set of links is a bit shorter than the last. Also, I just discussed my new year’s resolution with Kedar, and it is to blog more often. Feel free to ping me on Twitter if you think I’m doing a bad job living up to this resolution. The Evolutionary Errors of X-Men [...]

If you’re reading this post, congratulations! You’ve made it to the end of 2011! You may be going out tonight to ring in the new year with friends and family, and if so, there’s a good chance that you’ll be sipping some champagne when the clock strikes midnight. Below is another video from Byte Size [...]

2011 was an exciting, stressful, occasionally scary, and very fruitful year for me, personally and professionally. I hope you are all pleased with the way life treated you this year. And if not, there’s always 2012! Instead of reviewing my activities in the past year, I thought I’d do something a little different and share [...]

Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) has a degree in medicine, so I would expect that he’s had some rudimentary biology education at some point in his life. However, you wouldn’t know it just from glancing through the entries in his “Wastebook“, a list of projects funded by the government that he considers wasteful. A good handful [...]