CRISPR gene editing produces unwanted DNA deletions
"DNA-cutting enzyme used for genetic modification can create large deletions and shuffle genes."
How Long Will The Supreme Court’s Conservative Bloc Survive?
It's really hard to know how long Supreme Court Justices will live. It's true that many will live until their 80s but life expectancy is largely random at micro level. A car crash or some other kind of accident could end the life of a justice prematurely.
July 19, 2018 6:21 pm Update
“Any historian of warfare knows it is in good part a comedy of errors and a museum of incompetence; but if for every error and every act of incompetence one can substitute an act of treason, many points of fascinating interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination.” – Richard Hofstadter, 1964
an epic TV news fail – Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
"The recent heat wave, which broke records around the world, has been a staple of TV news. Yet over a two week period, only 1 of 127 segments on the topic mentioned climate change."
American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage – Streetsblog USA
""It’s not an exaggeration to say American cities have been built for cars more than people.""
West on East Branch
Altona fire, critical to jack pine survival, snuffed out
"Firefighters fully contained the Flat Rock wildland fire Tuesday night after it burned 547 acres of the jack pine forest. But that’s a good thing, said Kristopher Alberga, a regional forester with the State Department of Environmental Conservation. “On this pine barrens in particular, it’s really essential to have periodic fires because the fire is really what perpetuates the forest here,” he said.
"Unlike most tree species, jack pines actually require fire to open their pine cones, allowing them to propagate in the ash bed below. By next summer, new jack pines should have germinated, creating new, dense thickets across much of the area, said Mark Lesser, an assistant professor of ecology at SUNY Plattsburgh. Jack pines exist in about only 20 places worldwide, including on the Flat Rock, Alberga said. Fires such as this one have taken place there five or six times there in the last 100 years."