Relaunch in 10...9...8...

Quintessence of Dust has been on hiatus for more than five years. It's time to resurrect it. Why now? Because it's 2017, and 2017 is not a time to be quiet.

The first project involves some remodeling. Quintessence of Dust was built almost ten years ago, with a set of themes and goals that don't all fit in 2017. Most notably, the blog was conceived when I was a Christian, and for five years addressed issues and questions that I knew to be of interest to evangelical Christians. I am happily no longer a Christian, and will remodel the blog to reflect that. I do still live in the United States, in 2017, where evangelical Christianity exerts significant influence. And I know a lot about that world. So religion will be an occasional, if tangential, topic. But now I will write as a skeptic, as one who has transitioned from Christian humanism to just plain humanism. The remodeling of the site is mostly to make this clear. I do think I'll keep the Celtic cross in the banner.

In parallel with the remodeling I'll start writing about cool science. And I've already found the topic of my first post or two: a paper from last month that identifies a single mutation in the human genome that may explain (at least in part) the dramatic expansion of the cerebral cortex that occurred in our lineage. The story is a remarkable confluence of topics very dear to me: evolution, developmental neurobiology, and cellular signaling systems. The protein at the center of the story is closely related to the proteins that I spent my postdoctoral fellowship trying to understand. I'll explain all of this in the posts to come.

If you want to have a peek at the story, check out the news piece at the BBC, or the new paper itself (it's open access). The first part of the saga, in which the protein's role in brain development was discovered, was published in 2015 (also open access but requires free registration).

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Image: By Internet Archive Book Images [No restrictions], via Wikimedia Commons