How do fish adapt to life in hydrogen sulfide?

To find out, and to read some of the best recent blogging on evolution, visit the new Carnival of Evolution, 35th Edition, at Lab Rat. And go to the official carnival page to learn more about the Carnival of Evolution and perhaps to sign up as a future host.

Carnival of Evolution 14

Welcome to Quintessence of Dust and to the 14th Edition of the monthly Carnival of Evolution. Thanks for stopping by, and for supporting scientific carnivalia, members of a taxon that seems to be flirting with extinction.

One good reason to visit a carnival: brain stimulation. Brain Stimulant offers some thoughts and speculations on Free Will and the Brain, touching briefly on themes of selection and adaptation, and he doesn't charge as much as the clinic would.

Another good reason: you can bump into real scientists, the kind who actually work on evolution. Ryan Gregory has a day job as an expert on genome evolution, but somehow finds the time to blog at Genomicron. Recent entries there include fascinating pictures of ongoing field work. For this month's carnival, be sure to read two reviews of the ideas of Stephen Jay Gould, focusing on controversial papers by Gould published in 1980 and 1982. You may find that you have been misinformed about Gould's positions, and you'll surely learn more about evolution.

Michael White at Adaptive Complexity is another blogging scientist, and he writes very clearly about parasitic DNA in Selfish Gene Confusion.

David Basanta is a biologist who runs a cool blog called Cancerevo: Evolution and cancer, which is subtitled "Studying cancer as an evolutionary disease." Check it out, and don't miss his recent piece on Stem cells and ecosystems.

Zen Faulkes is a biologist who blogs at Neurodojo. That's cool enough, but the subtitle of that blog is "Train your brain." Hey, this could be a theme for the whole carnival! He recently wrote about a walking bat in New Zealand. Bat evolution...we can't get enough of that. I've written about it myself.

Brains and their origins come up in an extensive discussion of early animal evolution at AK's Rambling Thoughts. The post is The Earliest Eumetazoan Progression.

At The Loom, the peerless Carl Zimmer discusses AIDS in chimps and the relevance of the story to conceptions of scientific progress. AIDS and The Virtues of Slow-Cooked Science is engrossing and important. And John Wilkins discusses some new fossil apes in an excellent recent post at Evolving Thoughts.

John Lynch reviews a new book on Alfred Russell Wallace. Caveat lector. Brian at Laelaps takes us on a historical tour of the work of Florentino Ameghino. Are those elephants or not? Brian's discussion is typically excellent.

At The Spittoon, AnneH discusses new findings concerning both the past and the future of the mammalian Y chromosome.

Hoxful Monsters is a future host of this carnival; Nagraj recently reviewed some recent work on pattern formation in the development of spiders. Wonderful evo-devo stuff.

Someone at Wired wrote some swill about the "10 Worst Evolutionary Designs" which annoyed a few smart bloggers. At Deep-Sea News, Dr. M sets the record straight. The title is self-explanatory: Worst Evolutionary Designs? No! Brilliant Solutions to the Complexity of Nature and Constraints.

Larry Moran at Sandwalk is attending a conference entitled Perspectives on the Tree of Life. He's posted reviews of days one and two so far.

And that's our carnival. Thanks for reading, and on the way out I hope you'll look at my nearly-complete series on Notch and deep homology.

Next month's edition will appear at Southern Fried Science. To submit posts, use the submission form found at the Carnival of Evolution site. And if you like the carnival, help us promote it with a link, and/or consider hosting. More info at the carnival site.

Carnival of Evolution 14: Call for Submissions

The 14th edition of the excellent Carnival of Evolution will go up here at Quintessence of Dust this Saturday, 1 August 2009. Send submissions and links, to your own work or to good stuff you've seen elsewhere. Images welcome too!

Mendel's Garden, 28th Edition

Hello and welcome to the 28th edition of the genetics blog carnival known as Mendel's Garden, where we celebrate blogging on topics related to anything touching on what Mendel discovered (or thought he discovered).

While reading these interesting and informative pieces, please think about work that should be featured in a future edition and/or blogs (like yours) that would serve well as future hosts.

So do tomato seeds get you excited? No? Oh. Well, they should, if you're at all interested in evolutionary genetics. Michael White at Adaptive Complexity explores some new findings in which evolutionary changes in seed size in tomatoes are explained to a large extent by variation in a single gene, pinpointed through the use of standard genetic crosses. He summarizes the work as "a clear case of natural genetic variation controlling the size of seeds, variation for evolution (or plant breeders) to work on when larger or smaller seed sizes are needed to adapt to a new environment." Not peas, but close. Mendel would be proud.

"Mendel would be proud" happens to be the title of a post by Michael at Ricochet Science, pointing to a new educational site which he hopes will help students and laypersons learn genetics.

Ouroboros describes experiments on an interesting DNA repair enzyme called Ercc1. One might think that deletion of the gene encoding this protein (it controls nucleotide excision repair) would be a Bad Thing, but in fact mice that have been so altered are strikingly cancer-resistant. And there's more, but you'll have to check out the excellent Ouroboros blog (focused on aging and related biology) yourself.

At the Spittoon, Erin introduces her post entitled "Miss Con-GENE-iality" with this teaser: "If Facebook is starting to take over your life, maybe your genes are partly to blame." The subject is heritability of various aspects of social connectedness, and instead of whining "I could quit Facebook anytime I want" just go read about these new genetic analyses of our social behavior.

On a more serious note, Razib at Gene Expression explores the genetics that might underlie the interesting case of Sandra Laing, a woman born to apparently white parents but who appeared to be "of a different race." And in South Africa. For more on the genetics of human appearance, see the Eye on DNA interview with Dr. Tzung-Fu Hsieh, developer of a test for the red hair gene.

Oh, and before you give your credit card number to a personal genomics outfit, spend some time at Genetic Future – Daniel notes when a company is charging too much, and comments on some recent remarks by Francis Collins on the future of "consumer genetics."

Organic transgenic food might sound like an oxymoron, but Anastasia at Genetic Maize explains why it's not and introduces the new word for such methods: orgenic.

Jonathan Eisen at The Tree of Life is recruiting people to help with analysis of metagenomic data. Go there to learn more. I forgot to inquire about salary and benefits.

Back to evolutionary genetics: Todd at Evolutionary Novelties reports on an extraordinary example of evolutionary convergence, involving proteins called opsins which are best known for their roles in vision.

Need more evolution (with genetics)? Go read about pink iguanas at Nothing's Shocking. This should get you thinking about speciation, and that means it's time to read about "speciation genes" at Evolving Thoughts. John's not crazy about the term. What a grouch.

And here's a new twist on the whole "species boundary" concept: Ed at Not Exactly Rocket Science writes about a single gene in glowing bacteria that accounts for the ability of the same bacterial species to colonize (in a mutualistic relationship) two completely different organisms (pinecone fish with glowing "headlights" and squid with a luminous "cloaking device"). Now that's cool.

Let's give the Digital Cuttlefish the last word, at least because the blogosphere recently treated us to intensely disturbing images of cuttlefish meeting violent ends. At that little piece of blogospheric heaven, the Digital Cuttlefish reports on the cuttlefish genome project. It's not what you think – it's better.

Thanks for reading, and look for the next edition of Mendel's Garden the first Sunday in March at Biofortified.

Mendel's Garden here this weekend

The 28th edition of Mendel's Garden, a genetics blog carnival, will appear here at Quintessence of Dust on Sunday. Please send submissions, whether you wrote them or not.

Mendel's Garden #27

Mendel's Garden is a genetics blog carnival overseen by Rich over at evolgen. The new edition is up at Another Blasted Weblog and there's some excellent stuff in there, including some very Mendelian tidbits. Next month's edition will be right here at Quintessence of Dust.

Weekly sampler 18

1. A nice new Tangled Bank went up yesterday at The Beagle Project Blog, which is a cool site worth visiting at other times, too.

2. Last week saw the unveiling of the Evangelical Manifesto, "an open declaration of who Evangelicals are and what they stand for," which seeks "to rally and to call for reform." The document has sparked some pretty intense discussion among Christians I know. Some of my colleagues at Calvin have denounced it fairly strongly, at least in part due to frustration with evangelical politics. Jamie Smith (another Calvin colleague) has some interesting remarks in three parts (II and III) at Generous Orthodoxy Think Tank, and profitable discussion ensued. Here's one excerpt of clear relevance here:

All too often we have disobeyed the great command to love the Lord our God with our hearts, souls, strength, and minds, and have fallen into an unbecoming anti-intellectualism that is a dire cultural handicap as well as a sin. In particular, some among us have betrayed the strong Christian tradition of a high view of science, epitomized in the very matrix of ideas that gave birth to modern science, and made themselves vulnerable to caricatures of the false hostility between science and faith. By doing so, we have unwittingly given comfort to the unbridled scientism and naturalism that are so rampant in our culture today.

All well and good, but it's the last sentence I don't like. It's certainly true that evangelical credulity and ignorance are potent fuels for New Atheist engines, but in my opinion that's not the primary danger of the malignancy of obscurantism. Evangelical buffoonery on scientific matters betrays a deep and latent gnostic infection – North American evangelicals, in my experience, too frequently veer right to the brink of outright Gnostic heresy. "False hostility between science and faith," it seems to me, is actually real hostility toward the natural world, as evidenced by a pervasive preference for supernatural action as "God's work." I would have written something very different at the end of that paragraph – something sort of like this:

By doing so, we have unwittingly given comfort to the unbridled gnosticism that is so rampant in Christendom today, a great and ancient heresy that cleaves the creation in two, inviting the open degradation of God's good work by those who mistakenly assume that what is natural or material is worthless.

But I do like the document overall, and I agree with one commenter at the Generous Orthodoxy Think Tank who pointed out that it's the discussion of the document that makes it come alive.

3. I'm currently engaged with a discussion on the ASA listserv with one pseudonymous Mike Gene. He's recently published a book, and blogs at a site promoting that book. But wait...he's one design proponent who seems to be swimming clear of the Discovery Institute wreckage, by virtue of uncharacteristic intelligence and intellectual integrity. It's still ID, and I'm not enthused about the pseudonymity, but if you're looking for a pro-ID thinker who actually acts like an adult, Mike Gene is someone to check out. James McGrath gives the book a strongly positive review over at Exploring Our Matrix.

4. ORFans are genes that seem to exist in isolation, say in one or only a few closely-related species. They seem to have just popped into existence in those species, amid a huge common collection of genes shared by, say, all animals. If this sounds weird or interesting to you, go to Panda's Thumb to learn more. (Yes, of course, ID fellows have seized on this as another piece of ignorance on which to build.)

5. Check out someone's illustrated list of the world's 25 weirdest animals. I'm pretty sure I saw Dobby in there.

6. Gordon Glover is continuing his excellent series on science & Christian education. What do the Antipodes have to do with evolution? Are they anywhere near the Antilles or the Galapagos? Well, I'm not going to tell you; Gordon does it better.

7. Publishers Weekly online has a little interview with Ken Miller. He mentions his part in the intriguing new Templeton effort in which they've gotten a collection of big-brained white men (and one woman) to address the question "Does science make belief in God obsolete?" Included is a debate between Miller and Christopher Hitchens.

8. On the ASA web site, Jeffrey Schloss of Westmont College has an extensive review essay on Expelled, "The Expelled Controversy: Overcoming or Raising Walls of Division?" A blog was set up to allow discussion among ASA members (I'm not a member, dang it); not much there yet, but maybe that will change soon.

Tangled Bank and Encephalon

Two excellent new carnivals have gone up in the last day or so.

Yesterday it was Encephalon at SharpBrains. Encephalon is a neuroscience and psychology carnival that had been in hibernation for some months, and it's nice to see it back. My post on endocannabinoids is included in yesterday's edition.

And just posted on Greg Laden's Blog is Tangled Bank #99. It's loaded, as usual, with excellent and varied contributions.

Tangled Bank #98

Hey! Welcome to Tangled Bank #98, and thanks for stopping by. If you've never been to Quintessence of Dust, the lobby is below and to the right. I hope you'll poke around a little.

PZ didn't give me a budget for refreshments, but if you come to the house I'll make sure we at least have plenty of guacamole. Chips are here, and beer is over there. Our city was once used by Anne Lamott as a metaphor for plainness, but it's much cooler than most people think. You can get to our house on a nice bus system, and after the carnival we can pick one of two Ethiopian restaurants. My day job is at Calvin College, but right now I'm on sabbatical in the lab of a friend and collaborator at the Van Andel Institute in downtown Grand Rapids.

I know a junior-high science and math teacher who displayed a poster on her classroom wall that read, "Free knowledge: bring your own container." The image, of course, was a human brain. That's how I feel about the blogosphere, and if there's a theme for this Tangled Bank, that's it, although "junk DNA," the plague, heat (you'll see), sex and food are some other keywords. The last two are personal favorites, so...let's eat!

Is that a shrew eating a cephalopod? A shrew gagging on a cephalopod? A grey-faced sengi gagging on a cephalopod? You probably know what it is; if you don't, head over to The Daily Mammal and check out today's special. Ambitious and beautiful. Maybe it'll be beetles next; that'd take, what, 50 years?

Uh, "grey-faced sengi?" Like Matheson knows what that is. But Brian does, despite being "educated" at Rutgers. See one, and read about it, at Laelaps.

"Indisputably cute" is how the pika is described at The Beagle Project. The article is a fascinating lesson on natural selection, and it features the cute pikas and their remarkable colonization of high, cold regions. It's Detecting natural selection: a pika's tale.

Lots of those cute daily mammals have provided hot meals to pit vipers, and especially rattlers. Curious? Of course you are. Rigor Vitae is worth a look just because of the name, but today the article to read is A Serpent's Tail, exploring the rattle and discussing a new member of this charming group of creatures.

If you prefer birds, have a look at the White-Cheeked Pintails at 10,000 Birds. Mike says they "seem perfectly suited to that relaxed West Indies environment." We're expecting 10" of snow in the next 12 hours. Harrumph, Mike. Gorgeous birds, though.

What do hummingbirds and rattlesnakes have in common? Well, some hummingbirds use their tails to make sounds. Cool sounds, too: one species (Anna's hummingbird) makes a "high-frequency chirp...during his display dive." Read more about this Novel mechanism for sound production in birds at Behavioral Ecology Blog.

It's a famous question: "What good is half a wing?" GrrlScientist recaps a very recent paper examining mechanisms of evolution of flight in her post Flying Lessons: Additional Insight into the Evolution of Flight in Birds at Living the Scientific Life. (Warning: Living the Scientific Life is a carnival unto itself, so be sure to read just one article and hurry back.) One of my first posts on Quintessence of Dust reviewed an article on bird evolution and genome size; check it out if you get the chance.

Want weird? How 'bout "cactus animals"? Technically, they're chancelloriids, and they're in the spotlight at Catalogue of Organisms in Scleritome Week: The Cactus Animals.

At Invasive Species Weblog read about how flame retardants are likely to provide assistance to invasive plants, one of which is known to make wildfires worse. We Didn't Start the Fire...or maybe we did will wipe that Tangled Bank smile right off your face.

This should help. Go to PodBlack Cat's Blog and feast on this celebration of science and poetry: Nothing In the 'Verse Can Stop Me. In The Bath should prepare you well for a segue into, um, reproductive biology – read it, then go straight to The Tree of Life and ask yourself, "Is that a sex organ on the cover of Nature?" Check out the comments.

Proceed immediately to Not Exactly Rocket Science and read Sex runs hot and cold. Well, okay, the full title is "Sex runs hot and cold – why does temperature control the gender of Jacky dragons?" but we were on a roll with the sex thing and I didn't want to lose our momentum. The post reviews a recent study that addresses a longstanding question in evolutionary biology regarding sex determination.

Have you "worked up a good sweat" at this point? At Swans on Tea you can learn about how "a good sweat" can be too much of a good thing. Read No Sweat, and bring a towel.

Lemme guess: you're hungry now. :-) Let's carb-load on biblical pasta. No really: our server at VWXYNot? reviews "Ezekiel 4:9 Penne" in Holy Penne, Batman. Best line: "I tend to be in favour of the separation of church and dinner, but this stuff was quite tasty." So you prefer potatoes? Greg Laden writes in The Great Potato Origins Debate May Be Settled that the history of the European potato may need to be rewritten, and along with it our understanding of potato blight. And at rENNISance woman, Cath Ennis reviews recent work on the role of diet in evolutionary divergence (with regard to gene expression). She asks "Are we really evolving, or just eating too many Big Macs?" I'd say both...

I think "negligible senescence" sounds like a great name for a band, but it's also an interesting topic in evolutionary biology. Some organisms just don't age. (Like Mick Jagger. Or not.) Explore recent work on this subject at Ouroboros, in a pair of posts: The evolution of negligible senescence and The evolution of negligible senescence, part II: Organisms that are remotely like us.

Recently, The Black Death was featured prominently on some of the finest science blogs around. But a Black Death Carnival just doesn't sound right, so the plague is here on our house. Aetiology included an entire series on the topic of "What caused the Black Plague?" Retrospectacle ran five posts on the Black Death. And Archaeozoology discusses Yersinia pestis, ancient DNA and the Black Death. It's a sub-carnival of death that's worth a chunk of your remaining time on earth.

After all that heavy Black Death stuff, read about The Galaxy that ate Detroit. Why Detroit? Maybe Phil at Bad Astronomy is a White Sox fan. And is this biology? Well, it involves eating, doesn't it?

Oh, speaking of eating (again), go back to Living the Scientific Life to see how certain parasites make sure that they get from one host to another. Berry butts! Yum!

From red butts on ants to... well, have you ever wondered whether red leaves can still perform photosynthesis? Get to Further Thoughts to find the answer.

Punctuated equilibria made headlines in the blogosphere last week. To learn more about the dustup, and about the issues involved, go to Sandwalk and read Larry Moran on Macromutations and Punctuated Equilibria. Then check out a very interesting follow-up at HENRY, illustrating principles of Punctuated equilibrium and the evolution of languages.

Assessing Diversity in the Past is a detailed examination of another recent discussion of evolutionary biology on the blogs. Mike at The Questionable Authority works through a recent paper on recovery of ecosystems after the end-Permian mass extinction. People pay serious money for education like this.

Creationists make mischief with the term "junk DNA," and I'm working on a series on the subject. But the real work has already been done by Ryan Gregory at Genomicron. On his new blog, DNA & Diversity, he reposts a review of the topic – Junk DNA: function and non-function.
On the same subject, at The Open Helix Blog, you'll find a review of a recent article on non-coding RNA: Non-coding, non-functional or junk ncRNA. Pseudogenes are one kind of "junk DNA," and Science and Reason provides a basic overview in Human gene count drops again.

All this genomic analysis required DNA sequencing, and that process is becoming far faster and cheaper. Michael White at Adaptive Complexity explains in What Next Generation DNA Sequencing Means For You. And what about the converse – building custom genomes? Jim at from Archaea to Zeaxanthol provides a Synthetic life followup, commenting on the recent announcement of the first human-made genome.

If there's anything left of your brain at this point, drag it over to SharpBrains and read Looking inside the Brain: Is my Brain Fit? to learn some basics about brain imaging and the concept of "cognitive reserve."

At Pure Pedantry, Jake describes How tool use is encoded in the brain, reviewing some very recent and intriguing neuroscience. Turns out the tool is treated by the brain as a part of the body! [joke deleted]

Down Syndrome (Trisomy 21) is well-known for (among other things) its effects on the nervous system. Less widely recognized is apparent resistance to solid tumor formation in Down sufferers. At Guadalupe Storm-Petrel, barn owl discusses a recent report on this topic in Down Syndrome Mouse Models: Trisomy Represses Formation of Intestinal Tumors.

How's this for an interesting question: "Would you vaccinate against drug abuse?" Would you vaccinate against, say, cocaine? This has been recently proposed, and DrugMonkey explains the ins and outs before posing the tough questions.

Vaccination makes me think of homeopathy. (Poo.) Evolved and Rational contributes A skeptical look at homeopathy.

At Effect Measure, Revere patiently explains the potentially alarming but surely complex situation leading to "an unexpectedly high rate of Tamiflu resistance" in European influenza this year. The article is Tamiflu resistance in seasonal flu: the devil is in the details.

Okay, we're almost at the end. But before we hit the bottom, get acquainted with ResearchBlogging.org by reading the introduction at BPR3. Most of the posts in this carnival were flying the ResearchBlogging icon, and the aggregator is a great resource in which to find quality science blogging. Free education!

Deep Sea News belongs at the bottom, I think, although the subject is about The Beginning. Check out Hydrothermal Vents, Life and Everything Else to learn about The Lost City and carbonate chimneys.

Here ends Tangled Bank #98. Thanks for coming by. The 99th Edition will be hosted by Greg Laden's Blog on Wednesday, February 20.
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Image credits: star-nosed mole from this post at The Daily Mammal; others created at this sign generator site.

Weekly sampler 4

This week's theme is, um, "fun with biology." Seemed apropos after all the bickering I did this week. Which I'll mention as well.

1. So I assume you saw that Craig Venter's outfit produced the first "synthetic genome" recently. All this means is that they synthesized a very long piece of DNA, and included within it all the components known to be necessary for bacterial life. The simplistic line is that this is "synthetic life"; the standard scientific caveat is that this human-made genome hasn't been used to direct an actual organism. Yet.

2. And I'm guessing that you heard that the makers of this synthetic genome included within it a "coded message." The message itself is pretty uninspiring. ("METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL" would have been perfect, but anything would be better than the name of a company and its techies. Boooooorrrrrring!)

3. Well, what kind of message would you put into a genome? And by the way, it's not a completely silly question; it will soon be easy enough to do, and will take the place of name an asteroid/star after yourself/loved one as the latest vanity gift. Want to check it out? First you need to have a look at the alphabet that's available. Don't worry – it's not just A,T,G,C. That's the DNA alphabet, which is translated into the protein alphabet. The means of translation is what is commonly called the genetic code: each three-letter DNA "word" is translated (via RNA) into a single amino acid, a string of which adds up to a protein. There are 20 different amino acids in nature, and scientists have devised a single-letter abbreviation system to facilitate the display of protein sequences. So, here's your alphabet:

Letter	Amino acid	Letter	Amino acid
A	Alanine	M	Methionine
C	Cysteine	N	Asparagine
D	Aspartate	P	Proline
E	Glutamate	Q	Glutamine
F	Phenylalanine	R	Arginine
G	Glycine	S	Serine
H	Histidine	T	Threonine
I	Isoleucine	V	Valine
K	Lysine	W	Tryptophan
L	Leucine	Y	Tyrosine

You may have noticed that we're missing some very useful letters. Two vowels are out (O and U) and you'll have to do without B, J, X and Z. The Venter folks used V in place of U (a neat trick), but I don't know what we'll do for an O. (I guess we can use Q in a pinch.)

Still, you can do a lot with an alphabet like that, starting with "Methinks it is like a weasel." (But not "in the beginning.") And you can search genomes to see if they contain favorite words or secret codes just for you. (Is "ELVIS" in the human genome? Yep. "LIVES"? Yep. "ELVISLIVES"? Alas, no.) Want to try? Go to the Protein Blast page at NCBI, enter your word or phrase in the big box at the top, select "Non-redundant protein sequences (nr)" for your database, and enter "human" (or any other interesting species, or nothing to search all genomes) in the organism box. Click on the Blast button at the bottom, and ignore the window that comes up first; it will probably report that it hasn't found any "putative conserved domains" and will give you an estimate of how long you'll have to wait for results (mere seconds, usually). Then...presto!

You might get nothing of course, or you might get a report of X number of Blast hits on the sequence. Scroll down to see the various alignments, which might only encompass part of your search string.

'STEVE' hits dozens of proteins (some "hypothetical"); here's a partial screen shot of the results for 'STEVE' in the human repertoire, showing what the alignment looks like:
The alignments, perfect in this case, are indicated by the subtle red arrows. When I Blasted 'STEPHEN' the best match I got was 'STEPHE.'

So much more fun than biblical numerology, if you ask me, and Carl Zimmer seems to agree: he's sponsoring a contest to see who can find the longest word embedded in protein sequences. I'm gonna work on it!

4. Another way to waste time: GenePaint, a site full of anatomical maps, for the purpose of revealing gene expression patterns. Just what I need, Shelley.

5. Some of the bloggers at ScienceBlogs are having a book club of sorts, simultaneously reading and blogging on Stephen Jay Gould's hefty opus, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. I haven't read it yet, and maybe now I won't have to.

6. Instead, I'm reading H.W. Brands' biography of Ben Franklin, The First American. Very interesting; expect some quotes to find their way here.

7. Seen any good science blogging lately? Send me a heads-up – I'm hosting Tangled Bank next week and I'm looking for submissions, especially from bloggers who might not know about this excellent carnival.

8. Some seem to think I've been too hard on Tony Campolo. Well, check out what I wrote about Jerry Coyne in response to his brainless outburst in response to a blog post about "hopeless monsters." (There was a related discussion on Greg Laden's Blog in which I commented further.) See? I'm an equal-opportunity basher.

Tangled Bank here in two weeks

I don't know if Les Misérables will ever come to Grand Rapids, and all we got from U2 was a lecture by Bono. But, in two weeks, Quintessence of Dust will host Tangled Bank, and that'll have to do in the meantime.

Tangled Bank is an excellent old science/medicine blog carnival, and the 6 February edition will be #98. The current edition just went up at The Inoculated Mind. It's a blog I've visited occasionally; its author has turned up in discussions on the Reasons To Believe site, and it's a cool blog. Go check out Tangled Bank #97 over there, and see what else The Mind has to offer. Free admission!

So, please send me links to articles that you think the world should see. And get a haircut, will you?