Import from blogger prepends ‘>’ character

New Year’s early morning featured sun and blue skies over the valley fog, but by the time I left the house for the First Day Hike at the Droop Mountain Battlefield Park, these high…

How she reads so much

“The first rule of fact-checking is that everything you read and hear is wrong.”

“Though it might seem an irredeemable place, it turns out that the Pit—located in the mining town of Butte, Montana, and operational between 1955 and 1982—is proving to be a rich source of unusual extremophilic microorganisms, which have produced novel and compelling bioactive metabolites.

Read more: http://failuremag.com/index.php/site/print/the_berkeley_pit/#ixzz1fb2KZMJ9

“Newt Gingrich, you might say, is the world’s most hard-core fundamentalist…..
To give you a more complete understanding of how compulsively Gingrich abuses his favorite words, I searched Nexis transcripts and news accounts with the goal of plucking out every single phrase in which he uttered them. I started in the present day, and made it all the way to the beginning of 2007…. behold all loosely alphabetized 418 entries.”

Martin Enserink
Scientists have created an H5N1 avian influenza strain that has been genetically altered and is now easily transmissible between ferrets, the animals that most closely mimic the human response to flu. Flu researchers believe it’s likely that the pathogen, if it emerged in nature or were released, would trigger an influenza pandemic, quite possibly with many millions of deaths. The virus’s creators say the research, which has been submitted for publication, promises major public health benefits. Knowing exactly what makes H5N1 a virus with pandemic potential is useful because scientists can look out for such changes in the wild and prepare countermeasures. But the work is the subject of a heated debate among scientists, biosecurity experts, and U.S. government officials.