Archive for May, 2016
NYTimes.com: Scientists Talk Privately About Creating a Synthetic Human Genome
Saturday, May 14th, 2016Seeking Robert Levinson, the C.I.A. Consultant Who Vanished – The New York Times
Saturday, May 14th, 2016proovread: large-scale high-accuracy PacBio correction through iterative short read consensus
Saturday, May 14th, 2016Kuwait to require DNA testing of all tourists – Wild About Travel
Thursday, May 12th, 2016Good looking: 6 surprising ways to improve your eyesight | New Scientist
Thursday, May 12th, 2016QT:{{”
Nolan already takes the supplements himself, and thinks taking all three is important. Hammond, however, thinks it is best to get these compounds from your diet, by eating plenty of vegetables – kale, spinach and red peppers are among the best sources. Eggs are another. “We like things to seem like drugs, but you’d always be better off just eating some spinach,” Hammond says.
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https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22630220-800-good-looking-the-veggies-that-really-do-boost-night-vision/
Good looking: 6 surprising ways to improve your #eyesight
https://www.newscientist.com/round-up/eyesight Eating spinach results in demonstrable improvements
Many Middle-Class Americans Are Living Paycheck to Paycheck – The Atlantic
Wednesday, May 11th, 2016QT:{{”
I went to college; got a graduate degree; taught for a while; got a book contract; moved to a small, inexpensive, rent-controlled apartment in Little Italy to write; got married; and bumped along until I landed a job on television (those of you with elephant memories may remember that for three years, I was one of the replacements for Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert on the PBS movie-review show Sneak Previews). Then my wife and I bought a small co‑op apartment in Brooklyn, which we could afford, and had our two daughters. My wife continued to work, and we managed to scrape by, though child care and then private schools crimped our finances. No, we didn’t have to send our girls to private schools. We could have sent them to the public school in our neighborhood, except that it wasn’t very good, and we resolved to sacrifice our own comforts to give our daughters theirs. Some economists attribute the need for credit and the drive to spend with the “keeping up with the Joneses” syndrome, which is so prevalent in America. I never wanted to keep up with the Joneses. But, like many Americans, I wanted my children to keep up with the Joneses’ children, because I knew how easily my girls could be marginalized in a society where nearly all the rewards go to a small, well-educated elite. (All right, I wanted them to be winners.)
Still, we moved to the tip of Long Island, in East Hampton, where we wouldn’t have to pay that exorbitant private-school tuition and where my wife could eventually quit her job as a film executive to be with the children, the loss of her income offset a little by not having to pay for child care. (When people look at me admiringly after I tell them I live in the Hamptons, I always add, “We live there full-time like the poor people, not only in the summer like the rich people.”) We rented a house and made a go of it. After Martin Scorsese bought the movie rights to my biography of the gossip columnist Walter Winchell, we even managed to put together a down payment to buy the house we’d been renting.
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http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/my-secret-shame/476415/
Race Is a Social Construct, Scientists Argue – Scientific American
Wednesday, May 11th, 2016Professor suspected of being a terrorist because of a math equation
Wednesday, May 11th, 2016Prof suspected of being a terrorist because of a #math equation http://usat.ly/273zpEI What if he’d drawn chemical models instead HT @Layth
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/05/07/professors-airplane-math-leads-flight-delay/84084914/