Once the three-billion-letter-long human genome was sequenced, we rushed into a new “omics” era of biological research. Scientists are now racing to sequence the genomes (all the genes) or proteomes (all the proteins) of various organisms—and in the process are compiling massive amounts of data.
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“Amnesty” was supposed to be an easy issue for Ted Cruz in the Republican primary, but Donald Trump and Marco Rubio have mucked it all up for him. Immigration policy is extremely complex, but the failed bipartisan effort in 2013 to pass a comprehensive immigration reform bill created a symbolic fault line dividing Republicans who support eventual citizenship for unauthorized immigrants from those who don’t. For GOP primary purposes, Rubio falls on the wrong side of that line, Cruz does not. Rubio led the fight for that bill... Читать дальше...
In 1951, Dr. Joseph Cyr, a lieutenant of the Royal Canadian Navy, performed life-saving surgeries on Korean combat soldiers discovered drifting in a boat off the shore of North Korea. He was hailed back home as a hero, but his moment in the spotlight was also his undoing. Dr. Cyr, it turned out, wasn’t Dr. Cyr. He wasn’t even a doctor. Fred Demara, a serial con artist, pulled off the surgeries by following a medical textbook. Embarrassed to have been so thoroughly duped, the Navy quietly dismissed him without pressing charges. Читать дальше...
Last Friday, Rick Brattin, a Republican state representative from Missouri prefiled a bill, H.B. 1743, at his statehouse. Its declared purpose: To mandate “that any college athlete on scholarship who refuses to play for a reason unrelated to health shall have his or her scholarship revoked.” Which to student-athletes means shut up and play. While I can’t vouch for Brattin’s interest in collegiate sports—he did not respond to a request for comment—the target of his ludicrous bill couldn’t be more obvious. Читать дальше...
Last Friday, Rick Brattin, a Republican state representative from Missouri prefiled a bill, H.B. 1743, at his statehouse. Its declared purpose: To mandate “that any college athlete on scholarship who refuses to play for a reason unrelated to health shall have his or her scholarship revoked.” Which to student-athletes means shut up and play. While I can’t vouch for Brattin’s interest in collegiate sports—he did not respond to a request for comment—the target of his ludicrous bill couldn’t be more obvious. Читать дальше...
At long last, modern Turkey has been depicted in comic book form.
The work has a modest title, Dare to Disappoint, but its ambitions are large. Its creator, Özge Samancı, has produced a Künstlerroman that also recreates life in Turkey in the 1980s and early 90s, a time when the country’s secular heritage was enforced with a severity that has come under scrutiny in the era of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Here in Turkey, where her book is topping bestseller lists, Samancı has become the... Читать дальше...
The biggest political spin room on Tuesday night was not in Las Vegas for the Republican debate, but in the corridors of Congress, with Democratic and Republican leaders alike justifying the massive year-end spending and tax bill as a victory for their side. The real winner, however, appears to be the Grover Norquist-style principle of “starve the beast,” the idea that you can endlessly cut taxes as a pretext to crying poor about funding for government services.
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