My dog Leia is only 2, so she counts as a young geek.We all know that the White House is full of geeks. The administration has hosted science fairs, responded to petitions for a Death Star, and Obama himself created a new fusion of Star Wars and Star Trek with a "Jedi Mind Meld". It's fitting that the White House has started a new initiative called We The Geeks, a Google+ Hangout series to have conversations about STEM and how it fits into the administration's overall Strategy of Innovation. […]

In the wake of news that Everest's glaciers are shrinking, we also learn that Peru's giant Quelccaya Ice Cap is wasting away, taking along with it a valuable archive of past climate data. Continue reading →

naidu became a registered member Comments: 0

Huntington’s Disease (HD) is one of those rare diseases for which we know the exact genetic cause. If either of your parents bequeathed to you a huntingtin gene with extra CAG repeats, you will one day succumb to this terrible illness. This means that if you have a family history of HD, you can choose to have yourself tested and thus learn your inevitable fate, at least with regards to HD.Graphic showing the excessive repetitions of the cytosine-adenine-guanine (CAG) nucleotide sequence in a […]

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how quickly penicillin resistance was discovered not long before it was distributed to the public, and how even Alexander Fleming noted his worries over penicillin resistance in the closing of his Nobel prize acceptance speech. But even in the process of researching this article, I realised that I was merely scratching the surface. You see penicillin was not the first antibiotic discovered. If I want to talk about the first discovery of antibiotic […]