Cute, cuddly....and off the mark

Well, the gag-writers on the editorial staff of the entertainment publication called Nature have done it again!  This cover, like all of th...

epistemology

Adam's sin and Next Generation Sequencing

Before the Enlightenment, in western scholarship at least, our understanding of the world was based on data we could detect with our senses,...

epistemologyGWASNext Generation Sequencingphilosophy of science

How I Became Sick

by Jim Wood I am a patient.   I used to be a regular human being, but that was a long time ago.   Back in the 1980s, as a result of a routi...

epistemologysensitivityspecificity

We're all psychopaths sometimes

A paper  just published in the journal  Brain reports that psychopathic individuals are less empathic than controls, but that empathy can be...

epistemologyfMRIpsychopathy

The extent of what we can't know about gene function is infinite

A paper in Cell reports preliminary results of an effort to systematically mutate each of the genes in a mouse genome, one at a time, to det...

epistemologygene mappniggenetics

Why is the cause of X (or Y or Z) so hard to find?

£1.1m to find the answer -- will it? Acute Oak Decline (AOD) is killing England's oak trees, and no one knows exactly why.  The story i...

causationepidemiologyepistemologygenetics

Giving in.....and cashing in? The state of social sciences

To put it bluntly, the social sciences have largely been a scientific flop.  Despite ample funding for decades and claims to be science, no ...

epistemologysocial science