"Woo! Hooray for science!"

The Obama administration might get it:

In a sign that President-elect Barack Obama intends to elevate science to greater prominence, John P. Holdren, a Harvard physicist widely recognized for his leadership on energy policy and climate change, will be appointed White House science adviser this weekend, the Globe confirmed yesterday.

...

The news, coming in the same week as Nobel laureate physicist Steven Chu's appointment as secretary of energy, was heartening for the scientific community.

Many scientists have objected to the Bush administration's policies, from restrictions on embryonic stem cell research to the pace of action on climate change.

"I think they'll be restoring the role of science in the federal establishment," said Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists, a Cambridge-based advocacy organization. "We've got a bunch of people across the [new] administration who get it."

In 2004, Holdren joined other prominent scientists to sign a letter accusing the Bush administration of undermining and censoring scientists.

"When scientific knowledge has been found to be in conflict with its political goals, the administration has often manipulated the process through which science enters into its decisions," the letter said.

Holdren, who was an adviser to the Obama campaign and a member of a scientific advisory committee to President Bill Clinton, is a specialist on energy, climate change, and nuclear proliferation.

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Friday Dead Racist Blogging: Social Stigma Edition

I couldn't come up with any better title. Anywho, a few days ago Greg Laden blogged about a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences entitled "How social status shapes race". The abstract mentions,

We show that racial perceptions are fluid; how individuals perceive their own race and how they are perceived by others depends in part on their social position. Using longitudinal data from a representative sample of Americans, we find that individuals who are unemployed, incarcerated, or impoverished are more likely to be seen and identify as black and less likely to be seen and identify as white, regardless of how they were classified or identified previously. This is consistent with the view that race is not a fixed individual attribute, but rather a changeable marker of status.

Though it's a new paper, this certainly isn't news--at least, the idea that "how they are perceived by others depends in part on their social position" isn't new. We've known that since before the Civil War. In fact, it was the basis of court decisions trying to decide people's race. From an 1835 South Carolina case, State v. Cantey:

We cannot say what admixture of negro blood will make a colored person, and by a jury one may be found a colored person while another of the same degree may be declared a white man. In general, it is very desirable that rules of law should be certain and precise; but it is not always practicable, nor is it practicable in this instance, nor do I know that it is desirable. The status of the individual is not to be determined solely by the distinct and visible mixture of negro blood, but by reputation, by his reception into society, and his having commonly exercised the privileges of a white man. But his admission to these privileges, regulated by the public opinion of the community in which he lives, will very much depend on his own character and conduct; and it may be well and proper that a man of worth, honesty, industry, and respectability, should have the rank of a white man, while a vagabond of the same degree of blood should be confined to the inferior caste. It will be a stimulus to the good conduct of these persons, and security for their fidelity as citizens.

Emphasis mine.

A 1914 case, Tucker v. Blease, quoted the above section and gave it this introduction:

The law recognizes that there is a social element, arising from racial instinct, to be taken into consideration between those with and those without negro blood. The statutes and provisions of the Constitution hereinbefore quoted show that the law not only recognizes a classification, but makes it mandatory, and provides a penalty for failure to observe the laws in this respect, in the instances therein mentioned. The decisions prior to the abolition of slavery show that the classification between white and colored persons did not depend upon the extent of the mixed blood.

Again, emphasis mine.

So a person's legal race, which was supposedly defined in terms of blood and ancestry, was recognized to actually be based (in part at least) on social status. Two people with the same amount of black "blood" could be legally assigned to different races based on whether they exhibited particular good traits or were considered to be in good social standing, his "reception into society."
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A rare follow-up

Some more articles related to this post.

Race, genes, and illness:

Does a "genetic component" cause a higher rate of premature births among black mothers? Do black people carry certain gene variants that give them weaker hearts? Do Asians have special genes that enable the drug Iressa to fight non-small cell cancer better in their lungs?

Yes, indeed, authors of several recent medical studies claim. More and more, researchers are holding out the hope that genetic differences may finally explain a good part of the troubling health disparities among races. Perhaps then, the reasoning goes, the powerful tools of molecular biology may help solve them.

...

So far, the claims about race and medical genetics remain disturbingly fuzzy. What's meant by a "genetic component," for instance? The team at Washington University in St. Louis that studied early births accounted for other known variables, such as lack of prenatal care, and found that the higher rate among black women persisted. Based on the trends they saw, the group concluded there were racial differences at the genetic level - despite lack of any data on genes.

The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine researchers studying heart function had used magnetic resonance imaging to compare heart muscle contractions in Chinese-Americans, whites, Hispanics, and African-Americans. They also pointed to genetic differences as a likely cause. But they hadn't yet looked at any genes, either.

Genes explain race disparity in response to a heart drug:

Doctors in the United States who treat patients with heart failure have long been puzzled by a peculiar observation. Many black patients seem to do just as well if they take a mainstay of therapy, a class of drugs called beta blockers, as if they do not. It is almost as if they were immune to the drugs.

Now researchers at Washington University and the University of Maryland have discovered why: these nonresponsive patients have a slightly altered version of a gene that muscles use to control responses to nerve signals. People with this altered gene are making what amounts to their own version of beta blockers all the time. As many as 40 percent of blacks and 2 percent of whites have the gene variant, the researchers report.

The findings, heart failure specialists say, mean that people with the altered gene might be spared taking what may be, for them, a useless therapy. And since patients with heart failure typically take multiple drugs, which can interact and cause side effects like fatigue, getting rid of a drug that is not helping can be a huge benefit.

Of course, race doesn't exist... somehow.
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Interesting

This is old news, but I only just found out about it:

Interestingly, in September 1999, right around the same time as the Human Genome Project a retrospective study was published in the Journal of Cardiac Failure by Carson et al titled, "Racial differences in response to therapy for heart failure: Analysis of the vasodilator-heart failure trials." In this study, they analyzed data from two previous trials studying the use of ACE inhibitors, isosorbide, and hydralazine in the treatment of congestive heart failure. When the data was split apart by race, there was a statistically significant decrease in the response of African American patients to the drug enalapril, and a statistically significant decrease in the effectiveness of hydralazine/isosorbide in white patients. The conclusion of the analysis was that certain drugs respond better for some races than others. In response to this study, the drug carvediol was studied specifically in the African American and white populations to say conclusively that it benefited both groups equally, and this became a marketing point for the pharmaceutical company that manufactures carvediol.

This Wikipedia article has a little more info:

Isosorbide dinitrate/hydralazine is a fixed dose combination drug treatment specifically indicated for black people with congestive heart failure. It is a combination of hydralazine (an antihypertensive) and isosorbide dinitrate (a vasodilator). It is the first race-based prescription drug in the United States. The combination preparation is marketed in the United States by Nitromed under the trade name BiDil.

Originally rejected by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1997, the combination preparation was approved by the FDA in June 2005 for black use only based on the results of a clinical study. It was already known that black individuals with congestive heart failure (CHF) respond less effectively to conventional CHF treatments (particularly ACE inhibitors) than Caucasians. The study by Taylor et al. demonstrated that isosorbide dinitrate with hydralazine reduced mortality by 43%, reduced hospitalizations by 39%, and quality of life markers in black patients with CHF.

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I would not be surprised if someone put this forth in all seriousness

Watermelons have Viagra-like effects:

A slice of cool, fresh watermelon is a juicy way to top off a Fourth of July cookout and one that researchers say has effects similar to Viagra _ but don't necessarily expect it to keep the fireworks going all night long.

Watermelons contain an ingredient called citrulline that can trigger production of a compound that helps relax the body's blood vessels, similar to what happens when a man takes Viagra, said scientists in Texas, one of the nation's top producers of the seedless variety.

Found in the flesh and rind of watermelons, citrulline reacts with the body's enzymes when consumed in large quantities and is changed into arginine, an amino acid that benefits the heart and the circulatory and immune systems.

"Arginine boosts nitric oxide, which relaxes blood vessels, the same basic effect that Viagra has, to treat erectile dysfunction and maybe even prevent it," said Bhimu Patil, a researcher and director of Texas A&M's Fruit and Vegetable Improvement Center. "Watermelon may not be as organ-specific as Viagra, but it's a great way to relax blood vessels without any drug side effects."

So now we know the truth: blacks are sex maniacs because of all the watermelon they eat. It's all coming together.
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Evolution!

It works, bitches!

Italian wall lizards introduced to a tiny island off the coast of Croatia are evolving in ways that would normally take millions of years to play out, new research shows.

In just a few decades the 5-inch-long (13-centimeter-long) lizards have developed a completely new gut structure, larger heads, and a harder bite, researchers say.

In 1971, scientists transplanted five adult pairs of the reptiles from their original island home in Pod Kopiste to the tiny neighboring island of Pod Mrcaru, both in the south Adriatic Sea.

Genetic testing on the Pod Mrcaru lizards confirmed that the modern population of more than 5,000 Italian wall lizards are all descendants of the original ten lizards left behind in the 1970s.

...

The transplanted lizards adapted to their new environment in ways that expedited their evolution physically, Irschick explained.

Pod Mrcaru, for example, had an abundance of plants for the primarily insect-eating lizards to munch on. Physically, however, the lizards were not built to digest a vegetarian diet.

Researchers found that the lizards developed cecal valves—muscles between the large and small intestine—that slowed down food digestion in fermenting chambers, which allowed their bodies to process the vegetation's cellulose into volatile fatty acids.

"They evolved an expanded gut to allow them to process these leaves," Irschick said, adding it was something that had not been documented before. "This was a brand-new structure."

Along with the ability to digest plants came the ability to bite harder, powered by a head that had grown longer and wider.

Let's see your intelligent designer do that!

Via Pharyngula.
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A post!

I found this post and wanted to highlight it because it's a review of a book that deals with one of my brother's favorite things in the world: cognitive dissonance.
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A bit late, but I felt the point worthy of being made

I didn't mention it at the time, but a couple weeks back some animal-rights terrorists flooded a scientist's home because she did research on animals, causing tens of thousands of dollars in damage. They threatened her further by saying that she should feel lucky because their first choice was to use fire, not water.

This naturally led to wide-spread condemnation among sciencebloggers. However, most of the bloggers responded by pointing out that animal research is exceptionally useful for creating cures for humans, and is absolutely irreplaceable. We could not, for instance, use computer models to do the studies we need. They also pointed out that it animal researchers are not, in fact, sadists who get their jollies torturing cute and fluffy animals, and no, they didn't spend their childhood plucking the wings off of flies. Researchers are very concerned with the care of animals and there are strict rules in place to prevent unnecessary animal testing, and to make it as humane as possible.

I agree with all this, and I in no way mean to detract from any of these points. It's very important to point out that these despicable stereotypes of scientists who work with animals is completely fanciful. However, many of the animal rights groups have a reasonable concern: they don't think it's appropriate to study animals to benefit humans. So when Shelley Batts at Retrospectacle writes

Biomedical scientists do not live a wicked life, as the ALF [Animal Liberation Front] seems to believe. They are involved in research due to a passion for knowledge and a reduction of human suffering,

she's partly talking past these people. They don't care about any reduction in human misery (except maybe their own) that comes at the expense of misery in animals. And this may be a valid complaint.

Except, as you've already concluded by reading the banner at the right of this post, it's not entirely true. Researching animals helps humans, sure, and that's a perfectly valid reason to do it. But for those concerned about the animals, this research also helps animals. I'm surprised that in all of the blog posts or comments that I read on this subject, apparently no-one thought to bring up this simple fact--animals benefit from our research, as well.

For instance: antibiotics were, and are, tested in animals. Antibiotics clearly are used to help humans, but they're also used to help animals. My parents have an antibiotic salve for the purpose of treating animals--horses, dogs, cats--which came in handy recently when one of our cats was injured. This page points out numerous benefits to animals that have resulted from animal research, which include vaccines against numerous diseases and improved treatment of other ailments. HorseFacts.org, where I got the banner, point out other wonderful developments in equine treatment that resulted from animal research.

If animal rights activists really want to help animals, the best way is to let scientists study them so that we can help keep them healthy, and cure them when they're ailing.
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Now if they'd just do their own research instead of appropriating the research of real scientists

Any bets as to how long until intelligent design propagandists proclaim this as "proof" of intelligent design?

The function of the appendix seems related to the massive amount of bacteria populating the human digestive system, according to an online report in the Journal of Theoretical Biology. There are more bacteria than human cells in the typical body. Most bacteria are good and help digest food.

But the flora in the intestines sometimes die or are purged. Diseases such as cholera or amoebic dysentery would clear the gut of useful bacteria. The appendix's job is to reboot the digestive system in that case.

The appendix "acts as a good safe house for bacteria," said Duke surgery professor Bill Parker, a co-author of the study. Its location — just below the normal one-way flow of food and germs in the large intestine in a sort of gut cul-de-sac — helps support the theory, he said.

Also, the worm-shaped organ outgrowth acts like a bacteria factory, cultivating good germs, Parker said.

That use is not needed in a modern industrialized society, Parker said. If a person's gut flora die, they usually can repopulate it easily with germs they pick up from other people, he said.

But before dense populations in modern times and during epidemics of cholera that affected a whole region, it wasn't as easy to grow back that bacteria and the appendix came in handy.

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We are family

People aren't quite as similar as we thought:

People are less alike than scientists had thought when it comes to the billions of building blocks that make up each individual's DNA, according to a new analysis.

"Instead of 99.9 percent identical, maybe we're only 99 percent (alike)," said J. Craig Venter, an author of the study — and the person whose DNA was analyzed for it.

Several previous studies have argued for lowering the 99.9 percent estimate. Venter says this new analysis "proves the point."

...

The order of building blocks along a strand of DNA encodes genetic information, somewhat like the way a sequence of letters creates a sentence. Particular sequences form genes. Landmark studies published in 2001 indicated that the DNA of any two people is about 99.9 percent alike. The new paper suggests estimates of 99.5 percent to just 99 percent, Venter said.

The Venter paper joins several others published over the past three to four years that indicate an estimate of around 99 percent, said Richard Gibbs, a DNA expert at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston who didn't participate in Venter's study.

The studies produce the lower figure because they uncovered chunks of DNA that differ among people, whereas previous studies focused on differences in individual building blocks.

We're only 99% similar to each other? Obviously this means the dead racists were right--blacks are hardly people at all!
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Evolution in action

But nobody can witness evolution! Except, y'know, when we can:

A population of butterflies has evolved in a flash on a South Pacific island to fend off a deadly parasite.

The proportion of male Blue Moon butterflies dropped to a precarious 1 percent as the parasite targeted males. Then, within the span of a mere 10 generations, the males evolved an immunity that allowed their population share to soar to nearly 40 percent — all in less than a year.

"We usually think of natural selection as acting slowly, over hundreds or thousands of years," said study team member Gregory Hurst, an evolutionary geneticist at the University College London. "But the example in this study happened in a blink of the eye, in terms of evolutionary time."

The scientists think the males developed genes that hold a male-killing microbial parasite, called Wolbachia, at bay.

...

The team ran genetic analyses to see if the parasite had somehow vanished. It hadn't. Wolbachia was still present in butterflies from both islands. Other lab experiments indicated the males had evolved suppressor genes to shield against the parasite.

...

"The suppressor gene allows infected females to produce males," Charlat said. "These males will mate with many, many females, and the suppressor gene will therefore be in more and more individuals over generations."

P.Z. has some more, including a reference to Y: The Last Man. Of course, P.Z.'s complaint is silly--Yorick did sire a baby!
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How else do you explain pygmies + dwarfs??

Quoth the dinosaur denier (link is to person debunking dinosaur denier, not dinosaur denier hisself):

Why were there no discoveries by native Americans in all the years previous when they roamed the North American continent? There is no belief of dinosaurs in the native American religion or tradition.

For that matter, why were there no discoveries prior to the nineteenth century in any part of the world? According to the World Book Encyclopedia, "before the 1800's, no one ever knew that dinosaurs ever existed..".

[...]

Why has man suddenly made all these discoveries? Belgium, Mongolia, Tanzania, West Germany (and North America as well) were inhabited and very well explored for thousands of years and there were no discoveries until the nineteenth century. Why?

Answer: They did discover bones. They just thought they were dragons.

And used them as medicine.

Villagers in central China spent decades digging up bones they believed belonged to flying dragons and using them in traditional medicines. Turns out the bones belonged to dinosaurs, and now scientists are doing the digging.

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"They had believed that the 'dragon bones' were from the dragons flying in the sky," said Dong [Zhiming], a professor with the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

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Friday Dead Racist Blogging: This isn't my Friday Dead Racist Blogging post Edition

Human sacrifice in prehistoric Europe?

Investigations of prehistoric burial sites in Europe indicate that the region's population may have practiced ritual human sacrifice, according to a new study.

The large number of multiple-burial sites, some containing skeletons of dwarfs and deformed children with ornate burial offerings such as ivory beads, suggests that human sacrifice was a custom in Europe in the period between 28,000 and 10,000 years ago, said biologist Vincenzo Formicola of the University of Pisa.

"These findings point to the possibility that human sacrifices were part of the ritual activity of these populations," Formicola wrote.

Uh-oh. James Denson Sayers won't be pleased:

There is nothing to indicate that human sacrifice had a part in the rituals of the early Mayan civilization, but this horribly degenerate practice came more and more into use as the mongrelization process went on until it was claiming thousands of victims yearly when the Europeans came. Rarely has a White people been guilty of this terrible form of religion. In the most outstanding example where it was in use among a White people, namely, in Carthage, its greatest development came there in the last days of the city when the blood of the people was already heavily loaded with that of the Black, and, as in the later days of ancient Egypt, the priesthood was probably mongrel. The sacrifice of human beings to Moloch never reached such devastating proportions among the ancient Phoenicians as it did in their last mongrelized descendants of North Africa.

But wait! Maybe Mr. Sayers won't have to give up on his racist assumptions after all!

Rupert Housley, a professor of archaeological science at the University of Glasgow, suggested in a telephone interview that there may be other explanations for the unique inhumation, or burial. The beads may have been family heirlooms, prepared years earlier for a person of high status and incorporated into the graves of the children.

Housley, who is conducting a study in southern Russia on the connection between Neanderthals and modern humans, said that evidence of cannibalism has been found at sites 12,000 years ago in the same area, which could suggest a pattern.

But he said multiple burials were common in the period Formicola is investigating, and many children died at a young age.

...

Richard Klein, an anthropological science professor at Stanford University, called the findings interesting but lacking substance.

"The sample is too small to draw that conclusion," Klein said. "I'm not against the idea, but there is no link between the burials and anything with human behavior. They're far apart and come from different cultures."

Whew. That's a load off the mind -- what? What's that you say, Julius Caesar?

All the people of Gaul are completely devoted to religion, and for this reason those who are greatly affected by diseases and in the dangers of battle either sacrifice human victims or vow to do so using the Druids as administrators to these sacrifices, since it is judged that unless for a man's life a man's life is given back, the will of the immortal gods cannot be placated. In public affairs they have instituted the same kind of sacrifice. Others have effigies of great size interwoven with twigs, the limbs of which are filled up with living people which are set on fire from below, and the people are deprived of life surrounded by flames. It is judged that the punishment of those who participated in theft or brigandage or other crimes are more pleasing to the immortal gods; but when the supplies of this kind fail, they even go so low as to inflict punishment on the innocent.

Stupid reality, getting in the way of Sayers' preconceived notions of the innate morality of different races!
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I guess this makes up for it

We went to the zoo yesterday, and the scheltopusiks weren't out. Which was depressing, because usually they're quite prominent.

But hey, now there's a new species of limbless lizard.

An Indian zoologist said Monday he has found a new species of limbless lizard in a forested area in the country's east. "Preliminary scientific study reveals that the lizard belongs to the genus Sepsophis," said Sushil Kumar Dutta, who led a team of researchers from "Vasundhra," a non-governmental organization, and the North Orissa University.

The newly found 7-inch long lizard looks like a scaly, small snake, Dutta said. "It prefers to live in a cool retreat, soft soil and below stones."

...

While modern snakes and lizards are derived from a common evolutionary ancestor, they belong today to two entirely separate groups of animals, or orders. Snakes, over millenia, gradually lost their limbs and developed their characteristic forms of locomotion. But modern limbless lizards are not snakes, Dutta said.

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Gays have children

Gays can't have children, therefore they can't marry!

Except....

Women might soon be able to produce sperm in a development that could allow lesbian couples to have their own biological daughters, according to a pioneering study published today.

Scientists are seeking ethical permission to produce synthetic sperm cells from a woman's bone marrow tissue after showing that it possible to produce rudimentary sperm cells from male bone-marrow tissue.

The researchers said they had already produced early sperm cells from bone-marrow tissue taken from men. They believe the findings show that it may be possible to restore fertility to men who cannot naturally produce their own sperm.

But the results also raise the prospect of being able to take bone-marrow tissue from women and coaxing the stem cells within the female tissue to develop into sperm cells, said Professor Karim Nayernia of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.

Creating sperm from women would mean they would only be able to produce daughters because the Y chromosome of male sperm would still be needed to produce sons. The latest research brings the prospect of female-only conception a step closer.

Although, there may be complications:

The research also raises questions about the long term genetic effects of creating sperm in this way which could have implications for the health and development of embryos and the children and adults they eventually become.

However the general consensus amongst scientists is that this is unlikely because embryos generally require genetic material from both a male and a female to develop normally.

I wish they'd, you know, quoted any such scientists. And all the other articles I looked at didn't say anything of the sort, but that may not mean much.
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Science--demystifying the mystical for hundreds of years

One annoying cliché that people bring up when discussing religion is that some things are intangible, just like God, therefore God exists. Or something. One of the most common is love--I actually had a Mormon quip "What about love?" when I told her that I believe in things that can be measured. I wanted to yell at her--perhaps ask if she'd ever had an original thought in her life--but I had class to get to.

Anyways, the answer is yes.

Sexual behavior includes a lot more than sex. Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University, argues that three primary brain systems have evolved to direct reproductive behavior. One is the sex drive that motivates people to seek partners. A second is a program for romantic attraction that makes people fixate on specific partners. Third is a mechanism for long-term attachment that induces people to stay together long enough to complete their parental duties.

Romantic love, which in its intense early stage "can last 12-18 months," is a universal human phenomenon, Dr. Fisher wrote last year in The Proceedings of the Royal Society, and is likely to be a built-in feature of the brain. Brain imaging studies show that a particular area of the brain, one associated with the reward system, is activated when subjects contemplate a photo of their lover.

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Luddites--I mean, computer scientists demand the destruction of the internet!

An interesting idea: scrap the internet and start over.

One of the biggest things computer scientists have to deal with is backward compatibility. For example, suppose a company has created a program that connects to their remote server and performs some operation. If the company decides to update their server, and radically change the way it operates, they can't just write completely new code. If they did, then all the clients who were using their old software could no longer interact with the new server. So the company has to keep this in mind and make sure that the new server can also accept the same commands that the old server did.

This is one of the reasons that the Internet is rather messed up. The internet's precursor was very lax about things like security and authentication:

The internet's early architects built the system on the principle of trust. Researchers largely knew one another, so they kept the shared network open and flexible — qualities that proved key to its rapid growth.

But spammers and hackers arrived as the network expanded and could roam freely because the internet doesn't have built-in mechanisms for knowing with certainty who sent what.

The network's designers also assumed that computers are in fixed locations and always connected. That's no longer the case with the proliferation of laptops, personal digital assistants and other mobile devices, all hopping from one wireless access point to another, losing their signals here and there.

Engineers tacked on improvements to support mobility and improved security, but researchers say all that adds complexity, reduces performance and, in the case of security, amounts at most to bandages in a high-stakes game of cat and mouse.

The internet, at its core, is not a very secure thing. Protocols have been added on top of it to try to add security, but its all very ad hoc. So these people are proposing replacing the current internet with something that is secure at its very core:

Although it has already taken nearly four decades to get this far in building the internet, some university researchers with the US federal government's blessing want to scrap all that and start over.

The idea may seem unthinkable, even absurd, but many believe a "clean slate" approach is the only way to truly address security, mobility and other challenges that have cropped up since UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock helped supervise the first exchange of meaningless test data between two machines on September 2, 1969.

They may be right, but it'll be almost impossible to actually do it.

A new network could run parallel with the current internet and eventually replace it, or perhaps aspects of the research could go into a major overhaul of the existing architecture.

These clean-slate efforts are still in their early stages, though, and aren't expected to bear fruit for another 10 or 15 years — assuming Congress comes through with funding.

Guru Parulkar, who will become executive director of Stanford's initiative after heading NSF's clean-slate programs, estimated that GENI alone could cost $350 million, while government, university and industry spending on the individual projects could collectively reach $300 million. Spending so far has been in the tens of millions of dollars.

And it could take billions of dollars to replace all the software and hardware deep in the legacy systems.

It would be an interesting development, though....
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Not to mention the fact that our faces were designed to perfectly fit our glasses

One tactic that creationists like to use to attack evolution is to bring up biological systems that they think are so complex, they couldn't have happened by "accident", and therefore must be the product of a designer. The human eye is a favorite one.

I kind of wonder what they would think, then, of the eyes of box jellyfish:

Unlike normal jellyfish, which drift in the ocean current, box jellyfish are active swimmers that can rapidly make 180-degree turns and deftly dart between objects. Scientists suspect that box jellyfish are such agile because one set of their 24 eyes detects objects that get in their way.

...

Whereas we have one set of multi-purpose eyes that sense color, size, shape and light intensity, box jellyfish have four different types of special-purpose eyes. The most primitive set detects only light levels, but one set of eyes is more sophisticated and can detect the color and size of objects.

Was this the product of a designer, too? Given how random and haphazard it sounds, I'd vote for a committee of designers, each one slapping another, different eye onto this poor creature.

[Edit] More on the box jellyfish here.
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It was the Jooo~s!

Circumcision reduces HIV risk:

In an "extraordinary development" in the fight against AIDS, a medical journal article published Friday says that conclusive data shows there is no question circumcision reduces men's chances of catching HIV by up to 60 percent.

The question now is how to put that fact to work to combat AIDS across Africa.

The findings were first announced in December, when initial results from two major trials — in Kenya and Uganda — showed promising links between circumcision and HIV transmission. However, those trials were deemed so definitive that the tests were halted early.

The full data from the trials, carried out by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, were published Friday in The Lancet.

...

In the Kenyan study, 1,391 circumcised men were compared to 1,393 who were not. And in Uganda, 2,474 circumcised men were compared to 2,522 men who were not. Scientists tracked the men for two years and found that those who were circumcised were 51-60 percent less likely to contract HIV.

I think this proves that AIDS is a Jewish plot.
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Scientists find brain evolution gene:

Scientists believe they have found a key gene that helped the human brain evolve from our chimp-like ancestors. In just a few million years, one area of the human genome seems to have evolved about 70 times faster than the rest of our genetic code. It appears to have a role in a rapid tripling of the size of the brain's crucial cerebral cortex, according to an article published Thursday in the journal Nature.

...

That one gene didn't exist until 300 million years ago and is present only in mammals and birds, not fish or animals without backbones. But then it didn't change much at all. There are only two differences in that one gene between a chimp and a chicken, Haussler said.

But there are 18 differences in that one gene between human and chimp and they all seemed to occur in the development of man, he said.

...

And it's not just that this gene changed a lot. There is also its involvement with the cerebral cortex, which is responsible for some of the more complex brain functions, including language and information processing.

I predict that the following quote will be mined by creationists and 'intelligent design' enthusiasts as "proof" that evolution cannot possibly account for human intelligence and so God must have been behind it:

However, the gene changed so fast that Clark said that he has a hard time believing it unless something unusual happened in a mutation. It's not part of normal evolution, he said.

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