Archaeologists have discovered the remains of the Elizabethan theatre where some of William Shakespeare’s plays were first performed. The Curtain Theatre was the venue immortalized as “this wooden O” in the prologue to “Henry V.”The remains of the polygonal structure, typical of 16th-century theatres were found behind a pub on a site marked for redevelopment. They uncovered...
read moreBiology is tricky and evolutionary biology even trickier - in the modern age, with insights into epigenetics, that trickiness and general complexity means virtually any stance you want to adopt on any issue can claim to be 'biological' if you just say something pithy like 'It's a combination of nature and nurture', which is the biology equivalent of amateur political scientists who say 'If only...
read moreIf we want to start cutting budgets, Republicans are not wrong for noting that the Education Department and the Department of Energy could disappear without any consequence at all to America beyond the government union employees working there.But one darling of the right, the military, could do some cutting as well. America has 16 different intelligence agencies and one of them you likely...
read moreAt my kid's graduation party on Sunday I had a chance to meet Tom Goddard who, it turns out, works on a tool used to look at the spatial organization of chromosomes in the cell nucleus and protein structures determined by electron cryo-microscopy.The tool is called Chimera (a fun name by any measure) and it is developed/maintained by the Resource for Biocomputing, Visualization, and Informatics...
read moreWhat a difference six months makes. After the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, when a good-sized chunk of a rather antiquated US fleet was damaged or sunk, America had already bombed Tokyo 4 months later and U.S. cryptologists had cracked Japanese communications codes. So they knew Japan had sent four aircraft carriers to the tiny Pacific atoll of Midway to draw out and destroy what remained of...
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