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But several journals, including Biology Direct, where Kaplan is an editor, have decided to eliminate anonymity from the peer review process altogether. “Under the Biology Direct model, everything is transparent, and everything is in the open,” says Eugene Koonin, one of the journal’s editors-in-chief.

Q. But critics of the current system say that 10 to 15 percent of medical costs are due to medical malpractice. A. That’s wildly exaggerated. According to the actuarial consulting firm Towers Perrin, medical malpractice tort costs were $30.4 billion in 2007, the last year for which data are available. We have a more than a $2 trillion health care system. That puts litigation costs and malpractice insurance at 1 to 1.5 percent of total medical costs. That’s a rounding error. Liability isn’t even the tail on the cost dog. It’s the hair on the end of the tail.

Q. What about Senator John Kerry’s assertion that it’s “doable” to rid the system of frivolous lawsuits? A. I guess it’s doable because there aren’t very many frivolous suits.

Well, if the jury is still out on Tea Party hypocrisy, then let me make a few suggestions to those of you in the Tea Party to help you avoid being called hypocrites:1. Many Tea Party members (including some commenters here) oppose the $700 billion TARP bailouts. The Obama administration said last week that the projected total costs will come in under $50 billion, and that it could possibly make money for the government when it is fully paid back. Give the Obama administration credit for reducing the costs, and praise him if the costs reach $0 or if it pays for itself.2. After decrying the "generational theft" of deficit spending, the Tea Party seems to have no problem supporting the extension of the Bush tax cuts; even for the very wealthy. Tax cuts, were the single biggest factor adding to the deficit before the recession reduced revenues. You claim to worry about their children's futures, but they're putting their kids in debt to pay for the lifestyles of today's wealthy. Admit that at least some of the tax cuts have to go.3. If the deficit is the problem, then get serious about the defense budget. Last year defense spending costed more than social security entitlements, and more then medicare and medicaid, and far more than the stimulus or TARP. And on top of it, Americans get a very low return on their investment of tax dollars in military spending. Much of the benefit is realized directly by people in other countries who enjoy greater stability. Start supporting a downsizing of the military.4. Get off of your constitutional high horse. For a bunch of people who claim to support the Constitution, they sure were reluctant to support the First Amendment rights of Muslims who wanted to build a community center near the WTC site. Don't be so quick to anger when people are trying to exercise the freedoms that you claim to cherish so much. If you really love your freedoms, you should understand why people want to exercise theirs.5. Again, concerning the Constitution: stop picking candidates that know nothing about constitutional law. If you care so much about the Constitution, why are you listening to Sarah Palin, who could not have been more wrong when she claimed that the First Amendment protected her from criticism by the media? When running for vice president, she didn't know what the constitution said about the vice presidency. How about Christine O'Donnell, who couldn't name any recent Supreme Court cases last week? These are the people you chose to represent you and your respect for the US Constitution?6. If you want small government, then actively support same-sex marriage rights. Don't want the government telling you what to do? Then you shouldn't want the government telling you whom you can and can't marry. Small government does not regulate personal decisions about whom you spend your life with, and if you are serious about small government, then you should be out there protesting for gay marriage.7. If Congress is overstepping it's powers to regulate commerce with its healthcare mandate, then get out there and support the legalization of marijuana. Attorney General Holder recently stated that if California legalizes the sale of marijuana, then he will use federal power to prosecute marijuana users for possession of the drug. This should strike you as a gross abuse of federal power in violation of state rights. Come out against Holder's threat right now and get ready to protest if he follows through with it.8. Stop claiming that you have the Founding Fathers on your side, while assailing the educated elite. The Founders were the educated elite. They were all a part of the American Philosophical Society. Many of them were knowledgeable of physics and calculus--the cutting edge sciences of their day. Everyone knows that Benjamin Franklin was a scientist. So, stop the anti-science, anti-intellectual agenda. The Founders would never have stood for that.9. Admit it, you want another Bill Clinton. Sure, the Tea Party is nostalgic for Reagan, but he oversaw a large expansion of the deficit. Government borrowing started to decline under Bush Sr. but the deficit saw massive decline, leading to surpluses under Clinton. G. W. Bush turned those surpluses back into a gaping deficit. So, why do you vote Republican? Get over Reagan and admit that your party shouldn't have tried to impeach the most fiscally conservative president in thirty years.10. And yes, as Mr. Douthat has suggested, get serious about entitlements.

Regardless of the scale at which we explore the biosphere — whether we delve into the global ocean or the internal seas of individual organisms — bacteria are now known to be larger players than humans ever imagined.

Strictly by the numbers, the vast majority — estimated by many scientists at 90 percent — of the cells in what you think of as your body are actually bacteria, not human cells.

But a new body of research has begun to show how growth and achievement emerge from relationships. The new science begins with infancy. For centuries, babies were seen as blank slates who just filled their stomachs, emptied their bowels and bladders, and cried and slept in between. As for any significant aspects of their environment, small children were seen as passive receivers. (And largely insensitive ones: For most of the 20th century, doctors routinely operated on babies without anesthesia, believing them exempt from pain.)

Individuals lacking detailed knowledge of history and insight into human nature can makes assertions which, however implausible they may appear to the wise, cannot be decisively refuted.

You might think that believing in Santa Claus is a lot sillier than believing in homeopathy, but really they’re the same: they’re both fantasy.

For support in this thesis of mine, I present to you an article in the New York Times about how politicians who attack evolution legislatively are now also attacking global warming.

But the other reason I’m not surprised is that, over the past decade or so in particular, we’ve seen the far right promote fantasy over reality. Abstinence-only education, creationism, global warming denialism, defunding stem cell research, the mocking of volcano research, fruit fly research, planetarium star projectors.

Armed with a sense that life may not be arbitrary, counterfactual thinkers are more motivated and analytical in organizational settings, the study suggests.

it is actually very functional in terms of helping people establish relationships and make sense of cause and effect

Two spiders are walking along a track – a seemingly ordinary scene, but these are no ordinary spiders. They are molecular robots and they, like the tracks they stride over, are fashioned from DNA. One of them has four legs and marches over its DNA landscape, turning and stopping with no controls from its human creators. The other has four legs and three arms – it walks along a miniature assembly line, picking up three pieces of cargo from loading machines (also made of DNA) and attaching them to itself. All of this is happening at the nanometre scale, far beyond what the naked eye can discern. Welcome to the exciting future of nanotechnology.

Finance is a fund management science.

Economics is a social science.

Lately I’ve noticed lots of articles with titles that are variations of “Ten Things You Should Know About X.”

1. We don’t have time to read anymore.

2. Ten is close to the approximate size of our working memory.

One regular offender is the cyclobutane pyrimidine dimer. It's a bulbous ring attached to the elegant double helix of the DNA strand. It latches on to the damaged parts of DNA and is replicated along with them, causing widespread damage. Once it gets started, it can grow until it takes over the system.

Photolyase floats around the body, looking for encroachment from the dark side. This enzyme powers itself up using blue light, and then shoots out an electron.

Westen locates Obama's inexplicable failure to properly use his storytelling power in some deep-rooted aversion to conflict. He fails to explain why every president of the postwar era has compromised, reversed, or endured the total failure of his domestic agenda.

First, Roosevelt did not take office "in similar circumstances." He took office three years into the Great Depression, after the economy had bottom out, and immediately presided over rapid economic growth (unemployment plunged from a high of 24.9% in 1933 to 14.3% in 1937.)

[I]f you ask a liberal or a saltwater economist, "What would somebody on the other side of this divide say here? What would their version of it be?" A liberal can do that. A liberal can talk coherently about what the conservative view is because people like me actually do listen. We don't think it's right, but we pay enough attention to see what the other person is trying to get at. The reverse is not true. You try to get someone who is fiercely anti-Keynesian to even explain what a Keynesian economic argument is, they can't do it. They can't get it remotely right. Or if you ask a conservative, "What do liberals want?" You get this bizarre stuff - for example, that liberals want everybody to ride trains, because it makes people more susceptible to collectivism.

There are important caveats.  Don Boudreaux wisely observes that we should compare liberal intellectuals to non-liberal intellectuals, and liberal entertainers to non-liberal entertainers, not say Krugman to Beck.  I'd add that we should compare people in the same field: Rand's inability to explain Keynesian economics would be no more telling than Krugman's inability to explain Nozickian political philosophy.  (Of course, if Krugman could correctly explain Nozickian political philosophy, that would be fairly impressive).

In its 400+ year history, the corporation has achieved extraordinary things, cutting around-the-world travel time from years to less than a day, putting a computer on every desk, a toilet in every home (nearly) and a cellphone within reach of every human.  It even put a man on the Moon and kinda-sorta cured AIDS.

The Age of Corporations is coming to an end. The traditional corporation won’t vanish, but it will cease to be the center of gravity of economic life in another generation or two.  They will live on as religious institutions do today, as weakened ghosts of more vital institutions from centuries ago.

this post is mostly woven around ideas drawn from five books that provide appropriate fuel for this business-first frame. I will be citing, quoting and otherwise indirectly using these books over several future posts