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“Why isn’t this Snickers bar only a nickel?”

American History and Black History can not be separated.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

Prediction: the gop will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

It looks like winning debates is a black job!

When do the post office & the dmv weigh in on the wuhan virus?

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

The republican caucus is covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

Hey Washington Post, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” is supposed to be a warning, not a mission statement.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

The media handbook says “controversial” is the most negative description that can be used for a Republican.

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

This fight is for everything.

The current Supreme Court is a rogue court. Very dangerous.

At some point, the ability to learn is a factor of character, not IQ.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

When you’re a Republican, they let you do it.

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Excellent Links / Because You Can Never Know Too Much About Your Turkey’s Genome

Because You Can Never Know Too Much About Your Turkey’s Genome

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For your pre-Thanksgiving edification, I give you this delightful photo-feature on the genetics of tomorrow’s feast.

I’ll add just one note of unmerited self-satisfaction.  Emily Anthes, the writer of this piece, is an alumna of the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing — which I have the honor of directing.  She’s been doing great work since she left us (and before)  and it is part of my Thanksgiving Day treat to take pleasure in such outcomes.

__

So as not to be unseemly in this public space, I’ll just stop with the advice that you would be wise to keep an eye on Emily.

Image:  Pieter Claesz.“Still Life With Turkey Pie,” 1627

Reader Interactions

23Comments

  3. 3.

    Brachiator

    Wonderful stuff! I particularly liked the stuff on the genetic history of the apple:

    The genome of the Golden Delicious apple, published this fall, helped resolve a long-standing controversy about just where the domesticated apple came from. Scientists have now pinpointed Malus sieversii, a wild species of apple native to Kazakhstan, as the ancestor of the Macouns and Jonagolds filling our farmers’ markets today.

    Who knew that the “commonplace” apple had such exotic origins.

  4. 4.

    Culture of Truth

    Ah sweet vindication! And here I thought my nemesis didn’t stand a chance.

    Richard Cohen, take a bow. You are the worst hack in America.

  5. 5.

    inkadu

    @Culture of Truth: Wrong thread, dude. But it’s worth mentioning hackery while talking about science writing. I have friends who know about that stuff, and they always complain about the poor level of reporting on science — both quantity and quality. It’s good to see that scientists themselves are taking charge of the situation.

  9. 9.

    Roger Moore

    @inkadu:
    God yes. It’s bad enough that even the commentary in serious journals like Science and Nature is regularly awful. It doesn’t help that the science “journalism” about recent discoveries you see in most news media is just thinly rewritten press releases.

  10. 10.

    Platonicspoof

    Not really a cutting edge story.

    My source in Delaware informs me that egghead scientists created turkeys with human brains at least three years ago and just to poke their fingers in god’s eye.

  13. 13.

    Martin

    My son needs a creative writing in science program. For his 7th grade life science course, he needed to do a project on plant cell structure. He made a movie using my wife’s iPhone 4 and iMovie with he and his little sister giving a guided tour of the plant cell as they fly through a 3D SketchUp cell model that he created. Did you know that iMovie will do chroma keying? I didn’t either. So yeah, $7 worth of kelly green fabric got attached to his wall for a couple of days. That was the total cost of the project, and even that will be recycled into a storage bag or some such for the household.

    Long gone are the days of making this shit out of salt dough and craft paint (for him at least). Production quality is impressively high (the first fully edited screening was last night) considering he got no help from his parents, and while the script isn’t bad, it’s clear that the writing is seriously lagging the technical bits. He got all the science stuff right, but since he was clearly aiming for ‘instructional’ he fell down on systematically setting the context for the viewer, and bringing their knowledge level up step-by-step.

  14. 14.

    Roger Moore

    @Martin:

    That was the total cost of the project, and even that will be recycled into a storage bag or some such for the household.

    If he’s that good, you should consider keeping it around as a green screen for his next project.

  15. 15.

    Marmot

    Emily’s lucky to have a mentor like you to help promote her and send her in the right direction, Tom. That field is full of endemic roadblocks, from snotty editors and subsistence pay to a flood of applicants for every job. A heap of luck will pay serious dividends. Well, and an East Coast degree.

  17. 17.

    Martin

    @Roger Moore: iMovie is limited in that it only chroma keys in a certain color range. He’s saving up for a copy of Final Cut Express (Santa will more likely deliver on that) which among other things will allow him to change that to blue. The green is too close to his pasty-white-almost-jaundiced skintone and without careful attention to lighting half his face winds up turning transparent.

    The fabric works okay, but we’re not talking studio lighting here, so every wrinkle picks up a little shadow which sometimes throws the software off. If he does more of it (and his normally shy sister appears to really enjoy the acting bit – didn’t expect that), I’ll pick up a 4×8 sheet of 1/8″ white melamine, cut it down slightly, paint the back the right color, and hang it on the back of his closet slider for storage. $40. $30 if I luck out and find the paint at the hazardous waste disposal place. It’ll work better and allow him to move the operation around a bit more since it’ll be rigid, and it’ll give him a plain white background to shoot against and a free light reflector if he so desires. I’m sure we’ll find 11 other uses for it before we’re done. We’re a resourceful lot.

  18. 18.

    WyldPirate

    @Marmot:

    . A heap of luck will pay serious dividends. Well, and an East Coast degree.

    Yeah. Fuck skill, hard work and dedication and all that other boring shit. Most important is that “East Coast Degree”, preferably from an Ivy League school.

    Reminds me of this article, The Disadvantages of an Elite Education

    Here, too, college reflects the way things work in the adult world (unless it’s the other way around). For the elite, there’s always another extension—a bailout, a pardon, a stint in rehab—always plenty of contacts and special stipends—the country club, the conference, the year-end bonus, the dividend. If Al Gore and John Kerry represent one of the characteristic products of an elite education, George W. Bush represents another. It’s no coincidence that our current president, the apotheosis of entitled mediocrity, went to Yale. Entitled mediocrity is indeed the operating principle of his administration, but as Enron and WorldCom and the other scandals of the dot-com meltdown demonstrated, it’s also the operating principle of corporate America. The fat salaries paid to underperforming CEOs are an adult version of the A-. Anyone who remembers the injured sanctimony with which Kenneth Lay greeted the notion that he should be held accountable for his actions will understand the mentality in question—the belief that once you’re in the club, you’ve got a God-given right to stay in the club. But you don’t need to remember Ken Lay, because the whole dynamic played out again last year in the case of Scooter Libby, another Yale man.

    Gotta love the false meritocracy of it all.

  20. 20.

    WyldPirate

    @Marmot:
    No problem, marmot. I know you didn’t mean that and I clicked over and read some of her stuff and I agree that she is a good writer.

    I also didn’t mean to imply that the Ivies don’t produce some remarkably talented people, either.

    I suppose I am having an unusually strong flare-up of my chronic pessimism today.

  21. 21.

    slag

    Best part of stories like this…they give you something to actually talk about over Thanksgiving.

    Prevention of uncomfortable silence is yet another reason to give thanks for Balloon Juice.

    Happy festivities to all!

  22. 22.

    Capn America

    Tom, MIT Alum ’08 here. I don’t know if you worked with the writing center, but I loved the team there, they helped me polish an essay through many a HASS class. Keep up the good fight, we need more science writers to reach the masses and beat the anti-science demagogues.

  23. 23.

    Yutsano

    @Martin:

    The green is too close to his pasty-white-almost-jaundiced skintone and without careful attention to lighting half his face winds up turning transparent.

    Low tech solution to a high tech problem: stage make-up. It comes in a very large variety of skin tones, usually isn’t expensive, and the good stuff lasts a really long time. Not to mention the great stories you get to tell the grandkids.

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