An advertisement for the best burgers in Rome, showing a stack of monumentally unappealing and unItalian hamburgers Y’know, seeing this advert at a certain site almost every day is putting me off visiting that site again in future, because the entire premise is so very wrong on so many levels.

Björn over at 5¢ense points to a brief report, that the godlike J Craig Venter was slapped with a cease-and-desist by the estate of James Joyce, for daring to encode a Joyce quote in the DNA of the microbe Venter built.

“To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.”

Wha...

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I ask because there's a fascinating blog post -- Malaria, past and present -- over at Aidwatch. Laura Freschi takes a book review in Harper's because "it shows the historical roots of a struggle still raging in public health assistance today". That struggle is the unequal battle between simple, ea...

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This past couple of weeks I sipped from the well of erudition. Professor Leonard Barkan, of Princeton University, gave the 2011 Jerome Lectures at the American Academy in Rome, and his topic was Unswept floor: food culture and high culture, antiquity and renaissance.

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US States that voted Republican in 2008 "are now the biggest losers in the fight against childhood obesity," and yet they are also the states that most reject efforts to reduce obesity.

To me, the interesting thing about this table is what we public health people call “tracking.”  Obesity tracks...

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