Sundry Ruminations: December 2003 Archives

Prion proteins may store memories: Study hints at vital job for two-faced proteins.

Hmm, I meant to follow up on this one, but don't recall how...

U.S. News: Colin Pillinger, space scientist: Gambling big on life on Mars (12/29/03)

Who is to say that Earth hasn't contaminated Mars with its own meteor ejecta?

This article contends just this...

We are in the midst of the greatest mass extinction since the demise of the dinosaurs, and The Kill-Off describes whom (yes whom) is to blame, and why this culling differs qualitatively from those that have preceded it...

I'm as distrustful of and unreceptive to fancy continental scientific ideas, such as Pasteur's germ theory, as the next American. Thus, you can imagine my chagrin when, after being surrounded by people with a nasty respiratory ailment for most of the last week, I woke up with a seemingly identical ailment today myself.

I must reluctanlty concede that this Frenchman may have been on to something with these pathogenic contagion notions of his. I suppose, all and all, that this is a less unsettling explanation that divine retribution. In any case, I find myself with no voice. Except this one.

Heaven help us were ideas subject to this manner of contagion...