News blog

Quotes of the day

“Brian Mason was probably the best known and most revered geochemist of his generation. He could look at a rock and know something important about it. He could pick it up and elicit its story.”

Sorena Sorensen, of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, comments on the death of Brian Mason at the age of 92 (LA Times).

“Given that there are roughly 2.3 million people in prison and jail in the United States at any time, or about one in every 135 citizens, the prison population is sizable. … This population is at once controlled, ripe for most any scientific study, and a population under control, primed for exploitation and abuse.”

From an editorial accompanying the latest issue of Bioethics, which addresses the thorny topic of when prisoners should be involved in research.

“If we understand how their populations are changing, we can do something about it, such as making sure that our protected areas are in the right place for penguins in 100 years time.”

Tom Hart, a Zoological Society of London ‘penguinologist’, is extracting penguin DNA from feathers to tease out the relationships between different colonies and to track the animals’ movements.

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