Day: February 14, 2001

Wired’s Neal Adams Profile

It’s not online yet, but the latest issue of Wired has a long profile of comic book artist Neal Adams. That wouldn’t be so bad, except that the profile is largely about Adams’ pseudo-scientific view that the Earth is growing in size.

And no, Adams doesn’t just think that the Earth is growing in volume, but that it is also growing in mass. While he’s at it, Adams thinks matter is constantly being added to the universe and even invented his own particle, which he calls “primal matter,” to explain the allegedly fattening Earth. He rewrites practically every other area of physics while he’s at it to fit his growing Earth hypothesis.

Neal Adams the comic book illustrator is rightly a legend (remember the furor over the Green Arrow/Green Lantern cover with Speedy shooting heroin? That was Adams’ work). Neal Adams the scientist, however, is a nut. An 8 page story on Adams the artist might have been interesting, but the 8 page story on Adams the pseudoscientist was a pointless waste of paper.

Make Colleges NBA Franchises

Salon’s Allen Barra notes that the biggest problem the National Basketball Assocation has is that it relies on colleges to act as a minor league system. Unfortunately it doesn’t pay athletes in its minor league system like other sports do.

The solution is to recognize reality: Division I college basketball is a farm club for the NBA and its time to start paying the athletes. The NCAA needs to abandon its view that the only good college athlete is an impoverished one and allow the NBA to pay college athletes.

The best way to do this would be for all the NBA teams to contribute a small percentage of their total player salary to a central fund which then gets distributed equally to all Division I teams, who then decide for themselves within their programs how to divide the money up between players.

In addition, the NCAA should remove all restrictions on booster contributions directly to athletes. Some rich alumnus wants to buy the star center a Ford Explorer? More power to him.

Celera Anounces Decoding of Mouse Genome

On the heels of the publication of the human genome, |Celera| Genomics announced that it has completed sequencing the mouse genome. Since the mouse genome has a very large degree of overlap with the human genome, comparing the two genomes should yield important clues in understanding how human genes function.

Celera used its now-famous whole genome shotgun approach which helped it make such quick strides in sequencing the human genome. Celera used laboratory mice as the source of the genes it sequenced.

Now, Celera will turn to refining its mouse genome, annotating and analyzing the role of specific genes. Eventually extensive laboratory research will try to discern the function of specific genes by knocking them out of mice and then observing how the genetically modified mice are changed by the procedure.

Source:

The crucial mouse genome is assemblled, says Celera, the company which delivered the human genome on Monday. New Scientist, February 14, 2001.