My six year old daughter loves baseball (when she was three she invited Manny Ramirez to visit her school). She also loves Star Wars (which she consideres the ultimate princess movies). And she loves video games especially those that involve smashing things). So you can imagine how thrilled she was when, as we checked the [...]
Peer review is ostensibly one of the central pillars of modern science. A paper is not taken seriously by other scientists unless it is published in a “peer reviewed” journal. Jobs, grants and tenure are parceled out, in no small part, on the basis of lists of “peer reviewed” papers. The public has been trained [...]
The New York Times is fronting a story that combines two of my favorite subjects – DNA and baseball. Unfortunately, the story is ridiculously alarmist, and either willfully or ignorantly conflates DNA paternity/maternity tests with tests designed to extract other information from a person’s genome. The plug for the piece is that Major League Baseball [...]
One of my all-time favorite baseball players – Mark “The Bird” Fidrych – died yesterday. He was one of the first baseball players I remember loving because of how he played, and not because he was on the Red Sox. The weird antics on the mound – he patted the dirt, and talked to the [...]
President Obama or a Tampa-Philadelphia World Series
I'm a biologist at UC Berkeley and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. I work primarily on flies, and my research encompases evolution, development, genetics, genomics, chemical ecology and behavior. I am a strong proponent of open science, and a co-founder of the Public Library of Science. And most importantly, I am a Red Sox fan. (More about me here).
I can be reached at:
mbeisen at berkeley.edu
and @mbeisen on Twitter
