50% plus or minus 4%? Okay. That's damn close by some definitions, pretty different in others.

Depends on what you're calling it.

Nope, mortality stats for the developing world, as well as medieval and early modern times. This is where we can dive into the statistical swamp big time, if you want. We can argue about the relative influence of childhood mortality, coronary disease (a major killer not so long ago, much as it is now),…

Statins are safe in the sense that they won't kill you if you overdose (as with aspirin). A very common side effect is pervasive muscle pain, and safe doesn't always mean pleasant or without problems. There's always a risk/reward calculation that you need to go through with your doctor.

It would be interesting to know how much individual connectomes vary. Yes, the average male is different from the average female. Still, individual males and individual females differ dramatically as well. Which difference is bigger, the difference between sexes, or the differences in individuals among the sexes? …

There are a lot of exotic fish in Thailand. I'd suggest that it's one or more arapaima, imported from Brazil.

I've noticed a bit of push-back, and I happen to agree: in general, engineering approaches to ecosystem problems have failed miserably. They're too simplistic.

Yep. The good news is that people have known about the threat of leaf blight since before WW2, and to date the worst hasn't happened. Despite my grim description, there are plant pathologists and other people are working on solutions for things like rubber tree leaf blight.

Umm, I think that grey goo has already been invented. Isn't it called humans?

Actually, if you want something to truly worry about, forget gray goo. Human pathogens are potentially a big worry, but there's this huge infrastructure called the medical-industrial complex that makes it possible to sequence a new virus in days (cf: SARS) and come up with potential treatments within months.

Gray goo? Can everyone who serious believes in that go read a nice little book called Environmental Stoichiometry and get back to me when they realize what the issues are?

Take your pick. My personal favorite is that we're planning for "the future" as if it's the next 20 years or so. Perhaps a century It's just as likely that humans will be around for another million years. Does that horizon change your planning perspective a bit? Not so eager to use up everything because we're…

The Americas are a false analogy, because people had been living there for a minimum of 14,000 years before the Europeans arrived there for the second or third time (Columbus was preceded by the vikings, the pilgrims by Basque fishermen, etc). The Polynesians and Micronesians are a better example, because the islands…

Yeah, I saw that too, but he was a space tourist, not a worker. There's actually at least one more 2nd generation cosmonaut: Roman Romanenko, per Chris Hatfield's book. It's not in his Wikipedia entry.

Pardon the giggles, but we're not ready for it. It's not a matter of money but of culture. There's a really good example in Chris Hatfield's new An Astronaut's Guide to Life On Earth holds a bunch of examples, although that's not what it's about.

According to the Union Tribune San Diego, the San Diego Natural History Museum has withdrawn its items from the auction. Congratulations to the paleontologists who worked so hard to make this happen

Could I note that a 60 million year-old set of non-avian dinosaur fossils is truly amazing, considering that little asteroid strike that happened sixty-five million years ago. Perhaps the fossils are 66-68 million years old? I haven't found a good reference on this yet, perhaps because the precise provenance (other…

Agriculture is even more dubious: human body sizes shrank after they switched from gathering to agriculture. It provided less free time than did gathering. The advantage of agriculture is that you can pack more people into a small space, which wins wars with hunter-gatherers who have to live at lower densities. One…

"Racism: the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, esp. so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races (from Google). "

I'd suggest talking with Professor Rob Dunn about how urban living is affecting the critters that live on us. This will have a major effect on our immune systems.

I'd also suggest not assuming that the cities of the US are the norm. Mumbai or Lagos might be a better model of cities through history.