First blog post

I am going to use this page to summarize my readings of science on the web, from popular science to somewhat more professional reading. Although my professional training is at the interface between chemistry and biology, more than 50% of my reading of science on the web is about something else, e.g. human evolution, space exploration, information technology, and etc.

First, about space exploration. NASA is sending another orbitor to Mars, which was launched Aug 12. When I was trying to get the latest news about it, I found there are several sites on NASA, JPL, and etc, which update themselves differently, and I think, confuses people. Also, one thing missing on those sites is a link called "Where is MRO now?". A similar link was used frequently by me when I was following the trajectories of two famous Mars landers, Spirit and Opportunity.

News today on human evolution include the following:

The 1st chimp fossil was found in East Africa and reported in the most recent issue of Nature. This is exciting because in contrast to numerous findings of fossils of human ancestors since splitting from the human/chimp common ancestor (which happened around 6 million years ago), no fossil was found for the chimp ancestors at all, until now.

The chimp genome sequencing has completed and the result was again published on Nature. The identy with us is 96%. The difference is mainly within the neural system and the reproduction system. I feel the former is expected but the latter is less comprehensible.