Tuesday, November 09, 2004

Cones, Rods, and Brain Cells

A report of a very cool scientific discovery here. I confess I'm always a little worried about distortions in press releases; after all, if the person who wrote it gets Darwin not quite right (the press release is a little off in characterizing what Darwin said) when anyone can look up what Darwin actually says, what's to prevent them from not characterizing the discovery quite right, when it took technical efforts to discover it? But even compensating for possible distortion in how it is expressed to the public, it's an awesome sort of discovery.

(Hat-tip to Oscar Chamberlain at Cliopatria.)

UPDATE: Pharyngula gives some of specification you can't get in a brief press release.

UPDATE 2: I intended to put a link to the post in which I had already, in another context, put up the Darwin quotation. You can find it here.