So you're an HIV virion, cruising through some unlucky victim's blood. You dodge some antibodies and breathe a sigh of relief when you cross the cell membrane into a host cell. The next dangerous step is reverse transcribing your RNA into DNA. What with doctors pumping pesky reverse-transcriptase inhibitors into your victim, that can get tricky. But you do it and breathe another sigh of relief. Next you cross into the nucleus and integrate into the host DNA. Once that's done, you're home free, right? Inside your host's DNA, where could you possibly be safer?

Not so fast:

In tests on cultured human tissue, the mutated enzyme, Tre recombinase, snipped HIV DNA out of chromosomes.

This is a really cool approach, and, of course, I hope it pans out.

An appreciative article about Arts and Letters Daily and the people who run it. A and L is probably my biggest source for all the wonderful and interesting links I collect here; if you read it, you probably don't need to read me.

My college English professor speculates on the end of Harry Potter.

Another look at Jeffrey Sachs's millennium village project. This one focuses more on Sachs himself, his vision and, well, naivete.

A survey of school voucher programs in DC finds not much difference:

Students who participated in the first year of the District of Columbia’s federally financed school voucher program did not show significantly higher math or reading achievement, but their parents were satisfied anyway.

But wait, there is a difference:

The $7,500 scholarship that families spent was about half the average public expenditure per student in the District of Columbia public schools.

This last line is misleading; replace "families" with "taxpayers". The bottom line is that school choice provides more bang for the buck.

Astronauts use their free time to do more science.

Playing vaccine whack-a-mole:

The good news is that in the Prevnar-using world, those strains of bacteria have nearly vanished. The bad news from the Alaska study is that strains not covered by the vaccine seem to be moving into the vacuum the vaccine created—making an end run around Prevnar.

This one-sentence description from an article in Popular Science is so startlingly accurate that if you read it you almost don't need to take the tour:

If you tossed a Ben & Jerry’s scoop shop and a Munich beer hall in a blender, you’d get a pretty close approximation of the New Belgium Brewery in Fort Collins.

Even apart from the local reference, the article is quite good. It's about making biofuel from algae, something they're apparently starting to do in New Belgium's back yard.

Raise gas taxes, save lives.

A college education makes you more religious.

Junk DNA isn't junk:

The majority of DNA in the human genome is transcribed into functional molecules, called RNA, and that these transcripts extensively overlap one another. This broad pattern of transcription challenges the long-standing view that the human genome consists of a relatively small set of discrete genes, along with a vast amount of so-called junk DNA that is not biologically active.

A Mexican is worth exactly one third as much as a slave.

"Give us DDT."

I came into the office on Saturday to work, and instead, of course, I surfed the web. Here's what I found:

Yet another piece about how children don't play outside anymore.

Yet another piece about the potential clash between environmentalism and development. This one is strongly worded but maybe over simplified.

Terrence Tao's thoughts on "hard analysis" and "soft analysis". I take a look at Tao's blog whenever I want to feel like a fraudulent excuse for an incompetent mathematician; I got at least a few paragraphs into this one before getting lost, which is better than usual.

And my nomination for best blog post title of 2007, We'll Always Have Paris.

A thought-provoking interview about aid to Africa:

If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should finally terminate this awful aid. The countries that have collected the most development aid are also the ones that are in the worst shape.

Also of interest is this article about Jeffrey Sachs's millennium village project.

Guess who just doubled the size of what was already the largest anti-disease program in human history. Bill Gates? Jimmy Carter? Guess again.

Free life:

If we are willing to pay people to hear or watch ads, why stop there? How about "free life"? Corporations subsidize or create extra babies, under the proviso that the guardians agree to have their little ones doused with particular ads. What if you could addict your kid to Coca-Cola, or some other product, before birth, what sort of market would arise?

Andrew Sullivan has a long-running series of pictures from people's home and office windows. My office doesn't have a window, but if it did, the view would look something like this. I think it was taken from the Campus Police building across the street, and you're looking pretty much straight at me as I type this.