I'm back, and so are the Neanderthals

Whew, that was a long break. I haven't posted in a while largely because I now write a column for my paper. When you write your opinions every week, along with the odd editorial and a dozen or so stories, you get a little burned out on opinion piece writing pretty quickly.

Hopefully I'll do some more blogging in the future. For now, let's all the just marvel at the fact that scientists are sequencing the Neanderthal genome. I would have said this was very likely impossible about 10 years ago, and so would most scientists.

Of course, now there will be a whole bunch of stories about how this could be like Jurassic Park, cloned Neanderthals, etc. Stupid media, he said self-consciously. Aside from the obvious ethical conundrums of bringing back what is likely to be a sentient, but possibly less intelligent being, the technical challenges would be huge. Don't look for it any time soon.