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Comment Vote fraud, Medicaid fraud, etc (Score 1) 383

Biometric identification is needed to reduce fraud. We all know how easy it is for one person to vote as many times as they want. There is no way to even estimate how much Medicaid recipient fraud costs. Biometrics certainly won't eliminate fraud in these and other places but it's a step in the right direction.

Unfortunately we're very unlikely to see any progress on this anytime soon. Even suggesting that a person should present identification when voting is met with howls of protest.

Comment are they doing calculus? (Score 2) 51

Next the researchers need to figure out if the flies are calculating the necessary wing beats to correct or whether it's just a feedback loop. And whether they see that they're tilted or whether it's a built-in accelerometer. I'm betting on acceleration and calculus since the flies went to Cornell.

Submission + - As Animals Mingle, a Baffling Genetic Barrier (simonsfoundation.org)

An anonymous reader writes: The crows present a puzzling question to biologists, which gets to the heart of what it means to be a species: Given that hooded and carrion crows can mate and swap genes, how do the two groups maintain their individual identities? It’s as if you mixed red and yellow paint in a bucket but the two colors stubbornly refused to make orange.

In new research published in June in the journal Science, Wolf’s team has found that a surprisingly small chunk of DNA may hold the answer. A comparison of the carrion and hooded-crow genomes showed that the sequences are almost identical. Differences in just 82 DNA letters, out of a total of about 1.2 billion, appear to separate the two groups. Almost all of them are clustered in a small part of one chromosome. “Maybe just a few genes make a species what they are,” said Chris Jiggins, a biologist at the University of Cambridge in England, who was not involved in the study. “Maybe the rest of genome can flow, so species are much more fluid than we imagined before.”

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