Saturday Morning Links

Active rigs: 186 (steady)

Rigzone is asking whether US shale means a dose of Dutch Elm disease?

The US is probably giving up on the Arctic, but not Russia. The world's largest oil company, Rosneft, will invest $1.5 billion in the Arctic shelf. Rigzone is reporting:

The world's largest listed oil producer, Russia's Rosneft, plans to invest $1.5 billion to survey the East Arctic shelf, deputy general director at Rosneft-Shelf-Far-East said Friday, Interfax news agency reported.

WSJ Links

Section D (Off Duty): Later

Section C (Review):

• Can cancer cells solve the puzzle of junk DNA? The article certainly had nothing to do with the headline.
  

  Yet—and here's the source of the controversy—the HeLa cell line was derived from the tumor that killed a poor, black tobacco farmer named Henrietta Lacks in Baltimore in 1951. As Rebecca Skloot has documented in a remarkable best seller ("The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks"), the medical community never got her consent and treated her family with tactless disrespect for years—until Ms. Skloot's book began to make a difference. [I read the book twice; somehow I'm not sympathetic to the plaintiff's complaint, but I'm probably the only one. Right, wrong, indifferent, the HeLa controversy surrounding privacy and ownership certainly have nothing to do with junk DNA and cancer in the sense that the headline might have led some of us to believe. Having said that, it's a great little book, but about twice as long as it needs to be; but if it was half the length it is, it would not be a book; it would be a pamphlet.]

  Not enough of a difference, apparently. The German team did not seek the consent of the Lacks family before publishing the HeLa sequence, claiming it revealed nothing specific about Ms. Lacks's own genome. "Your claim is so wrong that I don't know where to start," replied one geneticist. The sequence has since been unpublished.

  So here's the paradox: A cancer genome like HeLa may not be sufficiently representative of human genomes to resolve the junk DNA question, but may still give away private information about the human being from whom it derived.

• Turkeys with teeth. Everything you learned as a child about dinosaurs is wrong. Sam Kean reviews Brian Switek's My Beloved Brontosaurus.

• Does the moon exist when I'm not looking at it. At 38 -- well past the age when physicists peak -- Erwin Schrodinger changed science with a sudden burst of creativity. Gino Segre reviews John Gribbin's Erwin Shrodinger and the Quantum Revolution. A timely book. And John Gribbin is one of the best in this genre. Very timely: I am reading David Bodanis' biography of the world's most famous equation, e=mc2, with my granddaughter.

• How Hello Kitty conquered the world. The cutesy Hello Kitty character came to be popular with everyone from small children to motorcycle gangs. Meghan Keane reviews Christine R. Rano's Pink Globalization.

• In praise of Daisy, Fred, Jones and Red. The creator of Charlotte the spider and Wilbur the pig reserved his own greatest affection for canines. Danny Heitman reviews E.B. White on Dogs. 

Section B (Business & Finance):

• Judge denies Macy's request to temporarily block the sale of some Martha Stewart-designed products at JC Penney. Probably won't matter.

• Will the Obama administration shrink your IRA? 

Section A:

• Almost laughable: US warns Japan on yen. 

• Pension plan would hit retirees: A coalition of unions and employers is proposing changes to the federal law that governs the pension plans of about 10 million people, including reducing benefits paid to retirees, the first time in four decades that such cuts would be allowed.

• Back-tax hit sparks fury. I guess. Wow, this will hurt. Twenty years of back taxes? Small startup companies in California are fighting the state's decision to tax them retroactively after a 20-year-old tax incentive was found unconstitutional. A great state to build a business: California. Not.

• Everybody must pay their fair shares. President's tax rate: 18%. President Obama and the first lady paid $112,214 in federal income taxes in 2012 on adjusted gross income of $608,611, an effective rate of 18.4%. Bakken millionaires probably pay a bit more. Just a hunch.

• A lot of stories on the Korean Missile Crisis. This story just doesn't have the same intensity as the Cuban Missile Crisis. Sequels never do.

• Sports: everyone agrees. Penalizing a 14-y/o amateur at the Masters was incredibly dumb. But then again, these guys didn't allow women for decades. There are going to be a lot of fans in the gallery today holding up stopwatches when Tiger Woods starts playing.

• Op-ed: using eminent domain for pipelines? That's "right of way" done wrong. A lot of folks in North Dakota will be cutting and pasting this article. I assume this will eventually find its way over on the Bakken Shale Discussion Group blog. Unfortunately they will miss the point. They have it pretty good in North Dakota.