January 27, 2016 at 01:00AM

Today I Learned: 1) Neil DeGrasse Tyson has a nephew, Stephen Tyson, who raps. Look him up and you'll run across a rather amusing, if slightly alarming, recent story. 2) The E. coli-based cell-free extract system we use in lab, TX-TL, is MUCH better at producing GFP than similar commercial kits. TX-TL is essentially cell innards minus the membrane, while commercial kits are built from the ground up with known components. Also, TX-TL is an order of magnitude or two cheaper than commercial systems, which is nice. 3) "Tort reform" is any change to the legal system that limits the ability of people to suit. In the US, tort reform almost always refers to the practice of capping payouts for medical malpractice payouts. The goal of tort reform (in the context of health care) is to reduce the amount of suits brought against doctors for malpractice and to reduce the payouts associated with those suits. This, in turn, should lower medical malpractice insurance, lowering the cost of healthcare. Does it work? Almost unambiguously no. Malpractice insurance only accounts for a couple of percent of US health care spending anyway, so even a massive reduction in malpractice insurance costs wouldn't do much to bring down overall costs. There's also no evidence that tort reform has lowered healthcare costs *at all* in the states where it has been implemented. Florida is an interesting case study -- when tort reform was enacted in Florida, the primary effect was that insurance companies didn't have to pay out as much money on lost litigation, and they didn't lower their prices, so their profits went up by a factor of 40 (not a typo).