A Blog Around The Clock

Five-Fiftysix meme

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 11:23:48 -0500

It started with Henry who was bored with the simplicity of the "pick the nearest book" meme and decided to make it really hard!

Mike picked it up and tagged a few people, including me and Wilkins.

So, what are the rules? Hey, Henry came up with this, so feel free to make the rules as you go. After all, what's he gonna do - release calcium from intracellular stores?

OK, pick not one but TEN books. They don't need to be the closest to you - take your time and make good picks. It's not easy - you want people to work hard, but still figure out the sources eventually. Goldilocks Principle applies - not too obvious, not too obscure. Or whatever you prefer - make it easy so everyone can have fun, or make it so darned hard nobody gets it and you can gloat about your sophistication!

The unalterable rule: take ten books, and transcribe the fifth sentence from page fifty six.

If you want, you can have five of them be fiction, but you can change that as well.

If you want, you can provide hints, but you don't have to.

Then tag six people, or some other number (including zero) as you wish. As Wilkins notes, memes are supposed to mutate and evolve, so don't be a stickler for the rules. Just have fun!

OK - here are my ten:

1. I suppose that the mere fact that I was in the company of two friends itself proves that I wasn't actually some kind of hermit when it came to my rat studies.

2. They're screwing the security guards in the bathroom.

3. By the end of the nineteenth century, organic synthesis was widely accepted and the vital force theory was abandoned.

4. Cyanobacteria actually can tell time using a mechanism similar to our circadian clock, from the Latin meaning "about a day".

5. Half blind, I picked myself up and ran and ran and ran.

6. The idea that the transmission of news via paper might become a bad idea, that all those huge, noisy printing presses might be like steam engines in the age of internal combustion, was almost impossible to grasp.

7. Born in 1769, the twenty-year-old seminary student had weathered the French revolution by working at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris with the dashing eccentric zoological genius Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hillaire.

8. Males place packets of sperm everywhere on the female's head or tentacles.

9. Escoffier begins with the browning of beef and veal bones in the oven.

10. The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.

Hints: 8 of the 10 authors also write blogs.

I tag:

John McKay
Peggy Kolm
Tom Levenson
Dr.Isis
Carl Zimmer
Brian Switek

Honor system - refrain from Google for 24 hours. Post your best guesses in the comments. I will post the solutions to the riddle in 24 hours in the comments here.

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Triangle Blogger Meetup

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 10:04:45 -0500

Triangle bloggers will meet at Carrboro Creative Coworking on Wednesday, December 10th at 6pm. Please join us if you can.

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My picks from ScienceDaily

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 09:12:41 -0500

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Coral disease outbreaks and warming waters

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 08:20:06 -0500

The next Sigma Xi Pizza Lunch -- noon, Wednesday, Dec. 17 -- is a chance to learn more about climate change's expected environmental toll. UNC-Chapel Hill marine biologist and ecologist John Bruno will discuss recent research on links between coral disease outbreaks and warming waters.
The Pizza Lunch speaker series is free and open to science journalists and science communicators of all stripes. Feel free to forward this invitation to anyone you would like to see included. RSVPs are required (so we can get a reliable slice count) to cclabby@amsci.org.

Directions to Sigma XI: http://www.sigmaxi.org/about/center/directions.shtml

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Clock Quotes

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 03:52:11 -0500

A timid person is frightened before a danger, a coward during the time, and a courageous person afterward.

- Jean Paul Richter

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The Open Laboratory 2008 - all the submissions fit to print

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 00:40:09 -0500

It's midnight! So, the submission form is now closed.

Over the past year we have collected hundreds of excellent entries for the anthology - thanks to all who made the submissions.

Jennifer Rohn has lined up some star people to judge all the entries, and in the end, we'll have the best 50 (plus a poem and a cartoon/image) published in a book with Lulu.com. We will announce the winners in a couple of weeks or so, but in the meantime, bookmark this post - this is the best of science blogging for the year!

And if the winter break is long enough for you to read all of these entries and still crave more - you can read the The Open Laboratory: The Best Writing on Science Blogs 2006 and The Open Laboratory: The Best Science Writing on Blogs 2007 all over again. We are hoping to have the book out and ready for sale before the ScienceOnline09 so we can sell some copies right then and there.

So, here are ALL the entries for The Open Laboratory 2008:

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Today's carnivals

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 23:54:54 -0500

Berry Go Round # 11 is up on Catalogue of Organisms

Carnival of Elitist Bastards, VIII is up on Cafe Philos

Carnival of the Green #156 is up on Healthy Child Healthy World

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ScienceOnline'09 on the Radio!

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 23:13:49 -0500

This Wednesday at 11am, tune in to Radio In Vivo with Ernie Hood at WCOM-FM 103.5 in Carrboro, NC (or check out the podcast online afterwards), because the show will be fantastic:

Radio In Vivo
December 3, 2008

Guests: David Kroll (NCCU), Anton Zuiker (Duke), Bora Zivkovic (PLOS) - co-organizers of ScienceOnline'09

Topic: ScienceOnline'09, coming Jan. 16-18, 2009, Sigma Xi, RTP

Ernie will even open up the phone lines (919-929-9601) for the audience so you can call in to heckle us or ask really tough questions ;-)

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Plant a Seed in every classroom

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 23:05:45 -0500

Now you can donate a subscription to Seed Magazine to a classroom of your choice:

Earlier this year, as part of the DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge, ScienceBlogs readers donated over $18,000 toward science literacy.
Seed Media Group was proud to donate a further $15,000, bringing the ScienceBlogs community's total contribution to over $33,000. Schools around the nation are already putting these badly-needed funds toward science classrooms and labs.

Science literacy is a crucial element in driving progress. We believe that by providing the next generation access to scientific perspectives, by introducing them to the stories of how we, our world, and our universe work, we are handing them the first critical tools to help build a healthy, prosperous future.

In the spirit of the DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge, we are offering the chance to give the gift of science year-round. Donate a Seed magazine subscription to a science classroom and we'll give you the base subscription price of $14.95. You may donate one or more subscriptions to a school (or schools) of your choice, or, if you do not have a specific school in mind, DonorsChoose has selected schools that are most in need of these donations and will happily choose one for you.

We're proud of the ScienceBlogs community, and of what we've been able to achieve together for science education. Thank you!

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New and Exciting in PLoS this week

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 22:18:36 -0500

Let's see what is new in PLoS Medicine, PLoS Biology and PLoS ONE today:

Time-of-Day-Dependent Enhancement of Adult Neurogenesis in the Hippocampus:

Adult neurogenesis occurs in specific regions of the mammalian brain such as the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus. In the neurogenic region, neural progenitor cells continuously divide and give birth to new neurons. Although biological properties of neurons and glia in the hippocampus have been demonstrated to fluctuate depending on specific times of the day, it is unclear if neural progenitors and neurogenesis in the adult brain are temporally controlled within the day. Here we demonstrate that in the dentate gyrus of the adult mouse hippocampus, the number of M-phase cells shows a day/night variation throughout the day, with a significant increase during the nighttime. The M-phase cell number is constant throughout the day in the subventricular zone of the forebrain, another site of adult neurogenesis, indicating the daily rhythm of progenitor mitosis is region-specific. Importantly, the nighttime enhancement of hippocampal progenitor mitosis is accompanied by a nighttime increase of newborn neurons. These results indicate that neurogenesis in the adult hippocampus occurs in a time-of-day-dependent fashion, which may dictate daily modifications of dentate gyrus physiology.

Mutualistic Interactions Drive Ecological Niche Convergence in a Diverse Butterfly Community:

What governs the composition of communities of species? Competition promotes divergence in behavior and habitat, allowing species to co-exist. But the effects of other interactions, such as mutualism, are less well understood. We examined the interplay between mutualistic interactions, common ancestry and competition in mimetic butterflies, one of the best studied examples of mutualism, in which species converge in wing pattern to advertize their toxicity to predators. We showed that mutualism drives convergence in flight height and forest habitat, and that these effects outweigh common ancestry (which should lead related species to be more similar) and competition (which promotes ecological divergence). Our findings imply that species that benefit from one another might evolve to form more tightly knit local communities, suggesting that adaptation is a more important process affecting community composition than is commonly suspected. Our results also support the idea that mimicry can cause speciation, through its multiple cascading effects on species' biology.

The Prevalence of Mental Disorders among the Homeless in Western Countries: Systematic Review and Meta-Regression Analysis:

There are well over a million homeless people in Western Europe and North America, but reliable estimates of the prevalence of major mental disorders among this population are lacking. We undertook a systematic review of surveys of such disorders in homeless people. We searched for surveys of the prevalence of psychotic illness, major depression, alcohol and drug dependence, and personality disorder that were based on interviews of samples of unselected homeless people. We searched bibliographic indexes, scanned reference lists, and corresponded with authors. We explored potential sources of any observed heterogeneity in the estimates by meta-regression analysis, including geographical region, sample size, and diagnostic method. Twenty-nine eligible surveys provided estimates obtained from 5,684 homeless individuals from seven countries. Substantial heterogeneity was observed in prevalence estimates for mental disorders among the studies (all Cochran's χ2 significant at p < 0.001 and all I2 > 85%). The most common mental disorders were alcohol dependence, which ranged from 8.1% to 58.5%, and drug dependence, which ranged from 4.5% to 54.2%. For psychotic illness, the prevalence ranged from 2.8% to 42.3%, with similar findings for major depression. The prevalence of alcohol dependence was found to have increased over recent decades. Homeless people in Western countries are substantially more likely to have alcohol and drug dependence than the age-matched general population in those countries, and the prevalences of psychotic illnesses and personality disorders are higher. Models of psychiatric and social care that can best meet these mental health needs requires further investigation.

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My picks from ScienceDaily

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 09:12:25 -0500

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Recuerdos de la Alhambra

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 09:05:43 -0500

A live performance by Johannes Moller from a concert in the Vasteras Concert Hall, Sweden, May 2005 :

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Today's carnivals

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 07:17:39 -0500

MetaCarnival: Volume One, Number 2 is up on Emergiblog

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Clock Quotes

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 03:52:54 -0500

Who says we didn't have controversial subjects on TV back in my time? Remember Bonanza? It was about three guys in high heels living together.

- Milton Berle

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