Greg Laden's Blog

If reason and science won't work, let's tug the heartstrings

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I lifted this from the fourth in a series on "why we vaccinate" from Elyse the Skepchick's blog. The first one is here.

Posted by Greg Laden at 9:52 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

What is life? New Biology Textbook

Category: Back To School Special! • Books • Science Education

My old friend, colleague, suaboya, and educator extraordinaire, Jay Phelan has written what many believe will be the next Campbell. The name of the book is What Is Life?. There are two versions: one regular, and one with extra physiology. And both are based firmly on and integrated thoroughly with excellent evolutionary biology.

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Posted by Greg Laden at 8:04 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Hurricane News and Coolest Pictures EVAH!

Category: Hurricane

As predicted, Gaston has emerged from from the ITCZ as a named tropical storm in the eastern Atlantic. Unlike Fiona, Gaston will reach hurricane status, and in fact, there is a pretty good chance that Gaston will be a major hurricane. What matters, of course, is where it goes. In any event, formation of a hurricane and nearing land will not happen until Labor Day or later.

Meanwhile, Earl, which during the night Thursday and early morning Friday will be turning with 100 knot winds off the coast of the Carolinas, is getting some special attention from NASA. Here's a picture NASA published just a few minutes ago:

In case you wanted to see wind speed and vector data from within the hurricane, we have that for you as well:

Read on »

Posted by Greg Laden at 10:16 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Cedric is dead

Category:

No, not that Cedric. This Cedric.

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Posted by Greg Laden at 9:45 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

How can science teachers use blogs?

Category: Back To School Special! • Science Education

Blogs and schools often don't mix. Many blogs are free ranging entities untethered to an institutional or editorial framework. In public discussions of Scienceblogs.com, the fact that every blogger is editorially independent of each other and of the hosting organization, Seed Media Group, is mentioned without fail, and is often the central topic. Non-Sblings (we scienceblogs.com bloggers call ourselves Sblings) readily accuse us of being under the influence of each other or this or that evil empire, and we just as readily deny it. And it's true ... we are beholden to no one.

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Posted by Greg Laden at 6:57 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Stones, Bones, Shards Dirt

Category: Archaeology

Natalie Munro (UCONN) and Leore Grosman (Hebrew University) have reported an interesting site dating to about 12,000 years ago in northern Israel. It is interesting because it seems to be the remains of feasting, a specific activity that any cultures around the world engage in. I'm actually writing something about feasting and related activities, so this is quite interesting to me. From the abstract:

We found clear evidence for feasting on wild cattle and tortoises at Hilazon Tachtit cave, a Late Epipaleolithic (12,000 calibrated years B.P.) burial site in Israel. This includes unusually high densities of butchered tortoise and wild cattle remains in two structures, the unique location of the feasting activity in a burial cave, and the manufacture of two structures for burial and related feasting activities.

As humans consumed the humped conch, the humped conch's average body size went up, in the Pacific Islands.

... researchers were surprised to find that the average size of the conchs actually increased in conjunction with a growing human population. Specifically, the length of the average conch increased by approximately 1.5 millimeters (mm) over the past 3,000 years. That may not sound like much, but it is significant when you consider the conchs are only around 30 mm long - which means the conchs are now almost 5 percent larger than they used to be.

Fitzpatrick believes the size increase is likely related to an increase in nutrients in the conch's waters, stemming from increased agriculture and other human activities.

source

So. Pollution. Figures.

You may not know this, but I personally discovered what for some time was the oldest house structure known in North America. It didn't get much press because the numbnuts in charge of the excavation didn't want to make waves (the site was bulldozed to widen a road). But that's all post holes under the bridge. Literally. Anyway, now, Oldest house in Ontario discovered at 4,500 year old settlement near Lake Huron, Canada

The find rewrites the history of the Canadian province of Ontario, proving that people were living a sedentary lifestyle at that time, even though they lacked agriculture and pottery.

Among the discoveries is a 4,500 year old house - the oldest ever found in the province. "It's semi-subterranean - it's dug partially down into the ground," said Professor Chris Ellis of the University of Western Ontario. He led the team that made the find. "It's as old as the pyramids really."

source

Check out "Diversity in the geosciences and the impact of social media" by Anne Jefferson:

One year ago, Kim Hannula, Pat Campbell, Suzanne Franks, and I launched a survey about women geoscientists reading and writing in the blogosphere. We presented the results at the Geological Society of America meeting, and Kim wrote a great post summarizing and discussing our data. Then I took Kim's post, polished it up with great wording and thinking suggestions from all of the co-authors and submitted it for publication. It went out to reviewers and a few months later, we were accepted for publication.

In the September issue of GSA Today, you can find our article...

I'll be blogging about that later, time permitting.

Posted by Greg Laden at 6:45 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Is Blood Ever Blue? Science Teachers Want to Know!

Category: Back To School Special! • Science Education

According to one of the leading experts on the human circulatory system, blood flowing through veins is blue.

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Posted by Greg Laden at 6:32 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

The Great Debate, Part I: Miller & Pennock vs. Dembski & Behe

Category: Back To School Special! • Creation Science • Creationism • Intelligent Design • Science Education

Posted by Greg Laden at 3:01 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

There is a new blogging network in town: PLoS BLoGs

Category: Blogging

PLoS has had a few blogs all along, PLoS.org, everyONE and Speaking of Medicine (the PLoS ONE and PLoS Medicine community blogs respectively). But now there is a new network, at blogs.plos.org, which includes a number of new blogs, including a couple of Scienceblogs.com diasporics.

The new blogs are:

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Posted by Greg Laden at 1:00 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks