Archives for December 11, 2007
Science News Tidbits: Climate and Ecology
Posted by Greg Laden on December 11, 2007 Rising CO2 signals wetter storms for Northern Hemisphere from PhysOrg.com While two new studies by researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences predict wetter storms for the Arctic and for the Northern Hemisphere because of global warming, whether or not this means more net precipitation depends on…
Reprogramming Adult Cells to Cure Sickle-Cell
Posted by Greg Laden on December 11, 2007 MIT researchers have successfully treated mice with sickle-cell anemia in a process that begins by directly reprogramming the mice’s own cells to an embryonic-stem-cell-like state, without the use of eggs. This is the first proof-of-principle of therapeutic application in mice of directly reprogrammed induced pluripotent stem (IPS) cells, which recently have been derived in mice…
Science News Tidbits
Posted by Greg Laden on December 11, 2007 Infants Fine-Tune Their Visual and Auditory Skills in First Year of Life, Psychologist Says from PhysOrg.com Infants refine and narrow their ability to discriminate between things they see and hear in their first year, revealing what appears to be a decline in ability at a time when most other skills and functions are dramatically increasing,…
Science News Tidbits
Posted by Greg Laden on December 11, 2007 Mars Orbiter Examines ‘Lace’ and ‘Lizard Skin’ Terrain from PhysOrg.com Scrutiny by NASA’s newest Mars orbiter is helping scientists learn the stories of some of the weirdest landscapes on Mars, as well as more familiar-looking parts of the Red Planet. [...] Mars Rover Investigates Signs of Steamy Martian Past from PhysOrg.com Researchers using NASA’s twin…
Microsoft Infuriated
Posted by Greg Laden on December 11, 2007 Proposed legislation that would mandate the use of the Open Document Format (ODF) across the entire Dutch government has infuriated Microsoft. A group promoting open standards sees no threat, however, and has invited Microsoft to join its ranks. On Wednesday the Dutch parliament will discuss a plan to mandate use of the Open Document Format…
The Wood Spider … stoned
Posted by Greg Laden on December 11, 2007 This is a good one for your 8th grade biology class… … or maybe not…
There are still mysteries
Posted by Greg Laden on December 11, 2007 Try this: Starting at home, drive, run, ski, or walk about fifty thousand feet. That would be about ten miles, or 15 kilometers. It won’t take you long (especially if you drive) and chances are, when you get there, it will be a place at least vaguely familiar to you. At the very least, it…
Big Surprise: Bushies Are Bushies
Posted by Greg Laden on December 11, 2007 How people respond to the U.S. government’s attempts to censor some war-related images comes down to whether or not they are supporters of President Bush, a new study suggests. Researchers at Ohio State University surveyed 600 people and asked them if they were interested in viewing photos or videos of the caskets containing dead U.S.…
Harvard Mind Survey: Meet the Politicians!
Posted by Greg Laden on December 11, 2007 You’ll remember that some time ago (ten, eleven minutes?) I reposted (from gregladen.com) an interesting story about a study of how the mind works. I did that because I knew that the researchers involved in this study have a new survey up on their web site, and that you might want to know about it.…
The Multi-dimensioned Mind, The Inexperienced God
Posted by Greg Laden on December 11, 2007 [Repost from gregladen.com] New findings reported by Harvard researchers in the journal Science suggest that the mind is typically viewed as having multiple dimensions that relate to specific important characteristics of individuals. This study has implications for how individuals develop ethical or moral stands on topics such as abortion, and how individuals view god, life,…
Three Interesting Commentaries…
Posted by Greg Laden on December 11, 2007 … From conservative Mac Johnson, on Intelligent Design; Student-Run Anchor of Rhode Island College Executive Editor Jessica Albaum on Huckabee the Hate-able ; and the Star Telegram’s OpEd by Alan Leshner on science standards in Texas….
Scientists Discover How to Make Robots Bounce on Water
Posted by Greg Laden on December 11, 2007 This makes a lot of sense to me. Since it is probably pretty easy to adapt any robot to live on water (a little duct tape, some rubber bands, and a bunch of plastic bags should do it), then we can let them live there … on the sea … where they will stop bothering…
Ronco Facts Shunned
Posted by Greg Laden on December 11, 2007 Archaeologists know that a “Roncofact” is an artifact that you find, and realize (or speculate) that it had multiple functions. “It slices, it dices, it makes Julian Fries….” A recent study claims that humans, in fact, shun Roncofacts. But wait, there’s more..
Have you seen Yahoo answers?
Posted by Greg Laden on December 11, 2007 The two most annoying kinds of “hits” from an internet search are: 1) When you find a site with your question rephrased exactly as it should be, and the first few sentences of the answer you need, but to continue … to be able to read the answer … you must register, and possibly even…
Prediction: Linux will Eat Microsoft on Most Desktops
Posted by Greg Laden on December 11, 2007 Sometimes, several unrelated changes come to a head at the same time, with a result no one could have predicted. The PC market is at such a tipping point right now and the result will be millions of Linux-powered PCs in users’ hands. Or so opines Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols of DesktopLinux.com.
Go Little Vger, Go!
Posted by Greg Laden on December 11, 2007 Vger 2 (Voyager) took off in 1977, and over the last 30 years has been working pretty well. Vger is now 12,680,021,376 kilometers away and is traveling at 56 327 km per hour. Think about it this way: How many instruments in current scientific labs, and how many computers sitting on anyone’s desktop, were made…
Les Scienceblogiers, Das Scienceblogdotkammerskinders, Wascienceblogani …
Posted by Greg Laden on December 11, 2007 Quelles langues parlez-vous ? Όποιες γλώσσες μιλάτε;??? … ouch … that was my blog on Greek …. Unasemaka luga gani? Science Blogs is expanding to different areas of the world (coming up: German) and the editors are intersted in taking the pulse of the Sb community to see what languages should be on the radar…
How to Justify a Desktop Upgrade
Posted by Greg Laden on December 11, 2007 From slashdot: “I stumbled across this fascinating Microsoft tutorial entitled “How to Justify a Desktop Upgrade.” It’s an attempt to coach IT professionals on how to sell Windows desktop upgrades internally. Apparently the value of Vista is not readily apparent, requiring detailed instructions on how to connive and cajole into an upgrade from XP. Here’s…
Speaking of Hard Drives
Posted by Greg Laden on December 11, 2007 Check this out: This is the IBM 350 Disk Storage Unit. It held five … count ”em FIVE … megabytes. That’s not bytes, not kilobytes, but MEGA bytes, baby. [source]
Human Evolutionary Rate Study
Posted by Greg Laden on December 11, 2007 There seems to be some interesting things going on with the recently reported study of rates of evolution in humans. We are getting reports of a wide range of rather startling conclusions being touted by the researchers who wrote this paper. These conclusions typically come from press releases, and then are regurgitated by press outlets,…
Missing protein may be key to autism
Posted by Greg Laden on December 11, 2007 From an MIT press release: A missing brain protein may be one of the culprits behind autism and other brain disorders, according to researchers at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. The protein, called CASK, helps in the development of synapses, which neurons use to communicate with one another and which underlie our ability…
Happy Birthday E. G. Robinson
Posted by Greg Laden on December 11, 2007 You would be 114 years old today!
Happy Birthday Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Posted by Greg Laden on December 11, 2007 
, which is now available for the 
