Science
Pharyngula
Category archives for Science
Briefing from the radioactive badlands of the American Southwest, 1954
Posted by PZ Myers on January 2, 2013 [We are fortunate to have this transcript, taken by a company stenographer, from one of the early efforts of the resistance to instruct an army company in tactics. Although we now have more sophisticated technologies to hold these invaders in check, it is instructive too see how the American military in the 1950s struggled to…
The CephSeq Consortium has a strategy
Posted by PZ Myers on October 29, 2012 I approve this plan. A number of researchers have gotten together and worked out a grand strategy for sequencing the genomes of a collection of cephalopods. This involves surveying the phylogeny of cephalopods and trying to pick species to sample that adequately cover the diversity of the group, while also selecting model species that have…
The ENCODE delusion
Posted by PZ Myers on September 23, 2012 I can take it no more. I wanted to dig deeper into the good stuff done by the ENCODE consortium, and have been working my way through some of the papers (not an easy thing, either: I have a very high workload this term), but then I saw this declaration from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.…
Can I add “Published Authority on the Female Orgasm” to my CV now?
Posted by PZ Myers on September 19, 2012 Our rebuttal to claims about the adaptive significance of the female orgasm has been published, as Zietsch & Santtila's study is not evidence against the by-product theory of female orgasm. I blogged about this a while back, and also dealt with some counter-arguments, and Elisabeth Lloyd thought my arguments were strong enough to be incorporated…
The best thing I’ve read today
Posted by PZ Myers on September 17, 2012 I know it’s early, but I expect it to be the best thing for a few days yet. David Byrne writes about his love affair with sound, and I came away from it feeling like I’d both learned something new and that it fit well with other ideas I already had — it was a…
O brave new world that has such penises in’t
Posted by PZ Myers on September 12, 2012 I am getting quite impressed with the progress being made in organ reconstruction. New techniques have allowed amazing improvements in bioengineering that allow whole complex organs to be grown in a dish and then surgically reimplanted — and much of this research is being driven by our military ventures, which provide a steady supply of…
How the turtle got its shell
Posted by PZ Myers on August 30, 2012 In my post bashing that silly article claiming to have figured out how endoskeletons evolved from exoskeletons, there was a good question buried in the comments, and I thought I’d answer it. Are there any models pulled out of arses which explain the turtle’s unique skeleton? Yes! I mean, no, not pulled out of arses,…
Who’s conscious?
Posted by PZ Myers on August 22, 2012 A recent meeting of neuroscientists tried to define a set of criteria for that murky phenomenon called “consciousness”. I don’t know how successful they were; they’ve come out with a declaration on consciousness that isn’t exactly crystal clear. It seems to involve the existence of neural circuitry that exhibits specific states that modulate behavior. The…
Live by statistics, die by statistics
Posted by PZ Myers on August 13, 2012 There is a magic and arbitrary line in ordinary statistical testing: the p level of 0.05. What that basically means is that if the p level of a comparison between two distributions is less than 0.05, there is a less than 5% chance that your results can be accounted for by accident. We’ll often say…
I’m ready for my close-up
Posted by PZ Myers on August 9, 2012 I’m getting a bit peeved at all this new technology. Why, back in the day when I was doing electron microscopy work, I’d spend days slicing up tiny fragments of zebrafish embedded in epon-araldite with an ultramicrotome, and I’d end up with hundreds of itty-bitty copper grids that I’d put in the EM one by…