Encephalon 38 is up at Not Exactly Rocket Science.

Highly Allochthonous discusses an issue I had never heard of before: geovandalism or the destruction of geological samples that could be used in research.

There are clearly trade-offs involved here: you don't want to completely shut off valuable avenues of research by preventing any sampling of geologically interesting localities, but you also don't want to cheat current and future geologists out of seeing these things in their original context, which is still the heart and soul of learning and doing good geology. Many times, these conflicts can be minimised by simply putting in that little bit of extra effort: rather than just hacking away at the outcrop which everyone stops to look at on field trips, take the time to explore around the river bend, or the in the surrounding undergrowth, to see if you can find what you need there. This seems to be the principal complaint in these South African cases: people weren't willing to go that extra yard to minimise the impact that their research had on everyone else.

Cosmic Variance has a very handy technique to normalize your grades across multiple TAs to account for the relative harshness of a TA's grading:

The problem is this: When you teach a 300 person class, you typically run it with a single lecturer and multiple TA's handling sections. The students do labs and problem sets, which are graded by the TA's. However, not all TA's are equally benevolent when it comes to grading, which can lead some sections to have lower scores than they should. On the other hand, not all sections are equally on the ball, so maybe their low scores are exactly what they deserve. So, how do you tell the difference between a TA who graded more harshly than average, and a TA that was stuck with somewhat dimwitted students?

This giant rat was not discovered in the NY subway system. It was discovered in Indonesia. By the way, I love the Scotsman's scare headline: "Giant rat is five times bigger than normal -- and fears no-one."

Michael Lemonick, a Time magazine science contributor, hates hearts science bloggers:

Now look what's happened. Go to the Science Blogs website and you'll find dozens of actual scientists, commenting in real time on every aspect of science you can imagine. It wouldn't be so bad if they were inarticulate -- but most of them aren't! They're eloquent, funny, sarcastic and really smart (the last kind of goes without saying). No sooner does a paper appear in a major (or even a minor journal) than they jump in with knowledgeable reaction.

This blogger is sadly one of the inarticulate ones.

The NYTimes has an excellent piece on the very appropriately acronymed seasonal affective disorder or SAD:

A major biological signal tracking seasonal sunlight changes is melatonin, a brain chemical turned on by darkness and off by light. Dr. Wehr and Dr. Rosenthal found that the patients with seasonal depression had a longer duration of nocturnal melatonin secretion in the winter than in the summer, just as with other mammals with seasonal behavior.

Why did the normal patients show no seasonal change in melatonin secretion? One possibility is exposure to industrial light, which can suppress melatonin. Perhaps by keeping artificial light constant during the year, we can suppress the "natural" variation in melatonin experienced by SAD patients.

Read the whole thing.