Maintained by Seed's editors, web editors, and the other people who make Seed tick, Page 3.14 points you in the direction of some of ScienceBlogs' finest offerings, plus the tastiest tidbits of science news and opinion from around the web.
Other Good Stuff
MEMBER, ORDER OF THE SCIENCE SCOUTS OF EXEMPLARY REPUTE AND ABOVE AVERAGE PHYSIQUE
Readers of denialism blog have long enjoyed the Hoofnagle brothers' determined war against the evils of denialism. Their new co-blogger Dr. Peter Lipson, also known as PalMD, joins them in the fight for scientific truth. Page 3.14 interviewed him and discovered, among other things, a fondness for waffles and Homer (the poet, not the Simpson).
What's your name?
Pete Lipson
What do you do when you're not blogging?
I'm an internist, husband, and father. It's probably in that order, but I'd like to change that eventually.
Despite An Inconvenient Truth's Oscar win and Al Gore's Nobel, public opinion of global warming has changed little since the film's release in 2006.
As Matt Nisbet recently pointed out: "Conventional wisdom pegged Gore's film and media campaign as changing the nature of the debate in the public's mind, but unfortunately this interpretation doesn't hold up to the data." Even more surprising is that apparently the debate is most heated among the college educated.
What about you guys? Did the film only tell you what you already knew? Did it change your mind? Did it bore you to tears?
Want to know the results? We'll publish them exclusively in next week's ScienceBlogs Weekly Recap—the fun e-newsletter that brings you the top posts, quotes, photos and videos from the previous week on ScienceBlogs. (Click here to subscribe to the newsletter.)
Where do you do science? Seed Magazine wants to know.
We've all seen the stereotypical pictures of a science lab: microscopes and petri dishes sitting atop sterile work benches; electric circuits sunk in a mess of metal wires and batteries; equations scribbled on blackboards. But we also know that plenty of world-changing science goes on in non-typical places.
Now hard at work on the next issue, Seed editors want to see the typical or not-so-typical places where you do science. For the chance to get your scientific work space featured in Seed, please send a photo of it to art@seedmediagroup.com by Tuesday, May 13th at 5:00pm EST. Please write "Where I Do Science Photo Submission" in the subject line, and send as high a resolution image as you can. In the body of the email, please include: your name; what kind of science you do; and the location of the photo.
Photos should *not* have any people in them, just the work space itself.
It's that time of the week again! Here are the large versions of this week's channel photos.
(Have a photo you'd like to send in? Email it to photos@scienceblogs.com, or assign the tag "sbhomepage" to one of your photos on Flickr. Note: be sure to assign your photo an "attribution only" or "share and share alike" Creative Commons license so that we can use it.)
It's the pithiest headlines of the past week at our European partner site, ScienceBlogs.de!
Friedrich Schiller's Skull Still at Large
A two-year investigation to determine which of two skulls belonged to the celebrated German poet Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) has found that neither is a match. This prolonging of a 180-year-old mystery doesn't thrill Ludmila Carone: "It is not that I do not appreciate Schiller's works. But the man is dead and a dead skull is not expected to create new literature."
Schools Resist Standardized Rankings
Germany's teachers don't like to be graded. As the ScienceBlogs.de editors' blog, Neurons, reports, even the teachers' union has voted against any kind of rankings.
But luckily, writes Florian Freistetter, there do exist several attemps to grade teachers, such as Spickmich and Kompetenztest, although "the ministry of education and cultural affairs doesn't like them." And there also has been a debate on the evaluation of university teachers on websites such as MeinProf. "Unfortunately," Florian continues, "there does not exist an official institution which grades teaching at German universities. Some universities evaluate their teaching and some don't. There are no common standards and not all results are published."
My Car Eats Your Bread
A study by Greenpeace says cars filled with biodiesel consume a loaf of bread every three kilometers (2 miles). Christian Reinboth says: "If every product with which is called 'bio' were actually saving the environment, then we would not need to worry for our planet. ... Biofuel increases hunger in the world."
An Itsy Bitsy Spy There...
Communications professor and ScienceBlogs.de guest blogger Miriam Meckel shares her impressions of travelling through the USA in her blog Americanische Begegnungen (American Encounter): "We are entering a surveillance society. Just take a taxi from the San Francisco Airport and you will discover a little camera in the front of the car that films you all the way downtown to your hotel."
That's all until next week. Note that links in this article are to blog posts in German—but their authors are usually happy to respond to comments in English. Danke!
This newsletter is compiled by ScienceBlogs.de managing editor Beatrice Lugger.
Last Thursday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) with a vote of 414 to 1. Lauded by most media pundits as an example of "forward-looking" legislation, the bill forbids companies from viewing the genetic profiles of their clients or employees. President Bush has promised to sign the bill.
But just how "forward-looking" is GINA? Does current genetic technology really put us in danger of genetic discrimination? How much longer before the themes in Gattaca become reality?
Want to know the results? We'll publish them exclusively in next week's ScienceBlogs Weekly Recap—the fun e-newsletter that brings you the top posts, quotes, photos and videos from the previous week on ScienceBlogs. (Click here to subscribe to the newsletter.)
To make your Friday that much better, here are the large versions of this week's channel photos.
(Have a photo you'd like to send in? Email it to photos@scienceblogs.com, or assign the tag "sbhomepage" to one of your photos on Flickr. Note: be sure to assign your photo an "attribution only" or "share and share alike" Creative Commons license so that we can use it.)
First photo here, the rest below the fold.
Life Science. A whale surfaces off the Brazilian coastline. From Flickr, by Amnemona
These top stories rounded out the month of April at our European partner site, ScienceBlogs.de. This will also be the last installment of the weekly update prepared and translated by ScienceBlogs.de assistant Anwen Roberts. She'll be greatly missed. Look for a slightly different format and feel starting next week.
Dynamic Science Blogs
Benedikt Köhler of Viralmythen has analyzed the growth of German science blogs as a ratio of last month's and recent Technorati rankings, and visualized his results in a tag cloud. As Beatrice Lugger writes at Neurons:
"His approach is based on an analysis of rankings he presents on his unique evaluation site Metaroll. This is a wonderful panorama of presently active German science blogs. It shows just what we're observing here—that our ScienceBlogs are very dynamic."
Her post has sparked a lively discussion about the sense and nonsense of rankings, and of entertainment and popularity values of science blogs.
New Therapy for Alzheimer's
Peter Artmann at Medlog congratulates the Dresden researchers of the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics for their Science article on an Alzheimer's inhibiting drug:
"The German research team with Hans-Joachim Knölker and Kai Simons has presented the world's best therapy concept for Alzheimer's disease... So far though, the results are limited to mice and flies... Probably the best thing about this paper is its foundations—instead of genetic engineering, the key of the drug lies in organic chemistry... Until this is licensed as a prescription drug however, there is still a long way to go."
Ma(r)x Surprise
Recently-discovered Northern German church documents state that Max Planck was actually christened Marx, prompting science bloggers to wonder whether the new information matters at all, as Planck clearly called himself Max—and if it does matter, whether the name plates of countless German research institutes will have to be changed.
"The Northern Elbe Church Archives in Kiel have now confirmed the discovery according to [German news magazine] SPIEGEL... Marx was in fact common enough as a first name. So are we really soon to have the Marx Planck Institutes..?" -Christian Rheinboth, Frischer Wind
"Usually Frank Abel reports on various weather phenomena and of his daily routine; his most recent, however, is a bit out of that line—a 5-minute video, bigger than the whole universe... It shows a computer-generated zoom into a Mandelbrot set. The knack is that the last frame of the video shows the 315th zoom level, which means that to display the entire screen selection of the first frame, 2^316 monitors would be needed, but that would relate to a size of 2^176 times the size of the known universe, as the video artist himself states..."
That's all until next week. Note that links in this article are to blog posts in German—but their authors are usually happy to respond to comments in English. Danke!
Thanks to Anwen Roberts and to ScienceBlogs.de managing editor Beatrice Lugger.
ScienceBlogs is proud to announce the newest member of our blogging community: ERV is the pseudonym of Abbie Smith, an Oklahoma-based graduate student who was bound for medical school until a summer internship turned her on to the research track. She now studies HIV and its evolution from a molecular and biochemical perspective. She also studies...wait for it...ERVs!
What does ERV stand for? We'll give you a clue- it's not emergency response vehicle, English revised version, or expiratory reserve volume (get your mind out of the gutter).
Maintained by Seed's editors, web editors, and the other people who make Seed tick, Page 3.14 points you in the direction of some of ScienceBlogs' finest offerings, plus the tastiest tidbits of science news and opinion from around the web.
Readers of denialism blog have long enjoyed the Hoofnagle brothers' determined war against the evils of denialism. Their new co-blogger Dr. Peter Lipson, also known as PalMD, joins them in the fight for scientific truth. Page 3.14 interviewed him and discovered, among other things, a fondness for waffles and Homer (the poet, not the Simpson).
