February 28, 2008
A flourishing wetland on Kenya's northern coast is under serious threat from plans to grow vast amounts of sugarcane, partly for biofuel production. Developers want to transform nearly 20,000 hectares of the spectacular Tana River Delta, into sugarcane plantations with other parts of the Delta…
February 28, 2008
Almost half of the world's oceans have been ruined to some degree ... often very severely ... by human activity. You've heard a lot on the news and in the blogosphere about this lately. This increased interest is in part because of the recent production (Feb 15th Science) of a map of the ocean…
February 28, 2008
This is a photograph of wild western lowland gorillas copulating in, sort of, the missionary position. This shot was taken in the Nouabale-Ndoki National Park in the Republic of Congo.
The female gorilla in the photograph, nicknamed "Leah" by researchers, has twice made history. In 2005 Breuer…
February 28, 2008
A DNA phylogeny based on over 200 species of lemurs and related species is now available.
Lemurs are part of the large group known as the strepsirrhine primates (yes, three r's...)From the abstract of this paper, coming out in March in Genome Research:
... strepsirrhine primates are of great…
February 27, 2008
You have probably heard that the current flu vaccine matches the current flue strains in the US very poorly, perhaps at about a 40 percent rate. Flu and the vaccine mismatch is a post at Effect Measure that will update you on this important issue. This is especially important because you need to…
February 27, 2008
Bennett Gordon has a post on the Har Mar Science Fair:
...Every diorama in the Home School Science Fair, which took place inside a shopping mall in Roseville, Minnesota, had a biblical quote attached to it. A young woman whose project involved teaching her dog how to run circles between her legs…
February 27, 2008
Because the Garmin GPS system ...
... is leading some drivers ... straight into a dead end. ...
The electronic maps don't show a gate that separates residential and industrial areas. It's only opened for a couple hours on weekdays in the northern New Jersey city.
Mayor Dennis Elwell says…
February 27, 2008
In this open access publication in PLoS it is
...suggest that, compared with placebo, the new-generation antidepressants do not produce clinically significant improvements in depression in patients who initially have moderate or even very severe depression, but show significant effects only in…
February 27, 2008
I've been avoiding discussion of the patent issue. This is partly because I don't know enough about it, and partly because I am terribly annoyed by it. Yes, yes, I blog about stuff that annoys me all the time, but these are topics that I'm professionally engaged in, so the annoyance is not…
February 27, 2008
I hate when people tell me what to blog (and not blog). I blog what I want, you read what you want. When the two coincide, wonderful.
Bayblab, which is apparently some kind of science blog mostly written by anonymous bloggers, has a post critical of certain areas of science blogging.
Mostly it…
February 26, 2008
... And Mike Huckabee is not standing for it...
Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee has endorsed an amendment to Colorado's constitution declaring that a fertilized egg is a person.
"This proposed constitutional amendment will define a person as a human being from the moment life begins…
February 26, 2008
My wife, a biology teacher, gets crazy in the biology classroom. She is famous for her interpretive dance renditions of numerous cellular processes. The students in the first class of the day reportedly stare in disbelief and roll their eyes, but the students in the other classes throughout the…
February 26, 2008
So a few weeks ago, we were over at Amy and Danny's for dinner, and somehow Lipitor came up (no, it had nothing to do with the dinner Amy was cooking!). Anyway, Amy said "Why is Jarvick a good person to promote a drug. I mean, that heart didn't work, right?"
Hmm.... Good point, I thought.
And now…
February 26, 2008
Hunting Wolves; Killing Elephants
The Bush administration on Thursday announced an end to federal protection for gray wolves in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, concluding that the wolves were reproductively robust enough to survive.
"Wolves are back," said Lynn Scarlett, the deputy secretary of the…
February 26, 2008
Rick Perry, Eagle Scout, has written a book about the boy scouts, defending their homophobic and anti humanist activism.
An Eagle Scout and the father of an Eagle Scout, Perry stresses the importance of Scout values such as being "courteous and kind." (He is fond of phrases like "gosh" and "…
February 26, 2008
According to the New York Times, "An
Errant Satellite Is Gone, but Questions Linger" ...
Should the people of the world be breathing a sigh of relief that the risk of a half-ton of frozen, toxic rocket fuel landing who knows where has passed? Or should they be worried about the latest display of…
February 26, 2008
Angst-ridden teens have different brain structures: study from PhysOrg.com
It turns out your mother was right: angst-ridden teens really do have something wrong with their heads.
[...]
Who benefits from antidepressants? from PhysOrg.com
A new study published today in PLoS Medicine suggests…
February 26, 2008
Well, the Face Book Thing seems to be going fairly well. Scienceblogs.com fanclub now has hundreds of members. My own site has a paltry ten or so, but growing. I hope soon to have eleven. I've been going through the Scienceblogs.com fan club list and begging folks from my old home town (Albany…
February 26, 2008
A new genetic analysis of people from around the world adds further confirmation to the African origin of humans. The study of genetic details from 938 individuals from 51 populations provides evidence of how people are related and different, researchers led by Richard M. Myers of Stanford…
February 25, 2008
More Life After Darwin
February 25, 2008
Go over to Laelaps and wish Brian a Happy Birthday!
February 25, 2008
Microsoft has paid the Library of Congress a huge bribe so that they will adopt some of their software, and use hardware running Vista in public areas. This is, of course, a travesty. As Boing Boing says, "Library of Congress sells itself out to Microsoft for a mere $3 mil" ... You know this is…
February 25, 2008
During the 2006 holiday shopping season, in a desperate attempt to boost weak sales of their totally sucky operating system, Microsoft engineerd the branding of zillions of PC's with the slogan "Windows Vista Capable."
Those computers were only able to run a very stripped down version of the…
February 24, 2008
That's the sound of a statistician or scientist laughing because s/he has some really cool software and didn't pay a dime for it, because it is open source.
Since we are talking about R, I thought I'd point you to a couple of screen shots. Here it is running on a Mac, and here it is running on a…
February 24, 2008
Like the title says, The Golden Compass has won an Oscar. Hooray.
February 24, 2008
Here they are, in all sizes for all blogs, sidebars, and other places on the web. Or blow it up and put it up on your lawn next to your Obama or Clinton sign! Or use it as the template for a tattoo. ...
February 24, 2008
Well, the oscars have just started, and the stars, the women in their fancy dresses and the men in their tux, are all talking to Regis on the red carpet....
....
...
....
Oh, man, this is boring, I'm going to do something else. Haven't seen any of the movies anyway....
February 24, 2008
Our worst fears have been realized. We finally have a chance to boot the Republicans out of the White House, and now Ralf Nader has announced his insane plans to do whatever he can to make sure that a Democrat does not take that position.
Nader announced his quixotic and potentially destructive…
February 24, 2008
More Life After Darwin
February 24, 2008
We are busy watching Florida, and the ICR's new "degree" in "life science education" in Texas, and whatever crap is happening in our own back yards, and we may be missing a dramatic development at the K-12 level in Texas: Social conservatives are poised to take over the Texas State Board of…
