milhayser
Posts by this author
September 2, 2011
Greg Laden reports that scientists have sequenced the genome of the Tammar Wallaby, which boasts "the longest period of embryonic diapause of any known mammal, highly synchronized seasonal breeding and an unusual system of lactation." The new research "provides a hitherto lacking understanding of…
September 1, 2011
Evidence that life on Earth is very old (and of humble origin) continues to accrue, but some beliefs are insurmountable. On EvolutionBlog, Jason Rosenhouse refutes the argument that the evolution of complex molecules and organisms is highly improbable. He notes that if we "imagine evolution…
August 31, 2011
On Brookhaven Bits & Bytes, Steve Kettell brings us up to speed on a new research project taking place beneath a mountain in southern China. The object of study is the neutrino, which can "pass through the Earth and through much of the universe without interacting with anything." Ethan…
August 30, 2011
It's mid-August, and the school year is nigh. On Dynamics of Cats, Steinn Sigurðsson provides a blueprint for a successful academic term, and yes, you should take notes. Steinn writes, "Ideally, the primary teaching delivery would be a wise person at the end of a log [...] unfortunately wise…
August 29, 2011
On We Beasties, Kevin Bonham tells us all his thoughts on GoD—the Generation of Diversity that enables B-cells "to make antibodies that recognize almost any chemical structure that has ever existed or will ever exist." By recombining three essential pieces of an antibody (with 100, 30, and 6…
August 19, 2011
On Pharyngula, PZ Myers reports that the curling and packing of intestines (which in humans grow to over twenty feet long) follows "simple mathematical rules" akin to "the Fibonacci spirals we see in the head of a sunflower or the coils of a nautilus shell." Researchers successfully recreated the…
August 18, 2011
On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess, Dr. Isis reports that drug-maker Lundbeck "will no longer provide Nembutal to prisons in states where lethal injection is legal." Nembutal is a barbiturate used in conjunction with two other drugs to execute capital offenders, and an alternative to…
August 16, 2011
On Universe, Claire L. Evans looks back on the starry-eyed futurism of the 1970's, when Gerard O'Neill envisioned "massive colonies of human habitation in space—self-sustaining environments capable of hosting hundreds of thousands of people." These colonies, housed in spinning cylinders, "would…
August 15, 2011
NASA's last shuttle mission has flown, and with no administrative fervor to put a human on Mars, what is humanity's place in space? On Life at the SETI Institute, Dr. Cynthia Phillips says that for scientific exploration of our solar system, "robots don't need food or water, they can withstand…
August 12, 2011
On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess, Dr. Isis solicits hypotheses for the increase in the number of A's awarded to students at American universities. In 1960's, one out of six students got an A (and C used to be the most Common). Now an A is most common, and the number of C's (and D's)…
July 15, 2011
On Dean's Corner, Jeffrey Toney reports the winners of Google's first Science Fair, and in all age groups the winner was a girl. They researched some very challenging and relevant topics: Lauren "studied the effect of different marinades on the level of potentially harmful carcinogens in grilled…
July 13, 2011
The Universe is a little less than 14 billion years old. Humanity, maybe 200,000. We have reached for knowledge at every step, and recorded what we could. The pace of our knowledge seems to accelerate; the 20th century tranformed our understanding of reality, as had the previous millenium. In 2011…
June 14, 2011
On Brookhaven Bits & Bytes, Kendra Snyder shows us new images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III, which analyzed the light of 14,000 distant quasars to map the ancient universe in 3-D. Hydrogen gas absorbs the light from quasars at certain wavelengths, generating a pattern known as the "…
June 4, 2011
Corvids are among the smartest animals on the planet, and Mo reports that the United States military considered tactical uses for their intelligence. The dream of "spy crows" sprang from research conducted at the University of Washington, where researchers donned rubber masks in the likenesses of…
May 27, 2011
Jellyfish aren't reknowned for specialized organs; they lack brains, guts, hearts, and lungs. But some of them have eyes in spades. Mo writes on Neurophilosophy that box jellyfish have "24 eyes contained within a club-shaped sensory apparatus called a rhopalium, one of which is suspended from…
May 26, 2011
Time goes on and turns our attention, but radioactive isotopes take a long time to decay. On Greg Laden's Blog, Analiese Miller and Greg update us on the nuclear crisis in Japan. Although the dangers faced at the Fukushima power plant have diminished, the long term consequences have just begun.…
May 22, 2011
On the USA Science and Engineering Festival blog, astronaut John Grunsfeld describes what it's like to rocket into space. Astronauts first spend two hours strapped in on the launchpad, "flipping switches and thinking about our training and the jobs we have to do." They count down to ignition,…
May 21, 2011
On Built on Facts, Matt Springer writes that "there's really no such thing as a purely continuous monochromatic light wave" and "any pulse of light that lasts a finite amount of time will actually contain a range of frequencies." Pass this pulse of light through a medium such as glass, which "can…
May 20, 2011
The moon entrances us—it is near yet far away, familiar, yet unremittingly mysterious. In synchronous rotation, it has a face it never shows. It pulls the oceans; it stirs the blood. It beckons into the unknown. On Universe, Claire L. Evans says that in 1969, six artists snuck "a minuscule…
May 19, 2011
On Bioephemera, Jessica Palmer considers the evolving relationship between patent law and DNA, as the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit hears the appeal of Association for Molecular Pathology v. U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. At stake are patents that Myriad Genetics holds on two genes—…
May 13, 2011
Greg Laden draws our attention to an object named Vesta, which by itself makes up 9% of the asteroid belt. Greg says "if you take the largest handful of objects in the asteroid belt, Ceres, Vesta, Pallas and 10 Hygiea, you've got half of the mass of the entire thing, according to the most current…
May 11, 2011
On Tetrapod Zoology, Darren Naish acquaints us with all manner of vesper bats, a group which comprises 410 of the 1110 bat species worldwide. In Part I, Darren provides an overview of the group as a whole, including their snub-nosed morphology, invertebrate eating habits, echolocation frequencies…
May 9, 2011
Bridging new media and old, The Open Laboratory takes the best scientific blogging of the year and prints it on actual paper. For 2010, forty reviewers narrowed down nearly 900 submissions to fifty of the very best. This year's edition also includes six poems and a cartoon! Editor Jason G.…
May 6, 2011
On Casaubon's Book, Sharon Astyk sees a future filled with nuclear power, deepwater drilling, hydrofracking, and mountaintop removal. To hell with the consequences, just give us the juice! But when the oil, gas, and coal are gone, the landscape pulverized, and the depleted cores of uranium…
May 4, 2011
We are excited to introduce a new blog dedicated to The Art of Science Learning. This project will culminate in the spring with conferences across the United States. Funded by the National Science Foundation, The Art of Science Learning will explore "how the arts can strengthen STEM skills and…
May 3, 2011
The staggering 9.0 magnitude earthquake that struck off the coast of Japan March 11 sent a thirty foot tall tsunami raging up to six miles inland, with diminished waves reaching all the way to the Pacific Islands and the shores of North America. In Japan, thousands are dead, and the devastation is…
May 2, 2011
On Uncertain Principles, Chad Orzel differs with Neil Degrasse Tyson, saying that scientific thinking isn't that new, or that exclusive, and in fact has defined humanity from the very beginning. Chad describes science as "a method for figuring things out: you look at some situation, come up with…
April 27, 2011
The universe remains a mysterious place, and one of the biggest mysteries confronting astronomers today is that "the amount of mass we can see through our telescopes is not enough to keep galaxies from spinning apart." Since the 1930's, this shortfall has been covered by dark matter, a…
April 11, 2011
On Confessions of a Science Librarian, John Dupuis considers the keys to writing a successful science book, such as The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Most important, says John, is crossover appeal: "normally picky reviewers loved TILoHL because it's more than 'just' a science book. They saw…
April 8, 2011
The science of cartography has come a long way over the centuries, from the caricatured coastlines of antiquity to the highly-detailed satellite images of today. We know our terrestrial boundaries very well, and until all the polar ice melts and raises sea levels, mapmakers are busy looking…