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One of the cowboy science teams (or cowgirl science team – see photo) that I was able to spend some time with at McMurdo Station is the Weddell Seal Research Team under the direction of Dr. Jenn Burns of the University of Alaska. This multi-faceted science team spends virtually every single day…

The Martian is a feel-good, science positive, uplifting film about the power of the human spirit, botany, and engineering. It looked, from the credits, like it had at least 8 scientific advisors from NASA (and possibly other places). Too bad that Ridley Scott only half listened to them. As one of…

I just wanted to say how amazingly brave and admirable I believe Robert De Niro's recent decisions have been regarding the screening of the anti-vaccination film "Vaxxed" at his Tribeca Film Festival. As this was apparently one of his first revelations of having an autistic child, his actions are…

Hi. Apologies for the radio gap. It turns out that Trish, the co-PI and irresistible force behind this project met with an immovable ice patch and broke her femur a few days ago at the Willy Field airport on the Ross Ice Shelf. She’s “fine” now, and freshly bionic-ized with new hardware pinning…

Internet Links and Social Links at McMurdo Station, Antarctica. Here are some links of interest related to Trish Suchy and my NSF Antarctic Artists and Writers Project: Trish Suchy’s blog about our Artist’s and Writer’s project. David Ainley’s website about his research on Adelie penguins: Penguin…

Our most recent helo trip out from McMurdo on our NSF Artists & Writers Project took us to Cape Evans, the site of Robert Scott’s Terra Nova Hut, where they based their 1910-1913 trip to the South Pole. We went with Anthony Powell (the filmmaker from Scott Base who made the movie “Antarctica: A…

On the next leg of our NSF Antarctic Artists & Writers project we flew to the Antarctic Dry Valleys from McMurdo. It is almost an hour helicopter ride across the ice shelf, and we hopped from site to site all day: landing at Lake Hoare for a moment to drop off someone and pick up Zach Sudman, a…

As part of our project we just flew to Cape Royds on a helicopter to take photographs of Dr. David Ainley among the penguins he’s studied for many years. It is about a 10 minute helicopter ride from McMurdo. We arrived in strong winds (maybe 30 mph? – enough to stop you from walking and have to…

Hello again, We’ve been on Mars – er, I mean in Antarctica for 1 week now. It’s similar to what one might imagine being on Mars is like, but with breathable air (nice air). The landscape around McMurdo Station is all volcanic rock. Rock and dirt everywhere. Stand in the middle of McMurdo and spin…

Hello, World’s Fair has been dormant for some time now. Sincere apologies to those who had been following it. We are reactivating it in conjunction with a project called “Antarctica: Persistence of Vision”. The project is part of the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writer’s…

It's time again for John Bohannon's annual "Dance Your Ph.D." contest. This year, in my opinion, there are even more high quality entries than in previous years! (I was one of the judges who did the first round of choices...the "winners" were then chosen by a panel that includes several…

I have a small part in a show called SACRED WASTE which was created by LSU Ph.D. student Bonny McDonald – which is playing in the upcoming New Orleans Fringe Fest.  The show involves dance, poetry, ritual, elaborate costumes (made of 100% recycled plastic), and explores many aspects of the…

Our lab has a paper called: "Enthalpic Switch-Points and Temperature Dependencies of DNA binding and Nucleotide Incorporation by Pol I DNA Polymerases" that was just published in BBA (Biochimica et Biophysica Acta): Proteins and Proteomics. The study follows up on an observation and prediction we…

This summer I am working with a student on trying to start to get some reasonable assessment of one of our ongoing oddball-ish outreach projects.  Working with a local videographer, we've been making 2 minute mini-profiles of astrobiologists who work here at LSU (Louisiana State University) - two…

I was discussing SciArt on several occasions with different people recently and was fishing for a way to classify different SciArt in order to make a particular point - the point being that the type of SciArt I find most interesting and valuable is in the minority. Basically, it seems there are 3 (…

I recently spent a week in Lithuania visiting biophysical laboratories and giving a couple of seminars. My host was Daumantas Matulis of the Institute of Biotechnology at Vilnius University, where they have an EU grant that includes funds for bringing in visiting scientists from other countries (…

I recently saw the beautiful (and beautifully ugly) National Theatre production of Frankenstein – written by Nick Dear and directed by Danny Boyle, and projected into cinemas around the world (just like opera simulcasts). Here is a review of the play, written as an open letter to Dr. Frankenstein:…

I recently read David Kirby's new book on science film consulting. This book is an absolute must-read for anyone even remotely or subconsciously interested in being a science consultant for the next Iron Man or Transformers, or smaller budget real-life dramas with real-life science in them. His…

A news story in ScienceNOW this week describes how City University of New York is planning to rearrange its "General Education" requirements so that non-majors who take science don't have to take lab courses anymore. Scientists at CUNY are, predictably, annoyed and upset. Even non-majors should…

Yanling Yang, who just graduated with a Ph.D. from my lab, has a paper in the just published November issue of Biophysical Chemistry. The entire issue of the journal celebrates the 25th Anniversary of a conference called "The Gibbs Conference on Biothermodynamics", and each of the papers is from…

The "Dance Your Ph.D." contest is on again for 2011. This unusual and highly interesting experiment in science outreach continues to be shepherded by John Bohannon, and continues to attract new sponsors -- this years sponsor is TEDx Brussels. So what is this? Basically: you create an interpretive…

Even in the small theater where I saw Rise of the Planet of the Apes, it was clear that this is, to some degree, a father and son movie - there were several father and son pairs in the audience - more than I've seen in any other movie. "Yes, son, now you will see why our planet eventually will be…

Reblogitation (pronounced with a "j" sound for the "g", of course): the blogospheric phenomenon of reposting, and re-reposting, and re-re-reposting the information from the "apparent first" or "most snarky" report (or blog post) about a news item. Mother-post: the "apparent first" or "most snarky…

The chair of the Theatre Dept. here at LSU and I have begun co-producing a new "SciArt Conversation Series" here at LSU -- where we get scientists and artists on stage together at the same time for informal presentations of their work. We are trying to pick combinations that have some sort of…

A physicist friend of mine recently lent me a copy of Harry Frankfurt's "On Bullshit", which purports to be the only ever philosophical analysis of "bullshit". This former essay turned teeny tiny hardback book reaches such profound conclusions as: 1) bullshit is sort of like humbug, only more…

Okay, after a long, long gap (on the blogosphere timescale) and/or almost zero elapsed time (by scientific literature standards), we're going to attempt to wrap up this mini-series on heat capacity effects in biology. Parts 1 and 2 are here and here, respectively. So: How do you know if your…

I've been strangely fascinated by the "arsenic-eating" and maybe "arsenic-utilizing' bacteria report from NASA researchers and the so-called "backlash" ("arsenic-gate") in the blogosphere. Many others have posted on this topic. What I've found most interesting is that there seem to be several…

The laws of thermodynamics are empirical laws - they were not derived from some first principles of the universe: they were derived by doing thousands and thousands of experiments, and then coming up with some relationships that could quantitatively explain all those experiments. In biological…

Scienceblogs is promoting the writing of "Science 101" general topic posts all through the "back to school" month of September. So, here is the first in a multi-part series on Heat Capacity in Biology: Heat Capacity in Biology 101: What is it? Heat capacity is basically a proportionality constant…

Wow! Either it's an odd coincidence, or the Latisse marketers are highly vigilant monetizers, because in less than 24 hours after I posted yesterday's rambling little piece about the eyelash wonder drug, a tasteful little ad for it showed up on the Scienceblogs homepage (cue spooky music now).…