Physical Sciences
pharyngula | April 26, 2011I read this story with mounting disbelief. Every paragraph had me increasingly aghast. It's another case of physicists explaining biology badly.
It started dubiously enough. Paul Davies, cosmologist and generally clever fellow, was recruited to help cure cancer, despite, by his own admission, having "no prior knowledge of cancer".
Two years ago, in a spectacularly enlightened move, the US National Cancer Institute (NCI) decided to enlist the help of physical scientists. The idea was to bring fresh insights from disciplines like physics to help tackle cancer in radical new ways.
Uh, OK…I can…
pharyngula | April 23, 2011I am looking forward to reading Anthony Grayling's new book, The Good Book, with considerable anticipation — I've ordered a copy (it's not as if it would be easily available in Morris!) which hasn't arrived yet, but what has arrived are teasers from Grayling himself. Here's a Q&A about the book that might have you itching for a copy as much as I am.
WHEN AND WHY DID YOU BECOME AN ATHEIST?
I was brought up in a non-religious family, and when I first encountered religion it simply seemed incredible, no more believable that the fairy stories and Greek myths that I had read and enjoyed as a…
krandall | April 19, 2011By Dr. Lori Fenton; Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, SETI Institute, and Gail Jacobs
Planetary scientist Dr. Lori Fenton joined the SETI Institute's Carl Sagan Center as a Principal Investigator in 2006, and was awarded NASA's Carl Sagan Fellowship for Early Career Researchers that same year. Lori's primary research interests include aeolian geomorphology - how wind shapes a planetary surface - for both Mars and the Earth, recent and ongoing climate changes, and the mobility of wind-blown sand and dust. Her research makes use of many different types of information,…
jrosenhouse | April 18, 2011The Guardian has an interesting dialogue between Sam Harris and Robert Winston on the subject of science and faith. I have some problems with both gentlemen, but, surprise!, I have bigger problems with Winston. Let's consider some excerpts. Harris first:
Religious language is, without question, unscientific in its claims for what is true. We have Christians believing in the holy ghost, the resurrection of Jesus and his possible return -- these are claims about biology and physics which, from a scientific point of view in the 21st century, should be unsustainable.
I certainly agree with…
catdynamics | April 13, 2011Official word on the IXO x-ray mission now, with rumours from Europe on what the European Space Agency has in mind.
LISA must be rebranded, quick!
IXO News
"This is an update on the discussions with the European Space Agency (ESA) at the recent ESA-NASA bilateral meeting.
...
ESA has ended consideration of IXO and the other concepts as partnerships at the scale proposed in the New Worlds New Horizons decadal survey (NWNH) and EJSM/Laplace in Visions and Voyages for Planetary Science.
Instead, ESA has begun a rapid definition effort that includes the formation of a new science team (to be…
catdynamics | April 8, 2011NASA has some official word on what is going on in astrophysics in general and with LISA in particular.
LISA and IXO ended.
Teams supported through Oct '11, if budget is not cut more.
New concept studies.
LISA and Changes in the Cosmic Vision Programme (pdf)
LISA and Changes in the Cosmic Vision Programme
"Based on discussions with the European Space Agency (ESA) at the recent ESA- NASA bilateral meeting, we provide the following information concerning LISA. Readers are advised to refer to any ESA postings - when available - for details and clarifications regarding the Cosmic Vision…
esiegel | April 8, 2011"School sucks, right? I mean you do what you can to improve it, but in the end, there's a limit. Because it's school. And 'school sucks.' Remember?" -Louis C.K.
At every level, education always seems to be a hot button issue. Whether it's in primary and secondary schools, where testing at every level is the primary means to evaluate teachers, or in adult life, where we're always hearing about how scientifically illiterate the public is, we have pressing issues facing us.
And we can't be experts in everything, even the best of us.
Image credit: NASA and the European Space Agency.
Sure, if…
stoat | April 5, 2011But he isn't a tosser. I'm sure he'll be glad to know that.
Which Mullah do I mean? I mean Richard Muller (who has one of the worst-looking websites in the known universe, beaten only in my personal experience by TimeCube and (of course) Lubos). Muller is running the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST, geeddit?) project. By now you'll have guessed I'm a bit cynical about all this, but don't give up on me yet, I'll not trouble you with any of the funding stuff, Eli is good for snark and mt has some good stuff too and Tamino pokes gentle fun.
Anyway, the back story (which I can't be…
drorzel | April 5, 2011
Surviving the World - Lesson 921 - Offense
I'm offended.
(tags: comics surviving-world pictures culture silly)
The birth of electromagnetism (1820) | Skulls in the Stars
"It is oddly fitting that the birth of electromagnetism, and an entirely new direction in physics, started with the tiniest twitch of a compass needle. In the year 1820, Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted (1777-1851) observed the twitch of said compass needle in the presence of an electric current, providing the first definite evidence of a link between electricity and magnetism that would set the tone for much of…
gregladen | April 4, 2011Europa is a moon of Jupiter, the smallest of the four Jovian moons discovered by Galileo in 1610. Juipter has 63 objects circling it that are called moons, though only eight of them are "regular" in their orbit and other characteristics. The rest are bits and pieces of clumped up matter that were probably captured by Jupiter's big-ass gravitational field, and have irregular orbits, i.e., they go the wrong-way around the planet, or are not in the solar plane, etc.
Europa is almost as big as the Earth's moon, probably has an iron core, and is otherwise made of silica. There is an atmosphere…
oracknows | April 4, 2011It figures.
I don't know if it's confirmation bias or not, but it seems that every time I go away on a trip, some juicy bit of blog fodder pops up. So, right here, right now, while I'm at the AACR meeting soaking up the latest and greatest in cancer science, inevitably someone posts something that normally would provoke--nay, demand--an Orac-ian deconstruction full of the usual Insolence. So what is it this time?
Dana Ullman.
Yes, everybody's favorite homeopath for whom no science is too settled to twist and homeopathy and homeopathic "thinking" are in fact responsible for much of medical…
gregladen | April 3, 2011Did you year the interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson today?
If not, that's OK, it's a podcast.
But first, a hint for those of you who want to do interviews. There's a trick to make it go well. Interview someone like Dr. Tyson, with his knowledge, enthusiasm, and experience in public media; Ask him a couple/few questions; Sit back and listen to all the good words that come out. Break occasionally for commercials if needed.
I did actually have a strategy, which was fairly simple: I wanted to avoid the most obvious topics that have been covered so often in interviews with a person who must…
jtoney | April 1, 2011
Is studying science and mathematics valuable for a general education? Former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott said it is a "waste of my time, waste of my teacher's time and a waste of space" - if your goal is to become a lawyer. His audience roared in laughter and applause. Is such an attitude entrenched in our society?
This brief video, shared by Sir Harold Kroto from his seminar at the American Chemical Society meeting this week, "Science, Anti-Science and Survival" exemplifies this caustic attitude towards education in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) that…
pharyngula | March 21, 2011
Clarifying tetrapod embryogenesis, accurately
By OldCola
[Note from pzm: The text of this one is a little rougher than I like, but the content is interesting and addresses the claims of a character who has been lurking about here for a while, and whose work I've criticized before. If nothing else, I'd also like to see a few science posts submitted as guest articles, so think of this as priming the pump.]
The article, "Clarifying tetrapod embryogenesis, a physicistʼs point of view," by V. Fleury, hasn't steered the revolution expected by Fleury in evo-devo. Two years after the publication,…
mikethemadbiologist | March 21, 2011It really does matter: if economists are going to use biology as a model for their discipline, we need them to understand ours, to help improve theirs. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
By way of Brad DeLong, we stumble across this Russ Roberts piece discussing the question of what kind of science (if any) is economics. What bothered me in reading the original piece was how badly the biology was mangled (which doesn't give me much hope for economics). Let's go to Roberts (italics mine):
I have often said that economics, to the extent it is a science, is like biology rather than physics.…
jdupuis | March 17, 2011For my own purposes I've been collecting various ebook-related posts for a while now and in particular the whole HarperCollins/library/ebook/Overdrive thing is a valuable source of lots of speculation and information. What I have below no doubt only represents a fairly small percentage of the total number of posts and articles about the issue.
My attention over the last few weeks has been a bit inconsistent too say the least so I'm sure I've missed a bunch of important posts. Please let me know in the comments about ones I should include. And I encourage people not to be modest and to let…
drorzel | March 12, 2011
What if editors got royalties? - Hey, There's A Dead Guy in the Living Room
So okay, publishing is risky no matter the paradigm. But what if, rather than a traditional publishing house glomming most of the risk into one big beach ball, each participant in the publishing process took ownership of his/her own little ping pong ball of risk?
Which brings me to: What if editors got royalties ... instead of salaries?
As a freelance editor, I can choose to help mitigate an author's risk by eliminating any up-front cost to hire me. What do you think, does that sound like an intriguing idea?
(tags:…
oracknows | March 5, 2011Due to my activities at the Society of Surgical Oncology meeting in San Antonio, somehow I didn't manage to crank out a bit of that Insolence, Respectful or Not-So-Respectful, that you all crave. So, given that this is Friday, I thought I'd to a "rerun" of a bit of classic woo. This one's a little newer than the reruns I usually do, only two and a half years old. So, if you've been reading less than two years, it's new to you!
In the nearly two years of its existence, I have strived to feature only the finest and most outrageous woo that I can find. It's mostly been medical quackery but…
oracknows | February 28, 2011Say it ain't so, Dr. Pho!
Back when I first started blogging over six years ago, one of the first medical blogs I came across was KevinMD, the weblog of one Dr. Kevin Pho. Back then, of course, Dr. Pho's blog wasn't anywhere near the medblogging juggernaut that it is now, a part of Medpage Today. Indeed, Kevin was one of my early influences, although, as you can see, I never managed to get the whole brevity in writing thing down. Or the whole commercial savvy thing, either. Or the team blogging thing, either. Respectful Insolence was and remains a one man operation (or one Plexiglass box of…
jdupuis | February 27, 2011I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here.
This one is from August 22, 2008 and reviews the following books:
Wrinkles in Time: Witness to the Birth of the Universe
Pursuit of Genius: Flexner, Einstein, and the Early Faculty at the Institute for Advanced Study
Archimedes…