Technology
jstemwedel | July 15, 2009In this post, I continue working through my thoughts in response to Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum's new book, Unscientific America. In this post, I focus on their discussion of the mainstream media and of the blogosphere. You might guess, given that I'm a member of the science blogosphere, that I have some pretty strong views about what blogs might accomplish in terms of helping the public engage with science. You would be correct.
A fair portion of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (reviewed here) explores conditions of American life that make it…
emjohnson | July 14, 2009On this day 76 years ago (July 14, 1933) a sterilization law was passed in Nazi Germany, known as Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses (Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring). Any German was a target if they were found to be suffering from a range of perceived hereditary ailments, such as congenital mental deficiency, schizophrenia, manic-depressive insanity, epilepsy, Huntington's chorea, blindness, deafness, any severe hereditary deformity or even severe alcoholism. Official pronouncements insisted that these individuals were a drain on the German people, both…
pharyngula | July 14, 2009The military has plans for a new kind of drone robot that will wander the wastelands of future battlefields, scooping up organic debris — such as dead bodies — and burning them to fuel their advance. The call it an EATR: Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot.
It's kind of sweet, in a morbid way. It recycles! It uses renewable energy! Put a gun on it, and it could even harvest its own fuel as it mows its way through the enemy's cities!
To be perfectly fair, though, the company building it doesn't talk about using bodies for energy, but is more about generic biomass. Bodies are probably…
grrlscientist | July 13, 2009tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter
Plump and hoping to get plumper, a red knot takes a break from eating horseshoe crab eggs at Mispillion Harbor.
Image: Louisa Jonas/WYPR [larger view].
Birds in Science
Catching adult eagles for research purposes is no easy task, but a Purdue University researcher has found a way around the problem, and, in the process, gathered even more information about the birds without ever laying a hand on one. "Many birds are small, easy to catch and abundant," said Andrew DeWoody, associate professor of forestry and natural…
mikethemadbiologist | July 13, 2009Sometimes, it's not the high end technology that saves lives, but the cheaper low end stuff. One of the ways microbiologists identify different bacteria is by growing them on 'defined' growth media. We have built up a vast knowledge of which growth conditions will support particular bacteria (and what those bacteria will look like on those media).
One of those media is blood agar plates.
A biological sample, such as infected blood, sputum (the gross stuff you hack up), or other disgusting bodily fluid will be cultured on an agar plate that contains a variety of nutrients (the agar, derived…
nisbetmc | July 9, 2009Somewhat predictably, several pundits and commentators have framed Thursday's Pew survey as supporting an all too common yet misleading "fall from grace" narrative about the place of science in society.
These interpretations proclaim a "growing disconnect," "a dangerous divide," a "widening gulf" and use other metaphors that are representative of what sociologists might label as a moral panic. This traditional fall from grace narrative about science argues for the need to return to a (fictional) point in the past where science was better understood and appreciated by the public. In the U.S…
nisbetmc | July 9, 2009[UPDATE: See this follow up on media reaction to the report.]
The Pew Research Center released today a major new survey report documenting Americans' views of science and technology and comparing these lay perceptions to a representative sample of U.S. scientists who are members of AAAS.
As part of a panel of experts, I had the chance to contribute input and ideas on the survey earlier this year. I have been eagerly looking forward to the findings ever since. Below I have jotted down a few key implications that come to mind on my first scan.
I will have more to say next week and probably…
oracknows | July 8, 2009I'm currently in Las Vegas anxiously waiting for The Amazing Meeting to start. Believe it or not, I'll even be on a panel! While I'm gone, I'll probably manage to do a new post or two, but, in the meantime, while I'm away communing with fellow skeptics at TAM7, I'll be reposting some Classic Insolence from the month of July in years past. (After all, if you haven't been following this blog at least a year, it'll be new to you. And if you have I hope you enjoy it again.) This particular post first appeared in July 2008.
Last week, The New York Times started a rather unusual series in its…
catdynamics | July 7, 2009``The King with half the East at heel is marched from land of morning;
Their fighters drink the rivers up, their shafts benight the air,
And he that stands will die for nought, and home there's no returning.
The Spartans on the sea-wet rock sat down and combed their hair.''
Full text of letter with signatures and footnotes (PDF)
July 6, 2009
Dear Governor Schwarzenegger:
The three hundred signers of this letter write to you as members of the US National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine, and as professors at the University…
wcrawford | July 6, 2009Say what?
I don't believe the three words are directly related--but they all play into changes in articles in the Library Leadership Network over the past week.
It's been one of those weeks where everything's a change in existing pages articles than brand-new articles. Sometimes that's a tough decision, sometimes not. Last week, it was a split decision: One major commentary from a blog, and a smaller related commentary from a different blog, started out as a new article--until I realized, the same day, that they worked better as part of an existing article.
Anyway...
Hemispheres
Much of…
pontiff | July 2, 2009DARPA, you know the people who invented the internet ("100 geniuses connected by a travel agent"), has a new director:
The Department of Defense (DoD) today announced the appointment of Regina E. Dugan as the 19th director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA is the principal agency within the DoD for research, development, and demonstration of concepts, devices, and systems that provide highly advanced military capabilities for the current and future combat force. In this role of developing high-risk, high-payoff projects, DARPA compliments and balances the…
hrynyshyn | July 1, 2009 I have an extremely low attention threshold for any mention of the small town of Inuvik, NWT, tucked away in the northwest corner of Canada's Northwest Territories. Not because it's a particularly beautiful place, or politically, economically or scientifically significant, but because I spent 14 months there back in the early 1990s as editor its newspaper, the Inuvik Drum. So when a former premier of one of Canada's provinces makes a speech there, I'm one of the few people outside of Inuvik who perk up. More so when the former premier is speaking about extracting more fossil fuels from…
edyong | June 27, 2009
You don't have to be particularly intelligent to use tools - many animals do so, including some insects. But it takes a uniquely intelligent animal to be able to combine different tools to solve a problem. We can do it, the great apes can do it, and now the New Caledonian crow joins our exclusive club.
Animals can use tools using little more than pre-programmed behaviour patterns that require little intelligence. But combining tools, or using one tool on another (a metatool, if you will), is a different matter entirely - that takes reasoning. This type of intelligence has been the engine…
clock | June 25, 2009Let's take a look at all seven PLoS journals today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Light, Sleep, and Circadian Rhythms: Together Again:
The 24-hour (h) light-dark (LD) cycle is a fundamental characteristic of Earth's environment and so its powerful influence on the behaviour and…
sb admin | June 24, 2009
by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure
For years those concerned about the consequences of an influenza pandemic from an exceptionally virulent flu virus, like A/H5N1 ("bird flu") have despaired about motivating business, government and neighbors to take it seriously enough to make serious preparations. It's understandable. There's are a lot of potential catastrophes competing for our attention and while each can be made plausible if we can get someone to listen long enough, it's rare we can do this. As I said, too much competition. Now that a real life influenza pandemic has arrived,…
revere | June 24, 2009For years those concerned about the consequences of an influenza pandemic from an exceptionally virulent flu virus, like A/H5N1 ("bird flu") have despaired about motivating business, government and neighbors to take it seriously enough to make serious preparations. It's understandable. There's are a lot of potential catastrophes competing for our attention and while each can be made plausible if we can get someone to listen long enough, it's rare we can do this. As I said, too much competition. Now that a real life influenza pandemic has arrived, the concern of some is that the public isn't…
clock | June 23, 2009The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January. Today, I asked one of my SciBlings, Greg Laden of the eponymous blog, to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background?
When I was young, I intended to become a priest. Since I was being raised among Jesuits…
clock | June 22, 2009The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January.
We kick off the series with the interview with Sol Lederman who gave a demo session: US Dept of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background?
I'm not a scientist and I don't…
clock | June 20, 2009Yesterday, I had an interesting discussion on Twitter with @jason_pontin (and a couple of others chimed in, e.g., @TomLevenson and @scootsmoon) about the role of quotes in journalism. Specifically, about the importance of providing a brief quote from sources interviewed for a piece. The difference in mindsets of Old vs. New journalism appeared in sharp relief.
I did not really think hard about this question until now, so this post is just my first provisional stream-of-thought about this and I welcome discussion in the comments.
So, let me try a mental experiment here. You are a journalist.…
oracknows | June 17, 2009In keeping with Homeopathy Awareness Week (which still runs until June 21), I can't resist commenting on this gem of a story that was sent to me the other day. I mean, we're talking super duper heaving shopping in the very heart of London. It turns out that the Helios Homeopathy Shop right in Covent Garden will fix you up with homeopathic plutonium if you need it:
Dr Fiona Barclay, a chemist at RGB Research in west London, made this discovery. Her company specialises in selling collections of the periodic table elements (with the exception of those elements that are illegal or are so very…