Technology
oracknows | January 5, 2009Over the last year and a half, Jenny McCarthy has been, unfortunately, a fairly frequent topic of this blog. There is, of course, a reason for this. Ever since she published her first book on autism back in the summer of 2007, she has become the public face of the antivaccine movement and autism quackery. Indeed, Generation Rescue, that reliable bastion of antiscientific antivaccine pseudoscience and autism quackery, has been--shall we say?--rebranded as "Jenny McCarthy's Autism Organization." In the process, she has demonstrated a level of burning stupid that defies description, a stupidity…
clock | January 3, 2009
Let's highlight some more of the participants of this year's ScienceOnline09 conference:
Dixie-Ann Sawin is a Research Fellow in the Neurotoxicology Group at NIEHS.
Amy Sayle is the Educator in the Adult Programs at the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center in Chapel Hill, NC.
Scicurious is a graduate student in Physiology and Pharmacology and my SciBling, on Neurotopia (v.2.0). She will co-moderate the session on the Web and the History of Science.
Sciencewoman is, well, my SciBling and a Sciencewoman.
Allison Scripa is a Science Librarian at Virginia Tech.
Megan Scudellari is a freelance…
j7uy5 | December 28, 2008The impetus for this post came from a confluence of stimuli, as is usually the case. Recently I received a book, a biography
of J. Robert Oppenheimer (American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin
J. Sherwin). The book describes the persecution of Oppenheimer
during the Red Scare in postwar USA. The current global and
perpetual war on terrorism shows us that such persecution still simmers.
I also read a post about matronizing, on the blog Mad Melancholic Feminista. The post reminded me that the war between the sexes also simmers.
At this point in time, were are a few years into an…
hrynyshyn | December 18, 2008This segment from Letterman is from back in April, but given the word that John Holdren, former AAAS head, will be running Barack Obama's Office of Science and Technology Policy (i.e., serving as chief science adviser to the president), it's worth a replay. This is a man who will be repeatedly reminding the president that climate change is not something that can be placed on the proverbial back burner. I mean, check out his c.v.
Along with Stephen Chu as energy secretary, Obama will be getting the best advice possible on the biggest public policy challenge in history. (Carol Browner will…
denialism | December 18, 2008Please check out this week's skeptics' circle at Happy Jihad's House of Pancakes.
Of note, I liked Dr Austs' post on the human toll of HIV/AIDS denialism, it is stirring. I also found the Skeptic's field guide particularly interesting. I would have two suggestions. One would be to prioritize by frequency of use or rhetorical appeal rather than alphabetical, and second would be to include a section on conspiracy (like the ones the Lay Scientist and Dubito Ergo Sum describe in this issue ), which I believe is the hallmark of all denialist arguments. If you need a non-parsimonious conspiracy…
clock | December 15, 2008Jeff Cohen was one of the people interviewed for this article in Raleigh News & Observer today about the Future of the Internet:
In 2020, powerful mobile phones will rule, privacy will erode further and the line between work and home life will be faint, if not obliterated.
That's what 578 technology gurus see in their crystal balls, according to a new report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The survey, "Future of the Internet III," conducted by Pew and Elon University, envisions amazing advances in mobile devices, virtual reality, voice and touch technology -- possibly…
revere | December 14, 2008I have three grandchildren (all wonderful, naturally) and the oldest is five years old today. I put wonderful in parentheses because most grandparents think their grandchildren are wonderful while the rest of the world just thinks they are a few more of the world's billions of children. Mine are luckier than most of them, having survived their first few months and more. But I got to thinking about what the world will be like when today's Birthday Boy is my age. Obviously I have no idea (nor do you), but I can at least look back on what the world was like when I was his age. That would be…
bioephemera | December 11, 2008Last week, the European Court of Human Rights unanimously ruled that retaining DNA samples from innocent individuals in a national law enforcement databank violates human rights.
The ruling is a direct blow to Britain's DNA databank, which holds samples and data for 7% of its citizens (4.5 million people, including children and crime victims). In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, police are authorized to collect and hold samples from citizens arrested for any recordable offense, whether or not the offense leads to formal charges or conviction, and hold them for the lifetime of the…
rallain | December 6, 2008This comes from Buzz Out Loud Episode 865 which got the story from Slashdot regarding a possible new technology that would use piezoelectric devices to charge cell phones while you talk. The original article the slashdot story pointed to talked mostly about the advances in piezoelectric devices, but I want to look at the possibility that sound could charge a phone.
First for the basic physics. How do you make sound and what is it? Sound is a compression wave in the air. To make a sound you need something to push the air (yes, I simplified this quite a bit). When that something pushes the…
grrlscientist | December 4, 2008tags: natural history museum, British Museum, Dry Storeroom No. 1, Richard Fortey, book review
Everyone I have ever met has, at some point in our conversations, told me that they wished they could work in a natural history museum. I am one of the rare lucky people in the world because I have worked as a research scientist in a natural history museum, so I can tell you that there is a book out there that brilliantly captures what this experience is like: Richard Fortey's Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum (NYC: Alfred A. Knopf; 2008).
This is a charming and…
pontiff | December 1, 2008Postdoc with some awesome Canadian quantum researchers:
Quantum Information Processing Program
JUNIOR (POSTDOCTORAL) FELLOWSHIPS
The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) is a private not-for-profit research institute. It is a catalyst for discovery, incubating ideas that revolutionize the international research community. CIFAR identifies emerging fundamental research questions concerning society, technology and the very nature of humanity and the universe, and creates interdisciplinary networks of leading scholars from around the world to explore them in a way that is…
jjacquet | November 24, 2008A.O. Scott had a nice piece in this weekend's New York Times Magazine on The Screening of America. In spite of all the technological advances, he believes the cinema is far from finished:
What will happen, in the age of iPod, DVR, VOD, YouTube and BitTorrent, to the experience of moviegoing, to say nothing of the art of cinema? The answer does not seem to be that people will stop going to the movies. Nothing has stopped us before -- certainly not the rise of television in the late 1940s or the spread of home video in the early '80s. While both of those developments appeared to threaten the…
dgmacarthur | November 19, 2008
A Nature News article describes the growing availability of technology that allows the screening of human embryos for hundreds of different genetic disorders prior to implantation.
The technology is based on the same type of chips used by personal genomics companies like 23andMe, but the chips used for embryo screening would initially be used to target known rare disease-causing mutations or large chromosomal abnormalities rather than performing a genome-wide scan for common variants (in the article, a screening company director describes the targeted diseases as "nasty, early-onset and…
pharyngula | November 18, 2008Once upon a time, way back when I entered graduate school, the first big project I was involved in was essentially a morphological mapping of the circuitry of the larval zebrafish. We did lots of backfills of neurons with horseradish peroxidase, and later the fluorescent dye DiI, and then with injected lineage tracers like rhodamine dextran. I guess technology has greatly advanced, because we never got anything as pretty as this set of fluorescently labeled neurons in the brain and spinal cord of a larval zebrafish.
(click for larger image)
This image was made using brainbow fluorescent…
oracknows | November 12, 2008I realize that the title of this post might sound as though I'm equating brain death and fundamentalist religion. As tempting as it is sometimes to do so, I'm not. What I'm more interested in is a story I came across by way of ScienceBlogs Big Kahuna blogger P.Z. Myers last night, mainly because it brings up some serious ethical issues, aside from any religious issues. P.Z. tackled the story as he usually does tackle stories involving religion, with all the subtlety of a jack hammer in a glass factory.
I'm not saying that I'll necessarily be subtle, but I do have some actual, hands-on…
revere | November 10, 2008One resource the incoming Obama administration is certainly to find no shortage of is advice. We don't know whom they will listen to, although we know much of it -- maybe most of it -- is likely to be of the self-serving variety. How to separate the wheat from the chaff will be a delicate task. Powerful people who give lousy advice still get bent out of shape when it isn't followed. So we'll have to see. Meanwhile we will be scanning whatever advice is made public. An example is a report from the Defense Science Board, issued on Election Day, no less. It purports to give the next…
sporte | November 6, 2008What kind of dead animals are in your freezer? I used to be skeptical about the whole notion of cloning wooly mammoths. But this recent article in PNAS (1), makes the whole idea seem less far fetched.
Wakayamaa et. al. describe an amazing technical advance where scientists in Japan were able to derive clones from mice that had been frozen for 16 years at -20°C.
I'm guessing that this wasn't one of the freezers with an automatic defrost cycle.
Sure, this demonstration is still a long way from cloning an elephant or related species. Even cat and dog cloning are fairly recent advances…
skookumchick | November 3, 2008A colleague emailed me notice of an article published 11/1 in the Columbus Dispatch, titled "OSU wants more female scientists." The first part of the article reads:
A new Ohio State University program that aims to help female professors advance in the sciences would lead to discrimination and quotas, the president of a scholars' group says.
"What will prevent Ohio State officials from hiring members of the preferred groups who are less qualified than other applicants because of cronyism?" said George W. Dent Jr., president of the Ohio Association of Scholars.
"If you have a quota to fill,…
evolgen | November 2, 2008After a few months off, here's the return of Mendel's Garden.
Blast from the past: rENNISance woman gives us a post on viral genetics.
Figuring out DNA looping with unbelievably advanced technology: Greg Laden reviews a paper on the structure of nucleic acids.
In the fly, delayed reproduction also delays aging: Ouroboros describes research on senescence in Drosophila.
Balancer Chromosomes: Larry Moran describes this marked chromosomal inversions (see also Hermann Muller Invented the Balancer Chromosome).
The Genetics of Voting: From Bayblab, a post on the heritability of filling the…
sporte | November 1, 2008I was in in Washington D.C. this last week attending the National Science Foundation's Advanced Technology Education conference. During the conference, I attended one workshop and one talk on Second Life. Both of the presentations were focused on Teen Second Life, which was interesting, but neither presentation did a very good job of illustrating how I would use Second Life as a teaching tool.
Julian Lombardi's blog has a short YouTube movie that comes pretty close. Be patient, the marketing pitch doesn't last forever.