Technology
mstebbins | October 31, 2008In the latest issue of Science, an article on grass-roots efforts by scientists in the last weeks before the election brought up a startling point, that there have been a lot of letters to the Editor and OpEds published in newspapers either endorsing Obama or pointing out the errors of the McCain campaign rhetoric on science. What is absolutely amazing, is that there has not been a single letter or OpEd by a scientist endorsing McCain. Not ONE? Here is a partial list of OpEds and letters that have appeared. This is by no means a comprehensive list. In fact, these are almost all in…
sporte | October 29, 2008A bit of unsolicited advice for workshop presenters
I'm currently in Washington, D.C. at the Advanced Technology Education conference co-sponsored by National Science Foundation and the American Association of Community Colleges. The people here are an interesting mix of instructors teaching high tech stuff and instructors who sometimes seem more advanced in age than technological know-how.
Mind you, people are doing amazing things. Some colleges have nanotechnology, some microfabrication, some biotechnology, computer forensics, but some of the high tech programs are managed by some very…
hrynyshyn | October 28, 2008The Chinese are a complicated lot. On the one hand, they're building a new coal-fired power plant every four or five or six days, depending on who's counting, an endeavor that cost them $248 billion in hidden costs last year "through damage to the environment, strain on the health care system and manipulation of the commodity's price" says Greenpeace. On the other, they've just announced that they're going to spend the equivalent of $280 billion enhancing their passenger rail network. Impressive. Just imagine if we dumped a proportional $75 billion into American passenger rail.
Actually, we…
clock | October 28, 2008Web journals 'narrowing study' by Linda Nordling:
Online publishing has sparked an explosion in the number of places where academics can showcase their work. Today, no field of study is too obscure to have its own dedicated title. But have platforms such as the Journal of Happiness Studies or Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy News made academic publishing more democratic?
Far from it, says Alex Bentley, an anthropologist at Durham University. "We're just producing so much wordage that nobody has time to read anything. It makes academic publishing, and even science itself, a bit like trying…
sb admin | October 27, 2008This article is cross-posted at Science-Based Medicine. Check it out. --PalMD
In a previous post, I argued that placebo is an artifact of certain clinical interactions, rather than a treatment that we can exploit. Apparently, there are a whole lot of doctors out there who don't agree with me. Or are there?
A recent study published in the British Medical Journal is getting
a lot of enk (e-ink) in the blogosphere. As a practicing internist, I have some pretty strong opinions (based in fact, of course) about both this study and placebos in general.
The Study
The current BMJ study defines…
pharyngula | October 23, 2008"YOU cannot overestimate," thundered psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, "how threatened the scientific establishment is by the fact that it now looks like the materialist paradigm is genuinely breaking down. You're gonna hear a lot in the next calendar year about... how Darwin's explanation of how human intelligence arose is the only scientific way of doing it... I'm asking us as a world community to go out there and tell the scientific establishment, enough is enough! Materialism needs to start fading away and non-materialist causation needs to be understood as part of natural reality."
Sound…
cwilcox | October 17, 2008OK, I apologize in advance for the general venting that is about to occur. But, in my defense, people really bug me sometimes.
I posted my post 'Take 30 Seconds to Save Sea Turtles' at another website and got this response:
Is there evidence anywhere that any shallow internet poll has ever actually determined any government policy? I donât mean to be rude, just blunt: what possible reason would a foreign government have to respect your wishes?
Itâs mostly the laz-ee-boy attitude that I think gets to me, the idea that it might be possible to stop resource waste or whatever by sitting comfy in…
sb admin | October 15, 2008
Last month, the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) proposed a rule that would require all U.S. mine operators to adopt the Dept of Transportation's 100-page regulation on drug- and alcohol-testing. Setting aside the fact that MSHA's proposal is a poorly designed, substantiated and written, the following is a news account, reported by Mine Safety and Health News and used with permission, about MSHA's public hearing on the proposed rule. The public hearing was held on Tuesday, October 14.
"MSHA may continue yesterdayâs public hearing on its proposed rule to require alcohol and…
hrynyshyn | October 15, 2008Canadian scientists, and climatologists in particular, are probably among the most depressed this morning following Tuesday's federal election, in which the semi-governing Conservative Party was sort-of re-elected to another parliamentary minority.
In Canada, minority governments don't command enough seats to ensure passage of legislation, but for some reason no one seems to think that means a coalition is required. None of the opposition parties will entertain the notion of a governing coalition, so in all likelihood nothing in the way of consequential legislation will be passed for the…
edyong | October 15, 2008
It is midday in Senegal and a chimpanzee is on the hunt. Its target is a bushbaby, a small, cute and nocturnal primate that spends its days sheltered in the hollow of a tree, beyond the reach of predators like the chimp. But this hunter is not like others - it is intelligent, it is dextrous, and it has a plan. Snapping off a thin branch, the chimp strips it of twigs, leaves and bark. And with its teeth, it sharpens the tip into a murderous point.
It forcefully jabs its newly fashioned spear into the bushbaby's hiding place, stabbing the hapless animal multiple times. The chimp breaks…
jrosenhouse | October 13, 2008Ohmigod ohmigod ohmigod! Just try to guess why I am so excited right now. I dare you, just try.
I'll even give you some time...
Okay, so maybe the title gave it away.
The long awaited (among chess fans anyway) match between Viswanathan Anand of India and Vladimir Kramnik of Russia begins today. To fully understand the importance of this match, let me lay some history on you.
In 1972 Bobby Fischer played defending champion Boris Spassky for the title. After twenty-one of the scheduled twenty-four games the match was mathematically over. In the weeks that followed Fischer was appearing on…
dgmacarthur | October 12, 2008
Nature News has an intriguing article
on the next three decades of reproductive medicine: essentially a
series of short musings from scientists working in the field about the
issues we will be facing in 30 year's time.
It's worth reading through in full, but this statement from Susannah Baruch at Johns Hopkins caught my eye:
There's
speculation that people will have designer babies, but I don't think
the data are there to support that. The spectre of people wanting the
perfect child is based on a false premise. No single gene predicts
blondness or thinness or height or whatever the 'perfect…
gregladen | October 11, 2008A robotic suit named "HAL" (will they never learn???) will become available for 2,200 monthly rental in Japan. It is actually a brain-directed mobility assistance device.
The 22-pound (10-kilogram) battery-operated computer system is belted to the waist. It captures the brain signals and relays them to mechanical leg braces strapped to the thighs and knees, which then provide robotic assistance to people as they walk.
Wikipedia reduces its server complexity by moving all services to one Ubuntu distro. According to computerworld:
In a few months, Wikipedia will finish a major…
mstebbins | October 10, 2008Francis Collins, the former Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute and lead on the Human Genome Project has just published an opinion piece in the Virginian Pilot endorsing Barack Obama. Unfortunately the Pilot does not post their guest opinion pieces online, but a good friend in Virginia scanned a copy in for me. It is not a great quality scan, but it is good enough to read.
What is striking to me about it is not just that a rather apolitical scientist of his stature came out to endorse Obama, but that he did it in a Virginia paper with far less profile than he could have…
nisbetmc | October 1, 2008A news release on a new survey from the Woodrow Wilson Center's project on nanotechnology:
Washington, DC -- A groundbreaking poll finds that almost half of U.S. adults have heard nothing about nanotechnology, and nearly nine in 10 Americans say they have heard just a little or nothing at all about the emerging field of synthetic biology, according to a new report released by the Project and Peter D. Hart Research. Both technologies involve manipulating matter at an incredibly small scale to achieve something new....
Synthetic biology is the use of advanced science and engineering to…
apalazzo | October 1, 2008This is the third year that I update this list of potential winners. A warning, the list is highly biased towards basic biomedical research. In addition, some of the prizes may be more appropriate for the Chemistry prize.
We'll start with my favorite, Membrane Traffic. This finding is one of the most basic discoveries in cell biology. The two obvious winners would be James Rothman and Randy Schekman.
Last year there was a rumor that intracellular signalling may win. Tony Hunter could get it for phospho-tyrosine, Tony Pawson for protein signalling domains, and Allan Hall for small G-protein…
sb admin | September 30, 2008If you've spent any time at all reading science and medicine blogs, you know that many of us are quite critical of the way the traditional media covers science. The economics of the business allows for fewer and fewer dedicated science and medical journalists. In the blogosphere, writers have a certain freedom----the freedom not to be paid, which means that the financial fortunes of our medium (the web) are not directly tied to how many readers I bring in with a headline. But all this is just a lot of words introducing my critique of a recent New York Times article.
The article is titled "…
gregladen | September 29, 2008An article just out in PLOS Biology explores one of the most important, but also difficult to observe, phenomena related to DNA regulation.
Figure 1 from the paper: "Atomic Force Microscopy of Lac Repressor-DNA Complexes (A) Schematic structures of biotin (bio)- and digoxigenin (dig)-labeled DNA constructs with one (O-539 and O-349) or two (O-153-O and O-158-O) ideal lac operator sequences (white bars)... (B) AFM image of molecules adsorbed to a mica surface ... (C) Scatter plot of the DNA arm contour lengths in repressor-DNA complexes....(D and E) Left: projection images of two…
jstemwedel | September 29, 2008In the 12 September, 2008 issue of Science, there is a brief article titled "Do We Need 'Synthetic Bioethics'?" [1]. The authors, Hastings Center ethicists Erik Parens, Josephine Johnston, and Jacob Moses, answer: no.
Parens et al. note the proliferation of subdisciplines of bioethics: gen-ethics (focused on ethical issues around the Human Genome Project), neuro-ethics, nano-ethics, and soon, potentially, synthetic bioethics (to grapple with ethical issues raised by synthetic biology).
Emerging areas of scientific research raise new technical and theoretical questions. To the extent that…
edyong | September 29, 2008
Two strangers are having a normal conversation in the middle of a large crowd. No one else can see them. No one else can listen in. Thanks to advanced gadgetry, they are talking in coded messages that only they can decipher. These invisible conversationalists sound like they've walked out of a Bond film. But they are entirely real, and their skill at secrecy is biological, not technological. They are squid.
Squid and their relatives, the octopus and cuttlefish, are masters of concealment. They have the most sophisticated camouflage abilities in the animal kingdom and use them to avoid…