Technology
petnoyer | July 8, 2008Students from the New York City Home Educators Association (NYCHEA) took second place behind Blue Hills Technical High School in the 2008 NE Regional ROV Design Competition sponsored by the Marine Advanced Technology Education (MATE) project. Winners advanced to the international competition on June 26 at Scripps Institute of Oceanography, where NYCHEA rallied to take first place!
This unique technology based competition challenged students to design and operate a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) in a pool-based exercise that simulates a descent to 2500 m depth to survey and sample a…
oracknows | July 7, 2008Last week, The New York Times started a rather unusual series in its medical section entitled, The Evidence Gap, described thusly:
Articles in this series will explore medical treatments used despite scant proof they work and will consider steps toward medicine based on evidence.
When I first saw the series, I was prepared for a crapfest. My experience has generally been that when reporters start examining the evidence for and against a treatment they usually do a pretty lousy job. This is most obvious when it comes to "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), where we are routinely…
gregladen | July 4, 2008 Nature (left) vs. OpenAccess A number of bloggers, including myself, had recently responded to a news item in Nature by suggesting that anti-OpenAccess and anti-PLoS position taken by the author, Delcan Butler, constituted an attack of one company against another. How silly of us to have done so. Here's what we should have been thinking instead:
There were also quite a few comments to the effect that the article was self-serving given Nature's business interests. That completely ignores the overall balance of Nature's coverage, which in my opinion is broadly supportive of open access…
neurophilosophy | July 1, 2008
In a very cool paper published yesterday in the open access journal PLoS Biology, an international team of researchers report that they have produced the most detailed and comprehensive map yet of the connections in the human cerebral cortex.
The cerebral cortex contains hundreds of billions of cells organized into thousands of discrete functional modules which act in parallel to generate all human behaviours and cognitive processes.
The new study uses neuroimaging to visualize more than 14,000 connections between nearly 1,000 of these modules, and reveals what the researchers call the brain…
neurophilosophy | June 30, 2008We are being constantly bombarded with news stories containing pretty pictures of the brain, with headings such as "Brain's adventure centre located". Journalists now seem to refer routinely to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as "mind reading", and exaggerated claims about its powers abound, as do misleading, irresponsible and downright ridiculous stories about the technology.
Take, for example, this article by Jeffrey Goldberg in The New Atlantic:
The preliminary findings began to arrive a few days later, in a series of e-mails..."Carter: big amygdala response on both sides…
j7uy5 | June 29, 2008On 6 June 2008, the Federal Register in the USA
href="http://www.thefederalregister.com/d.p/2008-06-06-E8-12671">contained
a notice, that the Department of Homeland Security is
conducting a review. They are reviewing the National
Infrastructure Protection Plan (NIPP).
The Federation of American Scientists
href="http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2008/06/dhs_invites_public.html">points
out that DHS is soliciting public comment.
The NIPP is explained and documented at a DHS
href="http://www.dhs.gov/xprevprot/programs/editorial_0827.shtm">site.
one of the documents (1.3MB PDF) is…
nisbetmc | June 27, 2008
On TV, Neil deGrasse Tyson uses narrative to dramatize the importance of basic research.
Last week in San Diego, I participated on a panel at the BIO 2008 meetings that focused on the communication challenges facing the biotech industry. Organized by Richard Gallagher, editor of The Scientist magazine, a major topic of discussion were the challenges that industry faces in communicating the value of basic research. In fact, this was also a major topic at the Cal Tech seminar that I ran on Tuesday.
When the public thinks about "science," they generally think in terms of either medical advances…
oracknows | June 27, 2008I realize that I've been mighty hard on Jenny McCarthy these last several months. I've made fun of her for her idiocy, her arrogance of ignorance, and her antivaccination lunacy, not to mention her utter ignorance of science, and, yes, I've been rather vicious at times. However, she richly deserved it. Indeed, I argue that in fact my reaction was actually mild in comparison to the sheer lunacy that she regularly spews and the threat to public health her ignorant antivaccinationist activism represents.
But it's Friday, and that means it's fun day. That means it's time for an excursion into…
hrynyshyn | June 24, 2008It shouldn't be all that difficult to figure out. Do we have the means at our disposal, now, to replace fossil fuels with clean alternatives that won't bankrupt us all? The only two variables we need consider are the energy conversion efficiency ratios of each candidate technology and the costs, up front or amortized, of same. So why can't we agree on this simple question?
Joe Romm of the Center for American Progress, and the blogger responsible for Climate Progress, sums up the disparity in an opinion piece in Nature:
Although it has recently been argued that "enormous advances in energy…
cmooney | June 19, 2008Over the past year, I've done well over two dozen talks, with Matthew Nisbet, about science communication. And now we're taking it to the next level.
Next week at CalTech, we're unveiling a two-part affair: Our lecture (entitled "Speaking Science 2.0") followed by an all day "Speaking Science" boot camp, which we're describing as follows:
...the full-day workshop will provide a hands-on media primer, focusing on two critical issues: 1) how audiences find, understand, and use scientific information; 2) the knowledge and tools that scientists need to deal with the press. In other words, when…
oracknows | June 13, 2008
Hard as it is to believe, this little weekly vanity project of mine, this little weekly excursion into the wild and wacky world of woo, is fast approaching two years of existence. Really. I kid you not. This wouldn't really disturb me so much except that I had been rather hoping to do a special anniversary edition of Your Friday Dose of Woo in a couple of weeks, but I really don't have anything suitable. No, it's not that I don't have lots of woo in the infamous Folder of Woo. There's stuff there for the foreseeable future. It's just that I'm like a little kid. When a really, really good…
hrynyshyn | June 12, 2008I have exaggerated and generalized to grab your attention. But it's not that much of a stretch to put reviving the North American continent's moribund passenger rail network at the heart of what really matters in this election year. By this, I mean how the American presidential and congressional candidates, and their analogs in Canada, approach the subject of mass transportation will tell you a lot about whether or not they understand the most important challenges facing society.
OK. I'm still exaggerating. But not much. Passenger rail and other forms of efficient ways of moving people…
clock | June 6, 2008Keeping Beer Fresher:
Scientists in Venezuela are reporting an advance in the centuries-old effort to preserve the fresh taste that beer drinkers value more than any other characteristic of that popular beverage.
Futuristic Linkage Of Animals And Electronics:
The same Global Positioning System (GPS) technology used to track vehicles is now being used to track cows.
Brown Argus Butterfly Sees Positive Effects Of Climate Change:
Global warming is generally thought to have a negative affect on the habitats of many animals and plants. Not for the Brown Argus butterfly, however. This insect seems…
sporte | June 3, 2008A little over ten years ago, Dr. Elaine Johnson obtained funding from the National Science Foundation to start Bio-Link, an Advanced Technology Education center, focused on biotechnology. Since that time, Dr. Johnson has become a national leader in biotech education, enlisting the country's top educators and industry captains to ensure that community college students receive a quality education and the best preparation possible for entering the workforce.
In this radio interview from Tech Nation, Dr. Johnson talks with Dr. Moira Gunn about the easiest way to a biotech career.
A Career in…
neurophilosophy | June 3, 2008
This month's issue of IEEE Spectrum Online magazine contains an excellent special report on the singularity, the hypothetical point in time at which technology will be sufficiently advanced so as to enable the human race to transcend their biology and take their evolution into their own hands.
Some transhumanists envision a future characterized by cyborg-like beings and thinking machines with superhuman artificial intelligence, and await the singularity as eagerly as end-timers wait for the Second Coming. Some go as far as to say that we will one day be able to cheat death by uploading our…
sb admin | June 2, 2008At a summit at the World Science Festival, panelists agreed that the U.S. is losing its stature as a leader in science. Panelists cited two reasons: diminished funding for research, and âa perceived high-level disdain for science.â Keith B. Richburg of the Washington Post explains:
Speaking at a science summit that opens this week's first World Science Festival, the expert panel of scientists, and audience members, agreed that the United States is losing stature because of a perceived high-level disdain for science. They cited U.S. officials and others questioning scientific evidence of…
oracknows | May 30, 2008If there's one thing I've learned over the last couple of years of doing this little feature, it's that there are a couple of kinds of woo. Actually, there are certainly more than a couple, but pretty much all woo can be divided into a couple of types. The first time is where the woo is based on no science at all, but rather mysticism or some other religious or "spiritual" force. This may or may not be combined with the physical or with some sort of scientific or pseudoscientific explanations to justify it, but at its very heart the woo far more religion than science. Then, there's another…
sporte | May 29, 2008"Why won't biotech companies hire people with Ph.D.s to be technicians?"
"I already have a Ph.D., how do I find a job?"
These were some of the questions that commenters left after my earlier posts (here, here and here) on biotechnology workforce shortages.
Unfortunately, for these students and post-docs, the shortfall of employees in the biotech industry is largely a shortfall of technicians. It is a sad thing that promoting science careers can have the unintended consequence of creating a surplus of unhappy post-docs and even more unhappy graduate students. Perversely, many of the…
clock | May 28, 2008Mind Over Matter: Monkey Feeds Itself Using Its Brain:
A monkey has successfully fed itself with fluid, well-controlled movements of a human-like robotic arm by using only signals from its brain, researchers from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine report in the journal Nature. This significant advance could benefit development of prosthetics for people with spinal cord injuries and those with "locked-in" conditions such as Lou Gehrig's disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
Authentic Viking DNA Retrieved From 1,000-year-old Skeletons:
Although "Viking" literally means "pirate…
pontiff | May 28, 2008Bill Gates thinks that robots are at the equivalent stage that computers were when he and Paul Allen and a ton of hobbyists helped fuel the PC revolution. But is he right? Here is a radical proposal: might not bioengineering be the next field where amateurs have a huge impact? Such is the hypothesis of DIYbio which had its first meeting in Cambridge, MA on May 1st:
In the packed back-room of Asgard's Irish Pub in Cambridge, a diverse crowd of 25+ enthusiasts gathered to discuss the next big thing in biology: amateurs. Mackenzie (Mac) Cowell led-off the night with an overview of recent…