Technology
tfk | October 17, 2006The Johnson County Sun is a fairly Republican paper, and its endorsements of incumbent Republicans as Insurance Commissioner, Treasurer and Secretary of State are pro forma. It's endorsement of Don Weiss over John Bacon is far from automatic. The editors clearly thought hard, and came down behind Don Weiss, calling him "by far, the more qualified candidate":
[incumbent John] Bacon is part of the notorious 6-4 Christian conservative majority that has enmeshed the board in distracting controversies such as evolution instruction, sex education and hiring Bob Corkins as education commissioner.…
purepedantry | October 13, 2006I expressed a certain level of skepticism about North Korea's nuclear test this week because of the low estimated yield and the failure of the earlier test of their Taepodong-2 missile. Basically, I question the ability of North Korea to make a nuclear weapon that will actually work, given the strict controls on their society and the limited ability to innovate. I think that we need to factor into our strategic calculations in dealing with North Korea -- serious as they are -- the possibility that they may not have the beef.
Now it would appear that North Korea's nuclear test -- in…
loom | October 8, 2006Two years ago this month, I was taken aback by some explosive news. A team of Indonesian and Australian scientists reported that they had discovered fossils of what they claimed was a new species of hominid. It lived on the island of Flores in Indonesia, it stood three feet tall, and it had a brain about the size of a chimp's. Making the report particularly remarkable was the fact that this hominid, which the scientists dubbed Homo floresiensis, lived as recently as 18,000 years ago. I wrote up a post on the paper, and took note of some strong skepticism from some quarters. And since then, I…
sporte | October 5, 2006Zuska never fails to make people think. And she made me wonder this and made me think that perhaps we could pass some names along to future Noble committees - you know, just in case they're having trouble coming up with names of female scientists. Maybe we can be some help.
I have a few suggestions below but I would really like to see more suggestions in the comments.
My suggestions for female Nobelists are:
1. Mary-Claire King
She could fit in two categories - The first category would be medicine for her discovery that a common disease, i.e. breast cancer, should have a genetic cause…
revere | October 4, 2006A couple of months ago we posted on the great Avastin versus Lucentis competition, two drugs for treating age-related macular degeneration (AMD). AMD is the major cause of blindness in the elderly. The interesting thing is that there is about a 100-fold difference in cost between the two drugs and both are made by the same company, Genentech.
Avastin is an anti-angiogenesis drug used to treat colon cancer. It works by inhibiting the new blood vessels the tumor needs to grow. New vessel growth (neovascularization) is also the pathologic process behind AMD. Several years ago an ophthalmologist…
oracknows | September 13, 2006I was going to blog about this a couple of days ago, but the Scientific Activist beat me to it, leading to a heads-up from PZ Myers. Never let it be said that a little thing like that stopped me from putting my two cents in. Besides, I think I bring a certain perspective that hasn't been addressed thus far about this subject, namely the declining success rates for applications for R01 grants from the NIH. For one thing, I have an R01. I'm about a year and a half into a five year grant, which means that I have about two and a half years or so before I have to go for renewal. Consequently, I…
cmooney | September 11, 2006In my new talk, I strongly emphasize that scientists need to be strategically aware of how they are communicating their knowledge and their results in politically contentious areas. If they're not careful, not only might they communicate badly--but what they say might actually backfire.
It' hard to think of a better case study than the recent controversy over the latest work by the biotech firm Advanced Cell Technology. ACT's scientists published a study in Nature about deriving pluripotent stem cell lines from single cells taken from an embryo, a result touted as "an approach that does not…
cevans | September 7, 2006
Of all the storied elements of our great folkloric misunderstanding of Chaos Theory, the Butterfly Effect has undoubtedly suffered most from popular conception. It was born innocuous, a slight allegory to explain how changes in a mathematical situation's beginning coordinates have an unprecedented effect on its outcome, and yet the Butterfly Effect has somehow mutated into a beloved believe-it-or-not tenet of pop science. A butterfly flapping its wings on a balmy midwestern afternoon, many of us believe, can cause typhoons on the coast of Japan. The image is lovely, of course, and gives us a…
oracknows | September 5, 2006I was perusing some articles that had accumulated while I was away, looking for ones that I wouldn't want to have missed and also looking for blog fodder (sometimes my day job and my blogging job actually mesh quite well, at least when it comes to discussing biomedical studies), and then I found an article that I had to discuss. Somehow I had missed it in the week leading up to my departure; how that happened I don't know, but it's time to make up for it. In any case, when I saw this article over the weekend, I knew I'd better comment on it, because, mark my words, it will soon be showing up…
bcohen | August 31, 2006Oh, how to load a question, eh? And a dangerous one, at that.
I mostly think of this topic, of progress and science and technology, as one of faith. Saying that doesn't explain much about what I'm talking about, but I don't intend here to be unnecessarily obscure. Rather, here's a poem instead of a diatribe or monologue or pontificatory (not a word) uber-blurb. It's by a Portuguese poet, and I thank WG for sending it along.
Affonso Romano de Sant' Anna"Letter to the Dead" (2000)
[translated from the Portuguese]
Friends, nothing has changed
in essence.
Wages don't cover expenses,
wars…
purepedantry | August 30, 2006Those of you who read an earlier post here noted that I was somewhat skeptical of the technical aspects of the so-called ethical stem cells. I felt that there were several technical hurdles that had to be surmounted before this technology could be used reasonably.
It turns things were even worse than I thought.
New Scientist reports that Nature has issued a clarification to the article because many had complained that the scientists had been disingenuous in suggesting that no embryos had been destroyed in that set of experiments. In fact, 16 embryos had been destroyed.
Early press reports…
worldsfair | August 30, 2006
Remarks by Stephen Lewis, UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa,
to the Closing Session of the XVI International AIDS Conference, Toronto, Canada
"This is the last speech I shall make at any of these international conferences in my role as United Nations Envoy. I'm glad, for obvious Canadian reasons, that it comes in Toronto. But I'm equally pleased because this has been a good conference, covering an extraordinary range of ground, and I therefore feel confident in asking you to join with me in giving force to the oft-repeated mantra: "Time To Deliver."
Of what would that meaning consist…
clock | August 28, 2006Summer is officially over. Kids are back in school. I am pretty much a stay-at-home-Dad these days and this is even more obvious during breaks in the school calendar.
And we certainly had a great summer, starting even before school ended, with our trip to New York City. We went to the pool a lot and generally had a nice laid-back family time together.
Coturnietta spent a week in a science-technology summer camp, then ran off to the beach with her cousins and my mother-in-law for a week. She read a bunch of books (all with cats as main characters - she is a huge cat lover). She had such a…
retrospectacle | August 25, 2006A few days ago, I issued a challenge to my fellow ScienceBloggers:
"Are you for or against the death penalty, or (if its conditional), in what cases? Furthermore, do you believe that societies that sanction war are hypocritical for opposing the death penalty?"
Quite a few of my esteemed cohort stepped up to the plate and took a swing. If you are interested in my thoughts on the subject, well they are below the fold.
Mike Dunford of The Questionable Authority is "more or less opposed" to the death penalty but reserves the right to fry the extra-baddies.
Tim Lambert at Deltoid discusses some…
hrynyshyn | August 14, 2006I have resisted reposting pre-ScienceBlog posts as the lazy way out, but seeing as how many of my fellow bloggers have done it, what the heck? This one comes from a year ago, on the heels of the discovery of "Xena," what might be a tenth planet. It seems appropriate given that newspaper columnists are doing the same kind of recycling as we anticipate the outcome of a big meeting in Prague later this month, when astronomers will announce just what it is that gets to be called a planet.
Astronomers have been finding new planets on an almost weekly basis for years. Until last week, though, they…
evolgen | August 13, 2006I tend to avoid writing about creationists (despite what Orac believes) because I find them quite boring. Sure, they can be amusing (scoring high on the unintentional comedy scale), but I'm not a huge fan of willfull ignorance, deception, and attacks on eduction. I'd rather waste my time writing about real advances in biology instead of attempts to undermine the scientific method. So, I present for you, without much comment, some new anti-anti-evolution resources and a bit of anti-science from a US politician.
The first is a pile blog where you can leave comments that would be deleted if…
clock | August 9, 2006Dominant Meerkats Render Rivals Infertile:
When pregnant, dominant female meerkats subject their subordinates to escalating aggression and temporary eviction causing them to become overly stressed and as a result infertile, a new study finds.
Does Environment Influence Genes? Researcher Gives Hard Thoughts On Soft Inheritance:
Organisms, including humans, all inherit DNA from generation to generation, what biologists call hard inheritance, because the nucleotide sequence of DNA is constant and only changes by rare random mutation as it is passed down the generations.
But there also is…
oracknows | August 9, 2006As you probably remember, the case that first got me discussing the issue of children and minors opting for "alternative therapy" rather than conventional medicine was not Starchild Abraham Cherrix (Abraham's personal website). Rather, this is a topic that I first approached nine months ago, even before I moved over to ScienceBlogs. With the prominence of the Cherrix case, the Wernecke case has dropped off the map more or less. Basically, her parents won the right to refuse the recommended radiation therapy for her, a treatment with a good chance of rendering her disease-free, and instead…
bcohen | August 8, 2006There is a triple theme here, circling around cabinets of curiosity, which I'll get around to eventually. How about a picture first.
Frontispiece from Museum Wormianum depicting Ole Worm's cabinet of curiosities
But first. A few days ago we linked to a site on the "Longest Running Scientific Experiment," at the Athananius Kircher Society. I'm still not sure what the site is, or the Society I should say, but it's, let's say, curious. Someone--Wamba--commented that it reminded them of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, which was just right. What a perfect connection. The MJT was the…
drorzel | August 5, 2006Yesterday saw the posting (or at least the arrival on my RSS reader) of two different discussions of the current state of genre fiction. I have issues with both discussions, but reading them together makes for an interesting effect.
First, there's Charlie Stross complaining about the state of SF, and once again lamenting the lack of... something in the SF vein. I'm not entirely clear what it is that he would like to see, other than that it isn't alternate history or werewolf porn-- more on this in a bit. There are various responses and duelling anecdotes in the comments. Over at the Whatever…