clock | July 12, 2008Children Are Naturally Prone To Be Empathic And Moral:
Children between the ages of seven and 12 appear to be naturally inclined to feel empathy for others in pain, according to researchers at the University of Chicago, who used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scans to study responses in children.
Scientists Identify Genetic Basis For The Black Sheep Of The Family:
Coat color of wild and domestic animals is a critical trait that has significant biological and economic impact. Researchers have now identified the genetic basis for black coat color, and white, in a breed of domestic…
clock | July 11, 2008To St. Paul, stripes, stones, shipwrecks, and thorns in the flesh were religious experiences; to Judas Iscariot, the daily companionship of Jesus of Nazareth was not.
- Leonard Hodgson
clock | July 11, 2008I guess it is unlikely you have not already heard about the big brouhaha that erupted when Bill Donohue targeted PZ Myers for showing disrespect towards a belief that made some religious nuts go crazy and violent against a child (yes, Eucharist is just a cracker, sorry, but that is just a factual statement about the world). If not, the entire story, and it is still evolving, can be found on PZ's blog so check out the numerous comments here, here,
here, here, here, here and here.
Also see what Greg Laden and Tristero say. [Update: see also John Wilkins and Mike Dunford for some good clear…
clock | July 11, 2008Friday Ark #199 is up on Modulator
Only four more days for your submissions to the Giant's Shoulders!
clock | July 10, 2008Many great writers have been extraordinarily awkward in daily exchange, but the greatest give the impression that their style was nursed by the closest attention to colloquial speech.
- Thornton Niven Wilder
clock | July 10, 2008This is very cool - African Bushmeat Expedition is a project which takes high school students to Africa where they both learn the techniques and at the same time do something very useful - track the appearance of wild animal meat in the market:
Although illegal wildlife poaching is conducted worldwide, the impact in Africa has been devastating. Unsustainable commercial hunting for bushmeat will inevitably lead to species extinction. In turn, localized species extinction impacts the health of native ecosystems. Marketing of illegal bushmeat can also have serious ramifications because pathogens…
clock | July 10, 2008Antony Williams, who I had a great time with over coffee yesterday, alerted me to his blog post about a new chemical with some amazing properties - shining UV light onto the solution turns the liquid green instantaneously, and removal of the UV source results in instant change of color from green back to transparent.
Aaron Rowe and Kyle Finchsigmate also blogged about it.
You can see the chemical structure here:
See those two rings with nitrogens highlighted in blue? See the bond that connects those two rings? That bond is broken by UV light and immediately rebinds once the light is gone…
clock | July 10, 2008I and the Bird #79: The Third Anniversary Edition is up on 10000 Birds and the celebratory topic is "Why are you still bird blogging?"
Change Of Shift - the Second Anniversary Edition is up on Emergiblog and the celebratory topic is explained by Kim: "In celebration, I asked nurse bloggers to send in their first posts and tell us a bit about why they started blogging."
Both are really worth checking out. Congratulations to both long-living carnivals!
clock | July 10, 2008Do We Think That Machines Can Think?:
When our PC goes on strike again we tend to curse it as if it was a human. The question of why and under what circumstances we attribute human-like properties to machines and how such processes manifest on a cortical level was investigated in a project led by Dr. Sören Krach and Prof. Tilo Kircher from the RWTH Aachen University (Clinic for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy) in cooperation with the Department of "Social Robotics" (Bielefeld University) and the Neuroimage Nord (Hamburg).
Surveying German Subs Sunk Off North Carolina During World War II:
NOAA…
clock | July 9, 2008The thing is plain. All that men really understand, is confined to a very small compass; to their daily affairs and experience; to what they have an opportunity to know, and motives to study or practice. The rest is affectation and imposture.
- William Hazlitt
clock | July 9, 2008Jim Evans, my friend here at UNC, says Yes, in an interview with NYTimes, and again on NPR's People's Pharmacy. He teaches a course on genetics to judges:
A lot of judges report that they did prelaw in college because it did not involve science. One of my favorite judges, a brilliant man, is fond of telling people he "flunked science in kindergarten." So in these workshops, I think of myself as a newfangled type of science teacher, instructing extremely smart and distinguished adults in science fundamentals.
clock | July 9, 2008Tangled Bank #109 is up on Greg Laden's blog
The 132nd Carnival of Homeschooling is up on SuperAngel's blog
clock | July 9, 2008Graduate Junction is a new social networking site designed for graduate students and postdocs. I looked around a bit and found it clean, easy-to-use and potentially useful. This is how they explain it - give it a try and let me know what you think:
The Graduate Junction is a brand new website designed to help early career
researchers make contact with others with similar research interests,
regardless of which department, institution or country they work in. Designed
by two graduate researchers at the University of Durham, The Graduate Junction
has proved very popular with research students…
clock | July 9, 2008Big Brains Arose Twice In Higher Primates:
After taking a fresh look at an old fossil, John Flynn, Frick Curator of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, and colleagues determined that the brains of the ancestors of modern Neotropical primates were as small as those of their early fossil simian counterparts in the Old World. This means one of the hallmarks of primate biology, increased brain size, arose independently in isolated groups--the platyrrhines of the Americas and the catarrhines of Africa and Eurasia.
Fossil Feathers Preserve Evidence Of Color, Say Scientists:
The…
clock | July 9, 2008What a delightfully obvious and visually compelling example of a transitional fossil! A flatfish in which the eye migrates from one side to another, but not quite as much as in the modern flounder. Carl Zimmer and Ed Yong have the details and explanation.