clock | May 16, 2008Ha! Made you look! Which is exactly the point! Go and add your own ideas in the comments there....
clock | May 16, 2008...no idea what kind of Internet access I will have there, so I scheduled some re-posts and quotes to show up automatically. I'll add more if I can when I can.
clock | May 16, 2008I'd like to sail on this thing:
Bay Area engineer Ugo Conti has sailed the world, but has always suffered from seasickness. A queasy stomach became his motivation to design "Proteus" - a spider-like sea craft made for smoother sailing. He designed the Wave Adaptive Modular Vessel to cross the ocean while flexing with the movement of the waves. And it may change the way people take to the high seas.
clock | May 16, 2008This kind of ignorant bleating makes me froth at the mouth every time - I guess it is because this is my own blogging "turf".
One of the recurring themes of my blog is the disdain I have for people who equate sleep with laziness out of their Puritan core of understanding of the world, their "work ethic" which is a smokescreen for power-play, their vicious disrespect for everyone who is not like them, and the nasty feeling of superiority they have towards the teenagers just because they are older, bigger, stronger and more powerful than the kids. Not to forget the idiotic notions that kids…
clock | May 16, 2008
First in a series of five posts on clocks in bacteria (from March 08, 2006)...
As I stated in the introductory post on this topic, it was thought for a long time that prokaryotes were incapable of generating circadian rhythms. When it was discovered, in 1994 [1], that one group of prokaryotes, the cyanobacteria, possess a circadian clock, the news was greeted with great excitement. This was the first definitive demonstration of a circadian clock in a bacterium (I intend to revisit the E.coli saga in a later post).
All three hypotheses for the origin of the circadian clock suppose that it…
clock | May 15, 2008By the time a man notices that he is no longer young, his youth has long since left him.
- W. Somerset Maugham
clock | May 15, 2008Monarch Butterflies Help Explain Why Parasites Harm Hosts:
It's a paradox that has confounded evolutionary biologists since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859: Since parasites depend on their hosts for survival, why do they harm them? A new University of Georgia and Emory University study of monarch butterflies and the microscopic parasites that hitch a ride on them finds that the parasites strike a middle ground between the benefits gained by reproducing rapidly and the costs to their hosts. The study, published in the early online edition of the journal Proceedings of…
clock | May 15, 2008Sciencewoman is in Atlanta, judging this year's International Science and Engineering Fair and liveblogging the whole thing:
Going to Atlanta....
First Taste of the International Science and Engineering Fair
ISEF 2008: Nobel Laureates Panel
ISEF 2008: Day 1 by the numbers
ISEF 2008: Full disclosure
ISEF 2008: Impressive science by high school students
ISEF 2008: Cool science and practical applications
ISEF 2008: Special awards and scenes from around the fair
Update: Here are the winners:
ISEF 2008: The best of the best! And they're girls!
clock | May 15, 2008My regular readers are probably aware that the topic of adolescent sleep and the issue of starting times of schools are some of my favourite subjects for a variety of reasons: I am a chronobiologist, I am an extreme "owl" (hence the name of this blog), I am a parent of developing extreme "owls", I have a particular distaste for Puritanical equation of sleep with laziness which always raises its ugly head in discussions of adolescent sleep, and much of my own research is somewhat related to this topic (see the bottom of this post for Related Posts).
So, I was particularly pleased when Jessica…
clock | May 15, 2008I got an interesting e-mail yesterday:
Columbia White Sale goes through May 31st. For more information, please visit: http://cup.columbia.edu/sale/23. We are offering up to 80% off on more than 1,000 titles in all subjects. (There are some really great deals). I hope this will be of interest to you and your readers. Please feel free to pass the word to friends and colleagues.
Hmmmmm, shiny!
clock | May 15, 2008The fifth annual Museum Night in Belgrade and other Serbian cities will be held this Saturday, May 17th:
More than 130 museums and galleries in 23 towns in Serbia will be open just for you, so the only decision you have to make is to choose a good company. We hope you are in good shape because there will be so many interesting exhibitions, concerts and performances that you will literally have the whole Belgrade under your feet!
What a great idea - pick a day, have special exhibits, events and concerts, all for free, and get the entire town to come out and enjoy.
clock | May 15, 2008Social networking meets social conscience:
As reported today in the science journal Nature, MalariaEngage.org aims to help in the stuggle against malaria. Rather than throwing buckets of money at big name Western research institutes, the new website aims to give smaller locally-based African projects a bigger profile.
Relying on grass-roots support from people who are concerned about poverty and disease, the website hopes to fund in-country research that would otherwise be overlooked by the big funders such as the Gates Foundation or NIH.
The site provides profiles of projects that…
clock | May 15, 2008I am kinda glad I went to Belgrade earlier and escaped the craziness of the EuroVision contest. The tickets have been sold out for a long time now. At least the European visitors will see how pretty Belgrade is now and how nicely it has recovered from a decade of wars, sanctions, hyperinflation, mismanagement and bombing.
clock | May 15, 2008Neurotic Physiology
Stitchin' Fish at the Ecology Action Centre
A Reasonable Theory
Scholarship 2.0: An Idea Whose Time Has Come
What Sorts of People
The Stanford Facebook Class
Giovanna Di Sauro
Wandering Primate
Vetskeptics
clock | May 15, 2008I And The Bird #75 is up on Gallicissa
Oekologie #16 is up on Science and Supermodels
clock | May 15, 2008The first in a series of posts on circadian clocks in microorganisms (from February 23, 2006)...
Many papers in chronobiology state that circadian clocks are ubiqutous. That has been a mantra since at least 1960. This suggests that most or all organisms on Earth possess biological clocks.
In the pioneering days of chronobiology, it was a common practice to go out in the woods and collect as many species as possible and document the existence of circadian rhythms. Technical limitations certainly influenced what kinds of organisms were usually tested.
Rhythms of locomotor activity are the…
clock | May 15, 2008To sleep or not to sleep: the ecology of sleep in artificial organisms:
We systematically varied input parameters related to the number of food and sleep sites, the degree to which food and sleep sites overlap, and the rate at which food patches were depleted. Our results reveal that: (1) the costs of traveling between more spatially separated food and sleep clusters select for monophasic sleep, (2) more rapid food patch depletion reduces sleep times, and (3) agents spend more time attempting to acquire the 'rarer' resource, that is, the average time spent sleeping is positively correlated…
clock | May 14, 2008Life is so much more meaningful if you take the time to hunt down and strangle twits who post blather to inappropriate newsgroups.
- Henry Spencer
clock | May 14, 2008Wild Three-Toed Sloths Sleep 6 Hours Less Per Day Than Captive Sloths, First Electrophysical Recording Shows:
In the first experiment to record the electrophysiology of sleep in a wild animal, three-toed sloths carrying miniature electroencephalogram recorders slept 9.63 hours per day--6 hours less than captive sloths did, reports an international team of researchers working on the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute's Barro Colorado Island in Panama.
Educated People In US Living Longer, Less Educated Have Unchanged Death Rate:
A new study finds a gap in overall death rates between…
clock | May 14, 2008Tangled Bank #105 is up on The Beagle Project Blog
Carnival of Education #171 is up on Instructify