clock | April 23, 2008The Tar Heel Tavern was the first blog carnival that focused on a geographical region instead of a topic. It was going strong for about two years, but I could not find enough time to manage it any more, so it went extinct.
But now that blogging in North Carolina has grown so much and got well organized, the idea of resurrecting the Tar Heel Tavern has popped up. Perhaps we can do a few, for special occasions, and if it "catches" turn it into a monthly or fortnightly carnival (weekly is far too intense).
Anton hosted the first resurrected TTHT with the topic of Water, due to the draught.…
clock | April 23, 2008Cathedral of Saint Sava:
Kalemegdan:
Chestnut puree:
Scenes from Knes Mihailova street:
A comic strip for kids, explaining what to do and what not to do if stuck inside the elevator:
clock | April 23, 2008Life Expectancy Worsening Or Stagnating For Large Segment Of U.S. Population:
One of the major aims of the U.S. health system is improving the health of all people, particularly those segments of the population at greater risk of health disparities. In fact, overall life expectancy in the U.S. increased more than seven years for men and more than six years for women between 1960 and 2000. Now, a new, long-term study of mortality trends in U.S. counties over the same four decades reports a troubling finding: These gains are not reaching many parts of the country; rather, the life expectancy of…
clock | April 23, 2008Sheril Kirshenbaum will be on a panel on Science and the New Media at the AAAS Forum On Science And Technology Policy on May 9th and, as bloggers tend to do, she is asking for questions, comments and ideas from the readers. If you have some thoughts on the topic - science on the Web, etc., - go and join the discussion in the comments there.
clock | April 23, 2008Grand Rounds 4.31, the medical blog carnival, is up on Dr. Val and The Voice of Reason
The newest edition of Gene Genie, the human genetics blog carnival, is up on My Biotech Life.
The Boneyard - Edition #18 - is up on Archaeozoology
Accretionary Wedge #8 is up on Andrew's Geology Blog
The 39th edition of Four Stone Hearth is up on Hominin Dental Anthropology
The 168th edition of The Carnival of Education is up on The Education Wonk
Carnival of the Liberals #63 is up on Vagabond Scholar
Carnival of the Green #124 is up on EcoTech Daily
The 121st edition of the Carnival of Homeschooling is up…
clock | April 23, 2008Nothing better than coming back home after a long time (13 years since my last visit), seeing my family and eating Mom's food:
Matzo-ball soup for Passover:
Beef and bone marrow - I dug it out of the bone and salted it:
Spinach&cheese pie:
Around the dinner table:
Grandpa:
The best chocolate/walnut torte in the world. It takes about two days to fix and is very rich. I had it every birthday when I was a kid, and also every time when I cam back home from travels. This time included:
Cannot visit Belgrade without having a chocolate banana....
.... and Niksicko pivo, the amazing…
clock | April 23, 2008This is the sixth post in a series about mechanism of entrainment, running all day today on this blog. In order to understand the content of this post, you need to read the previous five installments. The original of this post was first written on April 12, 2005.
A Phase Response Curve (PRC) can be made in three ways:
One can construct a PRC for a single individual. If you have a reasonably long-lived organism, you can apply a number of light pulses over a period of time. The advantage is that you will always know the freerunning period of your organism, and you will know with absolute…
clock | April 22, 2008A good time to keep your mouth shut is when you're in deep water.
- Sidney Goff
clock | April 22, 2008The second science blogging anthology, the Open Laboratory 2007 is now up for sale on Amazon.com. As the profits will go towards the organization of ScienceOnline'09, it is the best if you guide your readers to buy it directly from Lulu.com. However, it would be really nice if some of the readers wrote reviews on the Amazon.com page.
Also, do not forget to keep submitting new entries for the OpenLab'08.
clock | April 22, 2008Mutations in a Novel, Cryptic Exon of the Luteinizing Hormone/Chorionic Gonadotropin Receptor Gene Cause Male Pseudohermaphroditism:
A person's sex is determined by their complement of X and Y (sex) chromosomes. Someone who has two X chromosomes is genetically female and usually has ovaries and female external sex organs. Someone who has an X and a Y chromosome is genetically male and has testes and male external sex organs. Sometimes, though, the development of the reproductive organs proceeds abnormally, resulting in a person with an "intersex" condition whose chromosomes, gonads (ovaries…
clock | April 22, 2008Neanderthals Speak Again After 30,000 Years:
Dr. Robert McCarthy, an assistant professor of anthropology in the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters at Florida Atlantic University, has reconstructed vocal tracts that simulate the sound of the Neanderthal voice.
Slowly-developing Primates Definitely Not Dim-witted:
Some primates have evolved big brains because their extra brainpower helps them live and reproduce longer, an advantage that outweighs the demands of extra years of growth and development they spend reaching adulthood, anthropologists from Duke University and the…
clock | April 22, 2008Niyaz Ahmed's Blog
Worst Result Ever
Tomorrow's Table
Stimulating Aliquot
Little Grassroots
A Baltimore Block
Via Ginnastica
clock | April 22, 2008I think I have a profile on Friendster - I don't know, I haven't checked since 2003. I have bare-bones profiles on MySpace, LinkedIn and Change.Org and I will get an e-mail if you "friend" me (and will friend you back), but I do not have time to spend on there. I refuse to even look at all the other social networking sites like Twitter - there are only so many hours in the day.
But I am interested in possible ways of making science communication more interactive and more Webby 2.0, beyond just blogs. Pedro, Carl and Phillip have recently written thoughtful posts about this topic as well.…
clock | April 22, 2008This is the fifth post in a series about mechanism of entrainment. Originally written on April 11, 2005.
If you look at the Phase Response Curve you made you see that, as you follow the curve through the 24-hour cycle, you first encounter a dead zone during the subjective day (VT0 - CT 12) during which light pulses exert no or little effect on the phase of the clock. The line, then, turns down (negative slope) into the delay portion of the curve until it reaches a maximal delay in the early night. It reverses its direction then and goes up (positive slope) until it reaches maximal phase-…
clock | April 21, 2008The other day I put instant coffee in my microwave oven ... I almost went back in time.
- Steven Wright
clock | April 21, 2008Do you remember when Mitch Waldrop wrote a draft of an article about Science 2.0 and asked for community feedback? He got 125 comments. Using them, he has now finalized the text and it appears in today's edition of Scientific American: Science 2.0 -- Is Open Access Science the Future? Is posting raw results online, for all to see, a great tool or a great risk?
clock | April 21, 2008This is a summary of my 1999 paper, following in the footsteps of the work I described here two days ago. The work described in that earlier post was done surprisingly quickly - in about a year - so I decided to do some more for my Masters Thesis.
The obvious next thing to do was to expose the quail to T-cycles, i.e., non-24h cycles. This is some arcane circadiana, so please refer to the series of posts on entrainment from yesterday and the two posts on seasonality and photoperiodism posted this morning so you can follow the discussion below:
There were three big reasons for me to attempt…
clock | April 21, 2008The fourth post in the series on entrainment, originally written on April 10, 2005, explains the step-by-step method of constructing a PRC.
After months of applying light pulses to your animals you are ready to analyze and plot your data. You will print out the actographs (see how in the post "On Methodology" in the "Clock Tutorials" category) and you will see many instances of phase-shifts, somewhat like the very last figure in this post.
For each light pulse you applied to each animal, you measure the direction of the phase-shift (i.e., if it was a delay or an advance) and the size of the…
clock | April 20, 2008One must learn a different ... sense of time, one that depends more on small amounts than big ones.
- Sister Mary Paul
clock | April 20, 2008In the end, late at night, I had dinner (goulash - excellent) with the Director of FEST and a bunch of young science journalists, all graduates (Masters) of the Trieste program in Science Communication (SISSA) and most of them involved in some way in the organization of FEST: