clock | April 2, 2008Tangled Bank #102 is up on Further thoughts
The new Circus of the Spineless is up on From Archaea to Zeaxanthol
Grand Rounds 4:28 are up on GruntDoc
clock | April 1, 2008People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
- Iris Murdoch
clock | April 1, 2008There are 47 articles published in PLoS ONE this week. Here are some of the coolest titles - you go and find your own.
Ultrasonic Vocalizations Induced by Sex and Amphetamine in M2, M4, M5 Muscarinic and D2 Dopamine Receptor Knockout Mice:
Adult mice communicate by emitting ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) during the appetitive phases of sexual behavior. However, little is known about the genes important in controlling call production. Here, we study the induction and regulation of USVs in muscarinic and dopaminergic receptor knockout (KO) mice as well as wild-type controls during sexual…
clock | April 1, 2008Climate Change And Human Hunting Combine To Drive The Woolly Mammoth Extinct:
Does the human species have mammoth blood on its hands? Scientists have long debated the relative importance of hunting by our ancestors and change in global climate in consigning the mammoth to the history books. A new paper uses climate models and fossil distribution to establish that the woolly mammoth went extinct primarily because of loss of habitat due to changes in temperature, while human hunting acted as the final straw.
Anne-Marie, Kambiz and artificialhabitat have more.
Study Questions 'Cost Of Complexity…
clock | April 1, 2008April Scientiae is up on Women in Science blog
The 118th Carnival of Homeschooling is up on Why Homeschool
clock | April 1, 2008The trip to the UK is shaping up. Sing up here if you want to meet me during that week, or here if you want to meet me at the pub on April 9th (probably this one) or here if you want to go to the Museum and keep your eyes on those places for updates.
clock | April 1, 2008There have recently been several articles in the media about brain enhancers, so-called Nootropics, or "smart drugs". They have been abused by college students for many years now, but they are now seeping into other places where long periods of intense mental focus are required, including the scientific research labs. Here is a recent article in New York Times:
So far no one is demanding that asterisks be attached to Nobels, Pulitzers or Lasker awards. Government agents have not been raiding anthropology departments, riffling book bags, testing professors' urine. And if there are illicit…
clock | April 1, 2008Well, well, well, I went to my office this morning and, just as I got my coffee, opened up the laptop and logged in, who walks in? PZ Myers! What a surprise.
So, we chatted some. He thought that PLoS ONE should be the place to have all the Intelligent Design papers published. Since it is Open Access, everyone could see for themselves how foolish those "papers" really are and he can send the Pharyngulites to post thousands of comments. I thought that would be pretty poor framing for PLoS, though.
Anyway, I asked the barista to take a picture of us (under the fold):
Whoa! What happened!…
clock | March 31, 2008People spend too much time finding other people to blame, too much energy finding excuses for not being what they are capable of being, and not enough energy putting themselves on the line, growing out of the past, and getting on with their lives.
- J. Michael Straczynski
clock | March 31, 2008Climate Change, Humans, and the Extinction of the Woolly Mammoth:
What caused the woolly mammoth's extinction? Climate warming in the Holocene might have driven the extinction of this cold-adapted species, yet the species had survived previous warming periods, suggesting that the more-plausible cause was human expansion. Testing these competing hypotheses has been hampered by the difficulty in generating quantitative estimates of the relationship between the mammoth's contraction and the climatic and/or human-induced drivers of extinction. In this study, we combined paleo-climate simulations…
clock | March 31, 2008Teenaged Dome-skulled Dinosaurs Could Really Knock Heads, Virtual Smash-ups Show:
After half a century of debate, a University of Alberta researcher has confirmed that dome-headed dinosaurs called pachycephalosaurs could collide with each other during courtship combat. Eric Snively, an Alberta Ingenuity fellow at the U of A, used computer software to smash the sheep-sized dinosaurs together in a virtual collision and results showed that their bony domes could emerge unscathed.
Squid Beak Is Both Hard And Soft, A Material That Engineers Want To Copy:
How did nature make the squid's beak super…
clock | March 31, 2008Candidate Models
Plausible Accuracy
Dolores Labs Blog
StupidFilter
GraphJam: Pop culture for people in cubicles.
PSD Blog
clock | March 31, 2008The latest edition of Encephalon is up on Of Two Minds
Carnival of the Green #121 is up on Conserve Plastic Bags
clock | March 31, 2008Words of wisdom (via):
The internet isn't a decoration on contemporary society, it's a challenge to it. A society that has an internet is a different kind of society than a society that doesn't.
I agree. And people, regardless of chronological age, appear to separate along "generational" lines, with the word "generation" really meaning how much they grok the immenseness of the societal change. It changes everything: politics, economics, media, science, environment, public health, business.... The "old" generation thinks of the Internet as yet another place to put their traditional…
clock | March 31, 2008Elisabeth Montegna is quite a prolific blogger, with SECular Thoughts being just one of her virtual spaces. We finally got to meet at the second Science Blogging Conference in January and took a tour of the Museum of Natural Science in Raleigh together.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your scientific background? What is your Real World job?
I'm a senior graduate student at the University of Chicago. Since I get a stipend, I consider that my real world job. I graduated college from Boston…
clock | March 31, 2008
Robert Wilhelm Eberhard Bunsen (31 March 1811 - 16 August 1899) was a German chemist. With his laboratory assistant, Peter Desaga, he developed the Bunsen burner. Bunsen also worked on emission spectroscopy of heated elements, and with Gustav Kirchhoff he discovered the elements caesium and rubidium. Bunsen developed several gas-analytical methods, he was a pioneer in photochemistry, and he did early work in the field of organoarsenic chemistry.
clock | March 30, 2008Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people.
- Garrison Keillor
clock | March 30, 2008SEA will train scientists to run for office:
SEA is holding a workshop to train scientists to run for office on May 10th at Georgetown University. If you are a scientist or engineer and have been considering running for office or working on an election campaign, then join us for a crash course on how it's done. Below is a video for the workshop featuring Congressman and former physicist Vern Ehlers.
Hat-tip.