clock | September 25, 2007
If You Want More Babies, Find A Man With A Deep Voice:
Men who have lower-pitched voices have more children than do men with high-pitched voices, researchers have found. And their study suggests that for reproductive-minded women, mate selection favours men with low-pitched voices.
Spaceflight Can Change Bacteria Into More Infectious Pathogens:
Space flight has been shown to have a profound impact on human physiology as the body adapts to zero gravity environments.
Making Bicycles That Balance Better:
For nearly 150 years, scientists have been puzzled by the bicycle. How on earth is it…
clock | September 24, 2007While reason is puzzling itself about mystery, faith is turning it to daily bread, and feeding on it thankfully in her heart of hearts.
- F. D. Huntington
clock | September 24, 2007Sarah Wallace, Matt Ford, ScienceGoGo and Jason Stajich comment on the fungus that gets its energy from radiation. I've heard of Deinococcus radiodurans before, but this is a fungus! Well, if there is an energy source to tap into, even if it is in the middle of Chernobyl, some life form is likely to find a way to do it.
clock | September 24, 2007Encephalon #32 is up on Living the Scientific Life.
Gene Genie #16 is up on Neurophilosophy.
clock | September 23, 2007Come out of the circle of time
And into the circle of love.
- Jalal-Uddin Rumi
clock | September 23, 2007The three-day Foodblogging event has started, with a reading/booksigning by Michael Ruhlman at the Regulator bookshop in Durham.
Among those in the audience were Reynolds Price, local bloggers Anton Zuiker and Brian Russell, as well as Anna Kushnir, foodblogger who drove all the way from Boston (OK, via Virginia) to attend the event.
I bought The Reach of a Chef and asked him what is the best way to get a kid/teenager who is interested in cooking started. He said that hands-on experience is essential and that one should carefully pick a course that focuses on basics and not on fancy gimmicks…
clock | September 23, 2007Last night at the wedding, DJ went around asking for song suggestions and I thought back about Serbian weddings and how many songs there are that are inappropriate for weddings there - so many songs are sad, melancholic romances about lost loves, about lives lost in alcohol after the only loved one got married to someone else. Heck, just a brief look at songs by Djordje Balasevic (aka George Nationale) reveals several of those, so I found a couple on YouTube and posted them under the fold for my Balkan readers - the lyrics are very difficult to translate as he loves to use localisms,…
clock | September 23, 2007I was out and offline all day yesterday, so I missed this wonderful article by Dan Barkin in yesterdays' N&O (I just took the paper out of its plastic bag a few minutes ago):
Bloggers to talk science.
It tells you where Anton Zuiker comes from and where he is going next. The killer paragraph is this one:
The Web has evolved into a tribal Internet of passionate bloggers like Zuiker, and he has become a sort-of local brand. He's a quiet visionary. He's a low-key doer. He's a let's-get-together-and-see-where-this-goes guy. It's the Zuikers of this new, interwoven world who may play a…
clock | September 23, 2007The XVIth edition of Radiology Grand Rounds is up on Sumer's Radiology Site.
Friday Ark #157 is up on The Modulator.
clock | September 22, 2007It is common error to infer that things which are consecutive in order of time have necessarily the relation of cause and effect.
- Jacob Bigelow
clock | September 21, 2007It seems a long time since the morning mail could be called correspondence.
- Jacques Barzun
clock | September 21, 2007Wow - this was a busy and exhausting week! But Trackbacks are in place and (mostly) working.
I did not even have time to unpack everything from last weekend's pseudo-move - the house is nice and clean but still looks like a war-zone.
And tomorrow I am teaching Lab 3 (out of 4) in the morning and going to a wedding in the afternoon.
Sunday is the beginning of the Foodblogging event and I'll also meet some science bloggers in the evening.
Blogging? Backburner until Monday, most likely....
In the meantime, learn how to draw a magpie.
clock | September 21, 2007
How The Brain Handles Surprise, Good And Bad:
Whether it's a mugger or a friend who jumps out of the bushes, you're still surprised. But your response--to flee or to hug--must be very different. Now, researchers have begun to distinguish the circuitry in the brain's emotion center that processes surprise from the circuitry that processes the aversive or reward "valence" of a stimulus. C. Daniel Salzman and colleagues published their findings in the journal Neuron.
Official Kilogram Losing Mass: Scientists Propose Redefining It As A Precise Number Of Carbon Atoms:
How much is a kilogram? It…
clock | September 21, 2007Yesterday, PLoS ONE moved to the newest version of the TOPAZ platform. Rich Cave explains all the improvements that this move entails, including the citation download for articles, but one new feature that should really be exciting to bloggers are Trackbacks.
From now on, if you link to a PLoS ONE article in your post, that article will display a link back to your blog post (go to an article and look at the right side-bar, nested between the Discussions and Ratings). Thus, in addition to the conversation already going on in the commentary attached to the article itself, the readers will be…
clock | September 21, 2007Velociraptor Had Feathers:
A new look at some old bones have shown that velociraptor, the dinosaur made famous in the movie Jurassic Park, had feathers. The discovery was made by paleontologists at the American Museum of Natural History and the Field Museum of Natural History.
Personal Genomes: Mainstream In Five Years, But Who Should Have Access?:
Imagine this: you visit your clinician, undergo genetic testing, and then you are handed a miniature hard drive containing your personal genome sequence, which is subsequently uploaded onto publicly accessible databases. This may sound like science…
clock | September 20, 2007Go say Hello to the very latest addition to the Scienceblogs Universe - Coby Beck of A Few Things Ill Considered.
clock | September 20, 2007I and the Bird #58 is up on The Nightjar.
Change of Shift: Volume Two, Number 7 is up on Emergiblog.
The Carnival of Space - week 21, the XPrize edition - is up on Why Homeschool
clock | September 20, 2007To Chris (an no, I am not the commenter who signed with "a sea cucumber" handle...).
clock | September 20, 2007A post-doctoral position is available in the laboratory of Dr. Tosini to investigate the cellular and molecular mechanisms that control circadian rhythms in the mammalian retina [Tosini et al., (2007) Faseb J.; Sakamoto et al., (2004). J. Neuroscience 24: 9693-9697; Fukuhara et al., (2004) J. Neuroscience 24:1803-1811; Tosini G., Menaker, M. (1996) Science, 272: 419-421).The position is funded by a grant from the National Institute of Health.
The work will focus on the characterization of newly developed transgenic mice using physiological (ERG), molecular (Q-PCR and Laser Capture…