clock | July 27, 2007Last night, Professor Steve Steve took off work a little earlier and went to Oakland to see the offices of the National Center for Science Education, then went to Berkeley for dinner with the NCSE staff and fans at Eugenie Scott's house. Lots of pictures under the fold:
The logo at the back entrance:
The map of Creationist flare-ups:
Professor Steve Steve admires his official courtroom sketch with Judge Jones at the Kitzmiller trial in Dover, PA:
They have cool toys at NCSE, but we could not find the alleged Steve Steve impostor who is supposed to be there, waiting to be challanged to a…
clock | July 27, 2007The Science Idol: The Scientific Integrity Editorial Cartoon Contest by the Union of Concerned Scientists is over and the winner has been announced. Read the interview with the winner, Jesse Springer.
clock | July 27, 2007There are 31 new papers published on PLoS ONE this week, and here are some of my first, quick picks of titles that got my attention, but you should go and see them all, then rate, annotate and comment on them:
Stable Isotope Ratios in Hair and Teeth Reflect Biologic Rhythms by Otto Appenzeller, Clifford Qualls, Franca Barbic, Raffaello Furlan and Alberto Porta:
Biologic rhythms give insight into normal physiology and disease. They can be used as biomarkers for neuronal degenerations. We present a diverse data set to show that hair and teeth contain an extended record of biologic rhythms, and…
clock | July 27, 2007 This February 06, 2005 post describes the basic elements of the circadian system in mammals.
The principal mammalian circadian pacemaker is located in the suprachiasmatic nuclei (SCN) of the hypothalamus. The general area was first discovered in 1948 by Curt Richter who systematically lesioned a number of endocrine glands and brain areas in rats. The only time he saw an effect on circadian rhythms was when he lesioned a frontal part of hypothalamus (which is at the base of the brain) immediatelly above the optic chiasm (the spot where two optic nerves cross). Later studies in the 1970s…
clock | July 26, 2007Hypotheses leading to more hypotheses (from March 19, 2006 - the Malaria Day):
I have written a little bit about malaria before, e.g, here and here, but this is my special Malaria Action Day post, inspired by a paper [1] that Tara sent me some weeks ago and I never got to write about it till now.
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In a journal called "Medical Hypotheses" Kumar and Sharma [1] propose that jet-lagged travellers may be more susceptible to getting infected with malaria. They write:
Rapid travel across several time zones leads to…
clock | July 26, 2007Bjoern Brembs is at the ICN meeting and is blogging about the talks he saw. If I went, I would have probably attended a completely different set of talks, e.g., on birdsong, memory in food-caching birds, aggression in crustaceans, strange sensory systems, spatial orientation and animal cognition, but I am certainly glad that Bjoern has highlighted the best of what he saw there:
Robert de Ruyter van Steveninck: Velocity estimation and natural visual input signals
Martin Egelhaaf: Active vision: a strategy of complexity reduction in behavioral control
Roy Ritzmann: Movement through complex…
clock | July 26, 2007Tara of Aetiology, after reviewing Danica McKellar's book "Math Doesn't Suck", posted an exclusive blog interview with Danica, which you can (and should) read here.
clock | July 26, 2007Yup, there is a Wikipedia page about Scienceblogs.com, but it has practically nothing on it. If you go to the Discussions page, you will see some more. Be a Wikipedian - edit, add, remove and write stuff there. It is 'bad etiquette' for us to edit a page about ourselves, so our readers need to do it for us. Go forth and make the page grow and become comprehensive and useful.
clock | July 26, 2007Michael Hopkin interviewed Al Jean, the executive producer of The Simpsons show, about math and science, sometimes central, sometimes hidden, in the episodes of everyone's favourite show...
clock | July 26, 2007It is certainly possible. Compared to some people I know, I am definitely not. I have read each of the books once (more than halfway through the 7th - so do not give me spoilers yet!) and I have seen each of the movies once. I enjoy them, but do nothing on top of it: no speculations, no obsessions, no additional activity.
clock | July 26, 2007Harry Potter Carnival #51 is up on The Pensieve.
I and the Bird #54 is up on The Egret's Nest
Change of Shift: Volume Two, Number Three is up on Musings of a Highly Trained Monkey
Grand Rounds, Vol. 3, No 44 are up on A Chronic Dose
Carnival of the Green #87 is up on Hippyshopper
The 129th Edition of the Carnival of Education is up on Education in Texas
82nd Edition of the Carnival of Homeschooling is up on Tami's Blog
Horse Lovers' Blog Carnival is new to me (will I let myself get drawn into it!?) and the latest (9th) edition is up on Our Goldern Dreams.
And, if you have something relevant,…
clock | July 26, 2007Mo is really spoiling us with exciting, well-researched posts from the history of science and medicine (remember the trepination post from a month ago?). And here he does it again: The rise & fall of the prefrontal lobotomy, the most gripping post on science blogs this week. And a Wicked Stepmother is one of the main characters!
clock | July 26, 2007
I wrote this post back on February 02, 2005 in order to drive home the point that the circadian clock is not a single organ, but an organ system comprised of all cells in the body linked in a hierarchical manner:
In the earliest days of chronobiology, the notion of circadian organization was quite simple. Somewhere inside the organism there was a clock. It was entrained by light via photoreceptors (e.g., the eye) and it drove the rhythms of various biochemical, physiological and behavioral events in the body:
Very soon this simple notion became difficult to sustain in light of new data.…
clock | July 25, 2007Remorse sleeps during a prosperous period but wakes up in adversity.
- Jean Jacques Rousseau
clock | July 25, 2007SPARC just announced the Mind Mashup: A Video Contest:
SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) today announced the launch of the first annual SPARC Discovery Awards, a contest to promote the open exchange of information. Mind Mashup, the theme of the 2007 contest, calls on entrants to illustrate in a short video the importance of sharing ideas and information of all kinds. Mashup is an expression referring to a song, video, Web site or software application that combines content from more than one source.
Consistent with SPARC's mission as an international alliance of…
clock | July 25, 2007In this post from April 06, 2006, I present some unpublished data that you may find interesting.
Understanding the role of serotonin in depression has led to development of anti-depressant drugs, like Prozac. Much of the research in this area has been performed in Crustaceans: lobsters and crayfish. The opposite behavioral state of depression, something considered a normal state, could possibly best be described as self-confidence.
Self-confidence is expressed differently in different species, but seems to always be tied to high status in a social hierarchy. In crayfish, self-confidence is…
clock | July 25, 2007This post (written on August 13, 2005) describes the basic theory behind photoperiodism and some experimental protocols developed to test the theory.
Timely prediction of seasonal periods of weather conditions, food availability or predator activity is crucial for survival of many species. Although not the only parameter, the changing length of the photoperiod ('daylength') is the most predictive environmental cue for the seasonal timing of physiology and behavior, most notably for timing of migration, hibernation and reproduction. While rising spring temperatures may vary from year to year,…