clock | June 17, 2007On this day in 1991 I hopped on a train and left Belgrade for good.
On this same day, a little bit earlier in history, a baby was born.
Somehow, those two events got connected.
Happy birthday to my wife!
clock | June 17, 2007Here is an example of perfect science blogging. It starts seemingly innocuously, with a quiz: Monday's Molecule #30, where you are supposed to figure out what the compound is.
Then, after a couple of days, there is a post that you may not even realize at first is related to the first one: Bacteria Have Cell Walls
Another day or two, and A and B get connected: How Penicillin Works to Kill Bacteria
But how do we know this? Well, some people figured it out: Nobel Laureates: Sir Alexander Fleming, Ernst Boris Chain, Sir Howard Walter Florey - and now you know how we know.
Finally, putting…
clock | June 17, 2007Matt at Behavioral Ecology Blog is asking what strange searches bring readers to my blog. I was too lazy to go to Google Analytis (changing passwords and stuff), so I just checked the last 100 referees on Sitemeter and I found these:
"japanese quail" newspaper fascist radio
what a fetus of a horse looks like at two months old
green caterpillars
ancient art multiple penetration for women
do pigs have corkscrew penis
Did they find answers to their questions? Dunno, don't think so.
But my old blog, Science And Politics, is much worse - look at the stuff I found from the last 100 hits:
feeling…
clock | June 17, 2007I 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 | June 17, 2007Just Noticeable Differences
Miss ELISA's world
Eureka Science Forums
Britannica Blog
STS Wiki
Purse Lip Square Jaw
Muttering in a corner
clock | June 16, 2007When the tea is brought at five o'clock
And all the neat curtains are drawn with care,
The little black cat with bright green eyes
Is suddenly purring there.
- Harold Monro
clock | June 16, 2007Science Student Gender Gap: A Continuing Challenge:
Interactive classes don't necessarily solve the performance imbalance between the genders in physics classes, according to a new study that stands in stark contrast to previous physics education research. In fact, while students as a rule benefit from interactive classrooms, the teaching technique may even increase the imbalance in some cases.
Chad has more on this study.
Paying Taxes, According To The Brain, Can Bring Satisfaction:
Want to light up the pleasure center in your brain? Just pay your taxes, and then give a little extra…
clock | June 16, 2007What is it?:
Blip is a forum for artists, scientists and members of the public interested in new forms of art that explore generative and procedural processes, interaction, emergence and artificial life. We are based in Brighton, UK, and in the last 4 years we have organized presentations, exhibitions, gigs and three Big Blip festivals. To facilitate access, we primarily organize events in bars, clubs and other public venues in the centre of the city.
I have not been in Brighton since 1980 and I have not heard of Big Blip festivals until last night. Can someone tell me more? It sounds…
clock | June 16, 2007Fruit Bats Are Not 'Blind As A Bat':
The retinas of most mammals contain two types of photoreceptor cells, the cones for daylight vision and colour vision, and the more sensitive rods for night vision. Nocturnal bats were traditionally believed to possess only rods. Now scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt and at The Field Museum for Natural History in Chicago have discovered that nocturnal fruit bats (flying foxes) possess cones in addition to rods. Hence, fruit bats are also equipped for daylight vision. The researchers conclude that cone photoreceptors…
clock | June 15, 2007
Explanation
Actually, the picture (author is Antun Zuljevic, a birder extraordinnaire) is from the village of Svilojevo in northern Serbia (Vojvodina, near the town of Apatin on the Danube) where the Locust Trees have been cut, and nobody is building large haystacks any more, so the storks are forced to build nests in crazy places. This pair of White Storks was not successful in nesting on this factory chimney last year, but they had better luck this time around. Yup, storks prefer nesting on chimneys only in fairy tales. In reality, that is the site of last resort.
Source: Google group…
clock | June 15, 2007You may have noticed a site called "New York Articles" (http://nyarticles.com/) which "aggregates" content from a bunch of different blogs, including this one as well as a number of other scienceblogs.com blogs. It copies and pastes everything that is in the RSS feed, i.e., everything that is above the fold. As you know, I only occasionally place stuff under the fold, and some people never do.
Sure, it does provide a link at the bottom, so in that way, it is a tiny little bit better than some sites that don't (you may recall this case - see Part I and Part II). But how much better? What…
clock | June 15, 2007
Microarrays have been used in the study of circadian expression of mammalian genes since 2002 and the consensus was built from those studies that approximately 15% of all the genes expressed in a cell are expressed in a circadian manner. I always felt it was more, much more.
I am no molecular biologist, but I have run a few gels in my life. The biggest problem was to find a control gene - one that does not cycle - to make the comparisons to. Actin, which is often used in such studies as control, cycled in our samples. In the end, we settled on one of the subunits of the ribosome as we…
clock | June 15, 2007Here is the ranking of Top 100 (actually top 176) blogs that cover medicine, nursing and healthcare. Check it out.
clock | June 14, 2007Animals have these advantages over man: they never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.
- Franois Marie Arouet (Voltaire)
clock | June 14, 2007Deception Blog
Furious Seasons
Cumbrian Sky
JeffsBench - Curtis's blog
Marios' Entangled Bank
A Knowble Blog
clock | June 14, 2007Change of Shift: Volume 1, Number 26 is up on Nurse Ratched's Place.
Carnival of Space #7 is up on Star Stryder.
clock | June 14, 2007
This article, of course, got my attention:
Clocking In And Out Of Gene Expression
Using steroid receptor coactivator-3 (SRC-3), they demonstrated that activation requires addition of a phosphate molecule to the protein at one spot and addition of an ubiquitin molecule at another point. Each time the message of the gene is transcribed into a protein, another ubiquitin molecule is chained on. Five ubiquitins in the chain and the protein is automatically destroyed.
"It's built-in self destruction," said O'Malley. "It prevents you from activating a potent factor in the cells that just keeps the…
clock | June 14, 2007I wonder if this new study was designed better than this one:
In a detailed study that served to investigate the actual nature and content of sexual dreams across a large sample of dream reports from men and women, approximately eight percent of everyday dream reports from both genders contain some form of sexual-related activity.
The percentage of women that reported such dreams can be due to the fact that either women actually experience more sexual dreams now than they did 40 years ago, or that they now feel more comfortable reporting such dreams due to changing social roles and attitudes…
clock | June 14, 2007An interesting paper came out last week in PLoS-Biology: Projected Impacts of Climate and Land-Use Change on the Global Diversity of Birds by Walter Jetz, David S. Wilcove and Andrew P. Dobson. You can view some bloggers' responses on The DC Birding Blog, Field Of View and Living the Scientific Life and media coverage here, here and here.
The authors of the paper collected information about all known ranges of land birds and made a mathematical model for predicting how those ranges will be affected by global warming on one hand and the land-use on the other by years 2050 and 2100. They use…