clock | May 17, 2007The Fly Spontaneous Behavior paper is generating quite a lot of buzz.
Bjorn has collected some of the best blogospheric responses, including these from Mark Chu-Carroll, Mark Hoofnagle and Kate.
He also got Slashdotted - of course, whoever posted that on Slashdot failed to a) link to the paper, b) link to the press release and c) link to Bjorn's blog. Instead, a little blurb from one of the worst media articles from MSNBC is the only link. Those got linked later in the comments, so I hope Bjorn enjoys the traffic (it will go away tomorrow never to come back again).
Bjorn has also posted…
clock | May 17, 2007Business customers and children can be tough to manage online, but can you imagine managing scientists! They are already hard enough to satisfy in their native environment offline (e.g., to look beyond the usual metrics when awarding tenure). I know, I am making links in this post so cryptic, you'll just have to click to see what on Earth I am talking about and make your own connections...
clock | May 17, 2007Sure, she did not post about it, but a little bird told me that today is Jennifer Ouellette's birthday so go and say Hello and Happy Birthday to everyone's favourite physics writer/blogger!
clock | May 17, 2007Change of Shift: Volume 1, Number 24 is up on Nurse Ratched's Place
I and the Bird #49: the Wordchaser, is up on Via Negativa. In two weeks, the 50th edition will be hosted here by me, so start sending your entries to: Coturnix AT gmail DOT com.
clock | May 17, 2007Reproductive Speed Protects Large Animals From Being Hunted To Extinction:
The slower their reproductive cycle, the higher the risk of extinction for large grazing animals such as deer and antelope that are hunted by humans.
Bites From Mosquitoes Not Infected With Malaria May Protect Against Future Infection:
A new study suggests that bites from mosquitoes not infected with malaria may trigger an immune response limiting parasite development following bites from infected mosquitoes.
Molecular Biologists Convert Protein Sequences Into Classical Music:
UCLA molecular biologists have turned…
clock | May 16, 2007The 39th edition of the Carnival of the Liberals (the peer-reviewed one) will be hosted by me here next Wednesday. Please send your entries by using the blogcarnival.com automated form. The deadline is Monday at 11:59pm EDT.
clock | May 16, 2007
This and this arrived in the mail today. A birthday present from one of my readers! Thank you!
clock | May 16, 2007OptimalScholarship
The Fact Box
iSpiders
Depth-First
Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Brain
Like a lake
clock | May 16, 2007When I teach BIO101 I usually give at least one assignment that entails finding a biology-related article, writing a short summary of it and explaining the gist of it to the rest of the class. We did that this Monday and the students picked, as usual, some interesting topics (including some that take us way outside of the scope of the course, e.g., game theory and Evolutionarily Stable Strategies). The sources, as usual, are popular science magazines like American Scientist (the last one that is still of high quality, I'm afraid to say), Scientific American, Discover, Natural History, etc.…
clock | May 16, 2007The Carnival Of Education: Week 119 is up on The Education Wonks.
Carnival of the Infosciences #71 is up on Confessions of a Science Librarian.
The 72nd Carnival of Homeschooling: In My Backyard is up on PalmTree Pundit.
clock | May 16, 2007Maxine Clark, Attila Csordas, Deepak Singh, PZ Myers, Pedro Beltrao, Jean-Claude Bradley, Pierre Lindenbaum, Peter MR, Andrew Walkingshaw, Anna Kushnir, Timo Hannay, Richard Akerman and yours truly are some of the 200 people invited by Google, Nature and Tim O'Reilly to participate in this summer's Science Foo Camp. Apparently, the last year's camp was a blast. I'll give it another 48 hours to think before I reply, but I hope it is a Yes and that I will go, evangelize for Open Science and learn a lot about the ways it can be implemented.
clock | May 16, 2007Light Pulses Can Adjust The Brain's Clock For A Longer Day, Sufficient For Adaptation To The 24.65 Hour Day Found On Mars:
Researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital's (BWH) Division of Sleep Medicine and colleagues, have found that by giving individuals two 45 minute exposures to bright light pulses in the evening they could entrain (synchronize) a persons circadian system to function properly in days longer than the usual 24 hour light/dark cycle. The study was conducted for NASA's National Space Biomedical Research Institute and the findings can be applied to the planned year-and-a-half…
clock | May 15, 2007Life offers two great gifts - time, and the ability to choose how we spend it. Planning is a process of choosing among those many options. If we do not choose to plan, then we choose to have others plan for us.
- Richard I. Winword
clock | May 15, 2007Google was really no help in finding the exact quote, but everyone in the animal behavior field has heard some version of the Harvard Rule of Animal Behaviour:
"You can have the most beautifully designed experiment with the most carefully controlled variables, and the animal will do what it damn well pleases."
Anyone here knows who actually said that and what were the exact words?
Anyway, one way to re-word the "whatever they damned please" is to call it "free will". Björn Brembs says so but apparently not everyone agrees. The discussion in the media and on blogs is just about to start…
clock | May 15, 2007If you watch Tony Wright on his webcam every single millisecond of his experiment, you will likely have some interesting experiences yourself, apart from seeing how sleep deprivation messes with his mind. And his health.