clock | January 29, 2007Kate Michelman, lifelong feminist and former head of NARAL, talks about why she's signed up to work for John Edwards (click through the ad to read the entire thing):
....I think that says a lot about his seriousness and commitment to addressing the experiences of women in society. I think it speaks very well of him. And while I've been a leader on women's liberties and equality, I'm known mostly for my work on reproductive rights, which could make a candidate feel somewhat reluctant or questioning. But it didn't with John and Elizabeth.
I have often felt that in the past, campaigns have paid…
clock | January 29, 2007I love seafood, but I eat it quite rarely. About a third of my old Department did fisheries and aquaculture science so I've seen many seminars and Thesis defenses on the topic and am quite aware of the problems with the world's fisheries stocks.
I also prefer freshwater fish - I grew up on the Danube and my Mom fixes the best Fish Soup in the history of the Universe.
But, if you like seafood and you want to eat shrimp occasionally, yet you want to act in an environmentally responsible way, you need to know quite a lot about ecology, about behavior and natural history of shrimp, about the…
clock | January 29, 2007If you discover a brain chemical which, when missing or malfunctioning (due to a mutation in its receptor) abruptly puts people and animals to sleep when they don't want to - a condition called narcolepsy - then you can work on creating a drug that acts in the opposite way and induces sleep when you want to.
Apparently, that is what a Swiss team just did (Nature news report here and Nature blog commentary here). The drug, still without a sexy name, is known by its "code-name" ACT-078573.
The target of the drug is the orexin system. Orexins (also known as hypocretins - the discovery was…
clock | January 29, 2007Lots of food blogging around here lately, so why not re-post this one (from October 27, 2005):
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A few years back my brother went to Japan to do some fieldwork for several months. Although he had been taking Japanese for several years, the classroom language skills and real-life language skills are different kinds of skills.
Early on in his endeavour, trying to immerse himself in the local culture, he went to a restaurant. He picked up the menu and had no idea what any of the names of dishes meant. Well, he thought, if the Japanese can eat something…
clock | January 29, 2007As a follow-up on the whole PETA brouhaha, my astute commenter oneproudaardvark notices that the SOTU-farce ad campaign by PETA is strangely coinciding with the beginning of the trial against PETA for butchering dogs in the back of the truck here in North Carolina. Cosmic synchronicity? Don't think so....
clock | January 29, 2007You may remember last week I gave a radio interview. It is airing in Asheville area tonight but you can already listen to it on the Brainshrub blog.
clock | January 29, 2007Pediatric Grand Rounds Volume 1 Edition 21: What Dreams May Come.....now up on Unintelligent Design
clock | January 29, 2007Now that the Anthology is arriving at people's homes, getting read and even reviewed on blogs, I hope that more people will take a minute to post reviews or ratings on the actual book webpage. In one week, it has moved from non-existent to 33rd to 27th on the Lulu.com top sellers of the week list. I am also working on having the book more widely available, e.g., on sites like amazon.com and in independent bookstores.
clock | January 29, 2007Fruit Flies And Global Warming: Some Like It Hot:
Researchers working in Australia have discovered ways in which fruit flies might react to extreme fluctuations in temperature. Short-term exposure to high heat stress ("heat hardening") has been known to have negative effects on Drosophila. But Loeschcke and Hoffmann discovered that it can have advantages too. Flies exposed to heat hardening were much more able to find their way to bait on very hot days than were the flies that were exposed to cooler temperatures, but the heat hardened flies did poorly on cool days.
Beating Heart Muscle With…
clock | January 28, 2007Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)
clock | January 28, 2007Yes, I know, I've been guilty on occasion of this nasty navel-gazing practice myself, but I was never this funny or this funny. Links discovered by Bitch PhD who also indulges herself in some meta-blogging about 18th century blogging. So, this post is meta-meta-meta-blogging itself, isn't it?
clock | January 28, 2007In the series of "Basic Concept And Terms" (yup, I know, John is well known for misspelling people's last names, including mine), several people have already chimed in with their own definitions of the "gene", demonstrating how unclear this concept is and how much disagreement there is among the practitioners depending on the type of research they are doing (e.g, molecular biology, developmental biology, population genetics, evolution, etc.).
See how the term was defined and explained by PZ, Sandra and Greg so far and you'll see those differences in emphasis.
Now Larry Moran joins the fray…
clock | January 28, 2007...by Matt. No celebrity is very much look-alike with me (and I included only male faces to eliminate Lindsay Lohan's childhood picture):
http://www.myheritage.com
clock | January 28, 2007Since I think that Fiddler on the Roof is the best musical ever, of course I totally loved this:
(Found here by Joolya)
I blogged somewhere before (I cannot find it now - darned Google and Technorati are imperfect!) that I think that, upon arriving in America, the fourth daughter married a black guy and the fifth daughter married a woman. I never expected one to marry a puppet!
clock | January 28, 2007Since Katrina...
Women in Science
She's Such A Geek
Street Anatomy
Tangled Up In Blue Guy
Common Ills
Sasa Radojcic
KoBSON
clock | January 28, 2007...because I was not one of them. But now, thanks to Ed Cone, I know what the State of the Union address was all about.
clock | January 28, 2007Perhaps it's time for me to get serious about eating doughnuts!
(Hat tip: Greg)
clock | January 28, 2007
What Kind of Reader Are You?
Your Result: Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm
You're probably in the final stages of a Ph.D. or otherwise finding a way to make your living out of reading. You are one of the literati. Other people's grammatical mistakes make you insane.
Dedicated Reader
Literate Good Citizen
Book Snob
Non-Reader
Fad Reader
What Kind of Reader Are You?Create Your Own Quiz
(Hat-tip: Grrrrl)