clock | December 21, 2006The eighth part of my lecture notes series. As always, please pitch in and make my lectures better by pointing out the factual errors or making suggestions for improvement (originally posted on May 17, 2006):
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Evolution
BIO101 - Bora Zivkovic - Lecture 2 - Part 4
Imagine a small meadow. And imagine in that meadow ten insects. Also imagine that the ten insects are quite large and that the meadow has only so much flowers, food and space to sustain these ten individuals and not any more. Also imagine that the genomes of those ten…
clock | December 21, 2006
Chris Brodie of the American Scientist magazine is coming to the 2007 North Carolina Science Blogging Conference. Are you?
Technorati Tag: sciencebloggingconference
clock | December 20, 2006A minister has to be able to read a clock. At noon, it's time to go home and turn up the pot roast and get the peas out of the freezer.
- Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days (1985)
clock | December 20, 2006I did not have time to go through all the posts on all of today's carnivals, but Larry Moran discovered a real gem on today's Carnival of Education. Check the comments as well. Then come up with your own system.
clock | December 20, 2006Joel is collecting links to all the posts written today in honor of the 10-year anniversary of the death of Carl Sagan.
The phrase "Science as a Candle in the Dark", the subtitle of Sagan's magnificient The Demon-Haunted World, evokes such a powerful idea that we are fighting for - the Enlightement.
Coincidentally, today is also another anniversary related to light: on December 20, 1879 Thomas Edison performed the first public demonstration of the electric light. Next year, on the same day - December 20, 1880 - electric street-lights were first swicthed on Broadway. You know I am a Tesla…
clock | December 20, 2006Somehow I feel that I've been tagged by Janet for this meme, because it is public that we celebrate Hannukkah. But we really make it low-key, family-only, and have only been doing it for about a dozen years so far. Actually, this is the first time that we had guests for the first night.
1. Latkes or Sufganiyot?
Latkes. Mrs.Coturnix is a superb Latke-Meister.
2. Multi-colored candles or blue-and-white?
Coturnix Jr. lights the blue-and-white candles, Coturnietta lights the multicolored.
3. Do you place the Hanukiah by the window or away from the window?
In this house, away from the window…
clock | December 20, 2006For science bloggers, a study older than a week is often too old to blog about. For scientists, last five years of literature are the most relevant (and many grad students, unfortunately, never read the older stuff). I thought that for journalists, 24-cycle was everything. Apparently not.
Northwest Explorer's 'Senior Life' columnist is having a Senior Moment, I guess. In this article about Seasonal Affective Disorder, he mentions a study that is several years old and, what's worse, has been shown to be wrong. No, the mammalian circadian clock CANNOT be reset by shining a light at the…
clock | December 20, 2006The 29th Carnival of Feminists is up on The imponderabilia of actual life containing posts by several of my favourite bloggers, including Zuska who has her own pick of favourites there.
Speaking of Zuska, she also has a cool article in the inaugural issue of the new science-culture Inkling Magazine, the brainchild of the magnificent blogging Trio Fantasticus of Inkycircus.
And while we are on the topic, Razib exhibits a complete lack of sense of irony, i.e., the inability to see sarcasm and seeing seriousness instead.
clock | December 20, 2006Just for the holidays, you get two for the price of one - two simultaneous editions of the Pediatric Grand Rounds: the reverent version and the irreverent version. And no, not all the entries can be found on both. Beware of the pirates on that second one, though.
clock | December 20, 2006The new ecology carnival now has detailed submission instructions. You have about three weeks to dig out your best ecology post from the past or write new one and send (up to two posts) to the first host, The Infinite Sphere.
clock | December 20, 2006Here is the second guest-post by Heinrich (from March 20, 2005):
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Here is the #2 guest contribution by Heinrich (not Heindrocket) of She Flies With Her Own Wings (http://coeruleus.blogspot.com/):
Most of this post was inspired by a grand rounds / journal club given by David Dinges about two weeks ago based on years of his own research and large surveys. One line of argument in the presentation that I thought was particularly interesting - one that we as sleep researchers might want to remember when we write grants and perform our…
clock | December 20, 2006Too Mellow For Our Predatory World: Flight Behaviour Of Marine Iguanas:
Marine iguanas on the Galápagos Islands live without predators - at least this was the case up until 150 years ago. Since then they have been confronted with cats and dogs on some islands of the Archipelago. For scientists, they are therefore a suitable model of study in order to discover if such generally tame animals are capable of adapting their behaviour and endocrine stress response to novel predation threats. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, the University of Ulm Tufts University and…
clock | December 20, 2006Memory Experts Show Sleeping Rats May Have Visual Dreams:
Matthew A. Wilson, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, and postdoctoral associate Daoyun Ji looked at what happens in rats' brains when they dream about the mazes they ran while they were awake.
In a landmark 2001 study, Wilson showed that rats formed complex memories for sequences of events experienced while they were awake, and that these memories were replayed while they slept--perhaps reflecting the animal equivalent of dreaming.
Because these replayed memories were detected…
clock | December 20, 2006Tangled Bank #69: War on Christmas is up on Salto Sobrius.
The 98th Carnival of Education is up on The Median Sib.
The One Week Short of a Year Carnival of Homeschooling is up on Principled Discovery.
clock | December 20, 2006OK, everyone is doing this (Janet was the last one I saw), so I'll do it, too. Instead of writing a creative year in review, just copy the first sentence of the first blogpost of each month in 2006. Until June 9th I had three blogs, so I have to pick the first sentence from the first post on each! Since then, this is the only one. Here are mine (I skipped quick shout-outs to carnivals and such):
January
I am obviously using the extended holidays to recharge my blogging batteries.
Howard Hughes Medical Institute which funds a number of researchers in the field, has made, a couple of years…
clock | December 20, 2006
Neil Gussman of the Chemical Heritage Foundation is coming to the 2007 North Carolina Science Blogging Conference. Are you?
Technorati Tag: sciencebloggingconference
clock | December 19, 2006Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
- Jean-Paul Sartre, 1905 - 1980