clock | October 28, 2006Insights Into Honey Bee Sex Gene Could Bring Sweet Success In Breeding:
What makes a bee a he or a she? Three years ago, scientists pinpointed a gene called csd that determines gender in honey bees, and now a research team led by University of Michigan evolutionary biologist Jianzhi "George" Zhang has unraveled details of how the gene evolved. The new insights could prove useful in designing strategies for breeding honey bees, which are major pollinators of economically important crops--and notoriously tricky to breed.
Key Gene Controlling Eye Lens Development Identified:
Investigators at St…
clock | October 28, 2006Zeno has posted a nice, easy-to-understand primer on statistics and polling.
clock | October 28, 2006
Dave Johnson is coming to the 2007 North Carolina Science Blogging Conference. Are you?
Technorati Tag: sciencebloggingconference
clock | October 27, 2006Kefli was my second horse, back in Yugoslavia. I raised him from foal until he was almost 3 years old. I sold him a few days before I left for he US. I just got a picture of him, from a few years later:
clock | October 27, 2006Tomorrow morning I am starting to teach again. Only the lab this time around, my colleague is teaching the lecture. And it is going to look pretty much the same as last couple of times I did it:
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
clock | October 27, 2006Tangled Bank, Darwin or Wallace edition, is (finally) up on Thoughts From Kansas. There is something wrong with the intended host's website, so Josh volunteered to save the carnival and did a splendid job at such short notice.
clock | October 27, 2006A follow-up on last week's repost (originally from April 06, 2005)...
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I've been wavering in how to call the Right Wing. When I say "conservatives" I get attacked for equating conservatism with GOP (with implication that conservatism is good but GOP is not conservative any more). When I call them Regressives, I am told I miss the point, because they should be described as conservatives. Should I just call them Republicans? Not damning enough. People, make up your minds!
What follows is a mix of stuff I have already written before on this blog (…
clock | October 27, 2006Cougar Predation Key To Ecosystem Health:
The general disappearance of cougars from a portion of Zion National Park in the past 70 years has allowed deer populations to dramatically increase, leading to severe ecological damage, loss of cottonwood trees, eroding streambanks and declining biodiversity. Researchers are calling it a "trophic cascade" of environmental degradation.
Professor Analyzes Nuclear Receptors In Bee Genome:
Susan Fahrbach, a Wake Forest University biologist, is among the more than 170 researchers who helped decode the honey bee genome. She contributed to the article on…
clock | October 27, 2006
Fred Stutzman, the Facebook expert from Unit Structures is coming to the 2007 North Carolina Science Blogging Conference. Are you?
Technorati Tag: sciencebloggingconference
clock | October 26, 2006If you go here and copy and paste the code into your blog, you will get something that looks like this:
--AZ-Sen: Jon Kyl
--AZ-01: Rick Renzi
--AZ-05: J.D. Hayworth
--CA-04: John Doolittle
--CA-11: Richard Pombo
--CA-50: Brian Bilbray
--CO-04: Marilyn Musgrave
--CO-05: Doug Lamborn
--CO-07: Rick O'Donnell
--CT-04: Christopher Shays
--FL-13: Vernon Buchanan
--FL-16: Joe Negron
--FL-22: Clay Shaw
--ID-01: Bill Sali
--IL-06: Peter Roskam
--IL-10: Mark Kirk
--IL-14: Dennis Hastert
--IN-02: Chris Chocola
--IN-08: John Hostettler
--IA-01: Mike Whalen
--KS-02: Jim Ryun
--KY-03: Anne Northup
--KY-04…
clock | October 26, 2006Chris Mooney will be in the Triangle for three days - October 28-30th. Come to one of his book-readings:
Saturday, October 28
7:00 PM-8:30 PM
Quail Ridge Books
3522 Wade Ave.
Raleigh, NC 27607
Sunday, October 29
4:00 PM-5:30 PM
Regulator Bookshop
720 Ninth Street
Durham, NC 27705
Monday, October 30th
12 noon-1 PM
"Science Friction: When Science and Politics Collide"
Duke University Medical Center
Duke Center for the Study of Medical Humanities and Ethics
Room 2002, Duke North Lecture Hall
If you want to do more, i.e., meet Chris at some other time/venue, ask me, or even better, ask Abel who…
clock | October 26, 2006There is a new study out on computer and internet use in Serbia (via). Several things immediately jumped out at me: how many people connect by modem, how many connect from home (as opposed to work, school, etc.), how big is the rural/urban divide, and how many people think they have no use for the Internet and expect never to use it in their lives.
I have a feeling that these findings are quite different from other countries (not to mention the US). I'd like to know what are the equivalent numbers in other countries in which such studies have been done.
The numbers in Serbia may be also a…
clock | October 26, 2006Rev. BigDumbChimp alerts me that Ken Miller will be in Raleigh on November 6th, giving a lecture at NCSU at 7pm. Tickets are free but you have to have one in order to attend. You can get your tickets here.
clock | October 26, 2006
There is nothing easier than taking a bad paper - or a worse press release - and fisking it with gusto on a blog. If you happen also to know the author and keep him in contempt, the pleasure of destroying the article is even greater.
It is much, much harder to write (and to excite readers with) a blog post about an excellent paper published by your dear friends. But I'll try to do this now anyway (after the cut).
Paul Shaw is a friend, and Indrani Ganguli is a good, good, good friend. Faculty and graduate students in biology are usually a pretty smart lot. A subset of those, as self-…
clock | October 26, 2006A short but good article by my schools' President (April 25, 2006, also here).
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James Oblinger, the new President of North Carolina State University (promoted from within after many years as the Dean of the School Of Agriculture And Life Sciences), has a good editorial in today's News and Observer:
Nurturing success in the sciences:
We've all heard the line from President Bush: We need more students to join the "nerd patrol." It's an overly simple solution for a complex problem that imperils the traditions of invention and innovation that…
clock | October 26, 2006From the press release (doc):
The report, prepared by Potomac Communications Group of Washington, DC under a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, provides a candid glimpse into the NSF's Urban Systemic Program (USP), the first national effort to reform how a school district teaches and students perform in science and math throughout an entire school system.
Launched in 1994, the USP was the first time that the NSF gave funds directly to school districts rather than through universities. It offered districts the opportunity to address their own education challenges and control how funds…
clock | October 26, 2006Researchers Give Name To Ancient Mystery Creature:
For the first time, researchers at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, have been able to put a name and a description to an ancient mammal that still defies classification.
Protein Important In Blood Clotting May Also Play A Role In Fertility:
A protein known to play a role in blood clotting and other cell functions is also critical for proper sperm formation in mice, according to researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine.
Computer Scientists Go Badger Spotting:
Although an unlikely subject…
clock | October 26, 2006
Roy Hinkley of Moment of Science is coming to the 2007 North Carolina Science Blogging Conference. Are you?
Technorati Tag: sciencebloggingconference