evolgen | October 29, 2006Big ups to the grad students in the Ecology and Evolution Department at the University of Arizona for putting on a killer Halloween party and letting a couple of uncostumed drosophilists share in the festivities. That's the good.
The bad: US Airways. I just found out my last flight (of three) on my way home was canceled. Instead of arriving home at 9:30am, I won't get there until the early afternoon. There goes my plan to get work done on Monday.
Said drosophilists who were treated to vast amounts of ethanol by the Arizonans also got to see some really cool looking flies. I took some pictures…
evolgen | October 26, 2006There will be a ton of papers coming out over the next couple of weeks on the recently sequenced honeybee (Apis mellifera) genome. Carl Zimmer has a review of some of the topics that will be addressed in the upcoming publications. The NHGRI also has some information.
evolgen | October 26, 2006On November 7, the citizens of the State of Ohio will be voting a bunch of things, just like all Americans. One of the things they'll be voting for are seats on the State Board of Education (see Ed's discussion here). In one of the races, an anti-science incumbent, Deborah Owens-Fink, is running against a pro-science challenger, Tom Sawyer. Owens-Fink has been far more successful at raising money than Sawyer. To donate money to Sawyer's campaign visit here.
More about the push for donations can be found below the fold.
Taken from EvolDir:
Dear Fellow Scientists,
In 2003, our community pulled…
evolgen | October 26, 2006At least in polyploids.
So says this review of this paper. Take home message: polyploids use duplicates to buffer against mutations to important genes.
The review is brought to you by the Science Creative Quarterly. SCQ is brought to you by David Ng, who has just introduced The Filter. If you don't know about SCQ, you should check it out. And if you know about SCQ but haven't discovered The Filter, you should check that out.
evolgen | October 25, 2006I'm currently waiting to board my third flight of the day (for this trip), sitting in the Las Vegas airport. The Las Vegas airport has free wireless! That's a good thing. It's also packed with slot machines going "bleep-bleep", "ding-ding", and "do-do-do-do". That's kind of annoying.
The southwest is sunny and warm. That's also a good thing. Considering that this is what I left this morning:
And this is where I'm going to be tonight:
evolgen | October 25, 2006
At the same time this post is scheduled to go up on ScienceBlogs I should be a few thousand feet above Middle America. I'll be spending the rest of this week in Tucson, Arizona (which I like to pronounce "Tuck-Sun", like how we pronounce Phoenix "Pa-Ho-Nix") learning about Drosophila. Sure, I already know a bit about these pomace flies, but after this weekend I'll have mad Drosophila skills. They should provide an excellent complement to my chicken-head-eating skills.
This is my way of saying posting will be light -- kinda like the weight I push -- over the next few days.
evolgen | October 25, 2006Chuck Norris doesn't "believe" in evolution. And he's writing about it in the Wing Nut Daily. I won't link to the actual article, but you can read about it here. Thanks Bora for ruining my appreciation for the Texas Ranger.
To make up for bringing you that bad piece of news, here are the first four minutes of Borat's movie:
evolgen | October 24, 2006No ocean, river, or fjord is safe. The manatees are attacking. We've warned you before. Now is the time to take notice. Three times is a trend.
evolgen | October 24, 2006
Some biologist in Poland said this:
"A scientist showed me a picture of an American boxer. He had all the traits of Neanderthal man. These people are among us. They are part of the human race, probably more prevalent once upon a time, but who still exist."
Apparently those dudes from the Geico commercials are practicing the sweet science. But there are Neanderthals among us. Razib knows about them . . .
Big ups to whoever comes up with the best Polish invention for this item.
(Via The Panda's Thumb.)
evolgen | October 20, 2006I haven't touched an Ask A ScienceBlogger for a couple of months. This week, the powers that be are asking us:
What's the best science TV show of all time?
The first show that came to mind was Mr. Wizard. As young tyke in the 1980s, I watched a lot of Nickelodeon. Nick was a staple of my early TV viewing, with classics like Mr. Wizard, along with You Can't Do That On Television and Double Dare. Mr. Wizard was great for the science, but it was also fun to laugh at the dorky looking kids on the show. And I secretly longed to be one of those kids. Only not as dorky, but on the show none the…
evolgen | October 20, 2006The Idiot Box is contributing toward our search for the next science rockstar:
Filling Carl Sagan's shoes will be tough, but someone's gotta do it. Click on the image to the see the rest of the suggestions.
evolgen | October 19, 2006Check out this gem from the London Times:
Fraud may also be good for science, according to Steve Fuller, Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. Since most scientific duplicity involves researchers "idealising" results that they probably would eventually have achieved anyway, such fact-fiddling actually oils the wheels of discovery. He even questions whether it should be labelled fraud at all.
Fuller does draw the line at drug studies, where people could be physically harmed if researchers fudged data. But everything else is fair game. Take the recent discovery of the heaviest…
evolgen | October 18, 2006I need to vent . . .
I'm sick and tired of people referring to "higher" and "lower" eukaryotes. And, while I'm at it, I'm also sick of people mixing up "homology", "identity" and "similarity". This is nothing new; I've just reached a point where I need to write it down for the world to see.
First, the 'higher' eukaryotes thing. Measured how? Most people mean animals when they talk about 'higher' eukaryotes. Some are also referring to plants, I think. But I'm not sure, and that's the first problem: it's a meaningless term. Refer to clades and save us all some time and angst. Second, if both…
evolgen | October 18, 2006
We're in need of a host for the 9th Edition of Mendel's Garden, scheduled for 6 November. Mendel's Garden is blog carnival devoted to genetics, from evolutionary to molecular. If you would like to host the upcoming edition or any future edition, please contact Paul Decelles via the Blog Carnival Submission Page.
Also, we're switching from a biweekly schedule to a monthly schedule. A new edition of Mendel's Garden will be published on the first Monday of each month (starting November 6). Your entries are due by the Sunday before the first Monday (i.e., the day before the carnival comes out).
evolgen | October 17, 2006Science has published THE genome of breast and colorectal cancers. Not the whole genome, mind you, but just 13,023 protein coding genes. The researchers identified mutations associated with cancers, but I'm not sure if they looked outside of the protein coding sequences (I have yet to read the paper, and I'm not sure when I'll get around to it). Nobel Intent has a review of the paper.
When I first heard about this project I wondered what exactly they'd be doing. The fact that this study only looked at 11 cancers for each tissue is somewhat surprising. What I'd really like to see is a study…
evolgen | October 17, 2006Ben wants a house band, but he doesn't think it should be Phish. I agree. Phish sucks. A good house band should accompany a night of drinking. Let's just say Phish is the appropriate accompaniment for a mind altering substance not called alcohol. So who should be the ScienceBlogs house band? As much as I would love to nominate Sonic Youth (and I did in our back channel), I'm gonna have to nominate someone else. To find out who, click through to below the fold.
The Weakerthans (Les Plusfaibleque)
They're Canadian, which means they know how to drink. What else is there to do in Canada…
evolgen | October 16, 2006
Kevin's got us doing another nerd test. According to this test, I'm pretty smart. I'm not sure how this result relates to my nerdiness, geekiness, or dorkiness. I can tell you this: it won't be keeping me from biting the heads off of chickens!
evolgen | October 16, 2006If you thought American colleges and universities were all about thugging it up and diagramming the Z-scheme, you'd be surprised to learn how big of a deal football is. Heck, if you were to visit some universities on Saturday afternoon in autumn, you'd be surprised to learn that you were on the grounds of an institute of higher learning. And it's not just the four year colleges and universities that can be called Football-U.
California has the best public university system of any state in the US. Multiple University of California schools are ranked as top national universities. On top of that…
evolgen | October 16, 2006This video confirms two things I've long suspected: nature is really cool and white people can't dance. Okay, I have independent evidence for the second thing, but check out this little fella's moves:
He really shakes a proverbial tail feather. But like human males, the only reason for this guy to get on the dance floor is so that he can score a little trim. Unless that male is Michael Jackson, who dances 'cause he's freakin' weird.