gregladen | March 11, 2009Lee Yong Dae is an Olympic gold medal winning badminton player. ..
Totally stolen from Miss Cellania:
Watch Badminton Shuttlecock Smashes Watermelon and more funny videos on CollegeHumor
gregladen | March 11, 2009Funniest thing on the internet today.
Here in the TC, we have howling winds and sub zero temps, and the wind chill is 30 or 40 below. But we have food, at least.
gregladen | March 10, 2009The basic fabric of the universe is heterogeneous and lumpy. Why? Cosmologists fight over that. Recent theoretical work may be pushing the pendulum towards a string-related explanation (after a period of time when this seemed less likely).
A network of 'cosmic strings' criss-crossing the Universe could be responsible for a mysterious flux of antimatter particles which has been puzzling astronomers. ... theoretical astrophysicist Tanmay Vachaspati at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, suggests that space may be threaded ... with a network of much lighter strings - too lightweight to…
gregladen | March 10, 2009I first became acquainted with the Romanovs (as historical figures, not the actual Romanovs) reading in middle school about Russian History. Later, someone turned me on to Massie's Nicholas and Alexandra, which is quite a well known popular historical account of the last Czar of Russia and his family. Everyone knows the story of the end. The core of Czar's family -- the Czar Nicholas, his wife Alexandra, and his children -- had been arrested and all of them were transported to a remote location in the Urals. A complex series of events had begun involving Czarist and Revolutionary forces…
gregladen | March 10, 2009Pytoplankton gets some of its nutrients from the dust that settles on the ocean surface. Unfortunately, some of this dust, owing to human caused pollution, is toxic to phytoplankton.
Adina Paytan, a marine scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and her colleagues have found that air samples from different areas of the world are toxic to the most common phytoplankton species, Synechococcus.
Paytan incubated seawater phytoplankton in flasks filled with different samples of aerosol-rich air. "We wanted to find out how aerosol deposition impacts the phytoplankton community,"…
gregladen | March 10, 2009 ... has been found. Inside the fish's skull, in fact. This is from a chimaeroid fish, which today are fairly rare but during the Carboniferoius were quite common and diverse. There are really two aspects of this find that are especially interesting. One is the 3D imagery that was obtained of the ancient fossilized brain, and the other is the analysis of the fish's ear canals. The brain is cool just because it is cool (and shows some interesting morphology). The ear canal study is interesting because it shows a pattern different than expected for a fish: This creature was probably…
gregladen | March 10, 2009
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gregladen | March 10, 2009Karen Ventii is a medical writer in Atlanta, who formerly blogged at Science to Life on the Scienceblogs.com network. Karen has written a guest post for Quiche Moraine on Gender Trends in Science and Medical Writing. Please have a look, it is quite interesting. Here.
gregladen | March 10, 2009Dino spoor, that is. A recently reported finding in PLoS ONE clarifies a number of questions about how certain dinosaurs held their front limbs (zombie/Frankenstein-position palm-down vs. huggie-wuggie palms-facing-each-other). This research confirms ...
that early theropods, like later birds, held their palms facing medially, in contrast to ... prints previously attributed to theropods that have forward-pointing digits. Both the symmetrical resting posture and the medially-facing palms therefore evolved by the Early Jurassic, much earlier in the theropod lineage than previously recognized…
gregladen | March 9, 2009Franken/Coleman recount updates, what happened to the General Motors pension funds, 10 reasons why conservatives' fiscal ideas are dangerous, and the last stronghold of free-market economics: academia?
catch up here.
gregladen | March 9, 2009Fermi lab has observed a single top quark. If you know anything about quarks, especially top quarks, you will know that this is extraordinary. Top quarks, generated using the Strong Nuclear Force have been observed in the past, but a single top quark is generated with the Weak Nuclear Force. This is apparently very hard to do, but Fermilab has done it.
The following is, apparently, what a top quark ... a single top quark ... looks like:
Its in there somewhere, trust me.
Details here: Take That LHC: Fermi Scores Again In Discovering Rare Single Top Quark
gregladen | March 9, 2009I am reluctant to use the term "power couple" in reference to a pair of Minnesota leaders in the area of science and politics, but considering the contributions of Rebecca and Shawn Lawrence Otto, the term moves past cliché and into double entendre. Rebecca is the Minnesota State Auditor, an elected constitutional office that I consider to be second only to the governor in terms of authority and importance. Shawn has been one of the key figures involved in the organization Science Debate 2008, originally formed to spur the large field of 2008 presidential hopefuls to have at least one…
gregladen | March 9, 2009Why is there "junk DNA"? What is Junk DNA? What is a Pseudogene? What is Gene Duplication?
Goodness, you certainly do have a lot of questions. And some of them can be answered, or at least addressed, on examination of a very interesting new paper recently published about a gene that became a useless "pseudogene" a very long time ago and has recently been revived by evolution to serve once again as an active member of the community we know of as the genome. In humans.
"Junk DNA" is mainly DNA that is not used in the day to day course of coding for various products such as proteins…
gregladen | March 9, 2009 Capt. Charles Moore of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation first discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch -- an endless floating waste of plastic trash. Now he's drawing attention to the growing, choking problem of plastic debris in our seas.
gregladen | March 9, 2009Maybe....
Subject: Re: The UNIX-Haters' Handbook? (was Re: Who are the most obnoxious computer groupies?)
....
Matthew Crosby wrote:
>In article ,
>Loren Petrich wrote:
>>
>> In my experience, vi is the absolute worst full-screen
>>(character-mode GUI) text editor I have *ever* used.
>> [ and so on in the anti-vi mode ... ]
>
>vi has the fastest, most efficient keybindings around.
> [ and so on in the pro-vi mode ... ]
Harley Hahn's book _Unix Unbound_ (which I recommend, BTW,
to anyone learning Unix) has chapters on vi and emacs. The
vi chapter contains…
gregladen | March 8, 2009Consider this:
Apart from "Windows or Linux?" nothing will start an argument in a bar full of techies quicker than, "Which hardware gives you more bang for the buck, Mac or PC?"
It turns out that they are the same, but Mac's are more expensive.
Hey, don't yell at me, it says so here.
gregladen | March 8, 2009Do you see an ad floating over this blog post (or any other posts on this blog)?
If you do, and you like having this ad obscure what you are trying to see, let the marketing division of the company who's ad it is know.
Send your emails here.
Or maybe you don't like it. You could let them know that too.
gregladen | March 8, 2009Well, not ALL of you. Just the ones who also happen to be Scientists. Texans only, please. If you are not a Texan Scientist do not read this blog post.
The National Center for Science Education is asking Texas Scientists to contact the State Board of Education regarding the Proposed Texas Educational Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) Amendments.
Find your SBOE member here.
You are being asked to write your State board of Education member regarding the TEKS amendments passed in Janurary, 2009.
In general, the amendments single out topics touching on evolution (including the age and…
gregladen | March 8, 2009The Bourne Shell, that is ...
... we speak to Steve Bourne, creator of the Bourne shell, or sh. In the early 1970s Bourne was at the Computer Laboratory in Cambridge, England working on a compiler for ALGOL68 as part of his PhD work in dynamical astronomy. This work paved the way for him to travel to IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center in New York in 1973, in part to undertake research into compilers. Through this work, and a series of connections and circumstance, Bourne got to know people at Bell Labs who then offered him a job in the Unix group in 1975. It was during this time Bourne…