gregladen | November 29, 2008Markita Landry, a half-Bolivian, half-French Canadian physics Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, ... used a tango to convey her thesis, "Single Molecule Measurements of Protelomerase TelK-DNA Complexes." She is trying to understand how a protein called TelK bends DNA into hairpin loops. The mechanism makes for beautiful dance, with Landry bending like pliable DNA in her partner's arms.
aaas Science
gregladen | November 29, 2008Vince LiCata, a biochemist at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, won this category with the help of his graduate students. The foursome danced a slow and graceful double pas de deux, representing the interaction of pairs of hemoglobin molecules from his 1990 Johns Hopkins University Ph.D. thesis, "Resolving Pathways of Functional Coupling in Human Hemoglobin Using Quantitative Low Temperature Isoelectric Focusing of Asymmetric Mutant Hybrids." To study these molecules, LiCata had to cool them down and take pictures of them, a technique that was mirrored onstage by a long-bearded Old Man…
gregladen | November 29, 2008The raw material for Miriam Sach's solo contemporary dance was her 2004 Ph.D. thesis at the University of Düsseldorf, Germany, titled "Cerebral activation patterns induced by inflection of regular and irregular verbs with positron emission tomography: A comparison between single subject and group analysis." The question behind her research was whether different types of verbs are processed by different regions of the brain. Sach, now a neuroscientist at the University of California, Davis, embodied this difference by dancing in the various styles of processing: awkward and hunched for the…
gregladen | November 29, 2008Sue Lynn Lau chose classical ballet and highly kinetic party dancing as the way to interpret her Ph.D. thesis, "The role of vitamin D in beta-cell function." As The Nutcracker Suite lilts in the background, Lau, a graduate student from the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney, Australia, appears as the Sugarplum Fairy, delivering marshmallow glucose to four beta cell dancers. Meanwhile, a fifth dancer flings and twirls around the stage--representing the sunlight required for vitamin D biosynthesis.
aaas Science
gregladen | November 28, 2008A new study published by Chiao et al. in the journal PLoS ONE explores the gendered nature of American voting behavior. Subjects were asked to rank politicians -- based only on photographs of each politician's face -- along different quality scales, and also to choose among these photographs who should be President. The study concludes that male and female candidates are evaluated on distinctly different terms, and that male and female voters do this evaluation in somewhat (but not dramatically) different ways. The authors conclude that "...contrary to popular notions, people are not…
gregladen | November 27, 2008The word on the street is that Colleman recount watchers have shifted strategy in order to increase an apparent lead over Al Franken. It seems that many of the Coleman people are challenging perfectly good Al Franken ballots in order to make the miniscule Coleman lead appear to grow, possibly allowing Coleman to have Yet another Victory Press Conference.
According to Joe Bodell:
...a view from inside the recount operation shows just how the Coleman operation is working: not just challenging questionable ballots, but challenging ballots that are clearly Franken votes for the sake of…
gregladen | November 26, 2008A word of advice:
TAKE THE TURKEY OUT OF THE FREEZER NOW!
Here is a Thanksgiving Joke for you.
gregladen | November 26, 2008Personally, I think we should start with a dodo, and then work our way up the ethical ladder from there.
... We know roughly how the sequence of life ran forward in time. What about running it backward? ...
Last week in Nature, scientists reported major progress in sequencing the genome of woolly mammoths. [see this] ... Now, according to Nicholas Wade of the New York Times, biologists are discussing "how to modify the DNA in an elephant's egg so that after each round of changes it would progressively resemble the DNA in a mammoth egg. The final-stage egg could then be brought to term in…
gregladen | November 26, 2008Another local blogger, Jeff Rosenberg, is following the recount and providing his own analysis.
Here.
gregladen | November 25, 2008With 80.6 percent of the vote recounted, the known difference between Coleman and Franken has for the first time grown greater than the audited and adjusted original count differenct of 215. The difference is now, by my rekoning, a whopping 238. This, by Norm Coleman's standards, is a virtual landslide!!!
But that number is fairly small in comparison to the 3594 votes that are currently contested by both camps, and the thousand or so potentially contested absentee ballots.
It is still the case that anything could happen.
gregladen | November 25, 2008All sides in eastern DR Congo have committed serious human rights abuses, the UN secretary general has said.
Ban Ki-moon said both government forces and rebels loyal to Gen Laurent Nkunda had carried out arbitrary executions, mass killings, rape and torture.
The report covers July to November, when the most recent fighting flared.
In a separate report, a rights group has accused the government of using violence to eliminate political opponents following polls in 2006.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Congolese security forces had deliberately killed more than 500 people in a campaign against…
gregladen | November 25, 2008This is a MUST SEE video.
It starts with Arthur Laffer, the Regeanomic Yahoo looking like a moron. Then we move on to some other guys who look like utter fools ... Then, Ben Stein totally sticks his foot in it.
Ben Stein's Famous Last Words, one year ago: "Stocks will be a lot higher in one year than they are now." He especially recommended that you invent in financial companies leke Merrill Lynch.
hat tip: Joe
gregladen | November 25, 2008The numbers are now settling in for the Coleman-Franken Senate race recount for Minnesota. With 74.2% of the votes counted, it is now possible to make a reasonably good prediction of the outcome of the current recount, not counting challenged ballots or other changes. The following graph shows the change across time for each day of the recount in the number of votes for each of these two candidates.
What you see here is a random scatter of points. The regression line has become meaningless. What this tells us is that the number of votes from the recount process will be about 45 less for…
gregladen | November 24, 2008... ah, no, actually, it's just a meteor. But caught on video!
And a more detailed report:
So, so many science fiction stories start exactly like this....
gregladen | November 24, 2008Season's greetings from the secular side
by
August Berkshire
Minnesota Atheists
'Tis the season. With winter coming, some members of the religious right have begun bracing themselves for the so-called annual atheists' "war on Christmas." While we think that the government and public schools should remain neutral when it comes to religious celebrations, we have no interest in depriving anyone of whatever private celebrations they wish to conduct.
Nevertheless, in case you were wondering, here are the plans some of us have for December....
Read the rest here.