gregladen | February 29, 2008According to a poll this week, approximately 31 percent of surveyed Americans believe Roger Clemens is telling the truth about never taking performance-enhancing drugs.
This is about the same percentage of Americans who believe in creationism, and still insist George Bush is doing a good job. And here's my theory: These are all the same people, the true believers. If you cross-indexed these polls, you would likely find that Gallup and Quinnipiac just keep tapping into the same wacky group. ...
The Daily Blahg
gregladen | February 29, 2008That is the title of the First Place science fair project from a baptist science fair.
The description of the project:
Cassidy Turnbull (grade five) presented her uncle, Steve. She also showed photographs of monkeys and invited fairgoers to note the differences between her uncle and the monkeys. She tried to feed her uncle bananas, but he declined to eat them. Cassidy has conclusively shown that her uncle is no monkey.
Very cute. Too bad little Cassidy's brain is now hobbled forever. (Well, maybe not. She's only in fifth grade. She could get over it....)
This is from here.. You will find…
gregladen | February 29, 2008
Photograph of a chicken. Click to see larger version. From PLOS article cited in blog post.
Where and when were chickens domesticated?
From whence the humble chicken? Gallus gallus is a domesticated chicken-like bird (thus, the name "chicken") that originates in southeast Asia. Ever since Darwin we've known that the chicken originated in southeast Asia, although the exact details of which one or more of several possible jungle fowls is the primal form has been debated. The idea that more than one wild species contributed to the early chicken has been on the table for a long time,…
gregladen | February 29, 2008are here:
HIV infection at Wissen schafft Kommunikatioin
Other cellular stuff (an oldie but a goodie) at WeiterGen!
gregladen | February 29, 2008At this moment, there is a guy laid up in the hospital in Vegas with ricin poisoning. A stash of ricin has been found in his hotel room/apartment. His dog is dead (not sure why but probably due to lack of water and food) and a couple of other pets are either dead or not doing well (details are blurry).
Details, sketchy as they are, here.
So what is ricin?
Ricin is an extract from castor beans (Ricinus communis). The lethal dose is as little as 0.2 miligrams. That is an amount somewhat smaller than a house fly.
Some creative uses of ricin include the following, cribbed from…
gregladen | February 29, 2008... it was time to skip town.
I'm going to Mayaland in a few weeks. I know nothing about Mayan archaeology, even though I attended graduate school at one of the world's premier locals for the study of Mesoamerican archaeology. Since I was working towards a double PhD (in Biological Anthropology and Archaeology) I was allowed to "skip" one major subfield in each. Feeling ambitious, I skipped New World Archaeology (since I was already a New World archaeologist) and Anatomy (since I was really interested in Anatomy). That way I actually covered everything. But, my New World Archaeology…
gregladen | February 28, 2008Historical records indicate that 130 years ago, the white-tailed jack rabbit was abundant in the Yellowstone vicinity. The last confirmed sighting was in 1991. What happened? This apparently remains a mystery, according to Rabbit Expert Joel Berger.
"It could be disease, extreme weather, predation, or other factors," he says. "Since the rabbits blipped off without knowledge, there has simply been no way to get at the underlying cause."
Berger believes the absence of jack rabbits--historically, an important prey species in the ecosystem--may lead coyotes to rely on juvenile elk, pronghorn…
gregladen | February 28, 2008Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) is caused by a coronavirus that is now believed to have originated in bats. In 2004, thousands of palm civets (a cat like carnivore) were killed off in China because it was believed that they were the main reservoir of this disease. Ooops.
It appears now that the civets had contracted the disease from humans, rather than the other way around.
Nearly a thousand people among the 8,000 or so infected died during that outbreak, and no human infections are known since early 2004.
A number of different researchers who have been looking at the source…
gregladen | February 28, 2008Or is it just that they are more often recognized. Or more sensationally reported. A recent study suggests that "emerging" diseases such as HIV, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), West Nile virus and Ebola are more common.
By analyzing 335 incidents of previous disease emergence beginning in 1940, the study has determined that zoonoses - diseases that originate in animals - are the current and most important threat in causing new diseases to emerge. And most of these, including SARS and the Ebola virus, originated in wildlife. Antibiotic drug resistance has been cited as another…
gregladen | February 28, 2008Thousands of sick and dying bats are being found in caves in New York, Vermont and Massachusetts. These are mostly Myotis lucifungus (the fairly common little brown bat) but at least three other species, including the endangered Myotis sodalis (Indiana bat) are affected as well.
But why?
So far, nobody knows. Bacteria, viruses and toxins have been tested for, and researchers thing an infectious disease of some kind is the most likely cause, but positive results remain elusive. according to Beth Buckles, assistant professor of biomedical sciences in Cornell's College of Veterinary Medicine…
gregladen | February 28, 2008
A flourishing wetland on Kenya's northern coast is under serious threat from plans to grow vast amounts of sugarcane, partly for biofuel production. Developers want to transform nearly 20,000 hectares of the spectacular Tana River Delta, into sugarcane plantations with other parts of the Delta earmarked for rice.
"This development would be a national disaster, wreaking havoc with the area's ecosystem and spelling the end for wildlife across much of the Delta", said Paul Matiku, Executive Director of NatureKenya. "Large areas would become ecological deserts. The Delta is a wildlife refuge…
gregladen | February 28, 2008Almost half of the world's oceans have been ruined to some degree ... often very severely ... by human activity. You've heard a lot on the news and in the blogosphere about this lately. This increased interest is in part because of the recent production (Feb 15th Science) of a map of the ocean showing these impact.
Here is the map:
Click Here to View Larger Image
The work, published in the Feb. 15 issue of Science and presented at a press conference Thursday, February 14 at 1 pm EST at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting in Boston, MA, was conducted at…
gregladen | February 28, 2008This is a photograph of wild western lowland gorillas copulating in, sort of, the missionary position. This shot was taken in the Nouabale-Ndoki National Park in the Republic of Congo.
The female gorilla in the photograph, nicknamed "Leah" by researchers, has twice made history. In 2005 Breuer and others observed her using tools--another never-before-seen behavior for her kind in the wild. Leah tested the depth of a pool of water with a stick before wading into it in Mbeli Bai, where researchers have been monitoring the gorilla population since 1995.
"Understanding the behavior of our…
gregladen | February 28, 2008A DNA phylogeny based on over 200 species of lemurs and related species is now available.
Lemurs are part of the large group known as the strepsirrhine primates (yes, three r's...)From the abstract of this paper, coming out in March in Genome Research:
... strepsirrhine primates are of great interest ... due to their phylogenetic placement as the sister lineage to all other primates. Previous attempts to resolve the phylogeny of lemurs employed limited mitochondrial or small nuclear data sets, with many relationships poorly supported or entirely unresolved. We used genomic resources to…
gregladen | February 27, 2008You have probably heard that the current flu vaccine matches the current flue strains in the US very poorly, perhaps at about a 40 percent rate. Flu and the vaccine mismatch is a post at Effect Measure that will update you on this important issue. This is especially important because you need to understand what vaccines do, how they work and how they don't work.
The simultaneous news of widespread flu and the mismatch of two components of this year's seasonal vaccine (see here and here) seem to have synergized. That's not so good in the view of many flu experts, who believe (correctly) that…
gregladen | February 27, 2008Bennett Gordon has a post on the Har Mar Science Fair:
...Every diorama in the Home School Science Fair, which took place inside a shopping mall in Roseville, Minnesota, had a biblical quote attached to it. A young woman whose project involved teaching her dog how to run circles between her legs decorated the words: "If you love me, you will obey what I command." (John 14:15) in pink lace fabric. This quote got to the crux of the science fair, in my opinion: parental commandment. These parents pulled their children out of school, away from their peers, and said, "Now prove that Darwin was…
gregladen | February 27, 2008Because the Garmin GPS system ...
... is leading some drivers ... straight into a dead end. ...
The electronic maps don't show a gate that separates residential and industrial areas. It's only opened for a couple hours on weekdays in the northern New Jersey city.
Mayor Dennis Elwell says residents on Fifth Street started complaining about trucks clogging their street about a year ago ... Some drivers have to call police to open the gate because their trucks are too big to turn around.
[source]
This has led to a call for Open Source GPS databases.
gregladen | February 27, 2008In this open access publication in PLoS it is
...suggest that, compared with placebo, the new-generation antidepressants do not produce clinically significant improvements in depression in patients who initially have moderate or even very severe depression, but show significant effects only in the most severely depressed patients. The findings also show that the effect for these patients seems to be due to decreased responsiveness to placebo, rather than increased responsiveness to medication. Given these results, the researchers conclude that there is little reason to prescribe new-…
gregladen | February 27, 2008I've been avoiding discussion of the patent issue. This is partly because I don't know enough about it, and partly because I am terribly annoyed by it. Yes, yes, I blog about stuff that annoys me all the time, but these are topics that I'm professionally engaged in, so the annoyance is not personally as troubling.
The basic idea is this: The US patent office has apparently gone nuts, or is being well paid off, and is accepting or approving patents on things that really should not be patented. The result is that a corporation with lots of money can patent something, and the next day sue…
gregladen | February 27, 2008I hate when people tell me what to blog (and not blog). I blog what I want, you read what you want. When the two coincide, wonderful.
Bayblab, which is apparently some kind of science blog mostly written by anonymous bloggers, has a post critical of certain areas of science blogging.
Mostly it is whining wannabee dribble, sour grapes, and all that, and I couldn't care less about it. But BB makes a deeply disturbing error in conflating science blogging with blogging about peer reviewed reserach. Nothing else is considered "true" science blogging.
Here is my comment on BB's post:…