gregladen | January 22, 2008Marine biologist Tierney Thys asks the audience to step into the open ocean, for a visit to the world of the Mola mola, or giant ocean sunfish. Basking, eating jellyfish, and getting massages, this behemoth offers clues to life in the open ocean -- which accounts for 90 percent of the living space on this planet -- and also shows how climate change may be affecting all life.
gregladen | January 22, 2008Pilobolus dance company members Otis Cook and Jennifer Macavinta perform the sensuous duet "Symbiosis." Does it trace the birth of a human relationship, or the co-evolution of a pair of symbiotic species? That's left for you to decide. Gorgeous, organic choreography blurs the boundaries between the two performers, who use the body's own geometry to lift, move and combine. The music, recorded by the Kronos Quartet on Nonesuch Records, is a compilation of works: "God Music" from Black Angels by George Crumb, "Fratres" by Arvo Pärt, and "Morango ... Almost a Tango" by Thomas Oboe Lee.
gregladen | January 22, 2008You are going to be hearing a lot more about Darwin in the month of February, which is Darwin Month here on The Internet. (It is also Creationist Home Schooling Science Fair month, so hang on to your mice and keyboards!!!!) I have a Darwin plan of my own that you will be learning of soon enough.
In the mean time, I wanted to remind you of the Beagle Project:
We aim to celebrate Charles Darwin's 200th birthday by building a sailing replica of HMS Beagle and recreating the Voyage of the Beagle with an international crew of researchers, aspiring scientists and science communicators. The…
gregladen | January 22, 2008
The narration is annoying, but it is a good example of fieldwork (with ants)
gregladen | January 21, 2008Holy crap! The Age of The Machines is nigh: a bunch of scientists in Switzerland have created learning robots that can lie to each other. Okay, so they don't swill beer or put bends in girders--they just communicate to each other with benign flashing lights, thank goodness, instead of using lasers to destroy humans:
The team at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Federal Institute of Technology created the little experimental learning devices to work in groups and hunt for "food" targets nearby while avoiding "poison." Imagine their surprise when one generation of robots learned to…
gregladen | January 21, 2008For your amusement, a selection from the public comments on the fight over science standards in Florida.
"How is anyone's life improved by believing in evolution?"
"I will not allow you to teach my child this no matter what you put in your curriculum. I stand for Christ and his creation."
"To teach only one theory is communistic."
"This is unacceptable, unless Biblical Creationism is taught alongside evolution."
"I strongly disagree with the term 'evolution' being used in kindergarten or any grade level. I would change the term 'evolution' to a more user friendly term such as 'adaptations…
gregladen | January 21, 2008
Jan 21
Lenin died, 1924
Jan 21
Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson born in Clarksburg, VA, 1824
Jan 21
Our Lady of Altagracia in Dominican Republic
Jan 21*
Lee-Jackson Day in Virginia (3rd Monday)
Jan 21*
Robert E. Lee's Birthday in Alabama & Mississippi (3rd Monday)
Jan 21*
Martin Luther King Day (3rd Monday of January)
Jan 21
Anniversary Day (Wellington)
Jan 21
Austrian troops invade the Belgian United States, 1790
Jan 22
Sir Francis Bacon born, 1561
Jan 22
Sam Cooke is born in Chicago, 1935
gregladen | January 21, 2008The CIA on Friday admitted that cyberattacks have caused at least one power outage affecting multiple cities outside the United States.
Interesting...
Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute, said that CIA senior analyst Tom Donahue confirmed that online attackers had caused at least one blackout. The disclosure was made at a New Orleans security conference Friday attended by international government officials, engineers, and security managers from North American energy companies and utilities.
Paller said that Donahue presented him with a written statement that read, "We have…
gregladen | January 21, 2008Berry Go Round is a new web carnival. It is ...
A plant's Carnival, to be hosted at Seedsaside by the end of january 2008. Please submit your best posts before the 25th of January. Send contributions to seedsaside[at]gmail.com...
gregladen | January 21, 2008Sources at Google have disclosed that the humble domain, http://research.google.com, will soon provide a home for terabytes of open-source scientific datasets. The storage will be free to scientists and access to the data will be free for all. The project, known as Palimpsest and first previewed to the scientific community at the Science Foo camp at the Googleplex last August, missed its original launch date this week, but will debut soon.
Check it out here.
gregladen | January 21, 2008Check out this picture of the Internet! Can you find yourself? I think I see my house!!!
gregladen | January 21, 2008There is a new blog you should know about. It's called "The Worst of Scienceblogs.com" and it contains, so far, only three posts (so maybe we are not so bad after all). I thank Terra Sigillata, one of WOS's victims, for pointing this out.
Note, by the way, that the self-described curmudgeonly Right Winger who runs this new blog (Gerald Harbison) might be an ideologically driven moron. He takes Terra Sigillata to task for quoting Martin Luther King (on MLK's birthday-Monday, which is today). In his verbal lashing, Harbison notes: "Problem is, like most of King's published work, including…
gregladen | January 21, 2008Is chimpanzee food sharing an example of food for sex?
One of the most important transitions in human evolution may have been the incorporation of regular food sharing into the day to day ecology of our species or our ancestors. Although this has been recognized as potentially significant for some time, it was probably the Africanist archaeologist Glynn Isaac who impressed on the academic community the importance of the origins of food sharing as a key evolutionary moment. At that time, food sharing among apes was thought to be very rare, outside of mother-infant dyads. Further research…