gregladen | December 12, 2007Fossils representing on of one of the largest meat-eating dinosaurs known, the African Carcharodontosaurus iguidensis, were identified by Steve Brusatte, a student working at the University of Bristol. The fossils were originally located in Niger.
Carcharodontosaurus iguidensis, a new species, was about 13 to 14 meters long, with a skull about 1.75 meters long. It is said that its teeth were the size of bananas. So think about that next time you are eating a banana.
Bits and pieces of this dinosaur genus have been previously located, some of those fossils (from Egypt) having been…
gregladen | December 12, 2007This is an amazing story, and unfortunately, it is probably being repeated again and again across the country. It begins with a parent who does not want his daugther exposed to science, which is pretty common, but leads to a startling revelation about the local school board. Startling, but I'm afraid, probably not at all uncommon either.
In Pymatuning Valley Local School District, in Andover, Ohio, a "concerned" parent, Frank Piper, questioned the school board about the teaching of science in the middle school, where his daughter is enrolled.
Specifically, he is
concerned because the…
gregladen | December 11, 2007MIT researchers have successfully treated mice with sickle-cell anemia in a process that begins by directly reprogramming the mice's own cells to an embryonic-stem-cell-like state, without the use of eggs.
This is the first proof-of-principle of therapeutic application in mice of directly reprogrammed induced pluripotent stem (IPS) cells, which recently have been derived in mice as well as humans.
"This demonstrates that IPS cells have the same potential for therapy as embryonic stem cells, without the ethical and practical issues raised in creating embryonic stem cells," said MIT biology…
gregladen | December 11, 2007Proposed legislation that would mandate the use of the Open Document Format (ODF) across the entire Dutch government has infuriated Microsoft. A group promoting open standards sees no threat, however, and has invited Microsoft to join its ranks.
On Wednesday the Dutch parliament will discuss a plan to mandate use of the Open Document Format (ODF) at government agencies. The proposal is part of a wider plan to increase the sustainability of information and innovation, while lowering costs through the reuse of data.
Read the rest here.
gregladen | December 11, 2007This is a good one for your 8th grade biology class...
... or maybe not...
gregladen | December 11, 2007Try this: Starting at home, drive, run, ski, or walk about fifty thousand feet. That would be about ten miles, or 15 kilometers. It won't take you long (especially if you drive) and chances are, when you get there, it will be a place at least vaguely familiar to you. At the very least, it will be a place that is qualitatively familiar to you. Even if you end up in a strip mall, or a government office building, or a recreational park, that you've never been to before, you'll be able to find your way around.
Now do the same thing, but instead of going across the landscape, go straight up…
gregladen | December 11, 2007How people respond to the U.S. government's attempts to censor some war-related images comes down to whether or not they are supporters of President Bush, a new study suggests.
Researchers at Ohio State University surveyed 600 people and asked them if they were interested in viewing photos or videos of the caskets containing dead U.S. soldiers arriving in the United States from Iraq and Afghanistan .
The catch was that, prior to being asked whether they wanted to view the images, half of the survey respondents were told about a U.S. government policy which prevents the widespread…
gregladen | December 11, 2007You'll remember that some time ago (ten, eleven minutes?) I reposted (from gregladen.com) an interesting story about a study of how the mind works. I did that because I knew that the researchers involved in this study have a new survey up on their web site, and that you might want to know about it. From Heather Gray, one of the researchers:
...we recently revised the mind survey, just in time for the presidential primaries. Now our respondents are asked to judge pairs of American politicians-- for instance, is Barack Obama or Rudy Giuliani more capable of being honest, exerting self-control…
gregladen | December 11, 2007[Repost from gregladen.com]
New findings reported by Harvard researchers in the journal Science suggest that the mind is typically viewed as having multiple dimensions that relate to specific important characteristics of individuals. This study has implications for how individuals develop ethical or moral stands on topics such as abortion, and how individuals view god, life, and death. The study was based an online survey (n= 2,000+). The results suggest that we perceive the minds of others along two distinct dimensions: One is "agency," or the individual's ability for self-control, morality…
gregladen | December 11, 2007... From conservative Mac Johnson, on Intelligent Design; Student-Run Anchor of Rhode Island College Executive Editor Jessica Albaum on Huckabee the Hate-able ; and the Star Telegram's OpEd by Alan Leshner on science standards in Texas....
Intelligent Design, and Other Dumb Ideas
A few short years ago, nobody had ever heard of "Intelligent Design" (ID). Today it is alleged to be one of the hot button issues of our times, the latest front in the culture wars. The sudden prominence of ID is traceable, in my opinion, to two factors.
One is that, even ten years ago, ID had enough confidence…
gregladen | December 11, 2007Archaeologists know that a "Roncofact" is an artifact that you find, and realize (or speculate) that it had multiple functions.
"It slices, it dices, it makes Julian Fries...."
A recent study claims that humans, in fact, shun Roncofacts. But wait, there's more..
According to a piece in the New York Times:
In a clever experiment ... psychologists had students fill out a survey using a ballpoint pen that could also serve as a laser pointer. They then had half the students evaluate the pen's laser-pointer function, thus making this group more aware of the pen's dual purpose. Later,... all…
gregladen | December 11, 2007The two most annoying kinds of "hits" from an internet search are:
1) When you find a site with your question rephrased exactly as it should be, and the first few sentences of the answer you need, but to continue ... to be able to read the answer ... you must register, and possibly even pay; and 2)
When all you can find is the answer on Yahoo Answers.
The blockbuster success of Yahoo! Answers is all the more surprising once you spend a few days using the site. While Answers is a valuable window into how people look for information online, it looks like a complete disaster as a traditional…
gregladen | December 11, 2007Sometimes, several unrelated changes come to a head at the same time, with a result no one could have predicted. The PC market is at such a tipping point right now and the result will be millions of Linux-powered PCs in users' hands.
Or so opines Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols of DesktopLinux.com.
Vaughan-Nichols sees the following changes as basic to and causal of a sea-change in the desktop world.
1) The continued maturation of dektop Linux, to the point where "no one can argue with a straight face that people can't get their work done on Linux-powered PCs
2) The development of the "$100" laptop…
gregladen | December 11, 2007Vger 2 (Voyager) took off in 1977, and over the last 30 years has been working pretty well. Vger is now 12,680,021,376 kilometers away and is traveling at 56 327 km per hour.
Think about it this way: How many instruments in current scientific labs, and how many computers sitting on anyone's desktop, were made n 1977. Probably a few, but not many. Just now, this space ship is in the vicinity of the Plasma Boundary, or the Termination Shock Wave. I like to think of the Termination Shock Wave as a speed bump, or maybe one of those spiky things in parking lots ... (DO NOT BACK UP - TIRE…
gregladen | December 11, 2007From slashdot:
"I stumbled across this fascinating Microsoft tutorial entitled "How to Justify a Desktop Upgrade." It's an attempt to coach IT professionals on how to sell Windows desktop upgrades internally. Apparently the value of Vista is not readily apparent, requiring detailed instructions on how to connive and cajole into an upgrade from XP.
Here's a bit of the Microsoft Site:
How to Justify a Desktop Upgrade
...
Standardizing on the latest operating system and having enough RAM to support everyone's applications would make your life so much easier and more productive. It could also…
gregladen | December 11, 2007Check this out:
This is the IBM 350 Disk Storage Unit. It held five ... count ''em FIVE ... megabytes. That's not bytes, not kilobytes, but MEGA bytes, baby.
[source]
gregladen | December 11, 2007There seems to be some interesting things going on with the recently reported study of rates of evolution in humans. We are getting reports of a wide range of rather startling conclusions being touted by the researchers who wrote this paper. These conclusions typically come from press releases, and then are regurgitated by press outlets, then read and reported by bloggers, and so on. Here is, in toto, the press release from the University of Wisconsin, where John Hawks, one of the authors of the study, works. I reproduce the press release here without further comment.
Genome study…
gregladen | December 11, 2007From an MIT press release:
A missing brain protein may be one of the culprits behind autism and other brain disorders, according to researchers at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory.
The protein, called CASK, helps in the development of synapses, which neurons use to communicate with one another and which underlie our ability to learn and remember. Improperly formed synapses could lead to mental retardation, and mutations in genes encoding certain synaptic proteins are associated with autism.
In work published in the Dec. 6 issue of Neuron, Li-Huei Tsai, Picower Professor of…