gregladen | November 27, 2007
It is true. Praise be the noodles.
[A tip of the macaroni to Pharyngula]
gregladen | November 26, 2007... and get ready for the War on Christmas
Here's a few opening remarks that may serve to inspire.
Begin the War on Christmas from NoGodBlog.com
It's "The War on Christmas" Season Once Again... from Crooks and Liars...
Winning the War on Christmas
Check this out:
[from Stoptheaclu, a truly icky site]
Stay tuned....
gregladen | November 26, 2007I am very much looking forward to these papers:
In two papers set to be published next week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists report that the two largest groups of flowering plants are more closely related to each other than any of the other major lineages. These are the monocots, which include grasses and their relatives, and the eudicots, which include sunflowers and tomatoes.
Doug and Pam Soltis, a UF professor of botany and curator at UF's Florida Museum of Natural History, respectively, also showed that a stunning diversification of flowering…
gregladen | November 26, 2007From Birdlife International:
Thousands of birds die in Black Sea oil spill
Thousands of birds and fish have been killed as oil spills from a stricken tanker in the northern Black Sea. At least 30,000 birds have died, and thousands more are covered in oil and face death in the coming days. The main species reported to be affected are Great Cormorant Phalacrocorax carbo, Common Coot Fulica atra, Great Crested Grebe Podiceps cristatus and Black-necked Grebe Podiceps nigricollis. So far, 50km of Russian coastline is affected by the oil spills.
Dr Clairie Papazoglou, Head of BirdLife's European…
gregladen | November 26, 2007The green politically correct PC which is ironically on sale at WalMart (which is not a politically correct store unless you are ... oh never mind, if I have to tell you, you won't get it...) has been reviewed here.
From the manufacturer:
Hardware Specifications
1.5GHz, VIA C7®-D Processor, 512MB DDR2 533MHz, SDRAM, 80GB Hard Disk Drive, DVD-ROM/CD-RW Optical Drive, VIA UniChrome Pro IGP Graphics, Realtek 6-Channel Audio, (1) 10/100 Ethernet Port, (1) DB 15-Pin VGA Port, (6) USB 2.0 Ports, (1) RJ-11 Port, (1) Headphone/Line-Out Port, (2) Microphone/Line-In Ports, (1) Serial Port, (1)…
gregladen | November 26, 2007A new study addresses the link betwen omega-3 acidss and brain function, in this case in gerbils.
These studies show that oral supplementation with DHA, an omega-3 fatty acid, increases dendritic spine density in adult gerbil hippocampus...). This effect of DHA is approximately doubled when animals also receive [uridine-5â²-monophosphate] and is accompanied by parallel increases in membrane phosphatides and in specific pre- and post-synaptic proteins. Supplementation with arachidonic acid (ARA), an omega-6 fatty acid, fails to increase spine density....
What does this mean?
Amyloid beta…
gregladen | November 26, 2007An international collaboration led by researchers in the US and South Africa announced Nov. 20 the first genome sequence of an extensively drug resistant (XDR) strain of the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis, one linked to more than 50 deaths in a recent tuberculosis (TB) outbreak in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.*
As part of this work, genomes of multi-drug resistant (MDR) and drug sensitive isolates were also decoded. Initial comparisons of the genome sequences reveal that the drug-resistant and drug-sensitive microbes differ at only a few dozen locations along the four-million-letter DNA…
gregladen | November 26, 2007A team led by the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Milan has discovered some unexpected forms of liquid crystals of ultrashort DNA molecules immersed in water, providing a new scenario for a key step in the emergence of life on Earth.
CU-Boulder physics Professor Noel Clark said the team found that surprisingly short segments of DNA, life's molecular carrier of genetic information, could assemble into several distinct liquid crystal phases that "self-orient" parallel to one another and stack into columns when placed in a water solution. Life is widely believed to have…
gregladen | November 26, 2007If they are so OK with the spiders, why are they all wearing protective face-wear?
Anyway, this is a potentially useful video for teaching genetics. Captivating, good graphics, a balance of the icky and the cute, etc.
gregladen | November 26, 2007Somewhat funny look at what your email would be like if
Microsoft, not Google, had created Gmail? What would be the differences in that web mail client for users today? What if we apply some of the same design rules that brought us Hotmail, for instance?
Here...
gregladen | November 25, 2007A new bunch of math text books slated for implementation in Texas was werefound to have 109,263 errors. Apparently, in Texas, the publishers are fined $5000 per error. That comes out to $546,315,000.
The publisher, Houghton Mifflin, is working hard to correct the errors....
[source]
gregladen | November 25, 2007A handful of cool tricks you can do with the Linux Terminal. If you have a Linux Terminal. If you don't, you should consider getting one.
Everything you always wanted to know about your hardware and for the most part did not even know you could know.
The command dmidecode is " is a tool for dumping a computer's DMI (some say SMBIOS) table contents in a human-readable format. This table contains a description of the system's hardware components, as well as other useful pieces of information such as serial numbers and BIOS revision." (from the "man").
You need to be the Super User to…
gregladen | November 25, 2007According to a story in the last issue of Psychological Science:
... for most women, high sex drive is associated with increased sexual attraction to both men and women. For men, however, high sex drive is associated with increased sexual attraction to only one sex or the other, depending on the individual's sexual orientation. These results suggest that the correlates of sex drive and the organization of sexual orientation are different for women and men.
[This is a repost from Gregladen.com]
This is one of those studies where a perfectly good (i.e., falsifiable) hypothesis was being tested…
gregladen | November 24, 2007... has a what!?!?
I don't know how many times I've heard the phrase "Every culture has a story about a flood..." This is very annoying because a) it is not true (I can think of several cultures that do not) and b) it is very Euro-centric, as are most phrases that start with "Every culture has a..."
So, I decided to enter the phrase "Every culture has a" into Google and see how many other stupid ideas I could find.
The list is not very long because this exercise, while interestring in principle, can get a bit old. But here is what I found before I tired of it:
Every culture has a folk…