A couple of science carnivals will liven up your Sunday evening:
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Bio::Blogs #4 is up on Discovering Biology in a Digital World.
or, better yet, enjoy the fine selection of summer carnivals.
In no particular order, we have:
Bio::Blogs#3
Hosted this month by mndoci (aka Depak Singh) at business|bytes|genes|molecules, Bio::Blogs is a carnival of articles at the intersection of biology and computation. If you are interested…
Scientiae #12 is up on Thus Spake Zuska
Circus of the Spineless #24 is up on Naturalist Notebook
Boneyard #4 is up on When Pigs Fly Returns
Bio::Blogs #14 is up on My Biotech Life
What's Up, Postdoc? #7 is up on The Ways and Means of the Immune System
Carnival of Mathematics #15 is up on johnkemeny…
Write about science and get exposure - send your stuff to carnivals.
Calls for submissions have been announced for Tangled Bank, Grand Rounds, Skeptic's Circle, Mendel's Garden, Bio::Blogs, Encephalon, Circus of the Spineless, I And The Bird, Philosophia Naturalis, Change Of Shift, Radiology Grand…
From Paul Krugman's Monday NYT column :
"So the right-wing coalition is showing signs of coming apart. It seems that we're not in Kansas anymore. In fact, Kansas itself doesn't seem to be in Kansas anymore. Kathleen Sebelius, the state's Democratic governor, has achieved a sky-high favorability rating by focusing on good governance rather than culture wars, and her party believes it will win big this year.
And nine former Kansas Republicans, including Mark Parkinson, the former state G.O.P. chairman, are now running for state office as Democrats. Why did Mr. Parkinson change parties? Because he "got tired of the theological debate over whether Charles Darwin was right." "
Krugman was probably referring to this Salon story
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/09/05/sebelius/
Parkinson, the chairman of the Kansas Republican Party from 1999 to 2003, was planning to come out of the closet that Wednesday -- as a Democrat. At the request of incumbent Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius, a Democrat, Parkinson would be switching his party registration and running as the Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor.
"There's been a long series of Republican infighting over issues that do not affect people's daily lives," Parkinson explains. "I'm 49. I got tired of fighting about whether Charles Darwin was right when I was 14 or 15. I'm not spending the rest of my life on that issue."
I hate to raise an old issue, but this gets my blood pressure up.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/5392096.stm
"Truth in Science" rears it's ugly head again. Gah, I get so tired of fools...
Have you seen the Moon capture theory?
Basically, the idea is this: 600 million years ago, God tore the Moon up from Mercury and directed it to Earth's route in order to help the intelligent life it would design a few hundred million years later.
It's that ridiculous.
DIY breakfast-time miracles:
http://www.blacktable.com/gillin041202.htm
Here is an example of "useless" research which seems to have become useful.
http://thenexthurrah.typepad.com/the_next_hurrah/
"There's another kind of important little ending that is why I bring this up. The attitude towards biology research in this country is: "What can it do for me?" That is what NIH wants to know when it funds a grant, that is what Congress wants to know when they fund NIH, and that is what taxpayers want to know when they elect their Congressman. "I'm paying for this research, what disease are you going to cure?" Here's how the Times described the discovery of telomerase:
Telomerase is an enzyme that replenishes the tips of chromosomes. Discovery of the enzyme emerged after Dr. Gall and Dr. Blackburn studied two organisms, a pond-dwelling parasite and baker's yeast. The scientists were driven by curiosity, not because they thought their research was related to human disease, said Dr. Goldstein, who works at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.
In fact, Blackburn told me once that when she entered the field no one thought it was interesting. She was not setting out to cure cancer or to learn to make cells divide forever, like stem cells. She just had a simple question -- if a chromosome gets shorter every time it's replicated, what happens to the ends? -- and she and several others have been able, in just a couple of decades of very successful experiments, to get a pretty good answer to that question. It turns out that little ending provided the foundation for tremendous advances in medical fields."
http://redstaterabble.blogspot.com/2006/10/royal-nonesuch.html
They just keep going... and going... and going...
By the way, I wonder what he means by "It says not everything in biology is a result of chance and accidents." Hmm, I don't know.
Yours In "Poof",
386sx