purepedantry | September 20, 2007Synaptic transmission is incredibly fast. For example at the neuromuscular junction, the minimum time between the appearance of the electrical activity in the axon terminal and the appearance of electrical activity in the muscle as little as .4-.5 ms.
How is this managed?
One of the ways is that the vesicles that contain neurotransmitters are docked very close to the membrane. I talked about this is an earlier article where reconstruction of electron micrographs showed that synaptic vesicles are hemifused to the membrane.
Here is another article in this vein. Siksou et al. in the…
purepedantry | September 20, 2007This is the smartest thing anyone has ever done:
Hospital dress codes typically urge doctors to look professional, which, for male practitioners, has usually meant wearing a tie. But as concern over hospital-borne infections has intensified, doctors are taking a closer look at their clothing.
"Ties are rarely laundered but worn daily," the Department of Health said in a statement. "They perform no beneficial function in patient care and have been shown to be colonized by pathogens."
The new regulations taking effect next year mean an end to doctors' traditional long-sleeved white coats,…
purepedantry | September 18, 2007A boy from Britain who had a case of viral meningitis had to undergo surgery to drain the fluid from his brain. When he awoke and recovered, he had a new accent:
William McCartney-Moore of York was struck down with viral meningitis last March and needed brain surgery after doctors found he had a rare strain called empyaema. "He lost everything," said his mother, Ruth. "He couldn't read or write, he couldn't recognise things, he had no recollection of places he'd been to and things he'd done and he'd lost all his social skills. He went from being such a bright, lovely, wonderful eight-year-…
purepedantry | September 17, 2007Last week, I posted a long argument for why I believe pairing science and atheism is a poor strategic choice for scientists. The response to that article has I think been largely positive, but I do want to address the criticisms of it now that I have had a chance to read all the comments and posts about it.
Let me state clearly, though, that I think all of the counter-arguments are legitimate. The world is a complicated place, and I have no special insight into its workings.
Further, if any people find my arguments pejorative, I apologize. It was my intent that this discussion be conducted…
purepedantry | September 14, 2007Why must scientists play with salmons' heads like this:
Researchers have succeeded in making salmon couples give birth to trout -- using a technique that they argue could help to preserve rare species of fish.
Goro Yoshizaki and his colleagues at the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology in Japan had previously shown that male salmon could be injected with cells from closely-related trout to produce viable trout sperm. When the sperm were introduced to trout eggs, healthy trout offspring were produced...
Now the researchers have taken the work a step further, showing that salmon…
purepedantry | September 12, 2007
In 1922, John Dewey, pragmatist philosopher and champion of Progressive education, wrote an article in The New Republic entitled "The American Intellectual Frontier." The subject was William Jennings Bryan's attack on evolution that would later culminate in the Scopes trial. The argument that Dewey made was not what you would think, however. Though he was most definitely part of the the Northeastern liberal establishment at the time, he did not dismiss Bryan's attacks as indicative of rural ignorance.
Instead, he made the argument that while he disagreed with Bryan, liberals had to take…
kcontreary | September 12, 2007The Fraser Institute has put out its annual report on Economic Freedom of the World -- a score and rank measuring "the degree to which the policies and institutions of countries support economic freedom". It's basically a rundown of countries based on how much (or little) they embrace free trade, both domestically and abroad. The index is based on scores in five areas:
1) Size of government (taxes=bad)
2) Legal structure and security of property rights (secure=good)
3) Access to sound money (access=good)
4) Freedom to trade internationally (trade=good)
5) Regulation of credit, labor, and…
purepedantry | September 11, 2007From the always excellent xkcd (click to enlarge):
Someday, someday I will meet a woman who loves the fact that I like to graph. There is important stuff out there that needs to be correlated -- like the amount of torrential rain that falls outside my window vs. how many people fall flat on their ass on the way to work. These are important issues that demand graphical representation.
As a side note, do you think that "Age/2 + 7" rule is fair? I would say that it is fine when you are over a certain age, but that would mean I can date a 20 year old without sketchiness. Empirical evidence…
purepedantry | September 10, 2007An article in Science discusses the physician-scientist program (or MD-PhD) and the trouble in maintaining people in the basic sciences. Basically, most MD-PhDs say when they finish the program that they would like to remain researchers in some capacity, but many of them drop-out in order to become straight clinicians, instructors at medical schools, or work in industry.
Money quote:
The problem, he believes, stems from the fact that every lab chief "essentially is running a small business." Like all businesses, "you have to pay your bills." Lab chiefs, however, can only get the money they…
kcontreary | September 9, 2007Who knew anybody, much less the Economist had an opinion on whether or not Belgium should exist?
One question: if Belgium goes through a 'velvet' divorce, who gets custody of the chocolate?
purepedantry | September 7, 2007Megan McArdle:
I am not fighting for the Bush tax cuts; I'm fighting the notion that people who are in favor of tax cuts are all a bunch of liars or loonie tunes. Politicians in favor of tax cuts are all liars, as are all the politicians against tax cuts; in politics, lying is, sadly, the stable equilibrium. But most politicians are not loons; and most of their economics advisors are sober and intelligent fellows.
Now that's funny.
purepedantry | September 6, 2007Beer pong is now industrial:
These guys aren't exactly Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. But Messrs. Wright and Johnson, both 22 years old, are part of a new wave of young people trying to make money tapping into their peers' devotion to beer pong, a cross between ping-pong and beer chugging. As beer-pong season hits a peak with the start of the school year, these beer-pong entrepreneurs are running tournaments and peddling customized beer-pong tables, balls and apparel.
In 2004, brothers Ben and Jesse Spiegel took a leave from the University of Denver, pooled more than $50,000 in savings and…
purepedantry | September 5, 2007Shocking. An epidemiological study of bands in the US and Europe showed that musicians do really die prematurely. Equally shocking: drugs and alcohol are involved.
From the BBC:
A Liverpool John Moores University study of 1,050 US and European artists found they are twice as likely to die early than the rest of the population.
In all, 100 stars died between 1956 and 2005 with US stars dying at 42 on average and those from Europe at 35.
Drug and alcohol problems accounted for one in four deaths, the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health said.
...
Lead researcher Professor Mark Bellis…
purepedantry | September 4, 2007The issue of sympatric speciation -- or how to separate species emerge from a single species without geographic isolation -- is a contentious issue in evolutionary biology. How can two species emerge without reproductive isolation of two separate groups? Wouldn't they all just breed together, hiding any new genes in heterozygotes?
Bomblies et al. publishing in PLoS Bio have something interesting to say about that. The use a plant called Arabidopsis thaliana or thale grass to show that the answer might be in genes that regulate the immune response.
Just to get some background, the genes…
purepedantry | August 29, 2007Gene Expression has 10 Questions with Gregory Clark, author of A Farewell to Alms:
Clark also provides archival evidence that in medieval Britain (and to a lesser extent in China and Japan) the wealthy-who presumably had those "middle class" skills in abundance-raised more children than the average person. If you put these pieces together-a system that rewards a new set of abilities, plus greater reproductive success for those who have those abilities-then all you need to get some form of selection is one more link: A transmission mechanism. On the nature of the mechanism, Clark leaves the…
purepedantry | August 29, 2007That is so gross, yet also very cool.
The cowpea weevil or Callosobruchus maculatus has an arms race that is going between the males and females. This beetle species are promiscuous, and there is a lot of advantage for the males to be the last one to have mated with a particular female in terms of reproductive success.
This issue has spawned a variety of weird behaviors and adaptations. For example, the males have spines on their intromittent organs (read: insect penises) that puncture the females insides. This is to discourage them from mating with other males. In response the females…
purepedantry | August 27, 2007Fellow ScienceBlogger Tara Smith has a required reading article in PLoS Medicine on HIV denialists:
Since the ideas proposed by deniers do not meet rigorous scientific standards, they cannot hope to compete against the mainstream theories. They cannot raise the level of their beliefs up to the standards of mainstream science; therefore they attempt to lower the status of the denied science down to the level of religious faith, characterizing scientific consensus as scientific dogma [21]. As one HIV denier quoted in Maggiore's book [10] remarked, "There is classical science, the way it's…
purepedantry | August 27, 2007Bring more science into your life with scientific knitting...
This comes via Virginia Postrel where she examines the new glamorous scientist.
That makes the extraordinary success of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, which begins its eighth season this month, all the more remarkable. Unlike its direct spin-offs and numerous imitators, which are more-conventional cop melodramas, the original CSI has at its core an eccentric scientist: obsessive, brilliant, objective, and self-contained. "Oh, I have outlets," says Gil Grissom. "I read. I study bugs. I sometimes even ride roller coasters." What a…
purepedantry | August 27, 2007James Kirchick at Independent Gay Forum mentions the trouble he has had dating outside his politics:
"I can't date someone with a different belief system" is what he told me. I expected this answer from the guy I had been casually seeing. From early on, I suspected that our differing political bents -- his liberal, mine more conservative -- would ultimately cause a split. Once, we had a heated argument when I said offhandedly that people who could not afford to care for children should not have them (not a policy prescription, just a profession of personal ethics). After that, I tried to…