purepedantry | June 25, 2007So I don't know if other people were into this show, but since college I have been a big fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000. It was a show on Comedy Central and then on SciFi that made fun of old bad movies. The show itself was hysterical.
Anyway, I was watching one of the old episodes (a substantial number of which are now on YouTube), and I saw this one where they made fun of a clip of Commander Cody -- a serial from the 50s about this scientist who flies around in a rocket suit fighting crime and the like.
The plots of these things are just ridiculous. Like in this one entitled Radar…
purepedantry | June 25, 2007Science has a fascinating review about the history of cooking and its relation to human evolution. Richard Wrangham, a Harvard primatologist, has been pushing the idea that the expansion in Homo erectus' skull size was the result of additional energy released by cooking meat:
What spurred this dramatic growth in the H. erectus skull? Meat, according to a longstanding body of evidence. The first stone tools appear at Gona in Ethiopia about 2.7 million years ago, along with evidence that hominids were using them to butcher scavenged carcasses and extract marrow from bones. But big changes don'…
purepedantry | June 21, 2007Electric fish, Brienomyrus brachyistius, produce tiny electric signals from an organ in their tails that can be used to communicate and convey social status. They can also be used attract a mate, as reported in a study by Wong and Hopkins in the Journal of Experimental Biology. (The ghetto picture to the right -- the only one I could find that I am certain is of the right fish -- is from Schluger and Hopkins (1987), actually an interesting paper in and of itself. It shows that the fish follow electric field lines.)
In the study, the researchers recording from pairs of mating electric fish…
purepedantry | June 21, 2007Two big studies on genetics came out in the past couple weeks, and I want to talk about both. One of them -- the ENCODE study -- was well covered by the media. The other seems to have slipped through.
Paper #1:
In the ENCODE study, the authors compiled data using a variety of experimental techniques focusing on a small portion (about 1%) of the human genome. There purpose here was to go deep; they wanted to thoroughly catalog in their target area all the transcriptional elements, all the resulting RNA sequences, all the histone and chromatin modifications, and all of the intronic and…
purepedantry | June 21, 2007I always read these statistics comparing Americans' and Europeans' work schedules with a bit of skepticism. Most of them seem framed to suggest that Americans are either incapable of fun or under the Man's thumb -- neither of which I have found true in experience. Maybe it is just because I like my job, and I think that productive labor in a job that you enjoy is the root of lasting happiness.
Anyway, it turns out that Americans are by and large happy and on average happier than most European workers:
The truth is that most Americans don't feel particularly shackled. To begin with, an…
purepedantry | June 21, 2007Scientists in Britain have developed a super-efficient light bulb that works without filament -- thus making it likely to last longer than the machine that contains it:
Scientists working for Ceravision, a company based in Milton Keynes, in Britain, have designed a lamp that eliminates the need for electrodes. Their device uses microwaves to transform electricity into light. It consists of a relatively small lump of aluminium oxide into which a hole has been bored. When the aluminium oxide is bombarded with microwaves generated from the same sort of device that powers a microwave oven, it…
purepedantry | June 20, 2007
I must have it!
And it's electric too...energy efficient and cool...
Hat-tip: Gizmodo and sent from my dell desktop.
purepedantry | June 20, 2007Boooo, I say!
FOX and CBS have rejected a commercial for Trojan condoms on the grounds that they believed the ads stressed pregnancy prevention over disease prevention. From the NYTimes coverage:
Fox and CBS both rejected the commercial. Both had accepted Trojan's previous campaign, which urged condom use because of the possibility that a partner might be H.I.V.-positive, perhaps unknowingly. A 2001 report about condom advertising by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation found that, "Some networks draw a strong line between messages about disease prevention -- which may be allowed -- and…
purepedantry | June 20, 2007Oh wow:
Men are 12 times more likely than women to sustain severe human bite injuries for which surgery may be necessary, according to a study published in the July issue of the Emergency Medicine Journal.
Injuries are most likely to occur during brawls at weekends or public holidays and in most cases alcohol is involved.
The researchers reviewed the 92 patients requiring assessment for human bite wounds by the plastic surgery service at St James�s Hospital Dublin, Ireland, between January 2003 and December 2005. Eight five of them (92%) were men and the 92 patients had a total of 96 bites…
purepedantry | June 18, 2007Fundamental to the questions of human evolution is the question: when did human beings start doing human-like things? Human-like things include tool making, having a home base, using language, and possessing an aesthetic sense. Unfortunately, figuring out when humans started using behaviors that we would call modern is a troublesome business because we can't very well ask the people involved. We have to look at the remnants such people left behind and from these remnants attempt to infer the psychological world in which they lived.
One of the most compelling pieces of evidence used to…
purepedantry | June 15, 2007I am leaving for the weekend, so I haven't had much time to blog. In lieu of actual science, I leave you with the following YouTube videos of amateur science rappers. (There are a bagillion of these on YouTube, most of them bad...but these ones are fun.)
On Physics:
On Mitosis:
I have only one comment: In any just universe, there would be underwear on the stage at the end of each of these performances.
Hot.
purepedantry | June 13, 2007The SLEEP 2007 meeting is going on right now, so I have been trying to keep up with sleep-related news.
Here are two important stories:
First, college students who pull lots of all-nighters have lower GPAs:
A common practice among many college students involves "pulling all-nighters", or a single night of total sleep deprivation, a practice associated with lower grade-point averages compared to those who make time for sleep, according to a research abstract that will be presented Wednesday at SLEEP 2007, the 21st Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies (APSS).
"Sleep…
purepedantry | June 12, 2007The NYTimes has a lovely primer on sperm. Money quote:
Sperm do not really hit their stride until they are deposited in the female reproductive tract, at which point chemical signals from the vaginal and cervical mucus seem to spark them to life. Released from the buffering folds of their seminal delivery blanket, they at first swim straight ahead, torpedo-style, "with very little back and forth of the head," Dr. Tash said. They may linger in the cervical mucus for a couple of days, or cross the cervix and enter the uterus.
If an egg has burst from its ovarian follicle and been plucked by a…
purepedantry | June 12, 2007The holographic doctor from Star Trek. He never got tired. He never made mistakes. All he would do is get saucy when too many people were bothering him. If only all of us could be like that...(tear)
Anyway, unfortunately we aren't all like him, and to address the issue the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education -- the body responsible for certifying medical residencies in the US -- implemented in 2003 work rules to limit the number of hours residents can work. (The details of the rules can be found here.) Among other things, the rules limit the number of hours that a…
purepedantry | June 6, 2007Yes! Dutch students have found a loophole that they argue should allow alcohol to be sold to minors:
Dutch students have invented powdered alcohol which they say can be sold legally to minors.
The latest innovation in inebriation, called Booz2Go, is available in 20-gram packets that cost â¬1-1.5 ($1.35-$2).
Top it up with water and you have a bubbly, lime-colored and -flavored drink with just 3 percent alcohol content.
"We are aiming for the youth market. They are really more into it because you can compare it with Bacardi-mixed drinks," 20-year-old Harm van Elderen told Reuters.
Van Elderen…
purepedantry | June 6, 2007You would think that language as a general phenomena in the human species is genetically prescribed, but the peculiarities of individual languages -- such as whether a people uses a particular phoneme or not -- is the result of historical or geographical factors.
Dediu and Ladd, publishing in PNAS, have shown that is true with one exception: whether the language spoken by a population is tonal or not may be related to the genetic structure of that population. (A tonal language is one in which particular phonemes can mean different things depending upon the tone in which they are spoken. An…
purepedantry | June 6, 2007Lots of stuff has been written lately over the relative merits of carbon taxes vs. carbon trading markets. Just to summarize the policies, a carbon tax would apply an across the board premium on all users of carbon depending upon the amount they use. A carbon trading market would sell permits for carbon emission that could be traded at the market value.
Glenn Hubbard, a former chairmen of this President's Council of Economic Advisors, advocates a trading market (sadly this is behind a subscription wall because the WSJ insists on operating in the 17th century...the article is excerpted here…
purepedantry | June 6, 2007I wrote about my skepticism about libertarian paternalism before.
Here is some more skepticism. Glen Whitman writes about one type of policy advocated by libertarian paternalists -- the opt-out program. In opt-out programs, you are enrolled in what the government says you should do -- such as a savings account -- unless you specifically say that you don't want to do it. The problem as Whitman points out is in how difficult it is to get out. If you make it a bureaucratic maze to extricate yourself from a program, you have essentially made that program mandatory. (He discusses the slippery…
purepedantry | June 6, 2007Simon Baron Cohen writes in entelechy on theories of imagination (scroll down):
In what sense might something as intrinsically human as the imagination be biological? How could the products of the imagination - a novel, a painting, a sonata, a theory - be thought of as the result of biological matter? After all, such artefacts are what culture is made of. So why invoke biology? In this essay, I will argue that the content of the imagination is of course determined more by culture than biology. But the capacity to imagine owes more to biology than culture.
Let's start with a few definitional…
purepedantry | June 5, 2007A great article in the NYTimes about the debate over a sensory integration disorder:
The problem, these therapists say, is in the brain, which is not properly integrating the onslaught of information coming through the senses, often causing anxiety, tantrums and problems in the classroom. Such difficulties, while common in children with developmental disorders like autism, also occur on their own in many otherwise healthy youngsters, they say.
No one has a standard diagnostic test for these sensory integration problems, nor any idea of what might be happening in the brain. Indeed, a diagnosis…