purepedantry | January 16, 2007Our own Bora Zivkovic, proprietor of A Blog Around the Clock, has been editting an anthology of the best science blog posts of 2006. Yours truly was lucky enough to be included for this post on Floyd Landis several months ago. Here is the editor's announcement.
The book -- entitled The Open Laboratory: The Best Writing on Science Blogs 2006 -- goes on sale today at Lulu.com, so please go and check it out.
There are some incredibly good posts included in this book. This stuff is why I enjoy writing and reading science blogs so much, the opportunity to get really in depth about a subject…
purepedantry | January 15, 2007We've been chatting in the ScienceBlogs forum about doing some posts about basic concepts in science -- short articles for people who don't necessarily have lots of background but would like to get some. Anyway, Chad is inquiring from his readers what kind of posts they would like to see. Suggestions for him are ideas like energy and force.
I think that idea is a good one, and I am happy to participate. So here's the question: If I were to post some basic concepts articles, what would you like to know about? If it were something related to neuroscience, that would probably be good. At…
purepedantry | January 15, 2007Evolgen has a hysterical post on the evolution of zombie populations.
purepedantry | January 15, 2007The Hymn of a Fat Woman
by Joyce Huff
All of the saints starved themselves.
Not a single fat one.
The words "deity" and "diet" must have come from the same
Latin root.
Those saints must have been thin as knucklebones
or shards of stained
glass or Christ carved
on his cross.
Hard
as pew seats. Brittle
as hair shirts. Women
made from bone, like the ribs that protrude from his wasted
wooden chest. Women consumed
by fervor.
They must have been able to walk three or four abreast
down that straight and oh-so-narrow path.
They must have slipped with ease through the eye
of the needle, leaving the…
purepedantry | January 15, 2007Most of us probably haven't read the whole speech, but we should. I hadn't remembered this part:
But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must…
purepedantry | January 15, 2007Check this out:
Troy Hurtubise, the Hamilton-born inventor who became famous for his bulky bear-protection suit by standing in front of a moving vehicle to prove it worked, has now created a much slimmer suit that he hopes will soon be protecting Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan and U.S. soldiers in Iraq.
He has spent two years and $15,000 in the lab out back of his house in North Bay, designing and building a practical, lightweight and affordable shell to stave off bullets, explosives, knives and clubs. He calls it the Trojan and describes it as the "first ballistic, full exoskeleton body…
purepedantry | January 15, 2007The Economist has an interesting article on ideas for cooling the planet directly -- in manners other than CO2 emissions reductions -- and how they are being received:
This gloomy outlook has encouraged new interest in a technological fix. A scientific journal, Climatic Change, published a series of papers on the subject in August, including one by Paul Crutzen, a Nobel-prize-winning atmospheric chemist. Other journals followed up. In November the Carnegie Institution and NASA held a conference.
Many big ideas for global cooling have been suggested over the years. They include seeding the…
purepedantry | January 12, 2007From the NY Times:
An international team of researchers reported yesterday that the age of the South African skull, which they dated at about 36,000 years old, coincided with the age of the skulls of humans then living in Europe and the far eastern parts of Asia, even Australia. The skull also closely resembled skulls of those humans.
The timing, the scientists and other experts said, introduced independent evidence supporting archaeological finds and recent genetic studies showing that modern humans left sub-Saharan Africa for Eurasia between 65,000 and 25,000 years ago; probably closer to…
purepedantry | January 12, 2007Greg Beato in Reason:
"It will take a grassroots effort of doctors, community leaders and consumers to force the government and the food industry to get those sugary foods out of mainstream American diets" [Robert] Lustig [of UCSF] told the San Francisco Chronicle. "Everyone's assuming you have a choice, but when your brain is starving, you don't have a choice.... Congress says you can't sue McDonald's for obesity because it's your fault. Except the thing is, when you don't have a choice, it's not your fault."
...
...forget "starving brains" and the notion that we have "no choice" in the…
purepedantry | January 11, 2007Ouch. I know I am going to catch hell for posting this, but it is too interesting to pass up. Devendra Singh from UT performed a search of British literature from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. The only consistently reported good bodily feature on women was a narrow waist:
A team in the United States surveyed accounts of female beauty in British literature from the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and found that the only feature that consistently got authors' pulses racing was a slender midriff.
"The waist does not sound an intuitively sexy body part,"…
purepedantry | January 10, 2007I just wanted to plug something else on ScienceBlogs really quick. Chris Chatham at Developing Intelligence is running a multi-part series on the prefrontal cortex (PFC). The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that is responsible for what neuroscientists call "executive functions." Executive functions are things like planning and not acting like a jackass.
Anyway, since I just moved to a lab that studies the PFC, I am really enjoying his posts.
Yesterday he gave a introductory piece and today he explores neural cascades. Definitely worth the read.
purepedantry | January 10, 2007It's all about the serotonin:
In a relatively small study, 68 young men and women were surveyed about recent headaches and sexual desire.
Migraine sufferers reported levels of sexual desire 20 percent higher than those suffering from tension headaches.
Overall, men in the study reported levels of sexual desire that were 24 percent higher than women. But women with migraines had levels of sexual desire similar to men with mere tension headaches.
...
Sexual desire and migraine headache have both previously been linked to levels of serotonin, a brain chemical that also plays a role in depression…
purepedantry | January 10, 2007Everyone hates on the Ig Nobel awards, but I think they are pretty cool. It is a lot of science that would go totally unrecognized. Just because it has no practical relevance whatsoever doesn't mean it isn't cool. Take this work on how woodpeckers cushion their heads so that they don't get hurt when drilling into trees:
Last fall, [Ivan] Schwab [from UC Davis] was honored with an Ig Nobel award, the irreverent version of the Nobel Prize, for his research on how woodpeckers avoid headaches, published in the British Journal of Ophthalmology.
Along with their straight-as-an-arrow strikes at…
purepedantry | January 10, 2007I knew the children were up to something -- with their beady little eyes:
Adults who live with children eat more fat, and more saturated fat, than those who do not, according to a new study.
The report, published online last week in The Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine, was based on data from the Third National Health and Nutrition Survey, a six-year nationwide study of more than 33,000 people carried out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
According to background information in the article, the correlation between adults' and children's diets has usually been…
purepedantry | January 10, 2007Geologists are using computer models to speculate where the continents are going to go in the next 100 million years. Their conclusion: the continents may again rejoin into a new Pangea -- Pangea Ultima:
Today, some of his most ambitious efforts center on envisioning how Earth might look 250 million years from now. The easy part, Dr. Scotese said, is the continents. Their masses might change shape but seldom disappear altogether because their bedrock weighs little compared with dense ocean crust. Continents literally float above the action. So do mountains. Once formed, they tend to persist…
purepedantry | January 9, 2007Shocking:
The study, published by the Public Library of Science online journal PLoS Medicine, echoes other findings that show industry-funded research on drugs is more likely to be favorable to the drugs than independent research.
Ludwig's team reviewed 111 studies on soft drinks, juice and milk that were published between 1999 and 2003.
"We chose beverages because they represent an area of nutrition that's very controversial, that's relevant to children, and involves a part of the food industry that is highly profitable and where research findings could have direct financial implications,"…
purepedantry | January 9, 2007Evidence has been found for the stem cell theory of cancer development. For those of you not aware of this theory, it holds that cancers originate from cells that have inadequately differentiated from their stem cell origins. This would contrast with more standard theories of cancer development that have cells de-differentiating from a more mature state.
Evidence for this theory has been fleeting, but researchers at USC may be on to something. Laird and colleagues, publishing in Nature Genetics, look at the DNA methylation state of certain genes in colorectal tumors in comparison to normal…
purepedantry | January 8, 2007Daniel Kahneman and Johnathan Renshon, writing in Foreign Policy, put forward a fascinating thesis that because of the way human beings are organized psychologically we are prone to be more hawkish. Basically the thrust of their argument is that social and cognitive psychologists have documented numerous psychological errors that human beings make consistently. In this sense human beings are not exactingly rational. Where our judgment consistently differs from pure rationality we make mistakes. With respect to foreign policy these mistakes make us more hawkish because they place a higher…
purepedantry | January 6, 2007Two poems for this week because they are short.
Conscientious Objector
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
I shall die, but
that is all that I shall do for Death.
I hear him leading his horse out of the stall;
I hear the clatter on the barn-floor.
He is in haste; he has business in Cuba,
business in the Balkans, many calls to make this morning.
But I will not hold the bridle
while he clinches the girth.
And he may mount by himself:
I will not give him a leg up.
Though he flick my shoulders with his whip,
I will not tell him which way the fox ran.
With his hoof on my breast, I will not tell him where…