purepedantry | June 26, 2006I am not doing this because the Seed Overlords will be happy -- even though they probably will be. I am doing it because I think it will help you out. I wanted to plug a link that our happy friends over at Seed have. At the end of every week Seed publishes a "Week in Science" summary that I find exceptionally helpful. It is a short summary of whatever happened that week -- sort of a Kiplinger letter, only for science. If you don't have a lot of time but you still want to know what is going on, I highly recommend it. Anyway, here it is.
purepedantry | June 26, 2006A Japanese boy burned down his home, killing his stepmother and two younger siblings, for fear his parents would find out he had lied about his score on an English test.
Talk about your high pressure testing environments.
purepedantry | June 26, 2006Keith Burgess-Jackson questions in his TCS column whether we should listen to people like Noam Chomsky's opinions on politics -- a realm notably outside their stated occupational expertise. I must admit that I haven't read what Noam Chomsky's opinions are lately -- although it is my suspicion that with respect to the present administration, they are hardly complimentary. To whit:
Noam Chomsky is, by all accounts, a brilliant linguist. Let me stipulate that this is the case, since I'm not a linguist myself. Let me also stipulate that he is a competent philosopher of language, although he has…
purepedantry | June 26, 2006Janet has been discussing why scientists are reluctant to discuss ethics in science. One of her arguments is that scientists feel that the majority of ethical standards are being imposed from the outside rather than being adopted internally.
So here is an idea. Being a MD-PhD, I am a culture strattler. One of the things that I have noticed about medical culture is that in medical culture there is what I would call an occupational ethics -- a set of standards that have been debated and generally accepted -- for doctors. We take lots of classes about how to deal ethically with a variety of…
purepedantry | June 25, 2006
Hi all and welcome to the first The Synapse (a neuroscience carnival). Thanks to everyone who participated for their fabulous submissions. Remember that The Synapse is a biweekly carnival, and the next carnival will be hosted by Coturnix at A Blog Around the Clock on the 9th of July. For information on how to submit and future issues check out our permanent page.
Anyway here you go:
Shelley Batts at Retrospectacle summarizes the wonders of cybernetics, and why -- while I may not be able to become Inspector Gadget today -- a man can still dream. She also discusses the pathways involved in…
purepedantry | June 24, 2006Are Shelley Batts' magnetic brain stimulators the first step in creating the sex helmets from Demolition Man? You be the judge.
[after futuristic, contact-free "sex"]
John Spartan: I was thinkin' we could do it the old-fashioned way.
Lenina Huxley: You mean... *fluid transfer*?
I think it is only a matter of time.
purepedantry | June 24, 2006World's oldest living turtle dies:
The giant tortoise, known as Harriet, died at the Queensland-based Australia Zoo owned by "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin and his wife Terri. Irwin said he considered Harriet a member of the family.
"Harriet has been a huge chunk of the Irwin family's life," Irwin said Saturday. "She is possibly one of the oldest living creatures on the planet and her passing today is not only a great loss for the world but a very sad day for my family. She was a grand old lady."
It was owned by Steve Irwin? He probably tried to ride it, and it had a heart attack.
purepedantry | June 23, 2006Just reminding everyone that the first The Synapse (a neuroscience carnvial) is rapidly approaching on Sunday. To submit send your neuroscience related posts to the.synapse.carnival@gmail.com by 9 am Sunday. More information is available at The Synapse.
purepedantry | June 21, 2006I can't manage to find anything related to Philosophy of Science. This may have something to do with the fact that it is now nearly 4 in the morning, and philosophy of science is not something I do at 4 in the morning.
Therefore I have a lovely cartoon that I found on my friend's desktop:
purepedantry | June 21, 2006I remember for a couple years, it was "lipid rafts this" and "lipid rafts that." The idea of the lipid rafts -- for the uninitiated -- was that there were microdomains in the plasma membranes of cells defined by their more hydrophobic composition. You can definitely separate these fractions from the fractions of plasma membrane (I know because I have done it), and under some circumstances proteins migrate from one compartment to another.
A paper in the latest Cell by Douglass and Vale contests the notion that the hydrophobicity of the membrane is responsible for recruiting proteins into the…
purepedantry | June 21, 2006We have all (meaning Scienceblogs) been talking about this whole free access model for publishing papers. Nick and I even had a nice little debate about it.
Not to belabor the issue to much, but this news story in Nature does relate:
The Public Library of Science (PLoS), the flagship publisher for the open-access publishing movement, faces a looming financial crisis. An analysis of the company's accounts, obtained by Nature, shows that the company falls far short of its stated goal of quickly breaking even. In an attempt to redress its finances, PLoS will next month hike the charge for…
purepedantry | June 21, 2006I must admit that in general I like David Brooks. He seems to lack the stridency of many pundits, and I don't generally like people who shout. He also tends -- like Walter Bagehot -- not to think that people who disagree with him are evil, just that they disagree with him.
But on this piece I think he may have gone a little off. (Incidentally I would read this excellent review by Language Log, which is where I found out about it. They go into it in considerably more detail than I plan to.)
Here's Brooks:
Over the past two decades, there has been a steady accumulation of evidence that…
purepedantry | June 21, 2006CNN reports on Norway's new seed menagerie. This whole business smacks of a Raiders of the Lost Ark action movie. Too bad the payoff is a rare strain of alfalfa:
Norway's Agriculture Minister Terje Riis-Johansen has called the vault a "Noah's Ark on Svalbard."
Its purpose is to ensure the survival of crop diversity in the event of plant epidemics, nuclear war, natural disasters or climate change, and to offer the world a chance to restart growth of food crops that may have been wiped out.
would be stored at such cold temperatures that they could last hundreds, even thousands, of years,…
purepedantry | June 21, 2006New Scientist's Invention blog reports on a new way to save lives during crash landings. An inventor in Bangkok thinks it would be a good idea to load the planes with explosives on one wing to slow the sliding of an out of control airplane:
Normally, when a crash landing is inevitable and no runway is in sight, a pilot would make a controlled belly flop to prevent the plane from ploughing into any buildings nearby.
But Polchai Phanumphai's idea is for aircraft to spin their way down instead. As a suitably fitted-out plane prepares to crash down, an altimeter would trigger explosive charges…
purepedantry | June 21, 2006Future Pundit reports on research that demonstrates -- shockingly enough -- that vegetables are good for you. Alert the media I say!
Anyway, I wouldn't even mention it, but I love this line by him:
Most people do not eat an optimal amount of vegetables. Another report providing yet more evidence on the benefits of vegetables won't cause many to alter their diets. Maybe what we need is some sort of Pop-Tart that is mostly vegetables but with flavoring designed to hide the vegetable taste. (Emphasis mine.)
Perhaps some sort of magical Veggie-tart that tastes good yet is good for you -- a…
purepedantry | June 21, 2006Will Jake be doing all these posts from this issue of Nature? Perhaps...
This issue of Nature also has an editorial related to some Asian countries' recent decision to pay researchers for publishing papers:
South Korea has become the latest country to offer scientists cash prizes for publications in top-level international journals (see page 792). Other nations, including China and Pakistan, already have such programmes in place. The thousands, or even tens of thousands, of dollars on offer can be a fat prize for researchers in countries with lean science budgets.
...
Proponents can point to…
purepedantry | June 21, 2006For some reason I have been seeing lots of neuroeconomics articles lately. Maybe it is because people enjoy using that prefix. This article caught my eye because I have been reading off the reservation -- a history of economics by Mark Skousen -- who in spite of a rather lengthy "Keynes is a complete yo-yo" rant writes a darn good history.
What I have learned from this extensive reading is that people -- at least in aggregate -- seek out the best deal. I know...utterly shocking that. Unless you are an economist. If you are an economist, you tend to write 1,400 page books and then be…
purepedantry | June 21, 2006I am doing an all-nighter at the lab -- I know, how deliciously freshmen history paper of me. I also have a lot of free time as I am waiting for RT-PCRs to finish. Thus, I have decided to post something in every channel of Scienceblogs in one flurry of all-night bloggery. So watch for them. I already got physical sciences (I know pretty pictures is cheating but maybe I will find something better).
Here's a question for you? Do you think being a good grad student requires committment-demonstrating-all-nighters? Do grad students who spend their lives at lab do better in the long run?…
purepedantry | June 19, 2006I have a bagillion things to do this week, but I would note that many of the other bloggers on this site are running a fundraiser for DonorsChoose. DonorsChoose raises money so that teachers can do science projects with kids -- hopefully involving explosions though I have not independently validated that. Anyway here is the Seed Blog's post summarizing what is up with that and all the people trying to raise funds.
Science matters, and if you want science to continue to matter you need future scientists. You got to get 'em while they're young if you know what I mean. So if you have some…