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Real Clock Tutorial: History

Over at A Blog Around the Clock, Bora put up a sixteen part series of posts talking about clocks. Unfortunately, he was talking about biological clocks, which are a specific and sort of messy application, from the standpoint of physics. I talk a bit about clocks for our first-year seminar class, as a part of my two-week module on laser cooling (laser-cooled atomic clocks being one of the major applications). Like most of the other good bits of that module, this is shamelessly stolen from talks I've heard Bill Phillips give, but it works pretty well. In order to really discuss the physics of…

Olympic Voyeurism: The Naked, the Nearly Naked, The Prideful, and The Annoyed.

Watching (collecting data for the boycott) men's Olympic water polo, it occurred to me that the little tiny bathing suits the men wear were absurd. Why not just skip the bathing suit and get on with it? As I was thinking this, the commentators on the TV were learnin' me something new closely related to these thoughts ... regarding Terry Schroeder's body. Schroeder is the team coach, and I'll tell you about his body below the fold. For some reason this all made me think of the National Anthem. You see, today, part of the Olympic scene is the often forced voyeurism of nationalistic pride re…

Food is not medicine: Vitamin D

I dont understand people who view food as medicine. Well, I mean, I guess I do. Theyre terrified of disease X/Y/Z (even if X/Y/Z is treatable/preventable with modern medicine), and they think a component of food helps treat/prevent disease X/Y/Z, so they religiously eat said food. So I guess I mean to say "People who view food as medicine are being silly." Obviously, consuming food and getting proper nutrition is important. If you dont get enough Vitamin C, you get scurvy. Dont get enough iron, you get anemia. Dont get enough folic acid, your child is at risk for birth defects. Dont get…

Gingerich on Genesis

In a number of recent posts I have remarked that when it comes to Biblical analysis, I think the young-Earthers have more going for them than is sometimes acknowledged. I have also commented that I have been generally unimpressed with the more highbrow sorts of Biblical exegesis I have seen with regard to the text of Genesis. Let me give you an example. I just finished reading a book called Is God A Creationist?, an edited anthology of essays published in the eighties defending various sophisticated approaches to Genesis. One of the contributors was Owen Gingerich, a professor of Astronomy…

Trains of Clocks

My Gen Ed relativity course has mostly been me lecturing about stuff to this point, so on Wednesday I decided to shake things up a bit and convert a chapter of David Mermin's It's About Time. The idea was to get students up and moving around a bit, and actually making some measurements of stuff. Mermin's scenario as adapted for class is this: you have two trains of six cars passing in opposite directions. Each car contains a narrow window through which the other train can be seen, a clock facing the window, and an observer with nothing better to do than note the readings of the clocks in the…

Energy from Mass, Mass from Energy

I probably ought to get a start on the big pile of grading I have waiting for me, but I just finished a draft of the problematic Chapter 7, on E=mc2, so I'm going to celebrate a little by blogging about that. One thing that caught my eye in the not-entirely-successful chapter on momentum and energy in An Illustrated Guide to Relativity was a slightly rant-y paragraph on how it's misleading to talk about the energy released in nuclear reactions as being the conversion of mass into energy, because what's really involved is just the release of energy due to the strong force. It struck me as…

Trapping Ions With Light

There was a flurry of stories last week about an arxiv preprint on optical trapping of an ion. Somewhat surprisingly for an arxiv-only paper, it got a write-up in Physics World. While I generally like Physics World, I have to take issue with their description of why this is interesting: In the past, the trapping of atomic particles has followed a basic rule: use radio-frequency (RF) electromagnetic fields for ions, and optical lasers for neutral particles, such as atoms. This is because RF fields can only exert electric forces on charges; try to use them on neutral particles and there's…

Kids Those Days, Parents These Days

Back when I was a kid, and dinosaurs roamed the Earth, I spent about a week one summer staying with a great-aunt in Arlington, VA. I don't remember exactly when-- some time in the early 1980's-- and I don't remember where my parents and sister were at the time. I recall that they came down later and picked me up at the end of the trip, but not what they were doing while I was there by myself. Anyway, since I was in the DC area, and nerdy as hell even as a pre-teen, I wanted to see a bunch of the Smithsonian museums. My great-aunt never had any interest in that sort of thing (she did take me…

Gut bacteria - fat or thin, family or friends, shared or unique

You are not alone. Even if you're currently reading this in complete isolation, you are still far from a singular individual. You're more of a colony - one human, together with microbes in their trillions. For every one of your own genes, your body is also host to thousands of bacterial ones. Some of the most important of these tenants - the microbiota - live in our gut. Their genes, collectively known as our microbiome, provide us with the ability to break down sources of food, like complex carbohydrates, that we would otherwise find completely indigestible. Peter Turnbaugh from the…

Yet more Republicans in denial

The latest Pew survey on Americans' attitudes toward the climate crisis is so depressing, I am reminded of that old Busby Meyers song, "What's the use of getting sober, when you're gonna get drunk again?" I mean, really. Why bother? But because the only alternative to carrying on is to not carry on, here's my attempt at giving the numbers a positive spin. The Pew study found that "[T]he proportion of Americans who say that the earth is getting warmer has decreased modestly since January 2007, mostly because of a decline among Republicans." Since January, the percentage who recognize reality…

Fixed Point Structure

From a crazy model to a concrete question: is there a nice mathematical structure hidden here? Once upon a time I wrote a crazy paper (arXiv:quant-ph/03091189) on quantum computation in the presence of closed time-like curves. In this model, one identifies two types of quantum systems: those that are "chronology respecting" and those that traverse "closed time-like curves." These two types of quantum systems can interact amongst themselves and also between each other. A typical setup is as in the figure at the right, where n chronology respecting qubits interact with l closed time-like qubits…

Decoding the brain's response to vocal emotions

The ability to interpret other peoples' emotions is vital for social interactions. We recognize emotions in others by observing their body language and facial expressions. The voice also betrays one's emotional state: words spoken in anger have a different rhythm, stress and intonation than those uttered with a sense of joy or relief. But how the emotional content of a voice is encoded in the brain was unclear. Now though, Swiss researchers report that they have decoded the neural activity in the voice-sensitive regions of the brain, and demonstrate that this activity can be analyzed to…

Optimizing Cognition for Multi-threading: How 2 hours of training can make multitasking more efficient

New work by Minear & Shah shows that as little as 2 hours of practice can promote improvements in multitasking that generalize beyond the particular tasks trained. Specifically, they show that performance on individual tasks can be made more efficient while multitasking, but the efficiency of actually switching between them cannot. The data supporting this conclusion is fairly complex, but significantly adds to theoretical accounts to a number of previous studies showing that even the highest levels of cognitive processing (the so-called "executive functions") can be improved with…

Unarius Lives and Universe Live

Growing up, I watched a lot of television. Not the good stuff, mind you: rather, I would gambol home from elementary school to watch hours of Designing Women re-runs and then laugh uproariously at Step By Step while enacting my early OCD tendencies in elaborate Lucky Charms marshmellow seperation projects. In retrospect, I realize that I could have been playing soccer or going to sleep-away camp. My bearing witness to the worst television programming of early 1990s, however, has probably shaped me in ways I am yet to fully understand. For example, I am haunted to this day by a "Cablevision…

Reaction to my Milloy post

There has been quite a bit of reaction to my post on Milloy. Michael Peckham writes "Milloy's criticism may be right some of the time, but only when it fits his preconceived anti-regulatory agenda. " John Quiggin, at Crooked Timber and at his own blog observes that the link between Cato and Milloy reflects badly on Cato. Also the comments in the Crooked Timber have some attempts to defend Milloy against the charge that he is boosting creationism. Yes, Milloy offers the Theory of Evolution some faint praise, but he also thinks Creationism should get equal time with…

The two Wilsons on sociobiology

It's not often I get to comment on as-yet-unpublished work, but I have been sent a copy of a forthcoming essay by David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson, two giants of the theoretical evolutionary field, defending and redefining the nature of sociobiology (Wilson and Wilson 2007). As I have recently (i.e., in the last five years) come to be an unflinching sociobiologist, I think it is worthwhile summarising their argument and making some comments. This is the first in a rambling series riffing on that paper. Introduction Back in the dark ages, when I was a masters student, Kim Sterelny…

The first use of a taxonomic tree

Older histories of biology are often full of useful and interesting facts. One of my all-time favourites is Eric Nordenskiöld's history, but I came across an earlier one by Louis Compton Miall in which I found this text: Bonnet in 1745 traced the scale of nature in fuller detail than had been attempted before. He made Hydra a link between plants and animals, the snails and slugs a link between mollusca and serpents, flying fishes a link between ordinary fishes and land vertebrates, the ostrich, bat, and flying fox links between birds and mammals. Man, endowed with reason, occupies the highest…

Fallacies on fallacies

Many people are confused about what counts as a fallacy, including teachers of critical reasoning. Opponents of science often accuse pro-science writers of "the fallacy of authority" or "the ad hominem fallacy" when they are noted for having made silly and false claims before. I thought some words about what a fallacy actually is might be to the point. According to Archbishop Richard Whately, whose book The Elements of Logic, first published in 1828 from an encyclopedia article revitalised the modern study of logic in the English tradition, By a Fallacy is commonly understood, "any…

Ida: The Legend Continues

The exceptionally preserved skeleton of Darwinius, known popularly as "Ida." From PLoS One. Even though it has been about a month since Darwinius (or "Ida", if you like) hit the public scene there is still plenty to talk about. From uncertain evolutionary relationships to the interaction between scientists and the media, this controversy has given us plenty to discuss. One of the most worrying aspects of this entire ordeal, however, has been the prospect that media companies influenced the scientific study of Ida. As Earle Holland wrote on the Ohio State University On Research... blog, the…

The 100 colours of the Brainbow

Researchers from Harvard University have developed a remarkable genetic technique that enabled them to visualize complete neuronal circuits in unprecedented detail, by using multiple distinct colours to label individual neurons. The technique, called Brainbow, works in much the same way as a television uses the three primary colours to generate all the colour hues. With multiple combinations of up to four differently coloured fluorescent proteins, a palette of approximately 100 labels has been produced.  To develop Brainbow, the researchers used the Cre/loxP site-specific recombination…

Stanford Prison experiment posted on YouTube

The Stanford Prison experiment was a very famous -- now infamous -- experiment in social psychology that was conducted in 1971 by Dr. Phillip Zimbardo, Stanford psychology professor. You probably remember him if you took a high school or college intro to psychology course because he made a very popular set of instructional videos on psychology that are often used in such courses. The experiment randomly assigned male undergraduate students to participate in a two week mock prison. They were randomly assigned to be guards and inmates. However, things went horribly wrong. The guards faced a…

The Meowmorphosis: blatant meme abuse?

Ok, what are the people at Quirk Books on? I have to say, I love the cover of the book, and the typographical trailer is cute - but isn't this just blatant meme abuse? Quirk explains The Meowmorphosis thus. . . "One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that he had been changed into an adorable kitten." Thus begins The Meowmorphosis--a bold, startling, and fuzzy-wuzzy new edition of Franz Kafka's classic nightmare tale, from the publishers of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies! Meet Gregor Samsa, a humble young man who works as a fabric salesman to support…

a book meme!

Woo hoo! I've been tagged with a book meme! The rules: boldface the books on this list that you've read, and italicize books you started but never finished. Okay. . . 1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien 3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte~ 4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee~ 6 The Bible - I think I've read over 75% of this, so I'm going with it. The begats don't count. 7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte~ 8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell 9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman 10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens~…

O brave new world that has such penises in't

I am getting quite impressed with the progress being made in organ reconstruction. New techniques have allowed amazing improvements in bioengineering that allow whole complex organs to be grown in a dish and then surgically reimplanted — and much of this research is being driven by our military ventures, which provide a steady supply of scarred, damaged, and mutilated veterans who need new body parts. There I read that scientists are developing procedures to regrow penises…how could I not look up that paper? So I did, and now I have the current recipe for building new penises — or at least,…

Basic concepts: arguments.

As my first contribution to the growing list of basic terms and concepts, I'm going to explain a few things no one asked about when I opened the request line. But, these are ideas that are crucial building blocks for things people actually did ask about, like falsifiability and critical thinking, so there will be a payoff here. Philosophers talk a lot about arguments. What do they mean? An argument is a set of claims. One of those claims is the conclusion which the other claims are supposed to support. While logicians, geometers, and that crowd customarily give you the conclusion as the…

Put down those non sequiturs and stereotypes, Captain Fishsticks, and no one will get hurt

Captain Fishsticks is one of our local conservative nutjobs who haunts the pages of the St Paul Pioneer Press—he's a free market freak who wants to privatize everything, especially the schools, and yet everything he writes reveals a painful ignorance of anything academic. This week he's written a response to an article that left him distraught: Peter Pitman advocated more and better science education for Minnesotans, especially on the subject of climate change. Fishsticks, to whom all education is a zero-sum game because every time he has to learn another phone number a whole 'nother column…

Half right

Via Thoughts in a Haystack, here's an article on A Smart Battle Against Intelligent Design that almost gets the right answer, but then falls into the real trap, the conventional wisdom. First, here are the parts I think it gets right. For the last 100 years, scientists, teachers and parents have been relying mostly on lawyers to keep religion out of public school science classes in this country. So far, the lawyers have been doing a pretty good job. But the burden is shifting to the scientists themselves, say experts involved in recent cases defending public school science curricula from…

Friday Fractal XVIII

Fractals are like landscapes. From a simple process, be it a formula or continental drift, one area can be strikingly different from another. This is true for my favorite type of fractal, a Julia set, "colored" with a bit of fractal Brownian motion: Or the ripples on the Great Sand Dunes: Stone, Steam and Sand: A Geologic Photo Tour of Southwest Colorado, Part III In the first part of this series, I described the formation of the San Juan Mountains, and then a bit of the more recent history of the lands to the west of the range. The valley east of the San Juans had similar initial…

Back on the nets---but why bother

Mark Crislip has a nice piece up at Science-Based Medicine about the battle against the medical "de-lightenment". In his post, he looks at some data about what sorts of criteria anti-vaccinationists use in their propaganda. Not surprisingly, appeals to emotion and to pre-existing beliefs are much more common than actual facts. The question then becomes, "Why bother?" We on the side of science-based medical humanism tend to believe that education is the best solution to problems such as implausible health claims, but since these things function more as belief systems than as opinions…

A Dichotomous Key to Circus of the Spineless #32

Welcome to the 32nd edition of the Circus of the Spineless. It our distinguished pleasure to be host here at Deep Sea News. To make it easier for you to navigate through 95%+ of the diversity of animal life, I've developed a dichotomous key to help you work through it. Naturalists will undoubtedly be familiar with such a tool, but for the beginner I provide a brief overview. Read both parts of the number and follow path that best describes the post you are looking for. If there is a number at the end, go to that number and repeat until you come to a post you are attempting to identify. Simple…

Book Progress #14

One of the joys of working on this book has been discovering little tidbits of information that have been overlooked. I haven't turned up anything especially earth-shattering, but I have found a few things that overturn some of the "received wisdom" so often repeated in textbooks and technical paper introductions. For example, it is commonly said that the little perissodactyl Hyracotherium got its name because Richard Owen thought it looked like a hyrax when he named it in 1839. This piece of information has been repeated for over 150 years, yet Owen himself took a moment to correct this…

Is it part of a scapula or a pelvis?

As I've learned first-hand during my time in human osteology this semester, identifying bone fragments can be a very tricky process. It is easy to identify the differences between a radius and a fibula or a scapula and a pelvis when you have the whole bones in front of you, but if you only have a handful of broken pieces the task becomes exponentially more difficult. In reviewing the dirty & dusty collection available to me in preparation for my final exam next week, I've been focusing on some of the errors I consistently made and thought "What better way to remind myself than to write…

The tale of two articles: Are we going to destroy Naples?

Geologic and structural map showing the extent of the Campi Flegrei caldera on the north of the Bay of Naples, Italy. Image courtesy of INGV. One of the writing assignments I always enjoyed in high school was the "compare and contrast". You could sit back and look for stylistic differences between writers and texts - potentially offering signs about the nature of the writers motivations. I still find it fun - case in point, two article I read about the research drilling that is about to start at the Campei Flegrei in Italy. The Campei Flegrei is a large caldera system that most recently…

How Ashkenazi Jewish are you?

Carl Zimmer pointed me to a new paper, A genome-wide genetic signature of Jewish ancestry perfectly separates individuals with and without full Jewish ancestry in a large random sample of European Americans. The title is so informative that pasting the abstract is almost unnecessary, but here is the conclusion which gets to the point: In conclusion, we show that, at least in the context of the studied sample, it is possible to predict full Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry with 100% sensitivity and 100% specificity, although it should be noted that the exact dividing line between a Jewish and non-…

Something's fishy in the Mesolithic....

Archaeology: Sharp shift in diet at onset of Neolithic: The introduction of domesticated plants and animals into Britain during the Neolithic cultural period between 5,200 and 4,500 years ago is viewed either as a rapid event or as a gradual process that lasted for more than a millennium. Here we measure stable carbon isotopes present in bone to investigate the dietary habits of Britons over the Neolithic period and the preceding 3,800 years (the Mesolithic period). We find that there was a rapid and complete change from a marine- to a terrestrial-based diet among both coastal and inland…

Data & theory, then, now, and forever

In the 10 Questions for A.W.F. Edwards, a mathematical geneticist, he was asked: Like Fisher you have worked in both statistics and genetics. How do you see the relationship between them, both in your own work and more generally? Edwards responded in part: Genetical statistics has changed fundamentally too: our problem was the paucity of data, especially for man, leading to an emphasis on elucidating correct principles of statistical inference. Modern practitioners have too much data and are engaged in a theory-free reduction of it under the neologism 'bioinformatics'. This elicited a strong…

Rand Paul and the Transmogrification of the Southern Strategy

Amanda Marcotte has a must-read post about Rand Paul, and why we shouldn't just sweep his libertarianism under the rug. I'll get to Amanda in a bit, but, to explain the title, I want to first provide some context by way of deceased Republican political operative Lee Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, "N-gger, n-gger, n-gger." By 1968 you can't say "n-gger" -- that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally…

The Wall around Old Town, Part 3: Atop the Wall

tags: Old Town, Tallinn, Estonia, cities Looking towards the next tower along the wall around Old Town. Photographed in Old Town, Tallinn, Estonia. Image: GrrlScientist, 22 July 2009 [larger view]. (raw image) This is, in my opinion, one of the most spectacular views I've ever had the pleasure to see. I hope my photographs from atop the wall around Old Town can capture this for you well enough that you understand what I saw and experienced while I was in Tallinn. Looking towards the next tower along the inner portion of wall around Old Town. Photographed in Old Town, Tallinn, Estonia.…

Gulf coast flu, 1918

There's a lot of good regional reporting around that most of us don't get to see. Consider the Sun Herald in gulfport, Mississippi. We think of Gulfport as Katrina country these days, but like the rest of the world in 1918 it was pandemic flu territory. Local reporter Kat Bergeron looked back nine decades to that other catastrophe and concluded there are still a lot of missing puzzle pieces. Nearly nine decades after the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic swept across the Mississippi Coast - and every country in the world - researchers and health officials continue to study and revise death tolls.…

An Interview with Ian Hart of Integrity of Science

Meet Ian Hart, the athletic and self-confessedly "BoBo" author of Integrity of Science, a blog about public policy and the abuse of science—a fan of Caravaggio and detractor of strip malls. What's your name? Ian Hart What do you do when you're not blogging? I'm the Communications Director for the Pacific Institute, a nonpartisan, independent think-tank in Oakland, California, that uses interdisciplinary analysis to develop solutions to threats to sustainability at the intersection of environment, development, and society. In my free time I paint (oils in a realist style), run marathons, and…

Bali bird flu cases: signal or noise?

Bird flu in Indonesia and elsewhere keeps simmering away. Little stuff, here and there. Constant noise, so much so you wonder if you will hear the signal, if and when it sounds. Will it suddenly become so loud it is unmistakable? Or will it be there, growing louder and louder until everyone can hear it and in retrospect, see that it was there before we recognized it? I don't know the answer. Lots of worrisome sounding things I ignore and wait for a couple of days more information to sort them out. That's my inclination for the latest Indon case on the resort island of Bali: Bali has recorded…

Spoiling the tomato barrel

The US FDA is lifting the warning on eating tomatoes it issued on June 7 because of the country's largest produce-associated foodborne Salmonella outbreak. The source of the Salmonella infections, all said to be "genetically identical" isolates of an uncommon serovar is still to be discovered, although epidemiological evidence associated it with salsa containing fresh tomatoes. Later the possibility that other salsa ingredients such as jalapeno peppers or cilantro might be the culprit has been raised. So far no one seems to know how that thousand plus cases became infected with the Salmonella…

New Year's Day: Imagining the future

Yesterday I indulged myself and took a personal look backward. It was New Year's Eve, after all, the end of a year. Today is New Year's Day, the day we look to the year ahead. Is this the Year of The Big One (pandemically speaking)? Or another year of Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop? If we can't figure out what will happen over the next year (who will be President-elect?), how about the next hundred years? That will average out the inconsequentialities and get down to The Big Things. The New York Times did a story the other day where they interviewed a bunch of alleged experts about what…

New York Times Gets It Right, Just To Screw Up At The End In Blind Adherence To The He Said/She Said Journalism

Now behind the Wall, but plenty of excerpts available in this March 26, 2005 post... ------------------------------------------------------------------ Ha! The New York Times has this neat article, that is almost half as good as my early (and so far most frequently linked) post "Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sleep". Here are some excerpts, go read the rest: The Crow of the Early Bird THERE was a time when to project an image of industriousness and responsibility, all a person had to do was wake at the crack of dawn. But in a culture obsessed with status--in which every…

Tyrannosaur morsels

This story is in the news again, so I've reposted my description of the paper from 3½ years ago. This is an account of the discovery of soft organic tissue within a fossilized dinosaur bone; the thought at the time was that this could actually be preserved scraps of Tyrannosaurus flesh. There is now a good alternative explanation: this is an example of bacterial contamination producing a biofilm that has the appearance of animal connective tissue. Read GrrlScientist's explanation and Greg Laden's commentary and Tara Smith's summary of the recent PLoS paper that tests the idea that it is a…

But the Recession is Over...Right? Revisiting Tinkerbelle Economics

I have a pretty good track record on the economic crisis. In 2007, I pointed out that the "slowdown" that people were saying was absolutely not a recession, was, in fact, a recession. In 2008, I pointed out that most major economic downturns of the past century haven't been very brief - although technically the 1970s economic crisis consisted of two recessions, rather than one, you could just as easily observe that it consisted of a decade or so of high unemployment, economic stagnation, etc...etc... I argued that it was likely that the major economic crisis we were finally acknowledging…

Life-size two-dimensional condors and teratorns

Everyone interested in animals must, by law, have set eyes on that iconic image of palaeornithologist Kenneth E. Campbell standing next to a life-sized silhouette of the immense Argentinean teratornithid Argentavis magnificens [the image is shown below]. At the International Bird of Prey Centre, Gloucestershire (UK), I quite liked the wooden silhouette of an Andean condor Vultur gryphus and, in the image here, Tone is standing next to it, looking as much like Campbell as she is able. An actual live Andean condor can just about be seen sitting in the enclosure in the background. An Andean…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Poor Sleep Is Associated With Lower Relationship Satisfaction In Both Women And Men: A bidirectional association exists between couples' sleep quality and the quality of their relationship, according to a research abstract that will be presented on Wednesday, June 10, at SLEEP 2009, the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies. Less Than Half Of Older Americans Get The Recommended 8 Hours Of Nightly Sleep: Older Americans with depressive symptoms and poor mental health tend to get seven hours of sleep per night or less, according to a research abstract that will be…

Limusaurus inextricabilis

My previous repost was made to give the background on a recent discovery of Jurassic ceratosaur, Limusaurus inextricabilis, and what it tells us about digit evolution. Here's Limusaurus—beautiful little beastie, isn't it? (Click for larger image)Photograph (a) and line drawing (b) of IVPP V 15923. Arrows in a point to a nearly complete and fully articulated basal crocodyliform skeleton preserved next to IVPP V 15923 (scale bar, 5 cm). c, Histological section from the fibular shaft of Limusaurus inextricabilis (IVPP V 15924) under polarized light. Arrows denote growth lines used to age the…

Columbia President's Response

Lee Bollinger, the President of Columbia University, has issued a very strongly worded and entirely justified statement in response to campus protestors disrupting a perfectly legal speech at the university last week. I'll quote the full text below the fold: Columbia University has always been, and will always be, a place where students and faculty engage directly with important public issues. We are justifiably proud of the traditions here of intellectual inquiry and vigorous debate. The disruption on Wednesday night that resulted in the termination of an event organized by the Columbia…