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South Carolina Textbook Controversy

You already know about the controversy in South Carolina. Now is your opportunity to put in your two cents. Kansas City dot Com, which is NOT a South Carolina newspaper, has a short article on the story: The debate over how to teach the origin of species in public high schools could resurface in January, when the South Carolina Board of Education meets. The divided state panel withheld its endorsement of two biology textbooks this month when board member Charles W. McKinney pointed to dozens of questions raised in critiques by Horace D. Skipper, a retired Clemson University professor. And,…

Big Surprise: Bushies Are Bushies

How people respond to the U.S. government's attempts to censor some war-related images comes down to whether or not they are supporters of President Bush, a new study suggests. Researchers at Ohio State University surveyed 600 people and asked them if they were interested in viewing photos or videos of the caskets containing dead U.S. soldiers arriving in the United States from Iraq and Afghanistan . The catch was that, prior to being asked whether they wanted to view the images, half of the survey respondents were told about a U.S. government policy which prevents the widespread…

Let's Hear it for The Listening Project

Do you live in the Twin Cities Area? Are you doing anything next Thursday, December 13th at about 7.30PM? Come and see the film The Listening Project Born in Philadephia, reared in the Bay Area and schooled by his lifelong addiction to world travel, Twin Cities-based filmmaker Dominic Howes has spent the last 10 years trying to get accustomed to Minnesota winters -- and says he's still trying. But Howes admits that ice and cold are nothing compared to the dangers of "land mines and insurgent forces" in Afghanistan, one of 14 countries he and Rikshaw Films partner Joel Weber visited last…

New, Really Big Sea-dwelling Dinosaur

The small fragments of bone are spread out on a workbench in tiny pieces that could fit into a matchbox, betraying the size of their owner: a fearsome sea predator considered the Tyrannosaurus Rex of the oceans. ... a pliosaur, a reptile that swam the oceans 150 million years ago and was so big it could swallow a grown man in a single gulp. [note: there were no people living at that time -gtl] Bits of pliosaur fossils have previously been found in Germany, Britain and Argentina, but never have as many been found as this summer in the Svalbard archipelago off northern Norway in the Arctic. "…

Paszkiewicz is famous now!

David Paszkiewicz, the history teacher recorded while proselytizing to his students, has made the NY Times. Here's the familiar part: Shortly after school began in September, the teacher told his sixth-period students at Kearny High School that evolution and the Big Bang were not scientific, that dinosaurs were aboard Noah's ark, and that only Christians had a place in heaven, according to audio recordings made by a student whose family is now considering a lawsuit claiming Mr. Paszkiewicz broke the church-state boundary. "If you reject his gift of salvation, then you know where you belong,"…

Antivaccine cranks try to create Vaccine Injury Awareness Month. Everyone either yawns or laughs.

Normally, these days I greet the month of October with a mixture of anticipation and dread. The anticipation stems from October’s position as Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Now that somehow I’ve managed to have a variety of responsibilities with respect to how breast cancer is managed at our cancer institute, suddenly I find that I’m sometimes called upon to do media appearances, and Breast Cancer Awareness Month is one time we can use to get our message out about breast health and breast cancer detection and treatment, not to mention to highlight for the local media some of the cool research…

Ducks blowing in the wind

One day, about ten years ago, we were having a strong southerly fetch with small tornadoes popping out of the stormy front, so Julia and I were keeping an eye out the windows, watching wall clouds form and unform over our heads. Then, suddenly, there were these two ducks flying south, coming up over the houses across the street. They flew up into the air and beat their wings against the strong wind, not making any ground at all, and then finally, fell back out of our view. I'd seen these ducks before. By day they foraged to the north on the Metronics property, but roosted to the south,…

Facebook Launches Google Wave!!!!

No, wait ... not exactly. Well, sort of. We all thought Facebook would be announcing Facebook.com, the email server to end all googles. But instead it launched something else. It is called a "Modern Messaging System" and it combines email, instant messages, and SMS. Hold on, I'll be right back. OK, I looked up SMS because I didn't know what that was. It's texting. There are exactly two people with whom I regularly text, and by regularly I mean an average of something like one message per ... week. But my phone system does not support more than a few free ones, so I think I like the…

Louisiana Does The Right Thing, But Will Still Probably Screw It Up

Louisiana is one of those states where really stupid stuff tends to happen, especially when it comes to evolution in the school curriculum. Recently, a state panel was in a position to chose either creationist textbooks with which to abuse the children for whom they are responsible, or good biology textbooks to educate the children for whom they are responsible. Under considerable pressure to not become the next national laughing stock, the advisory council voted 8-4 to use the correct books. That's good news, but it ain't not over yet. This was only a preliminary vote, and the final…

Sapolsky on belief and biology

Robert M. Sapolsky is one of my favorite science writers — if you haven't read Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), The Trouble With Testosterone: And Other Essays On The Biology Of The Human Predicament(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), A Primate's Memoir(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), or Monkeyluv: And Other Essays on Our Lives as Animals (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), I suggest you get off your butt right now and visit your library or bookstore. He's a primatologist who studies the endocrinology and behavior of baboons, but he always presents his work in terms of the human condition. We aren't so…

How to get alpine to spell check your email

If you are using alpine as your email client, you may find that hitting ctrl-T to invoke a spell checker does not work, in alpine 1.0 as installed in Ubuntu. It is easy to fix. I looked around for the answer to this question, but it is a bit esoteric so there is very little, and what there is stands mainly as examples of the down side of community support. People state that the spell checker is not working, and others answer with various bits of advice that do not work at all because they are nothing other than vague guesses that do not address the problem. It is possible, even probable,…

YA Knee Update

A follow up on the earlier installment of "As the knee turns..." .... ouch. Don't day "as the knee turns...." In the video I showed two weeks ago, I raised my upper leg to the level at which my lower leg more or less dropped of its own accord perpendicular to the ground. I then extended my lower leg using all the abilities my quad muscles had at the time. In the following video I do the same thing, but with the brace on, so my quads are working against the weight of the brace. In the first video, that extension was very very weak. Had there been a headwind, I would not have been able to…

Oscar Post-Game

My detailed expert analysis of the Academy Awards presentation show: First off, did anyone else think it was strange that the best picture award was announced while the best director winner was barely off stage, and without any of the usual stuff that goes along with any given award happening first? Like a commercial, a wind up, a celebrity announcer, etc.? Was this the people who run "The Oscars" (as in the TV show) being pissed at the people who run "The Academy" for upping the number of Best Pic nominations from five to 10? I had been thinking lately about the fact that there are very…

The Calamari Wrestler

A recent article on Deep Sea News mentions the Ritual of 365 Points—since this is such an important reference to cephalophiliacs, I thought I'd repost my summary of a classic movie that hinges on it as a plot point. I have seen The Calamari Wrestler. It was…indescribable. I won't even try. The basic idea, though, is that it's about pro wrestling in Japan, with a dying wrestler who undergoes a magical transformation in Pakistan to keep him alive, which also allows him to become a super-star in the ring. He battles rivals to learn a heartwarming secret at the end. I've put a few frames below…

Which operating systems support USB 3.0?

Now that USB 3.0 is out, when will Linux get it? Well, Linux has it. Windows does not. Mac does not. Are you shocked? If so, you have just exposed a limitation on your own thinking. Linux supports more hardware (overall configuration and bits and piece) than any other system, by far. Linux is quicker to support hardware other than cases where proprietary drivers come out with the hardware from closed source companies, but Linux then ultimately tends to support those drivers sooner than other non-targeted OS systems do. In fact, let me tell you just how bad your thinking was on this, if…

Technology News

Has Bill Gates discovered drugs? What is the perfect desktop? Law against cyberbullying. Bill Gates at a recent press conference: "Mundie and Ballmer are idiots. Their talk about how open source software damages intellectual property or how Linux is a cancer, is moronic. When I heard these attacks I felt sick to my stomach. How could a company that I poured my blood, sweat and tears into spread these untruths? My conscience guides me, that's why I'm before you today." Don't believe it? Check it out! Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva Performance Compared on Phoronix Test Suite 1.0. "Ubuntu 8…

The 92nd Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle: Team Skeptic at the Ideology Olympics

It's that time again, the time that comes around once a fortnight for skeptical bloggers and blog readers to gather together to celebrate that best that skeptics have had to offer since the last time they gathered. It's time for the 92nd Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle. This time, it's hosted by Martin over at The Lay Scientist and it tells the tale of Team Skeptic at the Ideology Olympics, starting with a press conference: Team Skeptic Manager Martin gave a rousing press conference today as his team moved into their training centre in advance of the Ideology Olympics, but concerns remain…

Enema of the people? Or our blog mascot must make a pilgrimage

If you happen to be a blogger, has there ever been anything that you meant to blog about, but it totally slipped your mind? This is just such an item for me. Yes, multiple people e-mailed me about this on Friday, and for some reason in my amusement at David Kirby's antics over the weekend twisting a CDC report and then looking even more clueless as he modified his post in response to his errors being pointed out, producing a mangled mess that made even less sense than before, in all the fun, I totally forgot about the item. And my blog mascot is not at all pleased. Here's why: MOSCOW - A…

Lowess is great

One of the discussants in Brain and Behavioral Sciences of Seth Roberts's article on self-experimentation was by Martin Voracek and Maryanne Fisher. They had a bunch of negative things to say about self-experimentation, but as a statistician, I was struck by their concern about "the overuse of the loess procedure." I think lowess (or loess) is just wonderful, and I don't know that I've ever seen it overused. Curious, I looked up "Martin Voracek" on the web and found an article about body measurements from the British Medical Journal. The title of the article promised "trend analysis" and I…

"Gender and Race in Science Blogging" panel at the NC Science Blogging Conference

Suzanne E. Franks of Thus Spake Zuska and I are hosting a panel this coming weekend at the NC Science Blogging Conference, and we'd like your input. The title of the panel is "Gender and Race in Science Blogging". For now you can participate at the conference wiki by submitting your questions and comments but we are planning to webcast the panel so that it will be possible for you to participate even if you aren't attending. If you know of any great webcasting sites please let us know. I will be one of the three panelists along with ScienceWoman and Pat Campbell of Fairer Science. Each…

The science of memories

University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee (UWM) researcher Fred Helmstetter Ph.D. is trying to understand why human memory is so selective. Why, he asks, is it that amnesia patients can't remember their names or addresses, but can remember how to hold a fork? Dr. Helmstetter, a professor of psychology at UWM who researches the brain's regulation of memories, emotions and learning, explains that remembering 'what' is not the same as remembering 'how.' In a recent press release he explains that "different circuits in the brain are activated when you remember what you had for breakfast this morning…

The blue history of cyanide

Cyanides are old poisons, with a uniquely long, dark history, probably because they grow so bountifully around us. They flavor the leaves of the yew tree, flowers of the cherry laurel, the kernels of peach and apricot pits, the fat pale crunch of bitter almonds. They ooze in secretions of insects like millipedes, weave a toxic thread through cyanobacteria, mass in the floating blue-green algae along the edges of the murkier ponds and lakes, live in plants threaded through forests and fields. But cyanide didn't really become a widely used poison until the 18th century, beginning with some…

Hiatus continues, and an onion

My husband and I have been stranded by the ash cloud from Iceland. We are well-housed thanks to good friends and the strength of weak ties, so there is no need to worry about us. With luck, we'll be able to get home Tuesday the 27th. Blogging will continue to be sporadic until we're home. I couldn't let Yale's shortsighted decision to free-ride on open access pass without comment, however. This has always been a danger for gold open access: that libraries would protect their toll-access collection budgets by choosing to free-ride on others' support of open-access journals. It is wrong for any…

Tidbits, 18 February 2010

I'm home sick today, and not precisely looking forward to giving my class tonight because I really do feel wiped out. Fortunately, tidbits posts are easy… Denmark ponders the future of the research library. A thoughtful read for librarians; a good skim for scientists wondering how libraries will help them in future. Congratulations to Galaxy Zoo for its first published paper based on crowdsourced galaxy-classification data. May there be many more! Code is data too, says Chris Wiggins, arguing that you can't really judge results until you know what's been done to the data. An Economic…

Just in time for Halloween: Vampires

What could be more spooky than the idea of something sucking your blood while you are sleeping? Movies, TV shows and books about vampires abound these days. So what do some bats have in common with Dracula? The need to survive on blood alone. Vampire bats feed mainly off of livestock but have increasingly been feasting on humans. Besides being downright creepy, the big problem is that they are vectors for spreading rabies: So how do vampire bats find food? They are certainly better at finding veins to draw blood from than a phlebotomist-in-training. In fact, you can probably call them…

Mathematics

Here is a list of Basic Concept posts in Mathematics. Recently Added: Fractals by Karmen at Chaotic Utopia; Innumeracy by Mark Chu-Carroll at Good Math, Bad Math Statistics Normal Distribution by Mark Chu-Carroll at Good Math, Bad Math Mean, Median and Mode by Mark Chu-Carroll at Good Math, Bad Math Standard Deviation by Mark Chu-Carroll at Good Math, Bad Math Margin of Error by Mark Chu-Carroll at Good Math, Bad Math Correlation (and Causation, and Random Variables) by Mark Chu-Carroll at Good Math, Bad Math Percentage and percentage points by Kristjan Wager at Pro-Science Statistics…

The Art of Science Learning: Moving forward one step at a time

I am just now recovering from last week's Art of Science Learning conference in San Diego. For something that lasted just one-and-a-half days, there was an almost overwhelming amount of great presentations, great information sharing and exchange, and -- above all -- great people dedicated to moving the idea of the Art of Science Learning forward. When I first made plans to attend, I did so as an observer. However, soon after the presentations began on the first morning of the conference, I became an active and engaged participant. Each presentation provided me with a deeper understanding of…

The Fine Art of Creativity and Innovation

I was recently invited to teach a class for San Diego State University undergraduates interested in entrepreneurship: MGT 453.1 -- Creativity and Innovation. I accepted the invitation, and will begin teaching my brand-new class in the fall. However, there's just one problem: What will I teach? The good news is that I have an existing syllabus used by the current professor on which to model my own class. And as I reviewed the syllabus, it was no surprise to me that the arts are used to provide examples to students of how creativity and innovation work in the real world, and how they might be…

Art and Visual Representation at ScienceOnline2010

Last year we had a session on Art And Science and a workshop How To Paint Your Own Blog Pictures. At this year's conference we have more sessions that explore the visual aspects of science. Click on links to see what discussions have already started on these pages and add your questions and thoughts: Paint your blog images using a digital tablet led by Glendon Mellow Description: Get a chance to test out a digital tablet, and see why it's like having an entire art supply store on your computer. Beginning with tutorials on Glendon's blog before the conference, we'll try using Gimp, ArtRage…

Fun with celebratory gunfire

So the word is on the street that if you fire a bunch of bullets up in the air, they eventually end up falling back to earth at speeds capable of killing people. Great way to celebrate, eh? Celebratory gunfire injuries occur worldwide, and represent the ultimate in preventable injury. Incorvaia AN, Poulos DM, Jones RN, Tschirhart JM. Can a falling bullet be lethal at terminal velocity? Cardiac injury caused by a celebratory bullet. Ann Thorac Surg. 2007 Jan;83(1):283-4. Some dude was out celebrating New Year's in East Lansing, Michigan, and ended up in the hospital with a bullet in his…

8 Things of Absolutely No Consequence to Anybody But Me

Bora tagged me--and, as we all know, saying no to Bora means courting bad karma. So, we're gonna play a game. I will tell you 8 things about myself likely better left unsaid (see below) and then I will tag 8 other people and try to persuade them to do the same. Why? It's about sharing, people. Superfluous Information About the Author: 1) I once worked as a Call Box Operator. That person who told you to remain calm and wait for the highway patrol coulda been me. No joke. 2) I will watch any iteration of Pride and Prejudice no matter how stupid. I love it that much. 3) Left to my own devices, I…

Cruel and unusual

No matter how you feel about incarceration, it's a dangerous business. Inmates have high rates of serious transmissible diseases which aren't turned into the warden when they are released. Around 2.5 million people are held in American correctional facilities. HIV rates for imprisoned men 1.6% and for women is 2.4% (compared to about 0.4% among Americans as a whole). About 4.5% of inmates reported sexual victimization. Of the facilities that provide hepatitis B vaccination, 65% target "high risk" groups only. Tuberculosis rates are also very high. This is just a sampling of the horrifying…

I'm not OK with this

This morning I woke up early, showered, and dressed. Then my wife and I woke up our daughter, who seeing it was dark did protest loudly. But we got her out of bed, and a few minutes later she was her usual happy loquacious self at the breakfast table. We got her dressed in a navy dress with white polka dots and black patent leather shoes, straightened her hair, took some pictures, and got in the car. We parked about a half a block from the school and put her back pack on her. She wanted me to carry it because it was so heavy (sic). Then she wanted "uppy"---also a non-starter. A…

China---a (medical) capitalist paradise

China's a communist country, totally different from the capitalist U.S., right? They probably have some sort of socialized health system that makes Canada look downright libertarian. Right? No. I was talking to a friend (who I'll call "Pu") this week. She was surprised that I had to bend over backward to get someone insulin. Pu: "In China, this would never happen." Pal: "Really? You mean because the State would take care of it?" Pu: "No. In China, you pay a deposit for your care, and have to pay as you go, or that's it. Can't afford insulin? Tough. Go home and die." Hmmm...socialist…

Let the poo fly again!

Good news! One of my favorite skeptical bloggers, Matt at Pooflingers Anonymous, has ended his blogging hiatus. I was sad to see him announce in early January that he was leaving the blogosphere , and I'm happy to see that he's back in business. It turns out that the constant intense exposure to the rampant credulity of creationists like Kent Hovind and the writers of the Evolution Cruncher had made him fear for his critical thinking skills and even his mental health. (I warned him about it at the time, but would he listen? Nooooo!) He had to take a break just to recover. Now he's back,…

Finishing off Kaplan

I haven't commented on Kaplan's shoddy critique of the Lancet because Daniel Davies already demolished it here. Kaplan did have one argument that Davies did not address, so I will deal with that in this post. Kaplan wrote: The survey team simply could not visit some of the randomly chosen clusters; the roads were blocked off, in some cases by coalition checkpoints. So the team picked other, more accessible areas that had received similar amounts of damage. But it's unclear how they made this calculation. In any case, the detour destroyed the survey's…

Quack updates

A few news items of import: Andrew Wakefield, formerly a licensed to practice medicine in England, has officially lost that privilege.  Others have covered this more comprehensively than I'd ever be able to, but this is big news.  Wakefield is the father of the modern anti-vaccine movement.  His study of a putative relationship between the MMR vaccine and autism led to mass rejection of vaccination and a resurgence in many vaccine-preventable diseases.  After decades of relative quiescence, anti-vaccination ideas became popular again, especially among the rich and famous, but also among…

Kevin Trudeau sentenced to 10 years: File under "it couldn't happen to a nicer guy"

Although I don't want to distract (too much) from an interview I'm flogging today, I can't help but take note of an lovely development in the world of quackery. Everybody's favorite quackery promoter and financial scammer Kevin Trudeau has been sentenced to ten years in prison for his scams: Best-selling author Kevin Trudeau, whose name became synonymous with late-night TV pitches, was sentenced to 10 years in prison Monday for bilking consumers through ubiquitous infomercials for his book, "The Weight Loss Cure 'They' Don't Want You to Know About." As he imposed the sentence prosecutors had…

Congratulations to Kim Stagliano of Age of Autism...

...you've received some well-deserved recognition! I can't think of a more deserving up-and-coming antivaccine activist to be inducted into this most "prestigious" of groups of American Loons! I've written about Stagliano's science- and logic-challenged posts many times over the last few years, but it's good to see that others have noticed as well. From the citation: Diagnosis: Ignorant, ardent loon who are on the verge of taking the anti-vaxx movement well into TimeCube territory. The fact that she is unable to avoid a fallacy in every other sentence she writes should not be taken to…

Antivaccine quackery: You be Orac today!

Some antivaccine (and quack, but I repeat myself) tropes come up time and time again, and I've blogged about them time and time again. Obviously, at times this can get a bit repetitive, particularly when I've been blogging nearly every day for eight years. On the other hand, even after eight years, I still regularly come across new variants (almost always mixed with the old, naturally) of common quack and antivaccine (but I repeat myself again) tropes. After having written about such topics so many times over so many years, I sometimes wonder if I'm getting through to my readers. So I decided…

Nerd Fashion: Sandals with Socks Edition

My baymate and I started a little discussion about lab fashion. Why? Well I'm a pretty ardent wearer of sandals, I'll wear them until late fall if I have to. I'll wear them with jeans too. But under no circumstances will I wear sandals with socks. We then listed all the faculty who combine these clothing items on a regular basis (sorry, the list is confidential). This brings me to my question to all you out there is: why wear sandals with socks? (And why does the sandals with socks phenotype correlate with being in research?) Now while we were on the topic we asked a deeper, in some sense…

Exponential Decay of Quality Data

We've noticed that our cumulative knowledge of any individual process is inversely proportional to the number of researchers striving (i.e. contaminating) to gather data. Take APC, no not that APC, but the Adenomatous Polyposis Coli ... too many people study the damn thing and ... who knows what it does. And the Golgi? Who knows where it goes in Mitosis? (and frankly who cares) But if our theory is correct, we're in big trouble. From the not so latest Molecular Cell: The biomedical literature is growing at a double-exponential pace; over the last 20 years, the total size of MEDLINE (the…

Daisy chain house swapping

All my life I assumed hermit crabs deal with moving house the same way us humans do. When our living space gets a bit too cramped, we find a better-suited one, vacate the old one, and move. It's a fairly self-centered process and we rarely think about who ends up in our old space. Well, I was wrong. Biologists from Tufts University and the New England Aquarium recently published a paper in the journal, Behavioral Ecology, on the use of social networking by hermit crabs looking for new digs. They report that when a solitary hermit crab finds a housing upgrade, the overwhelming majority of…

Gay Penguins Steal Straight Couples' Eggs

A pair of gay penguins at Polar Land in Harbin, north east China has taken to stealing the eggs of straight couples and leaving rocks in place to fool their victims. The penguins, named Anderson Cooper and Clay*** by the zoo keepers, have been outed by their fellow penmates and have since been ostracized by the flock. Fearing for the stress levels of the flock, keepers have taken Anderson and Clay out of their enclosure and segrated them alone in a pen of their own. "Did you see little miss happy feet the other day? That new beak gloss was a travesty against all things good in this world…

One man's squirrel is another man's brush possum...

One of Zooillogix's readers, Tweet Gainsborough-Waring (awesome name btw), recently sent me these photos of ring tailed possums (the red ones) and brush possums (the grey ones), which she snapped on her way out to pizza in Brisbane, Australia. She pointed out that these furry little guys are fairly common in her neck of the woods, but to me they are exotic, so I'm sharing them. So what's common in your neighborhood that clueless tourists might find fascinating? Growing up in New England, it was these adorable little guys: In Japan, so I understand, the following fauna are quite common:…

"New Gold Rush" off Africa

Seafloor mining continues to gain popularity in response to discoveries of diamond beds off Namibia and mineral deposits off Papua New Guinea and New Zealand. Today the Cape Business News announced another player bidding for these deep riches, the Cape Town based Marine and Mineral Projects. The company was responsible for the construction of the remote crawler used on the Peace in Africa, a De Beers Consolidated Mines owned ship that was converted into a floating diamond mine in a mammoth two year project. An example of a deep-sea crawler is shown above from Seascape Company. The full…

The Race for the Arctic

More on the race to claim the Arctic. The Russian "scientific" operation was a sham. Despite the fact that a huge number of people were involved in the mission, it was more of a tourist trip than a scientific expedition. Two foreigners paid a substantial part of the expedition costs. According to Novaya Gazeta, the Swede Frederik Paulsen and the Australian Mike McDowel each payed 100,000 USD per day for their participation. Both men joined the two mini-subs, the Mir-1 and Mir-2, to the 4200 meter deep sea bed by the North Pole. The expedition was headed by Artur Chiligarov, deputy speaker in…

On This Episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous...

For the ultra rich in the next decade the Waldorf-Astoria is probably going to be a bit passe. "My pomeranians and I had spent every spring in the Waldorf, but now will it has become ever so cliche!" Luckily, this swath of society simply need to bookmark bornrich.org. whose "sole aim is to help you spend all your hard-earned money on the snootiest thingmazig around. Our people are working around the clock to find ways to empty your wallet and make you bankrupt." Last week bornrich.org covered the Top 10 Futuristic Luxury Hotels. Of the elite list 4 are located in outerspace, 3 in warm…

Pig Butt or Marine Worm?

From MBARI: This is a worm? This photograph of the newly named worm shows its mouth, which typically faces downward as the animal drifts about 1,000 meters (3,300 feet) below the ocean surface. Image: Karen Osborn (c) 2006 MBARI The picture is of a new marine worm, Chaetopterus pugaporcinus, that dwells at 1000m.  Its Latin name translates into "Chaetopterid worm that looks liek th rump of a pig.  It has a segemented body like other polychaetes but the middle segments are inflated.  The posterior and anterior segments are compressed against the inflated segments.  One of the…

Public Release of Ocean Priorities Plan

Tomorrow (Jan 26) will see the public release of Charting the Course for Ocean Science in the United States for the Next Decade: An Ocean Research Priorities Plan and Implementation Strategy which outlines the national ocean research priorities for the United States for the next ten years. The public event will be held at 1pm at the National Academy of Sciences building in Washington, DC. From the press release: This document takes a fresh approach in considering the ocean as a dynamic system rather than attempting to identify research needs based on historical academic disciplines or…