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The Forever Mortgage

No money down, but the payments go on forever.  The only people who win are the bankers and the contractors.  We make it easy to get in.  But like herpes and condominiums, it is hard to get rid of. When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was Starship Troopers, (1959).  It was written by a guy (Robert A. Heinlein)who was medically unable to be in a combat role in World War II.   In Starship Troopers, the planet Earth is ambushed by an enemy, but ultimately wins the war decisively.  This is done with just the right combination of patriotism, leadership, righteousness, brainpower, and…

Glacier Loss Illustrated

Yet another photo from href="http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=17644">NASA's Earth Observatory page, showing yet more evidence of what carbon dioxide hath wrought.   In the past 125 years, the Athabasca Glacier has lost half of its volume and receded more than 1.5 kilometers (0.93 miles), leaving hills of rock in its place. Its retreat is visible in this photo, where the glacier's front edge looms several meters behind the tombstone-like marker that indicates the edge of the ice in 1992. The Athabasca Glacier is not alone in its retreat: Since 1960…

Medicare "Advantage"

Sometimes newspapers raise more questions than they answer.  In the case of this WaPo editorial about Medicare, I find myself wishing that they had done a little more research. href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/04/AR2007050401871.html">Unsustainable Medicare Fixes for the program's funding will be needed soon. Saturday, May 5, 2007; Page A16 THE RELEASE last week of the annual report of the Medicare trustees underscores an unavoidable fact that too many politicians have nonetheless been avoiding for too long: Of all the entitlement programs,…

Ham is rich in irony

The LA Times did a story on those wacky Catholic geocentrists who read the Bible and insist that, by a literal interpretation of the words therein, the earth must be at the center of the universe, with everything else rotating about it. They quote verses and everything, so actually, in a very literal sense, they're right that the Bible does imply a very strange folk physics. But the story had to go further, and got a quote from…Ken Ham. Ken Ham. I guess it's kind of appropriate. You're doing a story about goofy literalist lunatics, and he is one of the biggest. But still, it seems like there…

InaDWriMo Week 1 Progress

Eek! We're one week into November already? How in the world did that happen? I've made good progress, but I still have *so* much left to do. I've already told you how my writing month got off to a start, but below the fold you can catch up on the rest of my progress. Sunday Nov 2: Added final sentences to proposal. Slightly reorganized methods section to clarify. Now have draft complete except what is needed from co-PI. Sent off to collaborator. (~150 words) Monday Nov 3: Wrote budget justification (499 words.) Tuesday Nov 4: Election day, too distracting to get huge amounts done, but…

Donors Choose: The home stretch, and Scienceblogs chips in!

This is it, folks - we're coming round into the home stretch of DonorsChoose, with one week left in October. And there is some great news - ScienceBlogs has decided to donate FIFTEEN THOUSAND DOLLARS to Donors Choose, distributed among the bloggers who are participating! I'm still checking about whether this is participating *blogs* or *bloggers* -- if the latter, that means Sciencewomen will have $1430 to distribute among our projects, woo hoo! So we want your help on deciding how to distribute the funds. Update at 11:34 am: Sb says $715 per blog, not blogger. However, we can still make…

The tyranny of the email

There are 999 messages in my inbox. An inordinately large number of them are flagged "urgent." There are 1710 messages in my "to sort" mailbox. This is a local folder where I dump messages from my inbox and outbox when I start getting error messages about having too many messages in my IMAP boxes. I am afraid of scrolling through my email because I will undoubtedly find a lot of things I have forgotten to do. And I don't have any more time to do them now as when they came in. I find I'm actually terrified of my computer, repository of all email-related requests, which makes my…

Not so much, actually.

I'm part of a team submitting a proposal to NASA, and as such, I had to register in the NASA proposal tracking system, creatively named NSPIRES. But I was a little less than inspired when I got to the first step of the registration process. The screen shot and my analysis are below the fold. The last name on my birth certificate has nothing to do with my professional identity and I don't want an automatically generated username (or similar) that I'm not going to remember because I would never use my birth last name for that purpose. My name change didn't come through marriage, but 81% of US…

Magnificent momma

This is one beautiful plesiosaur, Polycotylus latippinus. (Click for larger image) (A) Photograph and (B) interpretive drawing of LACM 129639, as mounted. Adult elements are light brown, embryonic material is dark brown, and reconstructed bones are white. lc indicates left coracoid; lf, left femur; lh, left humerus; li, left ischium; lp, left pubis; rc, right coracoid; rf, right femur; rh, right humerus; ri, right ischium; and rp, right pubis. The unique aspect of this specimen is that it's the only pregnant plesiosaur found; the fore and hind limbs bracket a jumble of bones from a juvenile…

Synaesthesia: The hidden sense

Synaesthesia is a condition in which stimuli of one type evoke sensations in another sensory modality. For example, hearing particular sounds might evoke strong sensations of colour or (more rarely) words might evoke strong tastes in the mouth. In The Hidden Sense, social scientist Cretien van Crampen investigates synaesthesia from an artisitic and scientific perspective. He interviews a number of synaesthetes, and finds that none of them considers their condition to be an impairment. He also describes the profound influence that synaesthesia has had on artists such as Kandinsky and van Gogh…

Imaging the vegetative state

In The New Yorker, Jerome Groopman discusses the work of Adrian Owen, a researcher at Cambridge University's Cognitive and Brain Sciences Unit who has been using functional imaging to assess patients in a vegetative state. Neurologists face major problems in diagnosing the persistent vegetative state (PVS) and other "disorders of consciousness" such as the minimally conscious state (MCS), not least because there is no reliable means of assessing the level of consciousness in patients. Large proportions of patients in such conditions are therefore misdiagnosed, and, until recently, most…

AQIS'10

AQIS'10 submission and registration is now open: ============================== ============================== The 10th Asian Conference on Quantum Information Science (AQIS'10) http://www.qci.jst.go.jp/aqis10/ Tutorials: August 27, 2010 Conference: August 28 - 31, 2010 The University of Tokyo, Japan Submission Deadline (2 to 10 pages): June 14 (Monday), 2010 Notification of Acceptance: July 12 (Monday), 2010 Final version (2 pages): July 30 (Friday), 2010 ============================== ============================== Apologies for cross-postings. Please send…

Hella! Huh? Meh. + "How Many Licks? Or, How to Estimate Damn Near Anything"

What prefix do you use for 1027? If Austin Sendak has his way, it will be hella (also Time article here.) The diameter of the observable universe is about one hellameter. As a fellow member of the club "people from Yreka, CA who do physics," I strongly support Austin's idea. Indeed it now tops my list of proposed prefix changes, a list that includes "tiny-" for 10-5 and my former front runner for 1027 "bronto-." But the real question is what do we call 10x when we don't know x? I suggest the prefix "huh". Examples: "My answer of about 5 huh-people wasn't good enough to land me a job at…

Raging pareidolia strikes again

This is just kind of sad, but it's something I've seen several times (Ed "Old As Coal" Conrad, the Seazoria guy): someone sees random clutter in some collections of rocks, perceives a pattern, and charges off, convinced that they have discovered amazing fossils of improbable creatures. In this case, the fellow has found mottled patterns in seashore rocks, and a few old bones, and has decided that he has uncovered a treasure trove of pterodactyl skeletons. He has also decided that these nondescript lumps must be worth a lot of money: $100,000. Pterodactyl with Tail's, Pterodactyl's,…

Ted Nugent Weighs In On Gun Control (The Sound of One Neuron Firing)

According to nutty gun-lover Ted Nugent, school shootings like Virginia Tech could be avoided if we all toted guns, and has the anecdotes to prove it! There are so many gems in this piece. For example: Already spineless gun control advocates are squawking like chickens with their tiny-brained heads chopped off, making political hay over this most recent, devastating Virginia Tech massacre, when in fact it is their own forced gun-free zone policy that enabled the unchallenged methodical murder of 32 people. No one was foolish enough to debate Ryder truck regulations or ammonia nitrate…

This PC Fan Wants To Be Convinced Apples Are Worth It

Which are you? Which am I??!? My PC, a 2 year old bottom-of-the-line Averatec is on life support. As in, I gotta start planning its funeral quite soon. I can't say that our life together has been blissful, or that I'm even sad to see it go. And if you wanna know the truth (shhhh), I may have even had a hand in its demise. I'm quite abusive to my technological partner, and I don't mind saying so. I'm ready to drop it like its hot (which sometimes the sub-par fan lets it get VERY hot). About six months ago, one of the Function keys stopped working. As in it is always depressed (ie, ON. I'm…

Kinda Gives Powerhouse Gym a New Twist....

Walking around the gym, watching all those people spinning or walking or treading or ellipsing....wouldn't it make good sense to harness all that rat-race energy as power? Could you imagine getting a free gym membership for spending a certain amount of time on power-generating machines? Well, seems plausible enough, and may actually be coming to A Gym Near You. The California Fitness club in Hong Kong is among the first to jump on the green energy treadmill -- stairmaster and cross-training machines at the gym have been wired up to the building's lighting system. If other gyms follow suit, it…

What's in a Twinkie?

Well, nothing good thats for sure. But my SciBling Dr. Charles has a interesting (if disgusting) post up on the inner life of a Twinkie. I was most interested in the notorious "is it a liquid or solid?" filling: *The Filling - primarily made of shortening (partially hydrogenated vegetable oil and beef fat). Also contains Polysorbate 60, a gooey chemical derived from corn, palm oil, and petroleum that substitutes for cream and eggs at a fraction of the cost. Cellulose gum gives the creme a "creamy" feel. Artificial vanillin is made in petroleum plants, avoiding the labor needed to hand-…

Fireworks + Gas Works + Seattle = environmental lawsuit

In Seattle, a venerable fireworks show has become the subject of a legal dispute between locals and the city - and since this is Seattle, it's only to be expected that the dispute is over environmental impacts. But it's not the fireworks themselves at issue - it's the fact that the city holds the show in Gas Works Park, a remediated coal gasification plant. I previously wrote about Gas Works Park back in 2007, when I joined a behind-the scenes tour with one of the original designers responsible for the remediation. You can see the photos I took of the majestic steampunk ruins of the plant…

Love: the neurochemical cocktail of insanity

Larry Young has written a rather ambitious essay for Nature that skims over the prairie vole/AVPR1A research, breasts as erotic objects, and evidence of dopamine-based mother love on its way to a "view of love as an emergent property of a cocktail of ancient neuropeptides and neurotransmitters." Young then asks whether "recent advances in the biology of pair bonding mean it won't be long before an unscrupulous suitor could slip a pharmaceutical 'love potion' in our drink." Unlikely? Maybe - but his point that antidepressants like Prozac influence the same neurotransmitters implicated in love…

Updated: Arsenic-based DNA? Well. . . sort of.

Okay, you've probably heard the buzz about the "arsenic organism" supposedly discovered in Mono Lake, and how NASA's 2pm press conference today will reveal more. I'll be honest, I wasn't that excited about it - extremophile bacteria metabolize some freaky stuff, and it seemed pretty clear the announcement wasn't about extraterrestrial life. But Gizmodo is now claiming the critter has arsenic based DNA. Did April Fools Day relocate to December? I'll believe this story when I hear it from the researcher herself, but that would be SO COOL. I'm getting my wide-eyed-awestruck-biologist hat out of…

Edward Tufte auctions off his library

In less than a month (December 2nd), Christie's will auction off Edward Tufte's library - an idiosyncratic collection of first edition books, plates, prints, and ephemera that the dataviz guru calls his "Museum of Cognitive Art," and I call "Jessica's Christmas List." I'm not going to sample low-rez images of the lots here, because there's a stunning slideshow, complete with curation, at the Christie's website. If you've got ten minutes, this is virtual antiquarian dataviz windowshopping at its best. There appear to be 160 lots; Tufte's website describes it as "200 rare books, including major…

Would you like an octopus on your beetle?

scarobeus cornepleura Mauricio Ortiz The technically gifted Mauricio Ortiz is originally from Costa Rica, but now lives in London, where his artistic star is on the rise. His octo-beetle, above, was recently selected to appear in a deck of playing cards as part of a high-profile British charity fundraiser, alongside a card by British bad boy Damien Hirst. The octo-beetle is one of a number of painstaking drawings in the style of scientific illustrations, and inspired by Wunderkammern, the "wonder cabinets" of the Renaissance. Rather than starting with completely unfamiliar wonders, though,…

More right-wing distortions of Breivik's ideology

Jon Stewart of the Daily Show did a marvelous job of showing how right-wingers were desperately straining to get out from under the taint of Breivik's clearly extremist nationalist/rightist/Christian/anti-Muslim ideology. They're clearly in denial. The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c In the Name of the Fodder www.thedailyshow.com Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook But here's another case. The Discovery Institute, under the name of that wretched 'scholar' John West, has gone through Breivik's manifesto…

Plagiarism or convergent evolution?

Thylacine Dingo Comparison Carl Buell In Slate, Matt Gaffney explains how the constraints of a given system - in this case crossword puzzles - may lead to suspiciously similar yet independent solutions. Gaffney wrote a Poe-themed crossword with the elements BRAVE NEW WORLD, INTRAVENOUS DRIP, CONTRAVENE, COBRA VENOM, and VENTNOR AVENUE (all of which have "raven" embedded in them). He was very proud of his puzzle, but. . . I soon learned that I wasn't as clever as I thought. Over the next couple of days, I started getting e-mails from solvers telling me that my theme had been done before. In…

Poem of the Week: A Myth of Devotion by Louise Gluck

You know the story of Persephone right. Here is a clever poem about it by Louise Gluck. A Myth of Devotion by Louise Gluck When Hades decided he loved this girl he built for her a duplicate of earth, everything the same, down to the meadow, but with a bed added. Everything the same, including sunlight, because it would be hard on a young girl to go so quickly from bright light to utter darkness Gradually, he thought, he'd introduce the night, first as the shadows of fluttering leaves. Then moon, then stars. Then no moon, no stars. Let Persephone get used to it slowly. In the end, he thought…

Michael Barone on the Likelihood of a Midterm Upset

Whatever you think about Michael Barone's personal views, he knows more about the history of American politics than any man alive. Here is an article he wrote in the WSJ about the history of party changes in Congress during second-term off-year elections. Interesting stuff. Money quote: All of which leaves me with the conclusion that ideas are more important than partisan vote counts. Democrats could not go beyond the New Deal from 1938 to 1958, because they had not persuaded most Americans to go Roosevelt's way until 13 years after his death. Similarly, Republicans never had reliable…

Surrender, don't cull

From Linda Holmes, a poignant post about how the deluge of information makes it impossible to scratch the surface in a single lifetime: there are really only two responses if you want to feel like you're well-read, or well-versed in music, or whatever the case may be: culling and surrender. Culling is the choosing you do for yourself. It's the sorting of what's worth your time and what's not worth your time. It's saying, "I deem Keeping Up With The Kardashians a poor use of my time, and therefore, I choose not to watch it." It's saying, "I read the last Jonathan Franzen book and fell asleep…

Family Sues Radio Station Over Water Intoxication Death

I've covered the water intoxication death of Jennifer Strange, first describing it here, with an update here. Her death was the result of a water-drinking contest organized by a radio station in Sacramento, with the prize being a Nintendo Wii. to date, the DJ's in charge of the stunt have been fired and the station was conducting an internal investigation. A new development in the debacle is a wrongful death suit which is being brought by Strange's family, against the radio station that green-lighted the fatal stunt ("Hold your Wee for a Wii"). (Continued below.....) ....it seems that the…

Deadly Water Intoxication Stunt For a Wii

A stupid radio stunt, where contestants had to keep drinking water and were not allowed to urinate, has resulted in the water intoxification death of one of the participants. A woman who competed in a radio station's contest to see how much water she could drink without going to the bathroom died of water intoxication, the coroner's office said Saturday. Jennifer Strange, 28, was found dead Friday in her suburban Rancho Cordova home hours after taking part in the "Hold Your Wee for a Wii" contest in which KDND 107.9 promised a Nintendo Wii video game system for the winner. "She said to one…

The International Day against Stoning

I hope this is something we can all agree on. Today is the The International Day against Stoning, a consciousness-raising event organized by Mina Ahadi, Patty Debonitas, and Maryam Namazie to call attention to the fact that some countries still practice public stonings as punishments for petty offenses against propriety. There are people in prison right now, awaiting that day when authorities drag them into the public square and people murder them by battering them with rocks. As you know Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani is still languishing in prison. The authorities recently mentioned her case…

Some Questions for Irene Pepperberg.......

I'm about to send these questions out to Dr. Pepperberg (hopefully for next week's Grey Matters), and wanted some feedback. Also, please suggest questions if you have some! Q. Initially your research background was not in comparative cognition and language. How did you become interested in this field? Q: Human language processing and production relies on specific brain structures (Broca's and Wernicke's areas). Are there thought to be equivalent structures in the avian brain? Q. Why might parrots have evolved to be such superior mimics, and how would this serve them well in the wild? Q. Do…

The Day the Mississippi Flowed Backwards

OK, this has nothing to do with cognitive science, but today's quake felt throughout the southeast reminded me of a little history that some people may not be aware of. In Tennessee, there is only one large natural lake, Reelfoot Lake, in the far western part of the state just south of Kentucky, near the Mississippi River. It's an exceptionally beautiful place, with bald eagles and bald cypress trees (in the picture below), but what's really cool about it is how it was formed. In 1811 and 1812, there were dozens of earthquakes, including 4 very large ones, in thea area around west Tennessee…

The Neuroscience of Playing Chicken

Theory of mind, or how we think about what's going on in other people's heads, continues to be one of the hottest topics in cognitive science today. A debate continues to rage over whether we reason about other people's thoughts by means of theory-like propositional knowledge, or through simulation (i.e., putting yourself in their shoes... in your head). Since psychologists are unlikely to solve this debate by themselves, they've called in the artillery - cognitive neuroscientists. And those buggers have come up with some interesting ways to figure out where mentalizing (another name for…

'Ceci n'est pas la Costa Brava': fake photo story gets weird

Last week the Guardian ran an amusing story of photo-fakery by enthusiastic Spanish tourism board employees: Spain's Costa Brava uses Bahamas photograph in ad campaign Tourist board denies being deceitful by using picture from tropical islands to advertise beaches in north-eastern Spain It's only afterwards that things get weird... Quite predictably, it turns out that sometimes the pictures in holiday adverts aren't actually representational of the destination. Who knew? The photo of an idyllic deserted beach used in a campaign for the Costa Brava was actually taken in the Bahamas. For…

Prolactin and Multiple Sclerosis

Scientific American makes note of a new finding regarding multiple sclerosis, first reported in The Journal of Neuroscience.   One of the big shifts in our understanding of brain structure and function, over the past decade or so, has been our improved understanding of the process of href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurogenesis">neurogenesis in adults.  It is more more common than had been assumed previously.  It turns out that neurons are not the only brain cells that change in such dynamic ways.  New href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroglia">neuroglia can be generated as…

Lou Dobbs understands the problem, but not the answer

I just saw this video on Biocurious: And I have to agree with Dobbs, postdocs are underpaid largely due to an oversupply of foreign PhDs (and yes, I am a foreigner, although I received my PhD here in the US). This is why women drop out of science, this is why there most blogs written by postdocs are filled with complaints. And yes, this is why that old argument that Americans are just not interested in science is hogwash. But do you really think that the solution is to build bigger walls around the nation? This is America, a nation built on immigration, and now you want to prevent the…

Let's talk about facts this election - Part VIII - John McCain DOES NOT support the troops

We ask our volunteer army to go out and fight for our country, the least we could do in return is to treat them well, regardless of whether any one of us supported the decision to send the army in the first place. One of the best pieces of legislation ever to be passed was the GI bill - it send many WWII vets off to college and helped build the large middle class. In contrast, the Bush administration has treated its soldiers and vet like crap. But let's focus on John McCain, of all politicians we should have expected that HE would have supported legislation that would have improved the lives…

Who's a clever boy then?

Self-recognition was long believed to be unique to humans. However, it was established more than 30 years ago that the great apes are capable of recognizing themselves in the mirror, and more recently it has been found that dolphins and elephants can too. Now Prior et al provide the first evidence of mirror self-recognition in a non-mammalian species. In this film clip from the supplementary materials which accompany the paper, a magpie (which is actually a female) realizes that it has a mark on the side of its head after seeing its relection in the mirror. It then removes the mark by…

Hearing voices (of advertisers)

Here's an article about a sophisticated type of advertising which uses hypersonic sound: New Yorker Alison Wilson was walking down Prince Street in SoHo last week when she heard a woman's voice right in her ear asking, "Who's there? Who's there?" She looked around to find no one in her immediate surroundings. Then the voice said, "It's not your imagination." Indeed it isn't. It's an ad for "Paranormal State," a ghost-themed series premiering on A&E this week. The billboard uses technology manufactured by Holosonic that transmits an "audio spotlight" from a rooftop speaker so that the…

Trip to NYC

I wasn't around for a bit - as you can tell I was overloading. Thus it was time to head down to the city. So Friday we packed our bags and headed down to NYC. Highlights from the trip: Although I thought that it was fading, the gallery scene in Chelsea was alive and well. On Saturday we not only gallery hopped, but attended 3 vernisages, all in the 22nd street area. A highlight of our outing was Boyd Webb's surrealistic photos of people trapped in a carpeted sea. Other notable exhibits are Wayne Atkins at the Taxter & Spengemann, and Darren Almond's large "digital" clock. We didn't go…

Show me the energy

OK I'm a cell biologist. I spend my time at a 'scope (as we microscopists like to say). And I have one thing to say to you and only one thing ... my brain is fried. Here is my theory, if you sit in front of a microscope in the dark for more than four hours, energy is sucked out of your body, through your eyeballs and gets transferred to ... well I'm not sure. You are left feeling like a deflated Dictyostelium fruiting body that has let out all of its spores. This lost energy, where did it go? Perhaps it dissipates into pure thermal energy, or maybe it ends up in the secret place where all the…

A weekend in NYC

Last week was too stressful - although by Friday afternoon I had put together the pieces of the puzzle and it all makes sense (I'd tell you more about it, potentially I've stumbled upon a really cool little "cellular circuit", but I'd rather publish it first. Mother Nature has so many neat tricks up it's sleeve.) To relieve that stress, we took off on the Chinatown bus (actually we took the "Boston Deluxe" which travels between the Prudential and 86th street on the Upper East Side. Highlights of this trip: - Santa Con (i.e. a thousand drunk Santas running around central park). One of the…

Non-Coding RNAs

There is a nice post by Coffee Mug at Gene Expression on non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs). This post was provoked by a paper in Annual Review of Neuroscience. In light of my post on the recent Eric Lander and David Spector's talks, here's a snippet: There are more ncRNAs than you thought: - Half of the "full-length long Japan" library of human cDNA clones appear to be non-coding. Anti-jargon: cDNA (complementary DNA) is sequence read off of RNA backwards. This group tried to take a very large scale unbiased picture of the RNAs floating around in human cells and did bioinformatics to guess whether…

An mRNA Nuclear Export Factor Regulates Itself

Biology is filled with feedback loops and other natural buffers to promote homeostasis. In the latest Nature, there is a ... cute ... paper about how the RNA export factor Tap (aka NXF1) mediates the nuclear export of an alternatively spliced form of it's own mRNA transcript. (For more background on the mechanism of nuclear export of mRNA, click here). Viruses like the Mason-Pfizer monkey virus can exploit our mRNA export pathway by having their transcripts bind directly to export factors such as Tap. The RNA elements that bind Tap are called constitutive export elements (CTEs). In a hunt for…

It's amazing how one "ad" can bring out all this emotion

So Friday I posted a photo of an ad that went up in our lunchroom. The feedback was very indicative of the current mood of postdocs within the life sciences: frustration. It all started with this ad: And it sparked an interesting series of comments. The type of discussion that our profession needs. I'm not cheering for one side - but here are my two cents. PIs, I understand, some of you look at this ad and you see passion, dedication and all these other virtues. And many postdocs (me included) see this ad as representative of an academic system gone amok. Sure we all value working hard and…

2007 DSN Education Fundapalooza Report and Prizes From Seed

If you haven't heard our Seed overlords are offering $15,000 in matching funds. Seed is also offering some sweet prizes to donors which you can enter to win: 1 fresh, new iPod nano 21 "Seed Hearts Threadless" tee shirts (design here ) 21 ScienceBlogs mugs 21 subscriptions to Seed magazine 9 copies of "The Best American Science Writing 2007" Sweet indeed! Interested? Just forward your email reciept from DonorsChoose to scienceblogs@gmail.com. There well be three prize drawings, each on a Tuesday: Tuesday the 15th, Tuesday the 22nd, and Tuesday the 29th (3 Tees, 7 mug, 7 subscriptions,…

Many Fish Emit Red Light...

While Andrew wows you with such exciting facts as What Kind of Hay to Feed an Oryx from the AZA, I thought I'd cover some actual bizarre zoological news this week. A group of ichthyologists have recently made a startling discovery, one that was literally glowing right before their eyes. This fish subsists on a diet of the pious and the weak. Conventional marine biological wisdom (which some say is an oxymoron, oh ZINGA DING DING, Kevin Z!!!) has always assumed that fish at certain depths have no capacity to see red wavelengths. The sun's red rays do not penetrate past a certain point…

Reader's Poll: Komodo Dragon Rampages

For centuries local villagers who lived around what is now Komodo National Park in Indonesia fed slaughtered animals to their neighbors, giant Komodo dragons. The locals believe that the dragons are the reincarnation of their ancestors and townsfolk, and would leave offerings of dead meat at the jungle's edge to keep the massive predators at bay. About a decade ago, however, they were forced to stop by their own government working with the American non-profit, the Nature Conservancy. Now they're blaming these groups for a recent spate of Komodo dragon attacks (including the death by bone-…

Quantum mechanics for fourth graders.

I had my kids with me at my office and needed to keep them occupied for a small chunk of time while I attended to business. The younger offspring immediately called dibs on the "Celebrating Chemistry" markerboard. The elder offspring, creeping up on 9 years old, asked plaintively, "What can I do?" I scanned my office bookshelves. Given that I am trying to minimize the number of frustrating parent-teacher conferences in the coming school year, I passed right by the Nietzsche. After a moment's hesitation, I pulled down my copy of David Z. Albert's Quantum Mechanics and Experience.…