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Bear Attacks

Animals eating1 people has always been an interest of mine, and bear attacks are among my favorite. As you know, I've got a few of my own stories, though I don 't know if I ever told this one. There were two of us canoe-camping in a state park in the Adirondacks. You had to park your car at a ranger station, sign in, get a canoe, and paddle across the lake to a distant spot. Turns out, I left the lights on in the car during that first part. This will become important in a moment. So, I'm sitting there in front of a little camp fire cooking up some stew. To my right is a bag of food…

John McCain and Newt Gingrich are acting like Middle School Bullies

I'd love to describe the details to you but I don't think I can ever do as good a job as Representative Henry Waxman and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. They wrote a letter to McCain and Gingrich. Gave 'em a good shellacking, they did. I love this letter so much I'm giving it to you three times. First, as a picture of the letter because it is so cool looking. Then, as a transcript so it is searchable. Then, as a link to a PDF file. And now, here is the text, from here: February 20, 2014 The Honorable John McCain 241 Russell Senate Office Building Washington, DC 20510 The Honorable Newt…

Who won the Bill Nye - Ken Ham Debate? Bill Nye!

In the Spring of 2010, evangelical Bible scholar Bruce Waltke, in speaking about the overwhelming evidence for evolution, said “To deny that reality will make us a cult, some odd group that is not really interacting with the real world.” In response to this, Ken Ham, president of Kentucky’s Creation Museum, commented, “What he is saying ultimately undermines the authority of God’s word.” Both statements seem to be true. (I don’t think you necessarily need to have faith in a god to accept the basic logic of Ham’s statement.) Also, that’s really all you need to know about young earth…

von S's testimony

Via Prometheus I find von S's testimony on the Hockey Stick and related issues. Interesting point number 1 is that von S has clearly noticed he is being used (or selectively quoted) by the septics, and so starts his testimony with Based on the scientific evidence, I am convinced that we are facing anthropogenic climate change brought about by the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Maybe that will be enough to stop too many septics pointing to it. We also have I conclude that the claim of "detection of anthropogenic climate change" is valid independently of which historical…

Vaccinated person transmits measles to other vaccinated people-- MMR doesnt work?

Spoiler to apologize for click-bait title: Yes, the MMR vaccine works just fine. But there is a difference between 'just fine' and 'perfectly'. A few things I would want in a 'perfect' vaccine-- Only one dose is needed, zero side-effects, 100% protective antibody or CTL mediated immunity for life, inability of the target pathogen to evolve resistance to the vaccine, dirt cheap, can be stored at room temperature (but stable at high/low ambient temperatures), doesnt need to be administered with a needle-- Im sure you and I can think of a lot more. But we dont live in a world where 'perfect'…

Notes Toward a Toy Model of the Arrow of Time

I'm fairly certain somebody has already done this, because it's such an obvious idea. It's a little beyond my cargo-cult VPython skills right at the moment, though (I can probably learn to do it, but not right now), and I none of the applets I Googled up seemed to be doing this, so I'm posting this sketchy description because I've spent some time thinking about it, and might as well get a blog post out of the deal. So, as we said back in the holiday season, one of the most fundamental concepts in the modern understanding of thermodynamics and statistical physics is the notion of entropy. You…

Genes and Peoples

Western European archaeology is largely a humanistic tradition where many scholars have little knowledge of the natural sciences. For instance, I myself haven't studied natural sciences in any organised way since high school. Still, in my field, I'm known as an unusually science-orientated guy. (Just look at me now, merrily blogging away at Sb.) I believe that human societies are to a fairly large extent shaped by human nature, which has long been controversial in anthro circles. I also favour stringent methods of data collection and analysis: archaeology should study and interpret its object…

The Bottleneck Years by H.E.Taylor - Chapter 82

The Bottleneck Years by H.E. Taylor Chapter 81 Table of Contents Chapter 83 Chapter 82 Rescued, November 20, 2059 The next day, Jon was formally charged by the IEC. they called it ecological crimes against humanity. Suddenly everyone had something to say. The media showed up. There were vloggers and agency stringers waiting for me when I left the university. I answered a bunch of questions, many of them repetitious and silly. I had just declared, "the next person who asks me how I feel and not what I think will end the scrum," when a new stringer rolled up with half a dozen newseyes…

If I Ran the Food Network

Okay, a break from all the serious stuff for a little pop culture. While doing a search for information on a restaurant, I came across this post on a blog I've never seen blasting the Food Network for many things. Now, the Food Network is quite possibly my favorite channel. I'm a serious food lover, particularly BBQ, as everyone probably knows by now, and yes I actually watch cooking shows. But the Food Network is definitely hit or miss. Some of it I like, some of it is awful. So herewith, the good, the bad and the ugly of the Food Network. Let's start with the bad. Yesterday they showed…

Judicial Activism, Take 56

I am back after a few days away, and while I was gone there has been some discussion in the comments about judicial activism. I don't wanna go back and answer all of those comments individually at this point, having written a great deal on the subject in the past. Let me give a brief overview of my perspective on it instead. I don't think the phrase "judicial activism" is inherently meaningless, but I do think the manner in which it is typically used is incoherent and inconsistent. As a general rule, I think its usage in political debates about the courts is practically meaningless because it…

Fundamental Research Funding

Michael Nielsen, who's so smart it's like he's posting from tomorrow, offers a couple of provocative questions about the perception of a crisis in funding for basic science: First, how much funding is enough for fundamental research? What criterion should be used to decide how much money is the right amount to spend on fundamental research? Second, the human race spent a lot lot more on fundamental research in the second half of the twentieth century than it did in the first. It's hard to get a good handle on exactly how much, in part because it depends on what you mean by fundamental…

Basic Concepts: Pick and Roll

Having watched UCLA set offensive basketball back about fifty years in the first half of last night's game (I didn't watch the second half, as the outcome wasn't in doubt, and really, I'd rather stab myself in the eye with a fork), it's worth taking a few minutes today to discuss one of the most important plays in basketball, the pick and roll. This was the Bruins' undoing on both offense and defense, so it's appropriate to explain how it's supposed to work. The play itself is extremely simple, and involves two players on the offensive team. One of the two, usually a guard, starts the play…

College Readiness and Advanced Placement

There's an article in Inside Higher Ed today on the problem of college readiness: We must come together in postsecondary education on many of these points if we are to prepare far greater numbers of students for college. ACT Inc. estimates that 60 percent to 70 percent of its test takers are not well-prepared for college study. Considering that only about half of students who enroll in college actually earn a degree or certificate, we must find ways to confront this problem. Research shows that most future job opportunities in the U.S. will require some level of college study or career…

Hands of Science

SteelyKid has recently begun to figure out her hands. As I noted last week, within the last couple of weeks, she's started to be able to reliably grab things near her. Just within the last few days, she's discovered that she has two hands, and they can interact with each other: She's started grabbing one hand with the other, and exploring them. I've also seen her start to use both hands in concert, holding a hanging toy steady with one hand, while manipulating bits of it with the other, like a good little scientist. Hands are, of course, critical to science. You can't be a good scientist…

The Young Birder's Guide: A Bird Book for the Middle Schooler

This is a repost of an earlier review. Bill Thompson's Young Birder's Guide The Young Birder's Guide to Birds of North America (Peterson Field Guides) is a book that I highly recommend for kids around seven to 14 years of age. (The publishers suggest a narrower age range but I respectfully disagree.) This is a new offering written by Bill Thompson III and published by the same people who give us the Peterson Field Guide to the Birds and many other fine titles. The book includes excellent illustrations by Julie Zickefoose. A birder since childhood, Thompson says he would have loved a…

Sunday Chess Problem

Blogging will continue to be light around here for at least another week. It's spring break, you see. That's hard to believe considering that Thursday and Friday of last week were both snow days, meaning that our spring break opened with a raging blizzard. Spring break is a good time to make progress on various writing and research projects that inevitably take a back seat during the semester. When the students are in town, being a college professor is pretty much a standard, nine-to-five sort of job. Our days are mostly taken up with classes, preparing for classes, office hours, grading…

Sunday Chess Problem

Well, it's taken me longer to get back to this than I originally planned, but how about a second look at the Babson Task? The problem below was composed by Leonid Yarosh, in 1983. It's white to move and mate in four: Remember that white is always moving up the board and black is always moving down. So, black's pawn on a2 is poised to promote. Folks, this is one of the most famous diagrams in the history of chess composition. Why? It's one of the first direct mates to show the Babson Task, and the first to show the task with an acceptable key. (The absolute first had a key that…

Campaign Watch

Here's the latest bit of wisdom from Sarah Palin: McCain's running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, speaking in Colorado Springs, Colo., said Fannie and Freddie had “gotten too big and too expensive to the taxpayers.” The companies, however, aren't taxpayer funded but operate as private companies. The takeover may result in a taxpayer bailout during reorganization. It is appalling, of course, that Ms. Palin was unaware of a basic fact central to what is likely to be one of the major economic issues of the next few years. But this sort of gaffe is entirely typical among Republicans, who speak…

What Is Color?

This year's "Flame Challenge" asks scientists to explain color in terms an 11-year-old can understand. The rules limit answers to either 300 words of text or a 6-minute video. 300 words is ridiculously short, so video is clearly the way to go. Of course, I'm not much of a video expert, but then, one of the finalists last year (when the question was "What Is Time?") was just a guy talking into a webcam, and hell, I can do better than that. So I did this: (This is, obviously, why I was fooling around with looking at the spectrum of light from my laptop a little while back...) The approximate…

Explaining, Education, and Outreach

A couple of days ago, Alom Shaha posted on the new Physics Focus blog (by the way, there's a new Physics Focus blog...) about his dissatisfaction with some popular books: I recently read a popular science book on a topic that I felt I needed to learn more about. The book was well written, ideas were clearly explained, and I finished the book knowing a lot more about the history of the subject than beforehand. However, I don’t feel I understand the key ideas in the book any better. I won’t mention the name of the book or the author because this post isn’t really about that specific book. It’s…

Hilbert's Hotel

One upside to my recent convalescence has been that I have had plenty of time for reading. Currently I'm working my way through Graham Oppy's book Philosophical Perspectives on Infinity, published by Cambridge University Press in 2006. Oppy is best known as a philosopher of religion, writing from a generally atheistic perspective. His book Arguing About Gods is really excellent, thought it definitely does not make for light reading. As for the present book, I'm only through the first two chapters so far. I think I'm going to like the rest, though, since the preface contains remarks like…

Monday Math: The Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic

In my last math post I casually mentioned that the sum of the reciprocals of the primes diverges. That is \[ \frac{1}{2}+\frac{1}{3}+\frac{1}{5}+\frac{1}{7}+\frac{1}{11}+\frac{1}{13}+ \dots=\infty \]   That seems like a hard thing to prove. Certainly none of the traditional convergence tests from Calculus II will get the job done. The problem is how to “get at” the primes. Plainly we need to do something clever. As it happens, the proof is a bit tricky. It has a lot of ingredients, too. On the other hand, each one of those ingredients is pretty interesting in its own right. So how…

This Is My Job

I got a weirdly hostile comment to my popularization post last night: You have some chutzpah. You are being paid, probably quite well, to do research! Journalists are paid, not nearly so well, to popularize research. It takes some nerve to take an extra year's salary, and to take time away from your real job---and then to complain about not being well-enough rewarded. If you want something to complain about, become a science journalist and see how well you are rewarded then. I'm sure you think that is beneath you, and that you do so much better a job---but the general audience you aim to…

24 Hour News Ruins Everything

Lance Mannion has a good post on the fake outrage of the moment in sports, where Derek Anderson, the terrible quarterback of the godawful Arizona Cardinals, was caught on camera maybe laughing with one of his receivers during their drubbing by the not at all good San francisco 49ers. When questioned about it at a press conference afterwards, Anderson blew his stack at a reporter, then stormed out of the room. The whole thing is pretty farcical. As Mannion notes: Listen. Soldiers under fire laugh. Sailors going down with the ship laugh. Pilots watching engines fail laugh. Firefighters,…

DeVos Promotes Intelligent Design

When I came home from work, and saw the headline: DeVos Backs Discussion of Intelligent Design, I knew I wanted to blog it.  Alas, I get the afternoon paper.   href="http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2006/09/devos_and_intelligent_design.php#more">Ed Brayton gets the href="http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060920/NEWS99/60920015">morning paper, and had already beaten me to it.  Not only that, but href="http://scienceblogs.com/mikethemadbiologist/2006/09/the_republican_war_on_science_1.php">Mike and href="http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/09/…

How many genes does it take to make a squid eye?

This is an article about cephalopods and eye evolution, but I have to confess at the beginning that the paper it describes isn't all that interesting. I don't want you to have excessive expectations! I wanted to say a few words about it, though, because it addresses a basic question I get all the time, and while I was at it, I thought I'd mention a few results that set the stage for future studies. I'm often asked to resolve some confusion: the scientific literature claims that eyes evolved multiple times, but I keep saying that eyes show evidence of common origin. Who is right? Why are you…

Doctoral student position open

Birgit Schlick-Steiner, of the University of Innsbruck in Austria, has funding for a Ph.D. student to work on the molecular ecology of the Tetramorium caespitum complex.  This research group has produced some top-notch science in recent years, and if you are looking to become a professional myrmecologist this is an excellent opportunity.  You'd receive training in some of the most current techniques at the interface of genetics, ecology, and taxonomy. The full announcement is below the fold. MOLECULAR ECOLOGY, INSTITUTE OF ECOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF INNSBRUCK PhD position The University…

Doctor, doctor, give me the news*

I've been having this 3:30 am (EST) insomnia for about the last two months, so I often pull the laptop up and survey the blogosphere in the still of the night. A simple look at the Last 24 Hours at ScienceBlogs and elsewhere in the blogosphere tells me that some knuckleheads in the mainstream press have taken issue with Dr Jill Biden, doctor of education, using the honorific, "Dr." Keep in mind that the article in question comes from the L.A. Times - the very same paper that graces my e-mail account weekly humping their fishwrapper's science and environment coverage. I did just look up some…

Reflections on Jesse Helms

Well, I didn't exactly plan to break my silence with a non-science post but a couple of you asked if I had any comments on the passing of Senator Helms. Frankly, I was already going into the US Independence Day weekend with a bit of melancholia, feeling very much like the Philadelphia Inquirer's Chris Satullo in his not-so-glorious-Fourth essay. Then Jesse Helms died on the 4th and I had to hear about "the passing of a great patriot," and any number of hypocritical invocations of God ("America has lost a great friend, but Heaven has gained another of the great cloud of witnesses. We stand on…

Drug improves endurance without need for exercise

For the first time, scientists have developed drugs that mimics the effects of endurance exercise. With the aid of two chemicals, Vihang Narkar, Ronald Evans and colleagues from the Salk Institute managed to turn regular lab rodents into furry Paula Radcliffes - mighty mice that were capable of running further and for longer than their peers. One of the drugs only worked in combination with exercise, but the other managed to boost stamina without it. Using drugs to boost performance isn't a new development. Steroids can help body-builders to build their bodies, while giving athletes an extra…

We're running out of time

The atmosphere is lethal But I will fear no evil Because it's not too late, It's not too late. -- T-Bone Burnett Marvelous musician and cracker-jack producer that he is, (responsible for last year's stellar Alison Krauss-Robert Plant collaboration), T-Bone may be dead wrong when it comes to doing something about the climate crisis. So conclude a quartet of researchers from Princeton University and the Brookings Institution. The problem is, we may have waited too long to start bringing down greenhouse-gas emissions. "Atmospheric stabilization and the timing of carbon mitigation" appears in the…

Pick a number between 1 and ...?

Climate-change chatter in the blogosphere over the Christmas holidays revolved around a provocative op-ed essay in the Washington Post by Bill McKibben, for whom 350 is the most important number. As in 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It's a curious new strategy from one of the leading global warming activist types, and it bears exploring if for no other reason than it originates in the mind of none other than Jim Hansen. Yes, that Jim Hansen, of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Seems he gave an academic talk last month that got lost in the all attention…

Brave New World, Part I

So much has changed in the last few weeks that I'm only now beginning to get a handle on things. I'm still processing and unsure about so much that I'm going to do something that I have resisted doing since joining the blogosphere three and half years ago. I'm going to share some personal thoughts about who I am and where I call home. First, there's the issue of my relationship to government. I was born a Canadian and except for 22 months in the late 1980s, spent my life in Canada, before moving to western North Carolina in the spring of 2005. As a Canadian, I grew up assuming that Canada was…

Why Blog the History of Science?

I contributed an essay to the History of Science Society (HSS) newsletter called "Why Blog the History of Science?" It is now in print and available on line. Go go, check it out, you can learn about why all blogging should be understood along the Ayers-Onuf axis. Here I'll excerpt that part: About that axis. Two historians began a call-in radio show earlier this year. One of them, let's call him Ayers, considered it an opportunity to contribute to the public debate about current issues by discoursing on historical context - voting, race relations, the environment, what have you. His…

Elsewhere on the Interweb (5/8/08)

In honor of Mother's Day, NPR has a great piece on the difficulties of being a modern Mom and delaying having children: Fertility seems to peak at about age 22, says Marcel Cedars, director of reproductive endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco. After that, it gradually declines, and past the age of 35, pregnancy is much harder to achieve. "Each egg is more likely to be genetically abnormal," Cedars says. "And a genetically abnormal egg is less likely to fertilize, is less likely to develop. It is less likely to implant. If it implants, it is more likely to miscarry."…

What constitutes a disease?

A healthy debate rages as to whether Restless Legs Syndrome is actually a disease, or whether it was something contrived by drug companies in order to sell drugs. Nicholas Wade reports in the NY Times that two separate studies have found a gene that is linked with the disease: Kari Stefansson, chief executive of Decode Genetics, said his company had linked variations in the gene known as BTBD9 with periodic leg movements during sleep and with low iron levels in the blood, two clinical features already associated with the syndrome. He said Decode had missed, but subsequently confirmed, the…

There's something obvious missing from this argument…

Andrew Brown does it again, and writes another clueless screed against one of those damned atheist scientists, in this case Harry Kroto. It's a common sort of objection, that these scientists are all mere logical positivists (or as Brown prefers to label them, "illogical positivists"), and as we all know, the philosophers have rejected logical positivism, therefore he's wrong. But that's only because bad philosophers and Andrew Brown only seem able to view scientists through the lens of philosophy, not as scientists, and rather consistently screw up their perceptions in odd ways. It's like…

Brain Damage in Football Players

Researchers at Boston University have done an autopsy on another former football player and found evidence of severe neurological damage that would likely lead to dementia later in life: Leading medical experts at the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy (CSTE) at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) reported today that nine-year NFL veteran, former Tampa Bay Buccaneer Tom McHale was suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease caused by head trauma, when he died in 2008 at the age of 45. In addition, the CSTE has discovered early…

Looking into Ramachandran's broken mirror

I visited Vilayanur S. Ramachandran's lab at the University of California, San Diego recently, and interviewed him and several members of his lab about their work. Rama and I talked, among other things, about the controversial broken mirror hypothesis, which he and others independently proposed in the early 1990s as an explanation for autism. I've written a short article about it for the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI), and the transcript of that part of the interview is below. I also wrote an article summarizing the latest findings about the molecular genetics of autism…

Bodily motions influence memory and emotions

WHEN talking about our feelings, we often use expressions that link emotions with movements or positions in space. If, for example, one receives good news, they might say that their "spirit soared", or that they are feeling "on top of the world". Conversely, negative emotions are associated with downward movements and positions - somebody who is sad is often said to be "down in the dumps", or feeling "low". According to a new study published in this month's issue of the journal Cognition, expressions such as these are not merely metaphorical. The research provides evidence of a causal link…

Does time dilate during a threatening situation?

"WHEN a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour," said Albert Einstein, "it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute, and it's longer than any hour." Einstein was describing one of the most profound implications of his Theory of General Relativity - that the perception of time is subjective. This is something we all know from experience: time flies when we are enjoying ourselves, but seems to drag on when we are doing something tedious. The subjective experience of time can also be manipulated experimentally. Visual stimuli which appear to be approaching are perceived…

Building Gab: Part Two

In my last post, I traced a debate over the evolution of language. On one side, we have Steven Pinker and his colleagues, who argue that human language is, like the eye, a complex adaptation produced over millions of years through natural selection, favoring communication between hominids. On the other side, we have Noam Chomsky, Tecumseh Fitch, and Marc Hauser, who think scientists should explore some alternative ideas about language, including one hypothesis in which practically all the building blocks of human language were already in place long before our ancestors could speak, having…

Can you truly ignore anything? New evidence questions "filtering" accounts of memory

A number of previous behavioral and neuroimaging experiments, as well as computational models, support the idea that people can filter the contents of memory and perception so as to focus on only the information that's currently relevant. For example, in a visually-complex environment, distracting items often go unprocessed by the human visual system, perhaps due to some low-level perceptual bandwidth limitations. However, in cognitively-complex environments (when working memory, but not perception, is loaded to capacity), distractors are more likely to be processed (this is Lavie et al's…

Prospective Memory: More Retrospective Among Children?

What processes allow us to execute delayed intentions? This ability, known as prospective memory, is often considered to have two constituent parts: a prospective component which involves forming the intention and possibly maintaining it until action execution, and a retrospective component which involves retrieving this intention, if that intention is not successfully and continuously maintained until the moment of action execution. These components can be easily illustrated. Imagine yourself in a situation where prospective memory is required: while at work, you realize that you need to…

Friday Rant: Atheists Need To Be Brighter

Now that the Darwin Reclamation Project collage has been posted, I can confess that I have a few problems with the recent atheist action that sought to counter the dunderhead Ray Comfort and his Creationist propaganda ministry. I'm not sure who originally suggested this action, but I don't think it was well thought out. Having athiests systematically round up as many copies as they can of a work they disagree with (however ridiculous such a work may be) stinks of censorship and creates an impression in the broader public that Comfort's arguments are somehow threatening to evolutionary…

I Am Extremely Terrified of Chinese People, But I'm Not Racist

Caught your attention, didn't it? Mine too. This morning I came across Steve Silberman's twitter headline pointing out that when people typed "I Am Extremely" into the Google search bar, one of the top suggestions was "Terrified of Chinese People." Fascinated to see what fools these mortals be, I clicked the link only to discover an article on Christwire that was actually able to claim that they were terrified of a racial group but that this didn't mean they were racist. Confused? You're not alone. Just take a quick look at some of the extremely confused statements that attracted nearly…

The Grid

The Large Hadron Collider is finally turning on. A quick step backwards: the LHC is a particle accelerator, the largest of its kind, underwritten by all the wild money in science, a ringed tunnel some 27 kilometers long, deep underground, crossing the French-Swiss border at four points. It's been over twenty years in the making and has garnered the support of 10,000 scientists in 85 countries behind its unimaginable modus operandi: to recreate the environment of our universe as it was less than a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, and hence to reveal, among other things, the…

The Intelligent Universe

James Gardner is part of a new breed of complexity theorists: an armchair philosopher that goes beyond the epistemological, who posits broad, celebratory theories about the nature of the future of the universe. His first book, Biocosm, proposed the "Selfish Biocosm" hypothesis, which suggests that intelligence doesn't emerge in a series of Darwinian accidents, but is hard-wired into the cycle of cosmic creation; it's a really beautiful idea, putting us right at the center of a living, breathing, intelligent universe, which, incidentally, is the title of his newest book. Dude also rolled…

Google Adds Cycling Routes to Their Maps!

Photo by Kamshots. Regular readers of Obesity Panacea will know that I am a huge fan of active transportation (e.g. walking or cycling to work, rather than commuting by vehicle).  I just can't say enough good things about it.  It often takes about the same amount of time as commuting by vehicle, plus it ensures that you're getting at least some physical activity on even the busiest days.  Even just taking transit instead of driving yourself increases your chances of meeting the daily physical activity guidelines, since transit trips almost always involve some walking on either end of the…

Fins made of straw, easily knocked down

In response to Neil Shubin's recent paper on the subject, and Carl Zimmer's summary, the creationist Michael Denton criticizes evolutionary explanations for the vertebrate limb. It's a bizarre argument. First, here's the even shorter summary of the Shubin work. Ray-finned fish have, obviously enough, rays in their fins -- rigid bony struts that provide structure. These rays are formed dermally. That is, osteoblasts deposit bone on the surface of a connective tissue matrix to build the rods of bone that prop up the fin. It's called dermal bone because the classic example is the assembly of…