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Pseudo-paleovirology

Paleovirology is one of my favorite topics to read about. Whether its bringing extinct viruses back to life, or finding ancient HIV-1 integration sites, or finding millions of year old viruses in genomes, or studying the modern side-effects of ancient viral infections, I love old viruses just about as much as modern ones. I even like wild guessing concerning ancient viruses, like this pic from Ancient Egypt: We *think* this fellow has a bum leg and a cane because of polio! And there were several 'plagues' that ravaged Ancient Greece. Scientists and scholars have proposed various pathogens,…

Epigenetics and Cancer: Making a messy mess messier.

As Carl Zimmer recently (and rightly) pointed out at the end of an article on epigenetics, while the concept of being able to alter our epigenetic profiles for therapeutic purposes is a really attractive concept, our current epigenetic therapy options are very, very messy. Like I said last week: Lemme give you an example. Lets say we find out that in people with Ke$ha Disease, their GTiM (Good Taste in Music) gene is underexpressed due to hypermethylation of the surrounding DNA. So, YAY! Thats treatable! We have drugs that could fix that, like 5-aza-2'-deoxycytidine! Um, well, your DNA is…

In just seven days... oh baby...

Since last weeks post on fitness (or lack of it) on SciBlogs*, blag brother Ethan suggested a blag-wide fitness event-- lets all talk about our personal 'fitness'. What we do, why we do it, mistakes we made along the way, even though we are totally amateurs :P Heres his pretty post :) My post is going to be primarily directed towards women, but it applies to men too. Doesnt matter whether you want to get big, get small, or just get healthy. *clears throat* LIFT WEIGHTS. A long time ago in a galaxy right here, I worked out like a Generic Woman. Treadmill. Eliptical. Bike. Aerobics…

Many roads lead to Rome, and tetherin down-regulation

While we are on the topic of IDiot Michael Behe, I thought now would be a good time to check in on our dear friend, HIV-1 Vpu! What neat evolutionary tales do you have for us this week, HIV-1 Vpu? Vpu directs the degradation of the human immunodeficiency virus restriction factor BST-2/Tetherin via a {beta}TrCP-dependent mechanism. We discovered a while back that we have a whole 'new' component to our innate immune system we didnt know existed until we started to investigate the peculiar mutation rates within HIV-1 Vpu. This protein is called 'tetherin', and every cell in your body (not just…

Evilution: Its always going to be smarter than you. Always.

I read a nice review article on viral evilution this weekend that really highlighted, for me, how clueless Creationists (especially Intelligent Design Creationists) are about evilution. Antiviral resistance and impact on viral replication capacity: evolution of viruses under antiviral pressure occurs in three phases. As we saw the last time IDiots tried to talk about HIV-1, Their Arguments Regarding Design focus on mutations rates-- HIV needs to make X mutations to escape a drug, HIV needs to make Y mutations to become climb a fitness peak, etc. What theyre talking about (what theyre clueless…

Steroids, bodybuilding, and anti-aging-- what a tangled web wooers weave

The latest edition of 'Life Extension' as once again provided me with a bounty of lols. For instance, did you know that "For the past fourteen years, the gerontological establishment has sought to persecute anti-aging physicians, anti-aging health practitioners, and the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine (A4M; www.worldhealth.net) itself, simply because they defy the prevailing model of disease-based, drug-oriented medicine"? The assaults have even included "mocking the anti-aging medical movement and its physician leaders." Well, if theres one thing I will never, NEVER stand for, its…

Super-evolution

One of my Christmas presents was something just for fun: Superman: The Dailies 1939-1942(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). It's a collection of the newspaper strips by Schuster and Siegel that were published in the earliest years of the superhero, and they're both funny and disturbing now. First off, Superman was always a jerk. It's actually a bit off-putting: while he has this profound moral goal of helping the little guy, he's also constantly treating Lois Lane like dirt — he uses his superpowers to get the big scoops at the newspaper, and Lois is always getting demoted to the "advice for the…

HIV, Tomato, Tomahto

This is, quite possibly, one of the weirdest examples of convergent evolution I have ever seen. I dont want to get ahead of myself, but HIV-1 transactivator protein (Tat) and Tomato Bushy Stunt Virus P19 are totally interchangeable. HIV and TBSV arent related, like, at all... yet two of their parts are interchangeable... This is so weird. Let me elaborate. Plants dont have immune systems like you and I (dir), but they have evolved their own ways of dealing with viral infections. Because most plant viruses have RNA genomes (RNA genomes can slide from cell to cell via plasmodesmata, berry…

Hi! Im another for realsies journalist who can write banal articles about atheism!

Journalists and journalism shouldnt exist anymore. Theyre no longer relevant. In todays world of Twitters and Bloggers and YouTubers-- there is no point in getting a 'degree' to be a journalist, when we all have the capabilities of being 'civilian' journalists. Civilian journalists that are, flat out, better than the for realsies journalists that exist today. Case in point: Tom Krattenmaker Toms just a dude. Degree in journalism. Writes articles for USA Today and other dying forms of media. Nothing against him. Except for this idiotic, insipid article he just wrote, Atheism, a positive…

Strengths and Weaknesses in Texas

The New York Times provides an update on the latest shenanigans of the ID folks: Now a battle looms in Texas over science textbooks that teach evolution, and the wrestle for control seizes on three words. None of them are “creationism” or “intelligent design” or even “creator.” The words are “strengths and weaknesses.” Starting this summer, the state education board will determine the curriculum for the next decade and decide whether the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolution should be taught. The benign-sounding phrase, some argue, is a reasonable effort at balance. But critics say it is a…

The Cats in Baghdad

Sunday's New York Times offers a poignant look at some of the victims of the Iraq War: IT was a bitterly cold night in the Baghdad winter of 2005, somewhere in the predawn hours before the staccato of suicide bombs and mortars and gunfire that are the daily orchestration of the war. Alone in my office in The Times's compound beside the Tigris River, I was awaiting the telephoned "goodnight" from The Times foreign desk, eight time zones west, signaling that my work for the next day's paper was done. That is when I heard it: the cry of an abandoned kitten, somewhere out in the darkness,…

Tidbits From the RNCSE

The new issue of the Reports of the National Center for Science Education turned up in my mailbox the other day. As always, it contains lot's of interesting nuggets. Michael Ruse reviews Sahotra Sarkar's recent book, Doubting Darwin: Creationist Designs on Evolution. The review is well done, by which I mean it says exactly what I would have said were I reviewing the book. (Short version: It's a good book with a lot of sharp arguments, but at times Sarkar's explanations of scientific or philosophical ideas are not as clear as they might have been). But this was the part that caught my eye…

Ranting at the Press

One of the sillier myths to have widespread acceptance in our culture is that the mainstream media, especially The New York Times, has a liberal bias. Anyone who actually reads the Times knows better. After all, these are the folks who kept the worthless Whitewater story alive during the Clinton administration, who published every phony anti-Gore story the Republicans fed them in the 2000 campaign, and who shamelessly parroted the Bush Administration's completely fallacious talking points in the run-up to the Iraq War. Completely unchastened by this recent history, the Times has now taken…

Eureka! Discovering Your Inner Scientist

I sent off the complete draft of the book-in-progress yesterday, somewhere between 12 and 36 hours ahead of my contractual deadline. Which I suppose makes it a book-in-process now, maybe. That process may still include re-writes, though, so my work probably isn't done yet. The final draft, according to Word anyway, comes to 253 pages (space-and-a-half) and 96,807 words. I don't remember the word count from the original contract, but this is more than that. Which is pretty typical of my writing, really. Because I wrote it down as part of the final checks, here's the approximate table of…

Nobel Prize Betting Pool 2013

Another year, another fall, another disbursement of dynamite money from our friends in Scandawegia. The 2013 Nobel Prize announcements are almost upon us. Which means it's time for the game everyone loves to tolerate: the Uncertain Principles Nobel Prize Betting Pool. As always, the core rules are simple: Leave a comment to this post predicting at least one of the winners of one of this year’s Nobel Prizes. If one of your guesses turns out to be correct, you win the highly coveted right to choose the topic of a future blog post. There's one small modification this year, though, regarding the…

Neil de Grasse Tyson Is John Harrison

Over at Galileo's Pendulum, Matthew Francis expresses an opinion that's sure to get him in trouble with the Inquisition and placed under house arrest: Carl Sagan's Cosmos isn't all that: However, even taking into account the differences in TV between 1980 and 2013, the show is very slow-paced at times. I’m not talking about the mellow oh-so-1970s Vangelis score, or Sagan’s measured style of speech: I mean the obvious stretching of material to make hour-long episodes. I have a long attention span, so I’m not saying Cosmos should be like the frenetic Star Trek reboot; I’m just saying that a…

Best. Arbitrary Four-Year Window. EVER!

My 20-year college reunion is coming up at the start of next month (at the end of the week of DAMOP in Quebec-- I'm going to be completely wiped out...), so I've been thinking a bit about nostalgia. A little while back, the subject of reunions came up on an email list, and somebody trotted out the classic "Those are the best four years of your life" line. This produced a definite split, with some people scoffing at the idea that college or high school could legitimately be considered the "best," while a couple argued that it's not necessarily ridiculous on the face of it: after all, you're…

Monday Math: Euler's Formula for Perfect Numbers

In last week's post, we discussed Mersenne primes. These were primes of the form: \[ 2^p-1, \phantom{x} \textrm{where} \phantom{x} p \phantom{x} \textrm{is prime.} \] I mentioned that such primes are relevant to the problem of finding perfect numbers. So how about we flesh that out? Let's define a function that takes in positive integers and records the sum of their divisors. We shall denote this function with the Greek letter sigma, so that \[ \sigma(n)=\sum_{d|n} d = \phantom{x} \textrm{the sum of the divisors of} \phantom{x} n. \] Here are some sample values: \[ \sigma(3)=1+3=4…

Monday Math: Infinite Descent

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, “Gosh, it sure is neat that we can generate all Pythagorean triples from one simple formula, but what happens if we try an exponent bigger than two? That is, can you find nontrivial integer solutions to the equation \[ x^n+y^n=z^n \]   when n is a positive integer bigger than two? We say “nontrivial” to avoid silly situations where, for example, all three variables are equal to zero. This, of course, is the famous Fermat equation. Our question was finally answered, by Andrew Wiles in the mid-nineties, in the negative. Sadly, his proof is…

Carnage Interruptus, But Plenty of Action Nonetheless

I've gotten a bit behind in my chess match coverage. Time to remedy that! Last we saw Anand had blundered away an easily drawn endgame in Game Eight. This allowed Topalov to tie the match. Undeterred, Anand came out swinging in Game Nine. Topalov decided he had had enough of Anand's Catalan, and played the Nimzo-Indian Defense instead. Everything proceeded along normal lines until Topalov allowed an endgame with his queen pitted against Anand's two rooks. If you remember your basic chess arithmetic, rooks are worth five points each, while the queen is nine points. So two rooks count as…

Let's Hear It for the Staff

The Dean Dad had a great post about staff yesterday: Politically, hiring office staff is a harder sell than hiring faculty. Faculty are conspicuous, and the tie to the classroom is obvious. Back-office support staff are inconspicuous, and show up in public discussion as 'overhead' or 'administrative bloat.' But their work is necessary, as anyone whose financial aid package got lost in the shuffle can attest. And the relative lack of romance in back-office work means that good people aren't willing to accept adjunct-level wages to do it; adding staff means full-time salaries with benefits. (…

Would You Like Some Calculus With Your Physics?

It's a nice demonstration of the oddity of the blogosphere that a libertarian political blog has become my go-to-source for thoughtful blogging about physics education. Thoreau had two good posts yesterday at Unqualified Offerings, one on the problems created by breaking down incorrect intuition, and another on the lack of calculus in calculus-based physics texts: The ostensibly calculus-based introductory physics book by Knight is not really a calculus-based book. Sure, integrals and derivatives pop up here and there, but the vast majority of the problems can be solved without them, and…

Links for 2011-01-25

Swans on Tea » Blogging: You're Doing it Wrong! (Part III) "Completely unrelated to this was a session called "How Can We Maintain High Journalism Standards on the Web," and it was attended mostly by the professionals. Most of the session focused on ethics standards and disclosure and avoiding the appearance of bias, which means Pepsigate came up (surprise!) and other related subjects as well. I get that most responsible journalists don't want their work tainted by the appearance that they are endorsing a product or service, which can be questioned by links or undisclosed sponsorships or…

Dance of the Photons by Anton Zeilinger

I hadn't heard anything about Dance of the Photons: From Einstein to Quantum Teleportation before it turned up in my mailbox, courtesy of some kind publicist at Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, otherwise I would've been eagerly anticipating it. Anton Zeilinger is a name to conjure with in quantum optics, having built an impressive career out of doing laboratory demonstrations of weird quantum phenomena. He shared the Wolf Prize earlier this year with John Clauser and Alain Aspect, and the three of them are in a small set of people who probably ought to get a Nobel at some point in the near future…

The Astrophysics of Bedtime Stories

SteelyKid is a big fan of the classic children's book Goodnight Moon, which, if you haven't spent the last sixty-odd years in a cave, you probably know features a bunny saying goodnight to a variety of objects in a great, green room. The attentive toddler will find a lot to look at in the pictures-- there's a mouse in every one that SteelyKid delights in pointing out-- but an inquiring adult might well ask "Just how long does it take this bunny to say goodnight to all this stuff, anyway?" Well, we can answer this question with SCIENCE! You see, there are six pictures in the book showing the…

Links for 2010-01-30

The Mid-Majority : Assistant Palestra Custodian for a Day "I presented my credentials. "I'm non-union, I work hard and I work for free," I told Dan. Usually, that gets me in the door every time. But not here. "Well, you'd better be pro-union," Dan replied. I assured him that my profession had no real national union, much less anything resembling a professional certification process. Besides, I said, I have friends who are high up in the Steelworkers. And that was good enough for Dan Harrell. I was about to take on the greatest temp job I've ever had in my whole entire life: assistant…

Four Things Everybody Should Know About Quantum Physics

Derek Lowe has a post talking about things biologists should know about medicinal chemistry. It's a good idea for a post topic, so I'm going to steal it. Not to talk about medicinal chemistry, or biologists, of course, but to talk about my own field, and what everyone-- not just scientists-- should know about quantum physics. Not just humans, either-- even dogs should know this stuff. 1) Quantum physics is real. Probably the hardest quantum idea to accept is the notion of vacuum energy and "virtual particles"-- stuff appearing out of empty space, then disappearing again seems almost too weird…

A Stainless Steel Baby Bottle

Let's say you have some liquid that you want to contain without leaks, say, milk for a baby. What do you do? Well, you put it in something like a baby bottle, the components of which are shown here: You have a hard plastic bottle, a soft silicone nipple, and a hard plastic ring that screws onto the bottle. When you put it together and screw the cap down tight, it compresses the silicone between the two plastic bits, squeezing it into the small gaps, and plugging any leaks. Done properly, this will ensure that milk doesn't leak out of the bottle except through the whole in the nipple. Now,…

Flash Forward, Left Behind

I've watched the first few episodes of "Flash Forward" more or less as they aired-- I've been DVR-ing them, but watching not long after they start, so I can fast-forward through the commercials, and still see it. I could just let them sit on the DVR, but at least for me, the DVR tends to be a sort of television graveyard-- I have a whole bunch of Nova episodes saved up that I never quite get around to watching. Watching them the same night helps me remember to watch them, rather than just piling them up. Anyway, I've been watching, and I have to say, I'm really not blown away at this point.…

Tolkien, Religion, and the Death of Western Culture

I was rather surprised when Friday's quick post about Tolkien spawned a lengthy comment thread full of people arguing against the suggestion that The Lord of the Rings is affected by Tolkien's Catholic faith. I'm no Tolkien scholar, but my impression of the field is that this is simply not a controversial statement, that there is ample material in the reams of letters, early drafts, and other background material showing that this is the case. On reflection, it seems that there are two things going on here. One is that some people seem to think that a book cannot be said to contain Christian…

Why Cheaters Should Be Reported

The Female Science Professor has been having a hard semester, and recently caught some students cheating on an exam: In the situation I had to deal with recently, I saw one student glancing repeatedly at another student's exam. I kept the two exams separate when they were handed in, compared the documents, saw the same strange but identical wrong answers on each one, and knew for sure that I had a Cheating Incident. I suppose if cheaters knew the answer to a question well enough to make a stab at it themselves, they wouldn't write down the word-for-word strange wrong answer of the person…

Half-Baked Course Idea: Great Experiments

A couple years ago, we revised the General Education requirements at the college to require all students to take a "Sophomore Research Seminar" in their second year. These classes are supposed to be writing-intensive, and introduce students to the basics of academic research. The specified course components are pretty heavily slanted toward the humanities-- library searches, primary vs. secondary sources, and so on-- and don't really map that well onto research practices in the sciences. A colleague in engineering managed to do a really interesting project-based class, though, and since…

Applications of Quantum Mechanics

Over at the theoretical physics beach party, Moshe is talking about teaching quantum mechanics, specifically an elective course for upper-level undergraduates. He's looking for some suggestions of special topics: The course it titled "Applications of quantum mechanics", and is covering the second half of the text by David Griffiths, whose textbooks I find to be uniformly excellent. A more accurate description of the material would be approximation methods for solving the Schrodinger equation. Not uncommonly in the physics curriculum, when the math becomes more demanding the physics tends to…

Tenure Is Not the Problem

Steve Hsu has a nice post on teaching, following up on the Malcolm Gladwell piece that everyone is talking about. Steve took the time to track down the Brookings Institute report mentioned in the piece, and highlights two graphs: The top figure shows that certification has no impact on teaching effectiveness. The second shows that effectiveness measured in the years 1 and 2 is predictive of effectiveness in the subsequent year. In this case effectiveness is defined by the average change in percentile ranking of students in the teacher's class. Good teachers help their students to improve…

Teachers, Quarterbacks, and Markets

Will Wilkinson has some comments about an article by Malcolm Gladwell from The New Yorker. I basically agree with him about Gladwell, but I'm bothered by the last paragraph: Now, there's no point in saying things that will make your readers think you are an evilcrazy person, so I can understand why Gladwell wastes words on quarterbacks instead of on the deeper mechanisms at work here. But why is it that "society devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?" The obvious answer is that care and patience are in greater…

Student Post: More on Gender Dominance--An Evolutionary Psychological Approach

I have some thoughts on the topic of male and female dominance brought up by Blue_Expo. In fact, it was the topic of a paper for my Evolution of Human Aggression class... Females are under some different sexual selection pressures than males stemming from the fact that they are the limited sex. They can only produce a finite number of offspring and are heavily invested in their progeny. Perhaps this is the basis for the female dominance social hierarchies observed in bonobos (Parish et al., 1994) and hyenas (Jenks, 1995). In both these systems, offspring inherit their mother's rank and a…

FutureBaby Playlist: A-B

As Scalzi wrote some time back, "one of a parent's more minor but nevertheless important responsibilities is to make sure his or children grow up with a love of music that doesn't totally suck." I was reminded of this the other day while driving around, when "American Pie" came on the radio. I have weirdly distinct memories of listening to this in the car as a small child (young enough to have absolutely no idea what a "levee" was, or why one would drive a Chevy to it), which got me to thinking about music and FutureBaby. This, of course, presented a wonderful opportunity for cat-vacuuming,…

"Story of Your Life" Guest Lecture

The Science Fiction class for which I agreed to guest lecture is an 8am class, which is earlier than I like to be up and about. Knowing this, I went to bed early on Thursday night. Of course, being a bookaholic of long standing, I needed something to read to put me to sleep. Genius that I am, I grabbed the ARC of Cory Doctorow's upcoming YA novel Little Brother... So, I hadn't really had enough sleep when I got to campus for the class on Friday. Still, adrenaline can make up for a lot... I was introduced as "Not only a physics professor, but also a world famous blogger," though I suggested…

Media Coverage of Psychiatric Genetics

I just finished reading a news release pertaining to a finding in psychiatric genetics.  I was prepared to be irritated, but was pleased instead. href="http://www.med.umich.edu/opm/newspage/2006/ocd.htm">New genetic findings add to understanding of obsessive-compulsive disorder Kara Gavin July 26, 2006 ANN ARBOR, MI – Obsessive-compulsive disorder tends to run in families, causing members of several generations to experience severe anxiety and disturbing thoughts that they ease by repeating certain behaviors. In fact, close relatives of people with rel="tag" href="http://www.…

The Web's Largest Conversation About Breastfeeding

The mission of ScienceBlogs is to have the href="http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache:u_aOpFk1_6IJ:www.seedmediagroup.com/press/releases/SMG_01.25.06.pdf+web+largest+conversation+about+science&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1&client=firefox-a">Web's largest conversation about science.  I've been posting here for a week.  During that time, I've been trying to decipher the href="http://faculty.ircc.edu/faculty/jlett/Article%20on%20Emics%20and%20Etics.htm">emics and etics of the community and its conversation.   It is apparent that, within this culture, it is important and…

The Amber Ant of Mysteries (Taxonomy Fail, updated)

Well. Raising a holy hullabaloo on the internet pays dividends. Vincent Perrichot, one of the authors on the contested PNAS paper, has sent along another aspect of the mystery fossil: Having trouble?  I've arranged a Formica specimen to model the pose: In the comments below, Vincent provides his perspective: Well, sounds that the ant nature of our fossil is getting much controversy here! I understand that the photograph provided in our paper is not very clear, so I'd like to clarify things and try to convince everyone. First of all the photograph you are commenting on was published here…

How to Identify Queen Ants

Atta texana queen and worker Ant queens are those individuals in a nest that lay the eggs.  They're pretty important, of course, as without reproduction the colony dwindles and disappears. Understandably, ant-keepers have an interest in making sure their pet colonies have queens.  Conversely, pest control folks trying to get rid of ant colonies need to be sure that they've eliminated queens.  Whether your interest is live ants or dead ants, I'll give some pointers in this post for recognizing queens. In many species the difference between workers and queens is obvious.  Consider the…

A feminist or not a feminist? A rant.

Blogger Feministx popped over the other day to visit and leave a comment on SW's "goody goody" post. I hadn't read Feministx before, but she claims she "started my blog with the intention of focusing on feminist concerns, but lately I have taken to writing about the biological basis of human behavior." Feministx invited Sciencewomen readers to come past her blog because "I really need some women that are interested in science to come add to my blog. Lately, I have been writing about biological basis of behavior issues and most of my readership has become male. They tend to disagree with me…

A junior faculty conundrum: should I write that review article?

You are an assistant professor in the biomedical sciences and are three or four years in, trying to really hammer on your productivity before the tenure dossier goes in a couple of years from now. Professor MegaMentor, editor of your society's second-tier journal (impact factor of 2.5), approaches you to write an invited review article on the state of your field. You take a look at the promotion and tenure guidelines for your institution and find that review articles are not counted as "original, peer-reviewed research publications." Professor MegaMentor has been very good to you since she…

Camouflaged communication - the secret signals of squid

Two strangers are having a normal conversation in the middle of a large crowd. No one else can see them. No one else can listen in. Thanks to advanced gadgetry, they are talking in coded messages that only they can decipher. These invisible conversationalists sound like they've walked out of a Bond film. But they are entirely real, and their skill at secrecy is biological, not technological. They are squid. Squid and their relatives, the octopus and cuttlefish, are masters of concealment. They have the most sophisticated camouflage abilities in the animal kingdom and use them to avoid…

Round peg, square hole - why our bird flu drugs are a fluke

The world's nations are stockpiling two drugs, Tamiflu and Relenza, to counter the threat of a bird flu pandemic. These drugs work by blocking a key protein that allows the virus to spread. But two years ago, a study revealed the structure of this protein and in doing so, shown that both Tamiflu and Relenza only work through a fortunate fluke. The threat of bird flu is looming large in the minds of the public, scientists and politicians alike. So far, 241 people have died of the disease across 12 countries. But the real worry is that that the virus could mutate into a form that…

Unusual unapproved drug action by FDA against Provident Pharmaceuticals

In an article by Wayne Heilman of the Colorado Springs Gazette, I learned of a US FDA action against contract drug manufacturer Provident Pharmaceuticals. The company has been cited for good manufacturing practices (GMP) violations as well as the manufacture of unapproved drugs. The GMP violations are of a magnitude that FDA requested that Provident hire a GMP training consultant to bring the facility up to snuff. However, Heilman seized upon an interesting side light in the warning: the names of the unapproved drugs apparently made by the company are missing from the detailed warning letter…

Today, The Chronicle. Tomorrow, The World! A Scientist's Guide to Academic Etiquette by Female Science Professor

I was just going through my unread Twitter stream from yesterday and found a link to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled, "A Scientist's Guide to Academic Etiquette," with a tagline about scientists lacking in social skills. Recognizing the truth in that statement, I fired up the post to the very pleasant surprise of learning that the author is none other than the Grande Dame of the science blogging community, Female Science Professor. Female Science Professor is the pseudonym of a professor in the physical sciences at a large research university who blogs under that…

Sizzle: A review

I wanted to like Sizzle. I really did. I like Randy Olson's contributions here on ScienceBlogs to Shifting Baselines. Randy is a former marine biologist and I have a degree in marine biology. He thinks the climate crisis is one of if not the most important public policy challenge of our time. So do I. Global warming pseudoskeptics drive him crazy. Me, too. If anyone should appreciate what Randy's trying to do with his latest documentary, it's me. The problem is, I wasn't quite sure what it is he's trying to do until the last section of the film. I think I figured it out, but I must report…

Do genes explain Republican extreme negative campaign tactics?

Warning: Anyone who takes this post seriously please resist the temptation to comment. Over the reported objections of John McCain and national GOP officials, North Carolina's state Republican party is about to run a campaign ad attacking Barack Obama for consorting with Jeremiah Wright. The ad disingenuously implies that Obama was sitting in the congregation when Wright made some of his more inflammatory remarks condemning America, even though there is no evidence to suggest that Obama was anywhere near the church at the time. Why are these kinds of dirty campaign tricks invariably the…