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Palinology

From Kathleen Parker of the National Review: If at one time women were considered heretical for swimming upstream against feminist orthodoxy, they now face condemnation for swimming downstream -- away from Sarah Palin. Oh what fun. Parker, a very conservative columnist writing for a very conservative outlet, is calling for Palin to step aside. To reduce the bleeding. No, I say, Sarah, don't you dare step aside, girl! We (Democrats) love you! You are a pox on your party! What could be better! At least stick around long enough to be eviscerated by Joe Biden. By the way, you can't see…

There's No Escape

There's just no getting away from science-and-religion. Yesterday's (snail) mail brought a flier from the Williams College Society of Alumni, giving the schedule of events for my upcoming 15th (!!) college reunion. The very first item on Thursday's list of faculty lectures: 1 p.m. "Celebrating Evolution from a Religious Perspective" featuring Stuart Crampton '58, Barclay Jermain Prof. of Natural Philosophy, Emeritus and Richard Spalding, Chaplain to the College That would actually probably be pretty interesting-- Prof. Crampton was co-advisor for my senior thesis, and he's a really smart…

Homage to a Myrmecologist

Let's take a lesson from the Swiss.  They deem myrmecologists of such great national importance that one once adorned the face of the country's highest currency.  Auguste-Henri Forel and his beloved ants were featured on the 1000 Franc note from 1976 to 1995. Ponder that for a moment. A country reknowned for finance.  Put an ant man.  On their top note.  For two decades. For those interested in more Forel, Antweb has a photo from Forel's extensive collection.  Antbase holds Forel's myrmecological publications.  And if you're one of those weirdos who finds sex more interesting than…

ScienceBlogs hibernates...

Well for a day anyway... ScienceBlogs is currently powered (and I say that in the most charitable possible sense) by Movable Type 3. This Saturday, we're upgrading to Movable Type 4, which will mean the following: No new posts from any of us from Friday 6pm GMT for about a day No new comments from you either (sad face) Some inevitable teething problems when the upgrade kicks in A bunch of vampiric, vitamin D-deficient bloggers who will stumble out into the bright, shiny world and be very confused, or just sit in a corner, typing into thin air and scratching themselves. Have good weekends…

A steaming cup of not getting cirrhosis

Researchers report that drinking coffee cuts the risk of cirrhosis of the liver from alcohol -- by 22 percent per cup each day -- but they stopped short of saying doctors should prescribe coffee for that reason. The report from the Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program in Oakland, California, was based on a look at data from 125,580 people. "These data support the hypothesis that there is an ingredient in coffee that protects against cirrhosis, especially alcoholic cirrhosis," concluded the report published in the Archives of Internal Medicine. You will be fine if you are an alcoholic; just…

Algorithmic Steampunk?

From the annals of "is that really the word you wanted?" from a New York Times article on steampunk: "There seems to be this sort of perfect storm of interest in steampunk right now," Mr. von Slatt said. "If you go to Google Trends and track the number of times it is mentioned, the curve is almost algorithmic from a year and a half ago." (At this writing, Google cites 1.9 million references.) Certainly I can interpret this as saying that the trend has a curve which can be generated by an algorirthm, but I'm guessing Mr. von Slatt meant something else, considering that the curve which is…

Dogs prevent asthma?

Image: LA Times Recent research has shown that dogs may offer protection from respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), a common virus in infants associated with high risks for the development of asthma. Mice fed dust from homes with dogs prior to exposure to RSV showed immunity to the virus when compared to mice fed dust from dog-free homes. Moreover, the dog-exposed mice had “a distinct gastrointestinal bacterial composition,” that may lend to this immunity. The researchers are now planning on identifying the microbes responsible for this immune protection in the hope of developing a vaccine.…

Congratulations! Calendar Girl!

I've used music from ccMixter for TheScian audio and it was always a pleasure to listen to remixes of Calendar Girl. Here's the news from ccMixter: In October 2006, singer song-writer Tamara Barnett-Herrin from London in the UK published a one sentence challenge to herself and to remixers around the World Wide Web: "I write one song a month. You remix and feedback. We make a record." This experiment in songwriting and remix culture unlike any other yielded over 300 remixes, setting a new record at ccMixter. Twelve of them have been chosen to be published in an album titled Calendar Songs…

The Neurocritic: Genomarketing!

Is this the foreshadowing of a highly unethical marketing practice? Marketing based on MAO-A genotype, as determined from mailed-in credit card applications and payments? Credit card companies will have in-house labs to extract DNA from stamps and envelope flaps (Sinclair & McKechnie, 2000; Ng et al., 2007).1 Taking it one step further, entire marketing campaigns will be tailored to specific markers in an individualâs genome.2 Is this what itâs coming to? Not so fast. Are there any limitations in the findings of De Neve and Fowler (2009)? There are many!! via neurocritic.blogspot.com…

Trying to identify our blogging voices better

So on the bottom of our posts is a helpful little note that says "posted by" and either Alice or SW, as the case may be. We also occasionally tag our posts as coming from either Alice or ScienceWoman. And yet, it may be confusing who is speaking when, especially for those folks reading the blog with RSS feeds. So, taking a page from Shelley and Steve over at Two Minds, we're going to try to mark the beginning of our posts with a little icon from our profile photos. Voila. Let us know if this makes things better, or if it is really irritating. Thanks.

Antarctic nights

Some awesome photos from NSF teams working in Antarctica (click for larger versions). This one makes me want to hum "O Little Base of McMurdo, how still we see thee lie. . . " McMurdo base by night James Walker/NSF Palmer Station Sunset Lisa Trotter/NSF Aurora australis over McMurdo Ken Klassy/NSF Amundsen-Scott Station Mel McMahon/NSF Source: 'Dispatches from Antarctica,' a series of posts by Air Force Lt. Col. Ed Vaughan with OPERATION: DEEP FREEZE, the Defense Department's support of National Science Foundation research in Antarctica. Vaughan's ongoing series of posts includes an…

Fight Fly Club

Well I got an email from the Journal of Visualized Experiment (JoVE). Here's the key pitch: JoVE is a new open-source publication that allows free access to the latest biological research and experimental techniques in video format. Video-articles published in the second issue include a variety of complex experimental approaches ranging from stem cell transplantation to behavioral studies in Drosophila. These include experiments from the leading stem cell laboratories. Included in it's second issue is a video entitled Studying aggression in Drosophila (fruit flies) where you'll learn how to…

And the Nobel Prize for Literature goes to ....

... Mario Vargas Llosa. From Wikipedia, we learn that his name is prounouced: "[Ëmaɾjo ËβarÉ£az ËÊosa]" Thank you very much Wikipedia, that was so xweÊul. Anyway, Vargas Llosa wrote La ciudad y los perros, La casa verde, 1965/1968), and the Conversación en la catedral. Many of Vargas Llosa's works are influenced by the writer's perception of Peruvian society and his own experiences as a native Peruvian. Increasingly, however, he has expanded his range, and tackled themes that arise from other parts of the world. Another change over the course of his career has been a shift from a style…

Science Blogs Updates Advertorial Policy

If you look at the Pepsi Food Frontiers Blog you will see that it now says "ADVERTORIAL" along the top of the blog. My understanding is that this is temporary and more design changes may occur, but the objective is to make this sort of blog clearly distinct from regular blogs. This is a good first step. The RSS feeds from sponsored blogs, including the Google News Feed and such, will be handled separately, and posts from the sponsored blogs in the Fire Hose feed will be marked as such (eventually, not sure if that is in place yet). People should still send in their feedback on this.

Is BP burning turtles alive?

According to some sources, yes. News has just emerged from the Gulf Coast that BP is burning endangered sea turtles alive. 1 A boat captain who has been leading efforts to rescue the endangered turtles says BP has blocked his crews from entering the areas where the animals are trapped, effectively shutting down the rescue operation. BP is using "controlled burns" to contain the oil spill. Shrimp boats create a corral of oil by dragging together fire-resistant booms and then lighting the enclosed "burn box" on fire. If turtles are not removed from the area before the fire is lit, they are…

War On Easter Surprise Attack

News outlets are reporting a surprise attack on Easter. War weary from epoch fighting in the War on Christmas, only recently suspended, most analysts had predicted that there would be no War on Easter this year. But they were wrong. From the front: This is Easter, the day Christians everywhere set aside to celebrate the day they were hoaxed by a gang of Middle Eastern charlatans into believing a local mystic rose from the dead... at Pharyngula. How to spot the enemy, at Laelaps. Peep Research Radio Propaganda War Heats Up. Linked; Easter and Cold Fusion. at Halfway There Are you ready…

The Jenny McCarthy Song

A loving ode to Jenny McCarthy from her good friends, Measles, Mumps, and Rubella: Genius. That's all I can say.Thank you Brian Thompson, a.k.a. the Amateur Scientist. And to you, Jenny McCarthy, the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella offer their profound thanks for saving them from eradication in the U.S., just as they've offered their thanks to Andrew Wakefield for saving them from eradication in the U.K..Bloggers, you know what to do. Spread this video far and wide. E-mail it to your friends. Even better, e-mail it to antivaccinationists. Let's see if we can make this sucker go viral. (Hey,…

Monckton Lambert debate blog round up

A couple of blog posts from people who were there Carmen Lambert (my totally unbiased coach). Mercurius. And lucia and co did a chat while watching the live feed. Update: James Annan thought estimating sensitivity from the last Ice Age was a good idea. Not surprisingly since I got the idea from him. And Andrew Bolt responds to the debate by defaming me, calling me "vituperative, deceptive, a cherrypicker, an ideologue, a misrepresenter and a Manichean conspiracist only too keen to smear a sceptic as a crook who lies for Exxon's dollars". Update 2: There seems to be a shortage of…

OMG It's So Cute!

Redmond, Wash.-based Microvision is unveiling a fully functioning, self-contained prototype that should be available as a real product--possibly from Motorola--later this year. Dubbed SHOW, the lensless PicoP projector is designed for home and business use, and uses tiny lasers to shoot a WVGA (848 by 480, roughly DVD resolution) image on virtually any surface that isn't a dark color or textured. It can even project onto curved and uneven surfaces. From a distance of two feet, it could project a two-foot diagonal, full-color image on a white T-shirt. From five feet away, it could show a five…

A Slice of Life Scarves

(from the archives) As a microscopist you are often are stunned by the beauty of what's on your microscope slide. I remember as a grad student showing this technician (a former doctor from China) a slide where cells were stained by immunofluorescence against microtubules. After peering into the microscope he turned to me and said, "there must be a God". Uhm ... yes quite beautiful stuff. So it came as no surprise when a good friend of mine sent me a link to A Slice of Life Scarves. This company uses motifs from the life sciences as patterns for their scarves and ties. Besides Golgi scarves (…

Dawkins on C-SPAN2

I caught Richard Dawkins on C-SPAN2's BookTV last night. This was a video of his talk at Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia on October 23, 2006. He read a few passages from his newest book, The God Delusion, and then proceeded to take questions from the audience. Dawkins was his usual erudite self, and as Lynchburg is also the home of Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, he tackled a number of questions from LU faculty and students. The result was both educational and entertaining. I don't think I can hear the phrase "I am a biology student at Liberty University" now without…

Parameters for Fantastic Contraption

Yes, I did some experiments with [Fantastic Contraption](http://fantasticcontraption.com/) ([Water sticks in Fantastic Contraption](http://blog.dotphys.net/2008/10/water-stick-springs-in-fantastic-contra…), [Torque from rotating balls in FC](http://blog.dotphys.net/2008/10/torque-produced-by-balls-in-fantastic-c…), [Basic stuff in FC](http://blog.dotphys.net/2008/10/physics-of-fantastic-contraption-i/)). But apparently, there is a wiki with some of the answers: [List of physics parameters for Fantastic Contraption](http://fc.therisenrealm.com/wiki/List_of_physics_parameters) I assume these…

SI/USGS Weekly Volcano Report for 12/2-12/8/2009

A new Weekly Volcano Report from the Smithsonian GVP/USGS ... enjoy! Highlights include: There has been a number of reports of new activity at Llaima in Chile (hat tip to Eruptions reader Manuel Humeres for bringing them to us). Most of the current activity is steam-and-gas plumes along with long-period seismicity, suggesting we could be headed towards a new eruption. Lava flows continue to erupt from Kliuchevskoi in Kamchatka, along with strombolian activity throwing ejecta up to 300 m / ~1000 feet above the crater. Rabaul is busy shaking windows 20 km / 12 miles from the Tavurvur crater,…

One Year After Fukushima, a Startup Named Kurion Continues to Shed Light on What it Means to Live in the Nuclear Age

By Larry Bock Founder and organizer, USA Science & Engineering Festival When searching for a prime, real-life example of how science and technology are making a difference in the world right now, my thoughts lately turn to a small but feisty greentech startup that you may never have heard of: Kurion, Inc. Based in Irvine, CA with 15 employees, this profitable three-year-old company which specializes in nuclear waste cleanup has quietly and effectively been using its technology at the front lines of Fukushima, the site of what is being called one of the largest nuclear disasters in…

Am I really related to Cleopatra? Qualitatively measuring DNA sequence quality

What do genetic testing and genealogy have in common? The easy answer is that they're both used by people who are trying to find out who they are, in more ways than one. Another answer is that both tests can involve DNA sequence data. And that leads us to another question. If the sequence of my mitochondrial DNA is only two bases different from Cleopatra's, am I really a distant relative? And how do I really even know that my mitochondrial DNA is only two bases different in the first place? What does having a DNA sequence really mean? Students sequencing mitochondrial DNA I wrote earlier…

Heat Kills: As temperatures climb, workers succumb to heat

On July 5, James Baldasarre, a 45-year old a Medford, Massachusetts US Postal Service employee who had worked for USPS for 24 years, died from excessive heat. According to news reports, shortly before collapsing in the 95-degree heat, Baldasarre texted his wife to say, “I’m going to die out here today. It’s so hot.”  On July 9, Juan Ochoa, a 37-year old farm worker in Tulare County, California about 35 miles north of Bakersfield, died from heat while checking on irrigation equipment in a lemon orchard. The temperatures that day reportedly climbed to 105º and 106ºF. According to his brother,…

What Does a Faster-Than-Light Object Look Like?

I exchanged a bunch of emails a week or two ago with a journalist who was working on a story involving the possibility of faster-than-light travel. He wanted me to check some statements about the relationship between FTL and causality. FTL creates problems for causality, because if you have an object moving faster than light, there will be pairs of observers who see events involving the FTL object happening in different orders, which means somebody will see an effect happen before its cause. I talk about this is How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog using the example of a stationary dog, a…

Where do Rogue Planets come from?

"Like all animals, human beings have always taken what they want from nature. But we are the rogue species. We are unique in our ability to use resources on a scale and at a speed that our fellow species can't." -Edward Burtynsky It's really a romantic notion when you think about it: the heavens, the Milky Way, is lined with hundreds of billions of stars, each with their own unique and varied solar systems. Image credit: 湖北直行便 of AstroArts, via http://www.astroarts.jp/photo-gallery/photo/13870.html. But beyond that -- in addition to the stars -- there are hundreds of billions of planets…

How we found the speed of light: it's not infinite!

"Nothing in the universe can travel at the speed of light, they say, forgetful of the shadow's speed." -Howard Nemerov I know many of you are still mad at the night sky because of the full Moon preventing you from seeing the recent, close-by supernova in the Pinwheel Galaxy, at least until the end of the week. Image credit: Original source unknown, retrieved from the Rose City Astronomers. With the full Moon brightly illuminating your sky (and filling it with light pollution), only the brightest, most compact objects are visible at most locations on Earth. But there is one object -- rising…

Punishing slackers and do-gooders

Humans have an extraordinary capacity for selflessness. We often help complete strangers who are unrelated to us, who we may never meet again and who are unlikely to be able to return the favour. More and more, we are being asked to behave in selfless ways to further the common good, not least in the race to tackle climate change. Given these challenges, it's more important than ever to understand the roots of cooperative behaviour. From an evolutionary point of view, it can be a bit puzzling because any utopic society finds itself vulnerable to slackers, who can prosper at the expense of…

I think Kopel atttributed the 98% to Kleck

So, was the attribution of the 98% to Kleck's study in the Lott quote below made by Lott, or did Dave Kopel add it? "Guns clearly deter criminals, with Americans using guns defensively over 2 million times each year---five times more frequently than the 430,000 times guns were used to commit crimes in 1997, according to research by Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck. Kleck's study of defensive gun uses found that ninety-eight percent of the time simply brandishing the weapon is sufficient to stop an attack." Our first piece of evidence is Kopel's recollections…

Alternate fuels: community ecology informs energy policy

There's little doubt that we need to move America off of its addiction to rapidly depleting fossil fuels. The challenge is that our current energy infrastructure is heavily dependent on there being a common currency of energy; cars and trucks all run on different formulations of the same product, factories and households tap into the same electrical grid. While the electrical grid is basically agnostic to the source of the electricity, replacing petroleum products will be trickier. The reason we need them is that cars and trucks need to carry their energy source with them. While hydrogen…

More Measurements of the Projectile Velocity

The last time I looked at this projectile motion lab, I was confused. My different methods for measuring the launch speed of the ball were not even close to being consistent. So, I am bringing out the big guns - video. I made a video of the ball shot both horizontally off the table and vertically. No point posting the whole video (unless you really need it), but here is a screen shot of what the setup looked like. These videos were made with my flip video camera, it doesn't have adjustable shutter speed so that there is some blur. Also, notice the carbon paper on the floor. This is so…

Junk DNA is still junk

The ENCODE project made a big splash a couple of years ago — it is a huge project to not only ask what the sequence of a strand of human DNA was, but to analyzed and annotate and try to figure out what it was doing. One of the very surprising results was that in the sections of DNA analyzed, almost all of the DNA was transcribed into RNA, which sent the creationists and the popular press into unwarranted flutters of excitement that maybe all that junk DNA wasn't junk at all, if enzymes were busy copying it into RNA. This was an erroneous assumption; as John Timmer pointed out, the genome is…

Liars: No Information Allowed

Bad from the Bad Ideas Blog sent me a link to some clips from Ben Stein's new Magnum Opus, "Expelled". I went and took a look. Randomly, I picked one that looked like a clip from the movie rather than a trailer - it's the one titled "Genetic Mutation". Care to guess how long it took me to find an insane, idiotic error? 4 seconds. It's the old "evolution can't create information" scam. The clip is Ben Stein interviewing a guy named "Maceij Giertych", who is allegedly a population geneticist. (I say allegedly because looking the guy up, he appears to be an agricultural biologist studying…

Webb Kinda Sounds Like a Liberal

I like it like that. Webb writes dirty words in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. You know, words like "class" and "elites." Says Webb (italics mine): The most important--and unfortunately the least debated--issue in politics today is our society's steady drift toward a class-based system, the likes of which we have not seen since the 19th century. America's top tier has grown infinitely richer and more removed over the past 25 years. It is not unfair to say that they are literally living in a different country. Few among them send their children to public schools; fewer still send their loved…

More on the PNAS reassortant paper

I have now had a chance to read the PNAS paper by Maines et al. and it is surprising in two respects. The first is it isn't that interesting. The second is related to the first. Why did they bother to hold a press conference about it? Even more, why did the press conference focus on the reassortment question when that didn't establish much. Anyway, that's how I read it. Here are my reasons. The most important part of this paper is methodological, testing a ferret infection model for transmissibility. Ferrets have been used as a reasonably good biological model for infectivity and virulence in…

Advice for Gulf responders about chemical exposures

by Eileen Senn, MS Response workers know a great deal about how they have been potentially exposed to chemicals in the Gulf of Mexico since the BP Horizon Deepwater oil spill began on April 20, 2010. Valuable exposure information resides in workers' knowledge of their daily experiences cleaning up the oil, drilling relief wells, transporting supplies, applying dispersant, burning oil, cleaning boom, operating vessels, and more. I suggest that workers write or otherwise permanently record their experiences while they are fresh in their memories. Workers should keep copies of their pay stubs…

Antipsychotic Drugs Prescribed to Kids Get More Scrutiny

Alison Bass directs our attention to the tragic story of Denis Maltez, a 12-year-old Miami boy who died of serotonin syndrome after being given two anti-psychotic medications (Seroquel and Zyprexa) plus an anti-seizure drug and tranquilizer. Serotonin syndrome occurs when a combination of drugs causes the brain to produce excess serotonin. Denis had severe autism and was living in a Rainbow Ranch group home; the lawsuit just filed by his mother, Martha Quesada, says the drugs were used as a "chemical restraint to control Denis's behavior."  Florida shut down Rainbow Ranch shortly after Denis…

Greek-nosed first-horned face and the 'bagaceratopids'

I never planned to do a whole week on ceratopsians: the initial idea was just to recycle some of those field guide texts in order to save a bit of time. But, oh well, Ceratopsian Week took on a life all its own. To finish things off, we're going to look at some tremendously obscure ceratopsians: they're reasonably familiar to dinosaur uber-nerds/dinosaur experts, of course, but are unheard of outside of the dinosaur community. We begin with Protoceratops hellenikorhinus Lambert et al., 2001 [shown here] from the Campanian of Bayan Mandahu, Inner Mongolia. P. hellenikorhinus is similar to the…

New and Exciting in PLoS

Lots of interesting stuff in PLoS Medicine and PLoS Biology this week, as well as a special, one-day-in-advance paper in PLoS ONE: Small-Bodied Humans from Palau, Micronesia: Newly discovered fossil assemblages of small bodied Homo sapiens from Palau, Micronesia possess characters thought to be taxonomically primitive for the genus Homo. Recent surface collection and test excavation in limestone caves in the rock islands of Palau, Micronesia, has produced a sizeable sample of human skeletal remains dating roughly between 940-2890 cal ybp. Preliminary analysis indicates that this material is…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 19 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Ancient Nursery Area for the Extinct Giant Shark Megalodon from the Miocene of Panama: As we know from modern species, nursery areas are essential shark habitats for vulnerable young. Nurseries are…

How Does Angular Momentum Emerge?

Yesterday's post about VPython simulation of the famous bicycle wheel demo showed that you can get the precession and nutation from a simulation that only includes forces. But this is still kind of mysterious, from the standpoint of basic physics intuition. Specifically, it's sort of hard to see how any of this produces a force up and to the left, as required for the precession to happen. I spent a bunch of time last night drawing pictures and writing equations, and I think I have the start of an explanation. It all comes down to the picture of rigid objects as really stiff springs-- the grey…

The Dishonesty of the Right's Anti-Judicial Rhetoric

Well last night was Demagogues on Display "Justice Sunday II", at which some of the most prominent religious right leaders - James Dobson, William Donohue, Tony Perkins, etc - threw red meat to their followers by railing at those evil judges out to destroy everything good and decent in America. Along the way they displayed some highly dishonest rhetoric. Like this: Dobson evoked the framers of the Constitution, saying: "These activist, unelected judges believe they know better than the American people about the direction the country should go. The framers of our great nation did not intend…

Son of Interstellar Laser Communications

I didn't plan to do a follow-up to yesterday's post about the optics of sending messages with lasers, but then I starting idly thinking about detection, prompted in part by a bunch of conversations with my summer students about single-photon detectors. which led to scribbling on the back of an envelope, which led to Googling, and suddenly, I have a follow-up post. So: as we said yesterday, if you want to send messages over a distance of ten light years, a relatively efficient way to do this might be to send them via lasers. This results in the light being spread over a pretty big area, though…

The Sound of Simulated Bombs

So, last week I idly wondered about the canonical falling-bomb whistle. The was originally intended to be a very short post just asking the question, but I got caught up in thinking about it, and it ended up being more substantial. And leaving room for further investigation in the form of, you guessed it, VPython simulations. This one isn't terribly visual, so you don't get screen shots, just a link to the code at Gist. It's a simulation of a falling bomb, with air resistance, tracking the velocity as a function of time. Then it calculates a "Doppler shift" using the velocity as a fraction of…

The Quirks of Scientific Public Speaking

As previously noted, I spent most of last week at the 2013 DAMOP meeting, where I listened to a whole bunch of talks. At some point, I was listening to a talk, and said "I bet this guy hasn't given a lot of these before." What was the give-away? The fact that he almost never said "Um." To the dismay of many students entering science majors, public speaking is a very significant part of being a professional scientist. Scientists are expected to give talks of a variety of different lengths-- 10-15 minute "contributed" talks at big meetings, 25-30 minute "invited" conference talks, 45-60 minute…

More fallout from New Mexico garbage truck E. coli-gate - up from the comments

Here's an update on E. coli-gate in Tularosa, NM: Okay, so it's more than fluid - it's about a pint of sludge left in front of each house where the garbage truck stopped. But this is ridiculous: [Tularosa resident Ken] Riedlinger took samples from the sludge puddle to the Diagnostic and Technology Center in Alamogordo and they found a huge amount of E. coli, he said. "The upper tray reported it's infinite, the numbers were too great to count," Riedlinger said. "This is massive, massive E. coli. This is deadly stuff." E. coli is a bacterium found in the lower intestine of warm-blooded animals…

Heroes in a half-shell show how turtles evolved

Clad in hard, armoured shells, turtles have a unique body plan unlike that of any other animal. Their shells have clearly served them well and the basic structure has gone largely unchanged since the time of the dinosaurs. But this unchanging nature poses a problem for anyone trying to understand how they evolved and until now, fossil turtles haven't provided any clues. All of them, just like their living descendants, have fully formed two-part shells. But three stunning new fossils are very different. They belong to the oldest turtle ever discovered, which lived about 220 million years ago…

A bad taste in your mouth - moral outrage has origins in physical disgust

Both objects and behaviour can be described as disgusting. The term could equally apply to someone who cheats other people out of money as it could to the sight of rancid food or the taste of sour milk. That's not just a linguistic quirk. Some scientists believe that the revulsion we feel towards immoral behaviour isn't based on our vaunted mental abilities, but on ancient impulses that evolved to put us off toxic or infectious foods. It seems that your facial muscles agree. Hanah Chapman from the University of Toronto has found that both physical and moral disgust cause the levator labii…