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New cells in the adult brain migrate long distances by crawling along blood vessels

The journey undertaken by newly generated neurons in the adult brain is like the cellular equivalent of the arduous upstream migration of salmon returning to the rivers in which they were hatched. Soon after they are born in the subventricular zone near the back of the brain, these cells migrate to the front-most tip of of the olfactory bulb. This is the furthest point from their birth place, and they traverse two-thirds of the length of the brain to get there. The first leg of this epic journey - the departure of the newborn cells from the subventricular zone - involves some of the…

More on polls

Over at Uncommon Descent, both Dembski and Dave Springer are highlighting this Harris poll from July of last year (you got to hand it to the ID supporters, they keep up with the literature). Dembski merely makes a number of observations (belief in ID increases with education and is more common in Democrats and in the NE and West of the country) while Springer practically passes out with excitement ("Wow! ... Amazing. I recall Bill Dembski months ago writing ID has the momentum and Evolution has the inertia. How right he was!"). However, one needs to look at the actual poll results before…

The Bluenose Marathon and Youth Run

Sorry for the absence the past few days - I am just back from the Bluenose Marathon Weekend in Halifax, Nova Scotia.  My girlfriend and I have a lot of family and friends in Halifax, so the race was a great excuse to spend the May long weekend visiting with them.  Daun and I ran in the 10km and Half-Marathon respectively, and 12 members of my extended family from 3 different generations walked or jogged the 10km.  This is my first time racing in the Bluenose, but last year I volunteered in the Youth Run, which was at least as much fun as racing, if not more so (and not just because of the…

Happy Birthday The Universe

The age of the Universe is 13.73 billion years, plus or minus 120 million years. Some people might say it doesn't look a day over 6000 years. They're wrong. The quote above is from Bad Astronomy, where Phil explains the latest WMAP results. Highly recommended. A very nice history of the study of the universe, accessible to all, is Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe (P.S.) by Singh. The big bang and stuff that happened in connection with this cosmic event, the so-called origin of the universe, left a signal that is visible today to instruments on earth. Careful analysis of this signal can…

How "Being Wrong" can be so right

Have you ever been wrong? Well then, this book is for you. It's a trick question, because everyone is wrong all the time. A more detailed review after the jump, but the bottom line: read it. I'm barely exaggerating when I say that reading Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margins of Error by Kathryn Shultz should be compulsory for anyone and everyone that ever that has ever thought they know the truth, which is to say everyone. Drawing from history, philosophy, science, current events and a smattering of personal reflection, Shultz takes us through what it means to be wrong, why we get things…

With friends like these, or Tony Campolo gets eaten by the Hitler zombie

Tony Campolo, generally considered a member of the Christian Left, writes a staggeringly wrong essay on evolution. After rightly dismissing typical creationist complaints that evolutionary "theories contradict their literal biblical belief that creation occurred in six 24-hour days," Campolo jumps onto the Coral Ridge/Disco. Inst. bandwagon, claiming that the "real dangers of Darwinism," lie in "the ethical implications of Darwin's original writings." After which we get the typical half-literate practice of judging Darwin's 500+ page opus based on a single phrase in the subtitle: "Favored…

Best Science Books 2010: The top books of the year!!!!

Every year for the last few years I've collected lists of notable science books from various media sources. I certainly continued this tradition for books published in 2010! I can tell it's a very popular service from the hit stats I see for the blog and from the number of keyword searches on "science books 2010" or whatnot I see in the logs. Last year I started taking all the lists and tallying up all the "votes" to see which are the most mentioned books from the year. An interesting exercise, to say the least! While the "winner" wasn't in any sense the best book of the year, it was…

Story Time From Space

Guest Blog by Festival X-STEM Speaker Dr. Jeffrey Bennett Originally Posted on The Huffington Post May 9, 2014 What you cannot imagine, you cannot do. --Astronaut Alvin Drew (STS-118, STS-133) How many people are living in space right now? I've found that since the end of the Space Shuttle program, most Americans think the answer is zero, but it's not. There are currently six people living aboard the International Space Station, including two Americans (Steve Swanson and Rick Mastracchio), one Japanese citizen (Koichi Wakata), and three Russian cosmonauts. All the astronauts currently get…

Digital Biology Friday: Animal Mitochondria and Evolution Revisited

Last year I wrote about an experiment where I compared a human mitochondrial DNA sequence to primate sequences in the GenBank. Since I wanted to know about the differences between humans, gorillas, and chimps, I used the Entrez query 'Great Apes' to limit my search to a set of sequences in the PopSet database that contained gorillas, bonobos, chimps, and human DNA. A week ago, I tried to repeat this experiment and... It didn't work. All I saw were human mitochondrial sequences.  I know the other sequences match, but I didn't see them since there are so many human sequences that match…

Bird flu, mosquitoes and blowflies

A notice from ProMed yesterday alerted many of us to a new published report [subscription firewall] about H5N1 influenza detection in an arthropod species in the vicinity of an infected poultry farm. The arthropods were mosquitoes (Culex tritaeniorhynchus) in Thailand. Two years ago a similar report implicated blowflies (Calliphora nigribarbis and Aldrichina grahami) near some infected farms in Kyoto, Japan. Both papers suggested using arthropods near infected farms as surveillance tools. But both, especially the Japanese paper, raised the open question whether arthropods might play a part in…

Mike Adams and NY Post promote more hysteria over Ebola

I've been asked several times about this NY Post article on the CDC's "admission" that a sneeze could spread Ebola. The Post (which, I should note, is the least credible newspaper in New York City, for those not familiar with the paper) suggests that the CDC has changed their tune regarding the spread of Ebola. Except, they haven't, and this is a ridiculous, trumped-up non-story, passed along not only by the Post but by others of the typical suspects like conspiracy theorist extraordinaire Mike Adams, aka "The Health Ranger" of Natural News. Here's what the NY Post claims: “Droplet spread…

Ebola in pigs! [UPDATED]

I've mentioned repeatedly how little we know about Ebola ecology--what the reservoir host(s) are, how it's transmitted to humans (and other species), why it causes outbreaks when it does. We know even less about the Reston subtype of Ebola, which--in contrast to the Zaire, Sudan, Ivory Coast, and Bundibugyo subtypes, originated in Asia and was first found in monkeys imported into the United States for research purposes. It also is different from the other subtypes in that it appears to be only mildly lethal to monkeys, and several asymptomatic human infections have been documented (but…

Ebola in gorilla groups = not good

Longtime readers know of my fascination with Ebola. Much of it is fueled not by the fact that it's a major killer of humanity, because it's not: in 30 years, it's been responsible for a bit less than 2,000 human infections, and ~1,200 deaths. Bats have long been suspected to be a reservoir of the virus, and recent studies have confirmed that they can carry the virus. With at least one strain of Ebola (Ebola Reston), we know that our primate cousins are more severely affected than we are. This strain has been found to infect captured primates brought into the United States from the…

Friday Random Ten, 4/13

I've been swamped lately, learning to manage my new commute, and being overwhelmed by my new job. So I've been a bit lax about the blog; I've missed three weeks in a row for the friday pathological programming; and I haven't been posting my friday random tens. I don't have time to do a FPP post today, but I can at least inflict my strange tastes in music on you. Friday pathological programming will return next week. Navan, "Ma Labousig Ar C'hoad": Navan is a wonderful traditional Irish a capella group. I caught them being interviewed on NPR the week before St. Patrick's day, and…

Kripke Semantics and Models for Intuitionistic Logic

To be able to really talk about what a logic (or a calculus) means, you need to define a model of that logic. A model is a way of associating entities in the logic/calculus with some kind of real entity in a way where all statements in the logic about the logical entity will also be true about the real-world entity. Models are incredibly important, because it's relatively easy to design a logic which looks as if it's perfectly valid, but which contains some subtle error which leads to it being essentially meaningless - showing a model for a logic guarantees that that can't happen. The model…

New Bird Species Discovered in Gabon, Africa

tags: new bird species, African forest robin, Stiphrornis pyrrholaemus, Gamba Complex, Moukalaba-Doudou National Park, ornithology, birds, avian, Smithsonian, researchblogging.org A male specimen of the newly-discovered olive-backed forest robin, Stiphrornis pyrrholaemus, is carefully examined in the hand of Brian Schmidt, the Smithsonian ornithologist who discovered the species. Image: Brian Schmidt. A new species of bird has been identified by ornithologists from the Smithsonian Institution. The bird, which was first discovered in Gabon, a small country in Africa, was unknown to the…

Neutrinos and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

"To use Newton's words, our efforts up till this moment have but turned over a pebble or shell here and there on the beach, with only a forlorn hope that under one of them was the gem we were seeking. Now we have the sieve, the minds, the hands, the time, and, particularly, the dedication to find those gems--no matter in which favorite hiding place the children of distant worlds have placed them." -Frank Drake and Dava Sobel Looking up at the canopy of stars in the night sky, and realizing that each point of light is a star system not so unlike our own, one can't help but wonder about those…

NOAA declares third ever global coral bleaching event

This just out from NOAA: As record ocean temperatures cause widespread coral bleaching across Hawaii, NOAA scientists confirm the same stressful conditions are expanding to the Caribbean and may last into the new year, prompting the declaration of the third global coral bleaching event ever on record. Waters are warming in the Caribbean, threatening coral in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, NOAA scientists said. Coral bleaching began in the Florida Keys and South Florida in August, but now scientists expect bleaching conditions there to diminish. “The coral bleaching and disease,…

Extreme Tides!

The Truth is far more powerful than any weapon of mass destruction. -Gandhi Last time, I spoke to you about how tides work on Earth. In a nutshell, a nearby massive body (like the Moon or the Sun) pulls on the Earth's center due to its gravity. But the portion of the Earth that's closest to that massive body gets pulled with a slightly greater force, while the portion that's farthest gets pulled with a slightly smaller force. This differential force, known as a tidal force, causes objects to be stretched out, and causes our oceans to bulge at the points nearest and farthest from the Moon,…

Should Bibles Be Tax Exempt?

Interesting case in Florida where a Wiccan group is suing the state because they exempt bibles from the state sales tax, but not other religious books. Naturally, religious right legal groups are defending the law because, truth be told, their goal is to preserve government benefits exclusively for their religion and not for others. Liberty Counsel, for example, has filed a brief in the case and makes a couple of unusual arguments in this article from Agape Press. He says: However, Staver maintains that the Florida statute being contested is constitutional. "The case that the Wiccans have…

Amazing Laser Application 8: Holography!

What's the application? Holograms are images of objects that appear three-dimensional-- if you move your head as you look at a hologram, you will see the usual parallax effects, unlike a normal photograph, which is fixed. So, if your hologram includes one object that is partly behind another object, you can see around the obstruction by moving a bit to the side, just as you would if the original objects were in front of you. What problem(s) is it the solution to? 1) "How can we jazz up flat images and make them look more lifelike?" 2) "How can we make credit cards harder to copy?" How does it…

Global and Seasonal thread summary and continuation

Okay, the "Globally and Seasonally averaged" thread has grown to over 500 comments and thus reached its point of diminishing return in terms of the time it would take to read it and the utility of doing so. And while on the one hand I don't like to feed what is drifting towards to troll-like behaviour, the conversation continues and I don't want to stifle it. It began with a comment of mine at Judith Curry's blog about who is a denier and who is a sceptic. See the update in the original article for why Richard clearly falls out of the sceptic category. So I am going to close that thread…

Dr Michael Egnor challenges evolution!

Time magazine has a science blog, Eye on Science, and the writer, Michael Lemonick, doesn't hesitate to take on the Intelligent Design creationists. A recent entry criticizes the Discovery Institute's silly list of dissenters from 'Darwinism'. Not only is the number that they cite pathetically small, but they rely on getting scientists whose expertise isn't relevant. The Discovery Institute is at it again. "Ranks of Scientists Doubting Darwin's Theory On the Rise," proclaims the latest press release from this organization that pretends to be interested in science. Read on and you'll find…

NASA Discovers Dust on Mars. It's everywhere!

This color image is a three dimensional (3D) view of a digital elevation map of a sample collected by NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander's Atomic Force Microscope (AFM). The image shows four round pits, only 5 microns in depth, that were micromachined into the silicon substrate, which is the background plane shown in red. This image has been processed to reflect the levelness of the substrate. A Martian particle -- only one micrometer, or one millionth of a meter, across -- is held in the upper left pit. The rounded particle -- shown at the highest magnification ever seen from another world -- is…

The brains of stupid people are just wired different, I guess.

Classic moment in ERV history: Me: *ranting to my mother about my interactions with a big-box-store veterinarian not understanding what 'platelets' are and letting smaller dogs attack him while he was waking up from anesthesia when he was getting neutered and my inability to get across to the 'vet' how FUCKING STUPID her actions were* Mom: Now honey, you know you dont deal well with those kinds of people. Me: *stops mid rant*... What kind of people? Mom: ... You know. Stupid people. I dont. Some people are just so stupid I honestly cant figure out how they know how to 'feed themselves' or '…

Trends in International Math and Science: Mostly Downward

My talk at the AAAS meeting was part of a symposium on the results from the 2008 Trends in International Math and Science Survey (TIMSS) Advanced. This is an international test on math and physics given to high-school students in nine different countries (Armenia, Iran, Italy, Lebanon, Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Slovenia, Sweden), and this is part of an ongoing survey, with a previous round given in 1995 or 1998. As part of the preparation for the talk, I got all the released items from TIMSS 2008, including score breakdowns and demographic information. My own analysis of this was fairly…

This is why I blog: from rock bottom to top tier

Last July we wrote about the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing and spoke of Buzz Aldrin's autobiography about his battle with alcoholism in the years following. The post drew a comment from a reader who I've renamed "Anon." Thank you so much for this post. I am a recovering drug addict and am in the process of applying to graduate programs. I have a stellar GPA, have assisted as an undergraduate TA, and have been engaged in research for over a year. I also have felony and was homeless for 3 years. I don't hide my recovery from people once I know them, but I sometimes, especially…

NIDA researchers Hinds (Kentucky) and Torres (Pittsburgh) given Presidential Early Career Award

Hearty congratulations this morning to a group of early-career investigators who received this award yesterday in Washington, DC: The Presidential Award for Early Career Scientists and Engineers was established in 1996 and is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists and engineers beginning their independent careers. [emphasis mine] Awardees are selected on the basis of two criteria: pursuit of innovative research at the frontiers of science and technology; and a commitment to community service as demonstrated through scientific leadership, public education…

Leafcutter ants rely on bacteria to fertilise their fungus gardens

Hardly a natural history documentary goes by without some mention of leafcutter ants. So overexposed are these critters that I strongly suspect they're holding David Attenborough's relatives to ransom somewhere. But there is good reason for their fame - these charismatic insects are incredibly successful because of their skill as gardeners. As their name suggests, the 41 species of leafcutter ants slice up leaves and carry them back to their nests in long columns of red and green. They don't eat the leaves - they use them to grow a fungus, and it's this crop that they feed on. It's an old…

Big-headed tiger snakes support long-neglected theory of genetic assimilation

Tiger snakes are a group of extremely venomous serpents found all over the southern half of Australia, and on many of its islands. Some were cut off from the mainland by rising sea levels more than 9,000 years ago, while others were inadvertently introduced by travelling humans and have been around for less than 30 years. When the snakes first arrive on an island, they find prey that are generally larger than they're used to on the mainland. That puts them under strong evolutionary pressure to have larger heads, in order to swallow larger meals. But by feeding snakes from different…

Next White House science adviser on Letterman

This segment from Letterman is from back in April, but given the word that John Holdren, former AAAS head, will be running Barack Obama's Office of Science and Technology Policy (i.e., serving as chief science adviser to the president), it's worth a replay. This is a man who will be repeatedly reminding the president that climate change is not something that can be placed on the proverbial back burner. I mean, check out his c.v. Along with Stephen Chu as energy secretary, Obama will be getting the best advice possible on the biggest public policy challenge in history. (Carol Browner will…

Brethren, to the tides

Though this may not come as a surprise to many, I have a confession to make: I am not an accredited scientist. In fact, I only just graduated from college. And although the pomp and circumstance has barely dissipated and I'm still getting checks in the mail, I'm already thinking of what the undergraduate experience has brought me: a tolerance for $2 wine, certainly, as well as a toolkit of $2 words. Mostly, however, these four years of liberal arts schooling have thoroughly complicated all of life's simple experiences. Things which once came easily to me -- a willingness to watch hours of…

The Tender Sensibilities of Men

Female Science Professor has the most wonderful story to tell about a career forum at her university. Organized by a junior female faculty at her school, There is typically a panel with representatives from various types of academic institutions (small colleges, research universities, medium-sized universities), from industry, and from government agencies. The panel members speak briefly about their jobs and then there is a lot of interactive question-answer time with the audience. After,there is informal social time for additional interaction between students and the panel members. What's…

How we know what someone else can see

Developmental psychologists since Piaget have been interested in how well children are able to take the perspective of another. Piaget's laboratory had a large table with elaborate models on top; children who were able to take the perspective of a doll on the table and explain what the table looked like from her perspective instead of their own perspective were said to be at a later developmental stage. But understanding whether a doll can "see" something doesn't always literally require taking her perspective. Take a look at this simple arrangement of objects on a table: You don't have to…

Are toddlers incapable of learning from TV?

There's lots of evidence that most TV isn't beneficial to toddlers, and it may even be harmful. But can't kids learn from TV too? Isn't that supposed to be what shows like Teletubbies, Barney, and Sesame street are all about? For older children, three and above, it does seem to be true that some learning can occur, but for two-year-olds and younger, the evidence tells a different story. Few studies have shown any evidence that two-year-olds can learn from TV anywhere near as well as they learn from real-world experiences. While they clearly can distinguish between nonsense programming and…

A pox on your house? How fighting one disease brought back another

Some were surprised to read that after a pro basketball player swatted a bat out of the air, he had to have rabies vaccinations. This is not a surprise to many medical folks who have had to give rabies prophylaxis after bat exposures. Most of the few human rabies cases in the U.S. are transmitted by bats, although raccoons are more often diagnosed with the disease. Because rabies is fairly easy to transmit and nearly always fatal to humans, we are very aggressive about prevention. Rabid wild animals can have unusually aggressive behavior and can transmit rabies to humans and to their…

From The Desk of Zelnio: Lucernaria janetae

Lucernaria janetae (Cnidaria: Staurozoa: Lucernariidae) Stauromedusae are not entirely uncommon, but not entirely common either. In fact "stalked jellyfish", as they are sometimes known, are very rare in the deep sea and only about 50 species are described (5). Only one other has been reported from abyssal depths (Lucernaria bathyphila). These strange jellies are making more appearances along the East Pacific Rise. "A Lucernaria ... may be compared in form to a goblet or a funnel with double walls" (6) Description L. janetae was described in 2005 from specimens at 8N on…

Transmitting swine flu by talking to someone

When I tell people I am an epidemiologist, most of them think it means I'm a skin doctor. I'm not (although the skin disease specialty is much more lucrative). Instead I study patterns of disease in populations and use what I see to try to figure out why the observed pattern rather than another. Since I'm a cancer epidemiologist I usually do large, highly systematic studies that often take years to execute and analyze, but some epidemiologists do much more immediate "shoe leather" epidemiology, investigating disease outbreaks. They are like disease detectives and we can often learn a…

Bent-winged bats: wide ranges, very weird wings (vesper bats part III)

Welcome to part III of the vesper bat series though, as we'll see, the bats I'm covering here are not really vesper bat at all (anymore, and in the strictest sense of the term 'vesper bat'). They are the extremely strange, highly widespread long-winged bats, long-fingered bats or bent-winged bats (Miniopterus). Of these vernacular names, I prefer 'bent-winged bats'. As you can see from the simplified cladogram shown below, they're consistently found as the sister-group to virtually all other lineages conventionally included within Vespertilionidae [adjacent photo, from wikipedia, shows…

Fascinated by boobies

Extant sulids - the gannets and boobies - are admittedly pretty uniform (greater diversity existed among fossil forms, as we'll see at some stage), but they still differ in many subtle ways. In the previous sulid post we looked at the gannets: we now turn to the boobies [composite image shown here features Blue-footed booby at top left, Brown booby at bottom left, and Nazca booby at right. All pics from wikipedia]. If you're here because you hadn't realised that 'boobies' was being used in the ornithological sense, sorry. On that subject - everyone knows why the birds are called 'boobies'.…

Comments of the Week #28: The end of the Universe, world, and one wonderful dog

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.” -Sylvia Plath It's been two weeks since our last edition of our Comments of the Week, and from the heartbreaking to the mystifying, there's a lot we've written about and explored together. If you missed anything, go ahead and take a look back at our amazing suite of articles over that time: What is the Big Rip (for Ask Ethan), Saving Salmon... with a Cannon (for our Weekend Diversion), The Inconstant Moon (a super article from Summer Ash), The Teapot Dome Cluster, M28 (for Messier Monday), The Planets That…

Comments of the Week #22: From Science/Religion to New Writers

"Growth is never by mere chance; it is the result of forces working together." -James Cash Penney We don't normally have a week like this, where we not only take on the biggest topics in all of existence, but also have a ground-shaking announcement to make that alters the very fabric of Starts With A Bang! This past week, we've had a whole slew of outstanding things that we've covered, including: Do science and religion have to be at odds? (for Ask Ethan), A Jedi's dream come true (for our Weekend Diversion), Virgo's final galaxy, M100 (for Messier Monday), The Opportunity of the lifetime…

Comments of the Week #131: from seeing the Big Bang to trillions and trillions

“There are in fact 100 billion galaxies, each of which contain something like a 100 billion stars. Think of how many stars, and planets, and kinds of life there may be in this vast and awesome universe.” -Carl Sagan And at long last, Carl Sagan's estimates are finally out of date. It's not ~100 billion galaxies, but a number more like two trillion, and at last we know! If you wanted to know what the topic of this month's Starts With A Bang podcast was going to be, there's your answer! Look for it sometime over the next two weeks. Of course, none of that has changed what we write about here at…

Comments of the Week #104: from black hole jets to our motion through the Universe

"All the evidence, experimental and even a little theoretical, seems to indicate that it is the energy content which is involved in gravitation, and therefore, since matter and antimatter both represent positive energies, gravitation makes no distinction." -Richard Feynman It was a big last week at Starts With A Bang, and you might not realize it but next week is shaping up to be even bigger! If you missed anything, here's what we took a look at: How do black hole jets carve out bubbles in space? (for Ask Ethan), Beyond human vision, distant galaxy clusters emit spectacular fireworks (for…

Comments of the Week #99: From "scientific" theories to what the Universe expands into

"Here's an analogy. The Universe is expanding the way your mind is expanding. It's not expanding into anything; you're just getting less dense." -Katie Mack Excitement about the Universe in general -- and gravitational waves in particular -- is still peaking here at Starts With A Bang. Did you catch everything we covered this past week? Here's what you may have missed: What makes a theory a scientific one? (for Ask Ethan), The most astounding picture of stars beyond our galaxy (for Mostly Mute Monday), Could aliens see heat-based signs of life on Earth? (an Astroquizzical wonder by Jillian…

Kalahari Green and Red

I have a childhood memory of a troop of baboons, waiting among nearby rocks on a sun baked kopje, taking notice of nearby humans and watching and waiting until they saw a weakness and finally moving in for the kill, barking, grabbing, ripping livid flesh with long sharp canines, howling like wolves. And for the longest time I thought that memory was a scene from a movie called Flight of the Phoenix. But it turns out it was a scene from a movie that showed up on my doorstep this morning. And some time between that childhood memory forming and the DVD's delivery I actually went to the…

Short takes

I'm still digging out from under the pile of neglected email that accumulated during my extended travels. I'm also still dealing with my disrupted physiology from all the zipping and the flying and the carousing and the glaven-hey, so cut me some slack, OK? Anyway, here are a few things that popped up that looked interesting, but that I'll have to just quickly announce to clear them from my to-do list. I'll let you sort through them. The city council of Fresno is feeling some heat: the Central Valley Alliance of Atheists and Skeptics is trying to end the practice of prayer before meetings.…

Sex and its unintended consequences

When it comes to plants, there can be no gene flow without two compatible partners. And most plants are quite choosy, preferring a close relative rather than someone outside its family. Pollen travels in gusts of wind, on the pollen basket of bees, as cargo of flies or in the hands of human plant breeders. If the pollen alights upon a compatible mate, there will be fertilization and the resulting seed will carry the genes of the parents. What will happen then if a transgene from a genetically engineered crop plant cross-pollinates with wild relatives? A new study in PNAS suggests that we…

Education & Careers and Politics Weekly Update 11/12/08

Greetings ScienceBlogs readers. In this post: The large versions of the photos on the Education & Careers and Politics channels, and a recap of the channel quotes. Education & Careers Education & Careers channel photo. An enthusiastic submarine driver pops his head out of the hatch to smile for the camera. From Flickr, by jurvetson Often in the scientific world, work and play intermingle. In this case, it appears to be especially so. Putting in the time to learn a specialty science can be incredibly rewarding. This week's reader reaction quote on the Education & Careers…

Education and Politics Weekly Channel Update 10-1-08

In this post: the large versions of the Education and Careers and Politics channel photos, comments from readers, and the best posts of the week. Education and Careers. Math class in Penang, Malaysia. From Flickr, by cleong Politics. Massachusetts state capitol building. From Flickr, by redjar Reader comments of the week: This week in the Education and Careers Channel Chad Orzel of Uncertain Principles took some time out to fantasize about Fixing Science Education. Given unlimited, nigh-Godlike powers, what would need fixing? Chad explained: The key to fixing science education,…