Search Content

Displaying results 15351 - 15400 of 87950

Doonesbury at the Grand Canyon

Gary Trudeau sticks it to the creationists in today's Doonesbury. The topic of the day is the sad fact that the U.S. National Parks Service sells in its Grand Canyon gift shop a book that offers a Biblical chronology for the world's creation, a fact that makes it very hard to explain how the canyon formed in a mere 6,000 years. Good old Bob Park at the University of Maryland has been following this sad case for three years now, but it's nice to see Trudeau bring it to a wider audience. There's also this feature from The New York Times that follows a creationist rafting trip down the canyon…

Tuberculosis, not cancer, killed Dr Granville's mummy

Around 2600 years ago in Egypt, a woman called Irtyersenu died. She was mummified and buried at the necropolis at Thebes, where she remained for over two millennia before being unearthed in 1819. Her well-preserved body was brought to the British Museum where it was examined by the physician and obstetrician Augustus Bozzi Granville. It was the first ever medical autopsy of an Egyptian mummy and Granville presented his results to the Royal Society in 1825. His conclusion: Ityersenu died of ovarian cancer. The mummification techniques of ancient Egypt were so good that Irtyersenu's corpse…

Things that haunt me: the music from High School Musical. (a.k.a. science angle in the musical genre)

Last weekend, my family rented a movie called High School Musical (my kids really loved it), and I tell you, it has infiltrated our very being to the point where... hush a moment... wait...be quiet for a second... do you hear it? Do you hear it? (Yes, I am embarrassed to show this picture - thank goodness, I have tenure) I hear it. I hear the soundtrack in my head - always in my head. Can't - make - it - go - away... Anyway, no doubt one of the songs in the movie will make my family's year end music list, but here's the thing: The musical itself has a bit of a science angle to it.…

Irony meter test

As a public service, I provide here an extremely rigorous and intense test of your irony meters. Please set your resistance values to at least one gigOhm, make sure all shielding is in place, and please have a fire extinguisher and first aid kit handy. If you are using some cheap off-brand meter, do not click to read anything below the fold. You have been warned, and I will not be liable for any mishaps. Harun Yahya has a new book…or more likely, it seems, yet another rehash of the same old stuff. This one, though, is streaming straight from Bizarro World. Imagine yourself meeting a person…

The Ghost Mall

The world's largest shopping mall boasts some impressive statistics:  7.1 million square feet (659,612 square meters) of leasable space and 890,000 square meters of total floor space; attractions, including a roller coaster and a Venice-like canal; and over 1,500 shops, with an occupancy rate of 0.8%.   That's right.  Although it opened in 2005, 99.2% of the shops are empty.   class="mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image" style="display: inline;"> Attraction: A bored attendant makes a phone call next to the ghost train ride at the mall (Photo: href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/…

Archaeologists discover 82,000 year old human ornaments

Fundamental to the questions of human evolution is the question: when did human beings start doing human-like things? Human-like things include tool making, having a home base, using language, and possessing an aesthetic sense. Unfortunately, figuring out when humans started using behaviors that we would call modern is a troublesome business because we can't very well ask the people involved. We have to look at the remnants such people left behind and from these remnants attempt to infer the psychological world in which they lived. One of the most compelling pieces of evidence used to…

October is a great month for physiology!!

This is a great month for Physiology! Several of the local chapters of the American Physiological Society (APS) are having their annual meetings.   The Nebraska Physiological Society met this past weekend at the University of South Dakota, Sanford School of Medicine. Here are the highlights from their meeting: Dr. Bill Yates, Professor from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine gave the APS sponsored keynote address on “Multisensory Control of Blood Pressure.” His research is focused on understanding the link between our vestibular system and blood pressure. The vestibular system in…

Kepler-10b -- The first unambiguous rocky exoplanet

By Dr. Franck Marchis Astronomer at the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, SETI Institute It is done. The Kepler team finally announced the discovery of its first terrestrial exoplanet. A referred journal, accepted in the Astrophysical Journal by Natalie Batalha and a large number of colleagues, describes this new member of the exoplanet family. This is the 519th known exoplanet based on the Extra-solar Planets Catalog, but definitely a special one. Skychart showing the position of KIC 11904151, a faint (11th magnitude in visible) sun-like star located at 172 pc in the…

How Many Species 2: More Questions.

On Thursday, I presented a species problem taken from a post over at my old blog. I presented data from experimental matings that were carried out among three insect populations, added a little bit of information about the appearance, behavior, and location of the populations. I asked you to tell me how many species these three populations represented, and promised that I'd give you the "official" answer today. I've decided, though, that it wouldn't be totally fair to answer the question just yet. You see, I withheld relevant data when I presented the original version of the question. When…

Cuts in movies, and their impact on memory

[Originally posted in January 2008] When we watch a movie, we're usually not conscious of the cuts made by the editor. The camera angle may change dozens of times during a scene, and we follow along as if the flashing from one viewpoint to another wasn't at all unusual. You might think this is just because we've been accustomed to watching TV and movies, but researchers have found that even people who've never seen a motion picture have no difficulty following along with the cuts and different camera angles in a video. But little research has actually been done on the impact of changing…

You've got to be kidding me

Scarcely do I put up a post arguing with Jerry Coyne, when I notice he has put up another with an example of evidence for a god from John Farrell. And lo, I did look, and verily, I did become depressed at how stupid and pathetic it was. An archeologist working in Israel, discovers an ossuary from the NT era: the inscription on the stone in Aramaic reads: "Twice dead under Pilatus; Twice born of Yeshua in sure hope of resurrection." And the name corresponds to what in Greek would be Lazarus. There are bones, so presumably with luck there may be some DNA that could be sequenced, but my main…

Cuts in movies, and their impact on memory

When we watch a movie, we're usually not conscious of the cuts made by the editor. The camera angle may change dozens of times during a scene, and we follow along as if the flashing from one viewpoint to another wasn't at all unusual. You might think this is just because we've been accustomed to watching TV and movies, but researchers have found that even people who've never seen a motion picture have no difficulty following along with the cuts and different camera angles in a video. But little research has actually been done on the impact of changing camera angles in a movie on our…

Insight into how children learn cultural values

Note: This article was originally posted on November 14, 2006 If a Brahman child from Nepal is asked what she would do if another child spilled a drink on her homework, her response is different from that of a Tamang child from the same country. The Brahman would become angry, but, unlike a child from the U.S., would not tell her friend that she was angry. Tamang children, rather than being angry, would feel ashamed for having placed the homework where it could be damaged -- but like Brahmans, they would not share this emotion with their friends. So how do children who might grow up just a…

A boy and his dog

A continuation of our "greatest hits" from past Cognitive Daily postings: [originally posted on July 11, 2005] There's something about kids and dogs. The phrase "A boy and his dog" brings up quite a range of images: from the sweetness of Norman Rockwell to what sounds like a truly bizarre movie from 1975. Despite not being a dog-person myself (okay, not being a pet-person at all), I find the results from a study that looked at kids and dogs amazing. Marina Pavlova and her colleagues at the University of Tüebingen were curious about how well kids would understand point-light displays.…

Insight into how children learn cultural values

If a Brahman child from Nepal is asked what she would do if another child spilled a drink on her homework, her response is different from that of a Tamang child from the same country. The Brahman would become angry, but, unlike a child from the U.S., would not tell her friend that she was angry. Tamang children, rather than being angry, would feel ashamed for having placed the homework where it could be damaged -- but like Brahmans, they would not share this emotion with their friends. So how do children who might grow up just a few miles from each other develop such different attitudes?…

I get email from a Spratlin

Hmmm. I just chewed out one repulsive little Spratlin named Daniel, when I get this email from a Spratlin named Ric. It's a vaguely threatening email, too. From: Ric Spratlin Subject: There's never a shortage of smarm among evangelicals Date: October 12, 2010 3:44:20 PM CDT To: PZ Myers Reply-To: ric.spratlin@att.net Delivered-To: pzmyers@gmail.com Received: by 10.216.183.144 with SMTP id q16cs155211wem; Tue, 12 Oct 2010 13:44:09 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.224.174.147 with SMTP id t19mr6103964qaz.262.1286916248284;Tue, 12 Oct…

Shark mystery solved - how thresher sharks use their tails

The tail of a thresher shark (Alopias vulpinus). From Wikipedia. Thanks to sensational documentaries and summer blockbusters, we are all familiar with the anatomy of a shark attack. The victim, unaware that they are in peril, is struck from below and behind with such speed and violence that, if they are not actually killed during the first strike, they soon find themselves a few pounds lighter in the middle of a billowing red cloud. The trouble is that this stereotyped scenario does not hold for all sharks, particularly one peculiar group of deepwater sharks which has long puzzled…

Why Baboons Pitch Underarm

Chucking stones at baboons; the first hominin passtime? From The Making of Man. For the Australian anatomist Raymond Dart, the fossilized bones scattered among the caves of South Africa were testimonies to the murderous nature of early humans. The recovered skulls of baboons and our australopithecine relatives often looked as if they had been bashed in, and Dart believed the bones, teeth, and horns of slain game animals were the weapons hominins used to slaughter their prey. (He gave this sort of tool use the cumbersome name "osteodontokeratic culture.") Our origins had not been peaceful;…

Ethical considerations in the development of a male birth control pill.

"Why don't they make a birth control pill for men?" There are important considerations from medical ethics that might explain why a birth control pill for men has not happened yet. You'd think that there would be an ethical impetus for the development of a birth control pill for men, given that men (or at least, their sperm) are a necessary component of human reproduction and that men have an interest in controlling their fertility, too. Men might view such a pill as a useful option. The question is whether that benefit outweighs the potential risks. The Belmont Report (which lays out the…

A conference paper I didn't see coming.

I thought I'd share a snapshot of my morning with you. For some reason, the internet seems like a good place for it. The paper promised to be about the evaluation of evidence in understanding the assassination of John F. Kennedy. What follows are the notes I took during the approximately 25 minute conference presentation, edited to clean up typos. I'm not naming names; Google will provide if you really need to know. The speaker is going to apply the principles of abductive reasoning to see what can be concluded about the assassination of JFK. Evidence -- all the available, relevant…

Friday Sprog Blogging: life science from two points of view.

It being spring and all, the Free-Ride offspring sometimes get that wistful why-aren't-we-4H-kids? look in their eyes. Not that there aren't critters aplenty in the back yard. The younger Free-Ride offspring sizes up the ladybugs and looks for a jar with holes in the lid that would be appropriate as a ladybug barn. (Then, I point out that the ladybugs are needed in the garden, right where they are, to keep the aphid population under control.) Most mornings, we have a delightful selection of colorful birds hopping around and eating (bugs, one assumes) right out our window. There are…

Eyes, Brains and Latitude

Two things have been known for some time now: Human brains get bigger as you go north, and the volume of the primate eye and the primate brain are correlated. This COULD mean, and this may not be true, that as you go north in human populations you'll get larger brains (for thermoregulatory reasons) and you'll therefore get larger eyes (because eyeball and brain size is somehow correlated). But a new paper suggests a different model: Large eyes evolve at high latitudes because there is more dark, and the larger eye demands a larger brain. Maybe, but I doubt it. the largeness of high latitude…

Global warming totally disproved again

Steve McIntyre found an error in the GISS temperature data for the US. The GISTEMP page says: USHCN station records up to 1999 were replaced by a version of USHCN data with further corrections after an adjustment computed by comparing the common 1990-1999 period of the two data sets. (We wish to thank Stephen McIntyre for bringing to our attention that such an adjustment is necessary to prevent creating an artificial jump in year 2000.) How much difference did the adjustment make to the US temperature series? Well, it changed this: to this: Not much difference. The right hand end of the…

The Rachel Carson telephone game

I think the employment contract at the CEI must include a clause requiring their hacks to write an article accusing Rachel Carson of killing millions of people. So far we've seen John Berlau, Angela Logomasni, Jeremy Lott and Erin Wildermuth, and Iain Murray. The latest effort is from the CEI's Eli Lehrer (who we last encountered cherry-picking with John Lott). Lehrer seems to have based his piece on stuff from the rest of the CEI crew because their factoids (which were wrong or misleading in the first place) have gotten somewhat garbled, just like in the telephone game. Lehrer opens with…

Satellites cause Global Warming!

John Mashey points me to this site, which claims that microwaves from satellites are causing global warming! Satellite antennas transmit UHF and higher microwaves frequencies all over the planet. Because orbiting Satellites are in the vacuum of space, the microwave transmissions are scattered through our atmosphere at an accelerated rate. The Earth is a rotating electromagnetic field containing a dielectric material called water. Sending oscillating microwaves from an antenna inside a vacuum through an electromagnetic field through a dielectric material, such as water, creates radio frequency…

Leakegate: How Jonathan Leake concocted 'Africagate'

We've already seen how Jonathan Leake fabricates his stories by quote mining his sources and stovepiping claims from Global Warming deniers. His story on "Africagate" provides another example: The most important is a claim that global warming could cut rain-fed north African crop production by up to 50% by 2020, a remarkably short time for such a dramatic change. ... The African claims could be even more embarrassing for the IPCC because they appear not only in its report on climate change impacts but, unlike the glaciers claim, are also repeated in its Synthesis Report. I guess this is…

Why Spiders Aren't Insects IV: Adventures in Molecular Homology

In the last post of this series, we established that spiders descended from marine arthropods called the eurypterids, distinct and separate from insects, appearing in the fossil record in the late Silurian/early Devonian, about 425 million years ago. The cladogram we used to analyze the spider's history was based on the organism's morphological characteristics, that is, visible structures like chelicerae and book lungs that can be tied to other organisms that possess the same structures. Limulus (the extant horseshoe crab) has both of these structures and predates the spiders, placing them…

Fantastical Fridays: Evolutionary Biology No Longer a Science

...Or at least that's the impression that college freshmen with US Department of Education Smart Grants are getting, the The Chronicle of Higher Education reported Tuesday: Like a gap in the fossil record, evolutionary biology is missing from a list of majors that the U.S. Department of Education has deemed eligible for a new federal grant program designed to reward students majoring in engineering, mathematics, science, or certain foreign languages.... The awards in question -- known as Smart Grants, for the National Science and Mathematics Access to Retain Talent program -- were created by…

What Bumblebees Do When You're Not Looking

Figure 1. Miniaturized radio transmitters attached to bumblebees. (a) Transmitter attachment on a Bombus terrestris individual kept in a glass tube with opened gauze where the transmitter is fixed with superglue. (b) Nectar collecting individual of Bombus terrestris on Phacelia flower having a transmitter attached. (c) Bombus terrestris individual with attached transmitter, foraging on red clover (Trifoliumpratense). Can you imagine being able to track a single bumblebee over the course of a day? German and Danish scientists accomplished this impressive feat. So what do those bees do all…

Empty Criticisms

Don't worry, this one has nothing to do with mtDNA. There's been a bit of a hubbub recently in the ScienceBlogs community about science journalism. Sometimes we're a bit too hard on the journalists. In this week's issue of Nature, Robert Barton takes the journal to task for their coverage of the Pollard et al paper describing a rapidly evolving non RNA gene. Barton makes a good point at the beginning of his letter: You state in your News story on genetic differences between humans and other species . . . that research is beginning to pin down genes that "evolved rapidly during the transition…

The Rundown on Mount Rainier

Mount Rainier (14,410 ft) has lately attracted a small amount of attention because of what is considered by some an increase in seismic activity there, so I thought it might be nice to get a baseline description of this volcano for those of you interested in such things. For scientifically accurate information and interesting discussion on the mountain, keep an eye on Eruptions Blog. Mount Rainier is a stratovolcano. This means that it is made up of strata of lava, tuff/tephra, ash, and so on that has been pushed out into a conical pattern. The lava from stratovolcanoes is usually…

Intro to Microbial Week by Christina Kellogg

Greek mythology portrays Atlas supporting the world, but the time has come to break it to you, Atlas is a metaphor for the vast unseen majority - the microbes. The few microbes that cause blood to spew from every human orifice get all the press. Most microbes are quietly minding their business and keeping life on this planet functioning. Beer, wine, cheese, bread, Penicillin--these are not just the components of a hot date, but everyday examples of microbiology in action. Any biogeochemical cycle out there has a microbial component. Aerosol bacteria seed clouds and alter weather. The…

ARCHIVE: 25 Things You Should Know About the Deep Sea: #8 Processes & Patterns In the Deep-Sea Are Linked to Surface Production

Light does not reach the deep-sea floor. This precludes photosynthesis and thus primary production (except in chemosynthetic communities like hydrothermal vents and methane seeps). The lack of primary production on the deep-sea floor results in these communities being intimately coupled to the production of food at the surface by phytoplankton. What fluxes down to the deep sea is a combination of decaying animals (from plankton to whales), fecal pellets, and photosynthetic material (phytoplankton to seaweed). This material (carbon compounds) is consumed by deep-sea species and either returned…

Beehived Babes, Big Blue & Univac

James Lileks maintains one of my favorite high-kitsch entertainment time-sinks, namely The Institute of Official Cheer. Lileks has scanned all sorts of advertisements, comics, and cookbooks (sp. The Gallery of Regrettable Food) from the 30, 40s, 50s and 60s, and then has commented on them. Some of his text makes me smile. Some makes me laugh aloud, spraying my computer monitor in a Jackson Pollock-like motif using masticated food or coffee as the medium. A science and technology related addition to the Institute is Compu-Promo. Here's an excerpt from the introduction: The "Computer" photo…

Feral Cats Aren't All That Bad

Feral cats are often portrayed as the scourge of of island ecosystems, killing off or pushing out endemic species at an alarming rate. To an extent such a reputation is deserved, but a new study out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals that the elimination of a top-level introducted predator can lead to an explosion in the numbers of other predators that were being controlled by the "top cat." While cats are certainly a problem in many areas where they were introduced, often preying upon adults and chicks in the nest, rats attack the birds from the other side of the…

Houses

Earlier today, John McCain got a bit confused. In and of itself, that wouldn't be so unusual. He's old and slightly crazy, so confusion is part of his daily experience. He can't tell Sunni from Shiite, Iran from Iraq, Iraq from Afghanistan, Czechoslovakia from the Czech Republic, or his wife from a telecom lobbyist. This confusion was special, though. McCain was asked how many houses he owns, and: "I think — I'll have my staff get to you," McCain told Politico in Las Cruces, N.M. "It's condominiums where — I'll have them get to you." Which is fine. I lose track of my property ownership…

Is the Disco. Inst. agreeing that ID is religion?

Disco. vocalist Rob Crowther wonders What Part of "shall not be construed to promote any religious doctrine" do his opponents not understand? Writing about SB 733, a creationist bill winging its way to Governor Bobby "The Exorcist II" Jindal, Crowther points out that: Section 1D of the bill clearly states that it "shall not be construed to promote any religious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs, or promote discrimination for or against religion or non-religion." Why is it, then, that "a slew of articles have been running in which activists…

A conundrum about evolution acceptance

Looking through the raw data from Pew's surveys on science from last summer, I cannot make heads or tails of certain findings. I started out looking at the correlation between rejection of evolution and rejection of global warming. As one would expect, it was significant. But the survey handily also asked not just about people's personal belief regarding these sciences, but also their beliefs about the views of the scientific community. And again, people who think scientists reject evolution are more likely to think scientists reject global warming. Then I got interested in whether people who…

Culture evolving & converging due to genes

In Nature, De novo establishment of wild-type song culture in the zebra finch: Culture is typically viewed as consisting of traits inherited epigenetically, through social learning. However, cultural diversity has species-typical constraints, presumably of genetic origin... Zebra finch isolates, unexposed to singing males during development, produce song with characteristics that differ from the wild-type song found in laboratory11 or natural colonies. In tutoring lineages starting from isolate founders, we quantified alterations in song across tutoring generations in two social environments…

Blogroll is finally finished!

You can get to it from the sidebar or from the cute little grey button right under the banner...

What We're Dealing With

Enough said. And that's from a demonstration in London, not Pakistan. Here's one from France: No. You go to hell.

Love, in its anatomical connections

From the Cold Spring Harbor Archive (click for larger image). From Micklos, The Science of Eugenics, pg 116 (1930).

Uffda... this guy is so dumb

From Science Notes, from the continuing series "Why do people laugh at creationists" ... This is installment number six.

The Evolution of Turkeys from Dinosaurs

Here is a neat special from National Geographic showing the evolution of turkeys from dinosaurs: Happy Thanksgiving everyone! -Dr. Dolittle

John Banister: Skeleton, brain, nerves

Skeleton, brain, nerves, from John Banister's Anatomical Tables, c. 1580. From the Anatomy Acts Exhibition website (via Morbid Anatomy). 

Japan quake, tsunami, nuke news 16: Radioactive leaks? It's a feature, not a bug!

Welcome to the "I'm starting to get cynical" edition. The situation at Fukushima Diiachi Nuclear Plant reached an impasse over the least few days. Two or three of the reactors are in a situation where cooling is being kludged, the reactor fuel rods are damaged and have melted but the details are unknown, storage pools are not being safely managed, unexpected fission events keep occurring despite the widespread belief that this can't happen, and no one knows what to do because no one can see what is happening because of the more immediate problem: There is a deposit of very dangerous highly…

The Great bustard returns

Over the weekend I and a bunch of friends and colleagues (representing the Southampton Natural History Society) went to Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire, in search of Great bustards Otis tarda. The Great bustard (one of 26 or so bustard species found throughout the Old World and Australasia) is a British native, but excessive hunting and (probably) changing agricultural practises, increasing human disturbance and perhaps other factors led to its extinction as a breeding species round about 1832, though some eggs were apparently discovered in 1838 and it is suspected that some native birds were…

A month in dinosaurs (and pterosaurs): 4, flaplings and head-sails anew

Already the article you're reading is several weeks late, and I had to make a real effort to finish it before those weeks became months. Anyway, I present here the penultimate in the 'month in dinosaurs (and pterosaurs)' series (for the previous articles please see part I, part II, and part III). The whole point of this little series was to discuss what happened during January 2009 in dinosaur and pterosaur research. So, we've done the dinosaurs (or, at least, the theropods and ornithischians). This time: pterosaurs. Before launching into the new stuff, I must note that a single, exceptional…

Science and human rights

Guestblogger Sastra checking in: A few years back the little Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in my area asked me to give a brief talk (!) on the topic of my choice. Seems they were looking for speakers, any speaker, and had noticed that I tend to talk a lot. So I considered the sorts of things that appeal to me, and the sorts of things that might appeal to them, and decided to try to see if I could put together an interesting speech on "Science and Human Rights," based on the idea "that concepts such as human rights, democracy, and science are historically linked together through similar…

Is the yellowstone caldera safe?

Not long after Yellowstone Park was officially created, a small group of campers were killed by Nez Perce Indians on the run from US troops1. More recently, the last time I was in the area, a ranger was killed by a Grizzly Bear (so was his horse) on the edge of the park. A quick glance at my sister's newspaper archives (Lightning Fingers Liz a.k.a. Caldera Girl has been running newspapers in the region for nearly forty years) shows a distinctive pattern of danger in the Caldera, mainly in relation to the lack of turning lanes on highways with poor visibility and other traffic related…