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A new family, genus & species of catfish

While I'm at it, here's another new species. In this case, it is a catfish from Mexico, Lacantunia enigmatica, which has a number of distinguishing characteristics. As the abstract to the description [pdf] states: A new family (Lacantuniidae), genus and species of catfish, Lacantunia enigmatica, is described from the RÃo Usumacinta basin of Chiapas, México. This odd siluriform is diagnosed by five distinctively autapomorphic and anatomically complex structures. ... Lacantunia enigmatica cannot be placed within or as a basal sister lineage to any known catfish family or multifamily clade…

Real-time brain-computer interface for music synthesis

Mick Grierson has created a real-time EEG-based brain-computer interface for music synthesis. You can watch a video here. We've been designing experiments to test how classic ERPs (P300/600, N400, etc) may emerge from user interactions with this system, given previous demonstrations that those waveforms are sensitive to the "grammar" and "meaning" of musical harmonies, respectively. What waveforms would you look for in this system? Related Posts: Meaning From Melody: Music as Language Harmony in Grammar: Music as Language Dynamic Gating in Long-Term Memory (and the N400) The Attentional…

I Want To Hear From You

The Primate Diaries will have been at its new home here at ScienceBlogs for three months this coming Halloween. I know there are a considerable number of regular readers but from where I sit you're all a faceless mob, sitting invisibly out there in the impenetrable dark. I'd like to turn on the houselights for a moment and see who you are. If you've commented before please introduce yourself and tell me your interests. If you haven't commented before, now's your chance. One of the great things about social media is the interaction between author and audience. The author may offer…

Using Feces to Identify Species

Image of big eared bats By Stihler Craig, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons According to a press release from Northern Arizona University, Drs. Faith Walker and Carol Chambers at the Bat Ecology & Genetics Lab have developed a system called Species From Feces to identify bat species from guano collected in field locations such as mines, caves, bridges, etc. The system takes advantage of DNA sequencing technology and an assay to look for genetic identifiers unique to different species using DNA barcodes. The sequences can then be compared to a…

Octopus-inspired robotic device

Speaking of octopuses, the ability for the animals to squeeze through narrow openings has inspired the creation of a new surgical robotic device that can squeeze into a patient's body. An EU team created STIFFness controllable Flexible and Learnable manipulator for surgical OPerations, dubbed "STIFF-FLOP", made from silicone. Unlike conventional robots used during surgeries, the idea behind STIFF-FLOP is to be able to navigate around organs inside the body and minimize potential damage to healthy tissues. Its movements are controlled by pneumatic actuators. To create stiffness, they…

The new name for SLA: will it divide us instead of uniting us?

A couple colleagues (Joe and Sara) wondered if support for the new name is divided between corporate and academic members. Actually, I've heard from folks from research labs (gov't, private, and corporate) really who really hate the name, too. My take: it's business researchers vs. science researchers. I think there are more fingers in the pot and more competition for competitive intelligence and market research than honest to goodness science and engineering work like you'd have at a pharmaceutical or communications technology company. (these companies also have business researchers, but I'…

Style

Found a Buddhist statue that's got style. (Style: also know as cool, aesthetics, taste and w00t!) I sent this picture (well, tried to) to all those unfortunate folks on my friends list in Facebook using some weird app that kept crashing on me (or my instance of Firefox 3 Beta). In the end, I think I sent more than a few duplicate messages. Sorry and dang. Facebook, as I see it now, would be my place of cool - pictures, art, music, and such. Also hopefully, I'll rub off some cool from those who unwittingly accepted my request to be their friend. If you liked the Buddha, here's another. Both…

Australian homicide figures 1900-1940

robert i kesten said: Could you give the date(s) and an 11 year (5 before, first year of implementation, 5 after) table of homicide rates. If possible I'm interested in Australia as a whole, not just NSW or any other state. Here are the states for which I have data. (Data for WA and Tas are incomplete in ways that make them useless for evaluating gun laws.) Qld and SA figures come from "Source Book of Australian Criminal & Social Statistics 1900-1980" Mukherjee. Victoria from "Victorian Year Book" volumes for 1901,1902,1903,1904, etc. NSW from "Homicide:The Social Reality" Wallace. -…

People Get Ready

People get ready There's a bus a'comin' Don't need no deity Just get on board Won't hurt believers If you can't hear God's mummery You'll still need a ticket From the Transport Board People get ready For the bus to show you All people are passengers From coast to coast Citizenship's the key For the doors of freedom There's room for all Among the secular host There's plenty of room For those you call sinners They're still part of humanity To each his own Have pity on those Whose minds are narrow Cause there's no real place Where theocracy's at home So people get ready There's a bus a'comin'…

Fully funded!

Our Donors Choose Challenge, as you can see from the icon to the left, is now fully funded. Thanks so much to all the generous donors! We raised $2,169.13 to help kids learn about science and the arts. Here's the ScienceBlogs total amount raised as of about 14 hours ago: Total donations: $22,554.38 Amount matched by SEED: $10,000 Completion bonus from DonorsChoose: $1447.30 Total raised: $34,001.68 As promised, Greta and I have donated $217 to our challenge, matching 10 percent of the total amount donated. Because our challenge goal was attained, these projects will also get an additional 10…

The British Council supports adventurous research

Good news from the Beagle Project. The British Council has funded plans for a Beagle Project research network aboard the Brazilian tall ship Tocorime (or Adventure, the name of the sister ship of the Beagle) during its proposed exploration of South America. According to the Beagle Project blog this means the funding will go towards; - a workshop in Rio de Janeiro "to bring together a new international team to discuss with the Tocorime operators - cruise logistics, scientific aims, timing, observations from space, public and schools outreach and contribution to the international Census of…

A Little Pop Radio For Your Friday

Back from DC and want to let readers know I do take notice when I get email. I appreciate the interest in my wandering career path and a few folks have written regarding the FOX news piece. More than one has questioned the way I sounded with regard to my former incarnation as a pop radio personality. Well, as it was pointed out, yesterday's audio was not very good because I was on a spotty cell phone traveling into the mountains of Massachusetts on the way to marry my brother. A mile or so down the road from the call, I lost signal altogether. That said, in response to your questions, I'…

Capitol Hill Oceans Week on your Desktop

posted by Sheril R. Kirshenbaum I promised to provide the run down of what went on in DC during Capitol Hill Oceans Week (CHOW) 2007.. three days when the biggest players in the oceans game gathered to discuss current ocean and coastal issues. The usual suspects ranged from marine scientists to fishermen to members of Congress with representatives from federal and state governments, executive agencies, and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in the mix. Even ocean celebrities Jean-Michel Cousteau and Sylvia Earle were involved. But why settle for my recap of CHOW when you can now watch…

Cyclone Gonu Death Toll Rising

Cyclone Gonu, having weakened down to a Category 1 equivalent storm, lashes Oman and Iran without making a full landfall on June 6, 2007. Image courtesy of NASA's Earth Observatory. This historic storm is now estimated to have killed 70 people in Oman and Iran, and that number may continue to rise. Much of the destruction in Iran appears not to have come from winds or from storm surge but, rather, from intense rainfall of a sort that the region isn't at all used to--and of course, dangerous floods resulted. It seems some Iranian villages were swept away entirely. Let's hope coming days don't…

Blogs Credited With Exposing Myanmar Violence

Blogs are becoming powerful tools of first-hand journalism, most recently evidenced by the conflict going on in Myanmar. A London blogger named Ko Htike has been blogging the violence against monks occurring in his homeland, but from his current locale in England. Htike wakes up in the middle of the night to review all the 'digitally smuggled' pictures and video that is sent to him from people in the thick of it in Myanmar. This is particularly important since very few Western journalists are allowed in Myanmar, limiting the amount of unbiased information released to the rest of the world.…

Poem of the Week: Joyce Huff's The Hymn of a Fat Woman

The Hymn of a Fat Woman by Joyce Huff All of the saints starved themselves. Not a single fat one. The words "deity" and "diet" must have come from the same Latin root. Those saints must have been thin as knucklebones or shards of stained glass or Christ carved on his cross. Hard as pew seats. Brittle as hair shirts. Women made from bone, like the ribs that protrude from his wasted wooden chest. Women consumed by fervor. They must have been able to walk three or four abreast down that straight and oh-so-narrow path. They must have slipped with ease through the eye of the needle, leaving the…

Tricked out hurricane websites

Naturally, one of the favorite pastimes here in the Cone of Probability is to monitor as many websites as possible for different forecasts and projections of Hurricane Ike. The more the models stray away from Corpus Christi the less anxious you feel. Currently three models veer to the north before landfall, so CC has a small chance of escaping the storm. The image above is from my favorite hurricane web interface so far, called Stormpulse. It's full screen, and very interactive, almost like a video game. If you're looking for in-depth analysis, grab a cup a' joe and dig in to Jeff Masters…

Radiations and Extinctions

... biodiversity through the ages ... There's a story that scientists like to tell about the great evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane. Supposedly, Haldane once found himself in the company of a group of theologians. They asked him what one could conclude about the nature of the Creator from a study of his creation. "An inordinate fondness for beetles," Haldane replied. The National Center for Science Education maintains a library of offprints and book chapters for which that they have been given explicit permission to distribute to the general public at no cost. One of these…

Yet Another Crop of Crackers Attacks Education in Florida

What?! Is Florida totally full of morons, or what? The Bay District School Board will vote on Wednesday on a resolution that waters down the proposed state standards for life science education. Please go to the Channel 7 web site where this story is posted and add your comments along side some guy from New York who is the first to chime in (in favor of rational thinking). If you are from one of these states mainly known for slack-jawed yokels who prefer to marry their siblings but will take a cousin in a pinch, and are NOT one of these morons, please, it is especially important that you…

Ringworld

The latest from the NZ Climate Science recommended Ken Ring: Basic science: Scattered here and there, ozone is individual molecules, not some kind of sheet metal covering the whole sky. How much? 3 parts in 100,000 of the atmosphere. Even CO2 is 35 parts in 100,000, yes 10x as much per volume and THAT doesn't protect us, in fact you and your friends are saying that that amount of CO2 HARMS us! Get it right Thomas, harms or protects, you can't have it both ways. If you believe a 3mm Ozone layer is protecting the 200 million square miles of the surface of the Earth from the sun's intense energy…

It's that time of year again: Santarchy

Too bad I can't make it back to Detroit this weekend. In fact, it's worse than that; I'm on call. Why? Because Saturday is Santarchy night. Basically a bunch of people dress up like Santa and go barhopping. Much drinking and debauchery ensue. If you happen to live in the Detroit area, here's a little test to see if you're "Santa enough" to participate. Sadly for me, maybe it's a good thing that I won't be there: You have scored a 100. While not completely lame, you do make for a weak Santa. And while some might think that should exclude you from participating in Santarchy, it's just possible…

Shorter Lavoisier workshop

The Lavoisier group has published the presentations from their 'Rehabilitating Carbon Dioxide' workshop. Allow me to shorten them for you. David Archibald: I predict imminent global cooling based on the record from five US weather stations. Tim Curtin: Nicholas Stern is in league with the Prophet Mohammed. David Evans: In 1999, we didn't know that the world had cooled from 1940 to 1975. The recent discovery of this fact has changed my mind about AGW. Michael Hammer: According to my calculations, the IPCC has got the climate sensitivity too high by a factor of 20. Bob Carter: E-G Beck shows…

Aftermath

Just in case my wife happens to check out the internets this afternoon, I'm sure she'll be interested in seeing the state of her yard. The plumbing crew came out this morning to repair our broken water main, and apparently to also plant a dead pagan king in a nice barrow outside our bathroom window, and imprint the rest of the lawn with interesting trackways. Oh, well, at least we now have fully restored water pressure. I must also thank the kind reader who sent us the disaster preparedness and cleanup manuals. They'll come in handy—as you might guess, there's now a musty odor rising from…

Nudists are infectious just like everyone else

In other words, you're more likely to catch a cold from shaking their hand than to get an STI from Sitting on the same bench. There isn't much reason to fear getting a sexually transmitted disease from naked sitters. These infections are most commonly the result of vigorous and prolonged exposure of a person's mucous membranes, the thinner and more permeable skin found in the mouth and on the genitals. If you happened to share a seat with an infected nudist, you'd be protected both by your clothes and by your epidermis, which serves as an effective barrier against pathogens all by itself.…

Even more AVoteForScience YouTube videos

We have had a fantastic response to our AVoteForScience YouTube challenge and the press has started to notice. I have done two interviews in the past 24 hours on the effort. If you are a scientist, get your videos explaining who you are voting for and why uploaded to YouTube and don't forget to tag them AVoteForScience so we can find them. I am noticing a lot of physicists uploading videos. Have biologists dropped the ball? Here are some of the latest videos: David Palmer an astrophysicist from New Mexico takes aim at John McCain and Sarah Palin's stances on science and endorses Obama.…

Now Behe puts D. James Kennedy at arms length

Darwin's Deadly Legacy, the program that Coral Ridge Ministries is airing this weekend that supposedly links Hitler to Darwin, is beginning to look like a public relations catastrophe for the organization. First Francis Collins repudiated the show, then the ADL put the hammer down, and now another of the "featured guests" is distancing himself from the content. Andrew Arensburger wrote to Michael Behe to find out about his contribution, and got this reply: I'm "associated" with it only in the sense that a clip of my appearance on a TV show of Dr. Kennedy's from years ago apparently is used in…

DIY data analysis: three fun examples

I recently came across some links showing readers how to make their own data analysis and graphics from scratch. This is great stuff--spreading power tools to the masses and all that. From Nathan Yau: How to Make a US County Thematic Map Using Free Tools and How to Make an Interactive Area Graph with Flare. I don't actually think the interactive area graphs are so great--they work with the Baby Name Wizard but to me they don't do much in the example that Nathan shows--but, that doesn't really matter, what's cool here is that he's showing us all exactly how to do it. This stuff is gonna…

Watch Protein Synthesis

From RamblingsThoughts of Prof Bil the Man: Protein Synthesis the film (it's a 37MB file off of a slow server, be prepared to wait). Some background on the film from Bil's blog entry: I gather that it was made in the early 70s and we have clearly learned a lot about protein synthesis since then. The funniest part for me is the description of the ribosome as an amorphous mass that assembles on the mRNA chain. The introduction is by Paul Berg, future Nobel laureate, and he illustrates the state of the art in the understanding of protein synthesis. At the time, Professor Berg was the chairman of…

Biggest Squid Ever!

Sweet Jesus! Several news agencies are reporting that New Zealand fisherman in the Ross Sea caught the LARGEST SQUID EVER FOUND.   It's not Architeuthis dux, the giant squid but rather Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, the colossal squid! The monster comes into 450kg (992 lbs). That is 1/2 ton! It is 10m long (32.9ft).  The previous record was 300kg from 2003, so you can see this quite a find. As I posted before, while the giant squid is longer, the colossal squid is heavier.  "It is believed the crew on the boat stopped winching in the long-line and spent two hours manoeuvring a net under the…

Frogmarch

"Scooter" Libby is guilty of obstruction of justice, perjury, and making false statements to federal officers. He did so to protect his boss, Dick "Go F--- Yourself" Cheney from an investigation into who ordered a covert agent's identity to be exposed. His lies prevented the investigation from moving on to Cheney and other administration figures, protecting the person truly responsible for endangering investigations into weapons proliferation. Libby was acquitted of one charge, that he lied to the FBI about a conversation with Matt Cooper of Time magazine, but convicted him of lying about a…

Columbus was a seer

Last month I pointed to two papers on China genetics. Rereading a bit more closely, I stumbled upon a very curious PC plot. It shows the relationship of various continental populations on the first two principal components of variation genetically. Look at how Mexican Americans from Los Angeles compare to Gujarati Americans from Houston: In world wide context South Asians and mestizos can be viewed as somewhat analogous; a stable admixture between West and East Eurasian elements. Of course, the "East Eurasian" ancestry of mestizos consists of the New World descendants of Paleolithic…

Halema`uma`u Update for 8/21/2009

The summit crater at Kilauea in Hawai'i has had a busy summer and now that fall is around the corner (yikes!), there is a bit of new info on activity in the crater. Halema`uma`u Crater emitting a steam plume in January, 2009. First off, the NASA Earth Observatory released an image of the steaming crater area of Halema`uma`u. The image captures the new plume of steam and volcanic gases that have been coming from the crater. The latest news reports that the glow (albeit faint) from the underlying magma has returned to the crater after the rockfall earlier this summer. Also, sulfur dioxide…

SI/USGS Weekly Volcano Activity Report for 4/1-7/2009

Your weekly dose of volcanic activity. As a sidenote, you can now get placemarks for the weekly activity report via Google Earth. Select "Google Earth Placemarks" from the SI / USGS Weekly Volcanic Activity Report page. Highlights of this week's report: New explosions at Ebeko. See my article today for more details. More evidence of increased activity at Nyamuragira and Nyiragongo, Congo. One interesting note is that scientists from the Goma Volcano Observatory noted that earthquake swarms usually precede eruption by 3-5 months. I've seen very little news about this, but Pacaya in Guatemala…

Sakurajima Eruption Video

I am back from the ion microprobe lab at Stanford after a few days of data collection, so I'll be trying to get back on posting schedule here at Eruptions. UPDATE 3/10/2009 12:45PM: Here is a little (and I mean a little) more information, mostly adding that the local residents have been given a "warning" about the activity. However, I did notice this morning at Sakurajima in Japan erupted after rumbling over the weekend. There aren't many details about the eruption beyond the fact that volcanic chunks were thrown a few kilometers from the vent, but the BBC does have some nice video of the…

Groundhog Scienceblog

I'm back from getting married, back from Brazil, back to work. Got my Twitter software working again, reading blogs, and am convinced that nothing has changed in the last month. Are we still talking about "Don't be a dick"? Yes, and now we're talking about whether it's dickish to call the radical religious right "American Taliban." (Not really). Or whether it's dickish to burn a Quran (yes, among other things). PZ is still trying to explain and defend Crackergate. The asinine obsessions of scienceblogs and skepticblogs have become our national discourse. Meanwhile, we're still talking about…

Shocking News: Cattle Terrorism

How far will you go to protect your prized cattle from "cattle terrorism" and from theft by aliens? . tags: cattle abduction, cattle terrorism, streaming video, humor, silliness, parody

Newspaper And Magazine Layout Disasters

More from buzzfeed. While I'm here, Sham journals scam authors is pretty good from JA. But really: a journal with no website? Do they still write with ink quills?

At least you can see a hint of what you missed

JackC has posted images from the Friggatriskaidekaphobia event this past weekend…and also from our tour of the Penn Museum. Guess who the people in this photo are:

Photo of the Day #151 (a): Playing Polar Bear

As promised, here's a photo to make up for the somewhat blurry picture from this morning, only this time I decided to use another shot from the polar bear sequence.

Introducing the second largest mammalian 'family': vesper bats, or vespertilionids

Bats are one of those groups of animals that I've come back to on several separate occasions, yet have never dealt with in satisfactory fashion (that is, comprehensively). Seeing as the group includes over 1110 living species, I hope that this is forgivable. But I have plans, and over the last few weeks a number of coincidental and unrelated events have caused me to do a lot of thinking and writing about the enormous, hugely successful, globally distributed microbat group known as Vespertilionidae. The bats in this group are variously known collectively as common bats, plain-faced bats,…

Original Sin, Again

The big original sin debate goes on. Ross Douthat has weighed in, as has Andrew Sullivan in this post. Both gentleman go after Jerry Coyne. Jerry has already stolen some of my thunder by replying himself (here and here.) He's a much more efficient blogger than I am. Still, I'll throw in my two cents. Douthat writes: Shea touched off the dust-up by arguing that there's nothing particularly radical, at least from the perspective of the Catholic tradition, about interpreting the first books of Genesis as a “figurative” account of a primeval event, rather than as literal historiography that…

This week in Engineering

Check out this great video from on of our partner orgnaizations Engineers.com. From the Science Festival to Mario Brothers and robots. Cool video! Thanks for the shout out!

Grand Rounds: Memorial Day Edition

While I'm still getting caught up on work from time at the conference and the holiday, check out the latest edition of Grand Rounds over at From Med Skool.

Further Olympic Racist Absurdity from Europe: What, sending Marco Polo east wasn't enough already?

This is an exclusive repost of this exclusive post from Gawker regarding yet another "slanty-eyed Chinese" photograph from a Spanish sports team. Read the story at Gawker. Hattip: Phil.

New Scientist: Watch Highlights From The Science Debate at AAAS

Lots of readers have been writing, asking us for video from the AAAS science debate... Now from New Scientist: Clinton vs Obama: who would be best for science?

An Interview with Sandra of Discovering Biology in a Digital World

(Dr. Porter discovers there's a physical world, too!) Today meet Sandra Porter of Discovering Biology in a Digital World, a bioinformaticist, bioinformatics teacher, and expert detector of bull excrement. What do you do when you're not blogging? Lots of things! Work-wise, I do a lot of things that revolve around teaching people how to use bioinformatics. This involves researching different kinds of problems, helping to design "bioinformatics" assays, overseeing and editing our user manual, testing software, and doing scientific consulting. I also have my own research grants (from the NSF…

IPCC: Media Friendly?

Here's three quotes from today's IPCC press conference, which I transcribed straight from the webcast (hence the wacky grammar). The first two are from Dr. Susan Solomon, co-chair of the report committee and an NOAA researcher, an eminent scientist whom I hold in very high regard, not least for her role in getting this report through the intergovernmental committee with its forceful language intact. In the first quote, Dr. Solomon unfortunately doesn't answer the reporter's question in "layman's terms," which it clearly required. In the second, she makes a good point about the IPCC's role in…

Food safety proposal: throw the bums out

As the tomato Salmonella outbreak heads past the 800 case level, it's time to ask some questions about why we don't know the source of what is the largest produce associated disease outbreak on record. CDC has its own explanation, namely, that figuring out where tomatoes come from and where they go is much harder than they thought. Said another way, the experts in foodborne disease outbreaks at CDC and FDA didn't know much about the industry. Since tomatoes have been a frequent cause of Salmonella outbreaks, that seems odd, except that my experience with CDC in recent years is that it is full…

Life's a (contaminated) beach

As I write this I am at 30,000 feet winging my way to Montreal, Canada, where the temperature is below freezing. So what more appropriate topic than microbial hazards of bathing beaches? Maybe it was my foray into the wonderful world of fecal accidents that prompted me to look further into the subject but I found a couple of papers from last year by a groups at Johns Hopkins about the effect of bather density on levels of parasites pathogenic for humans at one particular beach in Maryland, the Hammerman area of Gunpowder Falls State Park in Chase, Maryland in mid to late summer of 2006 (here…

That pesky cell phone issue again

I hate writing posts like this almost as much as people hate reading them. But write them I must. It's the cell phone issue again. Health risks from cell phones aren't supposed to happen because the radiofrequency electromagnetic radiation involved is not energetic enough to ionize molecules. The damage done by ionizing radiation is related to the chemical changes that ensue from the ionizations. Those chemical changes don't occur with exposure to non-ionizing radiation. The most non-ionizing radiation is supposed to do is heat of up the tissue (as in a microwave oven), and the thermal…