Search Content

Displaying results 16701 - 16750 of 87950

Film clip of a split brain patient

This film clip shows Michael Gazzaniga carrying out a behavioural study of a split brain patient named Joe. The split brain procedure (or corpus callosumectomy) involves severing of the corpus callosum, the bundle of approximately 100 million nerve fibres that connect the two hemispheres of the brain. The procedure was performed on patients with intractable epilepsy, the idea being that preventing the left and right hemispheres from communicating with each other would stop the abnormal electrical activity associated with epilepsy from spreading across the whole brain. Split brain…

Somebody doesn't understand basic genetics

Oh, boy. Look at these quotes from a recently published magazine article, and try to guess where they came from. Scientists had also implicitly assumed that the X chromosomes in all women were identical. We had? When? The first comprehensive study of gene activity in the X chromosome of women reveals an unexpected level of variation among individual females. This extensive variation means there is not ONE human genome, but TWO - Male and Female. This does not follow. There's also individual variation in chromosome 7, and every other chromosome in the genome. Allelic and expression variation…

Canadian Conservatives Just Don't Get It

As you know, I'll be leaving the US in the middle of the year to head up north to my native land where I'll be setting up my new lab. Having lived in both the US and Canada, I am in a good position to evaluate both societies. My basic conclusion? America you have a lot to learn from your northern brothers and sisters. It is really frustrating being down here and listening to Americans (especially those on the right) dismiss the concept of public institutions. What do you end up with? A country that is rotting from within. Fortunately things may change for the better. Money from the upcoming…

Unbelievable

That creationist rascal Kenwal Hamza is up to his tricks again: he's convinced the state of Kentucky to invest millions of dollars in his planned theme park, Koran Kountry. The controversial park is the creation of Answers in Koran, LLC, who seek to bring visitors to the “family-friendly attraction that celebrates the truth of the Koran, and the power of the global jihadist movement to liberate Muslims from the oppression of the infidels and Jews. We also have roller coasters.” The $300 million park, built on top of a reclaimed surface mining site in Muhlenberg County, was constructed with…

Naughty Gloria

In this wonderful passage from King Solomon's Ring, Konrad Lorenz, who, together with Nikolaas Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch founded the science of ethology, describes some of the behaviours of his pet capuchin monkey Gloria: She occupied a large, roomy cage in my study. When I was at home and able to look after her, she was allowed to run freely about the room. When I went out, I shut her in the cage, where she became exceedingly bored and exerted all her talents to escape as quickly as possible. One evening, when I returned home after a longer absence and turned the knob of the light switch…

Live from SICB

The deep-sea pickings are sparse this year at the Society for Comparative and Integrative Biology in San Antonio, TX. That's OK, It's a great meeting. "Horizontal", my advisor says, "not vertical." I'm learning about the flights of damselflies, hummingbirds, and bumblebees in between lectures on blue crab signaling and octopus middens. My day started with a terrific review of fluorescence in the deep-sea by Mikhail Matz at UT-Austin, and ended with a sonics enhanced award lecture on the nature of stomatopod and lobster sounds by Sheila Patek at UC Berkeley. Patek gave a great review of her…

Flying Lemurs Wearing High Tech Backpacks

Scientists in Malaysia have strapped high-tech backpacks onto flying lemurs, humans' closest cousins, to help understand the aerodynamics of how these nifty little creatures glide through the air. The flying lemurs aren't actually lemurs, so from now on we're going to refer to them by their mother's maiden name, colugos. The scientists also didn't "strap" the backpacks on the colugos, they attached them with adhesive, so from now on we're going to say that they were "glued" on. Domo Arigato, Mr. Colugo The backpacks use an accelerometer and a memory chip to track the colugos' movements in 3-…

Strategy is different when playing with a five-year-old.

The elder Free-Ride offspring has lately gotten into playing "poison", a nim-type game for two players. You start with a pile of twelve items that are the same and one item that is different (the poison). Each turn, players can remove either one or two items from the pile. The object of the game is to leave your opponent with no option but to take the poison. In theory, it is possible to win the game every single time if your turn is second. (Thanks to MarkP for straightening me out on this one.) What the elder Free-Ride offspring has discovered in playing with the younger Free-Ride…

Radial tree of life

I use a very pretty radial tree of life diagram fairly often — the last time was in my talk on Friday — and every time I do, people ask where I got it. Here it is: it's from the David Hillis lab, with this description: This file can be printed as a wall poster. Printing at least 54" wide is recommended. (If you would prefer a simplified version with common names, please see below.) Blueprint shops and other places with large format printers can print this file for you. You are welcome to use it for non-commercial educational purposes. Please cite the source as David M. Hillis, Derrick Zwickl…

The news from the science fair workshop.

Science fair projects are due Tuesday morning. Can you guess what we're doing today? The elder Free-Ride offspring tried to argue that preliminary experiments (growing crystals from solutions four different solids) had to be omitted from the project write-up. Why? Well, because the elder Free-Ride offspring had originally planned to use solutions of two additional solids in this experiment. It's unthinkable that anything was learned from growing four kinds of crystals rather than six! And reporting on unfinished experiments is just not done! Or, the Free-Ride parental units hypothesized…

New Homeschool History Text

Anne Coulter sends me emails now and then (she doesn't know who I am ... don't tell her) so I get the inside anorexia, I mean, the inside skinny on some of the moves the hard right wing are making now and then. Astonishingly, very little of this is ever of any interest. But the latest tidbit is somewhat interesting. The righties are creaming in their jeans about the republication (which actually happened last year) of Sebastian Adams' "time line of history." This document from the 1870s is historically interesting because it is one of the early "time lines" and it does reflect what some…

Footnotes - Losing a Patient From Afar

[Editor's note: now that The C.O. is back to work he is swamped by the duties of his day job, so he asked us if he could start a new post called "Footnotes," where he writes a quick comment about something on his mind. Of course we told him no - what does he think we're running here, a 6th grade field trip journal? Out of respect for the more delicate members of our reading audience we will refrain from printing his answer, but we can state with reasonable certainty that the penultimate member of his two word reply to us was "Up." Doctors can be somewhat recalcitrant, can't they? Anyway…

Birdfeeders Disrupt Ecology, Natural Selection

It has been claimed in the past that birdfeeders were bad for the environment, and now a couple of researchers are looking into published literature on whether or not birdfeeders significantly disrupt the ecology and future evolution of birds. The PR from SD is basically highlights of the researchers' survey, including indications that birds may get "trapped" in inhospitable areas by the surplus of food or that birdfeeders can disrupt a bird's natural breeding/feeding cycle throughout the year. This review seems to be a jumping off point for more research: "Changing the natural dynamics of…

Confidential to Savage Lovecast Listeners

In case anyone landed here after listening to this week's Savage Lovecast, I wanted to point you in the right direction. Please be gentle - that was my first time being interviewed for anything like that, so I was a bit of a nervous wreck. For the uninitiated - a couple of weeks ago on his podcast, Dan Savage fielded a question from a woman that thought a chunk of mushroom managed to make it through her boyfriend's digestive tract untouched and end up in his ejaculate. Dan rightly dismissed this notion, saying that things don't go "from guts to nuts." This is certainly true for solid pieces…

The Metamorphic Petrology of Ice Cream

I was struck by the similarity of these two images. Which one does your dentist want you to eat? I won't speculate about anyone's dentist's motivations, but the top image comes from The Science of Ice Cream, and the bottom from the USGS. I'm not sure what conditions the ice cream was stored under, but the USGS image is from a limestone that had been stored next to a piping hot intrusion of monzonite, and partially baked into marble. Frozen desserts left in the freezer too long will undergo a similar process. The edges of each ice crystal are constantly exchanging water with the sugar…

Another Lusi Update

From the perspective of this paper's publication, my cross-country move was badly timed. Since my email access has been so sporadic over the past couple weeks, I missed chances to help edit the press release and do a couple of interviews. The press seems to have done just fine without me (except that no reporters have found my blog - or at least, no reporters have found it interesting). The Boston Globe has a nice photo set. What's weird, though, is watching the quotes from various officials at the company whose borehole we claim is responsible for the disaster. In an article in the Financial…

Genetics and geography in Finland

Here's a figure from a brand new paper on the genetics of metabolic traits in a large Finnish cohort (which I'll be posting about in more detail shortly): On the left is a map of the counties the samples were collected from, colour-coded by geographical/linguistic group; on the right is the genetic clustering of the samples using the same colour scheme. For anyone who's been reading Razib's posts on genetic maps of Europe and East Asia, the clear message here won't come as a surprise: once you have a sufficiently large sample of markers, genes correlate with geographic ancestry with…

What I would do if I could do Something Else

'Dem fools is asking us this: "Assuming that time and money were not obstacles, what area of scientific research, outside of your own discipline, would you most like to explore? Why?" I guess "novelist" isn't an acceptable answer as it's not an "area of scientific research". Well, that and I've never really wanted to write novels. But never really wanting to do work hasn't stopped me from putting in a little bit of effort to get this far. So, if I wasn't wasting my time doing what I'm doing, what would I be doing? I'm not going to stray too far from my discipline. I took classes in chemistry…

Half a Million Sharks Finned Each Year in Ecuador

I am the lead author of a new study In Hot Soup: Sharks Captured in Ecuador's Waters out in the journal Environmental Sciences. We reconstructed the shark landings for Ecuador from 1976 to 2004 and demonstrated that Ecuador captures more than 3.5 times the number of sharks they officially report catching--or about half a million sharks each year. The shark fishery of Ecuador is one of many around the world that feeds the growing Asian demand for sharkfin soup. Fishermen catch more than 40 different shark species and one need only visit a few of the fishing ports along the coast to see shark…

"Child, are you going to Hell?" asks North Dakota Middle School Teacher

This is a bad one, folks. In Simle North Dakota, at the Middle school, a ...teacher is under investigation after showing a religious-themed video in health class. "We acknowledge that a video clip was shown in a classroom that violated School Board policy and that a parent has submitted a letter of complaint," said Superintendent Paul Johnson, reading a written statement. "We are investigating the incident and will decide on Monday what action to take." The teacher showed "A Letter from Hell," off of Godtube.com to a health class Wednesday, according to a letter from Steven and Heather…

Nature and Nurture

All of the following stories have one thing in common: They relate to the Nature-Nurture issue. Environment plays key role in children's readiness for school from PhysOrg.com Early school success seems to depend largely on children entering school ready to learn, and many policy initiatives have highlighted the importance of preparing children for school entry. A new study finds that children's environment plays a major role in their readiness for school, suggesting that intervention could help boost readiness in at-risk youngsters. [...] Family conditions may affect when girls…

Science Funding Freeze Under McCain

tags: politics, federal budget, funding freeze, science funding, technology funding, McCain, Ike Brannon United States Federal Budget Discretionary Spending. I just learned that, according to Ike Brannon, an economist and senior policy adviser to presidential candidate, John McCain, all funding -- including funding for scientific research -- will be frozen for one year if McCain is voted into the White House. "The purpose of the freeze is to evaluate each and every program, looking at which ones are worthwhile and which are a waste of taxpayer dollars," Brannon told the Task Force on the…

Is incompetence an act of God?

An Alabama church collapses on a Thursday night; fortunately no one was hurt. As we've come to expect, a god gets credit, never mind that maybe a truly beneficent god would have prevented the collapse in the first place. "Thank God nobody was hurt," Pastor Jeff Carroll said. "He chose to let it come down on a Thursday evening when nobody was there." This story has an additional twist, though. Why did the church collapse? The congregation and volunteers designed and built the new church apparently without filing plans or gaining approval from local or state entities. Carroll, himself a…

Oregon Dead Zone

Anoxic (extremely low or no oxygen) zones occur naturally in the oceans. Typically they occur below areas of upwelling such as off Chile. A naturally occurring anoxic zone also occurs off the western U.S. coast from around 600-1200m. The occurrence of this zone reflects ocean circulation in the Pacific that results in a very old and deoxygenated water mass circulated to the our coast. Coastal upwelling compounds this phenomenon. Anoxic conditions can also result from anthropogenic effects such as the Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone, where nitrogen and phosphorous runoff from the Mississippi…

Spectroscopy and Collimated light

There was a question from Jerry in a previous post: "A simple question for which I can't find an answer: Why do you have to collimate light spectroscopy? What would happen if you didn't collimate it?" The basic idea of spectroscopy is to look at the different colors of light coming from some source. Typically light from a source (like an excited gas) is passed through a diffraction grating that makes different colors bend different amounts (like a prism, only better). Collimated light is basically light that is all going the same direction. How about I go ahead and draw a picture. This is…

Cato: Arson still happens, so eliminate police, fire departments

Cato's Andrew Coulson actually applies that "logic" to a different government program, but it makes just as little sense. Yes, Americans tend to reject evolution, though not, as Coulson claims, 2 in 3; a survey by FASEB this month found that 6 in 10 support evolution. That doesn't mean we should give up on public education. It mean we should give public school teachers more support. A survey by the National Science Teachers Association found that When asked if they feel pressured to include creationism, intelligent design, or other nonscientific alternatives to evolution in their science…

Primitive man had "Neandertal teeth"

Dental maturational sequence and dental tissue proportions in the early Upper Paleolithic child from Abrigo do Lagar Velho, Portugal: Neandertals differ from recent and terminal Pleistocene human populations in their patterns of dental development, endostructural (internal structure) organization, and relative tissue proportions. Although significant changes in craniofacial and postcranial morphology have been found between the Middle Paleolithic and earlier Upper Paleolithic modern humans of western Eurasia and the terminal Pleistocene and Holocene inhabitants of the same region, most…

Mt. Baker Volcano Research Center Update

Mt. Baker in the northern Cascades of Washington. One of the best websites dedicated to any volcano is the Mt. Baker Volcano Research Center - hosted by Western Washington University. I've talked about it before, but David Tucker and his associates have put together an excellent resource on this (at least in my opinion) woefully underappreciated Cascade volcano. There is a pile of news from the MBVRC and I thought I'd pass it along. First off, the 2010 T-shirt design contest has kicked off. Last year the MBVRC raised much needed funds with a T-shirt sale and now you can try to design the…

Redoubt from space and from the ground

Image courtesy of AVO/USGS by Game McGimsey Following the provided script, Redoubt erupted again last night, producing a 32,000 foot / 10,000 meter ash column that prompted a new ash fall warning for the Kenai Peninsula area. Thus far, though, there have been few reports of major damage being caused by the ash fall. Alaska Air has yet to resume flights to Anchorage due to the ash, but will be reassessing as the day goes on. Since then, the seismicity has settled and we can wait for the next explosion. 2 PM Alaska time? Sounds good to me. I want to point everyone to the great video montage…

The domestication of chili peppers

Regular readers know that hot sauce and chili peppers are important to me. Currently I've taken to using dried habaneros instead of hot sauces, powders or fresh peppers. The last taste the best, but they don't always keep, and sauces are a mess. As for powders, there's always the problem of inhalation. In any case, from The American Journal of Botany, Genetic diversity and structure in semiwild and domesticated chiles (Capsicum annuum; Solanaceae) from Mexico: The chile of Mesoamerica, Capsicum annuum, is one of five domesticated chiles in the Americas. Among the chiles, it varies the most…

Happy Anniversary to Seed Scienceblogs!

This magnificient experiment got started exactly a year ago yesterday. It immediatelly caught fire and grew steadily from the initial 14 to the current 54 blogs and is still growing bigger and stronger. Here is a look from the outside.

Strange news in Korea?

I'm getting a flood of google searches from Korea, from people looking for images of anencephaly. Anybody know what's prompting this? I know there was some news on the practice of infanticide in North Korea last week…otherwise, it's a mystery.

Michael Mann: Evil Mastermind or Distinguished Scientist?

Quite possibly Pete Sinclair's best and most important videos yet. Click here to get more background from Peter Sinclair's site. The post refers to this book: The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines

Photo of the Day #881: An Anatomical Curiosity

The preserved head of a California sea lion (Zalophus californianus), dissected and dyed to show some of the glands inside the head. From the collections of the New Jersey State Museum (originally from the College of New Jersey).

One of the reasons I prefer a whiteboard to a chalkboard.

Chalk dust thigh: Indeed, this was the state of my pants after I walked partway across campus from my classroom to my office, so the level of chalk dust had decreased from its maximum level when I snapped this picture.

Top 10 Giant Movie Monsters

Pretty good overview: I was under the impression that many of them monsters Godzilla fought were not from outer space, but rather, from eggs shaken loose by earthquakes and mutated by nuclear irradiation and stuff. Am I wrong about this?

Copenhagen Diagnosis

The Copenhagen Diagnosis is an update to the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report to cover research published since then. This is the science that the cracker who stole the emails from CRU wants to distract you from. Via RealClimate.

How to fix Michele Bachmann

It's a great idea that I found on a new blog called Notes from the Pondonome, (which from the photograph in the blog's banner must be some kind of remote church and graveyard near a river in South Dakota): It involves bacteria.

Quote of the Day

From Paul Waldman's book Being Right Is Not Enough--What Progressives Must Learn from Conservative Success: But the stance of those in the Radical Religious Right toward homosexuality is unlikely to change anytime soon. Since they believe the Bible absolutely prohibits homosexuality, they don't see any room for compromise. As American opinion evolves, their views will grow further and further from the mainstream. Whether it takes ten years or forty years, there will come a day when gay Americans have full legal rights, and antigay prejudice becomes a hallmark of fringe thought. At some…

No jesus meat for you, Patrick Kennedy!

Representative Patrick Kennedy has been barred from taking communion by the Catholic church. This is a politically motivated action to intimidate a politician into supporting a position on a political issue opposed by the church, abortion rights. Hmmm…using religion to commit extortion. How unusual. I feel for him. I have a few consecrated wafers somewhere around the house; I'd love to send him some so he could cannibalize Jesus, but unfortunately, I also got threats to send me poisoned wafers from a few good Catholics, and I haven't tested them. I'd rather not be responsible for murdering a…

Links 8/29/11

Not much of a storm, at least in Boston. Let's celebrate with some links. Science: Teh Wimminz in Academia Thingy Again Racial Disparity in NIH Grants: Solutions from Your Humble Narrator Worst Excuse Ever (to not disclose ties to pharma companies. For Intelligent Designer's sake NIH, even Darrell Issa would be embarrassed to use that excuse) Cost of Compassion: Drug Resistance in Military Hospitals (what's interesting is that drug resistance is so much higher in bacteria from Afghans than from U.S. soldiers) Friday Tiger Blogging Other: Obama Goes All Out For Dirty Banker Deal More on the…

Tuesday Links

Happy Tuesday. Here are a lot of links from a long weekend. Science: Scientists Build Case for Undersea Plumes Attacking Science to Defend Beliefs When science clashes with beliefs? Make science impotent Safety Rules Can't Keep Up With Biotech Industry Gulf oil spill is public health risk, environmental scientists warn Other: Slavery of migrant farmworkers continues in the U.S. to this day Headline of the Month: Why a Pigeon Is Under Armed Guard in India When Teen Pregnancy Is No Accident Weakening America: Mitch McConnell Shows How Insulin giant pulls medicine from Greece over price cut…

MRSA ST398: Now It's in Chickens

The emerging MRSA strain ST398 has found a new home--chickens. MRSA (methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus) was first found to have swept through European swine herds from 2003-2006. Then it entered the hospital system. In the U.S., it had not been observed in agriculture until very recently (it's ScienceBlogling Tara's fault--on a serious note, she studies this critter). It hasn't been seen in hospitals in the U.S. yet. What's disturbing is that a recent study from Belgium indicates that MRSA is on the rise in chickens and that it's due to ST398 (this isn't a trivial thing; most…

The Things You Learn In Sunday School, Part 2

tags: religion, violence, genocide, fundamentalism, MtlRedAtheist, streaming video This is the second in a series of videos that address some of the violent, absurd and atrocious Bible stories being taught to children in Sunday School around the world today. This video discusses the Sunday School Bible story Joshua and the Battle of Jericho. This story describes how God ordained the extermination of the people of Jericho, a disgusting and unethical practice known as genocide. Teaching this to children is designed to teach them to have faith in God. However, it is an excellent example of how…

As long as we're playing games…

How about Playing Gods: The Board Game of Divine Domination? It's called a "satirical board game of religious warfare", and sounds like good silly fun. Some people, though, don't like to see their dogma mocked. [The game] has no basis in historical reality and doesn't actually represent any religion. It just appeals to people who hate religion to begin with -- the hip subculture of militant popular atheists. These people are fanatics, for the most part, themselves. Their thinking is rigid and hostile and not much different from jihadists who don't use their minds or study what they are…

Around the Web: Engineers crashing the gates of the library, Youth & digital media, Pricing bots and more

Engineers Crashing Our Gates From Credibility to Information Quality Youth and Digital Media: From Credibility to Information Quality How Bots Seized Control of My Pricing Strategy Most Smartphone Apps are Spyware Work for Hire? and Work for Hire update Letter from the trenches (science PhD embraces HS teaching career possibililty) The Bookstore in the Library Web 2.0 -- at Your Own Pace How to Counter Amazon: Create a One World E-Book Alliance Analyst: Publishers Seeing Steady Print Declines Should Ready for Steep Drop Half-Time Jobs, Full-Time Scientists How the e-book landscape is…

Best Science Books 2010: The Economist

Another list for your reading, gift giving and collection development pleasure. Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory by Peter Hessler A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming by Paul Edwards Biology is Technology: The Promise, Peril, and New Business of Engineering Life by Rob Carlson The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha…

Best Science Books 2010: Strategy + Business

One of the more interesting lists every year is Strategy + Business because it gives a good selection of internet technology/innovation and social media books. I drew from various of their lists: Top Shelf, Leadership, China and Innovation. Chasing Stars: The Myth of Talent and the Portability of Performance by Boris Groysberg Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead by Charlene Li The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China's Future by Elizabeth C. Economy Cognitive…

Friday Fun: The Onion on How To File A Patent (and a few more serious readings)

Oh, The Onion. You are so wonderful and your take on the world of patents is so spot on that it hurts. What are patents for, anyways? Here's a bit of an excerpt from their 11 Step Program. Drop by the site to see the rest. Brilliant. Step 1: First, come up with something really cool, like a cheese grater that works in both directions. Oh shit, don’t steal that one! That’s mine! Step 2: Research the marketplace to find out if your idea is original or if some asshole has already stolen it from you . . . Step 11: Spend remainder of bitter, unnaturally truncated life filing lawsuits to protect…

Biofortified pulls ahead in the race and our competitors cry "industry fixing"

An update from Karl Haro von Mogel: "A little more than an hour after PZ's post, GM Watch in the UK has wildly claimed that the 'biotech industry' is fixing the contest!" "The level of conspiracy theorizing reaches astronomical proportions at a moment's notice. Please keep voting, so they won't have the chance to use such falsehoods to attack us." FYI: Biofortified is a completely independent venture started by two graduate students. It is independently run on a volunteer basis, and is not supported by any funding from any companies. I work at a non-profit institution and the only thing I…