Search Content

Displaying results 16851 - 16900 of 87950

Life Science Blog Aggregator

Stew from Flags and Lollipops has begun a new life science blog aggregator, postgenomic. Here is how he describes it: Postgenomic aggregates posts from life science blogs and then does useful and interesting things with that data. For example, it allows you to get an instant picture of what news stories are being heavily linked to by researchers in the medical sciences, or which papers are being cited or reviewed most often, or which buzzwords are being used the most frequently. It's sort of like a hot papers meeting with the entire biomed blogging community. Sort of. He asks that you add…

Firing bad teachers.

There's been a bit o' lively chatter around the blogosphere about the present tenure system for teachers. One of the clear arguments is that bad teachers should be able to be fired more easily so our children get a better education. Seems nice right? But would it work? Here's one reaction from Uncertain Principles. And here's another from my mother the teacher: I think firing incompetent teachers would improve the state of public education; however, making it easier to fire teachers wouldn't necessarily get rid of the incompetent teachers. In my experience the teachers that…

The Science of Orgasms

Well - this book has everything you ever really wanted to know about orgasms - 338 pages.... that's a lot of orgams? multiple orgasms? Honestly, I'm a little surprised a book like this hasn't been written before. "I wrote this book because no one had approached the topic from a holistic view with the neurophysiology and endocrinology as well as the effects of diseases, medication and other concerns on orgasm," said Whipple, a Voorhees, N.J. resident. The 338-page book, published by Johns Hopkins University Press, is in its second printing after its release in late October. Behind its "plain…

Robot Update

High school robotics competition kicks off Some 35,000 high school students from over 1500 high schools in eight countries today began competing in the annual US FIRST student robotics contest. This year's competition, dubbed "FIRST Overdrive," challenges the student teams to build semi-autonomous robots that will move 40-inch diameter inflatable balls around a playing field and score the most points. The Evolution of Altruism in Robots Despite the fact that many fundamentalists believe morals come directly from god, scientists have long known that it's not just humans who are capable of…

Himalayan Ice Fields Have Not Grown in Fifty Years

Starting with Los Alamos, repeated atomic explosions altered the isotopic composition of the Earth's atmosphere in a way that is easily seen in historic proxyindicator records such as ice cores, lake cores, tree rings, and so on. Recently raised cores from the Himalayan ice fields, when analyzed, failed to show this global signal. This strongly suggests that these ice fields have not grown during the last fifty years, or more. The ice fields provide an important buffer in the headwaters of major rivers relied on today for agriculture and other uses by a very large number of people.…

How to Justify a Desktop Upgrade

From slashdot: "I stumbled across this fascinating Microsoft tutorial entitled "How to Justify a Desktop Upgrade." It's an attempt to coach IT professionals on how to sell Windows desktop upgrades internally. Apparently the value of Vista is not readily apparent, requiring detailed instructions on how to connive and cajole into an upgrade from XP. Here's a bit of the Microsoft Site: How to Justify a Desktop Upgrade ... Standardizing on the latest operating system and having enough RAM to support everyone's applications would make your life so much easier and more productive. It could also…

Colorblind Cuttlefish

A reader sent in this intriguing question in response to the previous post on cuttlefish: "What is there vision like? Do they really see around them clearly enough to have evolved mimicry?" Researchers Mathger et al. have shown that the animals are actually colorblind but can distinguish objects that contrast from the background environment by as little as 15%. Images from their work are shown below: Can you find the cuttlefish in these images from the paper? Cuttlefish also have cells called iridophores and leucophores that reflect the brightness of their environments further helping…

Donors Choose---final days

We have some very generous readers. We've managed to fully fund 12 out of 14 proposals from needy Michigan classrooms. We can probably pull off funding the final two projects this week, and although our readers have been quite generous in the size of individual gifts, I'd love to see a bunch of micro-gifts, in the 1-10 dollar range. Remaining Projects A Story to Tell: The teacher is trying to get a lap top and printer for her kids. That's it. She's $148 $123 away from getting it. Inner City Soccer Team: Aside from the benefit of athletics, these kids are isolated in an economically and…

The Twilight Zone, The Gate, and The Abyss

The twilight zone is a section of water extending from the euphotic zone down to 1000m. A new study demonstrates that this region acts like a gate and that little makes it to the seafloor. ...carbon dioxide --taken up by photosynthesizing marine plants in the sunlit ocean surface layer--does not necessarily sink to the depths, where it is stored and prevented from re-entering the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas. Instead, organisms in the twilight zone consume the material (50-80%) long before it reaches the murky depths. Understanding these processes are important for predicting the role of…

A small sense of accomplishment

Last week was demo week here at the Palazzo lab. Both Zeiss and Nikon dropped off their latest equipment and we had the chance to image some RNA. In addition we finally completed some badly needed lab renovations and as a result had an operation tissue culture area. I went ahead and transfected COS7 cells with a plasmid that we just received from Open Biosystems that contains a gene of interest (a membrane bound protein whose RNA did not contain an SSCR, for those keeping track) and tried out a new FISH probe. Of course we were missing forceps and those great porcelain coverslip racks from…

TGIF: GODAC deep-sea video database

The Global Oceanographic Data Center (GODAC) has a webpage of favorite deep-sea videos from the Japanese Agency for Marine Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) with cool names like "Milky Way floats on the abyss" and "Unusual atmosphere". What better way to whittle away the hours AND do your research at the same time? The JAMSTEC video database at GODAC.... ...provides streaming of the valuable deep-sea research videos maintained by JAMSTEC, along with various detailed information (metadata) including research location, purpose, video content (organism names and phenomena recorded), and…

PLoS ONE Get Its "Taxonomy Barrier" Broken

I really love that quote from Alex Wild, by the way. Brian Fisher (my former Evolution T.A. from ye ole UC-Davis days) and Alex Smith make open access history by publishing a taxonomic paper in PLoS ONE. It doesn't matter that this paper is about ants, not deep sea ants either like those discovered from whale falls above. I mean really, everyone knows they are just derived crustaceans anyways, by extension they are honorary deep sea taxa. Some amazing blogger already discussed the paper anyways. This is a huge step forward for taxonomy and PLoS ONE made the right decision to dive into…

Friday Find: The Sahara fertilizes the Amazon

NASA tells us Bodele Depression Dust Feeds Amazon: By studying NASA satellite data of the spread of dust across the globe, scientists discovered that more than half of the mineral dust that fertilizes the Amazon soil comes from a single spot in the southern Sahara, a large mountain-rimmed valley called the Bodele Depression. They have an image of the Bodélé there, and a link to the original research paper, "The Bodélé depression: a single spot in the Sahara that provides most of the mineral dust to the Amazon forest." As you can see from the image above, reproduced from that paper, there…

They're not dead, they're just mostly dead

I just got back from my weekend trip to Delaware. Friday night was absolutely miserable (cold, wet, half-cooked hot dogs for dinner, etc.), but by Saturday morning the weather had greatly improved. Unfortunately, however, a big storm had thrown off the rhythms of the up the annual horseshoe crab spawning and the majority of the ones I saw were either dead or dying. Late Saturday night I stumbled across two "in the act" (the week before, apparently, there had been thousands along the beach), but otherwise I saw more sun-bleached carapaces than living animals. Still, it was a good trip and here…

Photo of the Day #143: Lion

Large zoos have a number of different methods for presenting animals (large carnivores, especially) to the public, but the "pit" set-up is perhaps my least favorite. The lion (Panthera leo) exhibit at the National Zoo, for instance, is a a huge, deep pit with several tiers on it, the edge of the island being separated from the pit wall by a moat. The lions can't get out, but there isn't much preventing anyone from falling in, an event that isn't likely to occur but will definitely be dangerous if it does. Likewise, the pits put the animals further away from visitors than could be achieved in…

Vick and Animal Cruelty

For me, the most depressing aspect of the Michael Vick dog-fighting case is that I can't draw a bright moral line between his acts of sadism and the publicly acceptable forms of animal cruelty that we all support in the supermarket. (I'm talking about the cheap meat from big poultry farms and slaughterhouses.) Why is one illegal and the other condoned? Honestly, I want to be able to distinguish between killing dogs for sport and confining chickens to inhumane living conditions, or farming veal, but I can't find any good reasons, apart from the obvious "puppies are real cute" argument. Isn't…

My Accent

Fun for the whole family. If Judith Rich Harris is correct, then kids should have the same accent as their peers, not their parents. According to this quiz, my childhood friends in Southern California were actually from the Midwest. (Or maybe I just watched too much TV, since most television voices speak in the accentless drone of middle America.) What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern…

Let's not give England all our attention today — look at France!

This story about the desperation of the French priesthood to recruit new victims has some interesting statistics. There are around 24,000 priests in France today, down from 42,000 in 1975. The number of Catholics entering the diocese has declined as well, from 116 ordainments in 1999 to 89 in 2009. … While 64 percent of the French population, or 41.6 million of the country's 65 million inhabitants, identifies itself as Catholic, only a little more than 2 million attend church each week, said Jacques Carton, a representative from the Bishops Conference in France. How desperate are they?…

Sb/DonorsChoose fundraiser preliminary result.

Between the moment the drive kicked off on June 15 and the moment it closed last night, here's what generous ScienceBlogs readers accomplished: 195 of you made donations. Together, those donations added up to $16,097.27. You also helped 4 of the 19 challenges meet their goals, securing an additional 10% of the totals raised in those challenges ($841.53) from DonorsChoose. Thus, with the $10,000 match from SEED, you've raised $26,938.80 to help students and teachers get what they need to make education happen. That's pretty awesome! We thank you and the teachers and kids thank you. Don't…

Most appropriately named quack ever

He called himself Dr Woo. He was a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine, and even those quacks couldn't stand him, and disbarred him. He was bringing in female patients, asking them to get naked, and then poking and prodding in places totally unrelated to their complaints. Here's one remarkably resonant sentence from the article: Expert witnesses told the hearing there were no acupuncture points in the vagina. Well, yeah, we can get a flavor of what Woo was doing from that, but I'm left marveling: there are no acupuncture points anywhere, it's all a load of hokum, so where do they…

Down the line

My discussion with Jim Manzi on epistasis generated a lot commentary. It's a complex topic, as I said there are different ways to define epistasis, and evolutionarily its effect on trait value might be different from its effect on fitness. Finally, I think it is important that epistatic and additive genetic variation can convert from one to the other; and over the long term it is this heritable variation which is the "stuff of evolution," so to speak. But a friend recommended that I post a figure from Genome-wide association analysis identifies 20 loci that influence adult height. One…

The introduction of farming & new genes to Europe

Genetic Discontinuity Between Local Hunter-Gatherers and Central Europe's First Farmers: Following the domestication of animals and crops in the Near East some 11,000 years ago, farming reached much of Central Europe by 7,500 years before present. The extent to which these early European farmers were immigrants, or descendants of resident hunter-gatherers who had adopted farming, has been widely debated. We compare new mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences from late European hunter-gatherer skeletons with those from early farmers, and from modern Europeans. We find large genetic differences…

Which religious groups are Creationist?

Pew has the numbers: The main surprise here are Mormons. I knew that they had become much more Creationist over the past 3 generations due to their identification with conservative Protestants, but I didn't know that it went this far. In The Creationists Ronald L Numbers states: In 1935 only 36 percent of the students at the Mormons' Brigham Young University denied that humans had been "created in a process of evolution from lower forms." By 1973 the figure had risen sharply to 81 percent. This is interesting because Mormons have no objections to evolution which are distinctively Mormon.…

Antique illustrations

The National Library of Medicine has released scans of classic science texts from the 15th-16th century — they're beautiful. And the amazing thing is, they're still better science than anything you'll find from a creationist!

Radio reminder

This morning at 9am, tune in to Atheists Talk radio for an hour of women and godlessness with Annie Laurie Gaylor of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. It's Mother's Day! Free a mom from the shackles of superstition today!

How NOT to think about human behavior

Echidne, Amanda Marcotte, Laelaps and Larry Moran beautifully destroy the "Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature" article from the recent issue of 'Psychology Today', the latest garbage from the Evolutionary Psychology crowd. Much fun was had by all....

Condi's Pissed

Below the fold is an amusing video of what happened when Barbara Boxer tried to get an answer from Condoleezza Rice regarding how many casualties we can expect from the surge. . tags: streaming video, condoleezza rice,humor, satire, politics

Qi Zhang's electrifying organ performance

Organ virtuoso Qi Zhang plays her electric rendering of "Ridiculous Fellows" from Prokofiev's "The Love for Three Oranges" orchestral suite. This exhilarating performance from TEDx USC features the Yamaha Electone Stagea, a rare, imported instrument specially programmed by Qi herself.

Bacterial Builders

Check out this awesome video of a computer-controlled swarm of magnetic bacteria building a pyramid out of tiny bricks!!! From IEEE Spectrum, via It Takes 30, the always fascinating blog from Harvard Systems Biology, the department my lab is in!

Sherman's Vents Week #7

A coworker passed along 7 deep sea cartoons from the comic strip Sherman's Lagoon, who was gracious enough to grant us permission to use on our blog. Sherman's Lagoon by Jim Toomey © 2008 Jim Toomey. Used with permission from the artist.

Sherman's Vents Week #6

A coworker passed along 7 deep sea cartoons from the comic strip Sherman's Lagoon, who was gracious enough to grant us permission to use on our blog. Sherman's Lagoon by Jim Toomey © 2008 Jim Toomey. Used with permission from the artist.

Sherman's Vents Week #5

A coworker passed along 7 deep sea cartoons from the comic strip Sherman's Lagoon, who was gracious enough to grant us permission to use on our blog. Sherman's Lagoon by Jim Toomey © 2008 Jim Toomey. Used with permission from the artist.

Sherman's Vents Week #4

A coworker passed along 7 deep sea cartoons from the comic strip Sherman's Lagoon, who was gracious enough to grant us permission to use on our blog. Sherman's Lagoon by Jim Toomey © 2008 Jim Toomey. Used with permission from the artist.

Sherman's Vents Week #3

A coworker passed along 7 deep sea cartoons from the comic strip Sherman's Lagoon, who was gracious enough to grant us permission to use on our blog. Sherman's Lagoon by Jim Toomey © 2008 Jim Toomey. Used with permission from the artist.

Sherman's Vents Week #2

A coworker passed along 7 deep sea cartoons from the comic strip Sherman's Lagoon, who was gracious enough to grant us permission to use on our blog. Sherman's Lagoon by Jim Toomey © 2008 Jim Toomey. Used with permission from the artist.

Sherman's Vents Week #1

A coworker passed along 7 deep sea cartoons from the comic strip Sherman's Lagoon, who was gracious enough to grant us permission to use on our blog. Sherman's Lagoon by Jim Toomey © 2008 Jim Toomey. Used with permission from the artist.

Don't mess with your neck doing yoga either

For some reason the NYT is all about neck injury lately. In yesterday's discussion of a possible chiropractic induced injury, Russell asked: But given all the other stresses people put on their necks, from accidents such as headbumps, from purposeful athletics such as whacking soccer balls, and from just craning one's head in odd positions when performing various kinds of mechanical labor, it puzzles me that the risk from a chiropractor would be much greater than the risks from these other kinds of use/abuse. Of course, this is not excuse for the chiropractor, who is imposing that risk,…

Ask A Scienceblogger - Which parts of the human body could you design better?

The question this month is "Which parts of the human body could you design better?" This is a great question, because a lot of aspects of the human body represent what worked well enough for survival, not necessarily what works best. Therefore the engineering ends up being rather ramshackle, and convoluted, and sometimes, downright terrible. For instance, who can look at this image - an anatomical model of human pregnancy at term, and not think this is really, really stupid engineering. (image via wikipedia) The very first thing I would change would be the female reproductive system.…

The death of a wedge issue

I hope this time I'm finally right about this. I've been hopeful that some strategy of developing stem cells would allow us to bypass the absurd ethical restrictions from those who think one type of destruction of an embryo is worse than another. Particularly promising were spermatogonial stem cells, but they could only be made from men (and the procedure might have been unpopular), and placental/amniotic stem cells, which were limited by the ability to passage them without differentiation, and supply (not everybody freezes back their placentas). The ideal stem cell would have the following…

A scientific study of overvalued ideas

Corpus Callosum points us to a review in science entitled Childhood Origins of Adult Resistance to Science (Chris at mixing memory also has coverage of the article). This is a perfect study to emphasize a critical aspect of denialism and crankery, that is, the central role the overvalued idea plays in the evolution of a crank. Denialism, in a nutshell, is the rhetorical strategy used to protect an overvalued idea from things like facts and data. The denialist or crank is trying desperately to hold on to a concept that is important to their self-identity or ego, and is in conflict with…

Pronghorn, "designed by committee" (pronghorns part I)

The Pronghorn or Pronghorn antelope* Antilocapra americana is a strikingly unique artiodactyl, endemic to western North America. Historically, it ranged from southern Manitoba and Washington in the north to northern Mexico in the south, and to western Iowa in the east. Between 40 and 50 million Pronghorns were alive in 1850; excessive hunting had reduced this number to 13000 by 1920. Subsequent conservation efforts have resulted in substantial recovery: there are currently between half a million and one million Pronghorns. * Also known as the Cabrit, Prong Buck, Speedgoat (my favourite) or…

Ankylosaur week, day 5: Edmontonia

Welcome to day 5 of ankylosaur week. This time, we look at Panoplosaurus' sister-taxon Edmontonia. Edmontonia was a large (6-7 m long) Campanian-Maastrichtian nodosaurid that lived right across North America... Two species are presently recognised. The type species, E. longiceps, named by Charles M. Sternberg in 1928 for a specimen from the Horseshoe Canyon Formation of Alberta, is today known from multiple units of both the USA and Alberta [adjacent image shows the Drumheller Edmontonia model]. The second species, E. rugosidens, was first described in 1930 by Charles Gilmore for a specimen…

From Lambda Calculus to Cartesian Closed Categories

This is one of the last posts in my series on category theory; and it's a two parter. What I'm going to do in these two posts is show the correspondence between lambda calculus and the [cartesian closed categories][ccc]. If you're not familiar with lambda calculus, you can take a look at my series of articles on it [here][lambda]. You might also want to follow the CCC link above, to remind yourself about the CCCs. (The short refresher is: a CCC is a category that has an exponent and a product, and is closed over both. The product is an abstract version of cartesian set product; the exponent…

Backus's Idea of Functional Programming

In my earlier post about John Backus, I promised to write something about his later work on functional programming languages. While I was in a doctors office getting treated for an awful cough, I re-read his 1977 Turing Award Lecture. Even 30 years later, it remains a fascinating read, and far from being dated, it's positively astonishingly to see both how far-sighted Backus was, and how little progress we've actually made. Backus started from a pretty solid perspective. Almost all of the common programming languages that we see - ranging from Backus's own 1950s version of Fortran, to the…

The Theory of Monads and the Monad Laws

As promised, I'm finally going to get to the theory behind monads. As a quick review, the basic idea of the monad in Haskell is a hidden transition function - a monad is, basically, a state transition function. The theory of monads comes from category theory. I'm going to assume you know a little bit about category theory - if you have trouble with it, go take a look at my introductory posts here. Fundamentally, in category theory a monad is a category with a particular kind of structure. It's a category with one object. That category has a collection of arrows which (obviously) are from…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 22 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Bee Threat Elicits Alarm Call in African Elephants: Unlike the smaller and more vulnerable mammals, African elephants have relatively few predators that threaten their survival. The sound of disturbed…

World AIDS Day and the goal of an "AIDS-Free Generation"

December 1 was World AIDS Day, and this year's theme is "Working Together for an AIDS-Free Generation." In the 2011 United Nations Political Declaration on HIV and AIDS, countries set ambitious goals to reach by 2015: Reduce sexual transmission by 50%. Reduce HIV transmission among people who inject drugs by 50%. Eliminate new infections among children and substantially reduce the number of mothers dying from AIDS-related causes. Provide antiretroviral therapy to 15 million people. Reduce the number of people living with HIV who die from tuberculosis by 50%. Close the global AIDS resource…

On Faculty Mentoring

One of the evergreen topics for academic magazines like Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education is faculty "mentoring." It's rare for a week to go by without at least one lengthy essay on the topic, many of which recirculate multiple times through my various social media channels. The latest batch of these (no links, because this isn't about the specific articles in question) prompted me to comment over in Twitter-land that: Articles about "mentoring" of faculty are great for reminding me of all the ways I'm atypical for an academic personality-wise. — Chad Orzel (@orzelc)…

Ask Ethan #25: Where would you go, now?

"They will see us waving from such great heights 'Come down now,' they'll say. But everything looks perfect from far away 'Come down now.' But we'll stay." -The Postal Service Welcome back to another Ask Ethan! You keep sending in your questions and suggestions, and each week, I'll pick one of my favorites to answer for you and the world. Today's Ask Ethan comes from John, who asks one of the more fanciful and personal questions I've fielded yet, as he wants to know: If you could jump into the Enterprise, or the Millennium Falcon, or whatever is your favorite faster-than-light starship, what…

How to see the closest supernova in a generation!

"After your death you will be what you were before your birth." -Arthur Schopenhauer If only every star's death could be as glorious as a supernova, rocketing anywhere from thousands to millions of Earth-masses out of a star and into interstellar space. When we get one in our galaxy, like we do every few hundred years, the view from Earth can be spectacular. Video Credit: ESA / Hubble. The Crab Nebula, above, sprung from a supernova nearly a thousand years ago, in 1054. And while that supernova, and a handful of others since, have been visible from Earth with nothing more than the naked eye…