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Voting Ends Tomorrow for the Science is COOL video contest!!

Which is the coolest science video? You tell us! Cast your vote now for the Kavli Video Contest People's Choice Award! You have until tomorrow to VOTE! What are you waiting for? Just check out all the great science videos online, and then you rate them! And be sure to give your favorite a 5 stars rating. Voting for the People's Choice Award is fast and easy !!! First, you need to register and log into the SciVee site http://www.scivee.tv Then view all of the Kavli science videos here Click the star rating you prefer under each video that you review. A "Thank You for Voting" notice will…

Voting ends for the Kavli Video Contest on Wednesday!

Which is the coolest science video? You tell us! Cast your vote now for the Kavli Video Contest People's Choice Award! Just a few more days to vote! Just check out all the great science videos online, and then you rate them! And be sure to give your favorite a 5 stars rating. Voting for the People's Choice Award is fast and easy !!! First, you need to register and log into the SciVee site http://www.scivee.tv Then view all of the Kavli science videos here Click the star rating you prefer under each video that you review. A "Thank You for Voting" notice will appear and your vote will be…

ScienceOnline2010 - introducing the participants

As you know you can see everyone who's registered for the conference, but I highlight 4-6 participants every day as this may be an easier way for you to digest the list. You can also look at the Program so see who is doing what. Cynthia Allen is the Editor and Writer in the Office of Science Education at National Institutes of Health where she blogs on their SciEd blog. She is also on Twitter. Laurel Bacque is in charge of communications, a blogger, and the online community manager for the IceCube - the South Pole neutrino-hunting telescope. And she is on Twitter. Craig McClain is the…

Science Blogging at SICB and in NC

Grrrl, PZ and John will be panelists at the Media Worskshop during the next SICB meeting. You bet I am jealous! SICB is the coolest of all science meetings ever! Their workshop is about science blogging: Media Workshop: Hey, Wanna Read My Blog? Blogs are online "diaries" that are growing in popularity. Popular political and social commentary blogs are making the news, but is there more out there than chatty gossip and collections of links? How about some science? Can this trendy technology be useful for scientists? Come to the Media Workshop and find out! Experienced science bloggers…

NASA Astrobiology Roadmap 2 and 3: Prebiotic Evolution and Evolution of Advanced Life

The future of Astrobiology research within NASA is being set now. Next week there are further opportunities for community input. The online discussion for Solar System Exploration wraps up today! If you are an active researcher, a student planning on getting into astrobiology, or an interested member of the community, this is your chance to provide input on the direction of research. This is your future. Be there, or we will choose for you. The NASA Astrobiology Roadmap exercise is under way, and will continue over the next two weeks. NASA Astrobiology The next two topics will kick off…

Link love, shameless promotion edition

If you're not yet familiar with researchblogging.org, you need to click the picture. It's a blog-aggregator that pulls together posts about peer-reviewed research, and since the intersection of published research and blogging is getting a lot of play lately, this is a must-see. In addition, Dave Munger is launching a new forum to discuss research blogging where yours truly will be a janitor moderator. Next, I've started a new forum for the discussion of many of the issues seen in this space, at Science-Based Medicine, and any other interesting issues that come up. It's set for moderated…

Register for Science Online 2010 before it's too late!

Registration for Science Online 2010 is open. The conference web site is here and program info is here. Time is running out. There are currently about 175 registered and the organizers are going to cap it at 250. I've attended the conference for the past two years and it's a blast. I really enjoyed the sessions as well as the informal times between sessions, at the meals and in the bar. I've registered already, as has my son, Sam, who's in grade 11. He attended last year and also had a great time. Bora even interviewed him! There's been a good tradition of librarians attending the…

Darwin Correspondence Project

tags: Darwin, Darwin Correspondence Project, evolution, biology I have mentioned this before when the project was first underway, but all of Darwin's letters are now catalogued online for everyone to read. For those of you who don't know, Darwin was a prolific correspondent, regularly writing to nearly 2000 people during his lifetime. Among his correspondents were geologist Charles Lyell, the botanists Asa Gray and Joseph Dalton Hooker, the zoologist Thomas Henry Huxley and the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, as well as well-known thinkers and public figures, as well as ordinary men and…

Perverted Justice

I don't know if any of you saw last night's Dateline NBC show about sexual predators online. It was dragged out way too long and redundant, very poorly produced, but I think the project is very valuable. Working with the folks at Perverted Justice, a group that tracks and exposes folks who troll for sex with children online, NBC and the Sheriff's department in Riverside, California, set up a sting operation. Posing as 12 and 13 year old boys and girls in chat rooms, they would get messaged by men and set up dates with them. When the men arrived, they were confronted on camera and then…

links for 2007-12-28

The Least Essential Albums Of 2007 | The A.V. Club "Every year produces great music and a nearly equal amount of terrible music. Then there's the not-so-creamy middle, the albums that have no real reason to exist, but nonetheless find their way to music-store shelves and online music stores." (tags: music review culture) The Best Books We Read In 2007 | The A.V. Club Genre fiction tops the list! (tags: books review culture) AFP: Priests brawl at Bethlehem birthplace of Jesus "Seven people were injured on Thursday when Greek Orthodox and Armenian priests came to blows in a dispute over…

What brain games do you like?

There's a fair bit of evidence that playing games can enhance your cognitive ability and prevent decline as we age. Or at least that's the excuse I use when I take a few minutes off during the course of the workday to play a game or two. Here are some of my current favorites: Str8ts. This game confused me at first, but once I got the hang of it, I was an addict. Follow the walkthrough to get an idea of how it's played, then play the daily puzzle. Tip: You can type as many numbers as you want into each cell, then eliminate possibilities until you figure out the answer. Kakuro. I play the…

New online tools from Nature

OK a good friend and former colleague has induced me to get a Connotea account ... and I have to say that it's great. It's like a cross between Endnote and your bookmark page ... on steroids. If you don't know what Connotea is, it's a social bookmarking tool that lets you keep track of websites, files (such as online pdf files of scholarly articles) all while giving you the power of organizing these bookmarks with a single click of the button. One great feature is the ability of Connotea to extract all the info you need for any online publication simply by either adding a button to your…

A little help?

Update: Michael has been kind enough to track down a copy of A Discourse on the revolutions of the surface of the globe..., although it looks like I'm going to have to learn French if I want to read Researches on fossil bones. I've been reading a lot about Cuvier as of late, but I realized that I haven't actually read much of Cuvier's own work (not being able to read French is a general impediment). I was wondering, then, if any of you know of available English translations of Discours sur les revolutions du globe ( A discourse on the revolutions of the surface of the globe, and the changes…

South Park season premier!

You can watch it online today!

In the Wake of Science Online (#scio11): Supporting New Bloggers

I'm not sure exactly how, but somewhere between the lemurs, the books, the dinners, and the ridiculously short sleep sessions that I encountered at Science Online, I managed to learn quite a bit from many of those science writers to whose level of awesomeness I aspire, and am consequently left with a handful of scattered thoughts. Here is the first set of those scattered thoughts. Comments are, as always, welcomed and appreciated. At the first of two sessions that I helped co-moderate, we discussed ways for the more established science writers to help support new talent. There is a bit of a…

A Modest eBook Proposal for Publishers and Libraries

A recent change by Harper Collins Publishing regarding library-owned eBook has met with a lot of criticism: The value of this magically convenient library book -- otherwise known as an e-book -- is the subject of a fresh and furious debate in the publishing world. For years, public libraries building their e-book collections have typically done so with the agreement from publishers that once a library buys an e-book, it can lend it out, one reader at a time, an unlimited number of times. Last week, that agreement was upended by HarperCollins Publishers when it began enforcing new restrictions…

An Island in the Middle of the Charles River?

(Click to embiggen) Don't worry, I'm not describing Boston Mayor Menino's latest harebrained scheme. Esplanade Magazine, which is some great architecture/real estate porn (and it's free!), describes an effort in 1907, during the heyday of the City Beautiful Movement, to build an island in the Charles River. It didn't happen due to opposition from Beacon Hill residents (naturally...) who opposed what would have been called St. Botolph's* island. But imagine if the island had been built (from Esplanade Magazine): It's May, almost time for Commencement, and you are sunning yourself at the BU…

Friday Fun: 5 True Stories That Prove You Shouldn't Piss Off The IT Guy

Yeah, I'm sorta an IT guy, or at least I used to be a real IT guy. I guess now I'm a former fake has-been IT guy. In any case, this one from Cracked really tickled my cyborg funny bone: 5 True Stories That Prove You Shouldn't Piss Off The IT Guy. Let's take a quick peek at number 5: #5. Omar Ramos-Lopez Remotely Shuts Down 100 Cars If we told you that a young computer whiz disabled more than 100 cars from his computer, you'd probably think "Man, this Hackers remake is gonna suck." That's the sort of wildly impossible feat that could only come from Hollywood's ridiculous conception of…

Good and Bad News on Bush Administration and the Environment

First, the good news: A federal appeals court has struck down a 2006 EPA rule that prohibited state and local governments from strengthening efforts to monitor pollution from power plants, factories, and refineries. Under the Clean Air Act, state and local governments are tasked with issuing pollution permits to power plants, factories, and other polluters. Theyâre supposed to update their monitoring requirements with EPA guidance, but such guidance hasnât been forthcoming. When EPA proposed requiring that state and local governments improve their monitoring without that guidance, industry…

New Rolling Stones E-Book

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the Rolling Stones's first gig, at the Marquee Club in London. Journalist Hanspeter Kuenzler and Bavarian e-book publishers The eBook People GmbH celebrate the occasion with a massive illustrated two-volume biographical anthology in English on the band. Counting the pages in an e-book is of course difficult. But suffice to say that the first volume, that Aard has received for review, extends to 694 pages on my smartphone, where I read it. Kuenzler provides the year-by-year narrative backbone of the story and, in a nice touch, for each year lists…

A dietary supplement to slow aging

This is great news if you are a mouse! Here's the summary of the paper: NAD+ repletion improves mitochondrial and stem cell function and enhances life span in mice, by Hongbo Zhang, Dongryeol Ryu, Yibo Wu, Karim Gariani, Xu Wang, Peiling Luan, Davide D’Amico, Eduardo R. Ropelle, Matthias P. Lutolf, Ruedi Aebersold, Kristina Schoonjans, Keir J. Menzies, Johan Auwerx, (here, if you subscribe to Science.) The oxidized form of cellular nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) is critical for mitochondrial function, and its supplementation can lead to increased longevity. Zhang et al. found that…

Battle Over Private Nativity Scene

In Novi, Michigan, there's a big battle kicking up over a family's nativity scene in their front yard. The problem is that they live in a neighborhood with a neighborhood association that has rules against such displays: The Samonas' neighborhood association has ordered the Novi family to remove its seven-piece plastic display or face possible fines of $25 to $100 per week. The family isn't budging and neither are its three wise men. The Samonas have vowed not only to keep the display, but also are threatening to enhance it."If you take this out, it's not Christmas anymore," said Joe Samona,…

Brain has rebooted now

I have been sleeping the sleep of the dead—it turns out that if you don't bother to sleep for 40 hours you get really tired and when you lie down your brain shuts off. This is very good to know. It means I've been completely ignoring Pharyngula for a long, long time, and wow, did the comments pile up. So let me deal with a few things quickly. I am pleased to see that the comments did not descend into total anarchy, but come on, don't pick on Robert O'Brien because he looks like a dork. I look like a dork. I suspect that if you people had to verify your comments with your passport photos we'…

Inconvenient no more

Oscar winner An Inconvenient Truth available online.

Moore on the air

Dennis Moore's latest TV ad is online.

Closing Commenting

Popular Science, one of the longest running and, well, popular, magazines that deals with science has a website. Last Tuesday, on-line editor Suzanne LaBarre announced that Popular Science would no longer have comment sections on most of its pages. The reason sited was that "Comments can be bad for science." She noted: A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another…

CPB Report on Best Practices in Digital Journalism: Implications for Science Communication

This week, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting released a report on best practices in digital journalism that I co-authored with several colleagues here at American University and the Center for Social Media. Titled Scan and Analysis of Best Practices in Digital Journalism In and Outside U.S. Public Broadcasting, the report was commissioned by CPB as part of the organization's planning for future directions in online reporting and media. In keeping with CPB's mission, the report has a strong emphasis on strategies for using digital journalism to promote civic engagement, public…

Best of May

I posted only 127 times in May. Apart from many cool videos and various updates, I did blog about other things as well. I went to the WWW2010 conference and wrote my thoughts about it. Open Laboratory submissions are in full swing so I decided to post the old Prefaces and Introductions I wrote for the first three books. Dennis Meredith came to town to talk about Explaining Research so I reported from the event. I also reported on the presentation about Serious Gaming at Sigma Xi. Two of my friends and neighbors published books in May so I announced the sites and times for local readings - 'On…

Self-Referential Ethan Miller

I've been following Californian rock singer and guitarist Ethan Miller off and on since Comets on Fire's 2002 album Field Recordings from the Sun. I love his singing and psychedelic song writing. And so recently the song "Nomads" from the 2008 album Magnificent Fiend (with Miller's current band Howlin' Rain) has been playing in my head. I couldn't quite make sense of the lyrics, so I checked on-line, and found them (perhaps predictably) to be stonerishly meandering. But also bluntly self-referential in a way that is either really stupid or neatly self-ironic. You be the judge, Dear Reader.…

NASA's Revived STEREO-B Could Save Us From A Trillion Dollar Disaster (Synopsis)

“Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.” -Alexander Graham Bell In 1859, the Sun surprisingly increased in brightness so significantly for just a brief while that it was noticeable from Earth during the day. Less than 24 hours later, aurorae were visible so brightly and so far south that people awoke in the middle of the night, thinking it was dawn. But in addition to the spectacular sights, there were also downsides: telegraph wires spontaneously caught on fire, causing significant amounts of damage. The atmospheric effects…

How the last great American eclipse almost shocked Einstein (Synopsis)

“Astronomers are greatly disappointed when, having traveled halfway around the world to see an eclipse, clouds prevent a sight of it; and yet a sense of relief accompanies the disappointment.” -Simon Newcomb Next year, on August 21st, 2017, millions of Americans will delight in the first total solar eclipse to go from coast-to-coast in 99 years. The path of totality will range from Oregon to South Carolina, giving more than two minutes of the Sun being blocked by the Moon’s shadow to all along its central path. Image credit: Mir / RSA, 1999, of the Moon's shadow falling on Earth, during a…

Historic images coming to iPhone on DukeMobile 1.1

Seen yesterday in the local AP feed: Looks like a great partnership to access historic images on the iPhone or iTouch to satisfy pretty much any scholar or history enthusiast: Duke and Apple to join forces DURHAM -- Scholars and students who once had to travel to museums or libraries to view collections of historic images can now do so by clicking on their mobile device instead. With the launch of DukeMobile 1.1, Duke University Libraries now offer the most comprehensive university digital image collection specifically formatted for Apple's iPhone or iTouch devices. It includes thousands of…

Locavores go iPhone

Add this to the list from my prior post: a Locavore app from Enjoymentland, available at the iTunes store. Local agricultural advocates are already using social networking and building virtual marketplaces and identifying market and farm sites nationwide. This feature extends the connection between on-line consumer practices and local food advocacy. Two of my students bought it and are giving it a test run. I'll try to get an update a few weeks into this Spring season. According to the guy at Enjoymentland who made the app, the iPhone feature does this: * Automatically detects which…

New study attempts to quantify "internet addiction"

The idea of a distinct "internet addiction" problem separate from, say, compulsive gambling or obsession with pornography isn't especially new. It's been studied since at least 1999, and we reported on one attempt to describe it in 2004. Yet in the U.S., there has been no serious effort to quantify it until now. A new study of over 2,500 adults has found some dramatic results: 13.7 percent (more than one out of eight respondents) found it hard to stay away from the Internet for several days at a time 12.4 percent stayed online longer than intended very often or often 12.3 percent had seen a…

Extracting Genetic Material

The first (and sometimes 3rd, 12th, 25th, 134th...) step of any genetic engineering experiment is often extracting DNA from some organism or another. While novel gene synthesis technology will likely make this procedure obsolete, these days it's still most economical to do it by hand. Extracting DNA from fruits like strawberries has also seen a popular resurgence thanks to groups like DIYbio, with instructions for making DNA shots available online for a fun and nerdy party activity. Today my iGEM team extracted RNA from strawberries and oranges to isolate the genes responsible for strawberry…

Diplodocus according to G.G. Simpson

A cartoon of Diplodocus from Simpson's letter. The accompanying text reads (starting at the head); Diplodocus longus; CRANIUM, or to use the technical term, BEAN; Beaming Orbs; Neck like a tail; The Rest of Him (or Her as the case may be); Diplodocus tootsies; Relative size of a man (Homo sap) of relative size; Irregularity due to being dropped by nurse in infirmary; Tail like a neck; (From a late Jurassic Tintype). Earlier today I reviewed Oliver Hay's ideas about the habits and posture of Diplodocus, and being that today was already history-heavy I thought it fitting to put up a poem by…

Class

Online and Offline. Obligatory Readings of the Day.

Simpsons & Evolution online

Last night's Simpson's episode is available online here.

Some Sunday Links

Here are your links. Science goes firstest: Here's one more way antibiotics are misused: treating respiratory viruses. ScienceBlogling Tara describes how epidemiologists realized that we had an XDR-TB problem. Here's how fast a fastball really is. Joe Lieberman was so successful at foreign policy, he's decided to move into global warming. We're all going to die... I agree with PZ: we need to teach calculus in high school. The other stuff: Fox News: teaching grandmothers how to hate their grandchildren. If S-CHIP isn't adequately funded, parents could always buy pet health insurance…

Tickets to Dawkins!

All you Minnesotans should know by now that Richard Dawkins will be speaking at UMTC, in Northrup Auditorium, at 7pm on Wednesday, 4 March…next week! If you haven't got your tickets yet, you can join Minnesota Atheists and get one for free — so act fast. As an additional inducement, guess who is going to introduce Dawkins at the lecture? Me! Now you might be saying, "Bleh, who wants to listen to Myers babble?", but you'd be missing the important point: I'm only going to talk for 30 seconds to a minute, and then get out of the way. More Dawkins, less annoying functionary! In fact, if we can…

dog days of blogging

is the physics blogosphere a bit boring right now? Angry Physicist says it is, and he's mostly right... so, I got nothing - maybe I'll say something mean about Yarn Theory again later this week just to stir things up, or something... actually, I lie, I have about two hundred items that I have thought of, been asked to do or feel obliged to blog on, but no time Nuclear Mangos has a frightening set of quick hits - but not science per se. Calculated Risk is probably the best blog on the planet right now but getting frightfully busy In the meantime, I have a moral dilemma: clotheshorse that I…

Solution: blame scientists, add fluff

Mooney and Kirshenbaum continue their campaign with an op-ed in the Boston Globe, which, as we all know, has rigorous standards. Their explanation for scientific illiteracy in America is simple: it's the scientists' fault for being so aloof and distant. Their solution is also simple: philanthropists and universities need to give more money to employ media-savvy scientists. How…nice. I will say one good thing about their op-ed, though. It contains the full content of their entire book. Read the essay, now you don't need to buy the book, since it covers it fully, including all the non-existent…

Avuncular

Teaching 20-year-olds for the past term has begun to make me feel a little avuncular. But yesterday I had this sudden surge in my avuncularity. First, in the morning I finally took the step of shaving the sparse fuzz remaining on my forehead all the way up to the coronal suture. (That's the lateral seam in your skull that you feel if you put three fingertips between your eyebrows and slide them up to the top of your head.) To salvage a little dignity, I've always been one step ahead of the male pattern baldness. Then I talked to the heat pump repairman (31) about what it'll be like for him to…

Drugstore Misunderstanding About Saltpetre

Saltpetre, potassium nitrate, is added to food to give meat products a nicer colour. One winter in the 70s when we were living in Connecticut, my dad went to a New York drug store to buy saltpetre for our traditional Christmas ham. And the elderly druggist winked at him and said this odd thing. "Hehe, it's an old army trick!" As my dad told us later that night, he had to ask what on Earth the guy meant. And then he learned that the druggist thought he was going to take the saltpetre as an anaphrodisiac, to decrease his sex drive. Supposedly the US armed forces did this as a matter of course…

Theocon Priorities

Think Progress has video of Rep. Marilyn Musgrave, chief sponsor of the Marriage Protection Act, speaking at last weekend's Values Voters Summit. It includes gems like this: Musgrave declared that gay marriage "is the most important issue that we face today." She told the audience that "when you're in a cultural war like this, you have to respond with equal and hopefully greater force if you want to win," and warned that the "future is grim" if gay marriage is not banned. How's that for having your priorities straight? We've got a government flouting the constitution at every turn, we've got…

Secret voting for whales

Via JA I find David @ Tokyo who blogs about Caribbean Loses Drive For Secret Ballot At Whale Meet. Now I find this a bit weird... the caribbean nations don't have any interest in whaling; they are interested only because they are being bought off by the Japanese (is this wrong? why else do they want to whale?). So... they want to vote in favour of whaling, but can't do this in public because they might get boycotted etc. So they want to vote in favour in private. But then... how does anyone know how they've voted? Who will buy their votes? Or is there some kind of loyalty/honesty to the being…

Links for 2011-08-03

The Worlds Weirdest Book A truly unique work of fiction, ââ¬ËThe Codex Seraphinianusââ¬Ë is a book that appears to be a visual encyclopedia of some unknown world or dimension. Written down in one of that worlds beautiful curving languages, the book by Italian artist, architect and industrial designer Luigi Serafini, explains the odd inhabitants and their colorful behaviors. The book was created between 1976 and 1978 and for the low price of about $500.00 you can ponder over your own copyââ¬Â¦ Views: Myths About Fair Use - Inside Higher Ed "Academics potentially enjoy some of the greatest…

links for 2008-11-18

Kevin Drum - Mother Jones Blog: Conservatives and Unions "Overturning Roe is certainly a conservative priority, but it's only been on the list for about 30 years. Fighting unions has been on the list for more like 130 years. If it's not central to the conservative identity in America, I don't know what is." (tags: politics law us blogs society class-war) Cocktail Party Physics: a spark in the dark "This also establishes [Francis] Bacon as the earliest to record the phenomenon, known as triboluminescence, a.k.a., "the Wint-O-Green Life Saver Effect." " (tags: science physics chemistry…

Miss Prism has a brilliant idea

You all recall the Beagle Project that I recently mentioned was trying to raise money to reconstruct the Beagle and sail off to Patagonia (with me hiding belowdecks, of course). Miss Prism had a terrific idea: she's knitting a Darwin puppet that she'll sell off to some lucky commenter on Darwin's birthday, with all the proceeds sent off to build the Beagle. I should get in on this, although I have no talent for knitting. Any suggestions? Is there some little personal Pharyngula tchotchke I could convince people to bid on, knowing that their pennies would go to the construction of a boat? I…

The Speed of Money

Wow! Either it's an odd coincidence, or the Latisse marketers are highly vigilant monetizers, because in less than 24 hours after I posted yesterday's rambling little piece about the eyelash wonder drug, a tasteful little ad for it showed up on the Scienceblogs homepage (cue spooky music now). Robot voice: "Oh yes, I will go buy Latisse now." I will try it on my cats, because I have always thought that cats with long eyelashes are wickedly beautiful. But, Latisse, your ad says "ask your doctor about Latisse" -- I'm a bit disappointed. How could you pass up such a ripe possibility for pun…