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TGIF: Another Atlantis

Let's make Friday a special occaision here at Deep Sea News. Last Friday we posted a geeky fish video and an online video game, along with the usual photo. Folks were so thankful for the entertainment that our gross national product probably dropped by one millionth of one percent. We should make it a tradition, out of respect for our European friends, if not ourselves. Whatever happened to Fridays back in the American 70's, you know, with wall posters of kitty cats hanging from a limb saying "Hang On, Baby Friday's Coming" rather than foggy mountain vista's saying "Inspire. Achieve"?…

Water Facts

From Michael Specter's article in the New Yorker (not online): Nearly half the people in the world don't have the kind of clean water and sanitation that were available two thousand years ago to the citizens of ancient Rome. More than a billion people lack access to drinking water, and at least that many have never seen a toilet. Half of the hospital beds on earth are occupied by people with an easily preventable waterborne disease. In the past decade, more children have died from diarrhea than people have been killed in all armed conflicts since the Second World War. Clean water isn't a…

The Rumors Are True

tags: science news, SeedGroup, ScienceBlogs To the best of my knowledge, I have never been the subject of gossip before, probably because I am the most boring person whom you could ever know. However, an e-magazine, Element broke the news today that Scientific Life and several other science blogs will be moving to a new location. This has not exactly been a secret because I have hinted several times in the previous months that I will be moving to a new server, and some friends and colleagues have been following the development of this project behind the scenes, but the details of this move…

Twitter and Time Scale Management

Over at the Inverse Square blog, Tom Levenson announces that he's started Twittering in a post that contains, via Carl Zimmer, the best argument for why Twitter matters: Carl laughs me out of my seat. He points out that he tweeted his visit to my class, and received in return a couple of requests to pass on hellos from blogospheric friends I haven't seen since January (hello back, Dave); that a growing audience exists to feed him almost real time reactions to questions; that whatever I might think there is a hierarchy of information, and if I ignore the swift and the short, then I lose my…

Pressure Canning 101

Note: This is part of a two-part piece on the basics of canning (the whole thing in more refined form is contained in _Independence Days_ as well). In a previous post, I wrote about putting canning in perspective - it is not all of food preservation, nor is it essential. That said, however, I get more questions how how to can than all other forms of food preservation put together, so since my food storage class is doing Pressure Canning this week, I thought I'd re-run essays I've written about how to can. I should note, I ask that anyone who has never canned before (or not for decades -…

Good signage at Tangled Bank #98

The latest Tangled Bank is now online at Quintessence of Dust.

Tangled Bank #59

The newest Tangled Bank is now online at Science and Reason.

Full text of The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection

Is online. Also note the collected papers of R. A. Fisher.

The Detox Delusion: Kudos to Duke Integrative Medicine Nutritionist

Yesterday, the real-life mailbox brought the Pharmboy household the Fall 2009 issue of DukeMedicine connect, a biannual publication on current news from the Duke University Health System. Produced by DUHS Marketing and Creative Services, it "strives to offer current news about health topics of interest" to its readers. This issue is not yet online but you can see the Spring 2009 issue here. What caught my eye was a cover teaser titled "Detox Delusion" and an article on detoxification diets focusing on an interview with Beth Reardon a nutritionist with Duke Integrative Medicine. (Note added…

Pseudonymity and undisclosed conflicts of interest: online book review edition.

I'll confess that I am not one who spends much time reading the reviews of books posted on the websites of online booksellers. By the time I'm within a click of those reviews, I pretty much know what I want. However, a lot of people find them helpful, and the ability to post your own review of a book (or a film, or a product, or a business) online seems to give consumers more of a voice rather than leaving it to "professional" reviewers or tastemakers. Who, after all, knows whether those professional reviewers' first loyalties are to the public? But, unsurprisingly, it turns out that…

Tangled Bank #53

The latest Tangled Bank is online at Science Notes: Go climb a tree!

An Inordinate Fondness for Beetles #1

The inaugural blog carnival celebrating the Beetles is now online- go see!

OJR writes about ScienceBlogs

Online Journalism has an article about ScienceBlogs. I get quoted a couple of times.

Nanotechnology: Where Did It Come From? What Is It For?

The World's Fair sits down with Nanotechnology Scholar Cyrus C. M. Mody to discuss the history, ethics, and policy world of nanotechnology. And other stuff. Mody is a Science and Technology Studies guy, and now a member of the Department of History at Rice University. He is a leading light in science studies and/of nanotechnology; his work has appeared in numerous professional journals (see end of this post for a select bibliography); he is a sometime participant at nanotechnology and microscopy meetings (his earlier work was on the recent history of probe microscopy); and, of course, he is…

Best Science Books 2011: Kansas City Star, Salon, Slate, Zocalo Public Square

Another bunch of lists for your reading, gift-giving and collection development pleasure. Every year for the last bunch of years I've been linking to and posting about all the "year's best sciencey books" lists that appear in various media outlets and shining a bit of light on the best of the year. All the previous 2011 lists are here. This post includes the following: Kansas City Star Top 100 Books of 2011 Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation by Andrea Wulf The Quiet World: Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 by…

For the nerd who isn't very bright

Oh, boy — get out the model airplane glue and little bottles of paint: you can build a model of Noah's Ark! And it's only $74! (The price of plastic models has sure gone up since I used to buy them with my lawn mowing money). This injection molded plastic model kit measures over 18 1/2" long and includes 3 separate interior decks with embossed wood texture and many details including ramps and animal cages and corrals. The kit offers several building options. Modelers may display the Ark in cross section to reveal the internal decks or in the full-hull version. Additional building options…

Why deny only one part of science? IDists branch out into AIDS denial

Over at Uncommon Descent, the blog of William Dembski and friends, a contributor has a post up discussing Peter Duesberg's aneuploidy hypothesis for cancer (which Orac discussed here for more background). The post itself is a bit confusing--it's titled "When Darwinism Hurts," and according to the author's clarification, it's about "Darwinism" leading us down the wrong path as far as cancer research goes. (Though whether cancer would be due to mutations in specific genes or in chromosomes, it's still an evolutionary process, but I digress...) To me, anyway, the more interesting portion was…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Polarized Light Leads Animals Astray: 'Ecological Traps' Cause Animal Behaviors That Can Lead To Death: Human-made light sources can alter natural light cycles, causing animals that rely on light cues to make mistakes when moving through their environment. In the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, a collaboration of ecologists, biologists and biophysicists has now shown that in addition to direct light, cues from polarized light can trigger animal behaviors leading to injury and often death. Male Crickets With Bigger Heads Are Better Fighters, Study Reveals, Echoing Ancient…

June Pieces Of My Mind #3

It would be quite nice if writers feared for their lives over the difference between publishing city and printing city in bibliographies. Then they would be more motivated to get it right. My parents are great. They've got so much hiking gear, at 74 they still know exactly where they keep it, and they're happy to lend it to me. All I've had to buy for four days' mountain hiking is boots and a pair of sufficiently long waterproof pants. 24 applicants for Stockholm U archaeology lectureship, several with exceptional qualifications. Looking at the list I realise that you could staff two new…

London Vacation

Got back last night from a six-day stay in London with wife & daughter. YuSie had rented a flat in Southwark for us via Air BnB, so we had a good base of operations. I fell ill with a bad cold halfway through our stay, which explains the complete lack of museum visits and rock gigs, but I still managed to do some fun stuff. (Left to their own devices, it turns out, the ladies will sleep late, eat big meals, shop for clothes and ride buses for fun.) Outsiders in London portrait photo exhibition in the crypt of St Martin in the Fields. Lovely work, interesting subjects, and I had a long…

Why Basketball is Better Than Golf

While on vacation in Michigan, I played a round of golf, which I do a few times a year. I shot reasonably well, when you consider that it was my first round of the year, and it was pouring rain. I even birdied one hole, by chipping in from about thirty feet off the green, so go, me. The course we were playing is a fancy club in a resort area, and so the rental clubs were nicer than the clubs I own. In particular, they had one of those oversize drivers, and now I understand how it is that people come to believe that there's no problem in golf that can't be solved by spending money. I generally…

The Amazon Kerfuffle

(I really loathe both the longstanding practice of marking a scandal by appending "-gate" to a name and the newer version "-fail." I don't have a better alternative, but I hate both of those. Somebody get to work on a better scandal signifier.) So, the hot topic of the moment is the hissy-cow being thrown by Amazon and Macmillan over the pricing of e-books. A great many electrons have been expended in discussing this on the Internet, but Jim Henley's take is probably the one I like the best, and links to most of the others. UPDATE: Jim's follow-up post today is even better. It attempts to use…

Introducing a new in-depth feature: Cognitive Monthly

Today we're introducing a new feature on Cognitive Daily. Every month, in addition to our regular blog posts, we're going to create a downloadable mini-book (or maxi-article, take your pick) about an issue related to cognitive psychology. Surprise, surprise, it's called Cognitive Monthly. Although based on posts that have appeared in CogDaily, it goes beyond what's in the blog, synthesizing and incorporating interviews and other insights. The first issue (May 2009) comes out today! This month's report, "The Illusion of Theater," covers the remarkable science behind what theatrical…

Rosenberg writes rubbish about DDT

Tina Rosenberg, who wrote the hopelessly inaccurate article What the World Needs Now Is DDT, is back with more falsehoods about DDT: The truth is that many malaria victims would be better off if America still had the disease. If malaria still existed in America, we would be attacking it with DDT . In fact, we did exactly that. Yes, obviously if there were mosquito-borne diseases in America like, oh, West Nile virus, it would be attacked with DDT. Except that they use synthetic pyrethroids which seem to be a better choice than DDT. But now we know that DDT can beat malaria without…

I am the wrong person to answer this email

I am not a fan of homeschooling; in fact, if I had my way, I'd make it illegal. Too often it's an excuse to isolate kids and hammer them full of ideological nonsense, and in a troubled public school system, it doesn't help to strip students and money from a struggling district — it should be part of the social contract that we ought to provide a good education to everyone. Before you start protesting (aw, who am I kidding? Some will be howling in protest anyway) I know that there are good homeschool programs, and I have students who were homeschooled and were better prepared than kids coming…

Mallard Rape

Reposted from the old TfK, in honor of the late, great Greg Beck. Over at Death's Door, there is a certain degree of consternation about the possibility that mallard ducks would be gang raping each other. There is a bunch of confusion wrapped around that so let's start slow. I also wasn't aware that duck's had duck cocks to gangbang with. I never eaten a duck but I've eaten a lot of chicken, and when you buy the chicken in the store and pull out that little pouch of giblets and shit, I've never seen a tiny chicken cock sittin off in there. So, what do duck dicks look like, and why don't you…

Only in Academia

Inside Higher Ed's regular "Quick Takes" feature is chock full of weirdness today. From the "I Thought Mormons Were Nice" file: The Utah Legislature has passed legislation allowing students at public colleges and universities to request that they share rooms only with students who don’t carry concealed weapons, The Salt Lake Tribune. But lawmakers rejected a proposal to allow faculty members to bar guns from their offices or classrooms. The legislation follows a legal dispute in which the University of Utah asserted its right to bar guns from campus — despite Utah’s ban on state entities…

Australopith ancestry clarified

From UC Berkeley: New fossils discovered in the Afar desert of eastern Ethiopia are a missing link between our ape-man ancestors some 3.5 million years ago and more primitive hominids a million years older, according to an international team led by the University of California, Berkeley, and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The fossils are from the most primitive species of Australopithecus, known as A. anamensis, and date from about 4.1 million years ago, said Tim White, a UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology and one of the team's leaders. The hominid Australopithecus…

Blogging conference presentations doesn't break Nature embargo

Added in edit: the original version of this post implied that the Nature editorial was recent, when it was in fact published in February this year; I was sent a link to it today and assumed it was new. I've edited the post to reflect this. One of the major reasons for concern from presenters and conference organisers about the notion of conference bloggers is that having unpublished work discussed online may violate the embargo policies of journals and damage their chances of publication. We do have clarification of this issue from one major journal. Nature has an editorial posted back in…

Dawkins' book is for fence-sitters AND non-fence-sitters!

The latest online edition of Seed Magazine (you all know it's gone to an all-digital format, right? You should be reading it regularly) has an interview with Richard Dawkins on his new book — it focuses on the potential for the new book to persuade people to accept the idea of evolution. I think it does a good job of that, too. They asked me to write a little commentary on the book, and I think it has even wider possibilities. It's so readable and clear, I want some of those die-hard creationist fanatics to read it. Really read it, and understand it. I don't expect them to be converted at all…

Around the Web: Ignoring gurus, sherpas, ninjas, mavens and more

Why I Ignore Gurus, Sherpas, Ninjas, Mavens, and Other Sages Open Access and the Author-Pays Problem: Assuring Access for Readers and Authors in a Global Community of Scholars Tenure-Track Science Faculty and the 'Open Access Citation Effect' Academic Libraries as Data Quality Hubs Writing for Exposure: What Publishers Should Promise When They Aren’t Paying Why We Miss the First Sale Doctrine in Digital Libraries Publishers are reshaping themselves Teaching in a straitjacket (ie. a MOOC) Book publishers blast Amazon's plan to control domain names Unintended Consequences of Journal Ranking…

Why bother having a resume?

I'm not usually a big fan of Seth Godin's guruish pronouncements, but I thought this one was a pretty good encapsulation of what it means to be a public professional or a public academic in the 21st century. In other words, Why bother having a resume? If you don't have a resume, what do you have? How about three extraordinary letters of recommendation from people the employer knows or respects? Or a sophisticated project they can see or touch? Or a reputation that precedes you? Or a blog that is so compelling and insightful that they have no choice but to follow up? And we shouldn't kid…

Reader Poll: Best Science Movies

About a week ago, ScienceBlogger Randy Olson (documentary filmmaker of "Flock of Dodos" fame) left a comment on Shifting Baselines suggesting that the best way to combat anti-science propaganda like "Expelled" is with a pro-science film festival. "Right now, if a high school kid makes a really great video about evolution, where is he or she supposed to send it?" he asked. "And more importantly, the presence of such a festival becomes an incentive to draw new talent into the subject." Chad agrees, but makes the bold suggestion that bloggers could organize such a festival online. The issue got…

Beer in Zero Gravity

Last Friday, NASA released a report on astronaut health care that revealed two incidents of on-the-job alcohol abuse. Even though NASA rules forbid drinking alcohol while in orbit, a New Scientist article published online on Tuesday suggests that a few astronauts have done it (including Buzz Aldrin, who sipped communion wine from a chalice after landing on the Moon). But in a zero-gravity environment, could an astronaut (or a space tourist) really enjoy beer's frothy bubbles? Yes, explains the New Scientist article: The answer, Dutch researchers suggested in 2000, is to store beer in a…

Clockwise or counter-clockwise?

Gray Birds Cover 40,000 Miles Annually: "Sooty shearwaters may not look like much, but when it comes to travel they put marathoners, cyclists and pretty much everyone else to shame. These gray, 16-inch birds cover 40,000 miles annually in search of food, the longest migration ever recorded electronically, according to a report in this week's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences." How does that compare to Arctic Terns and their pole-to-pole migration? Or the east-west migration of some ptarmigans from Scandinavia to Kamtchatka and back? "The birds, which can have…

Monkey see, monkey do

Chimpanzees Can Transmit Cultural Behavior To Multiple 'Generations': Transferring knowledge through a chain of generations is a behavior not exclusive to humans, according to new findings by researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University and the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. For the first time, researchers have shown chimpanzees exhibit generational learning behavior similar to that in humans. Unlike previous findings that indicated chimpanzees simply conform to the social norms of the group, this study shows behavior and traditions can be passed along…

Carnivalia, blog business, etc.

Carnival of the Liberals is up at Capitol Annex Skeptics' Circle 101 is up at Ionian Enchantment. You may have noticed the Friend Feed widget on the sidebar. I've added this as a sort of "mini-blog", where we can post brief links or stories. I'd say it's just out of beta at this point, but it seems to be working out. I'll probably post links and carnivals there from now on. You may also have noticed the HONcode badge on the left sidebar. We receive our HONcode certification several weeks ago. We do our best to comply with the HONcode principles, which you can read about on their website…

Tet Zoo picture of the day # 5

Apologies to all for total lack of proper posts recently - I am just too busy. However, several posts will - in theory - appear very soon, and I hope that they will prove really, really interesting (especially to people interested in our views on the diversity of extant mammals. And please don't try and guess: I'm not telling). The theme for today's picture of the day is, obviously, rhinos.. again. This photo shows a Ceratotherium simum, the animal that (for an as-yet-unknown reason) we call the White rhino (and, no, that stuff about 'white' being a corruption of 'wide', 'wijd', 'weit' or…

Now, this is Open Science!

One by one, brave people are opening up science, serving as examples of how things can and should be done openly with no ill consequences. Today - examples of two such pioneers. First, Bryan Perkins published his research on his blog. Go and read it and post comments, ask questions, help him improve the work. If the feedback is good, who knows, he may submit it to a peer-reviewed journal. In any case, it is much better for data to be out in the open, available to anyone who knows how to use Google search, than gathering dust in some manila folder. Second, Darren Begley, a graduate student at…

How to get scientists to adopt web 2.0 technologies - Obligatory Reading of the Day

Eva Amsen: How to get scientists to adopt web 2.0 technologies: Many, if not most, scientists are not in the habit of putting things online. The ones that are might be tempted by the concept of sharing the papers they read, letting everyone look at their lab notebook, joining a forum or writing a blog. If you're reading this in your RSS feed or clicked through from FriendFeed, you're probably one of those people. But think about your friends and colleagues who only turn on their computer for work and e-mail. They're not going to tag their favourite papers or discuss the process of research…

Pseudo-moving!

Well, I was busy with work and everything, but behind the scenes, Mrs.Coturnix took some vacation time and started completely re-doing our apartment with a help of two of her best friends. It already looks better than ever and feels great, but it is not done yet. Oh, no. This weekend, we'll be taking the cats to the vet, kids and the dog to Grandma's house, bringing in a truck and loading all of our stuff on it so people can come in on Monday and Tuesday and paint, replace the carpets and vinyl floors, etc., so we can move back in on Tuesday night. I'll be going back and forth between…

ScienceOnline2010 session videos - Science and Entertainment Part 4

Science and Entertainment: Beyond Blogging Saturday, January 16 at 2 - 3:05pm D. Science and Entertainment: Beyond Blogging - Tamara Krinsky and Jennifer Ouellette Description: Over the past several years, the Internet has tangibly changed the way that movies and TV shows are produced and marketed. Blogs will call out ridiculous scientific errors found in stories and the critique can go viral very quickly; therefore, science advising is on the rise in an attempt to add some semblance of plausibility to your favorite flicks. As tools on the web continue to evolve, filmmakers and television…

ScienceOnline2010 session videos - Science and Entertainment Part 3

ScienceOnline2010 session videos - Science and Entertainment Part 2

ScienceOnline2010 session videos - Science and Entertainment Part 1

ScienceOnline2010 session videos - Science and Entertainment Part 6

ScienceOnline2010 session videos - Science and Entertainment Part 5

Skype backdoor

The popular VOIP Skype has a backdoor for bugging h/t Steve at Information Processing A German online tech source reports that Skype has a hidden backdoor on its encryption protocol enabling third party bugging of conversations. Info was leaked by Austrian police. Backdoor is presumably there at the request of European regulators, if not, Skype could be in serious trouble with the EU. Backdoor is presumably shared with the US authorities, specially since they are now US owned... Skype is very popular internationally as a quasi-free Voice-Over-Internet-Phone application. Skype was founded in…

Friday Fun: Entire Facebook Staff Laughs As Man Tightens Privacy Settings

Priceless, just priceless. PALO ALTO, CA--All 1,472 employees of Facebook, Inc. reportedly burst out in uncontrollable laughter Wednesday following Albuquerque resident Jason Herrick's attempts to protect his personal information from exploitation on the social-networking site. "Look, he's clicking 'Friends Only' for his e-mail address. Like that's going to make a difference!" howled infrastructure manager Evan Hollingsworth, tears streaming down his face, to several of his doubled-over coworkers. "Oh, sure, by all means, Jason, 'delete' that photo. Man, this is so rich." According to…

It's a little late for an apology to Alan Turing

But the sentiment is worthy. There is a petition you can sign asking the British government to express some public remorse for what was done to Alan Turing. I'm sure you all know who he was, but just in case… Alan Turing was the greatest computer scientist ever born in Britain. He laid the foundations of computing, helped break the Nazi Enigma code and told us how to tell whether a machine could think. He was also gay. He was prosecuted for being gay, chemically castrated as a 'cure', and took his own life, aged 41. The British Government should apologize to Alan Turing for his treatment…

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