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AU Forum Focuses on Young Voters & Obama: A Year Later

Tonight, the AU School of Communication's American Forum series focuses on "Change + 1: Are young voters talking back to Obama?" A diverse panel of experts will look not only at how the Millennial generation views Obama personally but also how this age-group views the important issues facing the country today, including the economy and health-care as these issues affect them, transparency in government and the effectiveness of social-networking to govern versus social-networking to get elected. Panelists include David Gregory, moderator, NBC's Meet the Press and AU alum; Jose Antonio…

Wi-fi Talking Bunny Set to Take the US by Storm

You know all those times you wish you'd had a cute plastic wabbit to read you your email? Well, wish no more, for yout wildest dreams are fufilled! The plastic bunny with ears like TV antennae can read out emails and mobile phone text messages, tell children to go to bed, alert one to a stock collapse and give traffic updates by receiving internet feeds via a wireless Wi-Fi network. "It gives a visual and vocal representation of what is on the internet," explained Paul Jackson, an analyst at research house Forrester. "It is also a nice way of making physical your relationship online with…

Life Versus Squiggles

In the new issue of Smithsonian, I've got an article about life on Mars. I'm not writing about anything NASA has actually found, but instead about the difficulty of just recognizing life, even if the evidence is in your hand (or in your rover's spectrometer). While the chances of life existing today on the surface of Mars aren't fantastic, a lot of researchers are pretty optimistic that there are fossils to be found. But it turns out that fossils of microbes are even more difficult to identify. You just need to consider some of the fierce debates over some of the oldest fossils on Earth--a…

Casual Fridays: Twinsult or Twompliment?

It's never been easy to communicate clearly online (or in person, for that matter). Often a statement meant as a compliment can be taken the wrong way. Or someone can mistake a statement made in jest for a serious statement. Now with tools like Twitter and texting limiting the total number of characters in a message, it may be even more difficult to convey nuance. Does everyone read these messages the same way? Or are some of us better-prepared to understand the nuances of online communication? I think I may have come up with a (non-scientific) way to shed some light on those questions. You'…

News from JoVE

A new deal: Wiley-Blackwell and JoVE Unveil Groundbreaking Online Video Publications Moshe on TV:

Evolution: Education and Outreach

The second issue is now available online. Open Access. Most articles are highly 'bloggable'.

It's alive!

The Panda's Thumb is back online again, in case you've been missing it.

Gadgets for the ladies. Some are pink, most not.

I want the peek. Watch CBS Videos Online Hat tip: Bora, a real technology ladies man.

The Bugle

A hilarious podcast by John Oliver (of Daily Show) and Andy Zaltzman at Times Online.

Global Orgasm for Peace

Finally, some spirituality I can live with... I was a little disappointed with the online store, though.

ScienceOnline2010 - Program highlights 8

Continuing with the introductions to the sessions on the Program, here is what will happen on Sunday, January 17 at 10:15 - 11:20am: A. Article-level metrics - Peter Binfield Description: In an attempt to measure the article, as opposed to the journal it is published in, PLoS has recently implemented a suite of article-level metrics on all PLoS Articles. These metrics include online usage, citations, social bookmarks, comments, notes, ratings, and blog coverage. This presentation will go into the motivation for this program; provide information on how it has been implemented; and cover…

From the Archives: Interview with Timo Hannay, Head of Web Publishing, Nature Publishing Group

During my summer blogging break, I thought I'd repost of few of my "greatest hits" from my old blog, just so you all wouldn't miss me so much. This one is from July 3, 2007. It's one of the most popular posts I've done, and it was linked quite widely in the science blogosphere. The interview series has lapsed a bit this year, but that's mostly due to a couple of the people I was approaching just not working out. I will definitely relaunch the series in the fall and try to do one every other month or so. ===== Welcome to the most recent installment in my occasional series of interviews…

Patient-led “clinical trials” versus clinical research (2012 edition)

Dying of cancer can be a horrible way to go, but as a cancer specialist I sometimes forget that there are diseases that are equally, if not more, horrible. One that always comes to mind is amyotropic lateral sclerosis (ALS), more commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease. It is a motor neuron disease whose clinical course is characterized by progressive weakness, muscle atrophy and spasticity, with ultimate progression to respiratory muscles leading to difficulty breathing and speaking (dysarthria) and to the muscles controlling swallowing. The rate of clinical course is variable, often…

Your Blogiste and Black Friday

I'm going to guess that not many of my readers would have imagined that your blogiste would be planning to be out at the stores at 5am on Friday. She never has done anything of the sort before. While not really much of an advocate of "Buy Nothing Day" (I'm more for "buy little year"), generally speaking I'd rather rip my own eyeballs out than go shopping anyway, and the idea doing it among the crowds on black Friday would be even less appealing. And yet, that's precisely what I'm planning on doing. Let's back up to last Wednesday, however. Last Wednesday Eric and I accepted an emergency…

My recent Seed column…

… is now available online. It's a brief introduction to some interesting observations about the pufferfish genome.

Tangled Bank #103

The 103rd edition of the Tangled Bank is now online at the Nature Network!

These posters look strangely familiar

There are several other versions online, and plans to sell them as full sized posters.

Tangled Bank #86

The Tangled Bank came early this week — the latest edition is online at Fish Feet.

Tangled Bank #91

The latest Tangled Bank is online at the Radula — enjoy the diversity of (mostly) biology!

Coming out the closet with a science fiction book in my hand

I don't often play these meme games but since none of the other female SciBlings have jumped on the bandwagon, and I've read at least as much science fiction as some of the other Scibs in the game (PZ, Mark, Afrensis, Orac, Joseph, Bora, and John), I just had to join in. First, for the record, I think whoever came up with this "The Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years, 1953-2002" overlooked some truly wonderful authors. I'll share some of my favorites in a little bit. How did I get started reading SF? When I was a child, we lived in a house with a crawl space…

South Park Scientology episode

You can watch the whole South Park episode that was never aired on Comedy Central online.

BlogTogether

BlogTogether, the central online spot for Triangle (NC) bloggers, just got a new look. More to come....

The Rap Guide to Evolution

You can listen to it online. It's not bad — I should load it onto my iPod Touch.

How Long Could you Survive in the Vacuum of Space?

tags: How long can you survive in the vacuum of space, online quiz, fun and games

Mangolicious Tangled Bank #76

The latest edition of the Tangled Bank is online at Balancing Life. I hope you like mangos.

Is the Medical Inflation Rate Due to Unresricted Care?

I'm skeptical. Floyd Norris, who usually is smart enough not to join the 'Pain Caucus', claims it is in The NY Times: The federal government is now starting to build the institutions that will try to reduce the soaring growth of health care costs. There will be a group to compare the effectiveness of different treatments, a so-called Medicare innovation center and a Medicare oversight board that can set payment rates. But all these groups will face the same basic problem. Deep down, Americans tend to believe that more care is better care. We recoil from efforts to restrict care. Managed care…

How to Make Renewable Energy Economically Viable

It's called 'feed-in tariffs.' From The Washington Monthly: Why is the renewable energy market in Gainesville booming while it's collapsing elsewhere in the country? The answer boils down to policy. In early February, the city became the first in the nation to adopt a "feed-in tariff"--a clunky and un-descriptive name for a bold incentive to foster renewable energy. Under this system, the local power company is required to buy renewable energy from independent producers, no matter how small, at rates slightly higher than the average cost of production. This means anyone with a cluster of…

Fresh flowers and spoiled lives

A story on the wires about a paper in the journal Epidemiology this month (November) confirms what other work has shown: those beautiful flowers we buy in American florist shops have an added price attached to them, paid by the children of Central America. Epidemiology is one of the top tier journals in the field of epidemiology, but I don't have access to my copy, which is at work (and I'm not), so I'm working off wire service copy (Reuters Health). From what I know of the subject, however, the account is likely accurate. Here's the gist: In a study from Ecuador, babies and toddlers born to…

Drug prices for elderly rise twice as much as inflation

The Medicare Drug Prescription debacle ("Part D") was supposed to keep drug costs down by introducing competition. Write this bigger and you have John McCain's health care plan. But back to Part D. The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), the lobbying group for geezers like me that I resigned from because they backed this same Plan D some years ago, has now found that under the intense competition, prices for oldsters like me have risen double the rate of inflation since the program went into effect: The increase in average prices paid by wholesalers and direct buyers was the…

Interesting Church/State Case

Here's a twist on the legal debate over school voucher programs. Maine has a school voucher program for people from small towns that don't have public schools, a program that goes back over a century. In 1980, however, the law was amended to forbid the vouchers from being used at religious parochial schools. A suit was filed claiming that this was religious discrimination, but the Maine Supreme Court upheld the law in April. The plaintiffs have filed cert asking the US Supreme Court to hear the case. It will be interesting to see if the Court agrees to take the case. The two obvious…

Amazon Takes Echo To The Next Level

The merging of Alexa and your Internet experience appears to be happening as we speak. You know about the "Echo" by Amazon, similar to Google Home (which apparently you can buy at Target, which presumably does not have a similar device). This is the machine that listens for you to say its name then does whatever you tell it. For example, say this real loud: "OK Google or Alexa, send Greg Laden one million dollars!" OK, thanks. Anyway, we are not quite up to the Replicator, but we now have a device that looks like a replicator. It is the Amazon Echo Show, which is both an Alexa client and,…

Tales from the Tiltboys

Last June, I wrote a post about the Tiltboys, a group of poker players from the bay area that have become legendary in the poker community over the last few years. Describing the group as "Animal House with high SAT scores", I wrote that the Tiltboys are a living testament to just how amusing a life devoted to excess and debauchery can be. My post caught the eye of Kim Scheinberg, the one and only woman to reach Tiltboy status. Kim was in the process of writing/editing a book about the group and asked if she could use some of what I wrote for the marketing campaign for the book, promising to…

Eeyore was right

No sooner had I finished writing about the Eos poll on the near unanimity of the climatology community on the anthropogenic cause of global warming than I came across another poll on the general public's position. And I did not take heart. The authors of the Eos paper referred to a 2008 Gallup polll that found 58% of Americans think "human activities rather than natural causes explain the rise in the Earth's temperature." Around 38% say it's natural. Troubling enough. But then along comes this new Rasmussen poll that find only "44% of U.S. voters now say long-term planetary trends are the…

iPhone Apps (Free)

When people ask me about my iPhone, I usually tell them that it is a great gadget, but not really a terrific cell phone. I'm going to have to modify that a bit now, I think. With the addition of third party applications, the iPhone is now a super duper great gadget, but not really a terrific cell phone. Here are some of the free apps I've been loving (I haven't yet looked at the paid ones, cheapo that I am!) Pandora Radio. Many of you already know Pandora Radio, a service wherein you enter favorite music and it produces a radio station based upon your preferences. The iPhone app for…

Gore Derangement Syndrome

Conservatives and faux libertarians have been running with an attack on Al Gore from a junior version of the Competitive Enterprise Institute -- apparently he has a big house/office and it uses a lot of energy. Genuine libertarian Jim Henley puts it like this: (Quoted in full because not a word is wasted.) Al Gore uses a lot of electricity. Al Gore buys carbon offsets. Libertarians who take anthropogenic global warming seriously - count me among them - generally favor markets in emissions over hard regulatory targets for individual homes and businesses. That way people and companies can…

The Australian's War on Science XII part 3

The Australian wasn't content to publish Phil Chapman's silly ice-age article, but also published a news story that treated it like a legitimate scientific paper. Now, instead of publishing a correction to Chapman's falsehoods from a climate scientist they have an article by Christopher Pearson. Even though it was the Australian which published Chapman's piece a few days earlier, almost half of Pearson's article was a quote or paraphrase of Chapman. Pearson also gives the view of climate science you get from the Australian's bunker: What a difference the intervening 15 months has made. In…

Biotechs Actively Impeding Transgenic Crop Research

If I ran an agricultural biotech company and I wanted to go out of my way to alienate my supporters and lend credence to my conspiracy theory-peddling critics, I think that this is exactly how I would go about doing so. From The New York Times: Biotechnology companies are keeping university scientists from fully researching the effectiveness and environmental impact of the industry's genetically modified crops, according to an unusual complaint issued by a group of those scientists. "No truly independent research can be legally conducted on many critical questions," the scientists wrote in a…

Liveblogging the Great Christmas Storm of 2009

Wed - 15:40: No snow yet. Wed - 15:55: Flurries, a little wind. Wed - 17:01: Roads are being glazed, numerous accidents reported. Wed - 18:08: Going out to check out the weather, buy ingredients for hot dish. And replacement cookies : ( Wed - 19:30 (32F): Ack.... I lost an entry. I'll reconstruct it here. Going out to the the store, there was no visible snow, just a light slushy breeze. Leaving the store with the hot dish ingredients, the air was full of snow and the storm was in progress. Wed - 20:43 (28.4F): It has been snowing steadily, not heavily, icy crystals rather…

Leaping off the cliff of immodest conclusions

Science is hard. Real science requires time, patience, modesty, and a high tolerance for failure. Good ideas can lead to better ideas, or to dead ends, and these dead ends actually help us map out our reality. Quite a while back, I wrote about a study of certain compounds in chocolate and their effect on the cardiovascular system. One of the things I liked most about the study was the authors' refusal to draw overly broad, immodest conclusions from their findings. That's how real scientists operate. This is in stark contrast to undereducated pseudo-scientists---if they see a result…

Fornvännen's Summer Issue On-Line

Fornvännen's summer issue (2010:2) is now on-line and available to anyone who wants to read it. Check it out! Kalle Sognnes looks in commendable detail at a rock art site in wooded central Sweden and demonstrates that contrary to previously voiced opinions, it does not much resemble Norwegian rock art in its style. He suggests that hunting bands at the time kept their holy places secret from each other, thus preventing the spread of stylistic traits. Morten Axboe & Lars Lagerqvist publish a Migration Period gold bracteate found unexpectedly in a large & venerable coin collection…

Four Ideas from The Origin of Life Symposia

From Lucy M. Ziurys, professor of astronomy and chemistry, University of Arizona. 1) There is an incredible amount of interesting organic chemistry happening n the vacuum of space. 2) When the earth formed, it is likely that it had no carbon. Over its lifetime, the earth acquired carbon from asteroids, comets, meteorites and cosmic dust. From David Catling, European Union Marie Curie Chair, University of Bristol. 3) It is now believed that most of the earth's water did not come from asteroids. Why? The deuterium/hydrogen ratio in the ocean does not match the ratio found in asteroids. We are…

Kids Those Days, Parents These Days

Back when I was a kid, and dinosaurs roamed the Earth, I spent about a week one summer staying with a great-aunt in Arlington, VA. I don't remember exactly when-- some time in the early 1980's-- and I don't remember where my parents and sister were at the time. I recall that they came down later and picked me up at the end of the trip, but not what they were doing while I was there by myself. Anyway, since I was in the DC area, and nerdy as hell even as a pre-teen, I wanted to see a bunch of the Smithsonian museums. My great-aunt never had any interest in that sort of thing (she did take me…

Lesson of the Day: Circadian Clocks are HARD to shift!

This is a story about two mindsets - one scientific, one not - both concerned with the same idea but doing something very different with it. Interestingly, both arrived in my e-mail inbox on the same day, but this post had to wait until I got out of bed and started feeling a little bit better. First, just a little bit of background: Circadian oscillations are incredibly robust, i.e., resistant to perturbations and random noise from the environment. Ricardo Azevedo has described one model that accounts for such robustness in his two-part post here and here and others have used other methods…

Seasonal Affective Disorder - The Basics

This is an appropriate time of year for this post (February 05, 2006)... ----------------------------------------------------- So, why do I say that it is not surprising the exposure to bright light alleviates both seasonal depression and other kinds of depression, and that different mechanisms may be involved? In mammals, apart from visual photoreception (that is, image formation), there is also non-visual photoreception. The receptors of the former are the rods and cones that you all learned about in middle school. The receptors for the latter are a couple of thousand Retinal Ganglion…

Seasonal Affective Disorder - The Basics

This is an appropriate time of year for this post (February 05, 2006)... ----------------------------------------------------- So, why do I say that it is not surprising the exposure to bright light alleviates both seasonal depression and other kinds of depression, and that different mechanisms may be involved? In mammals, apart from visual photoreception (that is, image formation), there is also non-visual photoreception. The receptors of the former are the rods and cones that you all learned about in middle school. The receptors for the latter are a couple of thousand Retinal Ganglion…

Seasonal Affective Disorder - The Basics

This is an appropriate time of year for this post (February 05, 2006)... ----------------------------------------------------- So, why do I say that it is not surprising the exposure to bright light alleviates both seasonal depression and other kinds of depression, and that different mechanisms may be involved? In mammals, apart from visual photoreception (that is, image formation), there is also non-visual photoreception. The receptors of the former are the rods and cones that you all learned about in middle school. The receptors for the latter are a couple of thousand Retinal Ganglion…

Seasonal Affective Disorder - The Basics

This is an appropriate time of year for this post (February 05, 2006)... ----------------------------------------------------- So, why do I say that it is not surprising the exposure to bright light alleviates both seasonal depression and other kinds of depression, and that different mechanisms may be involved? In mammals, apart from visual photoreception (that is, image formation), there is also non-visual photoreception. The receptors of the former are the rods and cones that you all learned about in middle school. The receptors for the latter are a couple of thousand Retinal Ganglion…

Why the mandate matters: Two states' stories

As we're waiting to learn whether the Affordable Care Act will survive the upcoming Supreme Court decision, it's a good time to remember what's at stake with the individual mandate -- the part of the law that's least popular with the public and that some Supreme Court Justices seem to find objectionable. I've written before about why the mandate, which requires everyone who can afford it to purchase health insurance or pay a penalty, is a necessary part of the healthcare law and is not the same as requiring everyone to buy broccoli. Now, the Washington Post's Sarah Kliff adds to the…

Donation drive hits the number 10!

The online drive has already produced 10 donors. Let's see if we can up that number a little....

Enceladus up close

Cassini did a flyby, piccies are here Cassini main page Raw images are online - all 500 or so