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Zebrafish Rules!

I hope PZ will comment on this study: A humble aquarium fish may be the key to finding therapies capable of preventing the structural birth defects that account for one out of three infant deaths in the United States today.That is one of the implications of a new study published online August 8 in the journal Cell Metabolism. The paper describes a number of striking parallels between a rare but fatal human birth defect called Menkes disease and a lethal mutation in a small tropical fish called the zebrafish that has become an important animal model for studying early development. ------------…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Fish Can Determine Their Social Rank By Observation Alone, Study Finds: A male fish can size up potential rivals, and even rank them from strongest to weakest, simply by watching how they perform in territorial fights with other males, according to a new study by Stanford University scientists. The researchers say their discovery provides the first direct evidence that fish, like people, can use logical reasoning to figure out their place in the pecking order. Genetic Evaluations Help Breed Better Bossies: Breeding dairy cattle is an inexact science, so many gene-linked traits must be…

Adam Bly Speaks

tags: Food Frontiers, Astroturf blog, influence peddling, PepsiCo,pepsi, scienceblogs Subject: Food Frontiers Dear ScienceBloggers, I will be posting this on 3.14 in a few minutes: We have removed Food Frontiers from SB. We apologize for what some of you viewed as a violation of your immense trust in ScienceBlogs. Although we (and many of you) believe strongly in the need to engage industry in pursuit of science-driven social change, this was clearly not the right way. How do we empower top scientists working in industry to lead science-minded positive change within their organizations?…

Apply MY Self

'Tis the season... ...to write dozens of recommendation letters. And, may I say, to the graduate program administrators around the country; the commercial on-line application services universally suck. Having to enter and re-enter the same information about myself, as a recommender, on poorly designed piece of crap websites is a waste of my time and a source of enormous irritation. If this continues I will start boycotting electronic grad school application services and send good old fashioned paper letters directly to the departments. I expect someone will then have to scan them (into…

all the myriad planets

NASA's Kepler mission has now been looking for transiting exoplanets for almost two years, and while we wait for the release of the next set of data and identified candidate exoplanets, they produced a very striking summary of what they got so far. These are all 1235 exoplanet candidates from the first set of data releases! The image shows the planet candidates and their host stars to scale, with the relative stellar size also shown correctly to scale, and the stellar colour rendered accurately. This is a really really nice illustration of what Kepler has found to date. It should be noted…

liveblogging the high redshift universe postscriptum

meeting is over, what did we learn first: don't wear "city socks" in ski boots - first day out I forgot to switch to high wool socks and I have the most amazing line of blisters on my left calf... totally awesome skiing though good meeting also, I gather all the talks will be online soon, will post pointer when it does two further things that interest me, and my apologies to all the talks and topics I didn't mention... first, there is the issue of reionization - did it come early, starting at redshift 10-15, as some of us think it must, or did it come late with rapid reionization between…

Bushehr going online in october

Iranian news agency is reporting that the Bushehr nuclear power station is going online in October 2007 That is interesting. It means the reports earlier that the fuel was delivered quietly by the Russians was accurate and they must be loading the reactor starting right now, if they want to be running in 3-4 months. It also means that people who are paranoid about Busherh being used to breed weapons grade plutonium 239 from fuel grade low enriched uranium are going to get extra paranoid over the next 3-9 months. By november it would be dangerously late to "do" anything about Bushehr, and if…

Friday Fun: The Lie of Star Wars as Entertainment

John Scalzi is one of my guaranteed Friday Fun go-to guys. Always amusing, always entertaining and occasionally controversial and provocative. He's definitely in the controversial and provocative mode here in a 2006 blog post entitled The Lie of Star Wars as Entertainment. The post is scathingly funny, cruel and vicious and sarcastic and brilliant. And spot on. So let's not pretend that the Star Wars series is this great piece of entertainment. Instead, let's call it what it is: A monument to George Lucas pleasuring himself. Which, you know, is fine. I'm happy for Lucas; it's nice that he…

NOVA: Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial

tags: evolution, politics, education, Kitzmiller, Dover School District, intelligent design, Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial, NOVA, streaming video Occasionally, very rarely in fact, I wish I had a television, and this is one of those days. I just received an ad from Kate Becker, regarding a new NOVA program, "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial" which will air 8 pm on Tuesday, November 13 on your local PBS station (you might have also noticed that they are advertizing this program on this site). This program documents the war over evolution that came to Dover, Pennsylvania…

Wikileaks

David Appell's recent post is excellent, so I'll steal most of it, a quote from Hillary Clinton in January: During his visit to China in November, President Obama held a town hall meeting with an online component to highlight the importance of the internet. In response to a question that was sent in over the internet, he defended the right of people to freely access information, and said that the more freely information flows, the stronger societies become. He spoke about how access to information helps citizens to hold their governments accountable, generates new ideas, and encourages…

Links for 2011-04-21

How to be South Asian on American TV « North Philly Notes "Recently, a student presented on Outsourced, providing an overview of the TV show, clips, and some background information, including that Outsourced is the longest running show to date that has multiple South Asians as major characters.  With over two million South Asians (from India, Pakistani, and other countries abutting the subcontinent) in America, I wonder why the first popular show about South Asians on American TV is set in India.  Also, although the actors are North American or British, they must adopt Indian accents for…

Retro Gamer

I never was much of a game console nut. My video game crazes mostly played out on the PC. But I did play the Atari in the 70s, the C64 in the 80s and the NES and SNES in the early 90s, when I wrote for Nintendo mags and borrowed the hardware from my employers. The SNES was the last console I paid any attention to. 11-y-o Junior loves all kinds of video games, particularly on-line multiplayer ones like Roblox and Runescape. But he's also installed emulator software on the PC and played a lot of old games that originally ran on machines he's never actually seen. He's got a Wii which allows him…

Geek Dump

1. The new Sookie Stackhouse book came out a few weeks ago, 'Dead and Gone'. I didnt blag about it because it sucked donkey balls. The general consensus is that it reads like someone other than Charlaine Harris wrote it. Someone who hadnt read the first eight books very well... if at all. Im not mad, though, as long as she recovers. One clunker out of nine aint bad at all. Get it at the library, or wait till paperback if your collection must be complete. 2. Season 2 of 'True Blood' starts in eleven days. eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!! *giddy clapping* You can try to win Season 1 DVDs or…

The Slave Rebellion is Here!

Achenbach, A., Foitzik, S. 2009. FIRST EVIDENCE FOR SLAVE REBELLION: ENSLAVED ANT WORKERS SYSTEMATICALLY KILL THE BROOD OF THEIR SOCIAL PARASITE PROTOMOGNATHUS AMERICANUS .  Evolution, Online Early, doi: 10.1111/j.1558-5646.2009.00591.x Abstract: During the process of coevolution, social parasites have evolved sophisticated strategies to exploit the brood care behavior of their social hosts. Slave-making ant queens invade host colonies and kill or eject all adult host ants. Host workers, which eclose from the remaining brood, are tricked into caring for the parasite brood. Due to their high…

Wine Authorities wine guys on local NPR today (Obama pre-emption; postponed 'til tomorrow)

Salamanzar and the Grand Poobah Wine Swami (Seth Gross and Craig Heffley) of the nationally-recognized wine merchant and community resource, Wine Authorities, will be appearing today on the local NPR affiliate. Here is the official word from the boys themselves: Wow! This coming Monday, the 24th, we're going to be on the air with none other than Mr. Frank Stasio on WUNC/NPR's "The State of Things" radio show. This is possibly the highlight of our professional careers thus far! We love this show. So tune in online or on the radio this coming Monday (November 24th @ 12 noon) of Thanksgiving…

Of course the dog won

A while back, the Way of the Master (Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron) came out with a board game, Intelligent Design vs. Evolution. I imagine the Discovery Institute cringes in pain every time those two clowns associate themselves with their brand, which is good; but you know it has to be an awful, horrible, brain-damaging game, which is bad. I thought about picking up a copy just for the kitsch value, but just couldn't bring myself to pay them money for it (and now it seems to have vanished from their online store). But Chad bought it and played it against his dog (his wife was too smart to…

New Journal: Evolutionary Applications

A new journal, titled Evolutionary Applications, has just appeared and the 2008 contents will be available online for free. Evolution now permeates essentially all aspects of biology, and evolutionary concepts and methods are being applied to problems of considerable practical importance. For example, concepts in evolutionary biology guide research to reduce drug resistance of pathogens and parasites, to discover ways of ensuring the long term genetic health of endangered species and some crop foods, to improve the understanding of the ultimate causes of medical diseases, and to predict the…

My Guardian column and other news

THANKS to those of you who've been in touch asking why I haven't been blogging lately. Rest assured that I'm still very much alive and kicking - I put the blog on ice temporarily to work on several other projects, and will start updating it regularly in the near future. I've written something special to make up for my prolonged absence, and will post that sometime in the next few days. I may also have one or more big announcements. Meanwhile, you might like to read the articles I've written for The Guardian. I've been writing for their science blog on a roughly fortnightly basis since…

My Wired Feature on Geoengineering

The latest issue of Wired is now on newsstands, though not yet online. In it, I have a lengthy feature story about the scientific mainstreaming of geoengineering, which has occurred because of several trends: 1. Global warming seems to be moving even faster than scientists originally expected. 2. Political solutions seem to be evolving even more slowly than many pessimists would have expected. 3. One geoengineering idea--putting reflective particles in the stratosphere--is outdistancing all the other proposals and has become a clear, and apparently affordable, front-runner. 4. With possible…

PZ Myers, Mind Your Manners

Dear PZ, [It's worth pointing out, my problem is not with profanity. Regular readers know that long before I entered the blogosphere, I've vocally celebrated the right to free speech and independent thinking. However, when influential and well respected professors argue like children in a very public online forum, substantive points decompose to nonsense blows, which puts a poor lens on a field that already has an image problem. As visible teachers and bloggers in the sciences, it's within our power to make strides to improve that, and a well argued rebuttal, over a dismissive profane…

WIRED on ScienceDebate2008

There's wonderful reason I've been quieter here than usual... ScienceDebate2008 has hit the ground running to so much enthusiasm and excitement, Chris and I are incredibly busy keeping up with all the hullabaloo! And we're also having a lot of fun working to make this incredible idea into a reality... We've been following the blogosphere and media reports, and here's the latest from WIRED: A Who's Who of America's top scientists are launching a quixotic last-minute effort this week to force presidential candidates to detail the role science would play in their administrations -- a question…

My Critique of Nordhaus and Shellenberger

My latest DeSmogBlog entry is up--it's a reaction to the recent Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger piece in the New Republic, which in turn is an excerpt/adaptation from their new book Break Through. You'll recall that these guys are the stylish authors of the famed "Death of Environmentalism" essay (PDF). Anyways, I think Nordhaus and Shellenberger are largely right, but also not really as revolutionary as you (or they) might think. As I put it: Not only do Nordhaus and Shellenberger get the central global warming message right--they go farther with detailed policy prescriptions. The…

Weekend video break: Journalism in the age of data

Knight Fellow Geoff McGhee created this polished video documentary series about how data visualization is infiltrating and transforming journalism. Interviews with Many Eyes creators Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg, Amanda Cox of the New York Times, and other dataviz luminaries are coupled with bios and links to further information, some history of visualization techniques, industry context (is dataviz profitable? who's doing it?) and lots of lovely examples. The last section of the video, "First Steps," is a mini-tour of useful DIY sites like Swivel and Wordle (which is ridiculously…

Science in Catalonia

I'm back in London now, after 5 days in Barcelona for ESOF2008. The trip has been rather hectic, and I neither attended as many sessions, nor saw as much of the city, as I would have liked. I still had a very nice time, but, as is always the case when travelling, it's good to be home. I still have more material on the event, so I'll continue to post about it for the next few days. During my time in Barcelona, Tobias Maier was kind enough to act as my host. Tobias and I met every day in the conference centre, attended a couple of functions together, and hit the town in the evenings. One…

Friday Deep-Sea Picture (10/19/07): The Art of Kawika Chetron

I am relaxing the 200m rule for DSN, to bring you some photographs from one of my favorites, Kawika Chetron. To say that Kawika's photos of the kelp forest are stunning would be a gross understatement. Luckily, you can view most of his portfolio online. "Deep Shale", Monterey Bay, California February 17, 2007: Often, when I show a picture to a non-diving friend, the first question they ask is "How deep were you when you took that?". The implication, of course, being that the deeper the depth, the better the photograph must be. This, then, is the very best photograph on the site. This…

Zoom into a Surreal Collaboration

I've had a link to the original zoomquilt on my blogroll for as long as I've had a blogroll. The idea of a collaborative online art project has always intrugied me. Can a dozen plus different artists around the world paint the same canvas, and still have a cohesive work of art? The first zoomquilt was strange, an eclectic collection of surreal and morbid scenes, each blending practically seamlessly into the next. Now, there is a second Zoomquilt available: Zoomquilt 2: Click to visit and zoom in. (Flash is required.) Like the first, this Zoomquilt is a montage of bizarre images. The scenes…

For shame, NPR, for falling for false "balance" about vaccines!

This is going to be uncharacteristically short, for me that is. I sometimes listen to NPR as I drive home from work, and I happened to be doing just that yesterday evening when I heard a story about the new Institute of Medicine report on vaccines and the vaccine schedule. (Stay tuned for my post on that in a few hours.) The report was crisp and summarized the findings of the report quite well. Then, at around what I know to be the three minute mark (now that the audio is up) I heard something most dismaying. Yes, believe it or not, for the "other side" of an issue for which there is no other…

Animals Gone Wild Web Cam

Have you ever said to yourself, "Self, have you ever said to your self, 'What are African wild animals up to right now?'" Now you can satisfy your self's overly demanding curiosity with National Geographic's WildCam. Don't worry, unlike most streaming webcam feeds, this is one you won't have to delete from your browser's history. The WildCam program is designed to inspire more talk about conservation by plopping viewers down right in the middle of the wild. Like, the real wild. Like, the no-messin-around-or-animals-gone-eat-you-up wild. In an age where people are inundated with edited sound…

Vermes

What's 200 feet long, has 18 ways to reproduce, and breaks into pieces? The worm. Vermes. National Geographic is running a beautiful multimedia story about Hawaii's Unearthly Worms. This week couldn't ask for better recommended reading material, except... "where did all the words go?". Nat Geo has evolved into a little multimedia jukebox right before our eyes. I remember stacks of old National Geographic magazines filled with text. Not any more. They probably have those online. You can check out the photo gallery and three videos. They let you copy fotos, like this Hawaiian Chaetopterus sp…

Amy Bishop, the Stephen Glass of biology?

Ruchira Paul points me to a blogger who's been digging through Bishop's recent published works, and there's a lot of fishy stuff in there. You have to read it to believe it. Here's the conclusion: There is no question that Dr. Bishop is smart. But it also seems very evident that she suffers delusions of genuis. Far from establishing a record of accomplishment warranting the grant of tenure, since joining UAH Dr. Bishop took a long nap on her one true laurel -- her affiliation with Harvard . Evidence strongly suggests that Dr. Bishop used her husband, her family and by all appearances the…

Cancer and the Mind

The Cartesian wall separating the mind and body has been so thoroughly deconstructed that it's newsworthy when a bodily condition is not affected by our mental state. After all, recent studies have shown that everything from chronic back pain to many auto-immune diseases are all modulated by various psychological factors, such as stress levels. But cancer appears to be relatively immune to the mind. Those tumor cells don't care about what you think or feel. Here's the Times: The idea that emotional well-being can affect the course of disease finds no support in a new report on head and neck…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Old Flies Can Become Young Moms: Female flies can turn back the biological clock and extend their lifespan at the same time, University of Southern California biologists report. Their study, published online this month in Molecular Genetics and Genomics, casts doubt on the old notion of a tradeoff between reproduction and longevity. Flies May Reveal Evolutionary Step To Live Birth: A species of fruit fly from the Seychelles Islands often lays larvae instead of eggs, UC San Diego biologists have discovered. Clues to how animals switch from laying eggs to live birth may be found in the well-…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Study Of Bear Hair Will Reveal Genetic Diversity Of Yellowstone's Grizzlies: Locks of hair from more than 400 grizzly bears are stored at Montana State University, waiting to tell the tale of genetic diversity in the Yellowstone Ecosystem. My friend Tim Langer has done a very similar study here in North Carolina. Squirrels Use Old Snake Skins To Mask Their Scent From Predators: California ground squirrels and rock squirrels chew up rattlesnake skin and smear it on their fur to mask their scent from predators, according to a new study by researchers at UC Davis. Anne-Marie has more. Pinot Noir…

Nymph of the Sea

tags: Cinerocaris magnifica, Nymphatelina gravida, ostracod, arthropoda, crustacean, fossil, zoology, biology Recently, geologists made a stunning discovery: hard boiled eggs that are over 425 million years old! The scientists, who are from the USA and the UK, discovered a female from a new ostracod species, Nymphatelina gravida -- a minute relative of the shrimp -- complete with a brood of approximately 20 eggs and 2 possible juveniles inside her body. Other parts of her soft anatomy were also preserved, including legs and eyes. "Ostracods are common, pin-head sized crustaceans known from…

Iron Age Multi-Burial Contains People From Different Centuries

Here's something new in burial archaeology! In 2008 a cremation burial of the Pre-Roman Iron Age was excavated at Skrea backe near Falkenberg in Halland province. It's unusually rich for its time, being housed in a continental iron-and-bronze cauldron and containing three knives, an awl and 5.3 litres of burnt bones from a lamb, a sheep, two pig's trotters, a bird and three people. I've never seen a knife-handle like that before, with an iron-rod frame, but I've never really worked with the period nor with Halland so that counts for little. A bizarre detail though is that a foot bone from…

She Blinded Me With Science!

I am a science teacher. I think I am actually a pretty good science teacher. So, it came to me as a surprise as how much I was baffled by the new SEED AskTheScienceBlogger question: What makes a good science teacher?... The answer, I guess, depends on the precise definitions of the words "makes", "good", "science" and "teacher". [read the rest under the fold] Is this the question about inherent talents shared by the good science teachers, or the methods one may use to turn a lousy or mediocre teacher into a good one? Being extroverted helps. Being a natural performer helps. Loving…

PLoS, it rhymes with floss: Interview with Liz Allen

Today I have to be very, very careful, because Liz Allen is the person who hired me for PLoS and is my immediate supervisor. This means, in PLoS terms, that we work great as a team, talk on the phone a couple of times per week and exchange approximately five gigazillion e-mails every day, enjoying every second of it as we are both true believers in our mission - getting everyone to LOVE Open Access and Public Library of Science. Liz is the Director of Marketing and Business Development at PLoS and the person in charge of communications, online and offline. Some of you had the good fortune…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Tom Linden

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009. Today, I asked Tom Linden from the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present? My passion always has…

PNAS: Katherine Porter, Educational Content Editor

(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of Katherine Porter, an editor of textbooks and other educational materials.) 1) What is your non-academic job? I work as a science content editor for Words & Numbers, an educational content developer. Our…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 27 brand-new articles, just uploaded on PLoS ONE. Here are a couple of titles that drew my immediate attention: Maternal Enrichment during Pregnancy Accelerates Retinal Development of the Fetus: Although much is known about the harmful effects parental stress has on offspring, little is understood about how enriching a mother's environment affects fetal development. In this paper, the authors experiment on developing rat embryos and find that an enriched environment speeds up the development of the nervous system. The results suggest that development of the visual system is…

What's the difference between HeLa and HeLa S3 cells? Part I: Launching the lab

When I first started my independent academic laboratory in 1992, it was in a brand new facility across the parking lot from a then 40-year-old building named in honor of the woman to the right. I took on a big teaching load from day one and while I had some cash left from the $50,000 start-up package, I didn't hire a technician immediately. So it fell upon me to do all the ordering of the basic supplies to get the operation rolling. No problem, right? I ordered much of my own stuff as a postdoc so it should be no problem to get everything I need to start the lab from scratch. One of the…

How nice

Finally, after months of silence, my old server at pharyngula.org lives again. It turns out that all my head-desking was for nought — the reason it was offline is that it had been intentionally blocked on suspicion of harboring illicit p2p activity. They just forgot to mention it. Anyway, all anybody will really care about there is that my daughter's blog, Lacrimae Rerum, is back online now.

The Adman Can Attack Afflictions!

The Times' Amanda Schaffer covers a retrospective of public health posters on display at the National Academies until December 19th, 2008. The catalog (pdf) is online. My favorite: It reads: "No home remedy or quack doctor ever cured syphilis or gonorrhea. See your doctor or local health officer." You could replace "syphilis or gonorrhea" with just about anything! Perhaps we should reissue this poster to deal with the modern quacks!

Can you stand another dose of KKMS?

Yeah, I know, I already had you listen to our drecky Christian radio station earlier this week, but today at 5pm Central, KKMS-AM will have the president of Minnesota Atheists, August Berkshire, online for an interview titled "Understanding and Responding to Atheist's Beliefs". It could be interesting, just for the experience of seeing how these clowns treat August (I already know that August will be polite to them.)

North Carolina Gubernatorial Debate tonight

Tune in tonight at 7pm for another live televised debate between Beverly Perdue and Pat McCrory. You can watch the debate in the Charlotte area on WMYT, in the Triangle on WRAL, and in the Triad on WFMY. In addition, you can listen live on WUNC or watch online at WRAL.com. The debate will also be replayed numerous times across the state. Check the schedule here.

What's Your Ideal Career?

This is relatively accurate, as online quizzes go. What are your results? Your Career Type: Investigative You are precise, scientific, and intellectual. Your talents lie in understanding and solving math and science problems. You would make an excellent: Architect - Biologist - Chemist Dentist - Electrical Technician - Mathematician Medical Technician - Meteorologist - Pharmacist Physician - Surveyor - Veterinarian The worst career options for your are enterprising careers, like lawyer or real estate agent. What's Your Ideal Career?

What Kind of Reader Are You?

tags: reading quiz, online quiz What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Dedicated Reader   You are always trying to find the time to get back to your book. You are convinced that the world would be a much better place if only everyone read more. Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm   Literate Good Citizen   Book Snob   Fad Reader   Non-Reader   What Kind of Reader Are You?

How Much of You Does Your Blog Own?

62.5 % My weblog owns 62.5 % of me. Does your weblog own you? I am especially curious to know what my blog siblings scored on this quiz. I think my results are skewed since I am unhappily unemployed, which means that I have no meaningful life whatsoever, outside of my blog, that is. And depending upon whom you speak to about the relative value of blogs, even that assertion is suspect. tags: online quiz

AAAS 2010 meeting - quick update

AAAS meeting is in full swing. Follow hashtag #AAAS10 on Twitter. My session is tomorrow at 8:30am. It will be recorded, I think, so you'll be able to see it in a day or two after. Sorry for no (live)blogging but there is no online access in the convention center.... I will wait until I am back home and write a summary post after the event is over.

Bush's Power Base Finally Realizes Their Mistake

A friend emailed this image, prompting me to ask; when will the pastor of this congregation be arrested and detained indefinitely as a terrorist? A reader points out that this sign was created using an online church sign generator. Well, of course! That explains why the sign was not vandalized. Create your own church sign and feel free to share it with my readers! . . tags: Bush, politics, terrorism, freedom of speech