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How much rat poison should you give a patient? Genetics helps

Warfarin (a.k.a. Coumadin, Jantoven, Marevan, or Waran) is the most widely-prescribed blood-thinning agent on the market. It's also (in the words of Howard McLeod) a "terrible drug" - it has a very narrow therapeutic window, meaning that the minimal useful dose and the maximal safe dose are very close together. (The effects of over-dosing on warfarin - reduced blood clotting - are so severe that the drug is also used as a highly effective rat poison.) To further complicate things, the dosage of the drug that is both effective and safe differs widely between individuals, and is known to be…

Broadcast: The Search for Life

Update: The broadcast went really well. Thanks to everyone for participating. You can check out the replay and transcript with Jill Tarter and Seth Shostak here â Stay tuned for more interactive broadcasts to come. We've got some dingers lined up... Join us tomorrow for a special interactive broadcast of The Search for Life in the Universe, originally taped during the 2010 World Science Festival. Accompanying the broadcast, we're very excited to have live commentary and a Q/A session with the SETI Institute's Jill Tarter and Seth Shostak. Are we alone? It’s a question that has obsessed us…

Review of Judgement Day

JUDGMENT DAY PRAISED IN NATURE From the National Center for Science Education ... Judgement Day Praised in Nature Reviewing Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial -- the new documentary about Kitzmiller v. Dover -- for the November 8, 2007, issue of Nature (450: 170), Adam Rutherford was impressed, not least with the way in which the filmmakers met the challenge of retelling the story. "The makers of Judgment Day inject tension with eyewitness accounts from the people of Dover," he writes, "and home-video footage of raucous school board meetings shows how passionate and divided this…

Coral Week is ON for April

Mark your calendars for the last few days of April because the tentacles are gonna hit the fan here and across the blogosphere from April 27 to May 2 when Deep Sea News asks readers "how deep is your love" for corals. This is 2008, the International Year of the Reef! But we're gonna try to squeeze it all into one big Coral Week between April and May, kinda like an online tropical vacation from work ... or something. You may have noticed we celebrated International Polar Year just last month. Yes, it's true, it's other years, too... the Year of the Rat, the Year of Sanitation, its all…

The next Google?

The collaboration between Yahoo! and Microsoft is spawning a lot of articles about the coming duopoly in search (since the Yahoo! Microsoft deal is for 10 years, we're talking 10 year horizon times). But this got me to thinking: when did people realize Google was something big? I realized Google was something big (for me personally since I'm a data junkie) after being pointed to it from this article in Salon in December of 1998. I became a Google evangelist. Initially most people thought my enthusiasm was a bit strange, at that point there were a dozen search engines, and all of them were…

Around the Web: College Reinvented, Shirky on MOOCs, Newspapers & citizenship and more apocalypse

College, Reinvented: The Finalists Napster, Udacity, and the Academy Is the death of newspapers the end of good citizenship? MOOCs and the Future of the University Survival of the Fittest in the New Music Industry The Stanford Education Experiment Could Change Higher Learning Forever How Dead Is the Book Business? Beyond Literacy and Beyond ‘Beyond Literacy’ Conservatives and the Higher Ed 'Bubble' Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics, or What's Really Up With Automated Essay Scoring Our Napster is Udacity: Quality Doesn’t Beat Access University of the future: A thousand year old industry on…

Alle Terroristen sind Darwinisten

Adnan Oktar/Harun Yahya has been interviewed in Spiegel Online (that's in German; you might want to read this short paraphrase in English). He says a number of, umm, interesting things. He dislikes Intelligent Design intensely, and sees it as a dishonest form of creationism. The Islamic terrorists aren't actually Muslim—they are all foreign-educated Darwinist atheists. That includes Osama bin Laden. In the 2009 Darwin year, he plans to celebrate the collapse of Darwinism. I don't think so. He claims that he can finance sending out free copies of the Atlas of Creation because he doesn'…

Around the Web: The problem with online reputation, eBook piracy, Green cities and more

The problem with online reputation E-Book Piracy on the Rise How to Use Social Media for Marketing Another Lesson About Cognition And The Web: Lara Logan And Hate Hawking contra Philosophy The 'Triumph Of The City' May Be Greener Email is Over Early results: public data archiving increases scientific contribution by more than a third Kobo: What Do eBook Customers Really, Really Want? Optimism in reality-based reality Does the web make experts dumb? Bring on The Live Web Social innovation: a simple model Citation tools & Future of Publishing About the preservation of databases Things I…

Support classrooms by supporting science ed!

Funding raising drives come and go but the need to educate the coming generations in science and math never goes away. With your help, teachers can help their students. DonorsChoose.org is an online charity that connects individuals, like you, to classrooms in need. The average public school teacher spends $500 - $700 on classroom supplies out of his/her own pocket, and students still go without critical supplies they need to learn. At DonorsChoose, teachers post requests for classroom equipment and supplies, like microscopes, DNA kits, even field trips to the zoo, and you can help fund…

Keep your god out of my kids' schools!

I confess to some mixed feelings about this one. Several schools in Wisconsin hold their graduation ceremonies in local churches, and Americans United is threatening litigation to block them. One the one hand, I am all for secularizing 'sacred' spaces — let's take them all over and do something useful with them for a change. On the other, I don't think that's what this particular situation is all about, since it looks like the schools are using the churches to pollute what should be a secular ceremony with religious smog. There is a poll, so you can weigh in on the topic…and like all online…

Science Anthologies Reviewed

John Dupuis, the Confessing Science Librarian, wrote a review of three science-writing anthologies, including the Open Laboratory 2006, which ended up in the highly respectable second place, nested between two professional collections. The beauty of online on-demand publishing is that one can correct errors on the go, as in "right now", not waiting for an official Seocnd Edition and such. So, I'll try to fix a couple of things John noticed before the book gets an ISBN number and starts getting shipped to the real bookstores. And, with ten months instead of three weeks to work on it, Reed…

"Computational Complexity and Fundamental Physics"

Summer continues, and the public lecture series on physics continues a pace at the Aspen Center for Physics with Dr. Catherine Heymans of the University of Edinburgh talking today on the "Dark Side of the Universe". The talk is part of one of the three workshops currently taking place: "Testing the Laws of Gravity with Cosmological Surveys" "Emergence, Evolution and Effects of Black Holes in the Universe: The Next 50 Years of Black Hole Physics" "Entanglement Matters" the public talks are recorded and will, eventually, be available online courtesy of Aspen Grassroots TV, in the meanwhile,…

A beautiful sacrament

The colossal squid that was caught last year is in the process of being thawed prior to a public dissection. The Te Papa Museum of New Zealand is pulling out all the stops and are going to have webcams recording every step of the process — the schedule of events is online. I'll be watching. This is an extremely cool thing to do, and a mark of respect for this magnificent animal — I wish I could have this sort of dismantlement done to me after I'm dead. Both my fans and my critics would enjoy it, but on the downside, my family would probably be a bit distressed, and to be honest, human…

Laziness in reporting - what's new?

You may have heard about a recent Wikipedia hoax: A WIKIPEDIA hoax by a 22-year-old Dublin student resulted in a fake quote being published in newspaper obituaries around the world. The quote was attributed to French composer Maurice Jarre who died at the end of March. It was posted on the online encyclopedia shortly after his death and later appeared in obituaries published in the Guardian, the London Independent, on the BBC Music Magazine website and in Indian and Australian newspapers Yup. Journalists check their sources carefully. Especially the despised untrustworthy Wikipedia, only a…

ConeHead Bill?

A friend saw this story and asked what is happening with my own little power bill drama. Since several others of you have also asked, I thought I'd let you all know that I checked my bill status online yesterday, worried that there would be a notice there saying that Harry and Guido were waiting in my apartment to break my kneecaps for non-payment, but I instead discovered that, after receiving a heart-stopping bill for nearly $800, I now owe .. Nothing. Well, so far (I am suspicious). My slumlor ... er, landlord, the evil vermin-loving and money-grubbing Scott, will be so relieved to know…

ScienceOnline2010 - Writing for more than glory: Proposals and Pitches that Pay (video) - Part 7

Writing for more than glory: Proposals and Pitches that Pay - Rebecca Skloot with guests Saturday, January 16 - 4:40 - 5:45pm Description: What is a sellable idea? How do you develop one? Is your idea enough for a book, is there more you can do to develop it, or should it just be a magazine article or series of blog posts? This will be a hands-on nuts and bolts workshop: Come with ideas to pitch. Better yet, bring a short (1 page or less) written proposal to read and workshop. This workshop will provide handouts on proposal writing as well as sample proposals you can use to help develop your…

ScienceOnline2010 - Writing for more than glory: Proposals and Pitches that Pay (video) - Part 6

Writing for more than glory: Proposals and Pitches that Pay - Rebecca Skloot with guests Saturday, January 16 - 4:40 - 5:45pm Description: What is a sellable idea? How do you develop one? Is your idea enough for a book, is there more you can do to develop it, or should it just be a magazine article or series of blog posts? This will be a hands-on nuts and bolts workshop: Come with ideas to pitch. Better yet, bring a short (1 page or less) written proposal to read and workshop. This workshop will provide handouts on proposal writing as well as sample proposals you can use to help develop your…

ScienceOnline2010 - Writing for more than glory: Proposals and Pitches that Pay (video) - Part 5

Writing for more than glory: Proposals and Pitches that Pay - Rebecca Skloot with guests Saturday, January 16 - 4:40 - 5:45pm Description: What is a sellable idea? How do you develop one? Is your idea enough for a book, is there more you can do to develop it, or should it just be a magazine article or series of blog posts? This will be a hands-on nuts and bolts workshop: Come with ideas to pitch. Better yet, bring a short (1 page or less) written proposal to read and workshop. This workshop will provide handouts on proposal writing as well as sample proposals you can use to help develop your…

ScienceOnline2010 - Writing for more than glory: Proposals and Pitches that Pay (video) - Part 4

Writing for more than glory: Proposals and Pitches that Pay - Rebecca Skloot with guests Saturday, January 16 - 4:40 - 5:45pm Description: What is a sellable idea? How do you develop one? Is your idea enough for a book, is there more you can do to develop it, or should it just be a magazine article or series of blog posts? This will be a hands-on nuts and bolts workshop: Come with ideas to pitch. Better yet, bring a short (1 page or less) written proposal to read and workshop. This workshop will provide handouts on proposal writing as well as sample proposals you can use to help develop your…

ScienceOnline2010 - Writing for more than glory: Proposals and Pitches that Pay (video) - Part 3

Writing for more than glory: Proposals and Pitches that Pay - Rebecca Skloot with guests Saturday, January 16 - 4:40 - 5:45pm Description: What is a sellable idea? How do you develop one? Is your idea enough for a book, is there more you can do to develop it, or should it just be a magazine article or series of blog posts? This will be a hands-on nuts and bolts workshop: Come with ideas to pitch. Better yet, bring a short (1 page or less) written proposal to read and workshop. This workshop will provide handouts on proposal writing as well as sample proposals you can use to help develop your…

ScienceOnline2010 - Writing for more than glory: Proposals and Pitches that Pay (video) - Part 2

Writing for more than glory: Proposals and Pitches that Pay - Rebecca Skloot with guests Saturday, January 16 - 4:40 - 5:45pm Description: What is a sellable idea? How do you develop one? Is your idea enough for a book, is there more you can do to develop it, or should it just be a magazine article or series of blog posts? This will be a hands-on nuts and bolts workshop: Come with ideas to pitch. Better yet, bring a short (1 page or less) written proposal to read and workshop. This workshop will provide handouts on proposal writing as well as sample proposals you can use to help develop your…

ScienceOnline2010 - Writing for more than glory: Proposals and Pitches that Pay (video) - Part 1

Writing for more than glory: Proposals and Pitches that Pay - Rebecca Skloot with guests Saturday, January 16 - 4:40 - 5:45pm Description: What is a sellable idea? How do you develop one? Is your idea enough for a book, is there more you can do to develop it, or should it just be a magazine article or series of blog posts? This will be a hands-on nuts and bolts workshop: Come with ideas to pitch. Better yet, bring a short (1 page or less) written proposal to read and workshop. This workshop will provide handouts on proposal writing as well as sample proposals you can use to help develop your…

They'll Blog Anything These Days

Here's a link for Ed Brayton, who does a fair bit of poker blogging: via Dave Sez, Brian at MGOBlog is playing the the World Series of Poker, and blogging about it. You may or may not regard the WSOP as the beginning of the end for ESPN, but the broadcasts are weirdly hypnotic. I've played just enough poker for fake moneyto know that I'm not very good, but it is kind of fun to play. I occasionally think about trying to play more often, but I don't know any non-students who play locally, and really, an online gaming habit is just above "heroin addiction" on my list of things to acquire. Anyway…

Weekend Diversion: A Fun Online Game!

Sometimes, gravity and motion has the power to mesmerize me. I found this online game called "compulse" which was so much fun, that I spent about 90 minutes this week just playing this game until I had beaten every level on the "pro" setting. Yikes. (My score is 104 under par, 8 under pro.) And so, in the interest of bringing it to you, I've tried to embed it into my website. Have fun playing if it works in your browser (I told you to use firefox or safari), and if you enjoy playing with the mechanics of motion as much as I do, maybe you, too, have the interest it takes to be a physicist!…

British Metal Detectorists Do a Good Job

Since a 1997 change in UK law, metal detectorists in that insular realm are reporting ever more finds to the authorities. David Lammy, the minister of culture, said that metal detetectorists who spend days scanning newly ploughed fields in the hope that a beep will lead them to buried treasure, are doing a huge service to Britain's cultural life. "Metal detectorists are the unsung heroes of the UK's heritage. Thanks to the responsible approach they display in reporting finds and the systems we have set up to record them, more archaeological material is available for all to see at museums or…

Quick reference on "pharmaceuticals" vs biotechnology products

[Retraction 14 December 2007: Following a consideration of comments by Prof Ian Musgrave (below), I must retract my recommendation of this table - upon re-examination, I should have been much more critical of the information provided.) The Wall Street Journal online has a nice general information table comparing and contrasting small molecules vs. proteins used as drugs. Biotechnology products like insulin or erythropoeitin protein molecules whereas classic drugs like the statins or antiinflammatory drugs are termed "small molecules." In truth, both classes are pharmaceuticals so I would've…

Seamus Heaney turns 70

Seamus Heaney, Irish poet and Nobel Prize winner is 70 today. To celebrate here is his poem "Strange Fruit," one of a series of poems about bog-bodies. Here is the girl's head like an exhumed gourd. Oval-faced, prune-skinned, prune-stones for teeth. They unswaddled the wet fern of her hair And made an exhibition of its coil, Let the air at her leathery beauty. Pash of tallow, perishable treasure: Her broken nose is dark as a turf clod, Her eyeholes blank as pools in the old workings. Diodorus Siculus confessed His gradual ease with the likes of this: Murdered, forgotten,…

If I was in Glendale ...

So the Arizona Cardinals moved out of Sun Devil Stadium (home of the ASU Sun Devils) and got themselves a new state-of-the-art facility in Glendale, a city in the west valley. By all accounts it is a sweet stadium. With Super Bowl XLII in 2008 on the horizon, the naming rights for the new stadium are up for grabs and the Cardinals went with ... University of Phoenix Stadium. Yup. $154.5 million later and a 20-year deal and those powerhouses of the NFL are willing to sound like a freeking college team. At least they play like one. UoP, for those that dont know is a for-profit school that is…

THE PASSION OF APOCALYPTO: Metaphor of "End Times" Prophecy Raises Questions About a Blockbuster's Impact on Audiences

Buzz is building for Mel Gibson's Dec. 8 release of Apocalypto[trailer]. The film's actual plot is still a bit of a secret. Judging by the title and the focus on the decline of the Mayan civilization, Gibson is offering a metaphor for "the end times." Like Gibson's Passion, the movie is likely to serve as a rallying point for Evangelicals, especially after the recent election and other events have taken some of the wind out of the Evangelical movement. Yet what effects is a movie with a clear, if not symbolic, political and social message likely to have on audiences? To contextualize…

THE NEXT BIG STORM: Article Examines News Coverage of the Hurricane-Global Warming Debate; Suggests Ways Scientists and Journalists Can Work Together to Improve Coverage

With Chris Mooney, over at Skeptical Inquirer Online, we have a lengthy article evaluating coverage of the hurricane-global warming debate. We interviewed the major science writers, columnists, and political reporters who have written about the topic, we also interviewed several of the major scientists in the area. We conclude with recommendations on how journalists and scientists can work together to improve coverage. The article was originally intended to appear this summer at a print magazine, but got bumped at the last minute. So we decided to get it up on the Web with timeliness and…

Digesting the literature

Many years ago, ians, really, I naively asked my lecturer who I thought knew everything in the field, how he kept up with the literature. He shrugged and said he couldn't, and neither could anyone else. I thought he was just being self deprecating. Experience taught me better shortly. But there are tools that help, and now, in this all-electric age, they are online. A Philosopher's Digest has just been started, which will give brief summaries of important papers, so those of us who do not follow every paper in every field can sound more intelligent and erudite. Damned nice of them, really.…

Philosopher threatened with prison for copyright violations

I'm very conflicted about this: An Argentinian professor who put Derrida's works in translation online because the published works were out of print or too expensive (way more than the European editions) has been charged with criminal copyright infringement, according to this page. While I think that publishers, especially academic publishers, who screw their market with exorbitant prices, or simply fail to maintain their catalogue are Bad Guys, I also know that the costs involved in publishing are nontrivial. Also, I tend to think that publishing Derrida is a criminal offense (I joke). But…

Kids in poorer countries more interested/excited about science

If you had to guess where in the world kids are the most enthusiastic about science and technology, you might figure that places like Norway and Japan would seriously outdistance, say, Uganda and Botswana. If you did, you'd have it exactly backwards. An article in the new online journal Science in School reports on a study of teenagers in 35 countries. Across a variety of measures, kids in poorer countries -- those whose economies depend much less on science and technology -- had a much more optimistic attitude about science than kids in wealthier nations. Take a look at this figure showing…

Soft as the womb of a marshmallow mermaid

San Francisco based company Cordarounds seems hell-bent on living up to every stereotype about that quirky city. Their store is online-only and features a trippy blog. Their catalog ads involve horizontal corduroy pants worn by attractive-and/or-grungy people drinking, eating, playing guitar, camping, reading The Satanic Verses in a reversible smoking jacket, that sort of mundane thing. They offer free shipping - but only to Greenland, of course. Best of all, they're not afraid to offend people with their uberedgy science: Okay, maybe that's actually pseudoscience. If it's not, I really…

Neuroscience on JoVE

The Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) is a pioneering open access online journal devoted to the publication of peer-reviewed biological research in video format. The JoVE website was launched in December 2006, and now has about 200 films, which are divided into 7 categories, and which describe all sorts of experimental procedures. The neuroscience category contains videos describing basic techniques such as culturing mouse neocortical neurons, and more sophisticated procedures, such as implanting a glass-covered "brain window" for in vivo imaging in rats. (In March of last year, I…

Winding down this blog

This is the last blip before Scienceblogs.com/thescian fades into the background. I am no more a blogger. The past few years has been a memorable journey and your company was wonderful. A big thank you to you, the readers, and to Scienceblogs who made this a great experience for me. Please visit TheScian.com to relive those old times. I am publishing, as text and audio, the best posts of this blog since 2006 along with reader comments. The articles and audio will go online every friday starting today. You can subscribe to it via iTunes and other apps. I am in the process of revamping…

New web-based scientific tools & sites

The Graduate Junction The Graduate Junction provides an easy way for Masters, PhD and Postdoctoral researchers to see what current work is being undertaken by their peers and communicate with those who share common research interests in a global multi-disciplinary environment. It was created by a team of graduate researchers at Durham and Oxford University. With this website, they hope to build an online graduate research community. www.graduatejunction.com Labmeeting.com Labmeeting.com is a new, web-based tool to help researchers organize and search their collection of PDFs, find out about…

Science Online 2010

Blogging is liable to be sparse next week, as I will be at Science Online 2010 to do a workshop about institutional repositories, and talk about libraries generally alongside the inestimable Stephanie Willen Brown. Here are the slides for my half of the latter: So you think you know libraries I'm not doing slides for the workshop; it's a workshop and I want it to be hands-on and participant-driven. I expect we'll do some SHERPA/RoMEO trawling, some test uploads and metadata, some cold reads of publication agreements, things like that. If you'll be there next week, please come say hi; I look…

Why Definitions of Science Literacy Matter

Everyone claims it's a major societal problem, but what does science literacy exactly mean? What does past research suggest are the valid definitions of this frequently used term? Similarly, what is meant by the "public understanding of science"? Is it the same thing as "public engagement"? As I explain in our Framing Science article at Science and in the Speaking Science 2.0 road show, these definitions matter when it comes to effective public communication. Over at my blog Framing Science, I repost a 2005 column that I wrote for Skeptical Inquirer Online. The short piece offers a lot for…

Big Drills and THE NEED OF AN INTRODUCTORY PARAGRAPH

An oddly incomplete article is over at the Tenerife News Online. Despite its revealing title of An Interview with Professor Searle - MICHAEL - IN NEED AN INTRODUCTORY PARAGRAPH - WHO DID THE INTERVIEW ETC , Searle provides some interesting commentary on the first expedition of the RSS James Cook.. The drill could produce some good samples of mantle rock, but as I said the sediment cover in many places was thicker than we expected. We are therefore thinking about writing a proposal for funding to bring a larger drill here to penetrate deeper. But don't worry, the mantle substance at the…

Science academies working in concert?

The Independent Online Edition >Independent makes a tantalizing announcement: The world's scientific community united yesterday to launch one of the strongest attacks yet on creationism, warning that the origins of life were being "concealed, denied or confused". The national science academies of 67 countries warned parents and teachers to ensure that they did not undermine the teaching of evolution or allow children to be taught that the world was created in six days. So far, though, I've only found this one source that mentions it, and neither the National Academies or Royal Society…

Wikipedia Wants To Know

Jimmy Wales has a question for you: Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase copyrights to be made available under a free license. What would you like to see purchased and released under a free license? Hmmm...I'd start with a good newspaper archive, like The New York Times. I'd make every article ever written completely accessible and free. Then, for purely selfish reasons, I'd go ahead and make Bob Dylan's entire music catalogue open access. If I had any money left over, I'd put introductory textbooks online. Shouldn't every kid have access to a lucid book on the basics…

Unions and Blogs

Two unions representing professions involved in the entertainment industry are on strike right now - Broadway stagehands in New York, and writers for both big- and little-screen productions nationwide. These strikes - especially the writers' one - have stirred up some discussion about online writing in general (and blogging in particular), and how non-traditional writers might benefit from unionization. From fellow Scienceblogger Chris Mooney: Meanwhile, on to bloggers, who are entirely dismissed as workers ... because blogging is somehow supposed to be fun or a hobby. Well, guess what:…

Religion, Happiness, and History

Kevin Drum wades into a discussion over a claim that religion leads to happiness (started by Will Wilkinson and picked up by Ross Douthat), and offers an alternate theory for why religious people are happier in America by unhappier in Europe: This is way outside my wheelhouse, but here's another possibility: Europe has suffered through centuries of devastating religious wars that didn't end until fairly recently. If you live in Western Europe, there's a pretty good chance that you associate strong religiosity with death, destruction, and massive societal grief, not with church bake sales. So…

God and Fraternities

There was a faculty-student happy hour event last week for St. Patrick's Day, and I spent a bunch of time drinking Irish beer, listening to Irish music (one of the English department faculty is an accomplished piper, and brought a bunch of other local musicians in to play for the party), and talking to some students from one of the local fraternities. Inevitably, one of them asked me what I really think about frats. This is a hot topic on campus, because fraternities have historically been huge at Union, but there are a number of people on the faculty who make no secret of their opinion that…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Elia Ben-Ari

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 Elia Ben-Ari of the To Be Determined blog to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is…

Your rights: long may they waive

This both made me laugh and made me mad. Corey Doctorow over at Boingboing relates how he was contacted by a new online service to write a letter of recommendation for a former student applying to graduate school. Using a web-based interface the same letter could be submitted to multiple universities. Good idea. Like a lot of professors I have to write a lot of these and making it easier is good for me and good for students. The catch was that this one came with an end user license agreement (EULA) requiring the submitter (who is doing everyone a favor, including the web-based application…

That Fruitfly Will Beat You Up

Fruit Fly Aggression Studies Have Relevance To Humans, Animals: Researchers in the North Carolina Sate University genetics department have identified a suite of genes that affect aggression in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, pointing to new mechanisms that could contribute to abnormal aggression in humans and other animals. The study, led by doctoral student Alexis Edwards in the laboratory of Dr. Trudy Mackay, William Neal Reynolds Professor of Genetics, appears online in PloS Genetics. Feisty flies themselves may not be very scary, but their genes and biochemistry have more in common…

Links for 2011-04-07

Revenue Streams 2010 Â« Whatever "In my continuing quest to demystify things related to the business of writing, at least inasmuch as they relate to me, today I am going to talk revenue streams. As many of you know, I am a huge proponent of writers having multiple revenue streams, so that when one of them cuts out on you -- and it will cut out on you -- you still have money coming in while you look for something to replace the income you've lost. I am also a huge proponent of recognizing that even within an individual stream of income, there can and will be substantial variation from year…

Ask a ScienceBlogger: Evaporating Water

Here is another question from Ask a ScienceBlogger. Reader Uday Panta asks: How does water evaporate in the seas? Doesn't water evaporate at 100 C? There were some very good responses in the comments where the question was, but I am going to answer it with some more details. Small Particle Model This is where we need to start - the small particle model of liquids and gases. This model treats the liquid as being made up of a lot of particles (well, obviously). If there is a gas (or liquid) at a certain temperature, then there are particles moving around at different speeds. Often it is…