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At last, some science behind the Superorganism concept

Figure 1. Relationship between normalized metabolic rate and body mass for unitary organisms and whole colonies (from Hou et al 2010) The notion that insect colonies and their constituent individuals are analogous to multicellular organisms and their constituent cells has been a controversial idea for decades. Is it useful, for example, to think of an ant colony as a single individual? Do superorganisms really exist as coherent entities? Or do insect colonies function more as aggregations of individuals? Last week, PNAS published the first application of empirical methods to test the…

Photo Synthesis

Myrmecos seems to have caught the eye of the editors at ScienceBlogs, and I've been contracted to inaugurate a new photography site for their network.  Photo Synthesis will be a rotating showcase of science imagery: The internet is home to a wealth of captivating science images, from the many microscopic components of a cell to the remote corners of the universe captured by Hubble. On Photo Synthesis, we aim to bring you the best of what's out there. Every month we will feature the work of a different photoblogger, exposing worlds both small and large, familiar and exotic. We will let the…

Study invasive ants on Christmas Island!

From my inbox, a postdoctoral job announcement: The Department of Botany, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia seeks to appoint a Postdoctoral Fellow to conduct research in Invasion Biology on Christmas Island.  Over the last decade, supercolonies of the invasive yellow crazy ant Anoplolepis gracilipes have spread across island rainforest and caused a variety of significant impacts.  High ant densities are consistently associated with high densities of exotic honeydew-secreting scale insects. This project will determine the dependence of ant supercolonies on associated scale insects…

Myrmecos Blog at one year

As a matter of coincidence, my first blogiversary falls on Thanksgiving day.  Happy Thanks-Blog-Giving, then. Or something. I started out aiming my writing at a non-technical audience.  So I featured insect photographs, simplified coverage of entomological news, and notes about photographic technique.  But I've come to realize from various feedback that many of my regular readers are professional scientists.  This poses a bit of a problem of where to pitch my content. Both my mother and Phil Ward read this blog.  What might interest both of them? This imbalance in the biological fluency…

Shattuck revises the Australian Army Ants

Aenictus aratus - Queensland In my utterly unbiased opinion, Australia hosts the most charismatic ant fauna of all the continents.  Except for their army ants, that is.  While South America is bursting at the seams with scores of Eciton, Labidus, and Neivamyrmex, and Africa has hoardes of Dorylus, Australia's army ants are limited to a few small species of Aenictus, a genus that is likely a recent arrival, in a geological sense, from Asia. In any case, Steve Shattuck continues his taxonomic march through the Australian ants, reviewing the Australian Aenictus in a paper appearing Friday in…

Call for posts for August Scientiae, hosted by Abel Pharmboy

Hooray, the first male host of Scientiae! Abel Pharmboy is hosting the August Scientiae, and posts the following on his blog: Summer days, driftin' away. . . Consider how you balance the demands and pleasures of this season. Have you found ways to make progress on your must-dos while also taking time for your family, friends - and yourself - and being in the moment of this time of year? Or are July and August just another month for you? And so as not to exclude our colleagues in the Southern Hemisphere (where I am fortunate to draw 5-7% of my blog visitors), why don't you take this time from…

Ask Sciencewomen: what should I look for in a graduate school?

I recently got this email from Nikitha Sambamurthy, blogger at Diff-EQ (tweeting here) and undergrad at Purdue who regularly attends my department's seminar series. Nikitha is looking for some advice, and agreed to let me ask her question to teh blogosphere (below the fold). Nikitha writes: I'm currently in the process of studying for the GRE and researching graduate schools and was wondering if you had any advice and tips on what I should do to get the process started. I'm interested in educational technology and am not quite sure how to find schools to apply to since different universities…

In praise of physicians/surgeons

The other day I wrote about a really nice post someone wrote about a cardiologist with whom I have had a relationship since postdoc years. I also have several physician friends and colleagues IRL and on these interblogs who must constantly be questioned about their motives, their pharma connections, etc. Let me state from this place and time: t There are far more physicians who uphold our idealistic Rockwellian view of them than not. Two years ago, I shared a cab with a doc on his way to a basic and clinical cancer research meeting focused on an organ we both study. Good guy. I might have…

Department of obviousness

Well. I don't see the point of this study, but I suppose there are people who need to be clubbed about the head with the obvious who would be well-served by reading it. It's a study to determine whether clones would have separate identities. Umm, yeah? They determined this by interviewing twins, who are clones of one another. OK, yes? From these findings the scientists said they could assume a clone would probably not feel their individuality was compromised by sharing genes with someone else; that their relationship with their co-clone was a blessing; and their uniqueness was not a negative…

Thanks a million!

In the midst of all of the PepsiCo #SbFAIL events of the week (here and here are my two contributions), I totally missed checking in on my blog traffic statistics this week. But every Saturday morning I get my weekly e-mail report from SiteMeter, the service I use to track how y'all get to the blog, what search terms you use, etc. Yes, sometime during the week we drew our one millionth pageview since starting up here at ScienceBlogs four years ago last month. It's small potatoes compared with other bloggers at the network, some of whom draw a million page views every two weeks or two months…

Now this is interesting...

For once, playing the role of unofficial in-house organ for the Republican Party is pays off in the scoop department. The Washington Times is reporting this morning George W. Bush is about to call for legislation that would do something about the country's greenhouse gas emissions. The story is short on details. All we really get is: "This is an attempt to move the administration and the party closer to the center on global warming. With these steps, it is hoped that the debate over this is over, and it is time to do something," said an administration source close to the White House who is…

El Nino, El Nonsense

Just a pointer to yet another thoughtful rejoinder from the Real Climate group in the wake of media hysteria. This time it's all about whether El Nino or climate change is to blame for the ridiculously warm weather that recently dominated much of North America. As usual, the answer is: it's too complicated for simple answers. Among the many poignant observations: ...while El Nino typically does perturb the winter Northern Hemisphere jet stream in a way that favors anomalous warmth over much of the northern half of the U.S., the typical amplitude of the warming (see Figure below right) is…

Third-grader ‘heals’ friends with magic, Fox News reports it as news

Below is a news clip from our local Fox station. I feel very, very sorry for Leif Reffsgaard, who is being rewarded with a lot of attention for being gullible. He's a third grader who claims to be able to heal his friends by waving his hands around. Third-Grader Heals Friends with Qigong: MyFoxTWINCITIES.com There is some small hope for the poor deluded kid. Here's what he thinks about his 'powers'. I just think magic is really cool…I feel like I'm a wizard using the healing spell. Maybe someday he'll wake up to the fact that magic doesn't work in the real world. Or maybe about the time he…

Because I'm sort of Welsh, and it's St. David's Day today.

Well, actually, Kate my wife is Welsh, but whatever. In any event, I know how to say a few things in the Welsh tongue which is not such an easy thing to do. Although, it can come in handy when one wants to mess with the heads of Welsh children. For instance: I once memorized a Welsh nursery rhyme, and used it often in small teahouses and pubs across North Wales. Although this feat was primarily used to get free drinks, I remember, on one particular occasion, watching the face of a child who was just mesmorized by the wierdness of a Chinese fellow from Canada, singing a Welsh nursery rhyme…

David Then and Now: For those curious about the difference 10 years make

Although I recently had a piece on the art of vanity searching of the motif DAVIDNG, here is an interesting art project that revolved around "Davids" in general. (From Geist) In Winnipeg in 1993, Micah Lexier put an ad in the local newspaper looking for males named David. Hundres of people responded, and he asked the first David of each age one to seventy five, to be photographed at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. The result was an exhibition of life size portraits entitled A Portrait of David. Ten years later, Lexier, with the help of the Winnipeg Free Press, located many of the original…

Go Stare at the Sun (on your computer)!

Back in the 1600s science was much less specialized. You didn't really have biology, chemistry, physics, and even mathematics for that matter as fully separate disciplines. If you did science, you were a "natural philosopher" and that was that. Now even physics by itself could be argued to be about a half-dozen separate disciplines whose overlap is not always so large. Astronomy is often considered to be a sub-discipline of physics depending on the context, and in fact many universities have a "Department of Physics and Astronomy". My undergrad university does, my current university was…

Cool Science Elsewhere

You know what I've been delinquent in? Posting about some of the other blogs out there that I take for granted as being great, because they are. A random sampling of good stuff: Swans on Tea discussing entanglement in the popular press. Chad Orzel on the physics of Rumpelstiltskin. Dirac Sea on the fine art of research, and its ludicrous slowness. Cocktail Party Physics gives Isis a run for her money with the physics of jewelery. Would you like to learn how to generate Pythagorean triples in one post? Yes you (and I) would! Arcsecond will teach you how. Here's Fryeburg Academy Physics on…

Killer global warming ad

If the "Reality" anti-coal advertising campaign represents the best American environmentalists can come up with, Matt Nisbet is right. Communicating the facts about global warming to the masses is simply beyond our ability. Fortunately, there are others who understand how to craft a message that might actually work. As usual, the Brits demonstrate a superior ability on this score. Check out this ad from Europe's Big Ask campaign: One can quibble about the exaggerated and inconsistent reference to how much the Earth has warmed so far ;;;; the ad's narrator first talks about "almost" a degree…

Vomit Ejector Ejects More than Vomit

SciAm's Invention is reporting the filing of a patent for a vomit ejector -- a ultrasonic pulse that irritates the wall of the trachea triggering the patient too cough: Patients who overdose on drugs or alcohol can easily drown on their own vomit because they are too intoxicated to cough. Doctors must dread the thought of giving mouth-to-mouth to such a patient in an emergency. So inventor John Perrier from Queensland, Australia, has come up with an ultrasonic device that promises to make anyone cough, no matter how ill or sedated they are. The handheld device, which resembles a rechargeable…

SkeptiCamp Phoenix

The following is shamelessly lifted from Jim Lippard's blog: On March 28, SkeptiCamp Phoenix 2009 will take place at Arizona State University in Tempe. Participants include Mike Stackpole of the Phoenix Skeptics on "Practical Techniques for Street Skepticism," John Lynch on "Academic Freedom and Intelligent Design," and Tony Barnhart on "Methods of the Pseudo-Psychic." The event is sponsored by the Skeptics Society/Skeptic magazine, the Center for Skeptical Inquiry/Skeptical Inquirer magazine, and by the James Randi Educational Foundation. It will be the fifth SkeptiCamp, after two in…

[Short Review] On The Origin of Species: The Illustrated Edition

This being the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth - and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his masterwork - many folks seem to have the goal of reading Origin for the first time. Generally speaking the first edition of 1859 (or the second of 1860) is taken as the best edition to begin with - in later editions Darwin muddies his ideas in response to critics and it becomes increasingly difficult to clearly delineate what “Darwinism” entails.  David Quammen has produced a very nice edition of Origin that relies on the first edition for its text but supplements it with extracts from The…

New Mexico joins the horde …

NCSE is reporting that a “strengths and weaknesses” bill is on the table in New Mexico. It’s your typical “academic freedom” bill that the DI has been shilling for a while now: The department, school district governing authorities and school administrators shall not prohibit any teacher, when biological evolution or chemical evolution is being taught in accordance with adopted standards and curricula, from informing students about relevant scientific information regarding either the scientific strengths or scientific weaknesses pertaining to biological evolution or chemical evolution. The…

Update on the Flannery (& Dembski) Wallace Book

Just a quick update on the book I mentioned last night. It appears that it will be published by Dembski's vanity press (for which Flannery is in charge of publicity and marketing). The work is not an edited series of papers, but a re-issue of Wallace's World of Life (available for free here) with an introduction by Flannery and foreword by Dembski. So nothing interesting here, I'm afraid, beyond perhaps some breathless claims that "OMG! Wallace would have been one of us!!!!" or "Teach the controversy over Wallaceism!!!!" This one will die a natural death. Move on. From Charles Smith's…

Vatican Event to Exclude Intelligent Design

Catholic News Service reports: Speakers invited to attend a Vatican-sponsored congress on the evolution debate will not include proponents of creationism and intelligent design, organizers said. The Pontifical Council for Culture, Rome's Pontifical Gregorian University and the University of Notre Dame in Indiana are organizing an international conference in Rome March 3-7 as one of a series of events marking the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's "The Origin of Species." Jesuit Father Marc Leclerc, a philosophy professor at the Gregorian, told Catholic News Service Sept…

The most awesome obit notice ever?

From here: Dolores had no hobbies, made no contribution to society and rarely shared a kind word or deed in her life. I speak for the majority of her family when I say her presence will not be missed by many, very few tears will be shed and there will be no lamenting over her passing. Her family will remember Dolores and amongst ourselves we will remember her in our own way, which were mostly sad and troubling times throughout the years. We may have some fond memories of her and perhaps we will think of those times too. But I truly believe at the end of the day ALL of us will really only miss…

Why does iTunes suck so bad?

I have a large digital music collection. Every file is correctly tagged and album art is both embedded in the file and available as a jpg in the album folder. All of that took about four straight days to do over the summer using MediaMonkey (which I now also use to sync my collection with my iPod Classic). Unfortunately, I have some DRMed music bought from the iTunes store and have to use iTunes to get them onto the iPod. But here's what gets me - every time I transfer the DRMed tracks over, iTunes not only screws up the album art on the DRMed tracks, but also screws with the album art of…

Stuart Kauffman reinvents God

It seems Stuart Kauffman has come out as a pantheist. Discussing his new book Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion for New Scientist, he writes: The unfolding of the universe - biotic, and perhaps abiotic too - appears to be partially beyond natural law. In its place is a ceaseless creativity, with no supernatural creator ... Shall we use the "God" word? We do not have to, yet it is still our most powerful invented symbol. Our sense of God has evolved from Yahweh in the desert some 4500 years ago, a jealous, law-giving warrior God, to the God of love that Jesus…

New DARPA Director

DARPA, you know the people who invented the internet ("100 geniuses connected by a travel agent"), has a new director: The Department of Defense (DoD) today announced the appointment of Regina E. Dugan as the 19th director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA is the principal agency within the DoD for research, development, and demonstration of concepts, devices, and systems that provide highly advanced military capabilities for the current and future combat force. In this role of developing high-risk, high-payoff projects, DARPA compliments and balances the…

GQI 'Best Student Paper' Award at APS March Meeting (2009)

Fame and fortune could be yours. Tell your supervisor to nominate you: Once again, GQI will award two "Best Student Paper" prizes at the APS March Meeting (2009): one for theory and one for experiment. The awards, each consisting of a $500 cash prize, are sponsored by Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, and the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo, respectively. All undergraduate and graduate students who are both first author and presenters of an oral or poster presentation are eligible. To be registered for the competition, a brief…

Quick, to the Quantum Singularity!

Sometimes you find one that is just so over the top that it brings a smile to your face. It starts out okay, The doughnut shaped universe spinning about a central axis of quantum singularity India Daily Technology Team May 26, 2008 An unexpected patterns in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) - the relic radiation left behind by the Big Bang points to the fact that the universe is donut shaped and finite. The cosmologists are stunned by the fact that cosmologists were surprised to find that longer wavelengths were missing from measurements of the CMB made by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave…

Leveraging Existing Infrastructure

We've seen these demos before, but Johnny Lee's TED talk still wows: Not only does it seem that interfaces are undergoing some radical redesigning right now, but also methods to take existing "cheap" products and leverage them into something which would normally cost a lot more, seems to be catching on. Just yesterday I saw a talk by Shwetak Patel from Georgia Tech which leverages things like existing power lines, plumbing, or HVAC systems to detect activities occurring in a house. What was nice about the work, in my mind, was the fact that it leveraged current infrastructure and thus…

Interview with Jeff Kimble

Jeff Kimble, who taught me all about waves as a second year undergraduate at Caltech, is interviewed by Scientific American. My favorite part: Switching gears--this new movie, Jumper, is about a kid, and some other people, who teleport from place to place. I didn't know that. If you saw X-Men, with Nightcrawler... I haven't seen X-Men either. Do you watch Heroes on NBC? No. I watch some of the football playoffs. But you know Captain Kirk... I have some advice. Just don't talk about teleporting people in your story. The technical base of our society is information commerce, and in the next 20…

Physics Justifying Gambling

Quantum theory justifying gambling? So reads this column by one Reverend Doctor Mervin Stoddart from Florida in the Jamaica Observer. Now I don't know whether quantum theory "justifies" gambling or not. But this paragraph Life itself is a gamble and a game of trial and error in which all humans are forced to participate. In matters of life, all humans win some and lose some. Living is mostly sowing and reaping, and often just investing while losing or gaining. Playing the slot machine by investing 25 cents with a chance to win $25,000 is much better odds than buying ordinary shares or…

Pseudonyms in Science?

A while ago a message from Kris Krogh appeared on Scirate.com about ariXiv:0712.3934 stating Kris' belief that the paper appeared under a pseudonym (the comment contains the contents of the link which was sent to the arxiv's administrator.) Today I checked with the arxiv and found that the paper had been removed: This submission has been removed because 'G.Forst' is a pseudonym of a physicist based in Italy who is unwilling to submit articles under his own name. This is in explicit violation of arXiv policies. Roughly similar content, contrasting the relative merits of the LAGEOS and GP-B…

QEC07 Conference

The grades are all done, and the students are gone, and now I'm conferencing. (That sentence should be sung to the tune of "Busted") After a mere hour and a half delay at the airport I arrived last night at USC for QEC07. Day one is a half day of tutorial talks and then a half day of talks. I've posted slides of my talk here: "Topological Codes and Subsystem Codes and Why We Should Care About Them..." Hopefully I'll have some interesting things to post about in the next few days as I listen to the latest and greatest from the world of quantum error correction. So far the highlight of the…

Proof by Logical Exhaustion

Uncertain Chad asks "What's your favorite dubious proof technique?" I just don't have one dubious proof technique: I have an entire book of dubious proof techniques! Seriously, I have a book where I write them all down. But if I had to choose a dubious proof technique that was my favorite, it would have to be "proof by logical exhaustion." Now you might think that this means that I logically list all possibilities to prove something, a technique which is perfectly valid and not very dubious at all. No, no. "Proof by logical exhaustion" is where you put forth a chain of logical reasoning…

Venter's Virus--Assembly Instructions Now On-Line

Craig Venter has followed up on his announcement that he and his coworkers have assembled a virus from its genome sequence. Now there's a paper available at the Proceeding of the National Academy of Science web site. A bleary-eyed late-night inspection suggests that this is not a flawless Xerox machine for viruses; the researchers had to cast away lots of misassembled versions. (Still, they were able to isolate a perfect sequence in just two weeks.) More interestingly, the authors talk a bit about how they can use this same method to cobble together chunks of much bigger genomes to make…

Nature on Climate Change Communication

Nature magazine ran an editorial last week arguing the need for new directions in climate change communication, reflecting directly many of the themes shared at this blog and in past articles or presentations. Specifically, the Nature editors conclude: The climate-research community would thus do well to use a diverse set of voices, from different backgrounds, when communicating with policy-makers and the public. And scientists should be careful not to disparage those on the other side of a debate: a respectful tone makes it easier for people to change their minds if they share something in…

Are Farm State Dems Waging a War on Science?!

At the WPost today, Dan Morgan contributes an excellent analysis of what he calls the "agracrats," Democratic members of Congress from traditional farm states such as Iowa or Minnesota. As Morgan notes, these representatives have been an influential force in first opposing and then fundamentally altering climate change legislation, fearing as Morgan describes that "the cap and trade measures would increase fuel and fertilizer costs for farmers, hurt coal-burning rural electric utilities and leave the Midwest's thriving biofuels industry vulnerable to regulatory restrictions by the…

AAAS Issues Policy Alert on Sarah Palin

From the latest Policy Alert of the American Association for the Advancement of Science: Republican VP Pick Supports Teaching "Both Sides." Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, Sen. John McCain's choice for his running-mate, has expressed views on a number of issues of interest to scientists. In a televised debate during the Alaska governor's race in October 2006, Palin, in response to a question about teaching creationism in public schools, replied, "Teach both. You know, don't be afraid of information. Healthy debate is so important, and it's so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching…

Talk Tomorrow at George Mason-Arlington Campus

At Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School on Monday, about fifty faculty and students turned out for the lunch time seminar on Framing Science. The Q&A generated traditional questions but also a lot of new ideas and angles. From one of the visiting faculty, we even received an invitation for a possible fall talk at Carleton College in Minnesota. For those in the DC area, I will be giving a another talk tomorrow at the George Mason-Arlington campus. Open to the public, it's part of the George Mason-Georgetown-George Washington seminar series on science and technology policy. Anyone is invited…

Wisconsin/Minneapolis Area Talk: Consensus and Conflict in Communicating about Science

For readers in the Madison-to-Minneapolis region, on Thurs. March 27 I will be giving a talk at the University of Wisconson-Eau Claire. I will be covering much of the same ground that was featured on the two AAAS panels I appeared on earlier this month. In the talk, not only will I be focusing on the need for new directions in communicating about evolution but also in the area of climate change (see this column for a preview on that latter topic.) In fact, there are many parallels between the two issues in how polarizing communication strategies keep us from making progress. The talk…

Free anthropology workshop in Minneapolis!

What a deal. The American Association of Physical Anthropologists is meeting in Minneapolis next weekend, and they are offering a free, open workshop for teachers on "Fossils, Bones, and Primates: Enriching High School Teaching." I hope our local educators can find time to take it! The workshop runs from 8:15 to noon on April 16 in the Rochester room at the Hilton Minneapolis, 1001 Marquette Avenue in Minneapolis. Featured will be Andrew J. Petto (the editor of Reports of the NCSE and a member of NCSE's board of directors) speaking on "Primate Clues to Human Behavior"; Michael Alan Park…

A university student future-projects the use of social networking technologies in the university classroom

This is nicely done. Andre was one of our Terry talk speakers last November and he did a great job. In essence, he described current practices in the classroom setting, and tried to make a case that education could be greatly enhanced when certain technologies are brought into the learning process (particularly as social networking and gadgets continue to progress). Anyway, he describes his talk as: I would like to talk about the potential for technology to change the way that education works, specifically at the University level. This will take off where Sir Ken Robinson's TED talk…

Radiohead versus Wilco (redux)

Sciencescout twitter feed I put this Wilco vs Radiohead query up a while back on the blog, and essentially got a fair amount of commentary stating musical tastes, preferences, why the comparison is invalid, etc. Anyway, imagine my surprise when I heard about a CD coming out this summer, which can add a bit of weight to the discussion. I'm talking specifically about the new Neil Finn "Seven Worlds Collide" CD. Here's a YouTube channel devoted solely to the collaborative project, and here's part of a review of one of the live concerts held to back up the upcoming CD. That included four…

Meme (the spreading of ideas) as demonstrated via silly dancing.

For those of you at this year's Terry talks, you'll obviously be aware of our little YouTube experiment. In any event, I present to you the fruit of that labour below. If you weren't at the conference, here is the gist: audience members were ask to participate by brainstorming, pitching, choosing, and then executing an activity amenable to recording via YouTube. This was done during the odd free 5 minutes here and there in the conference program. In total I think about 20 minutes in all was used to get the material for the video. Big thank you to the all involved, and related to this (…

Archaeopteryx lithographica tangles with the devil

Proof of "a threshold species between modern birds and their prehistoric dinosaur relatives" hanging out with Mephistopheles in Flight. Though don't take my use of the word "proof" too sincerely. Archaeopteryx lithographica (Berlin Specimen) [Convergences #33] Eugène Delacroix, Mephistopheles in Flight An excerpt from R.A. Villanueva, the contributor of the images and mini-narrative to Lawrence Weschler's Convergences series: Those who, generally speaking, follow the gospel of Darwin assign special significance to the Archaeopteryx as a liminal fossil--proof of a threshold species…

Thou shalt not suffer a witch to inspect your junk in the airport scanner

Carole Smith is a Wiccan who worked for the TSA at the Albany airport. Her coworkers didn't much care for working alongside a witch, so they complained. …her former mentor in on-the-job training, officer Mary Bagnoli, reported that she was afraid of Smith because she was a witch who practiced witchcraft. She accused Smith of following her on the highway one snowy evening after work and casting a spell on the heater of her car, causing it not to work. Well, now. If I were her supervisor and Mary Bagnoli told me that story, I'd be checking her locker for a bottle of hooch. What else, did…

Training Scientists to Run for Office

Scientists and Engineers for America is hold a workshop on May 10th to train scientists to run for public office. The workshop features Congressman and former physicist Vern Ehlers. Here is the registration page. It isn't open yet, but if you are interested you should get on the list. I myself am probably unelectable for at least four reasons: 1) I have written far too many offensive things on this blog already. I can't wait until all this stuff gets dredged up at an interview or something. 2) Libertarian = doubts the utility of government on principle = not electable in this country 3) I…

Today in Science (0304)

Apologies for no Monday Mustelid yesterday. Busy, busy. Events 1675 - John Flamsteed appointed first Astronomer Royal 1774 - First sighting of Orion Nebula by William Herschel. 1997 - Bill Clinton bans federally funded human cloning research. 2002 - Canada bans human embryo cloning but permits government-funded scientists to use embryos left over from fertility treatment or abortions. 2006 - Final contact attempt with Pioneer 10 by the Deep Space Network. No response was received. Births 1835 - John Hughlings Jackson, English neurologist 1847 - Karl Bayer, Austrian chemist 1854 - Napier…