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Illegal to Pay Foreign Terrorists. Instead...

Look at these news briefs: href="http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=cracking_down_on_corporate_abuses_abroad">In March, Cincinnati-based Chiquita Brands International, pled guilty in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to making regular protection payments to Colombian right-wing paramilitary groups totaling some $1.7 million between 2001 and 2004. href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/16/AR2007091601308.html?wpisrc=newsletter&wpisrc=newsletter">The Defense Department has picked five companies, four of them from the…

Slam Their Fist Down on the Table

The Pentagon needs to crack down on KBR and other contractors, said Dorgan, head of the Democratic Policy Committee. "It requires a change in mind-set at the Pentagon, for them to slam their fist down on the table and say, 'We're not going to put up with this anymore.' " What got US Sen. rel="tag">Byron Dorgan so upset?  Perhaps it was the fact the KBR continues to steal money from the American people.  Or at least they try.  According to USA Today: href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2007-07-16-iraq-auditors_N.htm">Largest Iraq contract rife with errors By Matt…

McGovern on Cheney

George McGovern takes Cheney to task for, among other things, misunderstanding political history.   face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"> href="http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-mcgovern24apr24,0,4084076.story?coll=la-opinion-center">Los Angeles Times: VICE PRESIDENT Dick Cheney recently attacked my 1972 presidential platform and contended that today's Democratic Party has reverted to the views I advocated in 1972. In a sense, this is a compliment, both to me and the Democratic Party. Cheney intended no such compliment. Instead, he twisted my views and those of my party…

DJ Emmo

It is not often that I write about music.  In fact, it is not often that I even think about music.  But this little item caught my eye, if not my ear, if only because it is perplexing to try to imagine Balkan-Techno fusion: href="http://www.geocities.com/emmo_dj/home.html">DJ EMMO Biography DJ Emmo has a Ph.D. degree in Biochemistry and Human Genetics. He is Research Scientist in a private Biotechnology company in Ann Arbor, Michigan, involved in discovery of new markers for Cancer Diagnostics ( href="http://www.rubicongenomics.com/">www.rubicongenomics com). Music is his…

Hi, I'm ScienceWoman and I sometimes blog around here...

It feels like forever since I wrote a blog post (although the new Movable Type platform informs me that it's been less than a week). In that time, I've found myself a bit snowed in by the start of a new semester and my mom's successful(?) ankle replacement surgery. It will probably be a few more days before I dig myself out a bit, but when I do, I have a couple of posts already gestating. I promise to bring you the results of my "time off between semesters" poll, and my thoughts on Mama, Ph.D.. Plus, I'm sure that Alice and I will both share some reflections from the ScienceOnline conference…

Blogging on grad school decision making? Blogging by Environmental Science grad students?

Despite being the keeper of a very well organized blogroll, I was surprisingly flummoxed by a request from a friend of a friend of a friend. She's decided to go to graduate school in an environmental science field, but she's unsure whether to go for a M.S. first or straight to a Ph.D. Specifically, she wondered whether I knew of any blogs by women environmental scientists who might have written about their decision making process, choosing a graduate school, etc. My first thought was Karina at Ruminations of an Aspiring Ecologist (and not just because she's showing off some Sciencewomen…

Workshop "On-ramps to Academia"

The University of Washington's ADVANCE Center for Institutional Change received an award this year from the National Science Foundation ADVANCE program to hold professional development workshops for Ph.D.-level women in industry, research labs, consulting, or national labs who are interested in transitioning to academic careers in STEM. The first workshop will be held October 19 and 20, 2009. This workshop will be very helpful to women interested in making the transition to academia. The workshop speakers will primarily be successful women faculty members who began their post-Ph.D. careers…

Open Thread: How NOT to give a scientific talk

One class I'm teaching this semester is a senior seminar focusing on oral communication. It should be a really fun class, and I'm looking forward to it. A major assignment for the semester will involve the students presenting a journal-club style talk on a scientific paper. Before I make them give a talk though, it only seems fair that I should have to give one myself. So I am going to borrow an idea from a colleague and attempt to give my talk using all the things one should NOT do during an oral presentation. (This is going to be really painful for me to do - but hopefully also kind of fun…

Happy Blogiversary to me!

Three years ago today I started blogging at On Being A Scientist and a Woman. I was a PhD student engrossed in field work and lab work and thinking about when to start a family. Fast forward three years and I am on the tenure-track with my own graduate students and I have a toddler. My how time flies! The last year has seen big changes on this blog too. In September, I moved from Blogger to Scienceblogs, and while endeavoring keeping my old network of wonderful readers and commenters, I've gained a new family of Sciblings and hopefully brought my words to new audiences. An even bigger change…

You cannot petition the Lord with prayer! But you can petition the British government

It's a very sensible petition, too, asking the UK government to treat creationism appropriately. Creationism and 'intelligent design' are not scientific theories, but they are portrayed as scientific theories by some religious fundamentalists who attempt to have their views promoted in publicly-funded schools. At the same time, an understanding of evolution is central to understanding all aspects of biology. Currently, the study of evolution does not feature explicitly in the National Curriculum until year 10 (ages 14-15). Free Schools and Academies are not obliged to teach the National…

In search of new music

I know I've written before about how I reward myself with iTunes purchases (but I can't find the links right now). Well, I am due for some serious spending on iTunes, as I recently had a paper accepted and recently celebrated a birthday. But here's the problem, I think I'm in a musical rut, and I don't know what to purchase. So I need your help, oh Internets. Here's what I've purchased most recently (all Pandora finds, but my Pandora is in a rut too.): Chantal Kreviazuk Alice Peacock Tara McLean Beth Orton Deb Talan Leslie Tucker Carla Werner October Project Here are some of my…

Mapping the memory landscape

This is an installation by New York-based artist Janice Caswell, called Competitive Races: The View from the Netroots. My drawings and installations represent mental maps, an investigation of the mind's peculiar ways of organizing memories. I attempt to trace the edges of recalled experience, plotting the movement of bodies and consciousness through time and space. This work arises out of a desire to capture experience, an impulse to locate, arrange and secure the past. I use a pared-down, coded language through which points, lines and fields of color define spaces and retell narratives…

Monkey business

The Believer has an interview with primatologist Franz de Waal: De Waal's research is no friend to human vanity. In the grand tradition of Galileo and Darwin, de Waal provokes those who seek to draw a clear line between human beings and everything else. But his message is an optimistic one. If human morality has deep roots in our evolutionary past, then we can expect it to be more resilient, less susceptible to the contingencies of history. Seeing morality in this light also undermines the view of human beings as inherently selfish--a view that de Waal terms "veneer theory." Morality,…

Think of a word, move a wheelchair

Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have demonstrated a device which can control the movements of a wheelchair when its operator thinks of specific words. The Audeo is a human-computer interface consisting of a neckband containing sensors which detect the electrical signals sent by the brain to the muscles in the larynx. The signals are transmitted wirelessly to a computer, which decodes them and matches them to pre-programmed signals before sending them to the wheelchair. The Audeo was developed by Michael Callahan and Thomas Coleman, who together set up…

Many Paths Interpretation of Scientific Careers

Items sharing a similar topic, meandered onto in the depths of a major outpouring of procrastination... The path less traveled by Andrea Schweitzer (via @mattleifer) on a different way to have a career as a scientist. And for a description of one of the most successful scientists from quantum computing, an interview with Ignacio Cirac (sent to me by Daniel.) Somedays, however, one might wonder about all the time professors spend working and contemplate the idea of death by tenure track. Or if you care a lot about the notion of tenure versus non-tenure AND you don't mind reading redstate.…

Another AAAS meeting! Hooray.

Tomorrow and Friday I'll be attending the 33rd Annual AAAS Forum on Science and Technology Policy in Washington, DC. According to AAAS, the Forum is the conference for people interested in public policy issues facing the science, engineering, and higher education communities. Gotta love those bold italics. Personally, I want to know what's going to happen to the penny that disembodied hand is dropping into the mysterious flask. Is the yellow liquid an acid? A base? A bodily fluid? Why do multicolored liquids in glassware scream "SCIENCE IS COOL!" like nothing else? One of the highlights…

Springtime for Sarah

There's a Sarah Palin "documentary" out, called The Undefeated, and it's a weird example of conservatives trying to create a new alternative reality again. First, she was defeated: notice that it isn't Vice President Palin. Second, the professional reviewers are all panning the movie — it's a hagiographic mess. But the crazies on the right must salvage the reputation of the movie, for great honor. The tactic they've chosen is to claim that it has tremendous grass roots appeal and that audiences have been flocking to it. Right-wing bloggers have been shouting that "'The Undefeated' Roars to…

Friday Grey Matters (Teaser): Parrots Destroy the Indestructible

I have another post coming out later today for Friday Grey Matters, but I just had to put up a link to this amazing parrot-post at the Lounge of the Lab Lemming. In America, the nuts of the sweet gum tree are prickly, indestructible annoyances: It was a family joke that they were so indestructible that after the sun burned out and blasted the Earth's atmosphere and biota to a crisp, the sweetgum balls would remain, the only biological object refactory enough to survive the inferno and bear testament to the former presence of life on the planet. However, Australians have a bit different view…

RIP Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut, long-time smoker author of "Slaughterhouse Five" and "Cats Cradle," died last night of brain injuries he suffered weeks ago during a fall. He was 84. "I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations," Vonnegut, whose watery, heavy-lidded eyes and unruly hair made him seem to be in existential pain, once told a gathering of psychiatrists. A self-described religious skeptic and freethinking humanist, Vonnegut used protagonists such as Billy Pilgrim and Eliot Rosewater as transparent vehicles for his points of view. He also filled his novels with satirical…

Video Game Mind Control

Every gamer's wet dream---controlling the game with your mind---may soon be a reality. Made by Emotiv, its called Project Epoc, and will be demo'd at the Game Developer's Conference this week. This wireless headset if fitted with sensors which, I only guess, can detect changes in blood flow in brain regions. That seems like it would be ridiculously expensive, though. [Edit: Actually it uses EEGs!] It is connected to different game platforms (from consoles to PCs) wirelessly, enabling gamers to control and influence a game purely by the power of the mind alone. This means even the disabled…

Goo-mageddon?

Or is it Arma-goo-ddon? For some reason, balls of unidentified biological goo have started showing up in the news. First we had the mysterious North Carolina sewer blob. It turned out that was just a colony of tubifex worms - yes, the same kind you feed your fish. But now we have a giant oceanic Alaskan goo ball: "It's pitch black when it hits ice and it kind of discolors the ice and hangs off of it," Brower said. He saw some jellyfish tangled up in the stuff, and someone turned in what was left of a dead goose -- just bones and feathers -- to the borough's wildlife department. "It kind of…

Fata Morgana: Fantasy, Femininity, and Absinthe

Throne Rene Lynch I was very happy to hear that Pam of Phantasmaphile is curating her first group show, entitled "Fata Morgana: The New Female Fantasists." It starts later this week at Dabora Gallery in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Pam has amazing taste in art, and she's enticed Madeline von Foerster, Amy Ross, Carrie Ann Baade, and eleven more artists to share their visions: In literal terms, a fata morgana is a mirage or illusion, a waking reverie, a shimmering of the mind. Named for the enchantress Morgan le Fay, these tricks of perception conjure up a sense of glimpsing into another world,…

The nightmare in Norway

The latest reports say eighty young people were gunned down on Utoya Island in Norway, and seven killed in the Oslo bombing. The questions now are who did it, and why. I've run across some wild speculation that it was an Islamic group, which would have meant we were in for months of furious howling and recriminations and righteous anger from conservatives. There's nothing quite like the boogeyman coming to life to stir the Right into paroxysms of self-vindication and pious demands for action. Unfortunately, the right-wing story line may very well be thoroughly derailed. The Norwegian police…

Board games, circa 1600

The Noble Game of the Swan, 1821 While visiting Monticello recently I was struck by a 19th century example of "The Game of the Goose" lying on the floor, as if a child had just left off playing with it. It fascinates me that the board game, a staple of my childhood holidays, was also enjoyed by families (upper class families, at least) hundreds of years ago. Sixteenth century Italian households probably weren't quite as board-game-obsessed as my family becomes every holiday season - we still reminisce about great Pictionary moments, and I have many utterly useless Trivial Pursuit answers…

Mystery Image #2

Where do you suppose this photo was taken? A. It's a false-color representation of the surface of a meteorite. B. It's a 100x enlargement of the surface of a shark tooth. C. It's crystals of an anti-cancer drug. D. It's the "teeth" on a butterfly wing. Answer below the fold. . . The answer is (C). This is a 10x polarized light image of mitomycin, taken by Margaret Oeschli at the Jewish Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky. It won 7th place in the 2008 Nikon Small World Competition. Mitomycin structure (from Wikipedia) Mitomycin C (also called mutamycin) is an antitumor antibiotic which…

Robin Hood and Friar Tuck: Zombie Killers

Okay, so between vampires and zombies, the undead have officially conquered pop culture. It's not really new - I was fascinated when young by Michael Jackson's Thriller and Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles - but it does seem a bit out of hand. With the release of "Robin Hood and Friar Tuck: Zombie Killers," I feel like we have slalomed down the slippery slope marked by "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies," ducked under "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters," and smacked a tree with our collective faces. From the synopsis: Soon after 'twas apparent that the fate Of all on Earth--the evil and the…

The ephemeral newspaper: giving thanks

fog 10 Steven Hight In the growling gray light (San Francisco still has foghorns), I collect the San Francisco Chronicle from the wet steps. I am so lonely I must subscribe to three papers - the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle. I remark their thinness as I climb the stairs. The three together equal what I remember. The November Harper's has a meandering, tragic paean to the lost city newspaper by Richard Rodriguez (quoted above). Unfortunately the full article is subscriber-only, but Marcus Banks links to two articles on the possible future of the…

Botanical Wednesday: Hey, those aren't buffalo hides!

This is the traditional ivy-covered teepee at the Morris Horticulture Gardens, which is having an event tomorrow night. Pack up the whole family and come to the Garden for the 41st annual Horticulture Night at the University of Minnesota West Central Research and Outreach Center (WCROC) in Morris on July 28 from 5 to 9 p.m. This yearly event has something for everyone: garden tours, horticulture demonstrations, educational displays, kids activities; plus food, fun, and entertainment. This year, there are more than 11 different demonstrations and garden tours. They include: Annual Flowers,…

Spanish fashion show rejects 5 women

I guess they are really serious: The organizers of Spain's top annual fashion show on Sunday rejected five out of 69 fashion models as being too thin to appear in this year's event, acting on a decision to bar underweight women from the catwalk. The show, known as the Pasarela Cibeles, decided in September 2005 not to allow women below a body mass to height ratio of 18 to take part. One of the rejected models had only reached a ratio of 16, the equivalent of being 5 feet 10 inches tall and weighing less than 110 pounds, said Dr. Susana Monereo, of Madrid Getafe hospital's endocrinology and…

Irish Catholics denigrate Hispanic Catholic artwork

University College Cork is hosting a small academic event featuring the work of Chicano artists, which includes an art exhibition that includes irreverent images of the Virgin Mary, with titles like "Our Lady and Other Queer Santas". Apparently, this image has stirred up fury and threats from deranged Catholics everywhere it goes — but then, it really doesn't take much to set off mindless fanatics. Irish Catholic bloggers are outraged and calling for it to be taken down — you aren't allowed to denigrate beliefs, they claim, never mind that yes, you are, and that there isn't anything…

Fart forces airplane to land

CNN's headline reads Flatulence on plane sparks emergency landing: It is considered polite to light a match after passing gas. Not while on a plane. An American Airlines flight was forced to make an emergency landing Monday morning after a passenger lit a match to disguise the scent of flatulence, authorities said. The Dallas-bound flight was diverted to Nashville after several passengers reported smelling burning sulfur from the matches, said Lynne Lowrance, spokeswoman for the Nashville International Airport Authority. All 99 passengers and five crew members were taken off and screened…

Repost: Field trip follies

Note: This was written January 30th, 2006. I went on a class field trip on Saturday - we left town at 7 am and didn't get back until almost 8:30 pm. Generally it was a good trip. It met one of my basic requirements in that it wasn't just pile out of the vans, stand around and listen to the prof, then climb back in and head for the next stop. Instead, we actually made some measurements - looking at differences between canopied and open areas. I think it's really important to get students engaging with the field trip topic/site rather than just feeling like they are stuck in one long lecture.…

Call for NeuroDataViz!

Daniel Margulies of the NeuroBureau, an open neuroscience community, shared this opportunity: The Brain-Art Competition 2011 Submission Deadline: 11:59PM CDT, Sunday, June 5th, 2011 Award Notification: June 28th, 9PM at the Cirque du Cerveau Gala (OHBM Annual Meeting), Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec. In order to recognize the beauty and creativity of artistic renderings emerging from the neuroimaging community, we are launching the first annual Brain-Art Competition. Countless hours are devoted to the creation of informative visualizations for communicating neuroscientific findings…

ScienceBlogGRRRRL Power!

I'm honored to get a brief shout-out today from the awesome Ed Yong in his post on female bloggers. I mention this not to toot my own horn, but to call attention to the amazing number of women blogging about scientific research - something I rarely do anymore at BioE, but which is very important to public science literacy, science policy, and inspiring young women to choose careers in science. Many of the women Ed mentions are already on my blogroll (Sheril Kirshenbaum, Jennifer Ouellette, Scicurious, Janet Stemwedel, to name a few), but I clearly have to add more - including my friend…

"Methodological Opportunism" at Alpha Psy

There's a really interesting post by Alberto over at Alpha Psy titled "Methodological Materialism" that I thought I'd point you to, in case you hadn't read it already. Here's an excerpt: As I see things, there is no deeper epistemological concern in recognizing that methods from natural sciences are increasingly being applied to social sciences than in recognizing that (say) it is snowing more than we had forecasted. The mistake that both Descombes and Sperber make in celebrating a false major philosophical event is their implicit commitment to the doctrine of "methodological essentialism":…

What Do You Do?

I know there are a few psychologists out there lurking around. This post is for you. I thought it might be interesting for some of you (all of you? any of you? hello, is this thing on?) to write a little bit about what you do as psychologists. That is, what you're researching, how you study it, perhaps your general perspective on cognition, why you got into cognition and your specific area(s) of research in particular, etc. It wouldn't have to be long (though it can be as long as you like), just a summary that, when combined with those from other psychologists, would give people a sense of…

Dupes, All

I know I've said this before, but I'm going to say it again. Anyone who reads the fundamentalist atheist blogs (you know, like the biggest blog on ScienceBlogs) knows that these people have a lot of passion and energy. They use it to write 50 posts a week pummeling creationists and telling us how evil religion is. Can you imagine what they might accomplish if they redirected that energy towards really important progressive issues like, say, health care, or poverty, or reproductive freedom, or AIDS in African American youth, or ending the war, or you know, pretty much anything else? Sometimes…

Religion and Tolerance

In the discussion that resulted from the last couple posts on religion, a lot of claims have been made, all of which are empirical claims, and all of which thereby require data. But of course, there's not a whole lot of data out there, and what is out there is easy to interpret in a variety of ways (as the back and forth about whether religion is in fact declining in the western world shows, for example). But scientists are really beginning to tackle some of the more difficult empirical questions about religion. The going is slow, because religion is a vague term, religions are varied, and…

JPMorgan Exploits Taxpayers

This is interesting.  Banks think they have found a way to make money no matter what happens.   href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601010&sid=axksyBiC6q78&refer=news">As Houston Auctions Fail, JPMorgan Exploits Taxpayers By Darrell Preston March 6 (Bloomberg) -- The collapse of the auction-rate bond market may cost borrowers from New York to California at least $1 billion in fees, enriching JPMorgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and the rest of Wall Street that let the market fall apart. The firms that pulled their support of the market where states…

Quote of the day

Today's quote is from the first two lines of a research manuscript about the neuroscience of Schadenfreude that appeared in a recent issue of Science. Envy is one of the seven biblical sins, the Shakespearian "green-eyed monster," and what Bertrand Russell called an unfortunate facet of human nature. It is an irrational, unpleasant feeling and a "painful emotion" characterized by feelings of inferiority and resentment produced by an awareness of another's superior quality, achievement, or possessions. It's not very often that you read flowery language in a scientific paper. Note that five of…

Quote of the Day

George Emil Palade, universally hailed as the founder of modern cell biology for his many discoveries and insights into the structure and function of eukaryotic cells, died on 7 October at the age of 95. He was pre-eminent among a small group of scientists who, in the mid-twentieth century, first used the electron microscope to study cell structure, developed and refined techniques necessary to observe cells, and introduced methods that permitted the isolation and biochemical characterization of many cell structures. ... Palade was a formidable scientist and a rigorous scholar. He was a man…

Tid Bits - Financial Crisis Edition

The New York Times Editorial Board on Proposition 1: Courting Chaos in Massachusetts From NPR, Brian Lehrer interviews Naomi Klein. Also check out her latest book, The Shock Doctrine. And if you missed it here's Klein on the Colbert Report: Note trhat even Colbert is shocked by Klein's last line on the prison industrial complex. Thomas Frank, Columnist for the Wall Street Journal and author of What's the Matter with Kansas?, wrote an excellent expose on how right wing ideology drove the current wave of corruption in Washington. This new book is called The Wrecking Crew and I highly…

Open Access Under Attack

I'm back from Toronto. And now I'm just trying to keep up with all the crap I haven't dealt with in the last few days. Tomorrow we have an RNA Data club meeting (info here) and then I got this interesting email about some terrible legislation that might actually come to a vote tomorrow: On September 11, 2008, the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee (Rep. John Conyers, D-MI) introduced a bill that would effectively reverse the NIH Public Access Policy, as well as make it impossible for other federal agencies to put similar policies into place. The legislation is HR6845: "Fair Copyright…

Update

I'll type something for you quickly as I have a couple of minutes. This week has been a little crazy. I've been preparing my talk in Montreal and gearing up to perform a major experiment, some old school bucket biochemistry. Baymate performed a similar experiment using dog pancreas, and I need to repeat the protocol with a human cell line. I've already gone through the protocol twice and had to rethink some of the details. Right now the big experiment will start Sunday night continue through "Patriots' Day" and finish some time on Tuesday. So if you are wondering why you won't hear from me…

Quote of the Day

I've been too busy being a postdoc. Here's a passage I just listened to on my iPod. It made me think about our current crop of president-wannabes. The only office of state which I ever held, O men of Athens, was that of senator: the tribe Antiochis, which is my tribe, had the presidency at the trial of the generals who had not taken up the bodies of the slain after the battle of Arginusae; and you proposed to try them in a body, contrary to law, as you all thought afterwards; but at the time I was the only one of the Prytanes who was opposed to the illegality, and I gave my vote against you…

Making scents of molecules

In today's issue of The New Yorker, John Lancaster reviews a new book called Perfumes: The Guide, by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez. Olfaction (the sense of smell) is, as Lancaster notes, "a profound mystery". Why is it, for example, that two aromatic molecules with almost identical structures can smell completely different from each other? Take this molecule, R-carvone, which smells of spearmint (and also elicits a cooling sensation, because it binds to, and activates the "cold" receptor TRPM8). It is one of two enantiomers, or mirror images, of the carvone molecule. S-carvone is chemically…

I give up ...

Yesterday I surrendered to the gods of the electronic world as I finally got a cellphone (now people can reach me where ever I may be, yikes!) and I registered with facebook where I will forever be eating plums (don't ask, this has to do with last night and it's a long story.) Well it could be worse, I could have been a citizen of Shenzhen (aka Canton). From today's NYTimes: Starting this month in a port neighborhood and then spreading across Shenzhen, a city of 12.4 million people, residency cards fitted with powerful computer chips programmed by the same company will be issued to most…

A paltry creationist effort

I missed it, but Angry by Choice, Tangled Up in Blue Guy, and Greg Laden visited the Creation Science Fair yesterday, and Greg Laden already has a write-up. It was as tawdry as expected, with every poster lauding Gawd with bible verses. It was also very small. There is another reason we go: To keep the creationists honest(ish). A few years ago, a group of us went to the fair and noted 20-something posters, and in that year the organizers, unaware of our presence, reported a much later number, thus lying about the level of participation in this event. When I pointed out on my blog that among…

Show Me the Microtubules

There's a new paper in Dev Cell with a nice reconstruction of a fission yeast cell (S. pombe) with all its microtubules. From the abstract: Here, we describe a large-scale, electron tomography investigation of S. pombe, including a 3D reconstruction of a complete eukaryotic cell volume at sufficient resolution to show both how many microtubules (MTs) there are in a bundle and their detailed architecture. Most cytoplasmic MTs are open at one end and capped at the other, providing evidence about their polarity. Electron-dense bridges between the MTs themselves and between MTs and the nuclear…

How Much Do You Like Big Cuttlefish?

Photo from the Cephalopod PageThe reason I ask is the Giant Australian Cuttlefish, the world's largest cuttlefish at 23lbs and near 4-5 ft long, may be facing a tougher future. Giant Australian Cuttlefish, Sepia apama, are confined to southern Australia between depths of 0m-100m. One of the largest breeding grounds for this species is Port Bonython which is being targeted by the mining industry for large deep-sea port to ship out billions of dollars of uranium, copper, gold and other minerals. The state's Chamber of Mines and Energy is lobbying Premier Mike Rann and senior ministers to…