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Another potential Alaskan eruption

Finally, in a very slow week for volcano news, we find a report from the Alaska Volcano Observatory about concerns of another eruption in the state. Currently, both Okmok and Cleveland are erupting, and now AVO has issued a warning about Kasatochi Volcano on the island of the same name (~100 kilometers east of Adak, roughly near 175W on the map above). The volcano is the island - more or less - and any people on the small island are being evacuated due to increased seismic activity underneath the volcano/island. Not much is known about the eruptive activity at Kasatochi. The volcano does…

Chaiten eruption worsening

The newest reports out of Chile are indicating that the eruption at Chaiten has reached levels of intensity not seen since the eruption first started over six weeks ago. I have to admit, that isn't a good sign in terms of keeping the volcanic edifice in one piece. There have been frequent, small (<M3) earthquakes along with "rumbling noises," which might indicates that the domes are collapsing to form pyroclastic flows. Alternately (and need I remind you, very speculatively) it might be the the edifice itself beginning to show the wear of this long eruption and the emptying of the magma…

Disco. 'tute: Evolution is a "terrifying cripple," "bang[ing] its crutches throughâ¦Hell"

The Discovery Institute is celebrating the 20th anniversary of Darwin on Trial, the mediocre book that inspired their movement. As part of the celebration, David Berlinski pounded out one of his typical droning missives from his recliner in Paris. As happens so often with the Disco. 'tute, there's little novelty to the argument, but along the way he managed to stick a thumb in the eye of anyone living with a disability: In Darwin on Trial, â¦[i]t was the great case of Darwin et al v. the Western Religious Tradition that occupied his attention. The issue had been joined long before Johnson…

My Darwin Day talk

Last Sunday, I talked at Kol Hadash, a secular Jewish community, about NCSE's recent work in the creation/evolution trenches. Our intrepid communications director Robert Luhn was there to film it, and has posted video of the talk to our Youtube channel. The Q&A will follow. A big shout out to a South Dakota student who comments: Wow. I live in South Dakota. We just learned about global warming. We were taught it was fact. I'm sure in a lot of the small towns the kids are being taught that global warming is only a theory. I hate that this is an actual resolution. I wouldn't vote for…

Lugnuts and the Lugs who love them

Remember when Disco. spinner Casey Luskin rolled out this silly attempt at refuting critics of irreducible complexity?: Car engines use various kinds of bolts, and a bolt could be seen as a small âsub-partâ or âsub-systemâ of a car engine. Under [Ken] Miller's logic, if a vital bolt in my car's engine might also to perform some other functionâperhaps as a lugnut--then it follows that my car's whole engine system is not irreducibly complex. Such an argument is obviously fallacious. He wrote that in April of 2006. Little did I know at the time that the Department of Homeland Security had…

Finally

A year into the administration, after the teabagging parties and record numbers of filibusters, senior Obama advisor Axelrod finally used the magic words: The American people ... all they want is an up or down vote. "Up or down vote" is the framing used by Republicans to break the last filibuster crisis, a fight over judicial nominations shortly before Republicans lost control of the Senate. Most Americans don't know what a filibuster is, or why some Senate votes take 60 yeas and some require a simple majority. Traditionally, the filibuster was used to bide for time, and as a show of…

Moral monsterism

Apologies for the profanity in the cartoon above, but it is as nothing compared to the eldritch horror quoted below. I offer Penny Arcade's theory as a possible explanation of where this comes from. Martin Cothran, who blogs for the Disco. Inst., who purports to teach logic (though he's has odd affections for elementary fallacies), and who works for Kentucky's Focus on the Family ally, wants to "keep the murder of abortionists safe and legal." Seeking clarification of that insane title, we learn that: Reading Ann Coulter is, for me, something of a guilty pleasure, given her gift of…

The Shroud of Turin is clearly fake…so why is the Pope worshipping it?

When an old thread is suddenly resurrected, it's interesting to try to guess why. Every time Kent Hovind gets a little bit of press, his weird fans start googling his name, and presto, they stumble onto one of my old threads and start waxing indignant. The latest zombie thread is about the Shroud of Turin, and I can guess what has prompted people to start digging on the web for info: that goofy ol' Pope Ratzi is genuflecting before the Shroud. He said that keeping up that hope is the message of the Shroud of Turin, in which disciples see their sufferings "mirrored" in the suffering of Christ…

If you have a slow metabolism, avoid those with fast ones....

Seems to be the upshot of this finding, I'll Have What She's Having: Effects of Social Influence and Body Type on the Food Choices of Others: This research examines how the body type of consumers affects the food consumption of other consumers around them. We find that consumers anchor on the quantities others around them select but that these portions are adjusted according to the body type of the other consumer. We find that people choose a larger portion following another consumer who first selects a large quantity but that this portion is significantly smaller if the other is obese than…

Americans have been Hindus for a long time

Rod Dreher is aghast at the fact that Americans don't assent to the views of "orthodox" Christianity. The problem that many secular and religious people on the extremes don't get (the anti-devout and the devout) is the cognitive complexity, and, frankly, the fundamental incoherency of the religious beliefs of most humans. In The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival and Cult Formation the authors report survey data from the early 1980s which shows that most American Christians would not definitely deny that Hindus could achieve salvation: Missouri Lutheran South. Baptist…

Sugar intake by demographic variable

Apparently the average American gets ~17% of their calories a day from sugar. This varies by population segment: The intake of added sugars was higher among men than women and inversely related to age, educational status, and family income. Asian Americans had the lowest intake and Hispanics the next lowest intake. Among men, African Americans had the highest intake, although whites and American Indians/Alaskan Natives also had high intakes. Among women, African Americans and American Indians/Alaskan Natives had the highest intakes. Intake of added sugars was inversely related to educational…

Maybe it will loosen them up a bit

Meanwhile, the rest of us will laugh. The Republicans have been indulging in a little hanky-panky. The Republican chairman, Michael Steele, promised on taking office that he would bring the party to corners of America it had not reached before. It is a fair bet that most Republicans did not expect these corners to include the Voyeur West Hollywood, a bondage and S&M club in Los Angeles. It emerged today that the Republicans spent almost $2,000 last month on a visit to the club where topless women hang from nets on the ceiling and simulate sex in a glass case. Apparently, Steele himself…

The Graeme Bird Memorial Thread

It happens now and then that some gibbering loon makes a persistent appearance somewhere on the blog, and the ensuing wrangle goes on and on and on. We've had just such an occurrence on this thread, which is bloating up to almost 700 comments now. Graeme Bird is an Australian wanna-be politician of the crank variety, a global warming denialist, anti-vaxer, anti-evolutionist and fan of ID, birther, truther, and like your typical obsessive kook, he just can't let it go, even though he's getting laughed at rather cruelly (and deservedly). Anyway, the thread is getting too long and with no…

The Ontology Of Voltron, not Transformers

Matt Yglesias says: There's no denying that this is a pretty amusing poster. Still, it reminds me that I think the film engaged in a bit of revisionism when it portrayed the Autobots as humanoid-shaped robots capable of change into cars and trucks and so forth. My understanding from my childhood is that we should think of them as car-shaped robots capable of changing into humanoid-shaped ones. After all, they're called autobots, like automobiles. Their essential property is their car-ishness. No surprise that Matt is being ahistorical, and relying on analysis of terminology, instead of…

To the big men go the women!

Market forces affect patterns of polygyny in Uganda: Polygynous marriage is generally more beneficial for men than it is for women, although women may choose to marry an already-married man if he is the best alternative available. We use the theory of biological markets to predict that the likelihood of a man marrying polygynously will be a function of the level of resources that he has, the local sex ratio, and the resources that other men in the local population have. Using records of more than 1 million men in 56 districts from the 2002 Ugandan census, we show that polygynously married men…

Religion & IQ

A correspondent forward me this paper, The intelligence-religiosity nexus: A representative study of white adolescent Americans: The present study examined whether IQ relates systematically to denomination and income within the framework of the g nexus, using representative data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY97). Atheists score 1.95 IQ points higher than Agnostics, 3.82 points higher than Liberal persuasions, and 5.89 IQ points higher than Dogmatic persuasions. Denominations differ significantly in IQ and income. Religiosity declines between ages 12 to 17. It is suggested…

Can simulations replace animal testing? Alas, no.

My good friend and blogfather, Orac, posted something yesterday about animal testing in medical laboratories. I've been meaning to write something about that for a while; now seems like a good time. I'm not someone who thinks that being cruel to animals is no big deal. I have known some people like that, but thankfully they're very rare, and none of them were scientists whose work involves doing animal testing in real laboratories. But animal testing isn't about pointless cruelty. It's about understanding things that we simply cannot learn about in any other way. It's extremely important…

Records in Erlang

One of the things I discovered since writing part one of my Erlang introduction is that Erlang has grown a lot over the last few years. For example, the idiom of tagged tuple as a way of creating a record-like structure has been coded into the language. There is, unfortunately, a bit of a catch. They aren't really added to the language. Instead, there's a pre-processor in Erlang, and records are defined by translation in the pre-processor. This to me typifies one of the less attractive attributes of Erlang: much of Erlang has a very ad-hoc flavor to it. There are important high-level…

Wind-Powered Perpetual Motion

(NOTE: It appears that I really blew it with this one. I'm the bozo in this story. After lots of discussion, a few equations, and a bunch of time scribbling on paper, I'm convinced that I got this one wrong in a big way. No excuses; I should have done the analysis much more carefully before posting this; looking back, what I did do was pathetically shallow and, frankly, stupid. I'm sincerely sorry for calling the guys doing the experiment bozos. I'll follow up later this weekend with a detailed post showing my analysis, where I screwed up, and why this thing really works. In the meantime,…

"Market based" College Evaluations

I'm a bit late to the party on this, but I couldn't resist saying something. A rather obnoxious twit by the name of Richard Vedder has set up a front-group called "The Center for College Affordability and Productivity". The goal of this group is purportedly to apply market-based mechanisms to the problems of higher education in America. When you take a look at their "research", you'll quickly recognize that this is astroturf, plain and simple. A typical example of this is described in an article Dr. Vedder recently wrote for Forbes magazine about a supposed research study done by his…

The story of symbolic algebra

Chad is not happy with my previous post where I consider that we shouldn't expect that everyone should be able to pass algebra conditional upon a deep understanding of the subject. First, let me state that my post was in part operating outside what I will call the "Cohen narrative." Rather, I wanted to interject the opinion that variation is a contingent fact of human history (otherwise, we wouldn't have been shaped by natural selection). I was attempting to offer that the alternatives are not black and white in that everyone should learn algebra or that everyone need not learn algebra.…

Singing in Slow Motion

tags: neurobiology, neuroscience, animal communication, birdsong, premotor nucleus HVC, brain temperature, neural circuitry, motor behaviors, bioacoustics Captive-bred Zebra Finch, Taeniopygia guttata, at Bodelwyddan Castle Aviary, Denbighshire, Wales. Image: Adrian Pingstone/Wikipedia [larger view]. Birdsong is the primary model system that helps scientists understand how the brain produces complex sequences of learned behavior, such as playing the piano. In songbirds, there are many interconnected brain regions that play specific and important role in the production of song. These…

Darwin's Finches Develop Immunity to Alien Parasites

tags: evolutionary biology, immunology, immune response, antibodies, parasite, avian pox virus, Poxvirus avium, nest fly, Philornis downsi, birds, ornithology, Darwin's Finches, Medium Ground Finch, Geospiza fortis, Ecuador, Galapagos Islands, researchblogging.org,peer-reviewed research, peer-reviewed paper A male Medium Ground Finch, Geospiza fortis, sits on a tree branch in Ecuador's Galapagos Islands. Image: Jen Koop. People often view the Hawaiian islands as a tropical paradise, the ideal vacation site, but you wouldn't agree with this assessment if you happen to be a bird. According…

The Task Force on Climate Remediation Research is wrong, and here's why

It's hard to argue against funding scientific research. But let me try. This past week 18 experts assembled as the Task Force on Climate Remediation Research released the product of its collective wisdom. A creation of the Bipartisan Policy Center, which the New York Times' Cornelia Dean describes as "a research organization based in Washington founded by four senators — Democrats and Republicans — to offer policy advice to the government," the task force concluded that the U.S. should be spending unspecified sums on research into what is colloquially known as climate hacking. Most everyone…

More about me

A very old post (from September 04, 2004), but you may like it anyway. ---------------------------------------------------- The other day, we were discussing birth order on JREG (http://www.jregrassroots.org/), and this is what I wrote about me and my brother: My older brother and I are quite similar, actually. We were always the best friends, shared everything and agreed on almost everything. He was always a big teacher and role model for me. Any differences? My brother had an easier time dealing with our parents through adolescence than I did. Fortunately, when I was of that age, he took me…

Oh, no! The New Atheists are getting attacked again!

Well, it's nothing to be concerned about. Just more of the same ol', same ol', with nothing much of substance to grapple with. Let's tackle Andrew Brown's complaints first. Brown is not a stupid fellow, but I see here a hint of irrationally roused hackles, with little explanation of what exactly he is complaining about. First he names a few of the people he identifies as New Atheists, and then he lists what he considers to be defining characters of this group. Look who he names: I made the grade! So, who are they? The ideas I claim are distinctive of the new atheists have been collected from…

On being inspired by the preface of a philosophy book

It's the end of a year that saw historic election in the United States. An African American was elected President. To many of us felt like a turning point. We'll have to see. But if it is, it is due to many people, some of whom we know, most of whom we will never know. Black people fought hard and long and suffered greatly. They had allies in the white community, including many academics. I thought of all this recently when reading the Preface of a book on the nineteenth century philosopher Gottlob Frege. If you aren't a philosopher or philosophy student (or possibly a logician) you may not…

Pandemic flu no worse than seasonal flu?

Peter Doshi has a bone to pick with CDC . His particular idée fixe is that CDC is cooking the books on their estimates of excess mortality attributable to influenza and he aims to set the record straight. He's done it before. Doshi is not the kind of critic CDC is used to. He is a graduate student, not an established public health figure. But he's no shrinking violet and is getting in CDC's face again in the latest issue of the American Journal of Public Health. This time Doshi extends his criticism to imply CDC is pandemic fear mongering, perhaps in collusion with Big Pharma. This has been…

Bird flu, umbrellas and cones

A new study from a glycobiology laboratory at MIT is creating a buzz in the flu community (see the MIT Press Release here). A great deal of molecular biology and virology studies what happens when the virus gets into a cell to use the cell's own machinery to make copies of itself. Glycobiology is a relatively new area, concentrating on the straight and branched chains of sugar units that make up a great deal of the "stuff" one finds outside of a cell. What do these sugars have to do with influenza? In earlier posts (see here and here and links therein) we showed how the influenza virus…

Did A Virus Make You Smart?

Not really a review of Greg Bear's "Darwin's Radio" and "Darwin's Children" but musing (practically SF itself) on the topic of these books (from April 20, 2005): Did A Virus Make You Smart? I've been reading science-fiction pretty much all my life. I usually go through "phases" when I hit on a particular author and read several books by the same person. Last year I was in my Greg Bear phase and I have read eight of his books. He is one of those writers who gets better with age: more recent his book, more I liked it. His is also some of the hardest of hard sci-fi around. He must be a…

Who Won The World War II?

This post (from May 10, 2005) was deliberately written to provoke, by asserting that the "victors write history" rule gets into trouble when there are too many victors writing too many histories. Thus, it was written deliberately as an opposite extreme to what kids learn in school in the USA, as well as a report on what many Europeans think and say over beer in a bar (I have heard it many times), not a report of yet another "Truth" that I actually believe in. So, I also re-posted the comments and hope that some real WWII experts chime in this time around (Orac? Archy?) and straighten-up the…

Mock Study Section (more than you ever wanted to know)

Most of you don't want to hear about my grant writing any more, but some of you are clearly interested in one of our innovations (at least I think it's an innovation; I've never heard of anyone doing it on this scale before): the Mock Study Section. So I'll take a break from writing (actually, re-writing) to describe it. First I should explain to the uninitiated what a "Study Section" is. In grantee parlance, the Study Section (also called a Scientific Review Group) is a committee of external scientists who review grant proposals and meet to discuss and grade them. There are many regular…

“No, nothing is changing” – Cell tower worker deaths continue

The incident report details are horrific and heartbreaking. If this was a radio broadcast, my editors and I would likely preface what I am about to relate with a warning: “The following report contains material that may be disturbing.” On July 2nd at 2:22 p.m., an emergency call came in to the Cynthiana, Kentucky-Harrison County 911 operators to report that “a man has been decapitated his head and arm are on the ground.” The follow-up report, made available by the Harrison County sheriff’s office, explains that Joel Metz, age 28, working for Fortune Wireless on a Verizon Wireless cell tower…

Carcinogen use and release declines dramatically in Massachusetts: An important step in cancer prevention

While we’re on vacation, we’re re-posting content from earlier in the year. This post was originally published on June 26, 2013. By Elizabeth Grossman In 1989, Massachusetts enacted a remarkable and landmark law known as the Toxics Use Reduction Act (TURA). Supported by both environmentalists and industry, and passed unanimously by the state legislature, TURA established toxics use reduction as Massachusetts’ preferred strategy for pollution prevention, and for reducing public, occupational and environmental exposure to hazardous chemicals. The law requires in-state businesses to report on…

Preventable deaths and unacceptable progress: CSB criticizes OSHA

Celeste wrote earlier this month about a public meeting at which the US Chemical Safety Board would vote on whether to label several of their outstanding recommendations to OSHA as having seen unacceptable progress. I attended the day-long meeting, and thought the CSB staff and board members made a strong case for the “unacceptable” designations, which the board unanimously voted to adopt. Throughout the meeting, the CSB was careful to acknowledge the progress OSHA had made in addressing the hazards, the factors that impede effective OSHA action, and the preventability of explosions and other…

“Fight for 15” takes to the streets in Chicago: Fast-food and retail workers demonstrate for raise beyond their lower-than $10 average wage

by Elizabeth Grossman On April 24th, hundreds of workers at fast-food restaurants in Chicago staged a one-day walk-out to demonstrate for a raise to $15 an hour and the right to form a union.  Striking workers included employees of Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonald’s, Subway, Popeyes Chicken, Macy’s, Nordstrom Rack, Sears, Lands’ End, Victoria’s Secret and Whole Foods.  Some stores were unable to open or forced to close when all workers who were not management either walked out or did not report to work.  Photos from Chicago show lines of striking workers stretching for several blocks. Among them was…

Chile leaves, Broccoli Stems and Pea Shoots...Expanding What we Eat

I find the ways we define ourselves by what we eat fascinating.  We do this project of self-definition both through what we DO eat and what we refuse to eat.  In Martin Jones' fascinating book _Feast: Why Humans Share Food_, he observes that our taboos about food can be so powerful that they are actively detrimental - observing that are indications that ancient peoples in coastal areas have had such a strong taboo against the ocean and fishing that they starved to death with easy access to plenty of fish.  Most of us have a powerful sense, instilled culturally, about what we do and don't…

Anyway Project Update 1

Just a note: Eric stepped on the overpriced device that allows us to have a slow and primitive but still wireless connection out here in middle-of-nowhere-land this morning. It is still working, miraculously (it doesn't look like it should be working), but I expect to lose internet access basically at any moment. So if this blog disappears, it isn't that I don't care, it is that my husband is a klutz. Since I'm a much bigger klutz, and have broken even more important things over the years, I can't really whine about it. But just FYI, I'm not sure how much internet access I'll have until…

Choosing a medical specialty III - applying, interviewing and matching

Aside from taking 4th year medical school classes it's also the time of year that medical students who plan to graduate in 2009 (like me) are applying to residency programs across the country. This is an interesting process and one that many people outside of medicine are unfamiliar with, and quite surprised by. For one, did you know that we don't have final say on where we train in residency but that the decision is made by a computer? It's true. The process is called "the Match" and it's a time of great excitement and anxiety for 4th year medical students. For one, there are far more…

Flu woo, immuno-woo, and vaccine woo--all in one!11!

Once again, I'm migrating more popular posts from the old blog. If this is a repeat for you, sorry. --PalMD Wow. I mean, wow. I was googling some flu information, and one of the first hits was so fundamentally wrong about all matters medical that I actually felt ill. The dangerous title is "Building a Child's Immunity the Natural Way". It's wasn't clear to me what this meant, so I had to read the damned thing. It starts out pretty bad: New Jersey's Public Health Council gave its citizens a Christmas present that will not please the health-conscious, as it became the first state in the…

Student guest post: A Push for Pasteurization

Student guest post by Molly Stafne Nothing could be worse than watching your seven-year-old lying in a hospital bed fighting for his life after being diagnosed with hemolytic uremic syndrome. Unfortunately, Mary McGonigle-Martin experienced it first hand as her son, Chris, fought for his life after being poisoned by E. coli 0157:H7 found in contaminated raw milk. Like many mothers, Mary was coerced into believing the inaccurate “facts” given to her by the farm she purchased raw milk from. Too often across the US, parents are given incorrect information about the safety of the milk they drink…

Former FDA Commissioners on Credibility, Drug Review, and Other Agency Challenges

By Liz Borkowski Last week, the Project on Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy (SKAPP) held a panel discussion on the FDA featuring four former FDA Commissioners. While all of the panelists made a point of saying that there are a lot of wonderful people working at the FDA, they also acknowledged that the agency has some serious issues that must be addressed. David Kessler, MD (FDA Commissioner from 1990 â 1997) remarked that being at the event was âin some ways very bittersweet.â He reflected: I left the agency now a decade ago and I thought had done a pretty good job. Frank had approved…

Genomicron wants to help ID out

We've discussed the incompetence of cranks in their critical reasoning skills, and their inability to think about science in a lucid or productive fashion. But have we tried to help them? Have we moved beyond caddy criticisms and actually bothered to extend a hand to our fellow man? Clearly not. Rather than continuing to mock ID for being the intellectually-dishonest, crank-laden nonsense that it is, why don't we help them become a real science? Genomicron has some suggested experiments to help ID get on the right track. Maybe, if they are legitimately interested in science, we'll be…

Todays tautology: "Egnor writes idiotic things" and "All people who write idiotic things are idiots", therefore "Egnor is an idiot"

Apparently, Michael Egnor just can't get enough of making himself look like an idiot. His latest screed is an attack on me, for criticizing his dismissal of evolution as a tautology. My observation that "Natural Selection" is a tautology, and therefore useless to modern medicine, seems to have set off quite a few Darwinists. Prominent Darwinist blogger Mark Chu-Carroll took me to task here, and comes up with an approach that he believes gets "Natural Selection" off the tautological hook: he asserts that all scientific theories are reducible to tautologies! Mark writes: And this brings…

New and Exciting in PLoS this week

It's Monday night, so let's see what just got published in PLoS Biology, PLoS Medicine, PLoS ONE and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases: Cryptochrome Mediates Light-Dependent Magnetosensitivity of Drosophila's Circadian Clock: Magnetic fields influence endogenous clocks controlling the sleep-wake cycle of animals, but the underyling mechanisms are unclear. Birds that can do magnetic compass orientation also depend on light, and the blue-light photopigment cryptochrome was proposed to act as a navigational magnetosensor. Here we tested the role of cryptochrome as a light-dependent magnetosensor…

New and Exciting in PLoS this week

Now that PLoS ONE is publishing daily (OK, not really, only on work-days, i.e., 5 times a week), I have been pointing to my picks every day. Let's look at what has been published there last night and tonight as well as what's new in other PLoS journals. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Courtship Initiation Is Stimulated by Acoustic Signals in Drosophila melanogaster: Finding a mating partner is a critical task for many organisms. It is in the interest of males to employ multiple sensory modalities to search…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Bizarre Bird Behavior Predicted By Game Theory: A team of scientists, led by the University of Exeter, has used game theory to explain the bizarre behaviour of a group of ravens. Juvenile birds from a roost in North Wales have been observed adopting the unusual strategy of foraging for food in 'gangs'. New research explains how this curious behaviour can be predicted by adapting models more commonly used by economists to analyse financial trends. Widespread Stress Found Among Veterinarians: Veterinarians frequently suffer psychosocial stress and demoralization associated with heavy workloads…

Did A Virus Make You Smart?

Not really a review of Greg Bear's "Darwin's Radio" and "Darwin's Children" but musing (practically SF itself) on the topic of these books (from April 20, 2005, also reposted here so you can see the comments): Did A Virus Make You Smart? I've been reading science-fiction pretty much all my life. I usually go through "phases" when I hit on a particular author and read several books by the same person. Last year I was in my Greg Bear phase and I have read eight of his books. He is one of those writers who gets better with age: more recent his book, more I liked it. His is also some of the…

New edition of the Journal of Science Communication

June edition of the Journal of Science Communication is out. Focus seems to be on communication in physical space and democracy. Check out the table of contents: Bringing the universe to the street. A preliminary look at informal learning implications for a large-scale non-traditional science outreach project: "From Earth to the Universe" (FETTU) is a collection of astronomical images that showcase some of the most popular, current views of our Universe. The images, representing the wide variety of astronomical objects known to exist, have so far been exhibited in about 500 locations…

Jellyfish lack true Hox genes!

I'm going to briefly summarize an interesting new article on cnidarian Hox genes…unfortunately, it requires a bit of background to put it in context, so bear with me for a moment. First you need to understand what Hox genes are. They are transcription factors that use a particular DNA binding motif (called a homeobox), and they are found in clusters and expressed colinearly. What that means is that you find the Hox genes that are essential for specifying positional information along the length of the body in a group on a chromosome, and they are organized in order on the chromosome in the…