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Blagojevich and the Ants

I can't help but feel gleeful at this morning's news.   Back in January I had landed, I thought, a postdoctoral position at the Illinois Natural History Survey.  It was a dream job.  I've been itching for years to figure out what's really going on with the evolutionary history of Camponotus, a hugely important ant genus with a godawful mess of a taxonomy.  The State of Illinois had finally provided the wherewithal, an independent postdoc to do research on a project of my choosing.  That would be Camponotus. So forgive me if I seem petty when I explain that's exactly when Mr. Blagojevich…

The Demise of the Standard Ant

Juergen Heinze has a must-read piece in the latest edition of Myrmecological News about how ant colonies are not often simple families as we like to think of them: Abstract: The social systems of ants are far more variable than has traditionally been believed. In addition to variation in queen number and queen mating frequency, recent research has documented such bizarre phenomena as the parthenogenetic production of females from unfertilized eggs or genetic caste determination. All these affect the genetic structure of ant societies, and it appears that in a large percentage of species…

Strobe placement makes a big difference

Among the more charismatic ants I saw during my visit to South Africa was a silver Polyrhachis that seemed all too happy to pose for me. With such an unusually cooperative subject, I was able to experiment with several different arrangements of the flash heads on my MT-24EX twin flash. Compare these two shots, differing only in the placement of one of the two heads: Polyrhachis schlueteri, St. Lucia, KZN, South Africa The top photo is the clear winner. The MT-24EX has detachable heads, and what I did here was remove one of them and hand-hold it under the leaf, facing upward at the ant.…

Miniature Trap-jaw Ants

Strumigenys louisianae stalking a springtail Tucson, Arizona Non-native species should make a naturalist's skin crawl, but these ornate little trap-jaw ants are a guilty pleasure. Strumigenys louisianae is among the most widespread of the miniature trap-jaw ants, occurring naturally from the southeastern U.S. to northern Argentina. The desert climate in Tucson is too dry for Strumigenys, but they persist in lawns, gardens, and other places in town where irrigation raises the moisture levels. No one knows when or how they arrived, but it is likely the founding colonies stowed away in…

Crafty goodness

There's a crafty meme going around the blogosphere and lovely academic blogger phd me is going to be sending me a craft of her making. In order to be deserving of her crafty goodness, I've promised to make crafts for 5 others. If you'd like to get something from me (probably photo-oriented), be one of the first five to leave a comment on this post. Here are the complete rules: The first 5 people to respond to this post will get something made by me! This offer does have some restrictions and limitations so please read carefully: * I make no guarantees that you will like what I…

"Cosmetic Acupuncture" - seriously?

While I lack the intestinal fortitude of my colleague, Orac, who actively seeks out the most impressive examples of pseudoscience and quackery, examples come to me without even looking for them. This week's case is in the form of a book announcement press release from a Denver-based "practitioner" who specializes in cosmetic acupuncture. Yes, the needle without the Botox®. Martha Lucas, Ph.D., L.Ac., Denver-based acupuncturist and practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), has authored "Vanity Calamity: Your Guide to Cosmetic Acupuncture for Anti-aging." The announcement is made by…

Now that's misogyny

I've often wondered what it would be like to have a conversation with an insect — a creature that shares no moral or rational assumptions with me. Now I've seen something close, at least, a fellow named Seth, discussing his obligations to his partners in sex. Basically, he feels none. It's a long ranty comment, and much of it is more explicit than I'd rather post here, but it amounts to insisting that pregnancy and abortion are all the woman's responsibility, because it is her fault that she demanded a penis enter her vagina. You want a man inside you, it's up to you to deal with the mess…

Scientiae carnival up at acmegirl's Thesis - With Children

I absolutely love the Scientiae blog carnival, established originally by and for women in the STEM blogosphere (but has occasionally accepted the blatherings of us with Y chromosomes). What I enjoy most about this carnival is that the host puts out a call for posts on a specific, usually introspective topic related to being a woman in science. Since the carnival is monthly, it gives the bloggers sufficient time to really reflect and develop a solid series of wonderfully-written posts. This month's carnival is up at Thesis - With Children, the blog of acmegirl, a graduate student whom I…

Just because Johnnie jumps off a cliff, would you, too?

NIH's NCCAM released a survey report on the use of complementary and alternative medicine in the US (report PDF here, post at WSJ Health Blog here.) . I don't know about you but the picture at Health Blog of the child receiving chiropractic manipulation scared the bejeezus out of me. Overall trends were toward greater use of these unproven approaches, many of which have no basis in science. Most concerning is that one in nine children were estimated to have received a CAM therapy. And from the NCCAM report abstract: Children whose parent used CAM were almost five times as likely (23.9%) to…

Thanks to Martin at The Lay Scientist for launching the Praxis blog carnival

I am officially embarrassed. It was recently brought to my attention that my previous post misattributed the new Praxis blog to Bora Zivkovic. Bora did indeed host the first edition of Praxis, the new blog carnival of academic life. However. The Praxis experimental carnival of "the experience of living the scientific" was established, founded, and otherwise continues to be led by Martin, author of The Lay Scientist blog. Mini Bio: Well I'm Martin, I live in Cambridge, England, and this is me on the Amazon in 2007. I did a frankly weird Ph.D. looking at the relationship between models from…

Link dump

I've made it to St Paul and am sucking down some caffeine before strolling over to the venue for my talk this afternoon, and I've got a few minutes for a quickie link dump from the mailbag. Digest these for a while… There's a great new response to the Randi paranormal challenge. Unfortunately, while I think her power is real and immense, it isn't paranormal. This settles it. The war of the annoying you-tube videos has gone too far—now we've got singing Christian pirate puppets. They say Nelson's Column is being renovated—I say it's being used as a clandestine staging platform for the…

Melamine and cyanuric acid chemistry lesson

Via the Knight Science Journalism Tracker at MIT, I was directed to one of the best-written articles on melamine contamination of pet food and animal feed. David Brown at the Washington Post is the guilty party whose article appeared Monday. Brown does a terrific job of explaining how the modestly toxic substance, melamine, can cause renal failure when combined with cyanuric acid. Not widely reported in the press is the fact that cyanuric acid, another nitrogen-rich compound, has also been found to contaminate some wheat gluten and wheat flour from China. For example, here is the most…

ScienceOnline2010 Saturday Evening Banquet

Welcome, fellow ScienceOnline2010 registrant! This is just the payment page; for more details on the banquet, CLICK HERE. ScienceOnline2010 Saturday Night Dinner Radisson at Research Triangle Park Saturday 16 January 2010 - 7:00 pm $37.50 (USD) per person (includes $1.50 PayPal fee) Who are you paying for? Myself $37.50 Myself and 1 guest $75.00 Myself and 2 guests $112.50 Myself and 3 guests $150.00 Guest names, if any Once your payment clears, I will mark you as paid on the list at the conference website. If you are unable to use this method of advance…

What do y'all think of THIS?

The man himself has been reduced to a footnote in the last advertisement from his new "we" campaign. The ad is scheduled to appear in the usual suspect media "to make sure Al Gore's clean electricity challenge stays on the top of our leaders' minds during their break." See a bigger version here. The campaign is currently asking its millions of lip-service supporters to put their money where it counts by helping defray the placement costs of the ad in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and New York Times. My motive for giving you a preview is not to ask that you donate (although feel…

NPR can go die in a fire

This is unbelievable. James O'Keefe, he of the Acorn fraud, of the aborted seduction, the unimaginative weasel whose sole game is staging bogus scenarios with his ideological opponents and trying to catch them saying embarrassing things, has done it again, teasing an NPR executive into saying disparaging things about the Tea Party lunatics. I saw the recording; it was tame, I'd say stuff a thousand times more disparaging about those racist morons while knowingly on the air. But it worked. NPR caved in, suspended the administrator, and now another one has resigned. Why? I don't know. Because…

Doubt vs. Certainty in the NYT

Venerable New York Times reporter William K. Stevens resurfaces today in the paper's Science Times with a few words on the changing nature of the debate over the changing climate. The headline is only slightly misleading: "On the Climate Change Beat, Doubt Gives Way to Certainty" Technically, there is no certainty, just diminishing levels of doubt. But it is a nice little essay. I just finished writing something similar for a magazine, and found the similarities with Steven's piece almost troubling, except that it's pretty obvious stuff. To say that reasonable doubt is vanishing does not mean…

Mea culpa on la barranca magnifica

Following up on a couple of posts back in which I trumpeted Gary Trudeau's inclusion in Doonesbury strip an apocryphal story about Grand Canyon park rangers and the age of the geological wonder they are entrusted with explaining to the public: We were duped. Skeptic magazine's Michael Shermer offers an apology, which I will borrow. Unfortunately, in our eagerness to find additional examples of the inappropriate intrusion of religion in American public life (as if we actually needed more), we accepted this claim by PEER without calling the National Park Service (NPS) or the Grand Canyon…

A call to arms and the crazy old aunt

Today's New York Times Science section includes coverage of a forum on the religion-science wars this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif. Just about everybody who's anybody in this battle was there. My favorite quote comes from Steve Weinberg: "Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization." That's quite a thing to say -- it's not the medical advances, and understanding of our place in the universe, or our kinship with all other species that will define science…

Astronomical madness

I envy Nature reporter Jenny Hogan, who's been blogging from the International Astronomical Union's big meeting in Prague for the past couple of weeks. I've always considered science journalism the most fascinating sector of the industry (that's why I'm one), but Hogan appears to be having an unusually fun time as the conference delegates lose their calm, rational demeanor in favor of an obsessive, impulsive approach to redefining the planets. Her latest post, made just a few hours ago, has a breathless quality to it: IAU: invasion! What a madhouse. I was skipping down the stairs of the…

Gay sex, global warming and terrorism

Last weekend's Los Angeles Times included a curious essay by Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert titled "If only gay sex caused global warming." How can you resist? The basic thesis, drawn from evolutionary biology, is threats are meaningless without a face to associate. To wit: ...global warming lacks a mustache. No, really. We are social mammals whose brains are highly specialized for thinking about others. Understanding what others are up to -- what they know and want, what they are doing and planning -- has been so crucial to the survival of our species that our brains have developed an…

Sunday Function

As we get closer to Halloween, let's take a look at one of the few functions that might cause a stir in Salem. I give you the Witch of Agnesi, for several values of its free parameter a: The Witch is a geometric construction involving triangles that's easier to show than describe: (Both images are from the Wikipedia article) Geometric construction though it is, you can also write it in closed form as a standard old function of x: Why did this seemingly mundane function merit such a creepy name? It was originally named by the Italian mathematician Maria Gaetana Agnesi, who called it la…

South African wildlife - Ostrich

A few years back, I was in a zoo looking at some ostriches. The man standing next to me was imparting knowledge to his children with tremendous pomp and circumstance, telling them about all things ostrich. He noted that despite their comical appearance, they are very powerful birds. So far, so good. He said that they had a powerful kick - also accurate. He said that they have a sharp, retractable claw on each foot that they can use to disembowel lions. No... that's Velociraptors. Perhaps I'm being too harsh. Ostriches, being the largest living birds, are formidable indeed and their toe…

Some housekeeping

Hi folks, A couple of housekeeping issues: ScienceBlogs have developed a set of funky widgets that allow you to share the headlines from your favourite blogs on other websites. You can find the one for Not Exactly Rocket Science here - just click Share, and then Install outside Netvibes. The deadline is looming for this year's Open Laboratory compilation of the science blogosphere's best offerings. If any posts in this blog have tickled your fancy, stretched your brain or stoked your loins (heaven forbid, but there are some strange people on the internet), submit them for consideration…

The Encyclopedia Britannica: This Week's World's Fair Sponsor

This week's alternative sponsor for the blog. Inquire within. Embarrassingly, Dow Chemical is still populating the scienceblogs webspace with it's P.R., and, regrettably, we here at The World's Fair have been lax to seek alternative sponsorship over the summer. But fear no more the carcinogens and toxins of Dow...embrace the knowledge of the Encyclopedia Britannica! We say "give your child a fair chance," with the set that "Furnishes Accurate Knowledge." Available at Sears, Roebuck, and Co., with affordable monthly payments. What really grabbed us, excited us, about this sponsor is…

Green Campuses

Jenna Fisher at the Utne Reader has a guide to green campuses. This helps with an earlier post I'd added last Fall about campus sustainability, which in turn is a continuation of the conversation on consumption patterns. Quoth Utne.com: In recent years, college and university campuses have proven crucial leaders in the movement to make large-scale, resource-demanding institutions more environmentally friendly. Many have implemented projects that promote alternative energies, energy efficiency, and environmental sustainability. But not everyone's jumped on the eco-bandwagon. So who's doing…

Technology Evangelist Wanted

This has to be the best new job title. George Mason University is looking for a Technology Evangelist. Quoth GMU: The Center for History & New Media at George Mason University is seeking a technology evangelist for Zotero (www.zotero.org), an open source bibliographic management and note-taking tool for the Firefox web browser. The technology evangelist will be responsible for building alliances with scholarly organizations and libraries, encouraging scholars to try Zotero, developing and maintaining user documentation, and building awareness of this next-generation research tool. We…

Auden, Science, and Nature (on the Infinite Variability of Socio-cultural Dynamics)

First, a quote, then (below the fold) the book I found it in (and, incidentally, the post title about infinite variability, is taken from the book, below): W.H. Auden: "The historical world is a horrid place where, instead of nice clean measurable forces, there are messy things like mixed motives, where classes keep overlapping, where what is believed to have happened is as real as what actually happened, a world, moreover, which cannot be defined by technical terms but only described by analogies." I've recently been reading How Nature Speaks: The Dynamics of the Human Ecological Condition,…

Fact-checking? We don't need no stinkin' fact-checking!

The focus has shifted from George F. Will's refusal to accept the science of climate change to the Washington Post's refusal to accept responsibility for Will's breach of journalism's most sacred tenets. I don't have more to say, but Carl Zimmer's second analysis of the problem is bang on. There's also Joe Romm (again) and Hilzoy of the Washington Monthly. The bottom line is, Will was caught misrepresenting the science, and when the errors were brought to his editors' attention, in no uncertain terms, they refused to acknowledge any had been made. It's one thing to make a sloppy mistake,…

Good news for scientists studying Southwestern jaguars

I've written before about efforts to study jaguar (Panthera onca) populations here in the desert southwest and Mexico, most recently to note that the Bush administration had declined to formulate a recovery plan for the species in the Southwest. The following is therefore encouraging for those of us who care about these magnificent animals. Three days ago, Arizona Game and Fish successfully captured and collared a wild jaguar for the first time in Arizona - a male (picture above) found just southwest of Tucson. The 118 pound specimen (perhaps âMacho Bâ who has been captured on camera a…

How not to begin a blog post

Avoid the "I don't want to…but" construction. It always leads to asininities like this: I don't want to trivialize the inhumane horrors that African slaves endured on slave ships destined for the Americas. But after a recent airplane trip, sitting tightly next to my neighbor in steerage seats, I feel the discomfort and pain endemic to the current air experience has certain curious similarities. Because once you get past the extremely superficial similarity of an abstract packing problem, you're stuck calling sitting on well-cushioned seats while stewardesses bring you drinks "discomfort and…

Like Space Camp, But Quantized

A friend sent me a link to QuantumCamp: Have you ever wondered how the microscopic Universe works? QuantumCamp is a one week journey through this strange but beautiful world - seeing nothing less than how every atom in our universe is working! We begin with Dmitri Mendeleev's periodic table of the elements. We move from Albert Einstein's idea of quantization and end up seeing the hydrogen spectrum while contemplating the ideas of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. We witness the explosive beauty and inner order of the elements which begs for deeper investigation. We dive in and immerse…

Rhythm is a Quantum Concatenated Code

I do believe this is the first time I've performed the paper dance on the scienceblogs incarnation of this blog. Yep, it's that time again: it's the paper dance! "A far away light in the futuristic place we might be; It's a tiny world just big enough to support the kingdom of one knowledgeable; I feel a wave of loneliness and head back down I'm going too fast (I'm going too fast)" arXiv:0806.2160 The Stability of Quantum Concatenated Code Hamiltonians Authors: D. Bacon Abstract: Protecting quantum information from the detrimental effects of decoherence and lack of precise quantum control is…

The Weight of Software

A story, from Jeff Silverman: Whenever you build an airplane, you have to make sure that each part weighs no more than allocated by the designers, and you have to control where the weight it located to keep the center of gravity with limits. So there is an organization called weights which tracks that. For the 747-100, one of the configuration items was the software for the navigation computer. In those days (mid-1960s), the concept of software was not widely understood. The weight of the software was 0. The weights people didn't understand this so they sent a guy to the software group to…

No lie too low

Coral Ridge Ministries, that awful fundagelical organization founded by D. James Kennedy, has "discovered" a couple of former workers willing to testify about the evil practices of Planned Parenthood. "They have an abortion budget and they have a certain number of patients that you have to perform abortions on every month, and there's a dollar amount attached to each woman." Everett's business plan included outreach in schools with talks given to break down children's natural modesty and promote Everett and her clinic associates as trusted authorities for all things sexual. Everett…

MIT Science Tracker On Coverage of the Pew Science Survey

Over at MIT's Knight Science Journalism Tracker, the wise Charlie Petit has a great round-up of coverage of yesterday's Pew science survey. On what I described earlier today as a troubling "fall from grace" narrative in some reporting and commentary, Petit points to the obvious difficulties science reporters might have in covering an issue they deeply care about: One notes that bylines [in coverge] tend to belong to science writers. Science writers can hope to cover science itself with a semblance of objective dispassion. But they have an inbuilt conflict of interest when the topic is the…

Rush Limbaugh Takes Credit for Global Warming Inaction

At the Washington Post today, Dana Milbank reviews Rush Limbaugh's Monday program. The peg is Wanda Sykes' comments at this weekend's White House Correspondents Dinner. Perhaps of greater interest, later in the column, Milbank reports on this line delivered by Rush during his Monday program: Among callers to his show yesterday, the opinions of Limbaugh were more on the side of extravagant admiration: "There are no words to adequately describe our appreciation for your program and your individual accomplishments as a patriot." The host had a similar sentiment: "I normally don't pat myself on…

PBS: The Most Trusted Source in Science?

Along with scientific journals, Americans rate public broadcasting as one of the most credible sources for information about biotechnology. Yesterday I noted data that reveals the PBS NOVA audience to be unique in its nature. Indeed, if a company or organization wants to reach a core audience of science enthusiasts and influentials, this might be the best outlet to be featured at or to sponsor. What makes PBS an ideal outlet is not just the nature of its audience, but also the public's trust in public broadcasting as an information source about science. Consider the findings from a 2005…

Expelled's Box Office Success Bucks Industry Trend

The box-office troubles of docs such as "Bigger, Faster, Stronger" is in contrast to Expelled's impact. The LA Times runs a story this week on the downturn in box office fortunes for the documentary film genre. The inability of well crafted docs about front burner issues such as Iraq or steroids to reach audiences and to catalyze policy debate makes the impact of Expelled (see column) that much more troubling and suprising. As the LA Times reports: Critically acclaimed films about provocative subjects struggle to make money all the time, but rarely have so many lauded documentaries…

Michael Pollan: Chewed Up and Spit Out

Oh boy. Pollan's new book, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, gets eviscerated in this review by James McWilliams at the Texas Observer (Laura Shapiro at Slate isn't a fan either, though offers some hope in her review; an issue of the journal Gastronomica last summer also called out Pollan on some features of his approach and message). I haven't read the new book, so this link is neither an endorsement of McWilliams's review nor of Pollan's text. But, wow, the review is a fun read. The opening line to Pollan's new book is this: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." McWilliams's…

Worst jobs in humanities? What are they exactly?

Worst Science Job 2007 - Hazmat Diver Dave Semeniuk over at the Terry blog has posed an interesting question. Namely, what are the worst jobs in the humanities? (Another pandering to the two culture debate?) The question is framed around the report that Popular Science annually releases on the "Worst Jobs in Science." But, thinking about it, I wondered if it was easier to think of such bad employment opportunities in science, because you get to think of worst case sensory situations (i.e. stuff that stinks, stuff that is icky), or worst case hazardous situations - dangerous chemistry,…

Your commentary decides the winner. DARWIN vs HIV, the Science Showdown 2007 Final.

Well it's been 9 months going and 64 teams from the beginning, but it's come down to this folks - a battle between two giants in the scientific world. DARWIN vs HIV So how does it look? Well, Darwin has never been a quiet one, and some say he's just gearing up for his 200th birthday. Conversely, this year's worldwide infection count downgrade of 40 million to 33 million doesn't fool anyone - as all indications suggest that HIV is definitely ready for action. Anyway, click on this bracket image below if you need a reminder of the amazing gameplay over the last 9 months. It'll take you a…

"A Note" (poem by W. Szymborska)

I just picked up Jonah's book, Proust was a Neuroscientist, which so far has me thinking differently about the other things I read. And with Whitman as the first chapter, I got to thumbing through some poetry. Plus, it's a nice season for poetry. Moving on, inelegant as this transition may be.... We've posted a poem by the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborksa before ("Discover"). Here is another, called "A Note." I liked it. Life is the only way to get covered in leaves, catch your breath on sand, rise on wings; to be a dog, or stroke its warm fur; to tell pain from everything it's not; to…

Radiohead versus Wilco: Discuss

Wilco is good, sometimes exceptional, but often inconsequential. So it would appear that the above statement is up for discussion. I'm speaking specifically about statement number 9 of the truth, now that Ben has noted that Wilco has relinquished one of their albums to Volkswagon. Of course, the first contender that comes to mind, especially since we're talking about things such as "selling out" is Radiohead, who recently have seen a lot of press over their IT'S UP TO YOU marketing experiment. And with that in mind, maybe, the truth #9 should be altered with boys from Oxford in mind.…

Thus Spaketh: Dennis Overbye on Cosmologists

Dennis Overbye of the NYTimes had this to say of cosmologists who are speculating about disembodied brains spontaneously generated in empty space: If you are inclined to skepticism this debate might seem like further evidence that cosmologists, who gave us dark matter, dark energy and speak with apparent aplomb about gazillions of parallel universes, have finally lost their minds. But the cosmologists say the brain problem serves as a valuable reality check as they contemplate the far, far future and zillions of bubble universes popping off from one another in an ever-increasing rush through…

When Readers Comment (1/7/08)

In my post ranting about the Iowa caucuses, I unintentionally set off an argument about whether "I could care less" is fine or whether you should say "I couldn't care less." vavatch had this to say: There's nothing wrong with "could care less". Just imagine it being said in a sarcastic fashion, it makes perfect sense. Language changes and evolves, there's no point getting angry about it being supposedly "incorrect" even though in this case it isn't remotely incorrect. ... The original post should have "could care less" restored and not give in so easily to priggish prescriptivist bullies! To…

"Sir, please try not to befriend the chimps."

Outcast chimp prefers humans to other chimps: We all know not to feed the animals when visiting the zoo. Now the Antwerp Zoo has urged visitors to, please, stop staring at the chimpanzees. New rules have been posted outside the chimp enclosure at the city zoo urging visitors not to form a bond with a particular male chimp named Cheetah. He was raised by humans but is now bonding with the seven other apes at the park, a zoo official said Wednesday. "We ask, we inform our daily visitors and other visitors that one of the monkeys (sic) is particularly open for human contact," zoo spokeswoman…

PeeZizzle does it again

Hilariously, Myers does it again and invades an Expelled event only to get expelled again. This time it was a conference call. There was some mad rustling and flustering about on the other side of the phone some complaints, etc., and then one of them asked me to do the honorable thing and hang up...so I said yes, I would do the honorable thing and hang up while they continued the dishonorable thing and continued to lie. No doubt Nisbet will have an attack of the vapors any moment now. Update: Predictably the DI-hack spin has begun already. Denyse O'Leary claims "Myers apparently somehow got…

Dublin World Atheist Conference

I've been bad. I've been busy. I'm at this conference, and the combination of bad wifi (I can't get connected in my room at all) and constant distractions means I haven't been keeping you updated here. Fortunately, Rorschach is here and has been blogging away while I can't, so I can just cheat and link to him. The Muslims have invaded. They don't have much stamina. They were there for Richard Dawkins' session yesterday, asked a stupid question, and since have retired to a table outside, where they peddle bad literature that looks like clones of Christian creationist nonsense. I gave a talk…

Today in Science (1012)

But first, your DonorsChoose update. We seem to have stalled out at 19% of our goal. While I’m sure we can feel happy that we are positively impacting the education of 210 students (and four of our challenges have been met), it has been five days since any reader has donated. Our masters at Seed have generously volunteered to sweeten the pot a little. In addition to the $15,000 in matching funds that they are putting up, donors can enter to win prizes, namely: 1 iPod nano 21 "Seed Hearts Threadless" tee shirts 21 ScienceBlogs mugs 21 subscriptions to Seed magazine 9 copies of "The Best…

Friday Poem

Eternal Circle I sang the song slowlyAs she stood in the shadowsShe stepped to the lightAs my silver strings spunShe called with her eyesTo the tune I’s a-playin’But the song it was longAnd I’d only begun Through a bullet of lightHer face was reflectin’The fast fading wordsThat rolled from my tongueWith a long-distance lookHer eyes was on fireBut the song it was longAnd there was more to be sung. My eyes danced a circleAcross her clear outlineWith her head tilted sidewaysShe called me againAs the tune drifted outShe breathed hard through the echoBut the song it was longAnd it was far to the…