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Spherical Waves and the Hairy Ball Theorem

Boy howdy do we love spheres in physics. Sure we might tell you that the reason involves deep truths in topology, and symmetry, and group theory, and all that mathematical arcana, and in fact there's a lot of truth to that. But if we're completely honest, or at least if I'm completely honest, I have to admit that I love spheres because they're easy. All that lovely deep symmetry tends to produce enormous simplifications in whatever actual calculations we happen to do involving spheres. Hence, our love for pretending everything is a sphere, or at least close enough for govermnemt work. There's…

A Week in Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam: Part One

First of all, i apologize for leaving everyone high and dry with no word. I received a few emails from worry worts (which I appreciated!), but seriously all is well. I just needed a few days post-Europe to collect my thoughts and re-adjust to life in the good US of A. Anyway, here's a recap of how things went down after my last post (about the beach). For the whole trip, I secured a Eurail pass which was a FANTASTIC deal. What this pass gives you is free travel in the countries that you choose for one (lower) price. I bought one for France, Belgium, and the Netherlands---this is really what…

Book Review: Coming to Life by Christiane Nusslein-Volhard

It is truly a challenge to write both scientifically, informatively, and accessibly. However, Christiane Nusslein-Volhard is able to strike a remarkable balance in her new book on developmental biology, Coming to Life. She succinctly summarizes crucial discoveries and experiments in the field, spanning from Darwin and Mendel to very recent work in cloning and gene therapy. But, the book does not read like a laundry list of names, dates, and reagents. Rather, the book feels more like a journey through time and science, with Nusslein-Volhard as the guide, pointing out sights and sounds along…

Just who is oblivious to facts here?

Last December I examined a posting by John Ray who dismissed ozone depletion as a "Greenie scare" using facts he seemed to have just made up by himself. Now he's back, attacking gun control. This time he's not using facts that he made up---he's using facts that Lott made up. He quotes from a review of More Guns, Less Crime by Thomas Jackson: "How strange it must be to be a liberal. Driven by slogans, blinded by superstitions, dazzled by fantasies, the liberal stumbles through life oblivious to facts. There is almost nothing the liberal thinks he…

I had no idea I was stepping into a controversy

It's such a petty and trivial one, though, I can't be too concerned. I'm at Skepticon 3, and I just learned tonight that the convention has been a source of dissent…and when I read the argument, I was stunned at how stupid it was. Apparently, Skepticon has too many atheists in it, and is — wait for it — "harming the cause". I'm not joking. Jeff Wagg, formerly of the JREF, has a long lament deploring that 3 of the 15 talks are explicitly atheistic, and that JT Eberhard, the organizer, emphasizes the problem of religion too much for it to be True Skeptic™ conference. It's utterly batty. Some…

Snow, cold, influenza and colds - Temperature and Infectious Disease

A "potentially historic" blizzard is barreling down on us here in New England, and is poised to drop up to two feet of snow on Boston. All of the schools in the area preemptively closed, our public transit system is shutting down at 3:30pm, and trying to buy groceries last night was bedlam. The snow is just now beginning to fall. Winter in New England can be rough, especially for a California-raised boy like me. It's not just because of the snow and cold, it's also the influenza and common colds. Source - Flickr user "Placbo" The fact that the rate of some infections can vary by season is…

No More Aspirin, Please

From the archives: (18 April 2006) If Massachusetts were a physician, I'd have mixed feelings about visiting him or her. Sure, Dr. Massachusetts would be incredibly persistent and would do its best to make sure I left its office feeling better than when I arrived, but on the other hand if I had any sort of serious condition, I'm skeptical about how far Dr. Mass. would go to treat the underlying causes, rather than just the immediate symptoms. Massachusetts would probably be an adept surgeon, but maybe not a great family doctor. Last week, amid great fanfare, Massachusetts governor Mitt…

Dopamine and Future Forecasting

Ed Yong has a typically excellent post on a new paper that looks at how manipulating dopamine levels in the brain can change our predictions of future pleasure: Tali Sharot from University College London found that if volunteers had more dopamine in their brains as they thought about events in their future, they would imagine those events to be more gratifying. It's the first direct evidence that dopamine influences how happy we expect ourselves to be. Sharot recruited 61 volunteers and asked them to say how happy they'd feel if they visited one of 80 holiday destinations, from Greece to…

Shout out to 'Blog around the Clock'!

Shout out to Bora over at Blog Around the Clock for his post about the USA Science and Engineering Festival. Take a read below or check out his blog. Do you have a blog of your own and want to write a post covering the USA Science and Engineering festival? Put a post up and contact us! Remember two years ago when I went to FEST in Trieste, Italy? (see pictures and coverage, e.g., this,this, this, this and more). Now nixed by Berlusconi who has other priorities than science, the FEST was one of the most exciting and famous science and technology events in the world. Sad that FEST is no more (…

Tipping point watch

More gumf from the Grauniad. Supposedly based on something in PNAS: anyone seen it? The usual suspects: the Potsdam folk and Tim Lenton and so on. Sadly (?) the online version doesn't have the appalling map that the print edition has, featuring highly implausible timescales for those bits I know anything about (Greenland and W Ant gone in 300 years). One of the dangerous tipping points was the greening of the Sahara, errrrm, because that could lead to dangerously low food prices? Shurely shom mishtake. I'm being unfair: that gets a mention (in print) as a rare beneficial example. Anyway, I…

Short Story Club: "The Jaguar House, in Shadow," by Aliette de Bodard

As mentioned a little while ago, Locus is running a Short Story Club to discuss the award-nominated stories that are available online. First up is Aliette de Bodard's "The Jaguar House, in Shadow". Like her novels and other notable short fiction, this has a Central American theme, though it's alternate-history SF rather than fantasy. This is a sort of caper story, set in a high-tech Mexica empire, where the elite order of Jaguar Knights are the only survivors of a bloody purge instigated by the new emperor, which has wiped out all the other orders. Xochitl, a young-ish female knight started a…

Economics of Writing

While I was out, John Scalzi had an interesting post about the changing economics of short story writing. Back in the day, Robert Heinlein made a living selling stories at a penny a word: As I was reading this again I was curious as to what at penny in 1939 would rate out to here in 2007, so I used the Consumer Price Index Calculator from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis to find out. Turns out that to you'd need fifteen cents in today's money, more or less, to equal the buying power of that 1939 penny. Dropping Heinlein's $70 into the calculator, you find that it was the equivalent of…

Technology News and Stuff

A robotic suit named "HAL" (will they never learn???) will become available for 2,200 monthly rental in Japan. It is actually a brain-directed mobility assistance device. The 22-pound (10-kilogram) battery-operated computer system is belted to the waist. It captures the brain signals and relays them to mechanical leg braces strapped to the thighs and knees, which then provide robotic assistance to people as they walk. Wikipedia reduces its server complexity by moving all services to one Ubuntu distro. According to computerworld: In a few months, Wikipedia will finish a major…

Think Science Now and Biotech's Communication Challenge

On TV, Neil deGrasse Tyson uses narrative to dramatize the importance of basic research. Last week in San Diego, I participated on a panel at the BIO 2008 meetings that focused on the communication challenges facing the biotech industry. Organized by Richard Gallagher, editor of The Scientist magazine, a major topic of discussion were the challenges that industry faces in communicating the value of basic research. In fact, this was also a major topic at the Cal Tech seminar that I ran on Tuesday. When the public thinks about "science," they generally think in terms of either medical advances…

Experimental Biology 2012 - Tuesday & Wednesday

I have had a lot of fun at this year's Experimental Biology conference. I always enjoy attending the symposia to listen to current research news as well as interact with fellow comparative physiologists at all levels of training. Here are the highlights from the sessions on Tuesday and Wednesday: Tuesday: J. Hicks, August Krogh Lecture: "Tales from the heart: A comparative and evolutionary perspective of the vertebrate circulatory system" Dr. Hicks gave a wonderful talk on the evolution of the heart and the physiological purpose of shunting that occurs in the crocodilian heart, which is four…

David Byrne Interviews Daniel Levitin -- or is it the other way around?

This month's issue of Seed magazine features an interview, or really more of a discussion between music researcher Daniel Levitin and David Byrne. Even better, you can read the whole article online! Byrne has been one of my musical heroes for decades now, and Levitin is a phenomenal researcher who really knows how to write. I'm about two-thirds of the way through his book This Is Your Brain on Music now, and I'm very much enjoying the read. So how does the interview go? It reads a little awkwardly -- you get the sense that Byrne and Levitin just sat down for a somewhat choreographed chat, and…

Resurrecting One of the World's 1st Video Games

This guest post is written by Peter Takacs, a physicist in Brookhaven Lab's Instrumentation Division. Takacs, who earned his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, joined Brookhaven in 1979. Peter Takacs More than a half-century ago, Brookhaven Lab nuclear physicist Willy Higinbotham sought to "liven up the place" with an experiment in entertainment. At BNL's annual open day in 1958, Higinbotham created what is often credited as the world's first video game. Hundreds waited in line for a chance to play "Tennis for Two," an interactive game made from an analog computer, two chunky…

Tid Bits

It has been a while. Here goes: 'Do you want to catch up on your Darwin? Here's a link to the Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online. Want something to listen to while you are stuck in traffic? How about the audio version of The Origin of Species. Also there is a great podcast from the Whitehead - I've been wanting to write about this for a while - go check it out. And there is the Science Saturdays at Bloggerheads.tv that I've mentioned previously. What else is there ... Via Hsien at Eye on DNA I stumbled onto this clip produced by Genome British Columbia's Learning Centre: ... uhm ... I…

Wall Street Journal on Lancet study

I missed this when it first came out, but Carl Bialik has written excellent summary of the issues in the Wall Street Journal. Researchers concluded that about 100,000 more Iraqis had died outside Fallujah since the invasion than would have died had the prewar death rate continued. Yet the study, published in the British medical journal Lancet, was roundly criticized for discarding the Fallujah data from calculations. Others questioned the study for extrapolating from only 89 death reports outside Fallujah, including reports of 21 violent deaths. The biggest concern with the Lancet study…

News Tid Bits

Summers and the Allston expansion. Latest stats on gender and higher education. And free books! Ladies and Gentlemen start your hard drives. (all quotes+links below the fold) From today's Boston Globe: As Harvard University searches for a new leader, questions loom over its last president's most ambitious project: turning America's oldest university into the nation's hub for life sciences. During his 5-year tenure as the university's president, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers worked to put Harvard at the forefront of research on how the human cell works, a question the school'…

LA LA LA LA LA - NY Times and the physics of football

People say I am picky. Ok, sometimes I am. But somebody has to stand up for what is right and just. Maybe I am that person. Please stop using the word force if you don't know what it is. There. I said it. You can attack me now. It wasn't just one thing that got me fired up. It was two things. First, I read this article on physics and football (Physics of 'The Hit' from the NY Times). If it was just this article, I would have let it go and moved on. But no. One of my kids just happened to be watching MythBusters (We all love MythBusters) and there was a discussion that used the term…

Industrialized Science

Wired has now put more photos from my article on the Allen Brain Atlas online. They're grotesquely gorgeous: While the Allen Atlas of gene expression has already proven itself to be a valuable research tool, I think the project's most profound long-term impact will come from its methodological innovations. For the most part, modern science remains a field of artisans, of technicians and grad students doing experiments by hand. However, because the Allen Institute needed to generate such vast amounts of data, they realized that a different approach was required. And so they pioneered a high-…

InnoCentive

Have you heard about InnoCentive? It's my new favorite website. The premise of the site is simple: "seekers" post their scientific problems and "solvers" try to solve them. If the problem is successfully solved, then the "solver" gets a specified monetary reward. (The money is the incentive part of InnoCentive.) The questions on the site are astonishingly varied, and include everything from a food company looking for a "Reduced Fat Chocolate-Flavored Compound Coating" (Reward: $40,000) to a research foundation looking for a "Biomarker for measuring disease progression in Amyotrophic Lateral…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Travis Saunders

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009. Today, I asked Travis Saunders (Twitter), my SciBling from the Obesity Panacea blog to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and…

Biology is Power

I got a lot of interesting responses to my post about DIYbio and how modeling innovation in biotech on computer hacker culture may lead to a science that is less "democratized" than what is being proposed. My friend Adam pointed me to Jaron Lanier's work criticizing the "open" and "free" culture movements online as both unfair and leading to cultural stagnation. While I don't agree with all of Lanier's arguments about the prospects of an open digital culture, he makes a lot of really important points that resonate with my feelings about the future of science based on the open online model, in…

Egyptian 2011 Revolution: Euphoria, Then Reality

This article was co-authored with Dr. Morad Abou-Sabe', President of the Arab American League of Voters of New Jersey. CNN's Ivan Watson talks to John King from Cairo about his exclusive interview with Egyptian activist Wael Ghonim. {February 9, 2011} The Egyptian revolution of January 25th, 2011 created widespread euphoria of the kind only wide-eyed optimists enjoy. It was a moment in Egypt's history that should never be forgotten. It evolved naturally after six decades of oppressive military rule of Egyptians who had - almost - given up hope of any chance for change. Increasing…

A cancer quackfest

Oh, goody. I think I see future blog fodder for the second half of September. (When you've been in the blogging biz as along as I have, you think that far in advance when the opportunity presents itself.) Well, maybe it's blog fodder. The problem is that I would actually have to wade through the blog fodder. You see, I'm referring to something that one of my least favorite cancer quacks, Robert O. Young, turned me on to yesterday. The same way that antivaccinationists have their yearly antivaccine quackfest known as Autism One, cancer quacks apparently like to have their quackfests, too. Only…

My Picks From ScienceDaily

Primates Expect Others To Act Rationally: When trying to understand someone's intentions, non-human primates expect others to act rationally by performing the most appropriate action allowed by the environment, according to a new study by researchers at Harvard University. The work was led by Justin Wood, a graduate student in the Department of Psychology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, with David Glynn, a research assistant, and Marc Hauser, professor of psychology at Harvard, along with Brenda Phillips of Boston University. Brain's Timing Linked With Timescales Of The…

Congratulations to Timothy Sandefur

Despite the fact that the first thing he did upon returning from his weekend getaway was bust my chops for my take on the Dan Rather fake memo story (LOL), I'd like to congratulate Timothy Sandefur both on his award from the Clarement Institute and on the recent publication of his article about the Declaration of Independence in Constitutional interpretation in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. He was kind enough to send me a copy of that article, and I give it a big thumbs up. I hope it will be available online at some point so that you can all benefit from his insights into a…

The Friday Fermentable: Open Source Blog Beer

I can't believe I missed this earlier in the year: Colorado's Flying Dog Brewery created a beer based upon a basic recipe together with reader suggestions in what was called The Open Source Beer Project: You are holding what we believe is the first Open Source Beer to hit the market in the United States. We started with a basic Doppelbock recipe and solicited suggestions from homebrewers on our blog. We took your comments and crafted this Doppelbock, aptly named Collaborator. The blog, the recipe, and the label are online at opensourcebeerproject.com, if you'd like to brew some yourself.…

50,000 physicists can't be wrong! (Who said they were?)

The Internet makes it waaaay to easy to be stupid. Over at my other blog, a collective effort assembled by the Weather Channel, I write exclusively about climate issues. Each of my posts and just about all my colleague's posts dealing with the subject assume that climate change is real and that humans are largely responsible. It's easier that way to keep things short. It also happens to be a reflection of what climatologists think. But almost every post attracts comments from those who beg to differ and last week was no different. Except that some of the comments were more inane than usual.…

The question is...

Has anybody reading this post used twitter in the classroom? Not in the sense of: "Students, write something witty in less than 140 characters" But rather: "Students, we don't mind you using twitter during class, but keep the tweets class specific. Oh yeah, and use this hashtag #subject101" In other words, use the online tool in much the same way as a conference, but specifically for a class in, say, university. I've had a chance to look at a number of articles here and there by searching "using twitter in classroom." This one, in particular, was interesting: Professor Encourages…

Repost: On devolution

I recently [some time back now - this being a repost] received this question in email. I hope the correspondent doesn't mind my posting it anonymously. I notice from www.dictionary.com that the word "Devolution" is a term in biology which means "degeneration". Is it an antonym of the word "Evolution" (which is the most likely reason why creation "scientists" state tiresome statements like "evolution would argue for improvements all the time")? Or does the word "devolution" touch on stuff that may or may not be related to evolutionary biology? Traditionally, degeneration meant simply change…

The myth of Darwin's delay

Many ideas in the history of biology get going for reasons that have to do with agendas, ideologies, and plain old bad scholarship rather than the results of research. In particular, myths regarding the motivations of historical figures. I well remember Erik Erikson's execrable attempt to psychoanalyse Luther from a distance of 500 years, culminating in the claim that he was anal retentive (and, therefore, so was his theology). There are plenty of these myths in the history of biology. One of the longer lasting ones, although it turns out to be a late arrival, is the myth that Darwin didn'…

Infants perceive language sounds differently by age 6 months

A study doesn't have to be brand-new to be interesting. Consider the situation in 1992: It was known that adults are much better at distinguishing between sounds used in their own language compared to other languages. Take the R and L sounds in English. In Japanese, both of these sounds belong in the same category of sounds: both sounds have the same meaning, which is why it's difficult for native Japanese speakers to learn the difference between the sounds in English. In 1992, it was thought that this linguistic specialization occurred at about the age of 1, when infants learn their first…

Nano-Alchemy: Turning Nickel into Platinum

With nanotechnology rapidly advancing, the sci-fi dream of a Star Trek replicator becomes increasingly less fantastic. But such radical technology would, in theory, require the kind of subatomic manipulation that far exceeds current capabilities. Scientists lack both the equipment and the fundamental knowledge of quantum mechanics (the Standard Model, for all its elegance, remains incomplete) to build items from the raw stuff of quarks, gluons, and electrons . . . but what about alchemy? Even Isaac Newton, credited with the dawn of the Age of Reason, felt the mystical draw of alchemy,…

The visible embryo: a visual history

The Moment of Conception and Ensoulment Illumination from Jean Mansel, Vie de Nostre Seigneur Jesus Christ, fifteenth century, fol. 174. 11.1 x 15.8 cm. Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris From "Making Visible Embryos" Via the invaluable Morbid Anatomy, I discovered a remarkable new website, "Making Visible Embryos." Assembled by Tatjana Buklijas and Nick Hopwood of the University of Cambridge, with the support of the Wellcome Trust, it traces the evolution of our understanding of the human embryo, beginning with an unexplored mystery within the inaccessible womb, through epigenesis and…

Lott's claim that women are 2.5 times more likely to be injured if they offer no resistence

So, apart from pretending to be one, what expertise does Lott have on women and gun issues? Well, he wrote this NRO article on women and guns. It was widely linked by bloggers, who felt that the key statistic was this: "The probability of serious injury from a criminal confrontation is 2.5 times greater for women offering no resistance than resisting with a gun." Lott makes the same claim in More Guns, Less Crime, in The Bias Against Guns and in op-eds and speeches and on radio and TV shows. Along with the "98% brandishing" it is one of his favourite…

The Vaccine War: Telling it (mostly) like it is about the anti-vaccine movement

Yesterday, I expressed concern about a FRONTLINE episode that was scheduled to air tonight entitled The Vaccine War (which, by the time you read this, should be available for online viewing in case you missed it). My concern was that there was going to be a heapin' helpin' of false balance, based on the promotional materials. My concerns were later somewhat assuaged based on the pre-airing reaction of the anti-vaccine movement, which was fairly wary, if not hostile even. Of course, any television show that doesn't conclude that their view that vaccines cause autism is at plausible or even…

Blogging my course design process (part 1.1)

After articulating that my most dire need is to get funded, it may seem disjointed to embark on a series of blog posts about teaching, but there you have it, the life of a professor at a place that requires both research and teaching. I still contend that I will get fired from my job much more quickly for failure to teach a course than failure to get funded, so I must do something about the new preparation I have for the fall. The new course, "Experimental Design and Data Analysis," is a graduate-only course with only a loose definition in the course catalog. It hasn't been taught for the…

It's nice to be noticed

Remember how I alluded to the fact that perhaps I've been doing a little too much blogging about dichloroacetate and the unscrupulous "entrepreneurs" who are taking advantage of desperate cancer patients to sell the stuff to them? Well, I can't resist mentioning something truly amusing that I just noticed. The "health freedom" warriors and "entrepreneurs" responsible for The DCA Site and BuyDCA.com appear to have noticed me and my humble efforts. How do I know that they've noticed me? Remember the long exchange between Heather Nordstrom and two people questioning the ethics and legality of…

The Roman Polanski Drama: "Then" vs. "Now" effects.

The Roman Polanski story has certainly gotten interesting. Well, actually, the story is still only mildly interesting, but the discussion about it has developed in interesting ways. So, I thought I'd muddy the waters by throwing in a few thoughts. This is one of those situations where people have started judging each other on their opinions. Don't even think about doing that with me. I have not actually formulated an opinion so you'd be wasting your time and mine. The LA authorities, Polanski's lawyers, none of those involved, have contacted me about my opinion, and I'm not influencing…

Spudly

Probably the biggest loss to last year's flooding in upstate New York was my potato crop. I could have dug them by the end of August, but as the saying goes "shoulda but didnta." It was a warm summer and potatoes stay better in the ground in August here than they do in my house - unless, of course, they are under 3 feet of water. The big loss wasn't the potatoes I had planned to eat all winter, although that was a pity - I can buy potatoes from farms that weren't flooded, up on higher ground. What I lost were 5 years of saved potato seed, varieties initially purchased and now adapted to…

What is healthcare like in the Netherlands?

The Dutch really have it together on health care, they have a system that has been proposed as a model for the US to emulate. In stark contrast to many other European systems, it's actually based entirely on private insurers, rather than a single-payer or entirely national system. Yet the Dutch system is universal, has far superior rates of satisfaction with quality of care and access, and still costs a fraction of what we pay for health care per capita in the US. How is this possible? You can read the Wikipedia entry on the Dutch system or read about it on their Ministry of Health's…

Everyone's Talking About the BECB!

As part of my one-man media blitz for my new book Among the Creationists: Dispatches From the Anti-Evolutionist Frontline, let me call your attention to a few posts. P. Z. Myers has posted a nice review.: What do you do on airplanes? I usually devour a book or two, usually something popcorny and light, sometimes something I need to get read for work. On my trip home from Washington DC, I lucked out: I was handed a book the day I took off, and it turned out to be a damned good read. Glad you liked it, P.Z! On the other hand, I do feel I must respond to his one criticism: Jason Rosenhouse…

Is there really wisdom in crowds?

Here's an interesting article about the wisdom of crowds. It starts by discussing the surprising accuracy of Wikipedia. The reason that Wikipedia is as good as it is (and the reason that living organisms are as sophisticated as they are), is not due to the average quality of the edits (or mutations). Instead, it is due to a much harder to observe process: selection. Some edits survive, while others quickly die. While one can look at the history of a Wikipedia article and see each and every edit, it is much harder to tell how many potential editors looked at an article, subconsciously thought…

The New York Times and fear mongering about the Apple Watch and wearable tech

The New York Times Styles Section giveth. The New York Times Styles Section taketh away. Last week, The NYT Styles Section published an excellent deconstruction of the pseudoscientific activities of Vani Hari, a.k.a. The Food Babe, by Courtney Rubin. Although skeptics might think that it was a tad too "balanced" (as did I), by and large we understand that this was the NYT Style section, and seeing a full-throated skeptical deconstruction of The Food Babe's antics in such a venue is just not in the cards. That's what I'm there for (not to mention other skeptics like Steve Novella), such as…

Rules for Radicals 1: The Prologue

What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away. Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals This is the beginning of a promised (and late) series of posts discussing Saul Alinsky's 1971 book Rules for Radicals. Alinsky started out in community organizing in the 1930s, working in Chicago's infamous "Back of the Yards" neighborhood. Rules for Radicals is a how-to guide for organizing, based on the…

Birds in the News 97 (v3n24) -- Labor Day Edition

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Among the animals Darwin spotted on the Galapagos Islands were the blue-footed boobies, Sula nebouxii excisa. The males show off their blue feet to potential mates with high-stepping dances. Image: Stephen C. Quinn, AMNH. [larger]. Birds in Science A new study published in the leading ornithological journal Ibis has uncovered that for the vast majority of bird species, there are more males than females. The discovery suggests that populations of many of the world's threatened birds could therefore be overestimated,…

The Shallows

I've got a review of The Shallows, a new book by Nicholas Carr on the internet and the brain, in the NY Times: Socrates started what may have been the first technology scare. In the "Phaedrus," he lamented the invention of books, which "create forgetfulness" in the soul. Instead of remembering for themselves, Socrates warned, new readers were blindly trusting in "external written characters." The library was ruining the mind. Needless to say, the printing press only made things worse. In the 17th century, Robert Burton complained, in "The Anatomy of Melancholy," of the "vast chaos and…