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Life Science and Earth Science Teachers: A few books for your classroom

I like to pass books about science on to the teachers in my daughter's school for them to have in the classroom (or to pass on to the library, as they wish). Now that you've heard this idea, you will want to do it to! Here's a few suggestions of recent titles that could be available used or cheap. Galapagos Diary: A Complete Guide to the Archipelgo's Birdlife ... in our look at bird books to consider, I wanted to bring in the Galapagos Diary. I cannot tell you which is the best book for birding in the Galapagos, because, sadly, I've never done that myself. But my daughter, Julia, has,…

Louisiana Repeal Effort SB 70 Fails in Committee

Louisiana Senate Bill SB 70 would have repealed Louisiana Revised Statutes 17:285.1, which in turn imposed the inappropriately named Louisiana Science Education Act which, as Barbara Forrest recently noted "was promoted only by creationists. Neither parents, nor science teachers, nor scientists requested it. No one wanted it except the Louisiana Family Forum (LFF), a religious organization that lobbies aggressively for its regressive agenda, and the Discovery Institute (DI), a creationist think tank in Seattle, Washington, that couldn't care less about Louisiana children." Despite the…

Rand Paul Thuggery

In light of this recent story of Rand Paul reporters wrestling a woman to the ground and stepping on her head, I decided to post this political campaign note from Jack Conway's campaign, because it contains parallel (and rather disturbing) information: Rand Paul's issue positions -- and his prior conduct -- are more than quirky or odd. They are wrong. Not just because he thinks our seniors should be forced to pay a new $2,000 Medicare deductible. And not just because he wants a new 23% sales tax on everything nationwide -- a tax that would penalize the poor and middle class. I mean, he even…

How To Get Away With Teaching The Controversy

The following is an abstract from an article by Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education called “WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE "TEACH THE CONTROVERSY" SLOGAN?” available here. a repost a repost Teachers are often exhorted by creationists to "teach the controversy." Although such encouragement sounds on the surface like a proposal for critical thinking instruction, the history of the creationist movement in North America belies this claim. Rather than teach students to analyze and evaluate actual scientific controversies, the intent of "teach the controversy" exhortations is to…

The King Is Dead. Still.

Elvis In 1977 I drove from Nashville down to Memphis with no particular plans regarding Memphis. It was just a place to stop on the way to Hot Springs, Arkansas. I had the name of a cheap motel and a vague idea of where it was. But I kept getting lost. Every time I came to about where this major street was supposed to be, there was a different street there. What the hell was going on? About the fifth time I came to the right/wrong location, it dawned on me ... "Elvis Presley Boulevard" must have just recently been named as such ... That, I realized, could also explain another…

Tech assistance, please: help me with mail!

I've finally had it with my mail software. I need advice on what I can do. Here's the situation: Mac OS X (that's not going to change), the standard Mac Mail program, everything up-to-date with the latest versions. I've got about 20 folders set up in Mail, with filters to automatically redirect incoming mail to sensible places — student email gets top priority, for instance, a couple of listservs get their mail shuffled off to a convenient holding pen, mail from family members gets its own place, etc. Spam is currently not a problem; I've set up all my email accounts to forward through gmail…

NCSE (Including Sbling Joshua Rosenau!) at Netroots Nation

National Center for Science Education staff will be featured at two key panels at the Netroots Nation 2010 conference in Las Vegas at the Hotel Rio. Details below the fold. "The ABCs of the Education Culture Wars" Time: 4:30pm - 5:45pm Date: July 22, 2010 Steven Newton, NCSE Dan Quinn - Texas Freedom Network Michael Bérubé - Literature Professor, Penn. St. Univ. Judy Jennings, Ph.D. - Texas Board of Ed. candidate Rebecca Bell-Metereau, Ph.D. - Texas BOE candidate Activists and leaders on the right have spent the past three decades running "stealth" candidates and funding pressure groups…

Blue Whale Excavation

How big is a blue whale? A blue whale is so big that a person can swim through it's largest blood vessels. A blue whale is so big that there are cars smaller than its heart. The blue whale is the largest animal on earth, now or ever, as far as we know. Its tongue is as large as the largest land animal on the present day earth (elephant). Oh, and it can go faster than most ships. A blue whale is so big that when it dies, it takes YEARS to rot. And it smells REALLY bad. And that is why people are moving out of a certain neighborhood in Canada. NAIL POND, Prince Edward Island - In…

Happy May Day

May Day is the day that we traditionally get our military hardware out and parade it around Moscow and Havana. It is also International Worker's Day and International Labor Day. As with all holidays, there are spooky ancient origins as well. May Day is the half way point between Solstice and Equinox, so it is a good day for a blood sacrifice, ritual sex, or repainting the temple. Whatever suits your particular "world view." For instance, in America, it is the day the President of the United States pretends to fly a Fighter Jet on to an Aircraft Carrier where he declaires: Mission…

Whence "Blue Blood?"

If you came here with the question "Is blood blue" or "Is blood ever blue" or "Is the blood in our veins blue?" then please visit this post: "Is Blood Ever Blue, Science Teachers Want To Know!" Here, we look at the question "What does the term "Blue Blood" mean? A "Blue Blood" is an upper classer, or one with new money, or nobility, or something along those lines (the use of the term varies, as is the case with almost all terms in any language, of course). The meaning of the term came up in discussion of actual blue (or not) blood, here. Well, I looked it up on Wikipedia and following is…

I wonder what the "toxins" brigade of anti-vaccine loons will think of this

I know I've been very, very harsh on Jenny McCarthy. After all, she has become the face of the anti-vaccine movement in America, and her activities are directly endangering children. Let's take a look back, oh, a few days to a video that she made in which she decried all manner of "toxins" in vaccines as the cause of autism, including aluminum (which is not toxic at the doses used in vaccines), mercury (which is no longer in most childhood vaccines other than in trace amounts), antifreeze (there is no antifreeze in vaccines), and ether (again, there is no ether in vaccines). Then look back a…

The mindset of an antivaccinationist revealed, courtesy of Jake Crosby of The Age of Autism blog

Readers may have noticed that we've had a minor antivaccine troll infestation in a couple of previous posts. It's no big deal of course, hardly worth my attention--except for one thing. That one thing is that a certain member of the antivaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism, for which no evidence that vaccines are not associated with autism is strong enough to penetrate its collective Borg-like hivemind and no study suggesting that vaccines are associated with autism is too execrable not to trumpet to the high heavens as "vindication" that the antivaccine cult is correct, arrived to tell us…

But what about the Illuminati and David Icke's reptilians?

The utter discrediting and disgrace of Andrew Wakefield, first by the judgment of the General Medical Council against him and then by the retraction of the crown jewel of his respectability his 1998 Lancet paper that sparked the modern anti-vaccine movement and launched a thousand autism quacks. The reaction of the anti-vaccine loons was very predictable, with Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey producing a hilariously paranoid conspiracy theory and J.B. Handley following suit with more monkey business. Truly, the downfall of their hero, which has been a long time in coming but has finally arrived…

The magic Alzheimer's helmet: A shocking dose of skepticism from ABC News

The other day I mentioned the now-infamous magic Alzheimer's helmet, a device being hyped to the press by a group of scientists on the basis of very little data. Believe it or not, of all organizations, ABC News has published an article citing the skeptics' side. It starts: What if the secret to stopping the progression of Alzheimer's disease -- and perhaps even reversing its ravages -- lay in the use of a special hat? Too crazy, too goofy, too good to be true, warn experts on the debilitating disease. Some more: But Alzheimer's researchers not affiliated with the work say the chances that…

Wegman Report on Hockey Stick

Joe Barton's Committee has released a report they commissioned on the hockey stick by Wegman, Scott and Said (WSS). The focus of the report is much narrower than the NRC report and the results are basically a subset of the NRC report. In particular, both reports find that "off-centre" method used in Mann Bradley and Hughes' 1998 paper (MBH98) tended to produce hockey stick shapes in the first principal component (PC1). Unfortunately, WSS stop there and do not address the question of what difference this makes to the reconstruction (which is not the same as PC1). The NRC panel did address…

Clue stick used some more

Tim Blair has added a slew of updates to try to bolster his case against the accuracy of the British Crime survey. The most interesting things about these updates is the way he introduces his sources: Ex-Labour councillor and academic Dr David Green: Barrister Rehman Chishti quits Labour: Now, if one of these guys was an expert criminologist, mentioning it would strengthen Blair's case, but why mention their associations with Labour? The answer seems clear. It's all about politics to Blair. He thinks that people decide on whether police numbers or crime survey numbers based on which…

Duffy on Global Warming

Chris Mooney has posted a transcript of a talk he gave at Rutgers on way that a misguided balance in science reporting between mainstream science and fringe beliefs misleads people. Michael Duffy has presented a radio program on climate change that doesn't have that problem. He has a range of panellists whose opinions on anthropogenic global warming range all the way from "it isn't happening" to "it doesn't matter". Where can you get panellists like that? The Lavoisier group, of course. Duffy opened the program with this howler: "Few people, for instance, are aware that 99% of…

The Hitler Zombie wants more brains to eat

Vacation time! While Orac off in London recharging his circuits and contemplating the linguistic tricks of limericks and jokes or the glory of black holes, he's rerunning some old stuff from his original Blogspot blog. This particular post first appeared on June 22, 2005 and is the third ever Hitler Zombie post. Although the Undead Führer himself has not yet made an appearance, the concept is there, and this forms the basis for what the monster evolved into. Enjoy! (Note: I did not check all of the links; if some of them are now dead, I'm sorry.) I've been wanting to write about Senator Dick…

Wetterling on ID

I have confirmation from both my son (who was there) and Eva that Patty Wetterling did address the question about whether ID ought to be taught in the schools in a recent debate. Here's what she said: We need to teach the truth about science. Evolution is scientifically accurate. We can't let our science curriculum to be based on religious beliefs. Exactly right. That's not hard to say, you know. There were a few comments in that prior thread that were trying to argue that, since the 6th district has a conservative population, Wetterling was a bad choice to run there—that the DFL should have…

Sylvia Browne tries intimidation when her psychic powers don't work

Congratulations to Robert Lancaster, purveyor of the fine website Stop Sylvia Browne, a site dedicated to documenting the misadventures and misdeeds of the phony "psychic" known as Sylvia Browne. Apparently she has noticed him. In fact, between Robert, The Amazing Randi, and Anderson Cooper piling on to document her errors and downright callousness towards the people for whom she claims to exercise her "psychic gift," she's clearly feeling the heat. Her screw-up over Shawn Hornbeck, where she told his parents that he was dead only to have Shawn discovered alive recently and her telling the…

Lempert on common sense and Lott

Richard Lempert comments on why he found Lott's results implausible when they first came out: To give another example, long before other research called their results into question, it was common sense that made me suspicious of John Lott and David Mustard's claim in the Journal of Legal Studies that right to carry laws diminish violent crime. What made me skeptical was their finding that while right to carry laws diminish violent crimes like murder, rape, and aggravated assault they led to increases in non-violent property crimes. The authors had an explanation for this; namely, that the…

The Australian's War on Science 31

Ian Musgrave has written the post I was going to write on Jon Jenkins' article in the Australian, so I just want to emphasize that fitting a degree six (yes, degree six) to temperature data does not produce a meaningful trend line in any way shape or form. Go read. Note that if the editors at the Australian had bothered to read their own paper just three days earlier they would have known that the Jenkins' claims about the Oregon petition and global cooling were rubbish. News Limited blogger Grame Redfearn also pointed out the enormous holes in Jenkins' arguments and talked to Australia's…

Lott's latest conspiracy theory

As well as his work on guns, John Lott has produced some bizarre claims about the Florida 2000 election. For example: African-American Republicans who voted were 54 to 66 times more likely than the average African American to cast a non-voted ballot (either by not marking that race or voting for too many candidates). To put it another way: For every two additional black Republicans in the average precinct, there was one additional non-voted ballot. By comparison, it took an additional 125 African Americans (of any party affiliation) in the average precinct to produce the same result. So 50%…

Podcast recommendations

I've become a big fan of podcasting and now like to listen to podcasts when I happen to be in my office while I'm working and in my car while driving to and from work. Unfortunately, there is a dearth of good skeptical podcasts, at least in comparison with the number of credulous ones. I thought I'd take this opportunity to mention a few skeptical podcasts that I listen to regularly: 1. Point of Inquiry. This is the official podcast of the Center for Inquiry and has to be near the top of the list for any skeptic to check out regularly. Host D. J. Grothe is a great interviewer, always prepared…

More skepticism about the "psychotics prefer Bush" study

Yesterday, I explained why a study that purports to show that psychotic patients tended to vote for President Bush in the 2004 election and is presently making the rounds to snarky gloating through the left-wing blogosphere is so utterly flawed that almost certainly does not mean what the author claims it does, given the data dredging, small sample size, and the failure even to consider alternative hypotheses to explain the observations. In my discussion, I complained that I had only found one skeptical take on the study among the credulous acceptance and use of the study to imply (or…

Fluoride - it's not just for teeth anymore!

Seems appropriate since controversial topics like vaccines are on the agenda this week. A study published in EHP finds that high fluoride (mean of 8.3 mg/L) or arsenic in water decreases IQ (it's very rare to have a fluoride level this high in the US, artificial fluoridation is supposed to be 0.7-1.2 mg/L and usually is). This isn't anything new really, it's been published multiple times before, just not in a major English language journal (and a couple of the previous studies had some control issues - controlling for Arsenic for one). This comes on the heels of a couple other interesting…

25 Skills Every Doctor Should Possess

As many ScienceBlogs readers know by now, last month Popular Mechanics published a list on their website of "25 Skills Every Man Should Know," which included such esoteric talents as "frame a wall" and "extend your wireless network." How these two made the list over such accomplishments as "find tickets to a Hannah Montana concert," or "pass gas anonymously on an airplane flight" is beyond me, but then again I'm a doctor, not a popular mechanic. Just for fun I'd like to share my version of this meme, so without further ado here is a list of 25 skills every doctor worth his or her salt should…

A Billion Lives Lost Due to Tobacco

One billion people will die of tobacco-related diseases this century unless governments in rich and poor countries alike get serious about preventing smoking, top World Health Organization (WHO) experts said on Monday. This is discouraging news and not just because of the tragedy of watching people voluntarily expose themselves to a premature death (slowly and painfully in many cases) by smoking cigarettes. Contrary to the demagogic wailing about overpopulation heard over the decades, many countries are not producing enough citizens to maintain their economies. Removing a billion or so…

Frustration

What's more disturbing, a frustrated patient or a frustrated oncologist? I only bring this up because I had one of those days at work today where it seemed legions of smartly dressed nurses, secretaries, pharmacists and lab techs were conspiring to drive me insane with their bureaucratic edicts all designed to obstruct my plans to deliver proper medical care [Waaa! The poor widdle kid! -Ed.] Now in the comfort of my home I realize I have violated Rule Number Four of the House of God: "The patient is the one with the disease." As penance let me share my view on the top reasons why patients…

Informed Consent for Drivers

As anyone who has ever received chemotherapy knows, oncologists are required to explain the possible risks and side-effects of all recommended medications before giving them. This is called informed consent and is a crucial part of the process of destroying cancer cells, both seen and unseen. As our training manual clearly states: "It is unethical to introduce a drug and/or biological agent into the body of a person without warning that same person of the potential adverse consequences on his or her personage that introduction of the drug and/or biological agent could introduce." Who writes…

Coffee, Tea, Milk or a Nitroglycerin Tablet?

"One should pour tea into the cup first. This is one of the most controversial points of all; indeed in every family in Britain there are probably two schools of thought on the subject. The milk-first school can bring forward some fairly strong arguments, but I maintain that my own argument is unanswerable. This is that, by putting the tea in first and stirring as one pours, one can exactly regulate the amount of milk whereas one is liable to put in too much milk if one does it the other way round." -George Orwell Thank you, George, but as my old professor used to say, "You're just…

The Sunday Night Poem - Edgar Lee Masters

Edgar Lee Masters wrote forty books in his lifetime, but none equaled the success of his first: Spoon River Anthology, published in 1915. The book is a collection of 244 epitaphs written in blank verse, each spoken by a dearly departed citizen of a small Illinois farming town. The tales of sorrow, anger, mistreatment, ignorance and pride (to name a few) of the dejected souls lying forever beneath their revealing headstones became one of the most popular works of fiction in the 20th century. Those of you who have read it understand what I am talking about. Anyone who hasn't yet had the…

Message from Coronary Arteries: "Remain Calm! All is Well!"

"Enron Founder Kenneth Lay Dies at 64" Upon reading this headline one cannot help but wildly speculate as to the cause of Lay's surprising death. Did he commit suicide? Was his body found in a Washington D.C. park? What on earth happened? Pastor Steve Wende of First United Methodist Church of Houston, said in a statement that church member Lay died unexpectedly of a "massive coronary." With this news all the doctors of the world gave out a collective "Oh, now I get it." Why do we understand? The clue is in the pastor's statement that Lay died "unexpectedly." Unexpectedly? Who are they…

Fridayish Lichenish Fractal

I suppose, if I wanted to make things easier, I would just start calling these the "Weekend Fractal" but it just doesn’t have the same ring. Besides, this week, Carl Zimmer beat me to the Friday Fractal, on naked skin even. (The owner of the fleshy fractal shares some interesting insights on his Julia set; be sure to check it out.) Still, I had this section of a Mandelbrot set lying around, whose autumn hues would be ill fit if posted later in the season: You can see where this slice fits in to the entire set in this short movie: &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp Here, if…

Road Trip!

I’m writing tonight from the currently rain-drenched city of Lincoln, Nebraska, en route to the Yearly Kos Convention in Chicago. Tomorrow, I’ll be meeting up there with other science bloggers, including Tara, Chris Mooney, and Ed Brayton. Most people are flying to the convention, but with my urge to experience the land up close and personal, I chose to drive. Some people have given me funny looks when I mentioned that I was driving. "Through Nebraska? The plains? Why?! They’re so... plain!" But I find this area to be anything but plain. Driving east out of Denver, it isn’t long before the…

Friday Fractal XLIX: Cephalopods Grok Fractals

It seems that cephalopods, from giant squids and octopi to camouflaging cuttlefish, are all the rage these days. As I've shown before, cephalopods can be quite fractalish (or fractals tend to be tentaclish, take your pick.) I'm not exactly sure why these creatures are so loved these days, but who am I to disagree with popular opinion? So, for this week's fractal, I took two Carlo Julia sets, and colored them with different variations of epsilon crossing. I then layered these atop a Mandelbrot set, and some fBm "plasma". In other words, this fractal includes just about everything and the…

Friday Fractal VII

The phoenix is one of those enduring symbols from ancient mythology that occurs frequently in modern culture. Phoenix is a name for places and stars (Hollywood and constellations alike.) It shows up in movies and literature (including the Harry Potter series.) Most importantly (at least for the context used here) this name for a mighty bird, which perished in flame, is a type of fractal. A phoenix set seemed rather fitting for today's image, as we'll soon see. This set (seen whole, at right) is a modification of the original phoenix sets, discovered by Shigehiro Ushiki. Essentially, I began…

Bad habits in the field

Chuck at the Lounge of the Lab Lemming has a good Monday-morning meme: bad geologic habits. What things do you forget to do - or do when you know you shouldn't? I am probably an embarrassment to everyone who ever taught me*. Here's an incomplete list of my bad habits: - Leaving gear at outcrops. (I've actually put bright-colored tape on my rock hammer, to make it easier to see. I also have cultivated the habit of carrying my hammer and my map in my hands, rather than in a pack or attached to my belt, so that something feels wrong if my hands are empty. - Forgetting my camera. Argh. Never go…

Unsolicited advice for dealing with course evaluations

So you're a fairly new professor, done with classes for the summer, ready to dive into research. And then you get your course evaluations back. What do you do? If the course evaluations were excellent, yay! You can walk around feeling good about yourself for a while, and then go back to the research. (Even at a teaching-intensive school, you've got to publish something to get tenure.) If the course evaluations weren't so good, well... First, put them aside and do something that makes you feel good. Talk to someone who likes you. Go for a run. Garden. Read your favorite novel. Go to a movie.…

The Amazing Volcano Rabbit

I've been reading up on this critter for the past few days, ever since I pulled out some old mammal texts I had sitting on the shelf. I got sucked in and thought I would share a bit of what I've read. The volcano rabbit, Romerolagus diazi, is found on the slopes of only four volcanoes in Mexico, south of Mexico city. These four - Pelado, Iztacohuat, Tlaloc and Popocatepetl - are part of the transvolcanic belt (TVB; also called the trans-Mexican volcanic or transverse neovolvanic belt), a biogeographic zone in the center of the country that exhibits a high level of endemism; in other words,…

A model organism…for life

Everything you need to know about biology is in E. coli. Sure, there are some apparent differences between us and a bacterium, but it's all details … lots and lots of details. That sweet humming core of life — metabolism, replication, communication, evolution — it's all whirling away in the tiniest of us all, and so you can learn much that is universally applicable by focusing on just one kind of creature. That, I think, is the message of Carl Zimmer's latest book, Microcosm(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). I could argue a little bit with the idea, since a key principle in understanding evolution is…

Ethidium (Glowing DNA)

Ethidium is a dye that's used in molecular biology to allow DNA to be visualized. Regular DNA isn't colored; it absorbs ultraviolet but not visible light, so you need to use tricks like making the DNA radioactive (which makes it pretty easy to spot), or using dyes that selectively bind to DNA. Ethidium does this by slipping in between the base pairs of DNA, or "intercalating." One ubiquitous method of visualizing DNA is called gel electrophoresis. You have no doubt seen this on some CSI-type show. The basic idea is this: you put DNA inside a water-based gel. DNA is negatively charged, so to…

If texans wrangled insects instead of cattle...

...these would be the beetles of choice. Onthophagus taurus dung beetles, showing size and horn variation among males. Dung beetles in the widespread genus Onthophagus sport a bewildering array of horns. Not only do the horns of different species vary in shape, size, and the body part from which they grow, many species show a marked dimorphism within the males. Consider these two male morphs of O. nigriventris, an African species: The big guy on the right is a major male, and he does pretty much what you'd expect. He bullies his way around with shows of bravado, guarding his burrows…

Teaching Engineers to Blog?

I got a request for advice from Maryam, an old undergrad committee-comrade-in-arms, which I have mangled for clarity: To make a long story short, I'm co-teaching a communication class to engineers and I want to introduce them to science blogging. I'm planning to have them write brief essays about classic science papers (similar to the Beginnings of Immunofluoresence), and then post the essays to a class blog. The main instructor of the class is a rhetorician, so we put emphasis on rhetorical situations and interpersonal communication. I wanted to introduce blogging because it's a new and…

Tiny Cyborgs

Synthetic biology deliberately equates genetic networks to electronic circuits, cells to machines, organisms to factories. In synthetic biology, every living can be thought of as a cyborg, a living machine that can be manipulated, changed to meet our needs, parts swapped in and out like a computer. Some projects in synthetic biology and biologically inspired engineering hope to bring the analogy a step further, combining biological and actual electronic and mechanical components into a single engineered unit, with the goal of essentially making tiny autonomous cyborgs. There are a lot of…

deCODE Genetics on the brink of insolvency

A reader pointed me to this press release on the dire financial state of Icelandic biotech deCODE Genetics.  The slow financial train-wreck that is deCODE has been sliding off the rails for years (see stock price chart below), but things look set to reach their final resolution one way or another within the next few months: the company currently has $3.8 million in cash reserves, but is bleeding out $12 million per quarter, and "believes it has sufficient resources to fund operations only into the latter half of the third quarter".  Where to from here? In the press release, deCODE CEO Kari…

Another Reason to Vote Democratic

If George Bush is driving our nation down a one-way road to hell, it's the Republican-controlled House and Senate that are enabling him to do this. On October 17th, Bush signed into law the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which had previously passed the Senate and House on the 28th and 29th of September, respectively. This is another dangerous piece of legislation from the Bush Administration, one that should leave us all slightly disturbed and give us something else to think about on election day. Current Yale Law student and former Oxford student (and India travel buddy) Cyrus Habib…

The Next Target for Global Warming Denialists: Children's Books

What they clearly lack in substance, they attempt to make up for in style, but global warming denialists certainly aren't winning any points for class. In a September 25th speech in the Senate, Crazy Ol' James Inhofe--who once called global warming "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people" and who ironically serves as the chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee--attacked The New York Times' esteemed environmental reporter Andrew Revkin for what else but his new children's book The North Pole Was Here. "So here we have a very prominent environmental…

Ask a ScienceBlogger: Being a Good Science Teacher

Before I get started here, I have a quick announcement. Seed is seeking reader-submitted questions to ask its ScienceBloggers, so if you have a burning question (and I know you do), submit it to askablogger@seedmediagroup.com. This week's (or last week's, rather) Ask a ScienceBlogger question is "What makes a good science teacher?" I probably put this one off for so long because there's so much to cover there. Since nobody wants to read a 5,000 word essay, and since I've pretty much missed the boat on this one anyway, I'll make this one short. Most of the general qualities that make…

Bacterial Ice-9?

Ice 9 by toastforbrekkie. The idea of Ice-9, although fictional, has always fascinated me. Its properties are so powerful, so influential, that one "seed crystal" can direct its entire surroundings, freezing oceans. A recent discovery of one component of the cell wall of bacterium reminded me of this effect. Let me explain. First: Ice-nine is a fictional material appearing in Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle. It is supposed to be a more stable polymorph of water than common ice (Ice Ih) which instead of melting at 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit), melts at 45.8 °C (114.4 °F…