ksharpe | May 21, 2008These are the stories that were moving and shaking this week at our European partner site, ScienceBlogs.de:
Biodiversity Issues
Thousands of experts on biodiversity from 191 countries are spending May 19-30 in Bonn, Germany, at the ninth meeting of the signatories to the Convention on Biological Diversity. The Convention is a U.N. treaty that was signed into law at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. It exists to preserve biodiversity and promote smart, sustainable use of the Earth's resources. Key issues on this meeeting's agenda are directly linked to the current food price crisis, the loss of…
vhughes | May 19, 2008Monday night, the British Parliament voted on embryo science laws for the first time in nearly 20 years. After weeks of debate, the House of Commons voted 336 to 176 to reject a proposed ban on the use of human-animal hybrid embryos in scientific research.
Human-animal hybrids were first created in 2003, by Chinese scientists who fused human cells with rabbit eggs. In 2004, researchers in Minnesota created pigs with pig-human blood cells.
So far, this kind of research has been banned in Australia, Canada, France, Germany and Italy.
Do you agree with Parliament's decision?
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ksharpe | May 14, 2008Germany had bank holidays this week, but the bloggers at our European partner site, ScienceBlogs.de, still had time to write about these stories:
Germany: How Green?
Germany is often seen as an environmental pioneer. Tell a German about the American trend of going shopping with a re-usable bag instead of getting plastic at the store, for example, and they might sneer: Germany launched a huge "Jute statt Plastik" ("jute instead of plastic") campaign 30 years ago.
So the bloggers at ScienceBlogs.de are puzzling over an an international comparison of environmental awareness that places Germany…
vhughes | May 12, 2008Despite An Inconvenient Truth's Oscar win and Al Gore's Nobel, public opinion of global warming has changed little since the film's release in 2006.
As Matt Nisbet recently pointed out: "Conventional wisdom pegged Gore's film and media campaign as changing the nature of the debate in the public's mind, but unfortunately this interpretation doesn't hold up to the data." Even more surprising is that apparently the debate is most heated among the college educated.
What about you guys? Did the film only tell you what you already knew? Did it change your mind? Did it bore you to tears?
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vhughes | May 9, 2008Where do you do science? Seed Magazine wants to know.
We've all seen the stereotypical pictures of a science lab: microscopes and petri dishes sitting atop sterile work benches; electric circuits sunk in a mess of metal wires and batteries; equations scribbled on blackboards. But we also know that plenty of world-changing science goes on in non-typical places.
Now hard at work on the next issue, Seed editors want to see the typical or not-so-typical places where you do science. For the chance to get your scientific work space featured in Seed, please send a photo of it to art@seedmediagroup.…
ksharpe | May 7, 2008It's the pithiest headlines of the past week at our European partner site, ScienceBlogs.de!
Friedrich Schiller's Skull Still at Large
A two-year investigation to determine which of two skulls belonged to the celebrated German poet Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) has found that neither is a match. This prolonging of a 180-year-old mystery doesn't thrill Ludmila Carone: "It is not that I do not appreciate Schiller's works. But the man is dead and a dead skull is not expected to create new literature."
Schools Resist Standardized Rankings
Germany's teachers don't like to be graded. As the…
vhughes | May 5, 2008Last Thursday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) with a vote of 414 to 1. Lauded by most media pundits as an example of "forward-looking" legislation, the bill forbids companies from viewing the genetic profiles of their clients or employees. President Bush has promised to sign the bill.
But just how "forward-looking" is GINA? Does current genetic technology really put us in danger of genetic discrimination? How much longer before the themes in Gattaca become reality?
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ksharpe | April 30, 2008These top stories rounded out the month of April at our European partner site, ScienceBlogs.de. This will also be the last installment of the weekly update prepared and translated by ScienceBlogs.de assistant Anwen Roberts. She'll be greatly missed. Look for a slightly different format and feel starting next week.
Dynamic Science Blogs
Benedikt Köhler of Viralmythen has analyzed the growth of German science blogs as a ratio of last month's and recent Technorati rankings, and visualized his results in a tag cloud. As Beatrice Lugger writes at Neurons:
"His approach is based on an analysis of…
vhughes | April 28, 2008About a week ago, ScienceBlogger Randy Olson (documentary filmmaker of "Flock of Dodos" fame) left a comment on Shifting Baselines suggesting that the best way to combat anti-science propaganda like "Expelled" is with a pro-science film festival. "Right now, if a high school kid makes a really great video about evolution, where is he or she supposed to send it?" he asked. "And more importantly, the presence of such a festival becomes an incentive to draw new talent into the subject."
Chad agrees, but makes the bold suggestion that bloggers could organize such a festival online.
The issue got…
ksharpe | April 23, 2008Spring has sprung, and so have these stories on our European partner site, ScienceBlogs.de:
Nobelist Eric Kandel: "Psychoanalysis needs to move on."
Scienceblogs.de Managing Editor Beatrice Lugger and Klaus Korak from JoVe.com spoke to Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel in Frankfurt. Psychology today still relies on Freud, Kandel says, but should learn to take advantage of modern technologies, such as neural imaging:
"The trouble with Freud is, he is worshipped like some kind of idol. He surely had some important insights into our brain functions, but...he also, not surprisingly, made a lot of…
vhughes | April 21, 2008Of the 83 bloggers currently featured on ScienceBlogs.com, 20 write under pseudonyms. Since many of our bloggers frequently write about highly scientific and/or highly controversial topics, some wondered: But but...Can anonymous bloggers be trusted?!
On a non-ScienceBlog (gasp!) Greg Laden commented that "The cost to the anonymous blogger is that they should expect to be taken less seriously than they may like under certain circumstances... Yes, arguments can stand on their own and in an ideal world that sometimes happens. But no, not in real life. We are cultural beings and interactive…
ksharpe | April 16, 2008A forgotten Soviet spaceship finds a permanent home in a German museum, Researchblogging.org opens a European branch, portraits of Nobel Laureates come to ScienceBlogs.de, and a blogger reasons about the causes for soaring global food prices. It's this week's top stories from our partner site, ScienceBlogs.de:
Final Home for a Space Shuttle
The Speyer Museum of Technology in the town of Speyer, Germany, has purchased a spectacular exhibit: the Buran, a disused Russian launch vehicle and twin sister of the US space shuttle. The Buran had been decaying behind a warehouse in Bahrain, and was…
vhughes | April 14, 2008Last Wednesday, Nature released the results of an informal survey about cognitive enhancers—drugs known to improve concentration and counteract fatigue. Twenty percent of the 1,400 international respondents said they had used cognitive enhancers (such as Ritalin and beta blockers) for non-medical reasons to stimulate their focus, concentration or memory. Eighty percent thought that healthy adults should have the option of taking these drugs if desired.
This week, we're polling our own readers: Should healthy adults have the option of taking cognitive-enhancing drugs for non-medical reasons…
ksharpe | April 10, 2008What's buzzing this week in science and science-blog news in Europe? Wonder no more: it's this week's top stories from our partner site, ScienceBlogs.de:
Bovine New World?
A team of scientists from Newcastle, England has succeeded in creating hybrid embryos from bovine ova and human nuclei from skin cells (something PZ Myers at scienceblogs.com has been looking forward to for months!)
Instantly, the research press release mutated into a Europe-wide ethics panel—which Tobias Maier at WeiterGen dauntlessly chooses to ignore:
"The outcry is enormous, but I'm not committing myself to that...I…
vhughes | April 7, 2008About six months ago, I started a book club with a bunch of my girl friends. So far, we've only read three books. But despite the infrequency of our meetings, the club has been both fun and intellectually fulfilling.
Anyway, the whole experience got me thinking about the popularity of book clubs. The Association of Book Group Readers and Leaders (AGBRL), a "cooperative information clearinghouse to provoke, inspire, and reward individual readers and members of book discussion groups," boasts over 500 members in 40 states and six foreign countries. And that's only counting clubs that bother to…
ksharpe | April 1, 2008It's this week's top stories from our partner site, ScienceBlogs.de:
German Communications Prof Observes U.S. Elections
Miriam Meckel, Professor for Media and Communications Management at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, is touring the States on an Eisenhower Fellowship and sharing her insights into U.S. political campaigning on ScienceBlogs.de, on a guest blog called Amerikanische Begegnungen (American Encounters). Meckel has a ball watching Barack Obama dance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, while she finds that Chris Matthews, host of 'Hardball' on MSNBC, is no match for the…
vhughes | March 31, 2008This week, Jane of See Jane Compute considered the question: Is computer science really a science? She wrote:
The more I thought about it, the more I realized how complex this question really is...Computer science is in many respects a tool. It's a discipline that has its reach into many other disciplines. And that's one of the coolest, most interesting things about it. But that's also what makes it so hard to classify, to quantify.
Jane's further tackling the question in a series of posts. And we thought it would be a great question for this week's reader poll...so please weigh in!
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ksharpe | March 26, 2008These stories made headlines during the past week at our European partner site, ScienceBlogs.de.
GM Potato Goes to German Bundestag
Tobias Meier, who has posted before at his blog WeiterGen about his concerns regarding the EU procedures for authorizing genetically modified food, is amused to find that the German Parliament's FDP (Free Democratic Party) faction is now asking more or less the same questions. "Only just in my blog," he writes,
now in German Parliament... The German FDP party now questions the scientific basis of German ministers' ballot behaviour in EU boards, as exemplified by…
vhughes | March 24, 2008On March 19, the prolific British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke died at age 90. At his 90th birthday party, in December, Clarke made three wishes: for the world to embrace cleaner energy resources, for a lasting peace in his adopted home, Sri Lanka, and for evidence of extraterrestrial beings. So...Which of Clarke's three wishes do you think will happen first?
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Want to know the results? We'll publish them exclusively in next week's ScienceBlogs Weekly Recap—the fun e-newsletter that brings you the top…
ksharpe | March 19, 2008Affirmative action for women professors, inaccurate science at the movies, education and privilege, and a YouTube vid not for the weak of stomach: it's this week's postcard from Europe.
Women-Only Science
The German Federal Ministry for Education and Research is opting for more female scientists. Two hundred women-only professorships are to be created, says Minister Annette Schavan, having observed that the current 11 percent of female professors is decidedly too low.
Tobias Maier at WeiterGen puts forward his view on why this very German form of affirmative action is beside the point:
"This…