biology
bioephemera | March 7, 2010
A blunt animated message for Surfrider's Rise Above Plastics, with Portland's Borders Perrin Norrander (full credits here)
Via Notcot and others.
oracknows | March 5, 2010Feeling stressed? Run down? Is your face not as chipper and toned as it might be? Of course you are. We all are from time to time, particularly as we journey into middle age and beyond. So what better than a bit of pampering at the spa? There's nothing like a soothing facial to get the skin toned and the face all relaxed. But what kind of facial? What is best to get that blood flowing, those dead skin cells exfoliated, and that skin all toned and tight?
Bird poop, of course. Just check out the Ten Thousand Waves spa in New Mexico and its Japanese Nightingale Facial:
This is our signature…
oracknows | March 2, 2010I hadn't really planned on writing anymore about animal rights extremists. The topic seemed as though it had played out over the few days. But those who've followed this blog know that I'm nothing if not tenacious when I grab onto a topic, and sometimes certain topics demand several posts. More importantly, over the last few days, I've had a minor infestation of animal rights extremists into my blog. Heck, Camille Marino even made an appearance. However, one animal rights apologist has been particularly persistent, someone named Douglas Watts, who's been a particularly persistent pest,…
oracknows | March 1, 2010I spent a lot of time writing about animal rights extremists who have threatened to harass the children of an investigator whom they view as a "vivisector" and how they fetishize the very violence they decry. Unfortunately, I was disappointed to see that a fellow ScienceBlogger, namely Eric Michael Johnson of The Primate Diaries, appears to share some of the scientific misconceptions that the animal rights extremists when he prefaces an Open Letter to the Animal Liberation Front with:
Vivisection, or what in polite society is merely called animal experimentation, is a barbaric practice that…
bioephemera | February 28, 2010
From the Center for Biological Diversity, "Endangered Species Condoms":
To help people understand the impact of overpopulation on other species, and to give them a chance to take action in their own life, the Center is distributing free packets of Endangered Species Condoms depicting six separate species: the polar bear, snail darter, spotted owl, American burying beetle, jaguar, and coquà guajón rock frog.
You can even sign up to win a lifetime supply. Whatever that is.
jstemwedel | February 26, 2010Younger offspring: Hey, look what I grew!
Dr. Free-Ride: Wow, those are tall.
Younger offspring: It's a bean plant.
Dr. Free-Ride: I recognized the shape of the leaves. From the looks of it, you actually have more than one bean plant growing in there.
Younger offspring: When it gets warmer, we should transplant it into one of the garden beds.
Dr. Free-Ride: Mmm. We could try that, but all my garden books warn that beans don't transplant well.
Younger offspring: Then we can just grow it in the cup.
Dr. Free-Ride: OK.
Younger offspring: And then I'll harvest the beans. But I won't eat them…
awild | February 26, 2010Bob Goldstein at UNC has been making some truly divine posters to advertise the talks of scientists visiting the Biology department. They are awesome.
oracknows | February 25, 2010As much as I hate to bring more attention than I did a couple of days ago to the truly evil animal rights extremist website run by a truly despicable animal rights terrorist wannabe Camille Marino, a website whose very title, Negotiation Is Over (NIO) tells you everything you need to know about the attitude of the loons running the site, especially given their targeting of researchers' children for harassment, I can't help but notice that the efforts of fellow science bloggers and myself have been noticed, both at NIO and another animal rights site Thomas Paine Corner.
Good.
The reaction of…
awild | February 24, 2010
Acyrthociphon pisum, the Pea Aphid
The genome sequence of the pea aphid Acyrthosiphon pisum was published today in PLoS. Concurrently, a set of supporting papers has come out in Insect Molecular Biology. This genome is significant for a number of reasons- it's the first Hemipteran genome to be sequenced, aphids have an unusual reproductive cycle, and this particular species is a serious agricultural pest.
I've not had time to fully digest the paper, but it seems the salient features of this genome are:
extensive gene duplications
a higher gene count than most other known genomes (including…
oracknows | February 24, 2010I have to admit, this one made me chuckle.
In an earlier post today, in which I expressed my outrage at animal rights terrorists targeting an investigator's children for harassment at their school, I asked the following question:
That reminds me: Where were these animal rights loons when "Andrew Wakefield was torturing baby Macacque monkeys in the name of horrendously bad science designed to be used as a "made for court" study against vaccine manufacturers?
Paul Browne responded in the comments:
Perhaps crank magnetism also acts as a force field that protects cranks from other cranks.
I…
bioephemera | February 24, 2010Sad, weird, and odd: a 1kg spectacled owl attacked, killed, and ate (part of) a defenseless three-toed sloth. Apparently the owl stabbed its talons in the sloth's neck while it was on the way to the ground to defecate, and then pecked its organs out. I wish I was kidding.
oracknows | February 24, 2010Remember Dario Ringach?
He's the scientist who has endured a prolonged campaign of harassment because of his animal research. I first heard of him in 2006, when, after a campaign of threatening phone calls, people frightening his children, and demonstrations in front of his home, gave up doing primate research. Terrorism and intimidation worked, but who could blame Dr. Ringach? He was afraid for his family. That's because it was more than just threatening e-mails and phone calls, but rather the campaign of intimidation included masked thugs banging on the windows of his house at night,…
awild | February 23, 2010A video from Cambridge University highlights an infectiously enthusiastic Chris Clemente as he figures out how ants stick to smooth surfaces:
Wow.
Two things strike me about the video. First, they simplified the science for a lay audience without fundamentally changing it. That's something of a rarity, as any scientist who has seen their work covered in the media can attest. Second, they did this while retaining a sense of humor and the strong sense of humanity in the scientific process.
Most scientists I know have a similarly intense fascination with their subjects- that's a rich vein for…
scientificactivist | February 21, 2010Last year, I wrote about a scientific controversy over the structure of the influenza M2 proton channel, particularly over the protein's binding site for adamantane type anti-flu drugs. The Schnell/Chou model, based on solution NMR, had the drug binding to the outside of the channel, within the membrane (at a 4:1 drug:protein ratio). On the other hand, the Stouffer/DeGrado model had the drug binding inside the channel (1:1 ratio), based on X-ray crystallography studies.
A new study was recently published in Nature (the same journal that published the original two competing papers), based this…
bioephemera | February 21, 2010FYI: the winners of the AAAS Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge are up! You may recognize some of them - including PhD (Piled Higher and Deeper) cartoonist Jorge Cham. Check 'em out and share your opinions; I'll have more to say when I'm back from blogcation!
grrlscientist | February 19, 2010tags: Center for Inquiry, CFI, NYC Skeptics, Free Inquiry and Secular Humanism, Darwin Day 2010, Ian Tattersall, Massimo Pigliucci, public education, outreach, New York City, NYC, education, streaming video
On the day after the anniversary of Charles Darwin's birthday, prominent paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall gave a public lecture about Darwin and his impact on what we know about human evolution. Tattersall, curator in the anthropology department at the American Museum of Natural History, then sat down for a conversation with Massimo Pigliucci, Chair of the Philosophy Department at…
aardvarchaeology | February 18, 2010
I got a great letter from Reggae Roger Wikell, which I publish in translation with the permission of Roger and Mattias Pettersson with the awesome metal hair. For context, note that these two scholar friends of mine are the area's foremost authorities on Mesolithic sites that have ended up on mountaintops due to post-glacial shoreline displacement. The lithics there are mainly quartz.
Not all that glitters is quartz.
Yesterday we had a planning meeting with Dr. Risberg [quaternary geologist and the Stockholm area's main shoreline displacement guy]. We're going to core bogs at high elevations…
oracknows | February 14, 2010A couple of months ago, I wrote about a case that demonstrated conclusively just how easily even respected researchers can be taken in by psuedoscience. Of course, I was not alone. A number of others, including Steve Novella, James Randi, bioethicist Art Caplan, Hank Schlinger, and myself, recognized the reports that a Belgian man named Rom Houben, who had been in a coma for 23 years, was actually conscious and could communicate with the help of a "facilitator" named Linda Wouters was in fact nothing more than the example of the quackery known as facilitated communication. This is a…
bioephemera | February 13, 2010
Upcoming at Observatory in NYC: Entomologia (Feb 26-April 4), a group show of art incorporating and inspired by insects. I'm particularly intrigued by the discussion scheduled for April 3, "Transgenics, Cybernetics, and Evolution:"
Silkworms engineered to produce pharmaceuticals and hormones, cyborg dragonflies designed for high-speed missions and surveillance... In connection with her recent work, Shanna Maurizi has been delving into the nether regions of genetic engineering and transgenics, molecular biology, and military cybernetics.
Ok, sounds good to me! Plus it's curated by Curious…
grrlscientist | February 12, 2010tags: faith-based birding, mass hysteria, endangered species, extinct species, conservation, politics, Ivory-billed Woodpecker, Campephilus principalis, IBWO, ornithology, birds, researchblogging.org,peer-reviewed research, peer-reviewed paper
The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has posted a reward of $50,000
to be given to anyone who can provide "video, photographic, or
other compelling information and lead a project scientist to a
living wild Ivory-billed Woodpecker."
Mass hysteria is that strange psychological phenomenon where a group of people experience the same hallucination at the…