Misc
ejohnson | May 14, 2008Readers of denialism blog have long enjoyed the Hoofnagle brothers' determined war against the evils of denialism. Their new co-blogger Dr. Peter Lipson, also known as PalMD, joins them in the fight for scientific truth. Page 3.14 interviewed him and discovered, among other things, a fondness for waffles and Homer (the poet, not the Simpson).
What's your name?
Pete Lipson
What do you do when you're not blogging?
I'm an internist, husband, and father. It's probably in that order, but I'd like to change that eventually.
What is your blog called?
I joined up with the Hoofnagle brothers at…
apalazzo | May 12, 2008Or is it the age of Malthus?
To think that our natural resources can last forever is one of our society's greatest myths. As the world population rises and the standard of living in the developing world increases, the capability to cloth, feed and provide energy through non-renewable resources will inevitably diminish. A couple of weeks ago the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) issued a very frightening report entitled The Age of Scarcity.
What does the report say? Lets look at oil. Here are the major points:
- World oil production peeked about 2 1/2 years ago. The rate of new oil…
ejohnson | May 9, 2008It's that time of the week again! Here are the large versions of this week's channel photos.
(Have a photo you'd like to send in? Email it to photos@scienceblogs.com, or assign the tag "sbhomepage" to one of your photos on Flickr. Note: be sure to assign your photo an "attribution only" or "share and share alike" Creative Commons license so that we can use it.)
First photo here, the rest below the fold.
Life Science. From Flickr, by dro!d
Physical Science. From Flickr, by jurvetson
Environment. The glacial waters of Patagonia. From Flickr, by angela7dreams
Humanities & Social…
apalazzo | May 8, 2008The lack of posts has been epic. Sorry life has been just too hectic.
I'll give you a flavor:
Running around. Setting up experiments. Training young rotation students. Off to Microbiology seminar. Off to Cell Biology talk. Off to Montreal. Where next? Vacation? Need to lengthen those telomeres. Paris, Munich, Reykjavik.
Convoluta Roscoffensis.
Need to get data club speaker. Must find new microscope room. Need to get reagent. Try to find protocol. Must get results!
Time to take a break. Flip journal. APC and mRNA? Strange. Too many people study that protein. It does everything and nothing.…
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…
ejohnson | May 2, 2008To make your Friday that much better, here are the large versions of this week's channel photos.
(Have a photo you'd like to send in? Email it to photos@scienceblogs.com, or assign the tag "sbhomepage" to one of your photos on Flickr. Note: be sure to assign your photo an "attribution only" or "share and share alike" Creative Commons license so that we can use it.)
First photo here, the rest below the fold.
Life Science. A whale surfaces off the Brazilian coastline. From Flickr, by Amnemona
Physical Science. Upper Antelope Canyon in Navajo Tribal Park, Arizona. From Flickr, by Farol's…
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…
ejohnson | April 29, 2008ScienceBlogs is proud to announce the newest member of our blogging community: ERV is the pseudonym of Abbie Smith, an Oklahoma-based graduate student who was bound for medical school until a summer internship turned her on to the research track. She now studies HIV and its evolution from a molecular and biochemical perspective. She also studies...wait for it...ERVs!
What does ERV stand for? We'll give you a clue- it's not emergency response vehicle, English revised version, or expiratory reserve volume (get your mind out of the gutter).
ERV, in this case, stands for endogenous…
apalazzo | April 27, 2008It is interesting how different corners of the world are preoccupied by unique items of interest. Take Montreal, my "home town". There is a long history of hockey here and recently the whole town has gone Berzerk. You see unlike Boston and the Red Sox, Montreal not only has a historic team, but everyone here knows a hockey player. For example the great Mike Bossy went to my high school (note that he never graduated). After leaving the Montreal Suburbs, he played with the NY Islanders and won four consecutive Stanley Cups with them. Unfortunately he had to retire extremely early due to a bad…
ejohnson | April 25, 2008For your viewing pleasure, here are the large versions of this week's channel photos.
(Have a photo you'd like to send in? Email it to photos@scienceblogs.com, or assign the tag "sbhomepage" to one of your photos on Flickr. Note: be sure to assign your photo an "attribution only" or "share and share alike" Creative Commons license so that we can use it.)
First photo here, the rest below the fold.
Life Science. From Flickr, by mrhappy
Physical Science. A rusted logging chain. From Flickr, by johndan
Environment. Fragments of smooth sea glass. From Flickr, by Akuppa
Humanities &…
apalazzo | April 24, 2008I'll be giving a short talk at the University of Montreal's Institute for Reasearch in Immunology and Cancer as part of their Young Investigators Research Symposium.
The title of the talk will be:
Beyond the signal sequence hypothesis: nuclear export and endoplasmic reticulum targeting of mRNAs
Wish me luck!
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…
ejohnson | April 23, 2008Thank god. Earth Day 2008 has come and gone and we can go back to leisure drives in our Suburbans and liberal watering of our front lawns. Time to ditch those canvas grocery bags- who thinks that far ahead?- and return to good old plastic. It's not like we're completely undoing all the good we did yesterday for the Earth- those elms we planted will continue to offset our carbon output all year long!
Okay, we kid. Obviously, awareness of environmental issues in any form is positive, and although we'd like to see people change their habits year-round- rather than a day or two in late April-…
stoat | April 22, 2008Monday: to The Junction, that singularly unappealing Cambridge venue, for Bellowhead who were superb. You can find them on Youtube but its not the same as watching them live. They're on UK tour now...
If you're in Cambridge and that way inclined, on wednesday you can hear John Otway and Wild Willy Barrett. I've heard Wild Willy at the folk fest and he was superb and bizarre. Strongly recommended, I'd go but I have an outing. Read this.
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…
ejohnson | April 18, 2008For your viewing pleasure, here are the large versions of this week's channel photos (but don't lose the love for the little ones!).
(Have a photo you'd like to send in? Email it to photos@scienceblogs.com, or assign the tag "sbhomepage" to one of your photos on Flickr. Note: be sure to assign your photo an "attribution only" or "share and share alike" Creative Commons license so that we can use it.)
First photo here, the rest below the fold.
Life Science. From Flickr, by Joi
Physical Science. The polished surface of malachite. From Flickr, by kevinzim
Environment. A dry lake bed in…
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…
ejohnson | April 11, 2008For your weekly viewing pleasure, here are the plus-size versions of this week's channel photos.
(Have a photo you'd like to send in? Email it to photos@scienceblogs.com, or assign the tag "sbhomepage" to one of your photos on Flickr. Note: be sure to assign your photo an "attribution only" or "share and share alike" Creative Commons license so that we can use it.)
First photo here, the rest below the fold.
Life Science. From Flickr, by emdot
Physical Science. A geyser in Yellowstone National Park. From Flickr, by jurek d.
Environment. From Flickr, by jurvetson
Humanities & Social…
stoat | April 11, 2008Last night we had the first ice-cream van of the summer around our streets. But we didn't stop it and buy one.
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…