Misc
apalazzo | November 8, 2007A micrograph of some wacky crystals I found.
Sometimes even crap looks cool.
apalazzo | November 7, 2007Bora (from A Blog Around the Clock) will be in Boston tomorrow. If anyone is interested you can meet us at the Miracle of Science Bar - we'll try to get there by 8PM. Friday, Bora will be discussing the future of science communication at the mini conference entitled Publishing in the New Millennium: A Forum on Publishing in the Biosciences. For more details click here or visit Anna Kushnir's blog.
vhughes | November 7, 2007For your weekly viewing pleasure, here are this week's large-scale versions of the 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.
From Flickr, by josef.stuefer
Characteristic spectrum of hydrogen as seen through a diffraction grating, from Flickr, by mirrorgirl
A wind farm, from Flickr, by eurodana
"Grand…
eanthes | November 6, 2007The conference has been astounding, but today, day four, I'm officially getting brain fatigue. (Notice how these posts are getting shorter?) Nevertheless, researchers continue to present fascinating work. Today's noteworthy event was a session on neurogenesis. A number of researchers presented interesting twists on the phenomenon, including:
Intermittent fasting significantly increases neurogenesis in mice—even more than calorie restriction does. The finding is particularly interesting because the calorie-restricted mice and the fasting rats were eating the same number of calories. All that…
eanthes | November 5, 2007Today's festivities featured a great talk on neuroethics. Actually, it was one of the first truly good talks I've heard about neuroethics. The speaker was Martha Farah, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. She skipped the dreadful sci-fi speculation that peppers so many talks on neuroethics and stuck to the facts, providing a broad but compelling overview of the current practice of neuro-enhancement. And rather than waffling about over the ethics, she concluded with strong recommendations—specifically, she recommended that there be more public…
eanthes | November 4, 2007Neuropalooza, day two.
Some fascinating presentations this afternoon on corollary discharge. Corollary discharge is the brain's mechanism for distinguishing between self-generated and external stimuli. It helps the brain disregard sensations that are generated by our bodies own movements. For instance, when we view a painting, our eyes are constantly moving across it. Yet, the painting appears stable. For that, we can thank corollary discharge—the messages the brain's motor centers send the sensory processing areas, warning them about upcoming movements. These messages allow the sensory…
eanthes | November 3, 2007Today, 30,000 scientists descended upon San Diego for Neuroscience 2007, the Society for Neuroscience's annual scientific meeting. With more than 16,000 presentations over just five days, the conference is more than any one reporter could possibly cover. But I'm going to do my best, posting daily wrap-ups here and highlighting some of the most interesting, mind-bending (no pun intended) presentations.
The meeting kicked off today with its annual "Dialogues Between Neuroscience in Society" talk, which is traditionally given by someone who's not a neuroscientist. (In previous years, this talk…
vhughes | November 3, 2007
The annual Society for Neuroscience (SfN) conference kicks off today in San Diego.
Seed associate editor Emily Anthes, one of SfN's 30,000 attendees, has graciously offered to do live blogging on Page 3.14 this weekend direct from the conference. The Dalai Lama won't be there this year. But she'll have her pick of entertainment—from keynote speeches by Jeff Hawkins, Andy Grove, and Newt Gingrich; to 16,000-plus scientific presentations; to chatting up some of the biggest names in neuroscience. Stay tuned!
Image Credit: Gaetan Lee
vhughes | November 2, 2007Yesterday was the last day to take part in the DonorsChoose challenge. Now the final tallies are ready, and we are super, super proud: ScienceBlogs readers donated $54,335 for 155 classroom projects. With $15,000 in matching funds from Seed Media group, that means our readers put $69,335 toward U.S. science literacy. WooT!
Janet Stemwedel, ScienceBlogs ringleader of the drive, said that she's "awestruck" at this year's numbers:
I knew already that ScienceBlogs bloggers and readers were strongly committed to the idea that improving math and science literacy would be a good thing, but it's…
vhughes | November 1, 2007Happy November! Last night, kids of all ages sported masks, fangs, third eyes and severed limbs. It's perhaps appropriate, then, that this morning we published our latest question to ScienceBloggers:
"Which parts of the human body could you design better?"
When we asked the bloggers how they'd answer it, Benjamin Cohen sent back a response that gave me pause:
Is this meant as as challenge to the anti-God bloggers, to let them show how they could do it better? I mean, I'm not even a religious blogger, neither pro or anti, but designing the human body "better"? Better than what?
Better…
vhughes | October 30, 2007Once again, feast your eyes on the larger 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.
Threads of a leaf, from Flickr, by NickStenning
A Christmas ornament shows fractals, from Flickr, by oskay
Wetland in Gouldsboro State Park, in Pennsylvania, from WikiMedia Commons
Relief brooch from…
stoat | October 30, 2007Taking a walk from a course at lunchtime I come across Wolvercote cemetary and little signs pointing to "J R R Tolkien, author". So I follow them. And there he is, along with Edith aka Luthien (checking up on wiki I find that "Tolkien's first civilian job after World War I was at the Oxford English Dictionary, where he worked mainly on the history and etymology of words of Germanic origin beginning with the letter W" - isn't that cute. Just think what might have happened had he started on F, instead).
On the grave is a thick red book, which proves on inspection to be a copy of LORT in,…
hrynyshyn | October 29, 2007You know the English language is in trouble when both NPR and the BBC World Service decide that "woman" is an adjective, as in "Argentina has just elected its first woman president." As a copy editor, I had to fix that one numerous times, usually in the copy of young reporters whose excuse was that the proper adjective, "female," was too clinical, and they didn't want their story to read as if it concerned a science project. Oh really?
First, that's no excuse. "Woman" is noun. Look it up. I always managed to win the argument by pointing out that you wouldn't seriously consider using the…
ksharpe | October 26, 2007We're proud of our new channel homepages, and delighted that they give us a chance to feature cool science photos—so delighted that we thought the cropped versions on the channel pages might not be enough. Here are the glorious full 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.
An aquarium…
vhughes | October 24, 2007
I was born in 1984. My earliest memory of a computer is thumbing through a plastic box of black, square 5.25-inch floppy disks, trying to decide whether I wanted to play The Oregon Trail, Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, or Word Munchers on the family Compaq 386.
Since most of the ScienceBloggers have a few years on me, we thought it might be fun to have a stroll down their technological memory lanes. Here's what they remember about old-school computing. (Feel free to give them a hard time about their ages; they're all extremely sensitive.)
Revere (b. A long time ago)
"My first computer…
tqa | October 21, 2007
The Skeptical Alchemist tagged me with the Pharyngula Mutating Meme - a series of questions that can change as they get passed from blogger to blogger according to a set of simple rules.
The original questions were:
1. The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is...
2. The best romantic movie in historical fiction is...
3. The best sexy song in rock is...
The Pharyngula mutating genre meme:
There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...". Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way,…
vhughes | October 20, 2007Page 3.14 gave the usual tough questions to one of our newbies, ScienceWoman, of On Being a Scientist and a Woman. (She's there in the photo, if you look very, very closely!)
What do you do when you're not blogging?
Teach freshman. Write grant proposals. Advise grad students. Change diapers. Breastfeed. You know. The usual.
What is your blog called?
On being a scientist and a woman
Where did that name come from?
I guess I wanted a blog name that described what I intended to blog about. And since people keep referring to my blog as self-explanatory, it must have worked. But I think it might be…
hrynyshyn | October 18, 2007Sooner or later, it would seem even the most brilliant and accomplished scientist says something stupid. James Watson's disappointing pronouncement on race and intelligence is in no way excusable, but it may be explainable. Would that it were not so, but I fear the law of inevitable stupidity will only become more apparent thanks to human longevity and the ever-expanding volume of the blogosphere.
Watson is far from being alone when it comes to that subset of distinguished and accomplished elder statesmen and women of academia who have stepped over the line of reason. Consider these other…
vhughes | October 17, 2007For the Salon feature in the June 2006 issue of Seed, we brought together the curator of the American Museum of Natural History, Niles Eldredge, with novelist Andrea Barrett to talk about the role of narrative in science.
Next Monday, October 22, Barrett will read from her new novel, The Air We Breathe, at the 92nd Street Y in New York City.
Barrett, who studied biology in college, writes historical novels whose themes betray her love for science. (Many of her characters, in fact, are 19th-century scientists.) Moreover, she sees science in the writing process itself. In the Salon discussion…