noise
dr. dolittle | February 22, 2016 Left Top: Pacific hatchetfish; Left Bottom: longfin lanternfish; Right: an acoustic instrument in the Pacific Ocean. (Images from Scripps Institution of Oceanography press release)
I love a good mystery. This one has puzzled scientists for several years now...ever since they discovered a humming or buzzing noise in the Pacific ocean, an otherwise rather quiet place. This was no ordinary noise, that they knew of. In a recent interview on NPR, Dr. Simone Baumann-Pickering, Scripps Institution of Oceanography (La Jolla, California) shared what she and her team think is causing all that noise…
dr. dolittle | August 2, 2015
Research published in the Journal of Experimental Biology shows that noisy humans are impacting the physiology and behaviors of dolphins and whales. To compete against man-made noises, these animals are altering the amplitude, frequency or length of their vocalizations or repeat what they need to say with the hope of being heard. Dr. Maria Holt and colleagues studied a par of bottlenose dophins vocalizing and discovered that the oxygen intake of the animals increased as they raised their voices. The team then calculated the number of additional calories the dolphins would need to ingest to…
dr. dolittle | July 26, 2013A fly landing in the ear of a tourist visiting Peru turns out to be more than just annoying. The screwworm fly had sufficient time to lay eggs that hatched flesh-eating maggots in her ear canal.
Warning: the video may be disturbing to some viewers
As strange as this sounds, it is not that uncommon
Fortunately the screwworm fly has been effectively eradicated in the United States since the 1960's by releasing sterile male flies resulting in fewer and fewer offspring. This work was conducted by the USDA as you can imagine how this fly would decimate livestock.
egrossman | June 1, 2011by Elizabeth Grossman
"With what's on the table in Washington now, you may think the technical phrase is 'job-killing OSHA standards' but standards save lives," said David Michaels, Assistant Secretary of Labor of Occupational Safety and Health, in his address to the American Industrial Hygiene Association meeting in Portland, Oregon on May 18th. "OSHA doesn't kill jobs. OSHA stops jobs from killing workers."
To occupational health and safety professionals, this is not news - and it's a message that Michaels has taken on the road over the past year - but in the current anti-regulatory…
stoat | November 29, 2010On of the key parts of science is prediction. Or so we're told. So it is fun to watch various people rip Steve Goddard's predictions of sea ice to shreds. WUWT is the one boosting Goddard's worthless noise.
* RMG seems to be the most complete, prompted I think by:
* Tamino and
* Neven.
There's a video, too, if you're in the habit of watching moving pictures.
Update
An update, but worth its own header. While we're on forecasting, I am reminded of something altogether more real: the Keenlyside fiasco. RC has a recent post pointing out how wrong K et al. were (but in a caring, consensual sort of…
cagapakis | September 10, 2010
Noise obscures meaningful information. Noise is what ruins your carefully designed synthetic biology gene circuit. But noise is part of life and life, it turns out, needs noise. There's a terrific review article in this week's Nature discussing recent theoretical and experimental work on biological noise showing functional roles for molecular, genetic, and evolutionary noise.
From the abstract:
The genetic circuits that regulate cellular functions are subject to stochastic fluctuations, or 'noise', in the levels of their components. Noise, far from just a nuisance, has begun to be…
cwilcox | March 17, 2009Picture this: It's Monday morning, and you wake up groggy to your alarm because the incessant traffic and blaring of truck horns from the local highway kept you from getting a good nights' sleep. You'd go back to sleep, but your spouse is already up watching TV and that annoying anchor for the 6 AM news is peppily rambling about how great his week abroad in Hawaii was - like an image of him in a speedo is what you need in your head first thing.
You hop in the shower, if only to drown out the television, and try and remember what exactly it was that you were supposed to do before work this…