the scentific life
pronald | March 5, 2010Science Magazine this week published the winners of this year's International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge.
Self-Fertilization: Heiti Paves and Birger Ilau, Tallinn University of Technology
Within its tiny white flowers, thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana) does what most plants avoid: It fertilizes itself. Heiti Paves of Tallinn University of Technology in Estonia took this photograph of the flower with its pollen grains and ovaries stained blue to show the process in action. From the six pollen heads, the grains grow thin tubes toward the bean-shaped ovaries in the flower…
pronald | March 3, 2010John Broder writes today in the New York Times that the uproar over the unauthorized release of hundreds of emails and recent revelations about a mistake in the IPCC report threatens to undermine decades of work and has badly damaged public trust in the scientific enterprise.
Broder's interviews with scientists reveal two thoughtful but seemingly opposing viewpoints:
'Ralph J. Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences, the most prestigious scientific body in the United States, said that there was a danger that the distrust of climate science could mushroom into doubts about…
pronald | January 4, 2010The word is spreading- we can feed the world without damaging it, if we can entertain some new ideas.
Check out Paul Voosen's article in the NYT and let me know what you think.
pronald | January 2, 2010The idea of writing this particular grant proposal at this specific time clearly makes no sense in the framework of my life, with teaching and traveling and kids and a million other things to do. It would border on the insane to try to do this now and to do it well. Yet the intrinsic impossibility of writing this proposal stays with me. It was with me in the pool this morning, where all was quiet except for the sound of strokes and flip turns in the water. It is with me now. I cannot resist thinking through some of our latest results.
And so it begins. Before I fully realize it, I am sucked…