Science
drorzel | April 27, 2010Dennis Overbye has a piece on "The Big Bang Theory" in today's New York Times, taking the "Is this good or bad for science?" angle:
Three years later some scientists still say that although the series, "The Big Bang Theory" (Monday nights on CBS), is funny and scientifically accurate, they are put off by it.
"Makes me cringe," said Bruce Margon, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, explaining, "The terrible stereotyping of the nerd plus the dumb blond are steps backwards for science literacy."
But other scientists are lining up for guest slots on the show, which has…
pharyngula | April 27, 2010If you've ever invited me out to give a science talk, you know that what I generally talk about is this concept of deep homology: the discovery that features that we often consider the hallmarks of complex metazoan life often have at their core a network of genetic circuitry that was first pioneered in bacteria. What life has done is taken useful functional elements that were worked out in the teeming, diverse gene pools of the dominant single-celled forms of life on earth and repurposed it in novel ways. The really interesting big bang of life occurred long before the Cambrian, as organisms…
bioephemera | April 26, 2010
These are images of cells from GE's IN Cell Analyzer Competition 2010:
every year we invite IN Cell Analyzer users to submit their images to the IN Cell Image Competition. This year we have received over 70 fabulous images from researchers' worldwide, working in areas such as toxicology, malaria, dermatology, obesity, cancer and neurology.
See the full-size images in all their fluorescent glory, and the winners from 2009, at GE's flickr page.
grrlscientist | April 26, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
This week's edition of Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People); "Scientia Pro Publica 27" was published by Mel at her blog, Melliferax.
Of course, this means that the Scientia email account has once more been emptied of submissions, so if we are to publish this blog carnival on a weekly basis this spring, we need to either find others or publish our own essays that are suitable for the next issue of Scientia that will (hopefully!) be published next Monday…
catdynamics | April 26, 2010Beware the pig-like Kanamit.
It's a cookbook!
The real problem is that nobody reads the literature anymore.
There are many Solutions out there, no matter how screwy
Next thing someone will come up with the clever solution to the Fermi Paradox that they have become too introspective and just play silly role playing games all the time...
drorzel | April 26, 2010As of 1:45 Monday, 217 people have cast votes in the Laser Smackdown poll. That's not bad, but it's currently being handily beaten by the 271 people who have voted for a favorite system of units.
The nice thing about using actual poll services for this sort of thing, though, is that I can re-post the poll to boost signal a little. So, here it is again, a list of the twelve most amazing laser applications suggested by my wise and worldly readers, with links to short explanations of the pros and cons of each:
Which of the following is the most amazing application of a laser?Market Research…
awild | April 26, 2010
You're in luck! Antweb has added an excellent blog to handle submitted questions. The answer squad is headed by myrmecologists at the Chicago Field Museum, and so far they've fielded queries about what ants do in winter, whether fire ants will reach the northern U.S., the difference between ants and termites, and several others.
Send your questions to askantweb@calacademy.org.
drorzel | April 26, 2010I'm currently enjoying the high, thin whistle of an impending deadline, so here are a couple of poll questions about infuriating behaviors to pass the time. The first is about people:
Which of these is more infuriating to read/watch/hear?online surveys
The second about presentations:
Which of these talks is more infuriating to listen to?Market Research
My answers to these are probably a big part of why I sometimes have trouble with the Internet and the people on it. I'm interested to know what other people think, though. And while the polls themselves are binary choices, feel free to…
rallain | April 26, 2010I meant to mention this earlier since it happened a little while ago. There is this "mini-conference" with three schools: Southeastern Louisiana University, Southern Mississippi University, and the University of South Alabama. The purpose is to give students (and some faculty) a chance to present their work at a smaller conference. I really enjoy this, mostly because it is small and I get to see lots of undergrad talks. There are two talks that stuck in my head.
Dr. Jiu Ding "Dynamical Geometry: From Order to Chaos and Sierpinski Pedal Triangles"
Jiu Ding is a mathematics professor at…
grrlscientist | April 25, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
~ Arnold Lobel [1933-1987] author of many popular children's books.
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited…
grrlscientist | April 24, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
The next edition of Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) will publish this Monday and as usual, it is seeking submissions and hosts! Can you help by sending URLs for your own or others' well-written science, medicine, and nature blog essays to me or by volunteering to host this carnival on your blog?
This week's edition of Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People); "Scientia Pro Publica 26" was published by Dan at his group blog, Genomics Law Report…
bioephemera | April 24, 2010Yesterday was a great day for space images. First, celebrating Hubble's 20th anniversary (via Wired):
This craggy fantasy mountaintop enshrouded by wispy clouds looks like a bizarre landscape from Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" or a Dr. Seuss book, depending on your imagination. The NASA Hubble Space Telescope image, which is even more dramatic than fiction, captures the chaotic activity atop a three-light-year-tall pillar of gas and dust that is being eaten away by the brilliant light from nearby bright stars. The pillar is also being assaulted from within, as infant stars buried inside…
bioephemera | April 23, 2010
FYI: I'll be appearing next Friday on a panel as part of the "Unruly Democracy: Science Blogs and the Public Sphere" workshop sponsored by the Program on Science, Technology and Society at the Harvard Kennedy School, the Shorenstein Center at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Knight Science Journalism program at MIT. I'll be appearing with Chris Mooney of the Intersection/Discover on a panel called "Science and the Web."
Now, if you've read the blog for a while, you'll know I'm not a new media cheerleader. I do love new media, but I also have many concerns about its evolving mores. So in…
grrlscientist | April 23, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
The next edition of Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) will publish this Monday and as usual, it is seeking submissions and hosts! Can you help by sending URLs for your own or others' well-written science, medicine, and nature blog essays to me or by volunteering to host this carnival on your blog?
This week's edition of Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People); "Scientia Pro Publica 26" was published by Dan at his group blog, Genomics Law Report…
drorzel | April 23, 2010In 1960, the first working laser was demonstrated, and promptly dubbed "a solution looking for a problem." In the ensuing fifty years, lasers have found lots of problems to solve, but there has been no consensus about which of the many amazing applications of lasers is the most amazing.
Now, in 2010, as we celebrate the anniversary of the laser, we finally have the technology to definitively answer the question: radio-button polls on the Internet!
Which of the following is the most amazing application of a laser?Market Research
Each of the choices above links to a post I wrote here giving…
oracknows | April 23, 2010If there's one thing that has irritated me (one might even say, irritated me enough to start this blog), it's ideology or religion trumping science. Perhaps the most annoying form of this disease is the tendency of the right wing whackosphere to do everything and anything it can to distort and twist science to agree with its ideology, in particular its religion. One area that I used to write about a lot but don't so much anymore (we bloggers have to subspecialize, I guess, and these days my subspecialty is science-based medicine with only the occasional forays against forms of unreason other…
catdynamics | April 22, 2010Well, Eyjafjallajökull is bubbling along nicely, there is still some ash coming out, but not high enough to carry as far, and less of it.
And the wind is turning, so tomorrow Icelandic airports will close as the ash comes back west across the country.
There is also a curiousity on the ice cap above the Katla volcano.
Life, however goes on, and there is a new band in Iceland.
That I like.
The Icelandic Coastguard sent their
new TF-SIF back over the eruption and got a new radar image of the caldera at Eyjafjallajökull
click to popup bigger image
yup, this caldera - the eruption has…
drorzel | April 22, 2010I wanted to test whether I can put links into PollDaddy poll items for the Laser Smackdown wrap-up tomorrow, so I needed a test poll. But, of course, if I'm going to go to the trouble, I might as well post it, so here's a dorky poll inspired by the fact that the book I'm using for Quantum Mechanics this term uses CGS units:
What's your favorite system of units?online surveys
It was inspired by a quantum book, but it's a classical Internet, so please choose only one. Or leave a comment to complain about the absence of your preferred choice.
drorzel | April 22, 2010What's the application? Producing artificial "stars" to serve as a reference for telescopes using adaptive optics to correct for atmospheric turbulence. This allows ground-based telescopes to produce images that are as good as those from the Hubble Space Telescope.
What problem(s) is it the solution to? "How can I make this giant telescope produce even more impressive pictures?"
How does it work?The basic problem with ground-based telescopes, as anyone who has ever looked at the stars or listened to nursery rhymes can tell you, is that stars "twinkle." They appear to fluctuate in brightness…
awild | April 21, 2010Earlier, while noting greater rates of pseudonymous blogging by women, Morgan Jackson raised the topic of why the majority of tenure-track science positions go to men. It's a striking pattern, especially considering that at the graduate student level women predominate in many fields- including entomology.
The obvious culprit is that women face discrimination in hiring decisions, as several of our commentators mention. And make no mistake- that does happen.
But I've seen enough people drop out of science to realize that there's more than just individual gender-based discrimination at work.…