Science
bioephemera | March 18, 2010When Google started "suggesting" the most popular search phrases below its query box, I was creeped out. Especially when I saw what it suggests for "is Obama". Yes, I was happier when I didn't know what other people were typing into Google.
However, the folks at HINT.fm took the opposite approach: they created an interface that invites you to explore the most popular search phrases for any given starting words. I took it for a spin to see what the American public is asking about you-know-who: scientists. (You totally thought I was going to say Palin, didn't you?)
click image for a larger…
oracknows | March 18, 2010It's been a while since I wrote about this topic, but I fear for the future of medicine.
Regular readers know what I'm talking about. The infiltration of various unscientific, pseudoscientific, and even anti-scientific "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) modalities into academic medicine seems increasingly to be endangering science-based medicine. Worse, this infiltration of quackery seems at least as bad, if not worse, in academic medicine, so much so that Dr. R.W. coined a most exquisite term for the increasing prevalence of pseudoscience in medical academia: Quackademic medicine…
ddobbs | March 17, 2010Jerry Coyne relates that Birds are getting smaller.
Most students use Wikipedia, avoid telling profs about it When I talk to writing classes, someone will usually ask if I use Wikipedia. I tell them, "It's often my first stop -- never my last."
Carl Zimmer has mashed up the data from his clever online survey and brings to us The Science Reader: A Crowd-Sourced Profile. He found that readers are going digital, but not to ebooks, possibly because they still love paper books, and some other good stuff. While Carl's Mac was crunching the data, he peeked Through the Sexual Looking Glass.
A new…
bioephemera | March 17, 2010While I was on blogcation, I got an email from the watchdog group Stinky Journalism, complaining that prominent science author and professor Jared Diamond (Collapse, Guns, Germs and Steel) was in the hot seat again. (You may remember that Stinky Journalism broke the story about the lawsuit against Diamond arising from his New Yorker piece on tribal violence in New Guinea; I blogged about the fallout of the controversy here and here.)
Really? I thought; what has Diamond supposedly done this time? Here's the scoop from Stinky Journalism:
[In] the February 18 issue of the journal Nature . . .…
oracknows | March 17, 2010
It's rare that I encounter a bit of nonsense that allows me to deploy two of my favorite rhetorical devices. First, it lets me pull out one of my favorite clips from one of my favorite movies, in which the immortal line, "Help! Help! I'm being repressed!" was first uttered. Second, it lets me repeat once again yet another variation of Inigo Montoya's immortal words. It's a two-fer! Not surprisingly, it's courtesy of the anti-vaccine crank blog we've all come to know and love (well, I love it because it has provided me such a target-rich environment for taking on quackery and woo, although I…
grrlscientist | March 17, 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) is less than three weeks away and as usual, it is seeking submissions! Can you help by sending URLs for your own or others' well-written science, medicine, and nature blog essays to me?
Scientia Pro Publica is a traveling blog carnival that celebrates the best science, environment, nature and medical writing that has been published in the blogosphere within the past 60 days targeted specifically to…
ddobbs | March 17, 2010I'll try doing this now and then, maybe regularly, to gather the more notable tweets I get in my twitter feed.
Darwin2009: Population-level traits that affect, and do not affect, invasion success http://ow.ly/1mMUp
jayrosen_nyu: "The New York Times is now as much a technology company as a journalism company." <--- Bill Keller http://jr.ly/2pfz
dhayton: âH-Madnessâ is a new blog on the history of psychiatry, madness, etc. For and by scholars: http://historypsychiatry.wordpress.com/
stevesilberman: The brains of psychopaths may be hypersensitive to dopamine rewards - http://bit.ly/daP9Go…
pharyngula | March 16, 2010
First, you start with a lizard.
Really, I'm not joking. Snakes didn't just appear out of nowhere, nor was there simply some massive cosmic zot of a mutation in some primordial legged ancestor that turned their progeny into slithery limbless serpents. One of the tougher lessons to get across to people is that evolution is not about abrupt transmutations of one form into another, but the gradual accumulation of many changes at the genetic level which are typically buffered and have minimal effects on the phenotype, only rarely expanding into a lineage with a marked difference in morphology.…
drorzel | March 15, 2010I'm terrible about taking notes on conference talks, especially when I'm jet-lagged and was sleep deprived even before I got on the plane. I do jot down the occasional paper reference, though, so here are the things I wrote down, and the talks they were associated with. This should give you some vague idea of what the meeting was like on Monday.
From Joel Moore's talk on topological insulators, one of the Hot New Topics in condensed matter, a review in Nature.
From Phillip Treutlein's talk on optomechanics, a recent preprint on coupling atoms to mechanical oscillators.
From Nathaniel Brahms'…
grrlscientist | March 14, 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) is less than two weeks away and it is seeking submissions! Can you help by sending URLs for well-written science, medicine, and nature blog essays to me?
Scientia Pro Publica is a traveling blog carnival that celebrates the best science, environment, nature and medical writing targeted specifically to the public that has been published in the blogosphere within the past 60 days.
The most recent…
bioephemera | March 14, 2010
Only National Geographic would dare cross The Amazing Race with the mystery of conception to get. . . The Great Sperm Race:
Each of us was the grand prize in an ultimate reality competition, the amazing race a sperm makes on the road to fertilization. Millions of sperm compete while overcoming armies of antibodies, treacherous terrain and impossible odds to reach their single-minded goal. To illustrate the full weight of the challenge, Sizing Up Sperm uses real people to represent 250 million sperm on their marathon quest to be first to reach a single egg.
Obviously there aren't 250 million…
grrlscientist | March 14, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
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 by me and published here for your information and…
oracknows | March 14, 2010...about the internecine warfare that breaks out from time to time around ScienceBlogs. At times we do appear to be a lot like professional wrestling.
Can you find Orac in there?
awild | March 13, 2010
Theodore Pergande (1840-1916)
Over 12,000 ant species have been described since the inception of modern taxonomy 252 years ago. From Formica rufa Linneaus 1758 to Paraparatrechina gnoma LaPolla & Cheng 2010, where did all those names come from?
Now it's easier than ever to find out. The Global Ant Project is assembling a biography for each of the 917 people responsible for our current taxonomy. These are the researchers who have defined the species, assembled them into genera and subfamilies, supplied the latin names, and refined the work of their predecessors.
Efforts like these help…
grrlscientist | March 12, 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) is less than two weeks away and it is seeking submissions! Can you help by sending URLs for well-written science, medicine, and nature blog essays to me?
Scientia Pro Publica is a traveling blog carnival that celebrates the best science, environment, nature and medical writing targeted specifically to the public that has been published in the blogosphere within the past 60 days.
The most recent…
grrlscientist | March 11, 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) is less than two weeks away and it is seeking submissions! Can you help by sending URLs for well-written science, medicine, and nature blog essays to me?
Scientia Pro Publica is a traveling blog carnival that celebrates the best science, environment, nature and medical writing targeted specifically to the public that has been published in the blogosphere within the past 60 days.
The most recent…
awild | March 11, 2010Debbie: Sean Hannity Bugs Entomologists, Belittles-Bug Collection
Bug Girl: Fox News Fail
Hannah: Defending the land grants
drorzel | March 11, 2010Lots of good suggestions as to Portland activities for my trip to the March Meeting next week. There's a second, related problem that I also need help with: What should I do at the meeting itself?
My usual conference is DAMOP, which I'll be going to in May, so while DAMOP is a participating division, and offers some cool-sounding sessions, it seems a little silly to go to the March Meeting and go to DAMOP talks. The whole point of being at the gigantic meeting is to see different stuff than usual.
The problem is, the scientific program includes forty-odd parallel sessions in each time slot,…
grrlscientist | March 10, 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) is less than two weeks away and it is seeking submissions! Can you help by sending URLs for well-written science, medicine, and nature blog essays to me?
Scientia Pro Publica is a traveling blog carnival that celebrates the best science, environment, nature and medical writing targeted specifically to the public that has been published in the blogosphere within the past 60 days.
The most recent…
awild | March 9, 2010Watch beetle guru Anthony Cognato trying to deal with Fox News ignoramus Tucker Carlson:
It isn't news that Fox News isn't, um, news. Nor is it news that Fox can't grasp the benefits of public investment in knowledge creation- perhaps because actual knowledge is anathema to their business model. But I digress.
I'm going to complain instead that Cognato missed out (or was edited out) on a major talking point to counter Fox's bluster. Fox pretends Cognato just sidled up to suckle at the stimulus teat while the getting was good. A university welfare queen, or something. But that's simply…