Science
ddobbs | January 13, 2010
Tomorrow I fly to North Carolina for the ScienceOnline 2010 conference, or unconference, where on Saturday I will sit down with Ed Yong, Carl Zimmer, John Timmer, and anyone else who squeezes into the room, to talk about rebooting science journalism. The obvious assumption behind the topic (if I can return to the titular metaphor) is that science journalism is such a mess that it needs not just cleaning up, but a wholesale restart. But "rebooting" is probably too mild a term for what most people think is needed; if we're to stick with digital metaphors, I'd to say the assumption is more that…
awild | January 13, 2010If I were to mention an ant-fungus mutualism- that is, an ecological partnership between an ant and a fungus that benefits both- most biologically literate people might think of the famed leafcutter ants and the edible mycelia they cultivate. But that is just one example.
Several other fungi have entered into productive relationships with ants, assisting especially in ant architecture. Consider:
Lasius umbratus walking in the galleries of an underground carton nest (Illinois)
A larger view of the same nest. The intricate galleries are made from fungal mycelia growing through a…
drorzel | January 13, 2010Miscellaneous book-related items for you to read while I spend most of the day in transit to Austin:
While I have yet to see a copy in a Barnes and Noble store locally, it's selling well enough in the national chain for them to have ordered more copies. Yay!
Relatedly, the publisher has just ordered a second printing, woo-hoo! I'm not sure what the total number of copies on paper is, but if they've asked for more, that's definitely a good sign.
I have a couple of radio interviews scheduled for next week, which ought to be an adventure. I'm taping an interview with Jim Scott of WLW in…
grrlscientist | January 12, 2010tags: Grab More Science, LabGrab, science news, technology, graphic, image of the day
Image: LabGrab, 13 January 2010.
An American start-up company in Portland, Oregon, announced the release of their new technology that creates a colorful chart to visualize the volume of science and medical stories published by discipline (above). The boxes are defined by discipline and their sizes are determined by the total number of article headlines published by universities, journals, science news aggregators, and science blogs within the given time period (as defined by the user).
"We read a…
tqa | January 12, 2010
It's been a long time since I've responded to an Uncommon Descent post, and I'm starting to remember why. There's one that went up over there the other day on the fossil record that's really almost mind numbing - starting with the title, which is "Why Not Accept the Fossil Record at Face Value Instead of Imposing a Theory on it?"
Here's what seems to be the main argument:
Hereâs a simple example â extinction estimates. Darwinists will say that 99.99% of species that have ever lived have gone extinct. Well, thatâs actually a bunch of B.S. There are roughly 250,000 species that have been…
grrlscientist | January 12, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Have you read an especially good essay about science, nature or medicine lately? If so, why not share it with the world by submitting the URL for this essay to a blog carnival designed to share excellent writing with others? You don't need to be the author of an essay to submit it for consideration, and this is one way that blog carnivals grow in size and influence: by sharing with others.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is a traveling blog carnival…
bioephemera | January 12, 2010
What can scientists do about Hollywood's ongoing inability to depict science in a realistic manner, as depicted by xkcd? If you're interested in this question (or still angry that Scully was somehow able to complete a Southern blot on trace alien DNA over her lunch hour), you may be interested in tomorrow's Armed with Science guests: blogger Jen Ouellette, who's heading up NAS' Science and Entertainment Exchange, and the executive producer of SyFy's EUREKA.
Jennifer Ouellette, director of the National Academy of Sciences' Science and Entertainment Exchange, and Jamie Paglia, co-creator and…
pharyngula | January 12, 2010Sven DeMilo posted a link to this here, but it's worth promoting up top: a nice compilation of instructive and entertaining videos for zoologists.
bioephemera | January 12, 2010Attention all art/science web-collaborative types! Dave Ng has just formally announced the Phylomon Project. Here's the hook: a paper published in 2000 determined that an 8 year old could identify and characterize 120 different Pokemon characters, but when it comes to animals in their own backyard, kids have no clue.
There's nothing wrong with kids having rich fantasy worlds - far from it. But why not give them the chance to discover that real biology is also incredibly cool - not to mention complex, beautiful, and for many kids, right outside their back door? Maybe I'm showing my age, but…
pontiff | January 12, 2010Another one from Michael, who spotted an article about one of my favorite mathematical words to use in everyday speech (much the chagrin of non-scientists) used in the Supereme Court of the United States:
Supreme Court justices deal in words, and they are always on the lookout for new ones.
University of Michigan law professor Richard D. Friedman discovered that Monday when he answered a question from Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, but added that it was "entirely orthogonal" to the argument he was making in Briscoe v. Virginia.
Friedman attempted to move on, but Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr…
drorzel | January 12, 2010I'm standing in the kitchen, sipping tea and watching snow blowing across the back yard. It's cold enough that the digital thermometer has stopped working, which puts it in the single digits Fahrenheit. I'm not looking forward to walking the dog in this.
"Pretty cold, dude," she says.
"Yeah," I say. "It's cold, all right."
"You better let me outside," she says, tail wagging. "I'm gonna catch a whole bunch of bunnies!"
"A whole bunch? How do you figure?"
"Well, it's so cold that they'll all be together. You know, like one of those Bozo Condensates."
"Bozo Condensate?" It's too early in…
grrlscientist | January 11, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Have you read an especially good essay about science, nature or medicine lately? If so, why not share it with the world by submitting the URL for this essay to a blog carnival designed to share excellent writing with others? You don't need to be the author of an essay to submit it for consideration, and this is one way that blog carnivals grow in size and influence: by sharing with others.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is a traveling blog…
drorzel | January 11, 2010I was looking at some polling about science over the weekend, and discovered that they helpfully provide an online quiz consisting of the factual questions asked of the general public as part of the survey. Amusingly, one of them is actually more difficult to answer correctly if you know a lot about the field than if you only know a little. I'll reproduce it here first, if you would like to take a crack at it, and then I'll explain why it's tricky below the fold.
The global positioning system, or GPS, relies on which of these to work?(answers)
Choose only one answer-- this is being recorded…
tqa | January 11, 2010
The big paleontological news of last week was the announcement that fossil footprints have been discovered that predate - by about 20 million years - the previous contender for the earliest fossil evidence of tetrapods. Naturally, this announcement led almost immediately to a new round of "learning anything new about evolution means that Darwinism is totally wrong" claims from the Creationists.
Their complaints don't impress me much. There's very little difference between the Discovery Institute's "if there were tetrapod footprints 20 million years before Tiktaalik, how can something…
bioephemera | January 11, 2010
As I've observed before, many scientists, especially physicists, seem to have a strong belief that the fundamental truths of nature are inherently elegant and beautiful. This new NPR story on symmetries fits right into that scientific-beauty-is-truth frame - down to the requisite Keats quote at the end:
The point here, as Tennant says, is that in the weird quantum world, under certain precise conditions, an order in nature emerges that was previously unknown. "When I started out I really expected that quantum systems would be somehow more complicated and somehow more confusing than the…
drorzel | January 11, 2010I've made a few references to book-related things that were in the pipeline in recent Obsessive Updates. The first of those has just gone live, an opinion piece for Inside Higher Ed on how the book came about and why more academic scientists should have blogs:
When I started my blog in 2002, I had no idea it would lead me to talking to my dog about physics. Let alone to writing a book about explaining physics to my dog.
I thought of the blog as a way to talk a bit about politics, pop culture, and academic science, and a place to let off a little steam as I went through the tenure process (I…
grrlscientist | January 10, 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…
drorzel | January 10, 2010There's a Kenneth Chang article in the New York Times this morning on the ever popular topic of "If the globe is warming, why is it so darn cold?" It's a good explanation of the weather phenomenon that's making the morning dog walk at Chateau Steelypips so unpleasant.
This reminded me of something I've wondered about the public perception of climate change. There was a good deal of hand-wringing on blogs over some recent polls showing depressingly low numbers of Americans believing in global warming (see this one, for example). This was mostly attributed to the successes of the right-wing…
drorzel | January 10, 2010Every year, John Brockman asks a big selection of smart people to answer some question or another, and posts it on the Internet to provoke discussion. This year's question is "How is the Internet changing the way you think?"
This always seems like a better idea than it ends up being in practice, because the whole thing is presented using Brockman's mad circa-1997 web design skills (at least, I hope he's doing it himself. If he's paying someone to put this together, he's being ripped off). On my large-ish desktop monitor, I have to hit "Page Down" five times to get from the top of the page to…
oracknows | January 9, 2010As regular readers know, I really like Tim Minchin's take on skepticism in general and on alternative medicine in particular. His piece de resistance thus far in his career is a "nine minute beat poem" entitled Storm, in which at a dinner party our performer is forced to deal with a female version of Mike Adams spewing nonsense about "natural remedies," how "science doesn't know everything," how "there's more" than just the material world and "you can't know anything," and how big pharma is just out for profit. Minchin's slapdown of this woo-filled nonsense is epic and hilarious.
It turns out…