Science
pontiff | November 18, 2009Last Friday I went to at talk by Brian David Johnson from Intel. That sentence sounds like any other that an academic could write--always with the going to seminars we acahacks are. That is until you hear that Brian David Johnson is a "consumer experience architect" in the Digital Home - User Experience Group at Intel. Okay that is a bit odd for a typical seminar speaker, but still lies in the "reasonable" range. And then you find out the title of his talks is "Brain Machines: Robots, Free Will and Fictional Prototyping as a Tool for AI Design" and you say, whah? Which is exactly what a…
awild | November 17, 2009
The chaotic evolution of colony size in ants. (Tree re-analyzed from Brady et al 2006, colony data taken from Hoelldobler & Wilson 1990 and other sources)
This tree depicts how colony size evolves in ants. The purple/blue colors represent small colonies with only a few to a few dozen ants, while the yellows and oranges represent species with enormous colonies of tens or hundreds of thousands of individuals. What's exciting about this rainbow-colored figure?
If you were expecting ant evolution to be an inexorable march towards larger and more complex societies, this tree should…
catdynamics | November 17, 2009deCode, the genetics startup that genotyped the entire population of Iceland and reconstructed the Book of Icelanders is going down
deCode files for US bankruptcy
assets are to be sold off and company may be liquidated.
This could get complicated - the database of icelandic genetic sequences is not a simple commercial property and I would expect the Icelandic government to intercede to prevents its sale.
This is also catastrophic for Icelandic PhDs - deCode employed a lot of bio researchers, many will probably seek to leave the country, other companies like prokaria will not be able to…
drorzel | November 17, 2009As every physics-loving dog knows, the idea that electrons behave like waves was first suggested by Loius Victor Pierre Raymond de Broglie (the 7th duc de Broglie) in 1923. The proper pronunciation of his surname is a mystery even to human physicists, though. So, how would you say it?
Louis Victor Pierre Raymond de Broglie's surname is pronounced:(polls)
Even though Louis was a quantum pioneer, please choose only one of the available options.
drorzel | November 17, 2009There's been an independent rediscovery of the notion of using dogs to explain physics, as you can see in this YouTube video of Golden Retrievers explaining the structure of atoms:
Emmy thinks she should get royalties, in the form of cheese. But then, she thinks that about everything...
drorzel | November 16, 2009Blogging has been light of late because I was in the Houston area for the weekend, at the annual meeting of Sigma Xi, the scientific research honor society (think Phi Beta Kappa, but for science nerds). Every chapter is required to send a representative to the annual meeting at least once every three years, and as I'm the current president of the Union chapter, I got to go this year.
In a lot of ways, the meeting was more Boskone than DAMOP, and I'm not just saying that because there were little ribbons for everybody's badges. This is an obvious consequence of the fact that it was mostly a…
grrlscientist | November 15, 2009tags: 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…
pharyngula | November 15, 2009My little laptop is functional again, so at least I'll be able to blog these Sunday morning IGERT sessions in real-time. I still have to transcribe my notes from yesterday; I'll plan on getting that done on the plane this afternoon.
Kristi Montooth: Mitochondrial-nuclear epistasis for metabolic fitness in flies
How do physiological systems evolve to maintain metabolic fitness? This is a process that involves interactions between two genomes, the nuclear and mitochondrial. Energy metabolism is important and is the target of mutation, but the same players are found all across the tree of life…
grrlscientist | November 15, 2009tags: religion, fundamentalism, christianity, humor, satire, funny, evolution shmevolution, Edward Current, streaming video
Edward Current comments about all of the ignorant evilutionists (including me) who are contaminating the world with our crazy ideas. Nevermind that we have proof and the religious wingnuts do not.
awild | November 12, 2009
Ross Crozier last week at the Chicago Field Museum
I learned this morning that pioneering ant biologist Ross Crozier has passed away. This is terrible news, and entirely unexpected.
Ross- a soft-spoken Australian- ushered social insects into the age of molecular biology. He karyotyped hundreds of ant species. He sequenced the honeybee mitochondrial genome. He documented natural selection in ant immune genes. He studied colony structure in termites, and speciation in ants. There's almost nothing in social insect genetics that Ross didn't do first.
Ross's passing is quite a shock-…
drorzel | November 11, 2009Some years ago, I heard Bob Park give a talk about pseudoscience, using "How to get rich and famous abusing your science knowledge" as a framing device. He ran through the deceptions involved in a bunch of high-profile "science" based scams and scares-- homeopathy, free energy, power lines causing cancer, etc.
Over at Live Granades, there's a four-step guide to creating a scientific controversy that gives you something close to Park's template:
1. Pick something that is regarded as true by the vast majority of scientists in the field and claim that it causes something bad.
2. Demand that…
drorzel | November 11, 2009I've gradually gotten used to the idea that as a semi-pro blogger, I will occasionally be sent review copies of books I've never heard of. These are generally physics books, and I have a stack of them sitting next to the bed at the moment, not being read nearly fast enough.
It's only recently that I realized that, having written a book in which I explain quantum mechanics through conversations with my dog, I'll probably start getting dog books as well. Not that there's anything wrong with that, mind-- we like free books, here in Chateau Steelypips-- but it's going to be a significant change.…
rallain | November 10, 2009Maybe this isn't that mysterious. However, quite some time ago my daughter found this rock in the backyard. First, you must understand that this is an odd occurrence. In this part of Louisiana, there really aren't any rocks, just dirt. When she showed it to me, I readily dismissed it as some lava rock from someone's garden. That was the end of the story until a year later when she found it again. This time, I held it and realized it was way too dense to be a a normal lava rock. Holding it up to a magnet, I found that there was some interaction.
Skip forward a little bit of time. I had…
awild | November 10, 2009
An oversized tyrannosaur photo-bombs the Global Ant Project group portrait, November 5-7 2009 at the Chicago Field Museum (photo by Darolyn Striley).
Last week I attended a conference ambitiously titled "Global Ant Project synthesis meeting II". Partly, I went out of curiosity about what this "Global Ant Project" might be. But mostly, I went for the chance to catch up with old myrmecological friends, eavesdrop on the latest ant gossip, and visit Chicago's fabulous Field Museum of Natural History. How'd it go? Mission accomplished on all counts. You can see my photos of the event…
drorzel | November 10, 2009I failed to write something on the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall yesterday, partly because I think the other six million blog posts on the subject had it pretty well covered. Another factor, though, was the fact that I don't have the sort of crystal-clear recollection of where I was and what I was doing on that night. I can reconstruct where I must've been-- I was a college freshman, so I would've watched it in the tv room on the second floor of Fayerweather-- but I don't clearly recall the event itself. It's all mixed together with the endless discussions of What It All Meant…
awild | November 9, 2009The following is a guest post from millipede expert Paul Marek.
The eerie glow of a Motyxia millipede (photo by P. Marek)
I study millipedes in the family Xystodesmidae (order Polydesmida). These millipedes contain hydrogen cyanide as a defensive chemical and use aposematic coloration to warn predators of their toxicity. Coloration patterns in these species include bright yellows, oranges, reds, and violet.
One nocturnal genus in this family, Motyxia, known only from California, does not display conspicuous coloration. These millipedes do something even more remarkableâthey produce a…
pharyngula | November 9, 2009Discover Magazine announced a contest to create a two-minute video explanation of evolution many months ago, and we finally have a winner. All five of the entries are good, so go to the link and watch them all!
bioephemera | November 8, 2009I'm currently attending the Grand Opening of the new Laboratory at Harvard University, "an exhibition and meeting space for student idea development within and between the arts and sciences," for a special colloquium on Art, Science, and Creativity featuring David Edwards (author of ArtScience), Lisa Randall, and others. This is awesome. Stay tuned for a report tomorrow.
drorzel | November 6, 2009Today's Quantum Optics lecture is about quantum computing experiments, and how different types of systems stack up. Quantum computing, as you probably know if you're reading this blog, is based on building a computer whose "bits" can not only take on "0" and "1" states, but arbitrary superpositions of "0" and "1". Such a computer would be able to out-perform any classical computer on certain types of problems, and would open the exciting possibility of a windows installation that is both working and hung up at the same time.
There are roughly as many types of proposed quantum computers as…