Science
bioephemera | November 5, 2009Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.
Last week, at the imagine science film festival in New York, Magnetic Movie won the Nature Scientific Merit Award:
In 2009, the Nature Scientific Merit Award went to the film judged to be not only the most deserving but also the most scientifically accurate, Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhard's Magnetic Movie.
I love Magnetic Movie, too - but what think you about the scientific accuracy angle? See what I had to say about it in my Art vs. Science series, earlier this year:
Art vs. Science, Part One: Semiconductor
Art vs. Science, Part Two: You want raw data…
drorzel | November 5, 2009It's not getting as much press as the "X Prize" for private rocket launches, but NASA has quietly been running a contest for work toward a "space elevator," offering up to $2 million for a scheme to transmit power to a small robot climbing a 1km cable. Yesterday, the team from LaserMotive, including certified rocket scientist and friend of the blog Jordin Kare, successfully powered a robot up a 900m cable using diode laser arrays to send power to solar panels on the robot. They managed an average speed of 3.73 m/s, which doesn't get them the full $2 million prize, but qualified them for the $…
bioephemera | November 4, 2009Since I posted last night, DrugMonkey, Dr. Free-Ride, and the Intersection have also checked in with their POVs on this issue. I particularly liked this comment from Dr. Free-Ride:
We get to foot the bill for the effects of other people's "moral failings" here as it is. Why, then, should it be so objectionable to consider spending some public money to figure out how to help people stop? Is it so important that people be punished for their moral failings that we're willing to sustain large-scale societal collateral damage just to enact that punishment?
DrugMonkey linked to a list of talking…
pharyngula | November 4, 2009Last week, I described the lectures I attended at the Chicago 2009 Darwin meetings (Science Life also blogged the event). Two of the talks that were highlights of the meeting for me were the discussions of stickleback evolution by David Kingsley and oldfield mouse evolution by Hopi Hoekstra — seriously, if I were half my age right now, I'd be knocking on their doors, asking if they had room for a grad student or post-doc or bottle-washer. They are using modern techniques in genetics and molecular biology to look at variation in natural populations in the wild, and working out the precise…
drorzel | November 4, 2009It's November now, which means we're edging into winter, and my morning ritual has been expanded to include scraping the frost off the cars when I get back from walking the dog. I've had to do this half a dozen times already, and I've noticed a puzzling pattern.
Our driveway is aligned almost exactly east-west, with the cars facing east when they're pulled in at night. This means that one set of side windows faces north, and the other south. And here's the thing that puzzles me: the frost layer is significantly thicker on the south-facing side windows than on the north-facing side windows. I…
catdynamics | November 3, 2009reports coming out of Ukraine and neighbouring regions that H1N1 'flu strain may be getting nasty in spots
too early to tell for sure, but there are consistent reports out of Ukraine, and also possibly Belarus and Romania, that the local H1N1 'flu strain is a bit more aggressive, making a higher fraction of people more sick, and maybe a higher fatality rate.
Also reports of hemorrhagic 'flu, which is bad, if true.
CIDRAP story:
"The high level of illnesses activity and severe cases, combined with reports of hemorrhagic pneumonia cases, have raised some speculation that the virus might be…
bioephemera | November 3, 2009My mom, like millions of others in the U.S., has been a smoker for decades. She's tried to quit a few times, but it's been hard for her. The thing that's helped the most so far? The nicotine patch.
While the patch is not a universal cure - see the Mayo Clinic's analysis here - physicians back them because, well, the long-term cost of remaining a smoker is too high (for the smoker, the smoker's family, and society). We all know smokers, and love them, and want to help them quit. Right?
But there's a huge double standard in the media, and in society in general, when it comes to drug abuse…
drorzel | November 3, 2009We're going to host the New York Section meeting of the American Physical Society next spring (joint with the New England Section, which will tax our resources), with the theme of the meeting being applications of nuclear physics. We've divided up the job of finding speakers for the meeting, and I'm supposed to be inviting people who can talk about nuclear energy, either fission or fusion.
This is not exactly in my wheelhouse, but I have a couple of ideas. It occurs to me, though, that I have access to a global audience which presumably includes some people who either could give a good talk…
pharyngula | November 2, 2009Here's a nice video about pachycephalosaurs describing a little exercise in taxonomic consolidation.
drorzel | November 2, 2009One of my pet peeves about physics as perceived by the public and presented in the media is the way that everyone assumes that all physicists are theoretical particle physicists. Matt Springer points out another example of this, in this New Scientist article about the opening panel at the Quantum to Cosmos Festival. The panel asks the question "What keeps you up at night?" and as Matt explains in detail most of the answers are pretty far removed from the concerns of the majority of physicists.
But it's a good question even for low-energy experimentalists like myself, as it highlights the…
rallain | November 2, 2009I am sad to say the following comes from a school that I attended. This was from an alumni newsletter regarding the activities of one of the physics faculty.
"Since the time of Archimedes, sciences advanced along two avenues, through new experiments and through theory...."
I have a problem with just that first part, but it goes on:
"For many centuries, theoretical physicists devised clever mathematical methods to describe many physical phenomena, yet some of the most important ones - like the properties of matter, of proteins and living things, or of weather patterns - are far too…
bioephemera | November 1, 2009*That's the Amazon rainforest - not Amazon.com!
Check out this interview from MAKE with Google's Rebecca Moore, who helped an Amazon chief use Google Earth to fight illegal logging.
Lots more here.
grrlscientist | November 1, 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…
grrlscientist | November 1, 2009
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is almost here once more and it is still seeking submissions for tomorrow's edition of this blog carnival! Can you help by sending URLs for well-written blog essays to the host?
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is a traveling blog carnival that celebrates the best science, nature and medical writing targeted specifically to the public that has been published in the blogosphere within the past 60 days.
The…
pharyngula | October 31, 2009Man, philosophers sure take a long time to get to the point.
OK, his outline: 1) development and differential entrenchment in evolution. 2) application of these principles to culture. 3) what new phenomena this theory can capture.
Plunges into "thick, thin, and medium viscosity theories of culture". I have no idea what he's talking about: I hope he'll get into some specifics I can grapple with soon, because right now this is just a wall of words.
Any evolving system must meet Darwin's principles: variation, which is heritable, which has consequences on fitness. Wimsatt suggests two additional…
pharyngula | October 31, 2009Darwin didn't know the basic mechanisms of evolutionary change. Mechanism of inheritance was a black box. Darwin's last publication before his death was "on the dispersal of bivalves". Why are freshwater bivalves so homogeneous in morphology? Describes a beetle with a conch attached to its leg, which provided a mechanism of dispersal. Turns out the specimen was sent to Darwin by Crick's grandfather.
How is variation generated and maintained in natural populations? What genes matter? What will finding the genes tell us?
We find genes underlying phenotypic diversity by comparison of highly…
pharyngula | October 31, 2009How can I resist an opportunity to see Ruse gibbering on the stage? I'm curious to see whether he annoys or enlightens. It could go either way.
He's not going to talk about evo-devo! OK, I'm already annoyed.
Criticizes the infamous New Scientist cover, "Darwin Was Wrong"; received email from Paul Nelson (boo) claiming the edifice of darwinism is crumbling; Rudy Raff has written that evolution requires development to remain relevant. Are today's evolutionists genuinely Darwinian or not?
Plans to pick on something that was self-consciously in Darwin's thinking. Darwin became an evolutionist in…
pharyngula | October 31, 2009Shubin had a tough act to follow, coming after Kingsley's great talk. I'm sure it will be good, though — last night I got a tour of his lab, saw the original Tiktaalik specimens and some new ones, and some of his work in progress (which I won't tell you about until it's published), so I'm confident I'm going to have a happy hour.
Darwin pulled together diverse lines of evidence to document his ideas. The different lines all reinforce each other making the argument even stronger, and what we're seeing now is new syntheses, which is the theme of this talk: how do we use different lines of…
grrlscientist | October 31, 2009
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) was just published recently…