Science
rallain | September 17, 2009Yes, this can be very complicated. But what should a middle-school student understand about light? You see stuff in textbooks that is either wrong or just a bunch of disconnected factoids (I like the word factoid). So, what do I think is important about light (not at the Maxwell's equations level)
What is a wave
If you want to talk about light, you need to talk about waves. So what is a wave? I like to start with an example. Suppose you are in a sports stadium - maybe a football game. Some inspired fan decides to start a wave. If you look at the individual people, the wave might be…
awild | September 17, 2009
Cimex lectularius - the common bedbug
Bed bugs are back. The resurgence of these blood-feeding pests is perhaps the biggest entomological story of the past decade. Take a look, for instance, at the Google search volume for "bed bugs" over the past few years:
Google Trends shows an increase in bed bug interest relative to other pests, 2004-2009
Why am I telling you all of this?
I've just posted a new online bed bug photo gallery. I was fortunate to get my hands on a vial of live bed bugs recently, and it turns out that the little guys are excellent entomological models. Cute, cuddly…
awild | September 17, 2009...and creates a visual representation of the Pyramica page history over at iphylo:
This is a continuation of an issue I blogged about a couple months ago.
pharyngula | September 16, 2009There are no more excuses. None.
The defining characteristic of all arguments with creationists is how damned ignorant they are. I'm sure many scientists have been stupefied into stunned silence when they first encounter these people; these advocated of creationism are typically loud and certain and have invested much time and effort into apologetics, but when you sit down and try to have a serious discussion with them, you quickly discover that their knowledge of basic biology is nonexistent. It's worse than that. We're used to freshmen entering our classes who don't know much about the…
drorzel | September 15, 2009We'll keep up the chemical theme that we've been following lately with another Dorky Poll to pass the time while I'm in lab all morning. We're not going to do all of the columns of the periodic table (does anybody really have a favorite transition metal?), but a couple more demand opinions. So, what's your favorite halogen?
What's your favorite halogen?(poll)
Your opinion is important to us. Please choose only one.
grrlscientist | September 14, 2009tags: nature, cosmos, streaming video
This amazing video takes us on a fantastic journey from the outer universe down to the earth, then into a leaf and on into submolecular structures, for a look at quarks that make up atoms.
bioephemera | September 14, 2009An excellent post from language log:
I propose a voluntary ban on the use of generic plurals to express statistical differences, especially in talking to the general public about scientific results in areas with public policy implications.In other words, when we're looking at some property P of two groups X and Y, and a study shows that the distribution of P in X is different from the distribution of P in Y to an extent that is unlikely to be entirely the result of chance, we should avoid explaining this to the general public by saying "X's have more P than Y's", or "X and Y differ in P", or…
drorzel | September 14, 2009Over in Twitter-land, Eric Weinstein is visiting the AMNH at the same time as a bunch of Orthodox Jews, and takes the opportunity for a little Q&A:
Me: Excuse me, but how is the phylogenetic tree reconciled with Torah.
Modern Orthodox Man: Lorentzian time dilation. It's a head hurter.
This is an interesting attempt to square the six-day creation story with modern science, and raises one obvious question: How fast must God have been moving for the six days of creation to last 13.7 billion years?
This is veering into Built on Facts territory, but the relevant formula is:
For six days (5.…
bioephemera | September 13, 2009
Okay, if you're anything like me, you don't have time to read the blogs you already follow. But I do recommend that everyone head over to SEED's Revolutionary Minds Think Tank, where Greg Smith is guiding a conversation on visualizing science.
That's where I found the video above, demonstrating the UCSD Software Studies Initiative's application of "cultural analytics" to Rothko's paintings. When the paintings are treated as data points over an artist's career, they can be compared and contrasted in untraditional ways, revealing new patterns and anomalies. Awesome find!
Here, Smith responds…
awild | September 13, 2009
Proceratium silaceum, alate queen.
Last week at the Vermillion River Observatory I collected this alate queen of Proceratium silaceum, an odd and highly specialized subterranean predator of spider eggs. Once I finished photographing the ant I pickled it in 100% ethanol. The specimen should be in good shape for DNA work.
As Proceratium is both relatively uncommon and phylogenetically interesting, I thought I'd offer the specimen to any lab that might have use for it. Contact me if you're interested.
drorzel | September 13, 2009Dan Meyer, like most people, has long wondered whether there was a good way to predict which check-out line at the grocery store will be the fastest. Unlike most people, he used science to find an answer: "I spent ninety minutes last week just watching, counting, and timing groceries as they slid across a scanner." This produced a graph showing a roughly linear relationship between items in a cart and time spent checking out.
The conclusion: Each item adds 2.9 seconds on average, but each person adds 48 seconds on average. So you would rather be on line behind one person with a full cart than…
ddobbs | September 11, 2009
Frederic Curtiss, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Managed Care Pharmacy, told Reuters Health that data attached to documents by Word has allowed him to discover undisclosed contributors. In one case, for instance, a revised manuscript arrived at his office with four named authors, but when he examined the metadata, he discovered an additional author was making substantial contributions.
When documents are saved in Word, the software attaches additional information, called metadata, which identifies the creator of the document. During the editing process, changes made by additional…
awild | September 10, 2009
Propodilobus pingorum
It's been nearly three weeks since the last new myrmicine ant genus was announced. An eternity, it seems. I've been going through novel-myrmicine-ant-withdrawal after a spate of descriptions earlier this year. Where will we be able to satisfy our craving for new and difficult to distinguish myrmicines?
Zootaxa, of course. This week Michael Branstetter gives us Propodilobus, a monotypic myrmicine that had been placed in the existing genus Stenamma.
Branstetter's paper is basically a detailed genetic and morphological study intended to better define Stenamma, a…
grrlscientist | September 10, 2009
Who: Toni Van Pelt, director of the Center for Inquiry's Office of Public Policy in Washington, D.C.
What: free public presentation, "Lobbying for Science and Reason on Capitol Hill"
Where: University Settlement, 184 Eldridge Street (and Rivington St.) [map] 273 Bowery site (that's at Bowery/Houston, just next door to an excellent Whole Foods branch [map])
When: 730pm, Thursday, 10 September
Toni Van Pelt is the director of the Center for Inquiry's Office of Public Policy in Washington, D.C. She will talk about her work as a lobbyist, promoting and advancing science and secularism. In her…
rallain | September 9, 2009I love this question:
Why is it warmer in the summer than in the winter (for the Northern hemisphere)?
Go ahead and ask your friends. I suppose they will give one of the following likely answers:
The tilt of the Earth
The tilt of the Earth makes us closer to the Sun
We are closer to the Sun
Really, that should be at least 85% of the answers. To really answer the question, think of the following key points:
When it is warm in the Northern Hemisphere, it is cold in the Southern Hemisphere
The Earth's orbit around the Sun is very close to being circular
The seasons depend on the time of…
awild | September 9, 2009
Multiple foundress queens of Acromyrmex versicolor atop their shared fungus garden.
A striking result from recent studies on the co-evolution of leafcutter ants and their fungus is that the two lineages do not show a tight pattern of coevolution. That is, the evolutionary relationships among the fungal lines often deviate from the phylogenetic trees shown by the ants. When ant populations speciate, the fungus doesn't follow.
The lack of cospeciation was puzzling, as the ants and the fungus are intertwined a tight ecological relationship. Each requires the other to survive. The…
drorzel | September 9, 2009One of the odd things about the C-list celebrity life of a semi-pro blogger is that I get a bunch of requests to review books on physics-related topics. Some of these take the form of a book showing up out of the blue, others are preceded by a polite request from the author. Aaron Santos's How Many Licks? is one of the latter, which helps bump it up the list of things to do...
This is a short little book-- 176 pages total-- built around the idea of Fermi Problems, the order-of-magnitude estimates that Enrico Fermi was famous for. The idea is that, with a little basic knowledge and some really…
grrlscientist | September 9, 2009
Who: Toni Van Pelt, director of the Center for Inquiry's Office of Public Policy in Washington, D.C.
What: free public presentation, "Lobbying for Science and Reason on Capitol Hill"
Where: University Settlement, 184 Eldridge Street (and Rivington St.) [map]
When: 730pm, Thursday, 10 September
Toni Van Pelt is the director of the Center for Inquiry's Office of Public Policy in Washington, D.C. She will talk about her work as a lobbyist, promoting and advancing science and secularism. In her work, she asks our congresscritters to base law and policy on empirical evidence and the scientific…
catdynamics | September 9, 2009Our astrobiology graduate seminar has started, and last week it got interesting as we pondered "weird life".
I'm a co-PI of the Penn State Astrobiology Research Center, and as part of our program we run an Astrobiology graduate seminar, which is generally topic based.
This year it is more student oriented, but occasionally the faculty are invited to kibitz.
Last week the theme was "Weird Life" - we fling this at all groups of students we can gather in astrobiology, in the hope that someone will eventually have a flash of insight.
The essential topic is: "if there is life out there that is…
drorzel | September 9, 2009We did the far right column of the periodic table, so here's one for the left: the coolest-chemistry-demo-ever column, the alkali metals:
What's your favorite alkali metal?(surveys)
While you can make heteronuclear alkali dimers, at least in a transient way, we're talking atoms here, not molecules. Choose only one.