Science
bcohen | August 25, 2009Part 1 | Pt. 2 (below) | Pt. 3
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Part 2 with Julie Sze, discussing her book Noxious New York, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-blogger series can be found here.
WF: Let's do this: I know we already brought up environmental justice before, but could you define it in your terms for the readers? In your use and experience, does it differ from environmental racism, does it differ from, say, an anti-toxics activism that some link to Love Canal and Lois Gibbs?
JS: That is a huge question in the book. I define environmental justice as the social movement that emerged in response…
grrlscientist | August 24, 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 a 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. To send your submissions to Scientia Pro Publica, either use this automated submission form or use the cute little widget on the right (sometimes that widget doesn't upload when the mother site is sick). Be sure to include the URL or "…
grrlscientist | August 24, 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 a 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. To send your submissions to Scientia Pro Publica, either use this automated submission form or use the cute little widget on the right (sometimes that widget doesn't upload when the mother site is sick). Be sure to include the URL or "…
drorzel | August 24, 2009I'm suffering through a wretched cold at the moment, which will limit my blogging activity. If you're looking for something to do, though, you might want to check out the Revolutionary Minds blog set up by the Corporate Masters. This is basically a short-form online version of a feature from Seed, in which they ask smart people to discuss Big Questions-- a more limited version of those Edge questions that John Brockman does every year.
The current question is:
The boundaries of science are continually expanding as scientists become increasingly integral to finding solutions for larger social…
bcohen | August 24, 2009Part 1 (below) | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3
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The World's Fair is pleased to offer the following discussion about Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice (MIT Press, 2007), with its author Julie Sze. Sze is an associate professor of American Studies at the University of California at Davis, an environmental justice scholar, and the founding director of the Environmental Justice Project at the John Muir Institute for the Environment.
Noxious New York "analyzes the culture, politics, and history of environmental justice activism in New York City within the…
grrlscientist | August 23, 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 | August 22, 2009
Last night, I asked for a copy of an article (I have plenty now, thanks!) that was getting a lot of press. The reason I was looking for it is two-fold: the PR looked awful, expressing some annoying cliches about evolution, but the data looked interesting, good stuff that I was glad to see done. Awful and interesting — I'm a sucker for those jarring combinations. My favorite pizza is jalapeno and pineapple, too.
I'm going to split my discussion of this article in two, just to simplify dealing with it. This is the awful part. I'll do the interesting part a little later.
The paper is about the…
drorzel | August 22, 2009Via Bora on FriendFeed, a cute little art project from MIT that takes a name, scans the Web for mentions of that name, and produces a color-coded bar categorizing the various mentions of that name. Here's what you get if you put my name in:
You can click on it for a bigger image, that makes the labels easier to read (these are screencaps edited in GIMP, because in true MIT Media Lab fashion, the whol site is a Flash thing with no way to link directly to anything). It's nice, and all, but there's something a little bit funny about it. Something... missing. Let's see if we can't illuminate the…
oracknows | August 22, 2009I know this one's been floating around the blogosphere for a while, but it finally made its way to me at a time when I needed something lighthearted and amusing:
Best quotes:
"Well, science doesn't know everything." Well, science knows it doesn't know anything, otherwise it would stop ... But just because science doesn't know everything doesn't mean you can fill in the gaps with whatever fairytale most appeals to you."
..."nutritionist" isn't a protected term. Anyone can call themselves a nutritionist. "Dietitician" is the legally protected term. "Dietician" is like dentist, and "…
pharyngula | August 21, 2009
That Answers in Genesis crackpot, Terry Mortenson, is speaking on "Millions of Years" at the Creation "Museum". Those of us who visited that circus of charlatanry know that this is one of their obsessions — the idea that the earth is more than 6000 years old is one of the wrecking balls atheists use to destroy faith.
He's right, of course. It's a very useful tool. When fundamentalists tie their faith absolutely to a claim that is easily refuted, that contradicts the evidence, and that requires them to constantly escalate their denial and delusions in order to sustain their belief, it makes…
drorzel | August 21, 2009So, I was checking to see that last night's Baby Blogging post had posted properly, when I noticed something unpleasant in the right column:
I recognize that this is the price we pay for being ad-supported, here at ScienceBlogs. It's unreasonable to expect every ad company on the Internet to perfectly screen all their content before serving ads to our blogs, especially given the sheer number of crank ads that are out there.
I am within my rights, however, to call out garbage when I see it. Particularly quantum garbage (though I'm no fan of fly-by-night Internet pseudo-universities, either),…
awild | August 20, 2009Biodiversity discovery continues apace. The past couple of weeks have seen not one, but TWO new myrmicine ant genera.
First, Shattuck described the Australian Austromorium:
Austromorium hetericki Shattuck 2009 - Australia
Then this morning, Fernández et al introduced a pretty little yellow ant from Brazil, Diaphoromyrma:
Diaphoromyrma sofiae Fernández et al 2009 - Brazil
Neither of these new ants show any unambiguous relationship to existing ant genera. But that's been the story with myrmicinae, even in the age of molecular systematics. The subfamily contains nearly half of all…
drorzel | August 20, 2009I have a bunch of errand-running to do today, so I will leave you with a Dorky Poll question for entertainment, this time regarding the work of the great Sir Isaac Newton:
Which of Isaac Newton's Laws is your favorite?(trends)
We're still dealing with classical physics, here, so superpositions of results are not allowed. Pick one and only one answer.
oracknows | August 20, 2009One of the advantages of hanging out around home on the proverbial staycation is that, instead of actually paying more attention to the news, I've paid less attention to the news. That's why I didn't notice some stories from earlier this week about what the new director of the NIH, Francis Collins, plans to do.
Regular readers probably know that, other than the occasional snarky comment on other people's blogs, I haven't (much) engaged in the blogospheric kerfuffle over Collins' religion and the (in my opinion) vastly overblown fear in some quarters that he would inject his religion into his…
drorzel | August 20, 2009... to write a guest post at the Science and Entertainment Exchange blog. So I did, on science communication:
I was asked to write a guest-blog post about "increased incentives for scientists to develop their communications skills." I'm happy to oblige, but in typical ornery-blogger fashion, the first thing I want to do is take issue with the question's phrasing. While it's commonly believed that scientists lack communication skills, that's very far from the truth.
It is almost impossible to be a successful scientist without also being a good communicator. Communicating results to other…
drorzel | August 20, 2009I tagged Steinn's post on publishing a comment a few days ago, because I thought it was pretty funny. In the interim, it's been picked up by the usual suspects as more evidence of the need to completely discard the current publishing model in favor of something more blog-like.
None of the subsequent discussion has answered what, to me, seems like the most obvious problem with the original story. Namely, why the insistence on publishing this as a Comment in the first place? I mean, here's the start of the saga:
1. Read a paper in the most prestigious journal in your field that "proves" that…
grrlscientist | August 20, 2009tags: How Proteins Are Made From DNA in a Living Cell, biology, molecular biology, DNA, streaming video
This video uses the latest research to create an animation of how DNA gives rise to proteins in a living cell. But do you think the word "machine" is correct? I have difficulty with the use of that word .. [4:27]
grrlscientist | August 19, 2009tags: Scientia Pro Publica, Science for the People, biology, evolution, medicine, earth science, behavioral ecology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, blog carnival
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
The summer has caused the carnival contributions to be reduced to a minimal number, but as always, all of the contributions are valuable and interesting reading. I am sure that the number of submissions will increase as soon as school begins soon.
Astrophysics
This thoughtful analysis describes cloud…
awild | August 19, 2009
In case you were wondering, ants turn out to be ambidextrous.
Instead of favoring one side or the other as we humans do with our hands, ants show no preference for working with either mandible. That's the conclusion of a new study by Cassill & Singh:
Abstract: The elongation and sharp teeth of ant mandibles are considered important adaptations that have contributed to ants successful colonization of terrestrial habitats worldwide. In extant ant species, mandibles function as hunting and defense weapons, as well as multipurpose tools for excavating soil, cutting leaves, capturing and…
catdynamics | August 19, 2009Interesting new paper coming out in Nature this week, presenting early scientific results from LIGO on the amplitude of stochastic gravitational radiation background of cosmological origin.
LIGO went into science operation a few years ago, achieving phase I design sensitivity at the end of that set of operation, the S5 science run from Nov 5th 2005 till Sep 30th 2007. During that time a year of coincident operation at the Hanford and Livingston interferometers was achieved, and the results of this data set are coming out.
LIGO Hanford (click to embiggen)
LIGO shut down for interim…