Science
drorzel | August 19, 2009Kate recently signed up for Facebook, and I was talking to her earlier about some of the options for wasting tons of time entertaining yourself with Facebook, and mentioned the ever-popular trivia quizzes and "personality tests" and the like. Of course, I had to caution her that most of the quizzes are really lame, because the people making them up don't know how to make a good quiz.
Making up good questions is a skill that takes time to master. The key elements that the people behind most Facebook quizzes are missing are good distractors-- the plausible-sounding wrong answers that lead…
pharyngula | August 18, 2009
This is the skull of an arthrodire, an armored placoderm from the Devonian.
Somehow, 20 foot long predatory fish with a mouth lined with razor-edged bony shears has never made me think of sexy time…until I ran across this comparison image.
Oh, schwiiing. It really doesn't take much to get a mammal to associate just about anything with sex. And then, what do you know, the latest Nature has a short article on an interesting fossil: it's the pelvic region of an arthrodire, Incisoscutum ritchiei, and look what it's got: an ossified clasper, comparable to the erectile organ of modern sharks.…
drorzel | August 18, 2009One of the blogs I hyped at the science blogging panel at Worldcon was Built on Facts, Matt Springer's blog explaining introductory physics concepts. You might not think that you want to read a blog that goes through freshman physics problems in detail-- I would've been dubious on the concept, had you explained it to me that way-- but it's really excellent stuff.
He's recently completed a series of posts on Maxwell's Equations, with one post for each of the four equations, plus one bringing them all together: Gauss's Law for Magnetism, Gauss's Law for Electricity, Faraday's Law, and the…
drorzel | August 18, 2009The New York Times yesterday had a story with the dramatic headline DNA Evidence Can Be Fabricated, Scientists Show, explaining that, well, there are nefarious tricks you can pull to falsify DNA evidence, provided you have access to a high-quality biochemical laboratory. The story is a great boon to conspiracy theorists everywhere, especially with this sentence:
Dr. Frumkin is a founder of Nucleix, a company based in Tel Aviv that has developed a test to distinguish real DNA samples from fake ones that it hopes to sell to forensics laboratories.
"See! They're selling fake DNA samples to…
oracknows | August 18, 2009Now here's some perfect reading for a lazy stay-at-home vacation day. It's even pretty science-y. Well, math-y, at least. It may even be the best scientific paper ever. The title says it all:
When Zombies Attack: Mathematical Modeling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection
The long version is at the link above.
The short version is that, if this ever happens, we're screwed.
The intermediate version is at Night of the Living Model.
rallain | August 17, 2009I have been reflecting on my recent failure to realize that the Giant Water Slide Jump was fake (more analysis here). I think the guys that made this video did a really good job on several levels. First, the motion appears to do two important things:
shows constant acceleration in the vertical direction
shows constant velocity in the horizontal direction
That seems like such a simple thing, but it is surprising how often fake videos don't have those two elements. Maybe they were not close, but with the error associated with the panning and zooming camera, it seemed close enough. Also,…
drorzel | August 17, 2009The results of the estimation contest are in. There were 164 serious entries (I excluded the $12,000 and $1,000,000 "guesses" from the final data). The mean value guessed by commenters was $83.30, and the median was not far off, at $77.12. The standard deviation was high-- $43.10-- but as you would expect with a large sample, the standard error (or standard deviation of the mean) was small, $3.37.
Or, in convenient graphical form:
That's a histogram with $20 wide bins showing the number of guesses in a given range. A pretty nice distribution, on the whole.
The red line indicates the actual…
oracknows | August 17, 2009Believe it or not, I happen to be on vacation this week. Fear not, it's a stay-at-home vacation (sometimes the best kind) and therefore my vacation doesn't mean I'll stop blogging. In fact, I consider blogging to be part of my recreation. What my vacation does mean is that I will probably slow down a bit and not do posts that force me to do a lot of background reading. It also means that, because I went to an actual rock concert last night (something I haven't done in years), not only did I sleep in a bit and therefore not have that post that usually goes up here by 8 or 9 AM, but I didn't…
drorzel | August 17, 2009Via I-no-longer-remember-who (the tab's been open for several days), there's a list of What You Might Not Know About Scientific Journals, outlining some of the facts about scientific publication. There's some good stuff, but as you can tell from my title, a lot of it is fairly specific to biomedical journals, and doesn't really apply in my usual context of physics. For example:
The most popular articles in a journal are reviews, editorials, letters, etc. and not research papers. Consequently, journals contain more narrative reviews than genuine research. It's what keeps them in business.
The…
catdynamics | August 17, 2009" 1. Read a paper that has a mistake in it.
2. Write and submit a Comment, politely correcting the mistake...
3. Enjoy your Comment in print along with the author's equally polite Reply, basking in the joy of having participated in the glorious scientific process and of the new friends you've made - the authors whose research you've greatly assisted."
This was circulated anonymously by e-mail among a group of my colleagues.
I asked, and got tracked back to the author who, I am informed, would like to see it out there and with his name on it.
It is, I am assured, a true story. Some of you…
grrlscientist | August 17, 2009tags: How DNA is Replicated in a Living Cell, biology, molecular biology, DNA, streaming video
I still remember when I learned how DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid) replication occurs, and it was like a lightning bolt from the sky: it changed my view of the world and a molecular biologist was born. This video uses the latest research to create an animation of how DNA is replicated in a living cell [1:54]
DNA replication is a fundamental process underlying biological inheritance that occurs in all living organisms to accurately copy their DNA. This process occurs through a "semiconservative"…
bioephemera | August 16, 2009
H. annuus
Macoto Murayama
Nanobots? Alien spaceships? A scene from TRON? No, it's illustrator Macoto Muriyama's delicate diagrams of flower structure. Muriyama says,
Generally, a plant is considered to be a being that has an organic form. However, that is just one of the aspects because along with their organic form, a plant possesses a contradictory element of geometric/mechanical structure. By highlighting the later, the plant's out-of-the-ordinary form is revealed, and in it, a different kind of attractiveness can be found. (source)
See an entire gallery of Muriyama's work at Pink…
bioephemera | August 16, 2009I read Scibling Jonah Lehrer's How We Decide some time ago, but Moveable Type ate my half-finished review, and it's taken me until now to get back to it. You may have seen quite a few reviews elsewhere by now - Adam Kepecs reviewed it for Nature back in April, and to make a long story short, I largely agree with him: Lehrer is a very good writer, but this is not a great book.
Lehrer starts his book with an airplane anecdote, so I'll do the same - although his opening anecdote is about crashing a plane (albeit a simulated plane), so I'm not sure I'd recommend the book for nervous flyers.…
grrlscientist | August 16, 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…
bioephemera | August 14, 2009
It commemorates Hans Christian Ãrsted, who discovered the relationship between electricity and magenetism. Re-enact Ãrsted's experiment here.
But what about that other Hans Christian, Hans Christian Andersen? Here's what the Guardian had to say: "while there's nothing wrong with fairy stories, they haven't contributed much to the development of electric motors."
Ouch! :)
drorzel | August 14, 2009This wooden box sits on top of my dresser, and every afternoon when I come home, I dump the change from my pockets into it. It's getting close to full, as you can see:
I've got a couple of extra galley proofs kicking around, so here's a contest:
Guess the total dollar value of the change in this box.
Leave your guess in the comments. I will take the box to the bank next Monday, and have the change converted to folding money. At that time, the commenter whose guess is the closest to the actual dollar value of the change in the box (above or below) will receive a galley proof copy of How to…
pharyngula | August 14, 2009Anyone notice the new Google doodle today?
In case you were wondering, they are honoring Hans Christian Ørsted, the clever fellow who noticed that a current generates a magnetic field, a nice simple fact that makes the device you are reading this on possible.
Nerds. Gotta love 'em.
bioephemera | August 14, 2009How NOT to practice medicine - no matter how bad the health care situation gets:
Benson has no medical degree. His expertise comes from his youth, which was spent on a farm in Indiana. "When one of us needed medical attention," he told me, "we dipped into our veterinary supplies." According to Benson, many pharmaceuticals for animals are the same as those formulated for humans, and can be purchased without a prescription at veterinary supply stores, of which most rural communities have several. In figuring out how to translate livestock dosages to human ones, Benson offers this jaunty rule of…
drorzel | August 14, 2009I have a thousand things to do today, and blogging isn't high on the list. So here's a dorky poll to pass the time, because it's been a while:
What's your favorite Law of Thermodynamics?(polls)
We're working in the classical limit, here, so you're not allowed to choose a linear superposition of all four laws. Pick one as your favorite.
oracknows | August 14, 2009Effect Measure is a site I highly recommend with experienced epidemiologists in charge. In other words, it's run by adults. But scientists often disagree about things. This is apparently a secret to non-scientists and many reporters who assume that when two scientists disagree, one is lying or wrong. But it's true nonetheless. Whatever the subdiscipline, there are disagreements. If you pick up almost any issue of Science or Nature you will find plenty of them, usually (but not always) couched in polite language in the Introduction or Discussion section of a paper or in the Letters. So it's…