Science
bioephemera | July 4, 2009Wow. . . coming off the Silence is the Enemy rape awareness initiative, it's more depressing than usual to see the Telegraph's latest bad science reporting. Their story implies that rape victims deserve blame for what happens to them:
Women who drink alcohol, wear short skirts and are outgoing are more likely to be raped, claim scientists at the University of Leicester (source).
Ben Goldacre of the excellent Bad Science blog didn't think so. So he tracked down the (student) author of the (unpublished) (MS) dissertation cited by the Telegraph. She said the article was completely wrong:
"We…
pharyngula | July 4, 2009Yesterday was my last day in Lindau, I'm sorry to say — it was also the day of the closing ceremonies on the island of Mainau, in case you were wondering why it was so quiet on the blog. I decided to leave all my electronical gear behind at the hotel and venture out for the last session with a stark naked brain.
The day began with a walk down to the harbor to board the Sonnenkönigin, a very impressive ship that can only be inadequately be called a ferry. We were welcomed aboard with a glass of wine or a glass of juice if you felt 8 am was a little early to begin, and tables heaped with food.…
edyong | July 4, 2009One of the highlights of the World Conference of Science Journalists was the final day's heated debate about embargoes. For newcomers to the issue, journalists are often given press alerts about new papers before they are made publicly available, on the understanding that they aren't reported before a certain deadline - the infamous embargo. This is why so much science news magically appears at simultaneously across news outlets. All the major journals (and many minor ones) do this with their papers, as increasingly do universities and other research institutions.
Vincent Kiernan (who has…
awild | July 2, 2009
(a) current distribution of Sasquatch (b) Sasquatch distribution post-climate change
For those of you dallying around about how seriously to take the threat of climate change, here's something for you. If we don't cease our emissions of greenhouse gases pronto, Bigfoot will invade Arizona and Utah. I'm serious.
pontiff | July 2, 2009DARPA, you know the people who invented the internet ("100 geniuses connected by a travel agent"), has a new director:
The Department of Defense (DoD) today announced the appointment of Regina E. Dugan as the 19th director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA is the principal agency within the DoD for research, development, and demonstration of concepts, devices, and systems that provide highly advanced military capabilities for the current and future combat force. In this role of developing high-risk, high-payoff projects, DARPA compliments and balances the…
awild | July 2, 2009A while back, Mike Kaspari asked me if I might be able to produce an image that really captures the essence of the leaf litter ant fauna*. A conceptual shot that would be useful for presentations and the like. It wasn't immediately clear how to do this, as the leaf litter is a dark, dark place. Most of the inhabitants are blind. Not many photons there for a photographer to work with, and lighting it up with a flash sort of kills the native ambiance.
In any case, while in Florida I sat down with a charismatic Strumigenys trap-jaw ant and tried a few things. I came up with this:…
ddobbs | July 2, 2009What's been distracting me lately from the big story I really really need to finish writing ...
A splendid, rich fracas over Chris Anderson's Free, set off particularly by a pan from Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker. The net fairly exploded -- search, and ye shall find -- with many noting that a pot was calling a kettle black. E.g., Itâs like War of the Speakerâs Bureaus and a more gently titled but equally damning (to Gladwell) post by Anil Dash. ,And one young writer accused Anderson of being a feudal lord. Anderson himself has been remarkably unfiltered in his tweet-pointers to reviews,…
pharyngula | July 1, 2009This talk has me a little concerned: it's proposing something rather radical, for which Arber is going to have to show me some unambiguous evidence to convince me, and I'm coming into it with a very skeptical mindset. Here's the relevant portion of his abstract:
The theory of molecular evolution that we also call "Molecular Darwinism" is based on the acquired knowledge on genetic variation. In genetic variation, products of evolution genes are involved as variation generators and/or as modulators of the rates of genetic variation. These evolution gene products act together with several non-…
pharyngula | July 1, 2009Uh-oh. I'm trying to follow this talk, but it's one for the chemistry purists: I don't understand the words he's saying, starting with "olefin" and continuing with "metathesis". You'll have to look to one of the other Lindau bloggers with more chemistry to explain it, because Schrock seems to be assuming I understand all the basics already, and I don't.
pharyngula | July 1, 2009The difference between biology and chemistry: biologists ask how natural systems and molecules work, while chemistry wants to know how to artificially re-synthesize natural biomolecules. Tsien favors a synthetic approach, asking hwo to build new molecules that will perform amusing and useful functions in biology. He compares it to architecture on a molecular scale that is also a rigorous test of one's understanding of molecular function.
He thinks biology has the most interesting grand questions in all of science (hooray!). He also likes pretty colors. However, he thinks that…
pharyngula | July 1, 2009Chalfie is interested in sensory mechanotransduction—how are mechanical deformations of cells converted into chemical and electrical signals. Examples are touch, hearing, balance, and proprioception, and (hooray!) he references development: sidedness in mammals is defined by mechanical forces in early development. He studies this problem in C. elegans, in which 6 of 302 nerve cells detect touch. It's easy to screen for mutants in touch pathways just by tickling animals and seeing if they move away. They've identified various genes, in particular a protein that's involved in transducing touch…
pharyngula | July 1, 2009Bioluminescence is common, especially in marine organisms. Shimomura classified thes into a couple of types: luciferain, photoprotein, and an undefined "other". Luciferin requires an enzymatic (luciferase) reaction, and luminescence is proportional to the concentration of the substrate. The photoprotein type requires a single molecule — aequorin, symplectin, pholasin, etc.
He summarized how D-Luciferin is converted to Oxyluciferin in the presence of O2 and ATP, catalyzed by luciferase, to produce light, either red light in acidic media or yellow green in alkaline media. There is also a…
pharyngula | July 1, 2009This is a wonderful video: it's Richard Dawkins interviewing Craig Venter and getting a tour of his amazing sequencing facility. It also reveals how much the technology is changing.
pharyngula | July 1, 2009I am in awe — they did it without anyone noticing. They just infiltrated nations all around the planet, smuggling in individuals to form vast new colonies of billions, all loyal to the overlords back home. Of course, these are very, very short Argentinians, which made them harder to notice: they're all ants.
In Europe, one vast colony of Argentine ants is thought to stretch for 6,000km (3,700 miles) along the Mediterranean coast, while another in the US, known as the 'Californian large', extends over 900km (560 miles) along the coast of California. A third huge colony exists on the west coast…
drorzel | July 1, 2009I no longer recall who pointed me to this current.com post titled "Scientists Make Radio Waves Travel Faster Than Light "-- somebody on Facebook, I think. As it would be a pretty neat trick to make light move faster than light, I took a look. The opening is fairly standard semi-gibberish:
Scientist John Singleton insists that Albert Einstein wouldn't be mad at him, even though at first blush Singleton appears to have twisted the famous physicist's theories about light into a pretzel.
Most people think Einstein said that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, but that's not really…
pharyngula | July 1, 2009This morning was a long session broken into two big chunks, and I'm afraid it was too much for me — my recent weird sleep patterns are catching up with me, which didn't help at all in staying alert.
Robert Huber: Intracellular protein degradation and its control
This talk was a disaster. Not because it wasn't good, because it was; lots of fine, detailed science on the regulation of proteases by various mechanisms, with a discussion of the structure and function of proteasomes, accompanied by beautiful mandalas of protein structure. No, the problem was that this listener's jet lag has been…
ddobbs | July 1, 2009
Among the many treats in Carl Zimmer's new Times piece on fireflies and sex -- go, and be enchanted -- I particularly liked this quick peek at how a life and a career can take a sharp turn for the most unplanned of reasons:
It was on a night much like this one in 1980 when Dr. Lewis first came under the spell of fireflies. She was in graduate school at Duke University, studying coral reef fish. Waiting for a grant to come through for a trip to Belize, she did not have much else to do but sit in her backyard in North Carolina.
"Every evening there was this incredible display of fireflies…
pharyngula | July 1, 2009I'm here for another long session of talks. Unfortunately, this is Big Chemistry day, and I'm struggling to keep up with the unfamiliar. I need more biology for it all to make sense!
Rudolph Marcus: From 'On Water' and enzyme caalysis to single molecules and quantum dots. Theory and experiment.
I was afraid of this. This Lindau conference has a primary focus on chemistry, and I am not a chemist…and I just knew there would be a talk or two at which I would be all at sea, and that was the case in Marcus's talk, which was all hardcore chemistry. I got the general gist — he's making an argument…
bioephemera | June 30, 2009Last Friday, in my post on Nature's comprehensive coverage of science journalism, I mentioned the recent Nature Biotechnology conference paper on science communications co-authored by scibling Matt Nisbet. I also said I'd come back to one of the points in it that bothers me.
As I said yesterday, most of the material in this paper (the issues of media fragmentation, framing problems, incidental exposure, etc.) has been expressed elsewhere. I agree with the majority of it, and it's nice to see it all in one place. But I have to take exception to a small piece of the paper - an example that I've…
pharyngula | June 30, 2009Ah, a solid science talk. It wasn't bad, except that it was very basic—maybe if I were a real journalist instead of a fake journalist I would have appreciated it more, but as it was, it was a nice overview of some common ideas in neuroscience, with some discussion of pretty new tools on top.
He started with a little history to outline what we know, with Ramon Y Cajal showing that the brain is made up of network of neurons (which we now know to be approxiamately 1012 neurons large). He also predicted the direction of signal propagation, and was mostly right. Each neuron sends signals outwards…