Science
pharyngula | June 10, 2009I want one, but I'll have to wait for the price to drop just a little bit…and I'm confident that the price will plummet in the next few years. It's really just a stock Mac, but it has something special on it: a copy of your very own genome sequence. The whole thing. Oooh.
Give it a few years, and the price of sequencing your genome will drop to a few thousand dollars, and then below a thousand…and then I'll be going for it. Unfortunately, at those prices they probably won't throw in a new computer with it.
pharyngula | June 10, 2009The Minnesota Planetarium Society has ambitious plans to rebuild and expand a planetarium and space discovery center in Minneapolis, and they're trying to spread the news and build more support. They are having an event to do this:
Summer Solstice Celebration
Monday, June 22
4:00pm - 8:00 pm
Minneapolis Central Library
300 Nicollet Mall
This event is co-sponsored by the Library Foundation of Hennepin County. Here is your chance to -- travel past the Sun out into the universe through the Society's ExploraDome sky theater, that has been wowing school kids throughout Minnesota -- learn…
drorzel | June 10, 2009OK, it's not really a full post-mortem, because I haven't graded the final exams yet, but I wouldn't tell you about those, anyway. Still, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the past term, which was my first teaching introductory mechanics on the Matter & Interactions curriculum.
On the whole, I continue to like the approach. I like the way that the book focuses on the major physical principles-- the Momentum Principle, the Energy Principle, the Angular Momentum Principle-- because those are the real take-away message from introductory physics. I also thing it's good that the class…
drorzel | June 10, 2009Over at Cosmic Variance, Julianne is annoyed at Nature's embargo policy. It seems that somebody or another posted a paper to the arxiv while submitting it to Nature, and included a note on the arxiv submission asking people to abide by Nature's embargo.
So, instead of blogging about the Incredibly Exciting Discovery (which I'd loooove to talk about), I'm writing about what a ridiculous fiction the authors are asking us all to participate in, for the sake of the authors' potentially getting a publication accepted to Nature. The authors advertised a paper to thousands of interesting, engaged…
awild | June 9, 2009You might recall how much I dislike DNA barcoding.
So you can imagine my frustration when, in spite of my best efforts to mount an empirical demonstration of what a waste of time it is, the technique turns out to be extraordinarily useful. I've been processing sequence data all day from the barcoding gene (COI) for a set of 7 Pheidole species distributed from Costa Rica to Argentina. The results are in hand, and here are the pairwise genetic distances:
See that blank spot in the middle? That shouldn't be there. If barcoding didn't work, that is.
For this sample of ants, then, any two…
awild | June 9, 2009Josh King writes in with the following:
Subject: Arthropod specimens available for analysis from large experiments in long-leaf pine forests.
We have material from 8100 pitfalls available for anyone (including enterprising students or post-docs) interested in studying the effect of disturbance or fire ant invasion on ground-dwelling arthropods in a variety of habitats.Â
We simply do not have the time to sort this material any time in the near future and we would prefer it not languish on a shelf for decades. The majority of this experimental work was conducted in and near the Apalachicola…
jrosenhouse | June 9, 2009I had not intended to go another round with Chris Mooney. But since his latest post mentions me specifically, and does so in a very unfair way, I feel compelled to respond.
Chris has decided that Jerry Coyne is confused about the distinction between methodological and philosophical naturalism. In my last post I pointed out that Coyne wrote, in his New Republic essay:
Scientists do indeed rely on materialistic explanations of nature, but it is important to understand that this is not an a priori philosophical commitment. It is, rather, the best research strategy that has evolved from our…
pharyngula | June 9, 2009You've probably noticed that as a soap bubble thins, it acquires a rainbow of iridescent colors across its surface. Or perhaps you've noticed that a film of oil on a mud puddle shows beautiful colors. These are common physical properties of thin film interference.
The way it works is that light entering a material with a higher refractive index is both reflected and transmitted. Some of the light bounces back with a partial phase shift, and some of it passes through. In a thin film, it passes through but doesn't travel far before it hits another boundary, for instance between the film and the…
drorzel | June 9, 2009
I'm watching Pardon the Interruption after work, and they're talking about the Belmont Stakes. They show a clip of horses running, and Emmy pipes up: "I like horses!" She does this when she feels I'm not paying her enough attention.
"Horses are okay," I say.
"Okay? Horses are really neat!" She thumps her tail on the floor, to emphasize the point.
"I guess." A really bad idea comes to me. "Say, did you know that all horses have an infinite number of legs?"
"What?"
"Yeah," I say, pausing the DVR. "All horses have an infinite number of legs, and I can prove it with logic."
"How?"
"Well, we know…
drorzel | June 9, 2009Every year around this time, references to that damn sunscreen speech pop up again, as people start thinking of graduations. It's in the air (Union's graduation is this Sunday, and I don't think I've ever been happier to see the end of an academic year).
And, of course, I have actually been asked to give a graduation speech. Which leads naturally to thinking about what one piece of advice I would give to a high school student who came up to me and said "I plan to study physics in college. What one thing should I study?"
(Hey, it could happen...)
My one-word piece of advice for students…
awild | June 9, 2009
Aphaenogaster workers tasting the elaiosome of a bloodroot seed. Illinois.
Some plants have come to rely so heavily on ants to spread their seeds about that they offer the insects a tasty treat in exchange for the dispersal service. Seeds of these species bear a lipid-filled structure called an elaiosome, whose sole function appears to be the attraction of ants. A recent study suggests that plant lineages dependent on ants in this way speciate more rapidly than related ant-free lineages.
photo details (both photos): Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS 50D
ISO 100, 1/160 sec…
drorzel | June 8, 2009Two things that are worth a plug beyond the Links Dump level:
1) Over at the Intersection, Sheril Kirshenbaum wants you to look at pictures of people kissing. This is for Science, so stop giggling, and tell her what you think of the pictures.
2) There's a new blog, Ecocomics, dedicated to exploring the burning questions of how the principles of economics play out in superhero comics. This is both more and less silly than that description makes it sound. If you'd like a participatory entry to parallel Sheril's kissing survey, they're asking readers who's the richest character in comics.
drorzel | June 8, 2009Tom at Swans On Tea comments on an article about meetings:
The most common meeting in my experience is the status meeting, where everyone gets together and reports on what they've accomplished. If it's a small group, these are usually fine because you already have familiarity with the tasks. But when you get a large group together, which has diverse tasks and goals, there is impending disaster. Bad meetings I've attended often involve people discussing details that nobody else at the table understands or possibly cares about -- the sort of thing that should happen one-on-one or in a small…
awild | June 7, 2009I saw this short video at a conference last year and was entranced. The clip shows how the ancestral arachnid body plan changed as it evolved through various descendant lineages.
grrlscientist | June 7, 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…
oracknows | June 7, 2009I'm busy working on a talk today, but there is a tidbit that lends itself to a brief (and hopefully amusing and educational) Sunday exercise. It comes, not surprisingly, from the anti-vaccine blog Age of Autism. It doesn't actually have anything to do with vaccines per se, but it is a perfect encapsulation of the sort of fallacious statements and arguments that pseudoscientists in general make. Indeed, this comment could easily have come from a creationist, religious, alternative medicine, New Age, or 9/11 Truther website, among others and fit right in.
Specifically, it is a comment that the…
awild | June 6, 2009
Pyramica (or is it Strumigenys?) rostrata, Illinois
I've been thinking today about the Wikipedia edits to the Pyramica page, and my curiosity about the controversy prodded me to attempt a quick phylogenetic analysis. Before I get to the analysis, though, here is some background.
The Ants. Forests in warmer regions around the world hold a great number of tiny, sluggish ants covered with bizarre hairs of unknown function. These oddly ornate little insects are predators of other arthropods. Mites, springtails, and the like. Because of their size, their preference for below-ground…
catdynamics | June 5, 2009are the odds of a meteorite downing an aircraft reasonable?
John at CV asks whether a meteorite could have downed fligh 447?
he concludes it is possible, but not very likely.
As he notes the meteorite hypothesis was also suggested for flight 800 from JFK back in 1996, but careful forensics showed it was due to a fuel vapour explosion in the central tank.
Learning from a Tragedy: Explosions and Flight 800 (.pdf) by Joe Shepherd
The CV comments have much discussion about the validity of the approximations John uses in deriving the odds of an impact on a plane in flight.
There is a simpler…