Science
razib | May 19, 2009
Seed's Mr. Space Lee Billings has an interesting piece, The Long Shot:
"If planets are found around Alpha Centauri, it's very clear to me what will happen," Marcy said. "NASA will immediately convene a committee of its most thoughtful space propulsion experts, and they'll attempt to ascertain whether they can get a probe there, something scarcely more than a digital camera, at let's say a tenth the speed of light. They'll plan the first-ever mission to the stars."
The premise seems to verge on science fiction. But then much of science could be fiction if it weren't fact. In any case, some…
catdynamics | May 19, 2009"Vaccine" is the title of a book by Arthur Allen
It has languished far too long on my review pile, and recent events spurred me to read through it:
Vaccine
by Arthur Allen
W.W. Norton
ISBN-13: 978-0-393-05911-3 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-0-393-33156-1 (paperback)
A primarily historical account, it starts with the random experiments on smallpox inoculation, and then rapidly moves onto the account of Jenner's discovery of cowpox vaccination.
The story recounts the ups-and-downs of vaccination against various major diseases, including both failures of science, industry and regulation; and the…
pharyngula | May 19, 2009This is an important new fossil, a 47 million year old primate nicknamed Ida. She's a female juvenile who was probably caught in a toxic gas cloud from a volcanic lake, and her body settled into the soft sediments of the lake, where she was buried undisturbed.
What's so cool about it?
Age. It's 47 million years old. That's interestingly old…it puts us deep into the primate family tree.
Preservation. This is an awesome fossil: it's almost perfectly complete, with all the bones in place, preserved in its death posture. There is a halo of darkly stained material around it; this is a remnant of…
oracknows | May 19, 2009A reader informs me of a plaintive, heartfelt request from Oprah for help in developing the television show of her new protege Jenny McCarthy:
You've seen it all over the news...Jenny McCarthy, one of America's funniest and coolest moms and Harpo is giving her, her own show.
Here is where YOU come in.
What would you like to see featured on Jenny's show? What would you like for her to talk about? What are you and your friends buzzing about?
Any topics you'd like for her to tackle? Are there any questions that you have -- that you would love for her to answer?
If so -- we definitely want to…
awild | May 19, 2009
The summer insect season is upon us here in temperate North America, and with it comes the need for good identification guides.
Before I begin, a cautionary note. We have so many species on our continent that were we to create a bird-type guide that listed all the insects, with their ranges and identifying characteristics, the full set would span at least 30 volumes.  Any book small enough to carry into the field necessarily omits more than 95% of the relevant animals. Insect guides are understandably neurotic and overwhelmed compared to the corresponding bird and plant guides, and it…
drorzel | May 19, 2009I'm leaving this afternoon for Charlottesville, VA and the 40th annual DAMOP conference. At this meeting, we will once again be confirming the prediction of the bosonic character of interesting talks. Bosons, as you know, are quantum particles that happily occupy the same state as other bosons, and as you can see from the meeting program, the most interesting sessions are bunched together in a few time slots on Wednesday and Thursday. Thus, interesting talks are clearly bosonic in nature.
(The same basic physics has been demonstrated dozens of times previously, at other meetings and…
awild | May 19, 2009I took my shiny new Canon 50D out for a spin this weekend, and along the railroad tracks I found a worthy myrmecological subject: Crematogaster feeding at the swollen nectaries of an Ailanthus Tree of Heaven. Ailanthus is an introduced Asian tree that's gone weedy across much of North America. Our local ants don't seem to mind, though, it's extra snack food for them.
pharyngula | May 18, 2009I've been reading a new book by Jack Horner and James Gorman, How to Build a Dinosaur: Extinction Doesn't Have to Be Forever(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and I was pleasantly surprised. It's a book that gives a taste of the joys of geology and paleontology, talks at some length about a recent scientific controversy, acknowledges the importance of evo-devo, and will easily tap into the vast mad scientist market.
It is a little scattered, in that it seems to be the loosely assembled concatenation of a couple of books, but that's part of the appeal; read the chapters like you would a collection of…
drorzel | May 18, 2009Thoreau offers without qualification some observations about the different approach to books taken by sciences vs. humanities. Specifically, he notes that despite frequent claims that it is the Most Important Book Ever, nobody actually reads Newton's Principia Mathematica
This is totally different from humanities. In humanities, people make a point of reading the original thinkers. They don't just say "Well, philosopher so-and-so influenced lots of other people and got the ideas rolling, so let's read somebody influenced by him and maybe a Cliff's Notes version of the original." They…
awild | May 18, 2009It seems my barcoding rant from last week has caught the eye of Alex Smith of the University of Guelph. Alex is the force behind numerous DNA barcoding projects, including the pioneering study on Malagasy trap-jaw ants, and I have elevated his reply from the comments:
Hi Alex â happened by myrmecos this morning, saw your essay and the comments that have piled up over the past several days and couldnât help add my two cents.
1) A barcode is a epistemological tool, an âevaluation criteriaâ for identification and can act as a catalyst for discovery. It is not an ontological truth that defines…
evolvingthoughts | May 17, 2009The custom of making abstract dogmatic assertions is not, certainly, derived from the teaching of Jesus, but has been a widespread weakness among religious teachers in subsequent centuries. I do not think that the word for the Christian virtue of faith should be prostituted to mean the credulous acceptance of all such piously intended assertions. Much self-deception in the young believer is needed to convince himself that he knows that of which in reality he knows himself to be ignorant. That surely is hypocrisy, against which we have been most conspicuously warned. [Ronald Aylmer Fisher, BBC…
grrlscientist | May 17, 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…
drorzel | May 17, 2009The Experimental Error blog considers the difference between disciplines (via Tom):
I often contemplate the differences between these two areas of study. Also, I hear fellow undergrads argue for one or the other, usually divided along the lines of their respective major. Anymore, I think they're so interrelated that I find it hard to find a difference between the two, except for the phases of matter that they most often deal with.
Back in the days when science was new, Physics dealt with understanding the fundamental laws of the universe, and it was Chemistry that was making the attempt at…
bioephemera | May 16, 2009Students and laypeople alike often view biotech patents with baffled disbelief. How is it possible to patent bacteria? Mice? Cell types and DNA sequences? How can someone else "own" gene sequences that all of us have carried inside our bodies since birth?
Honestly, as a biologist, the concept of patenting a gene doesn't really throw me for a loop. Think about it: although we all have genes, we can't read them unless we use a variety of lab techniques, many of them patented. In turn, reading the sequence isn't any use unless we know why we care - that this gene is relevant and can be used to…
grrlscientist | May 16, 2009tags: science, physics, boiling water into ice, streaming video
This should go into the category: What scientists do when the boss is out of town: This video shows a couple scientists who are "boiling water into ice." Can you describe how they do this? [5:02]
drorzel | May 15, 2009Speaking of conferences (as we were a little while ago), the Female Science Professor has a post on the phenomenon of logos in talk slides:
Do you put your institution's logo in your talks and on your posters at conferences? If you put a logo in your talk, do you put the logo on every slide or just on the title slide? Is institutional logo-ing more common on some continents than on others?
Logos on slides are one of those things that in principle, ought to be annoying. In practice, I'm usually just grateful that they're not using one of the godawful default slide layouts that come in…
drorzel | May 14, 2009I watched Jonah Lehrer on the Colbert Report a few months ago, and thought he did a really good job. So, when we were offered free copies of his new book, How We Decide, I asked for one, even though it's not my usual sort of thing.
The main point of the book is that what you think you know about thinking is wrong. Through both interesting historical anecdotes and summaries of the latest in cognitive science research, Lehrer shows that our usual decision-making process is nowhere near as rational as we would like to believe. And, moreover, that's not such a bad thing-- without contributions…
catdynamics | May 13, 2009Another topical colloquium here at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics...
"Money, It's a Gas"
New Developments in Statistical Mechanics of Money, Income, and Wealth (podcast, video, slides)
by Victor Yakovenko, University of Maryland.
Paper in Rev. Mod. Phys. (arXiv:0905.1518)
Money, of course, is not conserved.
It can be created, with some work,
and, famously, it can be destroyed.
Makes for interesting statistical mechanics, eh?
It turns out that putting a lower bound on net money per person was unphysical...
there is some interesting literature out there on the instability of…
awild | May 13, 2009One of the most vociferous debates in taxonomy is over a catchy-sounding concept called DNA barcoding. Since nearly all organisms carry a version of the COI gene in the mitochondrion, the idea is that the DNA sequence of the gene can serve as a standard identification marker. A barcode, of sorts. Of course, the practice only works if species have unique COI sequences. Which they do, much of the time, and the barcoders consequently have been successful in garnering research money and churning out publications.
So what's the problem?
There are two major objections. The first is…