Science
oracknows | April 23, 2009Better late than never, given that DrugMonkey has already been all over this. Unfortunately, there was another serious outbreak of antivaccine idiocy over at HuffPo that I felt I had to deal with before this:
Embedded video from CNN Video
It was a great day indeed. For far too long, animal rights terrorists have intimidated reesarchers into silence. According to the L.A. Times:
Competing rallies at UCLA today over the controversial issue of animal research are peaceful so far, with supporters of the research appearing to outnumber opponents by more than 10 to 1.
About 400 people,…
ddobbs | April 23, 2009Reading the Mindreading Studies - Science Progress seeks a handle on fMRI hype, hope, and horizons
The evolving Swine Flu story [Effect Measure] The skinny on a scary run of deadly swine flu, from people who've been doing this a while.
Green Issues Fade Is green losing its lustre?
Eli Lilly Tops List of Drug-Company Pay to Vermont Docs Altogether, 78 drug companies spent just shy of $3 million dollars in payments to health professionals in Vermont last year. This is a state of about 600,000 people, and only a few thousand doctors. Payments to psychiatrists, for instance, totaled $479,306.19…
pharyngula | April 23, 2009
It's yet another transitional fossil, everyone! Oooh and aaah over it, and laugh when the creationists scramble to pave it over with excuses.
What we have is a 23 million year old mammal from the Canadian arctic that would have looked rather like a seal in life…with a prominent exception. No flippers, instead having very large feet that were probably webbed. This is a walking seal.
(Click for larger image)a, Palatal view of skull; b, lateral view of skull and mandible, left side; c, occlusal view of left mandible. Stippling represents matrix, hatching represents broken bone surface. The…
drorzel | April 23, 2009I'm speaking, of course, about this past weekend's Bloggingheads conversation between Jennifer Ouellette and Diandra Leslie-Pelecky. They both blog at Cocktail Party Physics, and Diandra has written The Physics of NASCAR.
It's a good Bloggingheads, covering a wide range of topics related to physics, sports, and entertainment. Jennifer talks about the work of the Science and Entertainment Exchange, Diandra talks about how NASCAR people know more about physics than you might think, and they both have worthwhile comments about the diificult job of explaining complicated technical subjects in…
drorzel | April 22, 2009No, I'm not talking about students bribing faculty for good grades, but the reverse: faculty bribing students to attend events outside of class. For example, I offered the students in my class five bonus points on tomorrow's mid-term exam if they attended last night's Alan Lightman lecture. I'm fairly certain that 12 of the 16 took me up on it.
My feeling is that this has an almost negligible effect on the final grades, but can make a big difference in the audience for an evening talk. And it's often beneficial for students to attend these events and get some sense of the larger intellectual…
drorzel | April 22, 2009We had a talk last night by Alan Lightman of MIT, a theoretical physicist and novelist, best known as the author of Einstein's Dreams. He spoke for about an hour about his own background, and the similarities and differences between the worlds of science and the arts.
One of the differences he mentioned was the way the different disciplines handle names. He claimed that science is deeply concerned with naming things, because naming a thing in some sense defines it-- the word "electron" carries with it a whole host of properties that are shared by all electrons in the universe. In the arts, on…
tqa | April 21, 2009
Earlier today, a team of researchers lead by noted exoplanet hunter Michel Mayor announced a pair of blockbuster discoveries - the lowest mass planet yet discovered orbiting another star, and a new analysis suggesting that another, previously discovered planet is orbiting that same star within the theoretical "habitable zone" where liquid water can exist. Both of these discoveries are huge, but for different reasons.
The small planet, now known as Gliese 581 e, may weigh in at only about 1.9 Earth masses. That makes it the smallest exoplanet yet discovered. Gliese 581 is a red dwarf star…
catdynamics | April 21, 2009Two Earth Mass Planet found in close orbit around a red dwarf star
Gliese 581 is an M3 red dwarf, it has a mass of about a third that of the Sun, slightly lower metal content and is about the same age probably a bit older than the Sun, we think.
It is about 20 light years away.
Gliese 581 was known to have three planets already:
Gl 581b - 1/20th of Jupiter mass in a 5 day orbit == ok, 16 Earth masses
Gl 581c - 1/60th of Jupiter mass in a 13 day orbit == 5 Earth masses
Gl 581d - 1/50th of Jupiter mass in 67 day eccentric orbit == 7 Earth masses
Now there is Gl 581e, discovered with high…
pharyngula | April 20, 2009For some reason, I find this hilarious — it's an exercise in applying the mathematics of population ecology to the dynamics of human-vampire interactions. It's the real deal, the actual kinds of math used by those wacky evolution and ecology nerds, all built around some estimates of the rates of vampire siring measured against the rates that Buffy-style vampire slayers take them out. Here's the kind of thing you'll see in the document:
I like it. In case you're wondering, Buffy's Sunnyvale reaches a stable equilibrium with a population of about 36,000 humans and 18 vampires.
(Hmm. I posted…
grrlscientist | April 20, 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.
This is only the second issue of Scientia Pro Publica, but I am so pleased with its progress so far. Not only are friends and colleagues contributing their essays to this blog carnival, but there is an impressive influx of "new blood", too. Together, all of us are helping to promote the value of…
drorzel | April 20, 2009A couple of physics stories in the last few days have caught my attention for reasons that can be lumped together under the Vizzini Effect-- that is, they say things that involve unconventional uses of common words. Take, for example, the Physics World story Physicists distinguish between the indistinguishable, which starts off:
Spurred on by their work on building one of the world's most accurate atomic clocks from strontium-87 atoms, researchers in the US have now discovered that "forbidden" collisions can occur between these atoms.
Strontium-87 atoms belong to a class of objects known as…
grrlscientist | April 20, 2009tags: The Beagle Project, science, fund-raising, humor, streaming video
This amusing streaming video, featuring a self-described "fat, bearded chap with a Charles Darwin fixation" whom I know in real life, has an important message: Let's Bring the Magic Back! [1:50]
The Beagle Project aims to celebrate Charles Darwin's 200th birthday by building a sailing replica of the HMS Beagle and recreating the Voyage of the Beagle with an international crew of researchers, aspiring scientists and science communicators (perhaps, including me!). The voyage will apply the techniques of 21st century…
bioephemera | April 19, 2009We all know Twitter can be annoying, but is it really evil? During the past week, you may have heard that there is brand-new neuroscientific evidence proving exactly that. But the hype turns out to be just that: hype.
It all started with a press release from USC about an upcoming PNAS paper by Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Antonio Damasio, entitled "Neural Correlates of Admiration and Compassion." The USC press release, which was picked up by EurekAlert and other outlets, says:
The finding, contained in one of the first brain studies of inspirational emotions in a field dominated by a focus…
bioephemera | April 19, 2009C.P. Snow fans, prepare to head over to the Intersection to partake in an upcoming online discussion of Snow's famous "Two Cultures" address. In their new article, "The Culture Crosser," Sheril and Chris portray Snow as a sort of science policy prophet:
It helps to think of Snow as an early theorist on a critical modern problem: How can we best translate highly complex information, stored in the minds of often eccentric (if well meaning) scientists, into the process of political decision making at all levels and in all aspects of government, from military to medical? At best that's a…
grrlscientist | April 19, 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 | April 19, 2009I forgot to mention yesterday (although I did on Twitter) that I'm currently in Denver, where I will be attending the 100th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), as I do almost every year at this time. I hope to see, as Isis would put it, some hot, hot science over the next three and a half days. In between sessions, I'll be putting the finishing touches on my Challenge Grant, seeing old friends, and possibly even blogging. The frequency depends upon (1) how many old friends I see and (2) how good or crappy the wifi is at the Colorado Convention Center.
In the…
bioephemera | April 18, 2009
In her recent TED talk, JoAnne Kuchera-Morin described UCSB's AlloSphere, a new project that enables scientists to literally stand inside a three-story projection of their data:
The AlloSphere space consists of a 3-story cube that is treated with extensive sound absorption material making it one of the largest anechoic chambers in the world. Standing inside this chamber are two 5-meter-radius hemispheres constructed of perforated aluminum that are designed to be optically opaque and acoustically transparent. (source)
Scientists and artists can stand on a bridge through the center of this…
pharyngula | April 18, 2009Perhaps you remember the PCR song from Bio-Rad…or perhaps you tried hard to purge that from your memory. Then Eppendorf upped the ante with a pipettor love song. Now Greg Laden finds another pop tribute to PCR from Bio-Rad. The genre? Disco. By all that's good and rational, not disco.
Two can fight this war against good taste. How about a big hair rock ballad to a tissue culture cell monitoring system?
That one needs an encore.
Little known fact: most molecular biologists dress exactly like that in the lab.
drorzel | April 17, 2009Via the arxiv Blog, a review article has been posted by the Haensch group with the title"Testing the Stability of the Fine Structure Constant in the Laboratory." The fine structure constant, usually referred to by the symbol α is a ratio of fundamental constants-- the electron charge squared divded by Planck's Contant times the speed of light (e2/hc)-- and usually assumed to be constant. Some beyond-the-Standard-Model theories of physics, though, include effects that could cause this ratio to change over time.
For this reason, people have been looking to see if the fine structure constant is…
rallain | April 16, 2009I have been meaning to write about this for quite some time. Really, I wanted to reply to Chad's article on science at Uncertain Principles, but you know how things go. So, here are my key and interesting points about science in random order.
Science is all about models (not ball bearings)
Science is about making models. What is a model? A model can be lots of things. It can be a mathematical relationship, a conceptual model, or even a physical model. One model I like to use is static friction. For many cases, the frictional force can be modeled as:
This model says the frictional…