Science
bioephemera | March 9, 2009The President just released a new memorandum on scientific integrity:
Science and the scientific process must inform and guide decisions of my Administration on a wide range of issues, including improvement of public health, protection of the environment, increased efficiency in the use of energy and other resources, mitigation of the threat of climate change, and protection of national security. The public must be able to trust the science and scientific process informing public policy decisions. Political officials should not suppress or alter scientific or technological findings and…
denialism | March 9, 2009I have just finished taking my last major exam of medical school - Step 2 of the boards (including Step 2 Clinical Skills, or CS, which costs 1200 bucks, requires you to travel to one of a few cities in the country hosting it, and is sealed by a EULA that forbids me from talking about what the test was like), and am winding down my medschool career in the next few weeks. It's about 2 weeks from Match Day (the 19th), when I'll find out for sure where I will spend the next 5 or so years of my life. I'll be sure to have a post up a little after noon that day when I find out what the answer is…
pharyngula | March 8, 2009So Ray Comfort is now complaining on the revered pages of the respected publication, World Net Daily about me. The article is full of dishonest misquotes, but let's zip right to Ray's scientific misunderstandings. They are deep and painful. He has this bizarre idée fixe that the necessity of every species having males and females somehow greatly reduces the probability that new species could arise. It's total nonsense, and I dismissed it briefly when I commented on it before.
"I know Ray is rather stupid, but who knew he could be that stupid. This has been explained to him multiple times:…
pharyngula | March 6, 2009If you ever wanted to peer deeply into the decayed and shriveled eyes of Otzi, the 5,000 year old iceman, now you can. High resolution images of Otzi are available on the web, and you can pan and zoom all over his body. You can also find 3D images, and special closeups of his tattoos.
drorzel | March 6, 2009Over at Unqualified Offerings, Thoreau is bemused by his students' reaction to unusual numbers:
[I]t is fascinating how we condition people to be used to numbers in a certain range, and as soon as a number is either very big or very small it becomes disconcerting. On one level, I'm glad that they are able to do the conversion and that they at least realize that numbers need to be checked. I've had people happily measure the dimensions of an object in millimeters, get their conversion to meters wrong, and cheerfully tell me that their tiny metal cylinder has a volume of 27 cubic meters. At…
oracknows | March 6, 2009I have two brief observations to make before I launch into my latest bit of insolence. First off, it figures that, whenever I go away to a meeting, there's simply an embarrassment of blogging riches. People have been sending me stuff to which, even if I were at home and having a slow week, I could probably never get. Good stuff. Interesting stuff. Unfortunately, I'm now forced either to try to blog about them when I finally get home, which might as well be months later in blog-time, or let them go by uncommented upon, which hurts Orac's mighty ego. Oh, well. My next observation is that I feel…
bcohen | March 6, 2009Pt. I | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | Pt. 4
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Part 4 with Christopher Henke, discussing his book Cultivating Science, Harvesting Power, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-blogger series can be found here.
WF: What do you make of the intersection of STS and agricultural studies?
CH: STS folks aren't often citing rural sociology, and vice-versa. I think the connections between these realms are greater than it might at first appear. Historians of science like Margaret Rossiter, Charles Rosenberg, and Deborah Fitzgerald were writing about agricultural science some time ago (as a sociologist…
tqa | March 6, 2009
A few weeks ago, I read, enjoyed, and reviewed Phil Plait's Death From the Skies. After I caught my daughter looking at the book a couple of times, I managed to bribe convince her to write a review of the book. The result is the following review. I fixed the formatting a little bit, but I had absolutely no role in the development of the text.
Death From the Skies
When I got death from the skies I thought that it would be about people getting an unpleasant visit from flaming meteors, I was wrong. It was about the ways the world will end. I then got depressed and then got an unsettling…
awild | March 5, 2009This photo was ultimately rejected for a journal cover (it was the wrong shape!) but I shot it to accompany a research article that used museum specimens of midwestern bumblebees to compare current levels of genetic diversity with previous decades. Since this image won't appear in print anytime soon, I thought I'd share it here instead.
photo details: Canon 35mm f2.0 prime lens on a Canon EOS 20D
ISO 200, 1/125 sec, f/5, indirect strobe
drorzel | March 5, 2009Two announcements of science-related festivals have turned up in my email in the last week or so:
The second annual World Science Festival will be held in New York June 10-14 this year. They feature an impressive array of speakers again, including Nobel laureates (Physicists David Gross, Frank Wilczek, and William Phillips), well-known authors, distinguished scientists, and actors. Last year's festival was a huge success, by all reports, and let's hope this year's is as good. And, hey, it's not during DAMOP this year, so I might even be able to make the trip down if anything looks…
ddobbs | March 5, 2009Notables from my morning feedscan:
The vision folks at Barrow study "Where's Waldo?" to figure out search strategies.
A virtual-reality helmet claims to to feed all five senses. Interesting if true.
Winner best-and-worsrt headline writing in a press release: Prawnography shows captive bred prawns lack lust And in second place, running, um, close behind: Scatological clues lead to an intimate view, which actually looks at some pretty interesting group dynamics in lemurs during their annual birthing time, when babies are at risk of being murdered.
Neurotopia continues a good series on the…
drorzel | March 5, 2009EurekAlert had a press release yesterday titled Quantum paradox directly observed -- a milestone in quantum mechanics, which sounds like it ought to be great. The actual release, though....
For one thing, the description of the actual experiment is so vague as to be completely useless. It's not easy to quote without copying the whole thing, but it's short, so go read it yourself. Do you have any idea what's going on?
Second, it doesn't provide a complete citation for the article-- it gives the title, authors, and journal, but not the relevant page and volume information, which you need in…
drorzel | March 4, 2009A couple of weeks ago, I moderated a global warming panel at Boskone. The panel was recorded by Richard Amirault, who has now posted the video on his Boston fandom website (Episode 41, if it moves off the front page before you click that link). I haven't watched the video, but I listened to the audio while grading papers, and it's pretty good.
So, if you're kicking yourself for not getting to that panel, here's your chance to see what you missed.
awild | March 4, 2009Achenbach, A., Foitzik, S. 2009. FIRST EVIDENCE FOR SLAVE REBELLION: ENSLAVED ANT WORKERS SYSTEMATICALLY KILL THE BROOD OF THEIR SOCIAL PARASITE PROTOMOGNATHUS AMERICANUS . Evolution, Online Early, doi: 10.1111/j.1558-5646.2009.00591.x
Abstract: During the process of coevolution, social parasites have evolved sophisticated strategies to exploit the brood care behavior of their social hosts. Slave-making ant queens invade host colonies and kill or eject all adult host ants. Host workers, which eclose from the remaining brood, are tricked into caring for the parasite brood. Due to their high…
drorzel | March 4, 2009I went to a panel discussion yesterday on teaching critical thinking skills. It was more of a panel presentation than a panel discussion-- the panelist-to-allotted-time ratio was too high to allow much discussion-- but it was interesting to see how different disciplines approach the task of teaching students to think critically, and support arguments with evidence.
I thought the best comment of the panel was from a chemist, who said that the best test of the development of critical thinking skills is involvement with undergraduate research. This is a big emphasis for us, and one of the things…
catdynamics | March 3, 2009Sheril over at the Intersection commits a fallacy.
Worse than that, she undermines the rationale for all science in the progress.
In a post over at the Intersection, Sheril makes a variation on an old argument - the "why spend money on space when there is so much that needs doing here on Earth".
Or, specifically: "All I'm saying is, just perhaps--for the time being--we might be better off spending the kind of figures currently invested in large scale BIG 'what if?' projects on more proximate concerns...
My exuberance over the possibility of an eventual planetary census is tempered as this…
pontiff | March 3, 2009The NSF has put up a "recovery" page for the stimulus bill: http://www.nsf.gov/recovery. Interestingly it appears that there is an link to an rss feed for "weekly reports." These appear to be excel files of the spending done by the NSF under the stimulus act as of that week (so far nada has been spent.)
Cool, now we can set up a betting pool for spending amounts as of a given date :)
drorzel | March 3, 2009Having complained about the lack of recognition for good physical science writing recently, it would be bad form for me not to note Dennis Overbye's story about the Kepler spacecraft in today's New York Times:
Presently perched on a Delta 2 rocket at Cape Canaveral is a one-ton spacecraft called Kepler. If all goes well, the rocket will lift off about 10:50 Friday evening on a journey that will eventually propel Kepler into orbit around the Sun. There the spacecraft's mission will be to discover Earth-like planets in Earth-like places -- that is to say, in the not-too-cold, not-too-hot,…
bioephemera | March 3, 2009
A drawer of antique glass eye fragments
Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
via The Guardian
A new slideshow from The Guardian highlights some of the wonderful medical artifacts found at the new "Brought to Life" website.
drorzel | March 3, 2009Back before things went pear-shaped this weekend, Jonathan Zasloff had a good post about why "clean coal" is important:
I think it's terrific that the Coen Brothers are making funny, effective ads against relying on "clean coal" as part of the US energy program. But I worry that the clean energy community is really missing the boat here.
Clean coal research and development is absolutely crucial in fighting climate change not for us, but for India and China. India has the fourth largest reserves of coal in the world -- most of it very dirty, with high ash content. It currently imports 70%…