Science
drorzel | February 24, 2009The winners of the American Physical Society's Science Writing Awards for 2008 were announced today:
Ann Finkbeiner won in the Journalist category for The Jasons, her book about a secretive groups of scientists who work on classified problems for the US government.
Gino Segre won in the Scientist category, for Faust in Copenhagen, about the early days of quantum mechanics.
Julia Cort won in the Broadcast category for the NOVA ScienceNow episode Asteroid, about whether a giant asteroid will kill us all in 2036.
Alexandra Siy and Dennis Kunkel have won in the Children's category, for their…
razib | February 24, 2009Association Between Serum 25-Hydroxyvitamin D Level and Upper Respiratory Tract Infection in the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey:
The median serum 25(OH)D level was 29 ng/mL...and 19%...of participants reported a recent URTI [recent respiratory tract infections]. Recent URTI was reported by 24% of participants with 25(OH)D levels less than 10 ng/mL, by 20% with levels of 10 to less than 30 ng/mL, and by 17% with levels of 30 ng/mL or more...Even after adjusting for demographic and clinical characteristics, lower 25(OH)D levels were independently associated with recent…
rallain | February 24, 2009Quantum mechanics is not my area of expertise. Really, I have no area of expertise. However, I think it is time to bring the whole photon thing back up. Yes, I know I was a little harsh before. Maybe I should start over.
First, models. Yes models. I think science is all about models. Scientists build models that attempt to agree with observations. These models could be mathematical, physical, conceptual or numerical (like a computer program). For example, take Newton's Law of gravity (which isn't really a law). It says that the gravitational force between two objects has the…
drorzel | February 24, 2009the results from yesterday's poll on reporting exam scores were pretty strongly divided. 47% favored giving histograms, or some very detailed breakdown, while 33% were in favor of statistical measures only (mean, standard deviation, extrema, that sort of thing). 19% were in favor of giving no collective information at all.
My own usual practice is to give the high score, low score, and class mean, and that's it. This has as much to do with student psychology as anything else.
I provide the high score to prevent students with low scores from thinking "Oh, this was just impossible, so nobody…
drorzel | February 24, 2009Tallying up the results of yesterday's poll about formula sheets (as of 8:00 Tuesday morning, 39 total comments), people were overwhelmingly in favor of formula sheets. 72% of respondents reported being allowed to use formula sheets as students, and 69% were in favor of allowing formula sheets as faculty. A substantial number of the "no" responses were in favor of providing important formulae on the test paper.
This is more or less in accord with my own preferences. My general practice is to allow students to make up their own formula sheets in intermediate classes. In the introductory…
pharyngula | February 24, 2009
This is a photograph of Macropinna microstoma, also called barreleyes. It has a very peculiar optical arrangement. When you first look at this photo, you may think the two small ovals above and behind its mouth are the eyes, and that it looks rather sad…wrong. Those are its nostrils. The eyes are actually the two strange fluorescent green objects that look like they are imbedded in its transparent, dome-like head.
(Click for larger image)Video frame-grab of Macropinna microstoma at a depth of 744 m, showing the intact, transparent shield that covers the top of the head. The green spheres are…
awild | February 23, 2009What's new in ant science this week? Lots.
Atopomyrmex mocquerysi, South Africa
Myrmecological News has posted a pair of studies online. The first, by Martin Kenne et al, observe the natural history of one of Africa's most conspicuous yet chronically understudied arboreal ants, Atopomyrmex mocquerysi. The second, by Jim Wetterer, is part of a continuing series on the global spread of pest ants. This installment targets Monomorium destructor.
Onychomyrmex sp., Australia
The Australian Journal of Entomology counters with a pair of its own ant studies. In the first, Hiroki Miyata et…
drorzel | February 23, 2009Inspired by Leigh Butler at tor.com, I've been re-reading Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books. This happened to coincide with my recent vicious cold, which is good, because they're great sickbed reading.
Most of my re-reading has been done on my Palm, which miraculously came loaded with electronic copies of all the books. These are of, shall we say, variable quality, and riddled with typos, including one hilarious bit in which Rand is pursued by "Trollops." It's a little like reading the Wheel of Time as written by Matthew Yglesias.
As a result, the re-read is also serving as a nice reminder…
awild | February 23, 2009
Stenamma sp., California.
This request comes from Michael Branstetter:
I am working on a broad-scale phylogeny of the ant genus Stenamma and am in search of fresh specimens from the Old World. Stenamma is a cryptic genus that is most often collected in forest leaf litter. The genus is primarily Holarctic in distribution, but also has representatives in the New World tropics. Producing a phylogeny of the genus will help me in my quest to better understand the genus as a whole and to revise the Mesoamerican species. In the Old World there are species records from Europe, northern…
razib | February 23, 2009Seed Magazine has a nice review of the brewing controversy over shoddy statistical methods in the field of fMRI. To some extent science is politics, this is a sexy and appealing field. A friend of mine who is a psychologist mentioned that though he doesn't think much of fMRI the head of his lab group wanted to make sure that there was always some neural imaging in their papers to increase the likelihood of acceptance. A few vivid images is worth a lot of turgid prose; even if some of the criticisms of fMRI are overblown I suspect that it was necessary that the field be brought down a few…
drorzel | February 23, 2009No, this isn't a mistake-- I'm doing two quasi-polls on academic issues today, because I care what you think...
I'm handing back last Thursday's exams today. The scores on the test were about what I expect, given the material. As I'm looking at the scores, trying to assess the class as a whole, I'm curious about the issue of score reporting, so I'll throw this out to the general readership:
What information do you think students should be given about exam scores?
You can answer this from either a faculty or a student perspective (please indicate which).
My general practice is to hand back…
drorzel | February 23, 2009In the basement, across the hall from my lab, there are three plastic-covered collages made up of formula sheets from long-ago exams. One of my colleagues let the students in a Physics for Pre-Meds class write whatever they wanted on one sheet of paper to bring into the final, and made art from the collected pages after the test.
I was thinking about this last night as I graded last Thursday's exams, looking at the formula sheets I collected from the students. The range of things that people decide to immortalize on paper is pretty impressive.
Of course, such sheets are not universally loved…
bioephemera | February 22, 2009
Essays are like cupcakes: they're tasty, abundant, idiosyncratic, and small enough to finish without feeling you've overindulged - which leaves you vulnerable to the self-deception that just one more is a good idea. So here are some weekend reading suggestions for a lazy Sunday.
--At SEED, Carl Zimmer's love letter to natural history museums as functional wonder cabinets:
Gradually, royalty's cabinets of wonders turned into libraries of flesh and rock, where scholars could research the workings of the world. Ole Worm, a 17th-century anatomist, became famous for his collection of narwhal…
evolvingthoughts | February 21, 2009A 6th grade maths and science teacher emailed me about whether theories could become laws. Below the fold is his request and my reply. The short answer is that when laws grow up, they become theories, not the other way around.
Cameron Peters wrote:
Dr. Wilkins,
I was hoping you might be able to provide some insight on a question that is circulating amongst the NSTA email list serve concerning laws and theories. Specifically, there is some disagreement ( I would say confusion) of the difference between the two and, in particular, why a theory cannot become a law. Also, the question has arisen…
awild | February 21, 2009
The port at Mobile, Alabama, photographed from across the bay.
The port city of Mobile, Alabama holds special significance for students of ant science. Jo-anne and I took a weekend trip down to the gulf coast in January, and as we are both myrmecologists we felt compelled to stop and take a few photographs. Not only is Mobile the childhood home of ant guru E. O. Wilson, but the city's docks have been the point of introduction into North America for some notorious pest ants. We'd have neglected our intellectual heritage to just drive through.
Mobile's busy international commerce has…
thusspakezuska | February 20, 2009I love Ursula K. le Guin's the Earthsea series, and recently finished reading the final novel, The Other Wind. Those who are familiar with the Earthsea books will know that among other topics, le Guin explores traditional gender roles, their change, and men's disparagement of women's power. Towards the end of The Other Wind, one of the characters, Tenar, observes
How men feared women! she thought, walking among the late-flowering roses. Not as individuals, but women when they talked together, worked together, spoke up for one another - then men saw plots, cabals, constraints, traps being…
catdynamics | February 20, 2009the disbursement of the stimulus funding through the science agencies is going to get real interesting
some disparate word has reached me on the stimulus funding
first, the NSF divisions won't hear for a while, like next month, how much they individually get to push out the door (NIH might be different since the bill specifies the funding goes pro-rate to the divisions).
But, the clock on getting the money disbursed is already counting, they basically have 120 days to dispose of the money from the signing of the bill.
Now, some calls for proposal are in current evaluation (oh to have a…
drorzel | February 20, 2009Over at Making Light, Jim Macdonald has a response to the anti-vaccination movement, taking his cue from the Navy:
There's a manual that every Navy gunnery officer is required to read or re-read every year: OP 1014; Ordnance Safety Precautions: Their Origin and Necessity. It's a collection of stories about, and photographs of, spectacular accidents involving big guns and ammunition. Gun turrets that have fired on other gun turrets on the same ship. Holes in the coral where ammunition ships were formerly anchored. That sort of thing. It's simultaneously grim and fascinating.
Nowadays there's…
awild | February 19, 2009
A query from the inbox:
Hi, my question is regarding the gender of the worker ants (and the ant queen). As we all know; they are female, however was this discovered many centuries ago or is this a recent discovery?
I plead ignorance. I know apiculturists had figured out the sex of worker bees in by the late 1700s, and that by the 1800s it was widely accepted that ant workers were also female. But that's the extent of my knowledge.
So I'm punting to my diligent readers. Do any of you know who first observed that ant workers are female?
ddobbs | February 19, 2009
The Amygdaloids at the 92d Y, 4/3/08. Music starts at about 3m. LeDoux's the guitarist who is NOT singing. (Maybe it scares him?)
A few months back I gave a heads-up that NYU neuroscientist Joe LeDoux and his band, t the Amygdaloids, were playing in NYC. Well, the virus has spread! At Rock-It Science, March 3 in NYC, LeDoux and his band, the Amygdaloids (LeDoux pretty much owns the amygdala via his work on fear mechanisms) are to be joined on March 3 in NYC by other musical scientists-would-be-rock-stars, science bands, and science writers such as Pardis Sabetti (Harvard), David Soldier (…