Science
ddobbs | February 12, 2009Despite the rain on my window, it's a fine day indeed, with many wonderful celebrations of Darwin's 200th ringing throughout the blogoshere.
Most of these, naturally, focus on Darwin's theory of evolution and its many implications and reverberations. I much admire that theory. But what I find most fascinating about Darwin is not his theory of evolution but his method of empiricism. For as vital as was Darwin's theory of evolution was, his impact on how we view ourselves is rivaled by his impact on how we view and do science.
This and many other perverse oddities struck me when I was…
oracknows | February 12, 2009Today is Darwin Day. But, more than that, it is a very special Darwin Day in that it is the 200th anniversary of the birth of evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin. This day is meant to celebrate not just the life, but especially the discoveries, of Charles Darwin. His theory of evolution by natural selection, is one of the most elegant examples of science in history. Darwin's theory was so robust that subsequent discoveries did not invalidate it. Rather, many were either predicted or easily accommodated in evolutionary theory, and many more complemented it, such that, in the early 20th…
rallain | February 12, 2009Previously, I talked about science fairs. One of the problems is that students don't really have a good understanding of data analysis. For me, statistical analysis is just something to do with data. It isn't absolutely true. So, it doesn't really matter that students use sophisticated tests on their data. The important point is they use some type of test to compare data.
I just made up some arbitrary data analysis rules. Maybe if students and judges accept something like this, it could really improve science fair projects and judging.
To explain my analysis, I decided to have my own…
awild | February 12, 2009In honor of the old man's 200th, Myrmecos Blog is proud to feature Charles Darwin writing prophetically about the problems posed by social insects for his theory of natural selection.  The passage below is from the first edition of On the Origin of Species, and in it Darwin anticipates the same answers- kin and group selection- that later generations of biologists converged on to solve the riddle. Not bad for a barnacle taxonomist...
No doubt many instincts of very difficult explanation could be opposed to the theory of natural selection,âcases, in which we cannot see how an instinct could…
pontiff | February 12, 2009The Computing Research Policy Blog is reporting possible good news for science funding:
Speaker Pelosi's office just released a fact sheet on the conference agreement for the American Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Act and, wow, it looks good for science agencies in the bill. Here's the relevant bit:
Transform our Economy with Science and Technology: To secure America's role as a world leader in a competitive global economy, we are renewing America's investments in basic research and development, in training students for an innovation economy, and in deploying new technologies into the…
catdynamics | February 11, 2009there is a revised version of House Resolution 1 on thomas.loc.gov
looks like it might be the "final version" of the stimulus bill, post-conference
assuming that it is, here are the relevant bits (thomas.loc.gov is dynamic, can't provide static links):
UPDATE: Nope, those are too small - Pelosi put back a lot of the science funding
and it is even better than this version of the compromise - see David Bacon's comment
I'll update later.
Ok, there is an eighth revision of the stimulus bill, which puts in even more money for science, I thought I had it right last night because the seventh…
ddobbs | February 11, 2009
Just lost my physical science book... How is that possible? It's so BIG.
People do not believe in science.
masturbation IS a science
why did i decide to get involved with this computer science networking stuff? i am an arts person! what was i thinking? lol
sitting here doing science homework , o fun.
painting my nails... but should probably do my science homework?
Science nerd Alert:I just spent an hour learning about the evolution of early tetrapods. Evolution is so damn cool
its 7 pm i have 3 hours to get all caught up on my science paper design a wine poster and type of my life plan for…
awild | February 11, 2009A few years ago I needed to image some ants for a short taxonomic paper. Lacking a decent specimen imaging system (like Entovision), I decided to snap the photos at home using my standard macro gear: a dSLR with the Canon MP-E lens. The images turned out fine and were published in Zootaxa with the paper.
Later, the Antweb team imaged the same species using their standard set-up: a high-res video camera on a Leica microscope, focus-stacking the images with specialized software. I decided to compare the two. Here they are (click on each to view the uncompressed file):
Pachycondyla…
bioephemera | February 11, 2009I'm working on my Darwin Day blog entry for the Blog for Darwin swarm/carnival. In the meantime, you can have a little Darwin Day frivolity of your own by devolving yourself into an Australopithecus, courtesy of the Open University.
I hope it goes without saying that this is definitely not a scientifically accurate activity. But I'll say it anyway.
Speaking of frivolity, have you wished Darwin happy birthday on Facebook yet?
bioephemera | February 11, 2009
Leonotis nepetaefolia and Doctor Humming Birds, Jamiaca
Marianne North (1830-1890)
Kew Royal Botanic Gardens
Sponsorship price: £1,000
832 paintings in the Marianne North Gallery at Britain's Kew Botanic Gardens are up for adoption. No, you don't get to name them or take them home - but you do get a print and other benefits.
All of these paintings are the work of Marianne North, a prolific and Victorian artist who traveled throughout the British empire documenting native flora and fauna in her own idiosyncratic style. Independently wealthy, North gave the gallery building and the…
drorzel | February 11, 2009I didn't expect the post griping about the Best American Science Writing anthology to generate as much discussion as it did. Shows what I know.
In comments, "bsci" made a good suggestion:
Instead of complaining about this volume, I'd love it if you and your readers made a list of the best physics writing in the past year. I assure you that I would be one of many readers of the pieces on the list.
That's a good suggestion, so let's put it out there: What were the best articles about physical sciences published last year? These could be in general magazines (The New Yorker, etc.), in science…
awild | February 10, 2009 There's been a debate simmering among Argentine Ant researchers about the difference between the ant's ecology in its native South America and in the introduced populations. The heart of the disagreement is this: is the introduced Argentine ant dominant because its biology changed during introduction, or because the ecologies of the native and introduced ranges are different?
Like most scientific debates, some aspects are factual in nature while others are semantic. Sometimes the semantic and the factual become confused in a way that makes it difficult to tease the arguments apart…
drorzel | February 10, 2009I'm running a little behind this week, but I wouldn't want this week's Science Saturday bloggingheads to slip by without a mention. It's a conversation between George Johnson and Louisa Gilder about The Age of Entanglement, which I liked quite a bit:
The conversation is primarily about her book, the story it tells, and how she came to write it. There's also some discussion of publishing in general, and a bit about the recent teleportation results from Maryland, toward the end.
pharyngula | February 10, 2009
Fans of the great Cambrian predator, Anomalocaris, will be pleased to hear that a cousin lived at least until the Devonian, over 100 million years later. That makes this a fairly successful clade of great-appendage arthropods — a group characterized by a pair of very large and often spiky manipulatory/feeding arms located in front of the mouth. Here's the new fellow, Schinderhannes bartelsi:
(click for larger image)Holotype of Schinderhannes bartelsi. (A) Ventral. (B) Interpretative drawing of ventral side. l, left; r, right; A1, great appendage; A2, flaplike appendage; sp, spine; fm, flap…
catdynamics | February 10, 2009the other, other program running in parallel with the clusters09 program at KITP is "Low Dimensional Electron Systems", which seems intensely worried about the supply of pencils, or some such - at least graphene seems to be their buzzword du jour.
They, also, are having lots of talks, most all of which are also online video and podcast.
Monday they had their "Director's Seminar", to explain what the big deal is to the rest of us, and themselves:
Sankar Das Sarma "Low Dimensional Electron Systems: A Landscape of Graphene, Quantum Hall Effects, MOSFET, Luttinger Liquid, and Beyond"
most…
awild | February 10, 2009I'm up for a busy day doing Scanning Electron Microscopy of some braconid wasps, so instead of enlightening you with my own witty repartée I'll direct you to the following:
Catalogue of Organisms brings on The Most Unbelievable Organisms Evah!
The New York Times has kicked into full Darwin mode. Read them all, but particularly Carl Zimmer's piece on the difficulty of visualizing the Tree of Life. It's a problem I'll be grappling with shortly as we start to put together the Beetle Tree.
Roberto Keller has some great SEMs of the stridulatory organ, the little thing that makes ants…
drorzel | February 10, 2009Like a lot of physics departments, we offer an upper-level lab class, aimed at juniors and seniors. There are a lot of ways to approach this sort of course, but one sensible way to think about it is in terms of giving students essential skills and experiences. That is, i's a course in which they learn to do the things that no physics major should graduate without doing.
I'm sure that other disciplines do something similar, so I thought I might throw this out there as a general question:
What are the essential skills and experiences a student ought to have before graduating with a degree in…
oracknows | February 10, 2009Because of the fallout from the revelation by Brian Deer that very likely Andrew Wakefield, hero of the antivaccine movement but, alas for his worshipers, one of the most dishonest and incompetent scientists who ever lived, had almost certainly falsified data for his infamous 1998 Lancet paper that launched a decade-long anti-MMR hysteria that shows no signs of abating, I ended up not coming back to a story I was very interested in. Although this story is about Holocaust denial, the questions raised by it are applicable not only to history and Holocaust denial, but to any area of science or…
razib | February 9, 2009Chad is complaining that The Best American Science Writing 2008 is too focused on biomedical science. He finds it especially lame that there's no physics when this was the year of the LHC. Here's what I found in the contents....
Amy Harmon, Facing Life with a Lethal Gene
Richard Preston, An Error in the Code
Thomas Goetz, 23anMe Will Decode Your DNA for $1,000. Welcome to the Age of Genomics
Carl Zimmer, Evolved for Cancer
Tara Parker-Pope, How NIH Misread Hormone Study in 2002
Gardiner Harris, Benedict Carey, and Janet Roberts, Psychiatrists, Children and Drug Industry's Role
Daniel Carlat…
awild | February 9, 2009
Simopelta sp. nr. pergandei, Venezuela
I've just started a project in collaboration with Daniel Kronauer, Jack Longino, and Andy Suarez to infer the phylogeny of species in the Neotropical ponerine genus Simopelta. If you happen to have any DNA-quality specimens of these unusual ants in your keep, we'd greatly appreciate a donation.
Why Simopelta? These insects are among the "other" army ants, the barely-known lineages that have also evolved the specialized nomadic lifestyle that characterizes the well-known, photogenic, and oft-televised ecitonine and doryline army ants. Yet…