Science
drorzel | February 9, 2009Kind of a belated gripe, but something I was reminded of today that I forgot to blog when I first noticed it. I griped last year about the fomulaic nature of the "Best Science Writing" anthology, but I had no idea that the 2008 version would be worse.
OK, I haven't read it, but I leafed through it in the store, and there's not a chance that I would squander beer money on it: there isn't a single piece about physics in it. Not one of the 19 articles highlighted by special guest editor Sylvia Nasar is about physics. Or astronomy. Or geology. Or, really, anything that wasn't essentially…
grrlscientist | February 8, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"One cannot have too many good bird books"
--Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927).
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 enjoyment. Below the fold is this week's issue of The Birdbooker Report which…
catdynamics | February 6, 2009so the new senate version of the stimulus bill is revealed, the one that might actually pass.
It has a lot of cuts and some reduction in taxes, but with added programs that are not in the House version.
The final version does better for science than the original compromise being floated over the last day or two
data from ScienceDebate2008 folks
their summary shows:
NASA $1.3 billion - more than House version - I'm guessing $400M for science if the changes from original Senate version are equally spread
NSF gets $1.4 billion - that is substantially less than the House version and much of…
pharyngula | February 6, 2009I know! It's hard to believe! Why, any of the riff-raff can just charge in and start a blog anymore. You write a book or a few, do some internationally recognized research in evolution, and suddenly you get cocky and think you have the talent to write a blog. Back in the day when I started in this, I had to struggle with none of that. And I liked it!
Despite his awesome handicaps, it is a pretty good blog.
I especially like this image from his book, Why Evolution is True(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll):
©Kalliopi Monoyios
So…no transitional forms, huh? Look at that australopithecine between modern…
drorzel | February 6, 2009Not long after I posted my comments about textbook prices, I went to a panel discussion on teaching, where a social scientist made an interesting observation about the ways different disciplines interact with books.
In the humanities, the whole point of the class is to discuss the books. Nothing useful can be done until and unless the students have had the chance to do the reading. This is why humanities classes tend to let out early on the first day of the term, and have a full class on the last day of the term: the important reading has to be done before class.
In the sciences, on the other…
denialism | February 6, 2009
What do this cartoon and the latest edition of PLoS One have in common? Well, reading Bora's blog this week I saw an article entitled, Risks for Central Nervous System Diseases among Mobile Phone Subscribers: A Danish Retrospective Cohort Study and my ears perked up. We have been mocking the idea that cell phones cause everything from brain cancer to colony collapse disorder and it's always fun to see what cell phones are being blamed for based on weak associations and correlations.
In this article the authors identified more than four hundred thousand cell phone subscribers and linked…
drorzel | February 6, 2009There's a new paper from the PAMELA dark matter search out that's written up in Physics, including a link to a free version of the PDF. This paper is considerably less dramatic than one that appeared last year, leading Physics World to suggest that they're backing off the earlier claim.
What's the deal? Sean Carroll has you covered, with a detailed explanation of what's in both papers, and why the findings have been published and reported the way they have:
What happened is that the PAMELA collaboration submitted their second paper (anomalous positrons) to Nature, and their first paper (well-…
awild | February 6, 2009As if butterflies weren't flamboyant enough already, it seems that some of them actively impersonate queens.
Queen ants, that is. A report by Francesca Barbero et al in today's issue of Science documents a clever strategy employed by a European butterfly, the Mountain Alcon Blue Maculinea rebeli, to infiltrate nests of Myrmica schencki. The immature stages of the butterfly are parasites of ant colonies, and it seems the secret to their success is acoustic mimicry. The larvae and pupae squeak like queens, eliciting preferential treatment from the workers. Here's the abstract:
Ants…
pharyngula | February 6, 2009"I am not a number — I am a baby cuttlefish!"
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
awild | February 5, 2009
A trail of Atta leafcutting ants in Gamboa, Panama.
From the recent literature:
The Journal of Experimental Biology has a lab study by Dussutour et al documenting how leafcutter ants avoid traffic jams under crowded trail conditions. Apparently, unladen ants increase a narrow trail's efficiency by following the leaf-carrying ants instead of trying to pass their slower sisters. See also commentary by JEB and Wired.
source: Dussutour, A., Beshers, S., Deneubourg, J. L., Fourcassie, V. 2009. Priority rules govern the organization of traffic on foraging trails under crowding conditions in the…
pharyngula | February 5, 2009
Just wait — this one will be featured in some cheesy Sci-Fi channel creature feature in a few months. Paleontologists have dug up a fossil boa that lived 58-60 million years ago. They haven't found a complete skeleton, but there's enough to get an estimate of the size. Look at these vertebrae!
a, Type specimen (UF/IGM 1) in anterior view compared to scale with a precloacal vertebra from approximately 65% along the precloacal column of a 3.4 m Boa constrictor. Type specimen (UF/IGM 1) shown in posterior view (b), left lateral view (c) and dorsal view (d). Seven articulated precloacal…
razib | February 4, 2009
Recently I've been having an on-and-off discussion with a friend about the bioethical implications of neo-eugenics. I brought up one particular issue as a thought experiment: how about selective abortion of dark-skinned fetuses among South Asians? The light and dark variants of SLC24A5 segregate within the South Asian population at high frequencies, the light variant as high as 85-90% in the northwest decreasing in frequency and approaching 50% in the far south an east. SLC24A5 explains about 1/3 of the South Asian skin color variation, just as it explains 1/3 of the difference between…
tqa | February 4, 2009
Ed Yong has a nice article up about a new fossil find. This one is megafauna that probably wouldn't be very charismatic up close - a fifty foot, two thousand pound + snake.
Over at Wired Science, there's an article about some fossilized traces that represent the earliest evidence of multicellular life yet found - a chemical that's produced only by sponges that's turned up in 635 million year old rocks.
drorzel | February 4, 2009I got the last round of line edits on the book-in-progress Monday night after work, but I haven't had a chance to do more than leaf through the pages. This is mostly because I had lab reports to grade-- the second written report is due Sunday, and I needed to get comments back to the students before they start on the next report.
(Yes, I know, as a practical matter, I could've waited until Saturday for that, but I hope for better.)
Grading labs is just about my least favorite part of the job (narrowly edging out committee meetings), and since this is turning into a blog primarily about…
drorzel | February 4, 2009In the last report from my modern physics course, we wrapped up Relativity, and started into quantum mechanics, talking about black-body radiation and Planck's quantum hypothesis. The next few classes continue the historical theme
Class 10: I make a point of noting that Planck himself never liked the idea of quantization of light, and in fact never applied the idea to light directly. His quantum model for black-body radiation was based on the idea of having "oscillators" in the object emitting the radiation. Einstein was the first to apply the idea of quantization to light directly, and take…
pharyngula | February 4, 2009My teaching schedule this semester is a major time-suck; I'm teaching genetics and all of its associated labs (you really don't want to know how much prep time goes into setting up fly labs), I'm doing some major revision of the content this year, and I've got this asymmetric schedule that packs everything into the first half of each week. So I simply have to protest when those evil (Stein was right!) scientists announce a major discovery on a Tuesday, which just happens to be the very worst day of the week for me. They've gone and found another important whale transitional fossil, Maiacetus…
tqa | February 3, 2009
An article published tonight in the journal PLoS ONE is forcing scientists to rethink everything they thought they knew about whale evolution.
OK. That's not actually true. But I've got a bet going that "someone" is going to use the phrase "rethink everything" in their story about this find, so better safe than sorry. Plus, it's a way cooler lede than "new whale fossil discovery matches predictions beautifully", even if the mundane description is the one that's just the tiniest bit more accurate.
Seriously, though, a multinational team of authors led by University of Michigan rock star…
bioephemera | February 3, 2009In case you missed it, my Sciblings are abuzz about journalists' dismissal of Jill Biden's education.
From the LA Times:
Amy Sullivan, a religion writer for Time magazine, said she smiled when she heard the vice president's wife announced as Dr. Jill Biden during the national prayer service the day after President Obama's inauguration. "Ordinarily when someone goes by doctor and they are a PhD, not an MD, I find it a little bit obnoxious," Sullivan said.
and
"My feeling is if you can't heal the sick, we don't call you doctor," said Bill Walsh, copy desk chief for the Washington Post's A…
bioephemera | February 3, 2009
Devana chasma
Peter Wasilewski
Dr. Peter Wasilewski, a NASA scientist, creates these beautiful photographs by passing polarized light through freezing films of water in Petri dishes. He calls the results "frizions":
The eye and brain combine the mixture of physical colors to produce a striking color impression. I began to control the way the ice grows, into forms I desired, always with color as my guide. Simple forms, detailed and complex forms, and forms that simply happened, as though I imagined them, established my medium. Ice growth became the landscape, and thickness and the polarizer…
drorzel | February 3, 2009The Arxiv blog highlights a post on John Scalzi's favorite science question: the Fermi Paradox:
We have little to guide us on the question of the existence intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. But the physicist Enrico Fermi came up with the most obvious question: if the universe is teeming with advanced civilizations, where are they?
The so-called Fermi Paradox has haunted SETI researchers ever since. Not least because the famous Drake equation, which attempts put a figure on the number intelligent civilisations out there now, implies that if the number of intelligent civilisations…