Science
bioephemera | January 16, 2009ScienceOnline09 kicks off tonight. Formerly known as the Duke Blogging Conference, it's a weekend of interactive sessions on science blogging with lots of Sciblings and others representing the science blogging collective. Follow along on the conference wiki or Scibling Bora's blog for all the details.
I am extremely disappointed that I am too sick to go and co-chair the arts sessions with Glendon Mellow, but I made the right decision, because I am not getting better - I spent Wednesday at the State of the Net conference only a few miles from home, and I was destroyed afterward. I'll be…
tqa | January 16, 2009
When we talk about the role of fossil fuels in climate chance, what we're really talking about is the carbon cycle. That's the term that scientists use to describe the different forms that carbon is stored in on the earth, and the different ways that it can move from form to form. Understanding the carbon cycle is one of the keys to understanding both the effect of burning carbon-based fuels and the issues involved in trying to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. According to a paper in the latest edition of Science, there may still be some pretty significant gaps in our knowledge of…
drorzel | January 16, 2009A number of people have commented on the big New York Times article about the new intro physics classes at MIT:
At M.I.T., two introductory courses are still required -- classical mechanics and electromagnetism -- but today they meet in high-tech classrooms, where about 80 students sit at 13 round tables equipped with networked computers.
Instead of blackboards, the walls are covered with white boards and huge display screens. Circulating with a team of teaching assistants, the professor makes brief presentations of general principles and engages the students as they work out related…
catdynamics | January 15, 2009The proposed economic stimulus package includes some funding for science.
Chunk for NSF, lot of facility funding.
NASA gets climate science.
DoE gets some toys.
Appropriations Stimulus 0115 (pdf)
The total package is somewhere in the $800+ billion range, as proposed.
With about 1/3 proposed as tax cuts, the rest short term supplemental funding.
$10 billion is for science, largely for facilities and refurbishment. Mostly NSF and NIH.
Looks like this is a two year (effectively 18 months since much of '08-09 fiscal year will be gone if-and-when it passes) package, and then we ramp to regular…
pharyngula | January 15, 2009Exciting news if it pans out: there are some hints of possible life on Mars, in the form of sporadic plumes of methane gas, similar to instances on earth of outgassing from deep pockets of bacteria.
This would suddenly make a mission to Mars interesting. Extraterrestrial biology? Sign me up for that one!
awild | January 15, 2009This weekend, Arizona State University is hosting a slate of myrmecologists to brainstorm on ant genomes. I'd link to the meeting information, but apparently the gathering is so informal that they've not given the event a web page. In any case, the topic is this: in the age of (relatively) cheap genomes, which ants should we sequence? And, what should we do with the assembled data?
I originally planned to attend, but life intervenes and I'm frozen to the tundra of central Illinois. Instead, I will register here a few suggestions about which species should considered, in addition to…
oracknows | January 15, 2009P.Z. Myers turned me on to a phenomenal proposal at Change.gov, the website of President-Elect Barack Obama's transition team:
Defund the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine:
Here's a way to increase the available funding to NIH without increasing the NIH budget: halt funding to NCCAM, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. This Center was created not by scientists, who never thought it was a good idea, but by Congress, and specifically by just two Congressmen in the 1990's who believed in particular "alternative" (but scientifically dubious)…
drorzel | January 15, 2009Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean writes:
You know what the world really needs? A good book about time. Google tells me there are only about one and a half million such books right now, but I think you'll agree that one more really good one is called for.
So I'm writing one. From Eternity to Here: The Origin of the Universe and the Arrow of Time is a popular-level book on time, entropy, and their connections to cosmology, to be published by Dutton. Hopefully before the end of this year!
Dammit! Now it's a race to see whose pop-physics book will be out first. The approximately final draft of my…
awild | January 14, 2009From the Small Science Collective comes a little zine about ants:
The idea, I guess, is that printable pamphlets are ideal for scattering about in public places. Or as handouts during door-to-door myrmeco-evangelism.
drorzel | January 14, 2009A few years ago, the after-dinner speaker at the DAMOP conference banquet was Presidential Science Advisor John Marburger. As I wrote at the time, I think it's safe to say that he didn't make a positive impression on the audience. It also sparked a rather lively discussion afterwards, that some people speculated was the reason for the veiled threats we got the next year.
The Corporate Masters have just published an exclusive post-election interview with Marburger. I read it with some interest, mostly to see if it would change my impression of him.
I have to say, it didn't. Not only does he…
razib | January 13, 2009Vitamin D and Diabetes:
Diabetes is a leading cause of cardiovascular disease. Persons with diabetes are at greater risk for early cardiac mortality, and for repeat events if they survive their first cardiac event. Recently, low serum concentrations of vitamin D have been associated with increased risk for cardiac events. Evidence indicates that persons with diabetes have lower serum concentrations of vitamin D. In addition, persons at risk for diabetes or metabolic syndrome have inadequate serum concentrations of vitamin D. This review will assess the evidence relative to the impact of…
bioephemera | January 13, 2009Larry Young has written a rather ambitious essay for Nature that skims over the prairie vole/AVPR1A research, breasts as erotic objects, and evidence of dopamine-based mother love on its way to a "view of love as an emergent property of a cocktail of ancient neuropeptides and neurotransmitters." Young then asks whether "recent advances in the biology of pair bonding mean it won't be long before an unscrupulous suitor could slip a pharmaceutical 'love potion' in our drink."
Unlikely? Maybe - but his point that antidepressants like Prozac influence the same neurotransmitters implicated in love…
razib | January 13, 2009Sleep Habits and Susceptibility to the Common Cold:
There was a graded association with average sleep duration: participants with less than 7 hours of sleep were 2.94 times...more likely to develop a cold than those with 8 hours or more of sleep. The association with sleep efficiency was also graded: participants with less than 92% efficiency were 5.50 times ...more likely to develop a cold than those with 98% or more efficiency. These relationships could not be explained by differences in prechallenge virus-specific antibody titers, demographics, season of the year, body mass, socioeconomic…
drorzel | January 13, 2009Over at Built on Facts, Matt Springer is easing his way back into blogging by asking "What is Science?". He offers a simple one-sentence definition:
Science is the testing of ideas.
That's all. Every technicality I can think of is avoided so long as the person doing the science is honest. Create fair and objective tests, try not to fool yourself or anyone else, don't be wedded to your hypothesis, basic things like that. Be dishonest and I doubt there's a definition in the world that some sufficiently clever pseudoscientist can't wriggle out of. Test your ideas and be honest about it. That's…
drorzel | January 13, 2009The scare quotes in the title are to distinguish "Modern Physics" classes like the one I'm teaching this term from modern physics as a general subject, which, of course, all right-thinking people should study in depth. The question comes from a comment by Coriolis on last week's post about what "Modern Physics" is as a class:
Having passed through those classes (I'm now a grad student), I have to say I didn't see much worth in the Modern physics class (and your description of it is pretty much how I remember it, except without the relativity). It's basically in that middle ground trying to…
drorzel | January 13, 2009Or, Brian Greene Writes a Kid's Book...
This is a very odd book. It's printed on boards, like a book for very small children, but the story is a bit beyond what I would imagine reading to a normal kid of the age to want books of that format. It's too short and simple, though, to have much appeal to significantly older children, aside from the fact that the story is written over the top of 15 absolutely gorgeous reproductions of pictures of astronomical objects.
This is probably one of those objects whose cool appearance is the only real reason for the thing to exist. The pictures really are…
ddobbs | January 13, 2009
William J. Broad's Times piece on the new National Geographic "Ocean - An Illustrated Atlas gives a nice look at both the book -- and gives long-overdue and well-deserved attention to oceanographer Sylvia Earle, who co-authored the Atlas.
. Earle's passion extends to the far horizon. In the atlas, she reports that some 90 percent of deep-sea creatures use bioluminescence in their life strategies and that the eerie glows may turn out to constitute the planet's most common form of communication.
oracknows | January 12, 2009Here's a cool idea. Take a newbie, who has never read Charles Darwins' On the Origin of Species, and have the newbie actually read the book. Then have him blog each chapter. That's exactly what John Whitfield, London-based freelance science writer, is doing, and ScienceBlogs has him over at Blogging the Origin. Check it out. John promises to have all the chapters of Darwin's seminal work blogged by the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth on February 12.
You know, come to think of it, I've never read all of Origin. I've read a couple of chapters of it, but I've never read the entire book.…
drorzel | January 12, 2009 There's been a fair bit of press for the article Subtracting photons from arbitrary light fields: experimental test of coherent state invariance by single-photon annihilation, published last month in the New Journal of Physics, much of it in roughly the same form as the news story in Physics World (which is published by the same organization that runs the journal), which leads with:
A property of laser light first predicted in 1963 by the future Nobel laureate Roy Glauber has been verified by physicists in Italy.
These stories can be a little puzzling, though. After all, Glauber got his…
tqa | January 12, 2009
There are certain organisms that you hear about a lot in evolutionary biology. In some cases, like Drosophila flies or E. coli bacteria, that's because the organisms are easy to use in experimental studies. Other organisms, like Hawaiian silversword plants or Galapagos finches, come up frequently because they're fantastic examples of evolution happening out in the "real world". And then there are those rare cases where an organism is both a fantastic example of evolution in the field, and a convenient organism to work with in more controlled circumstances. The three-spined stickleback (…