Science
tqa | December 10, 2008
But I really don't know who it could possibly be.
If the latest set of transition leaks are as accurate as the previous few have been, President-Elect Obama will announce the nomination of Steven Chu for Energy Secretary.
And. The. Crowd. Goes. Wild.
Chu's background is a bit light on the politics side - no DC job, no elected political office - but even if you consider that to be a down side, the rest of his resume more than makes up for the lack. He's a career scientist. He's a world-class physicist, one of the 1997 recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics, and has been the director…
awild | December 10, 2008I see that Pachycondyla chinensis, which people are apparently calling "The Asian Needle Ant", is making headlines this week.
I know very little about P. chinensis, but the ant is apparently becoming widespread in the Southeast. Rob Dunn's lab at NCSU researches the species and has put up a page about it. Also, check out Benoit Guenard's P. chinensis photo gallery.
(Incidentally, Rob Dunn has a new book out about biological discovery. It looks excellent. I'll write more about this later, once I get my hands on a copy.)
ddobbs | December 10, 2008From Knight Science Journalism Tracker:
Phil. Inquirer: Four part series disembowels the Bush White House version of the EPA
Many reporters have dived pretty deep into the legal and regulatory changes wrought at the EPA in the last eight years and into the scientist-administrator Stephen Johnson who imposed them at the behest of the George W. Bush administration... But no other newspaper that the Tracker knows of has torn into the agency with as thorough, focussed and full-hearted a pummeling as seen in the Philadelphia Inquirer for four days this week. ....
Sometimes it’s good to let one’s…
pharyngula | December 10, 2008
The Institute for Creation Research has a charming little magazine called "Acts & Facts" that prints examples of their "research" — which usually means misreading some scientific paper and distorting it to make a fallacious case for a literal interpretation of the bible. Here's a classic example: Chimps and People Show 'Architectural' Genetic Design, by Brian Thomas, M.S. (Note: this is not the peer-reviewed research paper implied by the logo to the left — that comes later.) The paper is a weird gloss on recent work on CNVs, or copy number variants. Mr Thomas makes a standard creationist…
bioephemera | December 10, 2008This coming June, the NIH Office of Medical Applications of Research is holding a three-day course entitled "Medicine in the Media: The Challenge of Reporting on Medical Research." The agenda is here. Amazingly, course registration is free, and meals and lodging are provided - all you have to do is get yourself to Bethesda, Maryland.
What's the catch? Well, the application process is competitive; only 50 spots are available, and in recent years, only 1/3 to 1/2 of applicants have gotten in. So if you're a science journalist whose "primary target audience is the general public" - and yes, that…
oracknows | December 10, 2008
I have to wonder if the most famous denizen of the Discovery Institute in medical circles, Dr. Michael Egnor, is on vacation or something. For some reason, he's been especially active over at the Discovery Institute's repository of pseudoscience, Evolution News & Views, over the last couple of weeks. Neurosurgeons tend to be very busy people, more so even than a humble breast cancer surgeon like me, and few are as motivated as I am to blog. Yet, these days Dr. Egnor's been flooding EN&V with more of his blather than I've seen him do in a long time, maybe ever.
It's times like these…
awild | December 9, 2008
Solenopsis invicta - invasive or just disturbed?
Prevailing wisdom holds that imported fire ants marched across the southern United States on the virtue of their fierce nature and superior competitive ability. The fire ant conquest of the south reads like a tale of bravery and intrigue, but according to Walt Tschinkel and Josh King it is also not true.  They have a must-read study in PNAS this week detailing a tight set of field experiments that turns the conventional wisdom upside-down.
King and Tschinkel disturbed various patches of native Florida pine forest by mowing or plowing,…
bioephemera | December 9, 2008
Colonial Intelligence 3/4 (detail)
Eshel Ben-Jacob
One of the things I love about SEED Magazine is its incredible design (and no, they are not paying me to say this - in fact, my respect for SEED was one of the reasons I moved to Scienceblogs last February!)
SEED's editors have collected the "portfolios" of beautiful science from each issue on the website, so you can browse them at your leisure. Be sure to check out Eshel Ben-Jacob's swirling bacterial colonies and Robert Hodgin's renderings of the Mandelbrot set:
Fractals Revisited 1/4
Robert Hodgin
You enter to win an image from one of…
drorzel | December 9, 2008I'm sitting at the dining room table eating lunch, when I get the feeling of being watched. I look around, and see the dog across the room, curled up on her pillows staring at me. She's quietly chanting to herself "I get stuff. I get stuff. I get stuff."
"You're not trying that hypnosis thing again, are you?" I ask. "You know it won't work."
"No. I'm manipulating the wavefunction of the universe to bring me good things. Such as, for example, that cheeseburger you're eating."
"Really. Manipulating the wavefunction of the universe?"
"Really. You see, all conscious beings are surrounded by an…
oracknows | December 9, 2008My original post that asked the intentionally provocative question Was Nazi science good science? provoked a lot of comments, some of which made me think, which is good. This post was inspired by an article in which historian of the Nazi era Richard Evans was featured in a story about Nazi science and expressed his amazement at how much Nazi science was treated just like any other science, with little or no comment by other scientists of the era about the completely unethical and downright evil nature of the experiments, which reduced human beings to the status of laboratory animals, and…
bioephemera | December 8, 2008
This interactive climate change outcomes map is an ongoing project by the Center for American Progress. More on the rationale here and instructions for adding your own data points here. It's a nice example of an interactive online project that clearly cites scientific sources.
bioephemera | December 8, 2008Are your kids bouncing around on a holiday sugar high? Send them off to brainstorm names for NASA's new Mars Rover. Winners can send a "special message to the future to be placed on a chip" on the Rover, so when they finish with the name, they can start working on their message, and who knows - they might be distracted for a full hour! The contest runs through Jan 25.
NASA's Name That Rover Contest
PS. It's co-sponsored by Disney, so be prepared for your kids to return convinced that Wall-E is the best thing evah.
PPS. It's open to kids in grades K-12 only (sorry, 30-something geeks)
catdynamics | December 8, 2008Where is my air car?
Living in the future is good, certainly beats the alternative.
But I'm not sure I was expecting a choice between a Charlie Stross wild ride or a Ken MacLeod dystopia.
Could be worse, we could still fit in a R.A.H. theocracy timeline with some bad luck.
drorzel | December 8, 2008In comments to last week's rant about the low esteem in which science is held, taffe writes:
Ok then, what should scientists be doing, individually or as a community? Maybe the masses just plain find political info more interesting. I mean hell, you had to use dog fans as a hook for your popular book, right?
One of the maddening things about blogging as a medium is the way its ephemerality leads to repetition. I feel like I've written this before, but it's unreasonable for me to be peeved about it, because there's no reason why anybody commenting last week would've seen the earlier post. So…
drorzel | December 8, 2008I made a run to the library last week on one of the days I was home with SteelyKid, as an excuse to get out of the house for a little while. I picked up three books: Counterknowledge, The Devil's Eye by Jack McDevitt (an Antiquities Dealers Innnnn Spaaaaaace novel, and a good example of Competence Fiction), and a pop-science book titled The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Came of Age by Louisa Gilder, because it looked fairly relevant to my own book-in-progress.
Amusingly, my RSS feeds yesterday brought me the latest in a series of posts in which ZapperZ waxes peevish about the book…
grrlscientist | December 7, 2008tags: The Hungry Scientist Handbook, DIY projects, kitchen science, Patrick Buckley, Lily Binns, book review
When I was a kid, I enjoyed cooking and baking and I excelled at these activities since I regularly won all the blue ribbons in the pre-adult age divisions at the annual state fair. A little later, I expanded my kitchen-based activities to mixing drinks, a hobby that I pursue whenever possible to this very day. Later, when I began taking chemistry classes in school, my kitchen-based skills served me very well because I was a superb chemist. But I am not the only one to notice this…
grrlscientist | December 7, 2008tags: 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…
drorzel | December 7, 2008Carl Zimmer sent me a message via Facebook, which made me think I might owe the New York Times an apology for last week's ranting. Publishers Weekly has come out with their list of the best books of the year, and they do even worse than the Times: not one of the 27 books in their "Nonfiction" category are about science-- the closest they come is probably Gladwell's Outliers.
Better yet, in a move that will no doubt delight my colleagues here at ScienceBlogs, they have an entire category on their list for "Religion," but no category for "Science." Fantastic.
I'm not quite as bothered by this…
drorzel | December 7, 2008I spent most of yesterday helping out with an on-campus workshop for high school teachers and students. Seven high school physics teachers and seventeen high school students spent the day doing a half-dozen experiments to measure various physical constants.
I was in charge of having them measure Plack's constant using the photoelectric effect. The actual measurement (made using a PASCO apparatus) takes about fifteen minutes, so I gave each group a quick explanation of the history: Einstein proposed the particle model of light as an explanation for the photoelectric effect in 1905, and nobody…
drorzel | December 5, 2008One of the links in the previous post was to Josh's thoughts on the CNN science shutdown. Toward the end, he had an interesting note on why science doesn't get more play:
This is especially bad for CNN, since so much of their airtime is taken up by talking heads yelling at one another. Science doesn't work like that, and scientists fare poorly in a setting where rhetorical speed is valued over empirical evidence and fact-checking. This means that science is less likely to be covered at all, and when it is covered, it will be covered poorly.
He's right about CNN, but I wonder about the…