Science
oracknows | November 26, 2008Here we go again.
Every so often, one of the--shall we say?--less popular members of our crew of science bloggers, someone who, despite being an academic whose area of expertise is ostensibly science communication, has stepped in it again. I'm referring, of course to Matt Nisbet. Only this time, it's not him lecturing us just on how to combat creationism. No, this time around, he isn't limiting himself to just that, although that is what he made his name doing, around the blogosphere anyway. This time around, he's perturbed at a certain word, a certain term that we skeptics sometimes feel…
bioephemera | November 25, 2008Andre at Biocurious responds to something PZ Myers said at a talk, with this legit criticism of the "science is beautiful" theme:
How far down the road of "science shares more with art than engineering" do you want to go? Our society supports the arts because they provide beauty and insight and enrich our lives. We support science because it is inspiring and let's us reach beyond ourselves to see and understand things that didn't seem possible and because it provides tangible advances that improve the quality of our lives. Those benefits are worth a lot to people. The National Endowment for…
razib | November 25, 2008If the title piques your interest, check out a new ScienceBlog of that name. The contributors are familiar faces....
sporte | November 25, 2008I just love this title! It's nerdy and cute, all at the same time.
I read about this in www.researchblogging.org and had to check out the paper and blog write up from The Beagle Project (BTW: some of you may be interested in knowing that The Beagle Project is not a blog about dogs.)
The paper describes a class where students from Marseilles University investigate the function of unidentified genes from a Global Ocean Sampling experiment. All the sequences are obtained from the environmental sequence division at the NCBI.
Students follow the procedure outlined below:
This is a great…
pharyngula | November 25, 2008Got an hour? A good way to spend it would be to watch Neil Shubin lecture about digging in the arctic for fossil tetrapods.
I wonder if this is available in high-quality DVD format? I could see using this in the classroom.
oracknows | November 25, 2008As I sat down on the couch in front of the TV last night to do my nightly blogging ritual, trying to tickle the gray matter to come up with the pearls of wisdom or insolence that my readers have come to know and love, I had a fantastic idea for a serious consideration of a question that comes up in the discussion of science and pseudoscience and how to combat pseudoscience. It would be serious and sober. It would be highly relevant to the interests of my readers. It would rival anything I've ever written for this blog before.
I ended up writing this instead. Oh, well, maybe tomorrow. Besides…
ddobbs | November 24, 2008
Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa
As the Times reported Friday, Senator Charles Grassley's pharma-money sweep has taken down another huge player in psychiatry: Grassley revealed that Fred Goodwin, a former NIH director who has long hosted the award-winning NPR radio show "The Infinite Mind," which frequently examined controversies about psychopharmacology, had taken in over $1.3 million consulting and speaking fees from Big Pharma between 2000 and 2007 and failed to report that income to the show's listeners and, apparently, to its producers. (For rundowns on this, see Furious Seasons,…
awild | November 24, 2008Last week the Howard Hughes Medical Institute announced that they will be funding Danny Reinberg, Shelley Berger, and Juergen Liebig to sequence three ant genomes. Their interest is research on aging, hoping that solving the puzzle of why genetically identical ant nestmates can either live for a year as a worker or twenty as a queen will unlock some clues to aging in our own species.  I think that's a stretch, but whatever. We myrmecologists will be able to probe the ant genomes for plenty of other worthwhile reasons.
Three species were chosen to represent varying levels of caste…
drorzel | November 24, 2008The Corporate Masters have decreed a new question Ask a
ScienceBlogger question, and this one's right up my alley:
What do you see as science fiction's role in promoting science, if any?
If you look over in the left sidebar, you'll see a
href="http://scienceblogs.com/principles/sf/">SF category, which
is all about, well, science fiction stuff. I read a lot of SF,
regularly attend Boskone (a Boston-based convention), and we scheduled
our big Japan trip to coincide with the Worldcon in Yokohama. So,
yeah, this is a question I can spend a little time on...
The short version of the answer is…
pharyngula | November 24, 2008As I've already mentioned, I was off in Philadelphia this past weekend, participating in a symposium entitled "Understanding Darwin: The legacy of evolution". I was a bit amazed to be there, since this was primarily a history and philosophy event with several big names in those fields, and I'm an itty-bitty biologist with more of a popular following than an academic one, but I was also glad to be involved and learned quite a bit, hob-nobbing with the big shots. Here's a short summary of the content of the talks.
John Beatty talked about Natural Selection of & Versus Chance Variation. He…
denialism | November 24, 2008One of the great things about science is that it is open, international, and celebrates the free exchange of ideas. However, during the last 8 years we've seen some odd things at the National Institutes of Health - the premier governmental scientific institution in the world. The paranoia of the current administration has filtered down and contaminated day to day operations of what is essentially an academic health sciences campus.
For example, for some bizarre reason they decided to erect a 10 foot high iron fence around the entire campus:
And at the entrances every car is searched, every…
oracknows | November 23, 2008I figure after expressing dismay at a certain member of Canada's government yesterday, I should point out that something cool did happen in Canada the other day. Specifically, a police video camera caught a meteor streaking across the night sky in Saskatoon, to land somewhere in western Canada:
And news reports:
It must have been an impressive sight to see.
grrlscientist | November 23, 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…
rallain | November 22, 2008One of things I like to think about in science is "how do we know that?" It is interesting how one thing builds on another. This is a story of how the Greeks estimated the distance from the Earth to the Sun (an important idea in the development of the model of the solar system). I like this story because it is not too complicated. In fact, one could easily reproduce these measurements themselves. So, here is what I will talk about:
Measuring the size of the Earth.
Determining the distance from the Earth to the moon and the size of the moon.
Calculating the distance (and size) to the Sun…
oracknows | November 22, 2008Well, this is depressing to learn. I'd be even more depressed if I were Canadian. All I can say to my neighbors to the north is that I feel your pain, albeit belatedly. I just learned that the recently appointed Minister of State for Science and Technology within Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Cabinet is Gary Goodyear. So what's the big deal?
Gary Goodyear is an chiropractor. Not only that, but he's an acupuncturist, too. Nothing like putting someone who believes in pseudoscience in charge of science and technology. I wonder how that will work out.
Now, for Harper's next appointment, let's…
bioephemera | November 21, 2008
Tarantula
Elizabeth Goluch
sterling silver, gold, tourmaline
Canadian artist Elizabeth Goluch's precious metal insects double as treasure-boxes. From her website:
My fascination with nature in general and with insects in particular began while I was a child growing up on a farm in southwestern Ontario. The work that I do reflects the influence of that environment -- the wildlife and the insects, as well the intricacy, the complexity and the order inherent in nature. I am drawn to the beauty, but also to the danger in nature. I relish the visible, yet can imagine much more; which gives rise…
awild | November 21, 2008 My copy arrived from Amazon the day before yesterday. I've not given it anything more than a couple cursory thumb-throughs, but I'm immediately left with the impression of schizophrenia.
The bits on social organization, behavior, communication, and levels of selection- mostly Bert Hoelldobler's sections- seem an engaging and modern review, while the chapters dealing with ant history and evolution- Wilson's area- are... How do I say this diplomatically? Rubbish.
The past ten years have brought immeasurable advances in our knowledge of ant evolution, both in breadth and detail. …
bioephemera | November 20, 2008
From Wired comes this rather odd interview with conceptual artist Jonathon Keats, who advocates turning the nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain into a universe nursery.
Keats has already built a $20 "do-it-yourself universe creation kit" (pictured above). The Yucca Mountain project would simply scale it up. What exactly this would look like is a little unclear, since by Keats' own account the mini-univernursery is not terribly exciting to watch:
From the standpoint of being in the universe, making a new universe is very mundane. If you could stand outside it and see the universes cleave, I…
bioephemera | November 20, 2008
Chesterfields ad, 1952
Today, November 20, is the American Cancer Society's 33rd Great American Smokeout. Now, be honest: did you even know?
The Smokeout doesn't seem to get as much attention as it used to, perhaps because the link between cigarette smoke and cancer is no longer surprising or controversial. After decades of anti-tobacco campaigns hammering the research home, no media-conscious American could plausibly believe that cigarettes are actually good for his or her health. Yet this is a sea change from attitudes in the first half of the 20th century, when cigarettes' health…
pontiff | November 20, 2008If only I were Michael J. Fox, a letter I would send back in time.
Dear Respected Mathematician/Scientist/Researcher:
First of all let me tell you want an honor it is to write to you from the future. Your work is so important in my time that we have named the main theorem which you proved in your paper "Megamathematical functorial categories which nearly commute" after you. Yes the JoeRandomName theorem is well known and used every day in my field. Thank you for thinking it up and proving it!
But I'm writing to you today, not because of this great piece of work. Instead I'm writing to…