Science
bioephemera | November 4, 2008
Where do you suppose this photo was taken?
A. It's a false-color representation of the surface of a meteorite.
B. It's a 100x enlargement of the surface of a shark tooth.
C. It's crystals of an anti-cancer drug.
D. It's the "teeth" on a butterfly wing.
Answer below the fold. . .
The answer is (C). This is a 10x polarized light image of mitomycin, taken by Margaret Oeschli at the Jewish Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky. It won 7th place in the 2008 Nikon Small World Competition.
Mitomycin structure (from Wikipedia)
Mitomycin C (also called mutamycin) is an antitumor antibiotic which…
drorzel | November 3, 2008Continuing the series of descriptions of candidate technologies for making a quantum computer (previous entries covered optical lattices and ion traps), we come to one that's a little controversial. It's the only remaining candidate I can describe off the top of my head without doing some more background reading, though, so I will plunge ahead boldly...
Liquid state Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) was first suggested as a technology for quantum information processing in 1997, and some demonstration experiments followed very quickly, as there's relatively little infrastructure required. The…
grrlscientist | November 2, 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 wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that 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 published here for your enjoyment. Here's this week's issue of the Birdbooker Report by which lists ecology, environment, natural history and bird…
pharyngula | November 2, 2008My latest Seed column slipped quietly onto the interwebs last week — it's an overview of how the glues that hold multicellular organisms together first evolved in single celled creatures, represented today by the choanoflagellates.
Just as a teaser, the next print edition that should be coming out soon will continue the focus on enlightening organisms of remarkable simplicity with a description of the results of the Trichoplax genome. Get it! You will also be rewarded with a great issue focusing on science policy.
razib | October 31, 2008Genetic and Linguistic Coevolution in Northern Island Melanesia:
...Here, we use high-quality data and novel methods to test two models of genetic and linguistic coevolution in Northern Island Melanesia, a region known for its complex history and remarkable biological and linguistic diversity. The first model predicts that congruent genetic and linguistic trees formed following serial population splits and isolation that occurred early in the settlement history of the region. The second model emphasizes the role of post-settlement exchange among neighboring groups in determining genetic and…
bioephemera | October 30, 2008I can't freehand a parallelogram to save my life, but I can bisect an angle with the best of 'em! Woohoo!
How good are you at eyeballing geometry? Test yourself with this game. It's addictive, although your eyes will tire quickly if you have an inferior monitor. And at the end, it gives you a snazzy little readout of your scores, like this:
drorzel | October 30, 2008Steinn responds to yesterday's post about his comments about science blogging. I'm going to continue the tradition of responding here, rather than in his comments, because, well, I need something to post today.
He concedes that outreach is a worthy purpose of blogging, but continues to be concerned about blogging as a tool for more traditional science:
Is blogging enabling collaborations?
Is blogging leading to new initiatives? New directions in research? Providing connectivity which would not otherwise have happened? Conveying information that is important to research and otherwise hard to…
drorzel | October 30, 2008Via Facebook, of all things, a message reporting a conversation with Representative Bill Foster (D-Fermilab), talking about the best ways to encourage Congress to take science seriously. First, he addressed what's been done in the past:
On the effectiveness of the APS letter-writing campaign:
*Recently I sent my chief of staff to a meeting of about 70 House chiefs of staff. He asked, how many of them were aware of the APS letter-writing campaign. Only two others were aware of it.
*These campaigns are a form of spam, and there are lots of groups involved in them. For many small-group issues…
catdynamics | October 29, 2008Cosmic Variance is doing a Donors Choose Bloggers Challenge
This is one of those very good things that I keep thinking I ought to do, but am not organised enough to set up and walk through the paces and by the time I check the e-mail giving the info it is too late.
The CV crowd has lined up a bunch of physics blogs sending things their way and they've raised a bunch.
But, co SciBling Chad at Uncertain Principles is out raising them, so go donate or something.
I actually don't care who you go through, it is a win-win.
bioephemera | October 29, 2008
De prospectiva pingendi, Book 3, figure lxiv
Piero della Francesca (c 1412-92)
This month's Lancet has an interesting article by G.D. Schott, linking Piero della Francesca's pioneering orthographic projections to technologies like fMRI:
In the neurosciences today, images of the brain and its constituent structures are typically presented in the triadic orthogonal format, comprising coronal, sagittal, and axial projections. Less commonly, rotated or tilted projections are used. But our forebears are easily forgotten, and here I suggest that the contemporary way in which brain images are…
drorzel | October 29, 2008Last week, I wrote about ion traps as a possible quantum computing platform, which are probably the best established of the candidate technologies. This week, I'll talk about something more speculative, but closer to my own areas of research: neutral atoms in optical lattices.
This is a newer area, which pretty much starts with a proposal in 1999. There are a bunch of different variants of the idea, and what follows will be pretty general.
What's the system? Optical lattices use the interaction between atoms and a standing wave of light to produce a periodic array of wells in which individual…
drorzel | October 29, 2008Steinn asks a provocative question:
has science blogging done any good?
I can think of science policy issues where blogging has made a contribution, and the general spread of information and communication done by blogs has probably had some impact, but has any actual science been directly impacted by blogs, or discussion on blogs? I am hard pressed to think of concrete examples.
I think this is a badly framed question. That is, I think it's a mistake to define "good" for science to exclude science policy questions and the general spread of information. It's a very common mistake, mind, and…
drorzel | October 28, 2008The closing narrative of the McCain campaign is apparently going to be "Obama's a pinko commie socialist who wants to raise your taxes," which means it's time for all good liberals to bust out the graphs to show why this is false. Well, graph, singular. You know the one:
I don't remember who first posted it (I got it here), but it's been everywhere this campaign. It shows a head-to-head comparison of the consequences of the McCain and Obama tax plans for various income groups.
I hate this graphic.
Not because of the information it contains, mind-- that's fine. I hate this graph because it…
drorzel | October 28, 2008Over at Dot Physics (which might be the best physics blog in the world at the moment), Rhett Allain has a pair of posts exploring the physics of Fantastic Contraption.
The posts don't really lend themselves to excerpting, so you need to go over there and read them, but I think they're brilliant, and deserve better than just a spot in a links dump. These may be the best example of the scientific mindset that you'll find on a blog.
What he does is to set out to determine whether the world of Fantastic Contraption obeys a consistent set of physical laws, by coming up with ingenious experiments…
bioephemera | October 27, 2008
Care to guess what this is?
A. a dragonfly wing.
B. a solar panel array.
C. winter fields in the mountains of Thailand.
D. a gecko foot.
E. the award-winning roof of a new modern art museum in Seattle.
Answer below the fold. . .
Yes, it's a dragonfly wing. (I had to smudge out the scale bar on this one to keep it from being too easy.)
I was impressed by how, at a quick glance, this image was devoid of scale indicators - I really did think it was a macroscopic image of a landscape, or some kind of sculpture. And although I've looked at dragonfly wings under a dissection microscope, and I've…
awild | October 27, 2008
Jim Wetterer has a paper out in Myrmecological News detailing the global spread of the ghost ant Tapinoma melanocephalum. This diminutive dolichoderine is quite possibly the most widely distributed ant in the world, a hitchhiker on human globalization, thriving in the wake of human-wrought ecological destruction. Their cosmopolitan dominance reflects our own.
Oddly enough, we still don't even know where they originally lived.
Ghost Ants - photo by Picasa user Aimeric
citation: Wetterer, J. K. 2008. Worldwide spread of the ghost ant Tapinoma melanocephalum (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). …
oracknows | October 27, 2008Hot on the heals of my post earlier today about the flurry of misinformation-laden ads being aired in Michigan to try to prevent Proposition 2, the proposed amendment to the Michigan State Constitution that would allow embryonic stem cell research using embryos that would be discarded from fertility clinics, I've learned that my alma mater, the University of Michigan, where I did both my undergraduate and medical school training, has released a series of videos countering the dishonest propaganda of groups like MiCAUSE:
The truth about stem cell science
And there's more:
Where Do Embryonic…
pharyngula | October 27, 2008The Mesozoic was inhabited by some strange-looking critters, and here's another example: a Jurassic dinosaur called Epidexipteryx, which has spiky teeth, big claws, fluffy feathers all over its body, and four long decorative feathers coming off a stumpy tail. It resembles a particularly ugly bird with a nasty bite, but it couldn't fly — none of the feathers covering its forelimbs are pennaceous, but are more like an insulating fur. Or, alternatively, its feathers were all about display, a possibility suggested by the odd long feathers of the tail. Here are the bones; as you can see, the…
oracknows | October 27, 2008Two years ago, there was a brouhaha in Missouri over a ballot proposal to allow state funding for embryonic stem cell research using discarded embryos from fertility clinics. The issue made national news, including some rather despicable rhetoric from Rush Limbaugh about Michael J. Fox, who made ads in support of the Missouri initiative, as well as deceptive ads against the proposal featuring Patricia Heaton and members of the St. Louis Cardinals. It was a big stink that drew national attention.
Fast forward to two years later and to my home state of Michigan, and history appears to be…
awild | October 26, 2008
A True Fruit Fly - Tephritidae
Fruit flies are a family, Tephritidae, containing about 5,000 species of often strikingly colored insects. As the name implies, these flies are frugivores. Many, such as the mediterranean fruit fly, are agricultural pests.
Drosophila melanogaster, the insect that has been so important in genetic research, is not a true fruit fly. Drosophila is a member of the Drosophilidae, the vinegar or pomace flies. They are mostly fungivores, and their association with fruit is indirect: they eat the fungus that lives in rotting fruit. Some pointy-headed…