Science
bioephemera | October 26, 2008
Catching up on the announcement of the 2008 Nikon Small World contest winners, here's sixth place winner Klaus Bolte's stereomicrograph of a microleaf beetle (Chrysolina fastuosa). While you might think you've seen this kind of beetle before, pinned prettily in glass collection boxes, you'd be wrong - the silver disc behind the beetle is a pin head. The beetle is seen here at 40x magnification - pinning it down with a conventional pin would obliterate it.
The first place winner this year was Michael Stringer, who used polarized light, darkfield, and image manipulation to portray the graceful…
grrlscientist | October 26, 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…
drorzel | October 24, 2008This week's department colloquium was Roel Snieder of the Colorado School of Mines on The Global Energy Challenge. I have to admit, I was somewhat rude, and spent a lot of the talk futzing with my tablet, but really, while his presentation of the material was very good, the material itself wasn't new to me-- if you read ScienceBlogs, you've probably heard it all.
It's a colossal ball of woe, too. You know the story-- demand for energy is increasing, supplies of oil are dwindling. The planet is warming, the ice caps are melting, the oceans are rising. Everything is on the verge of collapse.…
bioephemera | October 24, 2008Today I encountered yet another example of the misleading language I see all too frequently in coverage of science news. I was browsing a health newsletter (the "Pink Sheet") when I saw this:
NeuroSearch pill doubles weight loss, study finds A Phase II trial of tesofensine found that the drug caused about 10% more weight loss in obese patients compared with placebo and diet. The finding indicates that the treatment, manufactured by Danish firm NeuroSearch, is twice as effective as existing obesity pills, which provide about 5% of weight loss.
Okay, how much weight loss does tesofensine…
drorzel | October 24, 2008Claims of the non-existence of dark matter are a staple of astro-kookery, but Physics World today has a news story with the provocative title "Galaxy survey casts doubts on cold dark matter," which makes it sound like people from reputable collaborations are questioning the existence of dark matter.
So what's the deal? Well, here's the explanation of the results, which come from a survey of 200-odd galaxies identified by both radio and visible telescopes:
Using data from both telescopes, the team classified the galaxies in terms of six independent properties. These were two optical radii (…
drorzel | October 24, 2008Chris Mooney visited Union on Wednesday, talking to two classes (one Environmental Studies class, and one class on presidential politics), and giving an evening lecture titled "Science Escape 2008." He's an excellent speaker, so if you're looking for someone to give a talk about science and politics, you could do a whole lot worse.
I enjoyed the evening talk quite a bit, in part because it echoed a lot of things I said in my talk at the Science21 meeting last month (video, live-blogging), thus reassuring me that I'm not a lone crank on these issues. He talked about his experience with…
pharyngula | October 23, 2008Tracking of the HMS Beagle by a manned space station. I don't know why; maybe those pre-Victorian Space Engineers had their steam-powered space-stations all tied up trying to find the source of the Nile or plotting invasion routes into Afghanistan, or something. This time around our 21st century panjandrums of outer space have their priorities a bit more in focus, and NASA has committed to using the ISS to watch the new Voyage of the Beagle. Read the Beagle Project for more details.
I'm just relieved that finally we've found something useful for these space nuts to do — providing supplemental…
drorzel | October 23, 2008Doug Natelson is thinking about fortuitous physics, inspired by some solid state examples:
Every now and then you stumble across a piece of physics, some detail about how the universe works, that is extremely lucky in some sense. For example, it's very convenient that Si is a great semiconductor, and at the same time SiO2 is an incredibly good insulator - in terms of the electric field that it can sustain before breakdown, SiO2 is about as good as it gets.
From my own field of physics, I would suggest the rubidium atom. Rubidium isn't a substance you run across every day, and that's a Good…
rallain | October 23, 2008I am sorry to point this out, but I can't help it. My kids watch this show "Fetch with Ruff Ruffman". It's mostly an ok kids show. However, there was a problem. In one episode, some kids were in the desert and measuring temperature with (they said it several times and it was even a quiz question at the end) - a LASER. Here is the device they used:
This is an infrared thermometer with a LASER aiming system. The laser is only there to help you aim. The temperature is determined by measuring the infrared…
bioephemera | October 23, 2008
Artist Julian Voss-Andrae created this metal sculpture, Angel of the West, which evokes da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. The molecule is probably instantly recognizable to many of you as an antibody:
The sculpture plays on the striking similarity of both proportion and function of the antibody molecule and the human body. A representation of the antibody molecule, in a style developed by the artist, is surrounded by a ring evocative of Leonardo's Renaissance icon Vitruvian Man (1490). Where man's arms reach up to touch the circle with his hands, the molecule's flexible 'arms' ending in highly…
awild | October 22, 2008
Adetomyrma sp. "mad-01", larvae and adults
Madagascar
With a name like "dracula ant" you'd think these waspy little Adetomyrma might suddenly lunge for your jugular. But they are shy creatures, drinking not the blood of hapless victims but sparingly from the hemolymph of their own larvae. It's an odd behavior, yet one that makes a certain amount of sense when considering the haphazard way that evolution works.
Here's the problem: ants have a skinny little waist through which their digestive tract must pass. Solid food would lodge in the bottleneck and kill the ant, so the ants can't eat…
drorzel | October 22, 2008Another question from a generous donor, in this case Natalie, who asks:
As for my question, how about "who is your favorite author, and why?" or, if you'd rather, "what's your favorite book, and why?"
This is a difficult question, because it's subject to a sort of quantum projection noise. That is, my "favorite book" and "favorite author" exist in a sort of quantum superposition of all the various possibilities. When someone asks, I can give an answer and either the wavefunction collapses to that value at that instant, or the universe splits into many parallel universes, each with its own…
drorzel | October 22, 2008Some time back, I wrote about what you need to make a quantum computer. Given that it's election season, I thought I'd revisit the topic by looking in detail at the candidate technologies for quantum computing.
The first up is Ion Trap Quantum Computing, probably the most well-established of any of the candidates. The field really starts with Dave Wineland's group at NIST, though there is outstanding stuff being done by Chris Monroe at Maryland, and a host of others.
So, how do they stack up? Here are the facts about ion traps as a quantum computing system:
What's the system? Ion traps are,…
illconsidered | October 22, 2008At NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory there is a news article posted yesterday that discusses "the other carbon dioxide problem." That problem is, of course, ocean acidification.
Ocean acidification is the result of CO2 released into the atmosphere finding its way into ocean waters. Estimates are that around one third of all human emissions of CO2 are currently absorbed this way. While that is good news for the problem of an enhanced greenhouse effect causing global warming, it is not good news for marine ecosystems.
In fact it is extremely bad news, and make ocean acidifications one of the…
awild | October 21, 2008
Argentine ants tending scale insects
Three years after finishing my Ph.D., I have finally published the last bit of work from my dissertation. It's a multi-locus molecular phylogeny of the ant genus Linepithema, a group of mostly obscure Neotropical ants that would be overlooked if they didn't happen to contain the infamous Argentine Ant. In less jargony language, what I've done is reconstruct the evolution of an ant genus using genetic data. Here's the citation:
Wild, A. L. 2008. Evolution of the Neotropical Ant Genus Linepithema. Systematic Entomology, online early, doi: 10.1111/j.…
drorzel | October 21, 2008Chris Mooney will be visiting Union tomorrow (I'm picking him up at the airport in a couple of hours). He'll be speaking to a couple of classes and then giving a presentation about science and politics in the evening.
If you have any questions that you've been dying to ask Chris, and haven't been able to get him to address on his blog, leave them in the comments. If they're reasonable, I'll see if I can get answers during one or another of tomorrow's events.
drorzel | October 21, 2008Lots of people talk about "Science 2.0" and "crowdsourcing" and the like. EurekAlert provides a story about taking it to the next level:
Nalini Nadkarni of Evergreen State College currently advises a team of researchers who sport shaved heads, tattooed biceps and prison-issued garb rather than the lab coats and khakis typically worn by researchers. Why is Nadkarni's team composed of such apparently iconoclastic researchers? Because all of her researchers are inmates at Cedar Creek Corrections Center, a medium security prison in Littlerock, Washington.
With partial funding from the National…
pharyngula | October 20, 2008I have to confess that the title of this paper, The remarkable influence of M2δ to thienyl π conjugation in oligothiophenes incorporating MM quadruple bonds, is Greek to me, that the abstract was impenetrable, and the paper itself was thoroughly incomprehensible. I'm a biologist, not a chemist or materials engineer! Fortunately, there are a couple of summaries that simplify the explanation enough that I can understand the gist of it, and it's cool stuff. Researchers have made a new material that promises to greatly increase the efficiency of solar cells. It works by collecting photons over a…
awild | October 20, 2008I've blogged a lot about lady beetles recently. That's because we have been inundated by them ever since moving to Illinois. The beetle deluge is not a good thing, though, as ours are nearly all Harmonia axyridis, an extraordinarily pesty species imported from Asia in what must rank as one of the most poorly executed biological control projects ever. In the wake of the alien lady beetle invasion, our native species have all but disappeared.
Enter the Lost Ladybug Project. The project is a citizen-science initiative out of Cornell University to gather information on the distribution of…