Science
drorzel | October 5, 2008Jennifer Ouellette's pop-science book project post and the discussionaround it reminded me that I'm really shockingly ill-read in this area. If I'm going to be writing pop-science books, I ought to have read more of them, so I've been trying to correct that.
Hence, Longitude, which I actually read a few weeks ago at the Science21 meeting, but am just getting around to blogging. Longitude is Dava Sobel's bestselling book about English clockmaker John Harrison and his forty-year sturggle to win 20,000 pounds for making a clock capable of keeping time at sea well enough to allow navigation.
This…
grrlscientist | October 5, 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 bird pals, 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 books that are (or will…
grrlscientist | October 4, 2008tags: John Scopes, Scopes Monkey Trial, Tennessee v. John T. Scopes Trial, evolution, creationism, religious fundamentalism, education
Tennessee v. John T. Scopes Trial: John Thomas Scopes.
Image: Watson Davis (1896-1967), courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution (copyright free). [larger view].
Description: Taken the month before the Tennessee v. John T. Scopes Trial. June 1925
Creator/Photographer: Watson Davis
Medium: Black and white photographic print
Dimensions: 4.25 in x 3 in
Culture: American
Geography: USA
Date: 1925
Persistent URL
Repository: Smithsonian Institution Archives…
grrlscientist | October 4, 2008tags: John Scopes, Scopes Monkey Trial, Tennessee v. John T. Scopes Trial, evolution, creationism, religious fundamentalism, education
Tennessee v. John T. Scopes Trial: Privies outside the Rhea County (Tennessee) courthouse with "Read Your Bible" sign.
Image: Watson Davis (1896-1967), courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution (copyright free). [larger view].
For the first time ever, a series of 39 original photographs from the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial are now available for your viewing pleasure.
Description: Taken during the Tennessee v. John T. Scopes Trial. July 1925
Creator/…
drorzel | October 4, 2008Over the past several weeks, I've written up ResearchBlogging posts on each of the papers I helped write in graduate school. Each paper write-up was accompanied by a "Making of" article, giving a bit more detail about how the experiments came to be, what my role in them was, and whatever funny anecdotes I can think of about the experiment.
If you haven't been following the series, or would just like a convenient index of the posts, here's the complete set:
Introduction and explanation of metastable xenon.
Experiment 1: Optical Control of Ultracold Collisions and the making thereof.…
bioephemera | October 3, 2008
fanfin seadevil
The Deep: Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss
Claire Nouvian
photographed by David Shale
For anyone who does not yet have a copy of Claire Nouvian's beautiful book, The Deep, here's a chance to win it - through Oceana's Freakiest Fish of 2008 contest. The book also has the Dumbo octopus in it. Is the Dumbo octopus' cuteness the perfect antithesis of the fanfin's hideousness? Would they annihilate each other if they collided? Discuss!
dumbo octopus
The Deep: Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss
Claire Nouvian
photographed by David Shale
grrlscientist | October 3, 2008tags: DonorsChoose2008, education, public school education, fund raising, evolution education, nature education, bird education
Today's featured project is below the fold.
This is a rural high-poverty school in North Carolina. The teacher is a bird watcher who also lives with pet birds, and she seeks to instill this love for birds into her students. In this proposal, she and her students will learn about the diets of owls by dissecting owl pellets and examining the remains of insects and bones from small animals that the owls cannot digest.
"Whooo's in the Forest?" Part II
I teach a…
drorzel | October 3, 2008Over at Nature Networks, Timo Hannay has posted a conference talk in which he questions the future of science blogging:
"Science blogging is growing" I confidently wrote in an essay a few months ago. Then, like any good scientist, I went in search of evidence to support my prejudice. But I couldn't find any beyond the anecdotal. For a year or more, estimates of the number of blogs by scientists about science seem to have been stuck at about 1,500 (give or take). Services such as Alexa and Compete.com (if they can be believed) show traffic to sites like ScienceBlogs.com to have been flat for…
bioephemera | October 3, 2008A recent PLoS Genetics paper triggered a sea change in the way genetic data is handled by research institutions like the NIH, the Broad Institute, and the Wellcome Trust. The paper, which came out last month, demonstrated that it's possible to identify a single individual's DNA in a pool of DNA from thousands of different people - something previously assumed to be about as feasible as finding a needle in a haystack.
Using the cumulative effect of tens of thousands of tiny differences in each individual's DNA (called SNPs), a team led by David Craig were able to determine if a specific person…
razib | October 2, 2008Rise of colonial African cities kick-started AIDS pandemic: scientists:
"As there must have been many opportunities for such transmission over past millennia, why did the AIDS pandemic not occur until the 20th century?
"The answer may be that, for an AIDS epidemic to get kick-started, HIV-1 needs to be seeded in a large population centre."
There are many ways that selection can operate on populations. There can be intraspecific competition, interspecific competition, as well as variation in fitness driven by changes in environmental factors. All of these are often in flux in a complex…
razib | October 2, 2008Again, Bayblab looks into it. I've checked it out myself for obvious reasons and found similar stuff. You have to look at the net effects of something.
zooillogix | October 2, 2008Zooillogix is participating in DonorsChoose, a very cool annual fundraising effort to directly provide needy schools with the materials they need. There are literally thousands of projects to choose from and we selected some pretty modest ones that we hope our readers will choose to support.
#1 An enterprising elementary school teacher in the Bronx wants to buy supplies to keep all sorts of live critters in the classroom, including: hermit crabs, butterflies, worms, ladybugs, pill bugs, and praying mantises.
#2 Another Bronx elementary school teachers wants to get an incubator, fertilized…
grrlscientist | October 2, 2008tags: DonorsChoose2008, education, public school education, fund raising, evolution education, nature education, bird education
One of the highest poverty areas in America is in Washington DC, our nation's capital. That's just disgusting. But we do not need to let the kids who live there succumb to the rampant despair of broken dreams, poor health and poverty. This proposal seeks to give these kids wings by teaching them about birds. Birds are a magical gateway into biological sciences; drawing kids into learning about the wonders of evolution and behavioral ecology and conservation. I know…
bioephemera | October 2, 2008
Squid Suckers
Jessica Schiffman and Caroline Schauer (Drexel University)
Honorable Mention, Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge 2008
The September 26 issue of Science contains the annual S&E Visualization Challenge winners. The feature is pay-only, but the winners are summarized in a free slideshow here. Winners and honorable mentions include short films, web interfaces, photos, micrographs, and digital illustrations (unfortunately, as in previous years, traditional media is somewhat underrepresented). The type of content varied too: the picture above is an artificially…
awild | October 1, 2008This morning I had to deny a scientist permission to use my photos of her ants in a paper headed for PLoS Biology. I hate doing that. Especially when I took those photos in part to help her to promote her research.
The problem is that PLoS content is managed under a Creative Commons (=CC) licensing scheme. I don't do CC. Overall it's not a bad licensing scheme, but for one sticking point: CC allows users to re-distribute an image to external parties.
In an ideal world, non-profit users would faithfully tack on the CC license and the attribution to the photographer, as required by the…
awild | October 1, 2008
Lachnomyrmex amazonicus - Feitosa and Brandão 2008
The new world tropics continue to be a rich source of species discovery. Today's issue of Zootaxa contains a monograph by Rodrigo Feitosa and Beto Brandão revising the ant genus Lachnomyrmex, a small yet delightfully wrinkled group of soil-dwelling ants. Of the 16 species recognized in the new paper, ten were previously unknown. For the mathematically-challenged, that's more than half.
Lachnomyrmex amazonicus, pictured above, is one of the new species. It has been recorded from lowland humid forests in the states of Amazonas, Para…
grrlscientist | October 1, 2008tags: DonorsChoose2008, education, public school education, fund raising, evolution education, nature education, bird education
Mrs. G is seeking supplies for a microbiology lab. I, as a microbiologist, recognize the value (and the intense fascination!) of teaching students about the natural world, particularly microbes!
I teach 7th grade Science in a school where the majority of the students are classified as Title 1, meaning that they need remedial help with their basic skills. Even without that classification, students this age are hard to motivate, especially in the content area of…
drorzel | September 30, 2008Via FriendFeed, I came across an article by Deepak Singh on attention and science, which spins off a long rant by Kevin Kelly on the idea that Where ever attention flows, money will follow. Deepak writes:
Attention can be driven by many mechanisms, marketing being the most effective one. The key is gaining sufficient mindshare, which is often accompanies by a flow of capital. In science, the money follows topics of research that have mindshare. Similarly people fund companies in areas that generate mindshare for whatever reason.
The question I often ask myself, both from my time as a marketer…
drorzel | September 30, 2008Sometime last week, I was directed to Chris Wilson's article in Slate, which comes with the provocative subtitle "Why can't science journalists just tell it like it is when it comes to particle physics?" I flagged this as a good jumping-off point for a blog post about how hard it is to communicate science to the general public, and set it aside for later, because I had a lot on my plate at the time.
Now that I read it carefully, though, I honestly don't see the point. It's not about the challenges of communicating difficult concepts, it's a lengthy complaint about "purple" prose in science…
razib | September 29, 2008Bayblab has a post up, Which organisms can feel pain?, on capsaicin. The post also points to an article about a man dying after eating habanero chili paste (though the article makes me suspect it was some allergy).
Related: 7 days of hot sauce.