Science
illconsidered | September 24, 2008Well, the good news is a recent finding of 740,000 year old permafrost in the Canadian arctic. What this suggests is that the permafrost may be more resilient than previously thought. If this ice is 740Kyr old, then it did not melt during the last three inter-glacial cycles. The peak warmth of at least the Eemian, 120Kyr ago, was a couple of degrees warmer than now, and some serious effort might keep temperatures from rising above that high marker.
The reason this is good news is because of the large (huge) quantities of methane stored in clathrates in this permafrost. If released, this…
awild | September 23, 2008
Battle of the Pavement Ants, definitely not Tetramorium caespitum
While walking through the park yesterday, I happened across a sidewalk boundary dispute between two colonies of Pavement Ants. As is their habit, these little brown ants opted to dispense with diplomacy in favor of all-out warfare.
Incidentally, if I had to pick one thing that annoys me about the purely molecular systematists, it is their tendency to avoid dealing with the taxonomic consequences of their work. A recent paper by Schlick-Steiner et al (2006) gave a detailed picture of the genetic structure within the…
drorzel | September 23, 2008Derek Lowe has posted an article about X-ray lasers in chemistry, which amused me because of the following bit:
Enter the femtosecond X-ray laser. A laser will put out the cleanest X-ray beam that anyone's ever seen, a completely coherent one at an exact (and short) wavelength which should give wonderful reflection data.
This is funny to somebody in my end of the science business, because we usually think of femtosecond lasers as have an extremely broad spectrum, not an "exact wavelength." It's a striking example of something I see all the time with chemists-- what chemists think of as "…
drorzel | September 23, 2008One full day of the Science in the 21st Century meeting wound up being devoted to what might be characterized as defining what we mean by Science. This started off with a talk by Harry Collins (microblogging, video), a sociologist of science who has done a great deal of work on the nature of expertise, then there was a remote presentation by Steve Fuller (no video, alas, but here's the microblogging), followed in the afternoon by Lee Smolin on "Science as an Ethical Community" (microblogging, video).
The talks by Collins and Smolin have a high information density, but are well worth a look.…
awild | September 22, 2008
Relevant to our earlier discussion, google search statistics suggest "flies" should be able to hold their own against "ants" in the public eye.
Caveat: additional meanings of "flies" (such as, the conjugate of the verb " to fly") may overestimate the fly tally.
bioephemera | September 22, 2008For the past two years, Scibling Bora has shepherded the creation of an anthology sampling the best of science blogging, called The Open Laboratory. Blog posts written since December 20, 2007 are eligible for consideration; you can nominate your own posts, as well as posts by other bloggers. The rules are here.
My first nominee? This smashing post by Mo on Wilder Penfield, the man who mapped the brain. It's incredibly long, though. Perhaps Mo should write his own book. . .
Things to consider:
-The deadline is December 1, 2008.
-Multiple submissions are okay - in other words, don't worry if…
pharyngula | September 21, 2008This seems like something of a cheat of the process: Sean Carroll and Jennifer Ouellette do a bloggingheads episode together…over the telephone. What, they can't just do the conversation in the same room with a single camera?
At least we finally find out what the universe is made of.
grrlscientist | September 21, 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…
awild | September 20, 2008
Dipterist Keith Bayless exposes a pernicious case of media bias:
Six new families of Diptera were described from newly discovered species in the last 6 years! None of these flies received the press coverage given to Martialis. There are a variety of explanations for this, including that
1) The fly descriptions were published in lower profile journals than PNAS
2) Many of the the new fly families evolved more recently than the first ant in the Martialis lineage
3) The level of public and scientific interest in ants inclines them to be better covered or
4) People who study ants are better at…
ddobbs | September 19, 2008Direct from Mind Hacks: Loud Music Makes You Drink More:
PsyBlog has a delightful article discussing whether louder music increases alcohol consumption. It turns out it does, and surprisingly, there seems to have been quite a few studies done to examine the effect.
One research group even did a sort of randomised controlled trial on bars and music in a fantastic real-world experiment.
One study by Gueguen et al. (2004) found that higher sound levels lead to people drinking more. In a new study published in Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, Gueguen et al. (2008) visited a bar…
drorzel | September 19, 2008The Pontiff beat me to it, but my Ph.D. alma mater has scored a $12.5 million grant from the NSF to fund the Joint Quantum Institute as a Physics Frontier Center for the development of quantum technology:
The Physics Frontier Center (PFC) award, effective September 1, will fund 17 graduate students, seven postdoctoral scientists and seven undergraduates as well as an extensive and highly cross-disciplinary research program under the general title Processing Quantum Coherence. Ultimately the work may lead to development of a computer that exploits the strange phenomena of quantum mechanics…
bioephemera | September 19, 2008
Blue Forest
Kevin O'Neill
io9.com posed its readers a challenge a few months back: design a synthetic lifeform using BioBricks. They didn't want another Spore creature - it had to be something biologically plausible, and preferably, functional. The question: would those readers voluntarily do the equivalent of biochem lab homework?
The answer appears to be heck, yes. The winner, nerd overachiever Vijaykumar Meli, proposed a modified rhizobial bacterium capable of invading rice roots, conferring nitrogen fixation capability on the plant and significantly reducing its need for fertilizer. He…
oracknows | September 18, 2008This one's been floating around the intertubes, at least those parts of the intertubes I frequent, for several days now at least. But it's so good that I just can't resist posting it myself.
I had no idea John Cleese had a video podcast...
awild | September 18, 2008The New York Times has a short piece on the discovery of Martialis and the story behind the name.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/18/science/18ant.html
The annotated specimen photo seems an effective way to point out key parts of the insect. I've got to say, I'm continually impressed by the extra effort the NY Times puts into their science reporting. They're a bright point in a sea of science reporting mediocrity.
drorzel | September 18, 2008There's an article in yesterday's Inside Higher Ed about the supply of scientists and engineers, arguing that there is not, in fact, a shortage:
Michael S. Teitelbaum, a demographer at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, looked at what he called five "mysteries" of the STEM work force issue. For example, why do employers claim a shortage of qualified STEM graduates while prospects for Ph.D.s remain "poor"? Why do retention and completion rates for STEM fields remain low compared with students' aspirations? Why is there a "serious" funding crisis at the National Institutes of Health after its…
awild | September 17, 2008
Platythyrea pilosula - Image by April Nobile/Antweb
Yesterday, the above photograph was uploaded to Antweb's databases.  Platythyrea pilosula is the final species to be imaged for the Ants of Paraguay project, marking the end of a sporadic and meandering study that I started in 1995 as a hobby during my stint in the Peace Corps. After combining several years' worth of my field collections with the holdings at 19 entomological museums, I tallied 541 species for the country. This turns out to be too many species to keep track of in my head (I max out at about 300 or so), so I've found…
catdynamics | September 17, 2008Collection of before and after comparison pictures of local areas near Galveston Bay
Mostly areal and recent satellite photos, done by locals to try to estimate what happened to their houses and their neighbours and favourite locales, far as I can tell.
The devastation in some places is astonishing
I hope the evacuation in these areas was selective - that is to say that the evacuation was more complete in the more vulnerable areas than the media reported evacuation statistics. Else we are in for some very bad news dribbling in over the next days and weeks as the local authorities get their…
drorzel | September 17, 2008After talking to Cameron Neylon last week, I'm strongly considering setting up an online lab notebook for my research lab. Not so much for the philosophical reasons having to do with openness and the like-- as a practical matter, I still don't think my data will do anybody any good-- but for reasons of sheer convenience. Having the lab notebook on the web will allow me to keep tabs on what's going on during the next few months when I'm going to be spending a lot of time at home with SteelyKid.
The one catch is, the system Neylon uses for his lab blog is optimized for, well, a biochemist--…
drorzel | September 17, 2008Another thing I thought was intriguing that came up at the Science in the 21st Century meeting wasn't from a formal talk, but rather a conversation over dinner with Garrett Lisi and Sabine Hossenfelder about the future of publishing. Garrett was suggesting a new model of publishing, based on pulling things from the arxiv (or something like it).
The idea here is that anybody who cared to would set up a "journal," consisting of a collection of links to papers they found worthwhile. If you wanted to know what Garrett Lisi finds interesting and useful from recent research, you would look at his "…
drorzel | September 17, 2008I have never been a huge proponent of the Open Access and Open Data movements in science publishing, because they've always struck me as wasted effort. I've never really seen what value is supposed to be added by either project.
When I think about the experiments that I've been involved with (see, for example, the Metastable Xenon Project blogging), and what the data for those experiments looked like, I doubt that anybody not directly associated with the experiments could do anything useful with the data. It's not just that many of the analysis steps required tacit knowledge of the set-up,…