Science
drorzel | August 31, 2008As you have no doubt seen by now, if you read any of the other blogs on ScienceBlogs, the Science Debate 2008 group has gotten Barack Obama to answer their 14 questions on science issues. John McCain has apparently promised answers at some point in the future.
The answers are, well, pretty much what you would expect. For example:
What policies will you support to ensure that America remains the world leader in innovation?
Ensuring that the U.S. continues to lead the world in science and technology will be a central priority for my administration. Our talent for innovation is still the envy…
pharyngula | August 30, 2008
Wow…so have you heard about this result?
One goal of regenerative medicine is to instructively convert adult cells into other cell types for tissue repair and regeneration. Although isolated examples of adult cell reprogramming are known, there is no general understanding of how to turn one cell type into another in a controlled manner. Here, using a strategy of re-expressing key developmental regulators in vivo, we identify a specific combination of three transcription factors (Ngn3 (also known as Neurog3) Pdx1 and Mafa) that reprograms differentiated pancreatic exocrine cells in adult mice…
awild | August 29, 2008
Juergen Heinze has a must-read piece in the latest edition of Myrmecological News about how ant colonies are not often simple families as we like to think of them:
Abstract: The social systems of ants are far more variable than has traditionally been believed. In addition to variation in queen number and queen mating frequency, recent research has documented such bizarre phenomena as the parthenogenetic production of females from unfertilized eggs or genetic caste determination. All these affect the genetic structure of ant societies, and it appears that in a large percentage of species…
catdynamics | August 29, 2008American Institute of Physics through Physics Today has bloggers at the DNC and RNC conventions as part of their Politics08 forum
Good discussion on the conventions here - everything from details of science policies, to what is in the goodie bags
Including the "coal stress reliever" if things get too heated.
Good read and source of information.
drorzel | August 29, 2008As anybody who has studied Quantum Optics knows, correlation functions play a very large role in our understanding of the behavior of light. Roughly speaking, the correlation function tells you how likely you are to detect a second photon some short time after detecting one photon from some source. This shows up in the famous Hanbury Brown and Twiss experiment, and definitive proof of the existence of photons was provided in 1977 when Kimble, Dagenais and Mandel demonstrated photon anti-bunching, where the correlation function goes to zero for short times.
Correlation functions are a powerful…
awild | August 29, 2008
Microphotus angustus - Pink Glowworm
California Coast Range
Believe it or not, this squishy pink thing is an adult beetle.
Now and again, evolution produces a species that loses the complexities of the adult form. These animals simply retain a larval appearance into their adult life, later gaining only the ability to mate and have offspring independent of the other trappings of maturity. Perhaps the adult traits of large eyes, large brains, long legs, and big wings are so expensive that just skipping all that extra development allows an animal to get on that much more efficiently with the…
drorzel | August 29, 2008No, not me. Not literally, anyway-- I'm quite happy with my current family.
Sigma Pi Sigma, the APS, and the AAPT are running a program called "Adopt-a-Physicist to help high school students learn more about what careers in physics are like:
Physicists and students interact through discussion forums for a three-week period. Before the three week period begins, the physicists and classes (via the teachers) each create a brief introduction page. After registration closes, teachers choose some physicists for their classes to interact with, preferably from different career categories.
The…
razib | August 28, 2008'Pristine' Amazonian Region Hosted Large, Urban Civilization:
The paper also argues that the size and scale of the settlements in the southern Amazon in North Central Brazil means that what many scientists have considered virgin tropical forests are in fact heavily influenced by historic human activity. Not only that, but the settlements - consisting of networks of walled towns and smaller villages, each organized around a central plaza - suggest future solutions for supporting the indigenous population in Brazil's state of Mato Grosso and other regions of the Amazon, the paper says.…
drorzel | August 28, 2008As I said in the introduction to the previous post, this was the first paper on which I was the lead author, and it may be my favorite paper of my career to date. I had a terrific time with it, and it led to enough good stories that I'm going to split the making-of part into two posts.
The experiment itself was based on an earlier paper by Phil Gould at UConn. Phil was a post-doc at NIST back in the day, and used to visit our group fairly regularly. On one of these visits, he stopped by the xenon lab, and gave me a pre-print of their time-resolved collision paper, saying "You guys really…
awild | August 28, 2008
A perpetually happy Venezuelan Leptogenys
We don't really know why some species of Leptogenys hunting ants sport a permanent grin. The oddly ecstatic mandible shape might, however, have something to do with handling the broadly curved exoskeleton of their preferred prey: isopods (the sow bugs and pill bugs).
Flickr user "venwu225" recently uploaded a fantastic series of the related species L. falcigera in action. Some of the shots show how the mandibles allow the ant to grip the isopod both above and below its wide skirt of armor. Cool stuff.
photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro…
catdynamics | August 27, 2008Every now and then I get a message which informs.
"If your jobs are unfortunately killed by the hurricane..."
"...simulation runs, please let us know and we will refund you the used SUs.
Sorry for the inconvenience."
LONI - the Lousiana Optical Network Initiative - is flushing its computing queue for pre-emptive hurricane modeling, this afternoon, and, I presume, through the weekend.
Current National Hurricane Center path predictions have NOLA right in the center of the predicted path - with landfall late sunday/early monday.
Cone of uncertainty stretches from NW Florida to NE Texas.
Click…
catdynamics | August 26, 2008It is the season, and there is a hurricane heading for the gulf with another 1-3 in the pipeline from Africa
Master's Wunderblog is the place for news
but the models used for forecasting are on the web.
Here is the GFDL current 5 day forecast, showing Hurricane Gustav hitting Lousisiana as category 4 storm
Forecasts that far in advance are highly uncertain, but current models show Gustav shooting the straits between Cuba and Yucatan into the Gulf as a major hurricane.
Could turn any direction after that, though models are converging on impact more to the northwest side, on monday-ish.
Full…
catdynamics | August 26, 2008Hindustan Times is reporting a mystery epidemic in Kanpur, India.
160 dead in two weeks, "thousands sick" in 350 villages.
Times reports it was initially diagnosed as "viral fever" (duh), then malarial.
Now apparently malaria is ruled out but 'cause is not known. Waiting for blood tests from New Delhi labs.
Times implies "viral fever" is ruled out, which seems implausible - rather I suspect they mean that some of the obvious viral infections have been ruled out, but it necessarily must be the case that it could be an obscure or new virus.
Presumably bacterial infection would be responding to…
drorzel | August 25, 2008Over on LiveJournal, Johan Larson has a great discussion topic:
Our hero, the time traveling engineer, starts out in 1901, with the goal of
working on the coolest engineering projects of the twentieth century.
Assuming he knows well the history of technical development during that
time, but is not actually allowed to substantially alter history, where is
he working during each of the hundred years?
He's reposted the consensus list of great engineering projects developed in a Usenet discussion of the question a few years back. It seems to me that it would be fun to do something similar for…
catdynamics | August 24, 2008Or so says Steen Landsy, director of the Kosmos Center.
You see, the Kosmos Center, which in the last 30 years has educated over 6,000 psychics is upset at the proliferation of "psychic educational institutions" in Denmark. There are now 25 such, up from just one a decade ago.
The problem, you see, is all these other so-called psychic educational institutions are just a bunch of hacks, and are not guaranteeing the quality of the education provided!
There are improperly certified psychics operating throughout Denmark, and the EU, one presumes, given the open borders.
What is needed, is…
rallain | August 24, 2008I can't believe there is still all this talk about what to call Pluto. Can't we just move on? In an effort to help, I have summoned the Zombie Feynman to get his words on the subject. This is what he said:
"We (my father and I) used to go up to the Catskill Mountains for vacations. In New York, you go the Catskill Mountains for vacations. The poor husbands had to go to work during the week, but they would come rushing out for weekends and stay with their families. On the weekends, my father would take me for walks at night. He often took me for walks, and we learned all about the sky, and…
grrlscientist | August 24, 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…
drorzel | August 22, 2008Every time I mention the idea of teaching physics to a wider audience than just physics majors, somebody brings up Richard Muller's course, "Physics for Future Presidents," at Berkeley. So, I was pleased to find out that he has turned the course into a book, also titled Physics for Future Presidents, with the subtitle "The Science Behind the Headlines." I was going to try to cadge a free copy from his publisher, but our default local Borders is closing, and they were offering deep discounts on all their stock, so I just bought a copy.
The book is framed as a sort of memo to somebody who will…
drorzel | August 22, 2008Over in LiveJournal Land, James Nicoll has a good idea that I'm going to steal. Over at SF Signal, they asked a bunch of writers what they would change about SF. Ken Macleod (author and occasional blogger) wrote, in part:
It's just rare to see stories written about a future that the writer believes in and the reader can get excited about - let alone one they'd like to live in. What we need is a new intellectual engagement with the real possibilities, coupled with a new confidence in humanity's capacity to deal with them.
James challenges his readership of SF fans to design such a future, but…
ddobbs | August 22, 2008And not-so-good news. As much of the math instruction in my own hometown school district (which was recently ranked as one of the best in the nation) is abysmal, news about poor math skills and instruction catches my eye. The news below, from Science, adds to the growing pile.
U.S. HIGHER EDUCATION:
Departments Scramble to Find Math Education Faculty
Jeffrey Mervis
According to a recent survey, 60% of 128 tenure-track academic jobs advertised last year in mathematics education went unfilled. Although that may be good news for job-seekers, it's another impediment for…