Science
drorzel | August 22, 2008Over at Tor.com, David Levine describes a really cool event he went to just before Worldcon: a crash course in modern astronomy for SF writers:
The idea behind Launch Pad is Gernsbackian: getting good science into popular fiction as a form of public education and outreach for NASA. SF writer and University of Wyoming astronomy professor Mike Brotherton managed to get a NASA grant to fund this workshop for five years, of which this was the second. All the attendees' expenses were paid, including transportation to and from Laramie, housing in college dorms, and most meals--though we had to pay…
denialism | August 22, 2008Prometheus brings us the best article I've seen to date on why the new push for a mitochondrial basis for autism is total nonsense.
Once I saw this push from denialists like David Kirby towards a link between mitochondria and autism I knew we were in for a world of trouble. If only because mitochondrial diseases are a relatively new area of study and there are enough unknowns that they'll be able to milk this nonsense for a decade at least.
Prometheus, however, does an excellent job showing how the likelihood of a mitochondrial explanation for autism is prima facie absurd. This is not…
awild | August 21, 2008
On my recent visit to the coastal forests of Kwazulu-Natal I noticed basketball-like growths on many of the Acacia trees. In North America, any large gray ball you see hanging off a tree branch is liable to be a hornet's nest. In South America, it's probably a carton nest of fierce little Azteca ants. The equivalent in South Africa? I didn't know.
A little bit of poking around in the acacias revealed the culprit. It was Crematogaster tricolor, an orange ant about half a centimeter long:
They didn't appreciate the disturbance, apparently, because they came after me without…
pharyngula | August 21, 2008Here follows a brief account of my sojourn in the Galápagos Islands, just to give you all a rough idea of what I was up to all this time. I've tossed in just a few pictures to illustrate what we experienced; I'm planning to dole out the rest a little bit at a time, each week. I took a lot of pictures, and I was a real piker compared to a few other people on the trip — I'm thinking that if I use mine and some of the other photographs people took, if I post one a week, I'll be able to keep the blog going for about 3800 years.
This cruise was organized by the James Randi Educational Foundation,…
bioephemera | August 21, 2008
Bibliodyssey just published an outstanding collection of illustrations depicting the development of the microscope. I recently saw these antique microscopes at the National Museum of Health and Medicine, and I enjoyed trying to match my photos with the engravings.
This ornately decorated microscope was made by Christopher Cock (~1665), designed by Hooke and used by him in preparing Micrographia. (NMHM, "The Billings Microscope Collection," 1974) Note the similarity to the microscope in this plate from Hooke's seminal book Micrographia (via Bibliodyssey):
I love the NMHM's period…
drorzel | August 21, 2008The experiment described in the previous post was published in early 1998, but the work was done in 1997. This was the year when things really turned around for me in grad school-- the optical control paper was done in the summer 0f '94, and '95 and '96 were just a carnival of pain. Everything in the lab broke, was repaired, and then broke again.
The lead guy on the lattice collision experiment was a post-doc named John Lawall, who really took charge. He completely re-vamped the lock system for the laser, and spent a huge amount of time re-doing the laser alignment for the trap and the…
illconsidered | August 21, 2008From NASA JPL's Global Climate Change website, here is a very cool map of sea level rise around the world.
Despite what one might think at first, sea level, and sea level rise, is not uniform around the world.
Local sea level is a surprisingly complicated function of wind, currents and temperature and globally sea levels can vary by up to 2 metres. The largest factor is the temperature in the local water column, thermal expansion from warming is the greatest contrubutor to sea level changes. Measuring sea level rise can be even more difficult due to the masking or amplifying effects of…
drorzel | August 20, 2008The Mad Biologist points to and agrees with a post by Jonathan Eisen with the dramatic title "Why I Am Ashamed to Have a Paper in Science. Eisen's gripe is mostly about Science not being Open Access, but he throws in a complaint about length restrictions, which is what the Mad Biologist latches on to and amplifies. Eisen writes:
Science with its page length obsession forced Irene to turn her enormous body of work on this genome into a single page paper with most of the detail cut out. I do not think a one page paper does justice to the interesting biology or to her work. A four page paper…
drorzel | August 20, 2008Via Swans On Tea, a ranty blog post titled Sucky Schools - How To Repair Our Education System, which takes its structure and much of its tone from Paul Lockhart's "Mathematician's Lament" (which, unfortunately, is a PDF file). I'm fond of ranty posts about education reform, but both of these kind of lose me. Lockhart, in particular, strikes me as being an excellent example of the dangers of being too attached to a subject.
He writes with great passion and at great length about the fun and creativity involved in math, which is all very nice. Unfortunately, it also leads to paragraphs like this…
oracknows | August 19, 2008Every scientist has had manuscripts rejected by various journals, and most who submit to the really high impact journals like Nature or Science end up being rejected without review. Few, however, have the creativity or cojones to respond to such a rejection in such a creative and amusing manner.
Sadly, in the medical literature, there really are no structures in the body left that can be named in such a manner; there really isn't a way I could respond to a rejection in quite the same manner. I'll have to think of something different the next time it happens.
awild | August 19, 2008I've always been fond of playful and irreverent scientific names, so imagine my delight when I discovered that Paul Marsh, the taxonomist I will be working with over the coming year, is the same Paul Marsh who brought us the classic wasp names Heerz tooya, Heerz lukenatcha, and Verae peculya.
I'll be supporting Paul's morphological studies in the taxonomically troublesome wasp genus Heterospilus with molecular genetic data, but be warned. There are several hundred species yet to be named in the genus, and who knows what sort of nomenclatural mischief awaits.
drorzel | August 19, 2008Via a comment to an earlier post, here's an example of a journalist doing science right: NPR's Sarah Varney looks at "cleansing" foot pads, and finds them wanting.
She took a set of the pads, tried them out, and then brought used and new pads to a laboratory at Berkeley, where chemists studied the composition to see if the greyish black goo on the pad contained heavy metal toxins, as the ads claim. They didn't.
Then she tested an alternative hypothesis, that moisture and warmth cause the color change, by holding a clean pad over a pot of hot water. The pad turned black.
What she did wouldn't…
awild | August 18, 2008
Both nature and nurture control caste development in harvester ants, forthcoming in The American Naturalist. (via Physorg).
An ant slave rebellion? Temnothorax often kill their Protomognathus captors.
oracknows | August 18, 2008As the guy who sort of fell into being the keeper of the original Skeptics' Circle after its creator decided to give up blogging three years ago, I'd be remiss in my duties if I didn't mention that I've been made aware of an initiative to set up a local version of the Circle based around trying to foster better communication among South African Science Bloggers being spearheaded by a recent host of the Skeptics Circle, Michael Meadon at Ionian Enchantment. Of course, it's an effort of which I heartily approve, and I hope my readers will check it out.
I would also hope, however, that some of…
drorzel | August 18, 2008Via Alex, WNYC's Radiolab podcast features a wonderful commencement address by Robert Krulwich to the Caltech class of 2008, making the case for the importance of telling stories about science to the general public.
This fits in wonderfully with what I said last week about science popularization. He comes at it from a different angle (and make an explicit connection to the evolution/ creationism debate, which I was avoiding), but it's the same basic argument.
And, as a bonus, he has a good NPR voice, suitable for helping get a slightly fussy infant to go to sleep...
drorzel | August 18, 2008A while back, after handing in my manuscript and before SteelyKid, I asked readers to suggest blog topics. I got to a few of them already, but there's one more that I've been meaning to comment on, from tcmJOE:
I'm a physics undergrad about to begin my final year, and while I'm still thinking of physics grad school, I'm starting to feel less and less inclined to go into academia. Would you talk some more about career options for physics students outside of academia/pure research?
In many ways, I'm a lousy person to ask about this-- I went directly from college into physics grad school, with…
pharyngula | August 17, 2008Since it has been a long time since I contributed any content to Pharyngula…here's something. I was asked to give a brief talk on the ship, so I've tossed my written draft below the fold. With these short talks I like to write the story first, but when I get up on the stage and actually perform it, I don't bring notes or anything like that, so what is actually said follows the structure of what I wrote, and some of the wording comes through, but it tends to be rather different. Probably a lot different —I know I extemporized a fair bit on the last half. This is all you get until I've had a…
grrlscientist | August 17, 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).
Here's this week's issue of the Birdbooker Report by Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, which lists ecology, environment, natural history and bird books that are (or will soon be) available for purchase. This edition is absolutely packed with book titles that you will want to read!
FEATURED TITLE:
James, Jamie. The Snake Charmer: A Life and Death in Pursuit of Knowledge. 2008. Hyperion. Hardbound: 260 pages. Price…
razib | August 16, 2008France Reaffirms Its Faith in Future of Nuclear Power:
Nuclear power provides 77 percent of France's electricity, according to the government, and relatively few public doubts are expressed in a country with little coal, oil or natural gas.
...
France generates half of its own total energy, up from 23 percent in 1973, despite increased consumption.
Electrical power generation accounts for only 10 percent of France's greenhouse gases, compared with an average of 40 percent in other industrialized countries, according to EDF.
There is No Free Lunch, and life is about trade offs. Those who…
pzminion | August 16, 2008Some more pure science from guest blogger LisaJ:
Everyone seems to love a little Sonic Hedgehog around here. Whenever PZ discusses another function that this fascinating gene is capable of, much excitement ensues in the comment posts. So I thought I would take this opportunity to talk a bit about what I study, and how my seemingly unrelated favourite protein pathway is also connected to the Shh gene.
The main protein that I study was originally identified through studies of a pediatric eye cancer, called Retinoblastoma, as loss of function of this protein (termed the Retinoblastoma protein…