Science
pzminion | August 15, 2008Imagine you're a paleontologist, digging through the Sahara desert looking for dinosaur bones and you stumble, instead, upon this wondrous find:
That's exactly what happened to Paleontologist Paul Sereno and his team back in 2000, and they have announced their findings from their excavations of this region in Northern Niger in National Geographic this week. This team unexpectedly unearthed 200 human burials on the shores of a long dried up lake, representing two very distinct cultures spanning 5000 years (between 4500 to about 9000 years ago). The image shown above is of their 'most…
sb admin | August 14, 2008OK, if you insist. This comes with the usual caveat directed at scientists that I know this is oversimplified, but I wish to reach the largest audience possible. Feel free to correct my mistakes, but please don't bother me about oversimplification.
So here's the deal. Several decades ago, it became scientifically fashionable to believe that most cancer had a viral cause. This belief coincided with the discovery that some viruses do cause cancer. And while it turns out that most cancers are not caused by viruses (probably), many of them are. Viruses can cause cancers in a number of ways…
pzminion | August 14, 2008Here's an awesome video of the most recent solar eclipse that took place a couple of weeks ago. This group was lucky enough to witness the eclipse from their airplane seats! You can see the eclipse pretty much from start to finish. Wait it out until the end, because it's an amazing view when the sun comes back out. (Posted by LisaJ).
awild | August 13, 2008Our first paper from the Beetle Tree of Life study has been published. Here's the citation:
Wild, A. L. & Maddison, D. R. 2008. Evaluating nuclear protein-coding genes for phylogenetic utility in beetles. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, doi: 10.1016/j.ympev.2008.05.023
My co-author David Maddison once summarized the point of the paper as "Hey guys! New genes!"
What we've done is develop lab protocols for sequencing 8 nuclear genes that should be particularly useful for inferring the evolutionary history of beetles. It's a foundational paper. We created the methods that will…
catdynamics | August 13, 2008Ever? or Lately?
Julianne over at Cosmic Variance is doing a review of scientific impact of Hubble.
Julianne knows galaxies and stuff.
She wants input on what you feel Hubble has done, big time.
Especially if it involves actual stars and other bits found in galaxies, that make up galaxies or generally are at distances not measured in gigaparsecs...
drorzel | August 13, 2008You may be wondering whether the recent spate of blogging about science in popular media and peer review (by the way, you should definitely read Janet's two posts on these issues) has any connection to my talk next month at the Science in the 21st Century workshop. Yes, yes it does-- I figure that I'm going to be getting so little sleep in the next few weeks that I need as much of a head start as I can manage. Of course, this also means that I will continue to go on and on about this topic for a little while yet...
The thing that I think is most critical here is to recognize that the poor…
pzminion | August 12, 2008Here's the open thread for comments about the Evolve episode on the History Channel-or anything else you'd like to chat about.
And here's a classic post by PZ on the subject of vertebrate jaw evolution, just to get you warmed up. Enjoy!
~Danio
catdynamics | August 12, 2008should artificial performance enhancers be permitted in athletics?
Tierney at the NYT argues for "anything goes" for performance enhancement for athletes, specifically in the Olympics, but presumably also in all other sports.
Although as an aside he notes they should not be allowed for minors, presumably on the grounds that they can not make an informed decision.
A major reason to consider performance enhancement is that it is becoming near impossible to detect many modern performance enhancers and that it would be fairer to just open the field and see who has the best pharmacist, and most…
drorzel | August 12, 2008In the comments to yesterday's post about science in popular media, ZapperZ responds with a comment that illustrates the problem:
I am not saying that the media shouldn't report ABOUT science, as accurately as they can. I am saying that DOING science isn't done in popular media. Science isn't done that way, especially when "research" is done haphazardly with little regards for proper scientific methodology. The popular media simply does not know how to do that.
Now, one can argue that they should. But till they actually get to that stage, science has only been properly done in various…
tqa | August 12, 2008
Update: 13 Aug. I've added a new post that I think provides a clearer explanation for the reason that this sort of behavior is such an irritant when it comes from a company like Elsevier.
Like most bloggers, I have an ego. I'm not mentioning that by way of apology, but as an explanation for why I was browsing through my sitemeter statistics last Friday. Every now and then, I head over to sitemeter, call up the view that lets me see what websites referred people to my page. If I see a link that's coming from a source I don't recognize, I browse over and look to see what people are saying…
tqa | August 11, 2008
This should come as no surprise, coming as it does on the heels of last week's revelation that the Bush Administration is planning to change the federal definition of abortion in an effort to make it easier for our homegrown religious extremists to deny women their right to good reproductive healthcare: we've just learned that the Bush administration is proposing rule changes that will eviscerate the Endangered Species Act.
This is no joke. The National Wildlife Federation has a pdf of the leaked proposal, and their own analysis of the proposed changes. I've looked at the proposal, and NWF…
pzminion | August 11, 2008PZ has been live-blogging the new "Evolve" series on the History Channel since it began a few weeks ago. This week's episode is on the evolution of jaws, and should be a good one. Alas, none of the Minions will be able to live-blog the program, but I will post an 'Evolve' open thread in time for the East Coast airing at 10 PM Tuesday night, in case anyone is interested in commenting as they watch.
Danio, for the collective.
oracknows | August 11, 2008Look what Bora's doing with poor Professor Steve Steve:
And what's poor Charles Darwin got to do with it? No wonder Jason's looking on in bemusement--or perhaps puzzlement.
razib | August 11, 2008A few weeks ago I reread large portions of A Life of Sir Francis Galton: From African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics. There were several chapters near the end which focused a great deal on the men that Galton mentored; from his protege Karl Pearson to the eventual nemesis of the Galtonian tradition in biology, William Bateson. In particular, I was struck by the social and scientific dynamics of the first 10 years of the 20th century, when Mendelism broke onto the scene and slowly eroded the primacy of biometrical theories of inheritance. A deeper exploration of the topic can be found…
awild | August 11, 2008
Asphinctopone differens Bolton & Fisher 2008
A new species from the Central African Republic
Bolton & Fisher Revise Asphinctopone (Zootaxa)
Shattuck Revises the Indo-Pacific Prionopelta
All imported Fire Ants in the U.S. are descended from 9-20 initial foundress queens
[summary in ScienceDaily]
ZooKeys: A new open-access journal for biodiversity & taxonomy
drorzel | August 11, 2008Lest you think I'm transforming the entire site into cute-baby-pictures-dot-com, let me reassure you that while the posting frequency may drop off a bit, Uncertain Principles will always be your go-to site for slightly ranty blogging about issues of science and larger culture. Well, one of them, anyway.
This is brought to you by a recent post at Physics and Physicists, in which ZapperZ takes issue with the New York Times. The Times wrote a silly piece on radioactive granite countertops a while back, which the Health Physics Society responded to, prompting ZapperZ to write:
When will these…
catdynamics | August 10, 2008The Mad Scientist, in The Car, with the Flask.
emptywheel has an interesting post on whether Dr Ivins, of anthrax mailer fame, could actually have mailed the anthrax letters from Princeton, and had the correct frank, given his known whereabouts in the morning and afternoon of that day.
Answer is, maybe, if he drove fast, missed traffic, and there was no 5 pm pickup that day at that mailbox...
But, he is a bioweapons scientist, who knows exactly what is involved and has presumably read the report on mailing anthrax spores for maximum disruption.
He has envelopes with 2 gm of anthrax spores…
pzminion | August 10, 2008Posted by LisaJ
Now this is a super cool new Science story. Have you ever wanted to make yourself invisible? Ever said "man, I wish I could just run away or hide and make everyone go away"? Maybe as a young 8 year old, trying to hide from those bullies on the playground. Or perhaps you'd like to saunter into mass inconspicuously one Sunday morning to grab one of those delicious wafers without starting a riot. Well, if this sounds like you, then your lucky day is (almost) here. Dr. Xiang Zhang and his group from the University of California have reportedly "created a material that could…
grrlscientist | August 10, 2008tags: Birdbooker Report, bird 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.
FEATURED TITLE:
Newton, Ian. The Migration Ecology of Birds. 2008. Academic Press. Hardbound: 976 pages. Price: $74.95 U.S. [Amazon: $67.46]. SUMMARY: An up-to-date, detailed and thorough review of bird migration.
New and…