Science
sb admin | August 10, 2008To wear the mantle of Galileo, it is not enough to be persecuted: you must also be right.
--Robert Park
I used to spend a lot of time on the websites of Joe Mercola and Gary Null, the most influential medical cranks of the internets (to call them "quacks" would imply that they are real doctors, but bad ones---I will no longer dignify them with the title of "quack"). I've kept away from them for a while in the interest of preserving my sanity. Unfortunately, Orac reminded me this week of the level searingly stupid and dangerous idiocy presented by these woo-meisters.
In light of this, it…
tqa | August 8, 2008
The latest issue of the journal Nature has two articles (an editorial and a perspectives piece) on the topic of drug testing for athletes. Both the editors and Donald Berry (the author of the perspectives article) argue for the need for both more scientific testing to support standards for athletic drug screening and for more openness in the process.
From the editorial:
Nature believes that accepting 'legal limits' of specific metabolites without such rigorous verification goes against the foundational standards of modern science, and results in an arbitrary test for which the rate of…
pzminion | August 7, 2008Hi all! This is LisaJ, and I'll also be guestblogging here on Pharyngula for the next 10 days or so. I'm very much looking forward to the opportunity to chat it up with you fine folks here on Pharyngula, and I hope I can do my part to keep everyone stimulated and satisfied.
I would first like to echo MAJeff and Danio's sentiment and send a big thanks to PZ for inviting me to participate as a guestblogger. I too was very surprised and flattered to be asked. What a nice guy that PZ is! Just to briefly introduce myself: I'm a 3rd year PhD student studying novel functions for the pRb/E2F…
pontiff | August 7, 2008Over at Science in the open, the the ScienceOpener (Cameron Neylon) is attending BioBarCamp. Now, IANAB (that stands for "I am not a stamp collector" :) ) but there are a ton of cool talks at BioBarCamp: many on open science / social media / science 2.0 etc (for which biologists are kicking everyone's rear at.) Here is the schedule on google docs. Because I'm supposed to be working on a talk for an upcoming review, I need something to listen to and watch out of the corner of my eye, as I work on the review. And ScienceOpener provides: A lifefeed of the event.
Which is cool, because now I…
pzminion | August 7, 2008MAJeff here, and I'll be one of your guestbloggers for the next several days. I'd first like to thank PZ for asking me to do this. I was more than a little surprised to get an email the other day inviting me, and I hope I can keep up the quality people have come to expect from the place.
I'm not sure of everything I'll be posting about yet. But, I'll probably be doing some of what I do when I teach, and that is asking questions. Y'all are a chatty bunch, so I probably won't need to do much asking. Sometimes, though, I just like to get to know folks better, to move beyond argument and talk…
catdynamics | August 7, 2008reasons for tenure #24952
ORNL fires Distinguished Scientist,
UT picks up slack
from Incoherent Ponderer
Oak Ridge National Lab denies charge that outspokenness of scientist the reason
NAS member and physicist who had a joint appointment at ORNL and University of Tennessee was terminated by ORNL without notice.
Reason, officially, was DoE's interest in "use-inspired" research as opposed to "discovery based" research.
The firing had absolutely nothing, whatsoever never-ever positively-not pinky-promise-honestly, to do with the researcher using his stature to make open criticism of the…
illconsidered | August 7, 2008Fed up of trying to decide who to believe in the endless blog wars over climate science? Well, don't despair and don't rely on third parties you may know little about, instead educate yourself!
That link is to a very handy page over at Things Break that lists some great resources for learning the science behind the political debate of anthropogenic climate change.
Books, open courses, audio-visuals, great internet resources, its all there, check it out.
awild | August 6, 2008
Euprenolepis procera
(photo by Witte and Maschwitz)
This is cool. A new paper by Volker Witte and Ulrich Maschwitz details a previously unknown behavior for ants: nomadic fungivory. Here's the cite and the abstract:
Witte, V. and U. Maschwitz. 2008. Mushroom harvesting ants in the topical rain forest. Naturwissenschaften, online early.
Abstract: Ants belong to the most important groups of arthropods, inhabiting and commonly dominating most terrestrial habitats, especially tropical rainforests. Their highly collective behavior enables exploitation of various resources and is viewed as a key…
oracknows | August 6, 2008Shot with my iPhone camera Friday at our campus bookstore:
Although I'm sure this was meant ironically (although one can never be sure), somehow I don't think that linking Al Gore with Jesus is a particularly good idea. Climate change "skeptics" already focus on Al Gore as though discrediting him somehow discredits behind science of anthropogenic climate change. Of course, Al Gore isn't a scientist. He is a popularizer and a politician; so even if his credibility were utterly destroyed it would have nothing to do with the validity of global climate science.
It's the same with other types…
drorzel | August 6, 2008Arts & Letters Daily sent me to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education with the headline How Our Culture Keeps Students Out of Science. "Hey," I thought, "Good to see this issue getting some more attention." And, indeed, the article starts off well enough, with a decent statement of the problems in science education:
Back in 2003, the National Science Board issued a report that noted steep declines in "graduate enrollments of U.S. citizens and permanent residents" in the sciences. The explanation? "Declining federal support for research sends negative signals to interested…
illconsidered | August 6, 2008A common misconception about global warming is that it means warming everywhere on the globe. This is an understandable, if too literal, interpretation of the phrase for a non-scientist and is something that is often played upon by less intellectually honest participants in the debate. This is one reason why "climate change" and "climate disruption" are perhaps better descriptors, even if warming is what the global average temerature is and will do.
Given the above, the fact that sea ice in the antarctic has increased slightly since careful mearsurements began (around 1%) is a frequent, if…
pharyngula | August 5, 2008I was sent this lovely bit of poetic biology, by someone who said it was written by a colleague at the Salk…maybe she'll give full credit in the comments. Consider yourself a knowledgeable cell biologist if you get all the allusions.
The p53rd Psalm
p53 is my shepherd, I shall not cycle
It maketh me to lie down in G1
It leadeth me beside still nucleotide pools
It restoreth my genome
It leadeth me past the restriction point for replication's sake
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of the cobalt irradiator
I shall fear no gamma rays, for thou art Guardian of the Genome
Thy…
catdynamics | August 5, 2008Freeze drying anthrax and the weird case of the US domestic anthrax attacks in 2001
There has been a set of good Sb posts on the recent developments in the anthrax mailing terrorist attacks in 2001, after the FBI revealed they had a new suspect, Dr Ivins, who was a researcher at Ft Detrick USAMRIID
Greg has a timeline and link to Greenwald
Tara lays out the basic story
and Revere comments
Mike lays out the open questions
There are two additional bizarro evidentiary leaks that came out today, that make the whole story even stranger: the letter were mailed from Princeton NJ, and Ivins has no…
drorzel | August 5, 2008(This is the first in a planned series of posts writing up each of the scientific papers on which I am an author. A short description and a link to a PDF of the paper can be found at the archived Optical Control page.)
The essence of the optical control paper is contained in this one figure:
"Very pretty," you're thinking, "But what does it mean?"
The graph shows the increase or decrease in the ionizing collision rate for a sample of xenon atoms (well, two different samples, of different isotopes, but they behave exactly the same) at a temperature of 100 microkelvin or so due to the…
oracknows | August 4, 2008It's happened again, only this time it's escalated. Sadly, this escalation was predictable.
Remember back in February, when I discussed how animal rights terrorists had been harassing a researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC)? At the time, protesters attempted a home invasion of a researcher, leading to a police response where a home was searched by the police. This time around, however, these thugs have turned violent:
SANTA CRUZ -- The FBI today is expected to take over the investigation of the Saturday morning firebombings of a car and of a Westside home belonging to…
drorzel | August 4, 2008I've been slacking a bit, lately, in terms of putting science-related content on the blog. Up until last week, most of my physics-explaining energy was going into working on the book, and on top of that, I've been a little preoccupied with planning for the arrival of FutureBaby.
I'd like to push things back in the direction of actual science blogging, so I'm going to implement an idea I had a while back: I'm going to go back through the papers in my CV, and write them up for ResearchBlogging.org.
This offers a couple of nice benefits from my perspective. First of all, I already know what's in…
drorzel | August 4, 2008Last weekend's post, The Innumeracy of Intellectuals, has been lightly edited and re-printed at Inside Higher Ed, where it should be read by a larger audience of humanities types. They allow comments, so it will be interesting to see what gets said about it there.
I may have some additional comments on the issue later, but it's a little hard to focus while going crazy waiting for FutureBaby.
(There's also a tiny chance that this will be noticed by some of my colleagues, which could be interesting. I know that some of them read the Chronicle of Higher Education religiously, but I'm less…
grrlscientist | August 3, 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:
De Roy, Tui, Mark Jones and Julian Fitter. Albatross: Their World, Their Ways. Due out: Sept. 2008. Firefly Books. Hardbound: 240 pages. Price: $49.95 U.S. [Amazon: $32.97]. SUMMARY: A well-illustrated account on…
drorzel | August 3, 2008Bad news from the worthwhile sections of this morning's New York Times: another SpaceX rocket blew up.
A privately funded rocket was lost on its way to space Saturday night, bringing a third failure in a row to an Internet multimillionaire's effort to create a market for low-cost space-delivery.
The accident occurred a little more than two minutes after launch, and the two-stage Falcon 1 rocket appeared to be oscillating before the live signal from an on-board video camera went dead.
On the one hand, I hate to see these things blow up. I'm no free-market zealot, but I'm all for cheap space…
pharyngula | August 3, 2008I'm wondering how this works. VADLO is a web search engine for biologists, and my first attempts at using it...it worked surprisingly well. I looked up a few techniques I've been using, and actually turned up some useful articles.