Science
awild | August 1, 2008I am minutes away from shutting down this computer to pack it away for the long trip to Illinois tomorrow, but before I do that let me point out the New York Times' review of what may well be the most ambitious arthropod exhibit ever: The New Orleans Insectarium.
If any of you have the opportunity to visit the Insectarium, drop me a line as to what you think. I've not had the chance to see it, but I do have several photographs appearing in the displays and am curious about how they look.
oracknows | August 1, 2008I mentioned last week that I was going to be in New York the weekend of August 9, the better to commune with my fellow Borg at the Cube (no, not that cube, although I may have to make a stop there too) in Manhattan known as Seed Media Group. As part of the festivities, our benevolent overlords at ScienceBlogs wanted to host a reader/blogger meetup.
It turns out that the date, time, and location have now finally been set, and here they are, courtesy of NYC Skeptics:
Join New York City Skeptics and ScienceBlogs for a special get-together Saturday August 9 with over a dozen science bloggers,…
pharyngula | August 1, 2008Every time I mention this developmentally significant molecule, Sonic hedgehog, I get a volley of questions about whether it is really called that, what it does, and why it keeps cropping up in articles about everything from snake fangs to mouse penises to whale fins to worm brains. The time seems appropriate to give a brief introduction to the hedgehog family of signaling molecules.
First, a brief overview of what Sonic hedgehog, or shh, is, which will also give you an idea about why it keeps coming up in these development papers. We often compare the genome to a toolbox — a collection of…
evolgen | August 1, 2008About a month ago, we were told that theory is dead. That was the thesis of Chris Anderson's article in Wired. Rather than testing hypotheses using the scientific method, Anderson argues that scientists are merely generating loads of data and looking for correlations and stuff. The article was a bit muddled, but that's Anderson's main point . . . I think.
Well, now the Times Higher Education has published an article by Tim Birkhead in which he argues the opposite (In praise of fishing trips). Birkhead says that the scientific establishment is too attached to hypothesis testing. This means…
drorzel | August 1, 2008Well, OK, that's a stretch, but there is water, according to the latest Phoenix results:
"We've now finally touched it and tasted it," William V. Boynton, a professor at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona and the lead scientist for the instrument that detected the water, said at a news conference on Thursday. "And I'd like to say, from my standpoint, it tastes very fine."
No word yet on whether they've managed to figure out how to turn on the alien atmosphere-generating machine. That'll probably have to wait for the next mission.
Update: Here's a bonus link to…
denialism | August 1, 2008The archived reports of the OTA are on a new site hosted by the Federation of American Scientists.
You may remember that we're big fans of the OTA as we feel that scientific assessment of government policy and guidance of legislation is key to having an efficacious, informed congress. In our initial post on the OTA we said:
It used to be, for about 20 years (from 1974 to 1995), there was an office on the Hill, named the Office of Technology Assessment, which worked for the legislative branch and provided non-partisan scientific reports relevant to policy discussions. It was a critical…
pharyngula | July 31, 2008
Ontogenetic allometry in the fang in the front-fanged Causus rhombeatus (Viperidae) displaces the fang along the upper jaw. Scale bars, 1 mm. We note the change in relative size of the upper jaw subregions: i, anterior; ii, fang; iii, posterior. d.a.o., days after oviposition.
I keep saying this to everyone: if you want to understand the origin of novel morphological features in multicellular organisms, you have to look at their development. "Everything is the way it is because of how it got that way," as D'Arcy Thompson said, so comprehending the ontogeny of form is absolutely critical to…
drorzel | July 31, 2008"The Internet is silly!"
I turn around from the computer. "Yes it is," I say to the dog, "But what, specifically, makes you say that?"
"All these posts about physics theories. Comparing them to women and men and stupid wizards, and relationships. It's silly."
"Yes, well, it does seem to be the diversion of the moment."
"Anyway, they've got it all wrong. Physics theories are like my toys."
"oh, god..." I was afraid of this.
"Go on, name a theory, and I'll tell you how it's like my toys."
"Do I have to?"
"Yes! Go on, name a theory!"
"Fine. Classical mechanics."
"Oh, that's easy. Classical…
pharyngula | July 30, 2008
This story is in the news again, so I've reposted my description of the paper from 3½ years ago. This is an account of the discovery of soft organic tissue within a fossilized dinosaur bone; the thought at the time was that this could actually be preserved scraps of Tyrannosaurus flesh. There is now a good alternative explanation: this is an example of bacterial contamination producing a biofilm that has the appearance of animal connective tissue.
Read GrrlScientist's explanation and Greg Laden's commentary and Tara Smith's summary of the recent PLoS paper that tests the idea that it is a…
drorzel | July 30, 2008Over at Backreaction, Bee has a nice post about uncertainty, in the technical sense, not the quantum sense. The context is news stories about science, which typically do a terrible job of handling the uncertainties and caveats that are an essential part of science.
Properly dealing with uncertainty is one of the hardest parts of science. Which is why I'm particularly impressed by people who spend their whole careers measuring nothing but uncertainties-- looking for an electric dipole moment for the electron, or parity non-conservation, or Lorentz violation, or any of a bunch of other things…
pharyngula | July 29, 2008It's the much anticipate first episode of a new series, Evolve - Eyes.
They are one of evolution's most useful and prevalent inventions. Ninety five percent of living species are equipped with eyes and they exist in many different forms. Learn how the ancestors of jellyfish may have been the first to evolve light-sensitive cells. Discover how dinosaur's evolved eyes that helped them become successful hunters. Finally, learn how primates evolved unique adaptations to their eyes that allowed them to better exploit their new habitat, and how the ability to see colors helped them find food.
I've…
drorzel | July 29, 2008Because I am a Bad Person who thinks and types relatively slowly, I have been lax about following up to the many excellent posts that have been written in response to this weekend's two cultures posts. Let me attempt to address that in a small way by linking a whole bunch of them now:
My rant was actually anticipated by this post at "It's The Thought That Counts,", which was pointed out to me in comments.
Janet had the first direct response, with a later follow-up speculating about the reasons for the divide. As I said in one of my own comment threads, I think a lot of it has to do with…
grrlscientist | July 27, 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:
Huxley, Robert (editor). The Great Naturalists. 2007. Thames and Hudson. Hardbound: 304 pages. Price: $39.95 U.S. [Amazon: $26.37]. SUMMARY: Covers the naturalists from Classical times to the end of the 19th…
drorzel | July 27, 2008A question raised in comments to yesterday's rant about humanities types looking down on people who don't know the basics of their fields, while casually dismissing math and science:
[I]t occurs to me that it would be useful if someone could determine, honestly, whether the humanities professors feel the same sense of condescension among science and engineering professors.
This is obviously not a question I can answer, but I agree that it would be good to know. So, how about it?
drorzel | July 27, 2008Richard Reeves is probably best known for writing biographies of American Presidents (Kennedy, Nixon, and Reagan), so it's a little strange to see him turn his hand to scientific biography. This is part of Norton's "Great Discoveries" series (which inexplicably lacks a web page-- get with the 21st century, already), though, so incongruous author-subject pairing is part of the point.
Some time back, there was a "meme" that went through the science side of blogdom asking people to post about their favorite historical scientist. I didn't contribute, mostly because I didn't really have a favorite…
drorzel | July 27, 2008Having admitted that I know noting about fine art, here's an opportunity to prove it...
A week or so ago, I was in the Schenectady library looking for something else, and noticed a book called Categories: On the Beauty of Physics, which is packaged in such a way as to make it difficult to attribute, but appears to be the work of Emiliano Sefusatti, John Morse, and Hilary Thayer Hamann, a science writer, artist, and art expert, respectively. It's subtitled "Essential Physics Concepts and their Companions in Art & Literature," which sounded very Clifford Johnson, so I figured I'd give it a…
pharyngula | July 26, 2008
The Tangled Bank was scheduled to appear on the Blue Collar Scientist this week, but as many of you already know, Jeff was diagnosed with hepatocellular carcinoma, and obviously he has more important issues to tend. So let's leap into some science right here right now!
What's with all the birds?
We've got two articles on the recent work by Rabosky and Lovette: Evolution of the Wood Warblers and DNA Reveals Tempo and Chronology of Speciation for Dendroica Warblers. This clade reveals evidence of a rapid burst of speciation events that slowed as they new species filled available niches.
If…
drorzel | July 26, 2008I know nothing about art or music.
OK, that's not entirely true-- I know a little bit here and there. I just have no systematic knowledge of art or music (by which I mean fine art and classical music). I don't know Beethoven from Bach, Renaissance from Romantics. I'm not even sure those are both art terms.
Despite the sterling reputation of the department, I never took an Art History class when I was at Williams, nor did I take any music classes. They weren't specifically required, and I was a physics major-- my schedule was full of math and science classes, and between that and the boozing,…
pontiff | July 25, 2008An interesting idea from Mark Changizi from RPI: can one design pictures which, when interpreted by your vision, perform a computation? Press release here (note to RPI public relations department: you should probably make it so that the webpage address of your press releases can be copied from the browser address bar. Somewhere a web designer should be shot.) and paper in Perception published here.
The basic idea is to use the orientation information we glean from looking at objects to perform computations. Thus for example, Changizi suggest that we can represent zeros and ones via the two…
drorzel | July 24, 2008I think there were ads running on ScienceBlogs for PBS's new science "magazine" show NOVA ScienceNOW, which premiered a while back. I never got around to watching it until last night when I caught the start of it completely by accident (quite literally-- I dropped a book on top of the tv remote, and it changed the channel to PBS...).
Neil deGrasse Tyson acts as the host of the show, introducing 10-15 minute pieces about reasonably topical issues in science. Some of these are original to the show-- in the first, Tyson squelches around a swamp looking for leeches with a colleague from the AMNH…