Science
grrlscientist | June 4, 2008tags: Magnetic Movie, magnetic fields, human technology, NASA, physics, streaming video
Magnetic fields are invisible, at least usually. But scientists from NASA's Space Sciences Laboratory have made them visible as "animated photographs," using sound-controlled CGI and 3D compositing. It makes the fields, as explained by the scientists, dance in an absolutely gorgeous movie called Magnetic Movie [1:17].
A reader, Ale, has provides commentary below that will provide more information.
catdynamics | June 3, 2008"In the beginning...
...was the command line!"
Now, there is Goosh!
The unofficial google shell.
All the power of google with the cuddly familiarity of the csh interface.
Sweet.
h/t y-ranter
Oh, yeah, and it works.
razib | June 3, 2008When I was a kid I was what you might call a "climate nerd." I would be at a party my parents took me to and pour over atlases and maps, as well as descriptive books on climatology, just to pass the time. Though it was just a phase I have kept a lot of that knowledge with me, and I've found it really useful. Many times I'm shocked at how ignorant many of my friends are of geography. If one was to choose between learning technique or information (e.g., math vs. history) I would pick technique because my own feeling is that technique is very versatile. But in the real world we don't choose…
catdynamics | June 3, 2008A young, male polar bear was discovered in northern Iceland this morning.
He had, almost certainly, got stuck on an ice floe that broke off the east Greenland pack and drifted to Iceland, where he swam to land.
From Doktor.is
Video of what follows - not for the squeamish
Seriously - if you are a sensitive sort, do not click through to watch the video.
The bear was spotted near a farm, wandering around about a kilometer from the road. Polar bears are not endemic in Iceland, but strays drifting over on ice are not uncommon, even nowadays, and were more common still in the 19th C and early…
drorzel | June 3, 2008The World Science Festival happened while I was at DAMOP (I missed getting to talk to Bill Phillips, because he left shortly after his talk to go to NYC), and by all reports it was a success-- they claim 120,000 attendees on their web site, and sold more tickets than expected for several events, and favorably impressed journalists. Good news, all.
Of course, at the same time on the opposite coast, the annual Book Expo America was going on, and as Jennifer Ouellete reports, science was shut out:
Every conceivable genre was prominently represented -- sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, romance, foreign…
pharyngula | June 2, 2008
We're all familiar with Pavlov's conditioning experiments with dogs. Dogs were treated to an unconditioned stimulus — something to which they would normally respond with a specific behavior, in this case, meat juice which would cause them to drool. Then they were simultaneously exposed to the unconditioned stimulus and a new stimulus, the conditioned stimulus, that they would learn to associate with the tasty, drool-worthy stimulus — a bell. Afterwards, ringing a bell alone would cause the dogs to make the drooling response. The ability to make such an association is a measure of the…
awild | June 1, 2008
Taxonomists are busy, busy people. Their efforts in the year 2006 have just been released by Arizona State University's Institute for Species Exploration. Within insects, here's the breakdown by order:
The Institute has also compiled a whimsical "Top Ten" list of their favorite new species.
source: International Institute for Species Exploration. 2008. The Status of Observed Species Report 2008. online at http://species.asu.edu/pdf/sos.pdf
awild | May 31, 2008
30 years ago, biologists thought they'd solved one of Darwin's thorniest problems, the evolution of sterile social insects:
No doubt many instincts of very difficult explanation could be opposed to the theory of natural selection,âcases, in which we cannot see how an instinct could possibly have originated...I will not here enter on these several cases, but will confine myself to one special difficulty, which at first appeared to me insuperable, and actually fatal to my whole theory. I allude to the neuters or sterile females in insect-communities: for these neuters often differ widely in…
pharyngula | May 30, 2008… is now available online. It's a brief introduction to some interesting observations about the pufferfish genome.
pharyngula | May 30, 2008Alex Palazzo is talking about open questions in cell biology — in this case, control of organelle shape. Any of us who have poked around in cells know that it is not an amorphous blob of goo, but has characteristic, recognizable elements that we can see from cell to cell. What confers these stereotypic intracellular morphologies on organelles, and what are the functional consequences, if any?
(There are no jebons in there, so you don't get to use those in your answer.)
drorzel | May 30, 2008I spent a whole bunch of time running around between talks on Thursday, and at one point was grumbling to myself about the way the organizers had scheduled all the good stuff at one time. Only later did I realize that it really wasn't their fault-- it's all good stuff, and there are only a few sessions here and there that I have absolutely no interest in seeing.
We need more sessions with names like "Boring Inscrutable Theory II," so I don't feel like I need to be in three places at once.
Anyway, a handful of highlights from Thursday's program:
I started off at the ultracold atoms session, to…
pharyngula | May 29, 2008
It's not often that something as delicate as details of the reproductive tract get preserved, but here's a phenomenal fossil of a Devonian placoderm containing the fragile bones of an embryo inside, along with the tracery of an umbilical cord and yolk sac.
(Click for larger image)
This is cool: it says that true viviparity, something more than just retention of an egg internally, but also the formation of specialized maternal/embryonic structures, is at least 380 million years old. Hooray for motherhood!
Here's a reconstruction of what the animal would have looked like in life, as it is…
pharyngula | May 29, 2008I've discovered a couple of important things at this meeting.
One, late night sessions at west coast meetings are deadly for any of us coming from more eastern time zones. At least the morning sessions are low stress.
Two, I haven't heard one Drosophila talk yet, and the message is clear: we're now in the stage of evo-devo in which everyone is diversifying and chasing down a wide array of species. There was a bit of model-system bashing, but at the same time, everyone is acknowledging the crucial role of those traditional, but weird and derived, lab critters in providing a point of comparison…
awild | May 28, 2008
Odontomachus coquereli - Madagascar
Myrmecology continues to lead the way in online taxonomy. Today saw the release of the very first taxonomic paper published by the top-tier open access science journal, PLoS One.
Brian Fisher and Alex Smith combine alpha taxonomy with DNA barcoding to produce a revision of the Malagasy trap-jaw ants. The revision includes mitochondrial DNA sequences from some 500 individual ants and resulted in the inference of several new species. I've got plenty to say about DNA barcoding, but I'll leave that for a later post and instead point you to the thoughtful…
pharyngula | May 28, 2008Did you know that the World Science Festival starts today in New York City? I expect all you eastern city folk to go. Unfortunately, I'm in an airplane flying west today, on my way to Berzerkeley, where we'll have to celebrate science amongst a band of evolutionary/developmental biologists.
awild | May 27, 2008
As if we didn't already have enough pest ants to worry about, here is a relatively new one. The rover ant Brachymyrmex patagonicus, a tiny South American species, has been working its way under the radar across the southern United States. Its presence is now large enough that pest control companies are reporting a sudden increase in requests. According to gardeners I've talked to, these ants emerged in huge numbers here in Tucson about 5 years ago. Given the interest in this species, I thought I'd post a summary of what we know of this emerging pest and how to reliably identify it.…
catdynamics | May 27, 2008The Howard Hughes Institute just handed out $10 million to a select group of 56 biomed researchers. Each.
Focus is on risky long term research on large scale health and public health issues.
These are junior and early mid-career researchers, with 4-10 year experience as faculty. Appointment is for 5 years initially, so the mean funding level is just over $2 million per year per investigator.
Should help the tenure case for the junior end of the range... awardees were chosen from a list of about 1000 applicants.
HHMI press release
Bio of the new investigators
The affiliation of the…
awild | May 26, 2008
Centruroides sculpturatus - Arizona Bark Scorpion
I have a hard time getting worked up over stuff that happened 25 years ago. But here's something that still angers me every time I think of it.
One of those educational safety movies we were shown back in grade school- you know, the "Stop-Drop-and-Roll" variety- presented the dangers of the Bark Scorpion. The film featured dark tones and a dramatic reenactment of a deadly encounter, complete with screams and fainting.
This was shown in Rochester, New York, mind you. We don't have scorpions anywhere near Rochester. The climate is is far…