Science
ddobbs | May 26, 2008
A Chopin Nocturne...
from Derek Bownds' MindBlog by noreply@blogger.com (Deric)Bownds blogs on neuro matters -- and, each week, posts a video of him playing a bit of classical music on his piano. Gotta like it.
FDA To Mine Big Databases For Safety Problems
from Pharmalot
The effort, called Sentinel Initiative,will be the first time the FDA will have an opportunity to monitoralmost immediately how drugs are affecting the public. To do so, theagency will mine databases of more than 20 million patients who receivetheir drugs through Medicare. The idea, of course, is to catch sideeffects…
pharyngula | May 26, 2008Apparently, NASA has dropped a new probe, Phoenix, on Mars. I'm looking at the first pictures beamed back, and so far, it looks a little too dry for squid, and they're also promising the existence of ice, which doesn't sound cephalopod-friendly, either. I'll keep checking the Bad Astronomer, though — I'm sure that when the first tentacle rises up somewhere on the horizon, he'll report it.
drorzel | May 26, 2008So, the Martians go and helpfully draw a box on the ground as a target for the Phoenix landing, and what do they do? They land next to it, not in it. Way to go, NASA.
I bet if they hadn't screwed up the unit conversions, they would've hit it...
(The square pattern on the ground is really something to do with the water ice that the mission is there to look for-- it's a natural phenomenon, and a good sign for the mission.
(It just looks like a landing zone drawn by space aliens.)
pharyngula | May 25, 2008
It's another transitional form, this time an amphibian from the Permian that shares characteristics of both frogs and salamanders — in life, it would have looked like a short-tailed, wide-headed salamander with frog-like ears, which is why it's being called a "frogamander".
Complete specimen in ventral view, photograph (left) and interpretive outline drawing (right). Abbreviations: bc, basale commune; cl, cleithrum; cv, clavicle; dm, digital elements of the manus; dt3, distal tarsal 3; fe, femur; h, humerus; ic, intercentrum; il, ilium; is, ischium; op, olecranon process of ulna; pc,…
drorzel | May 25, 2008Every now and then, I look at the huge list of blogs and news sources in my RSS feeds, and say to myself "You really need to thin these out..." How can I make any progress, though, when there are always great new blogs being created?
The latest new blog to ctach my interest and increment my subscription total is Built On Facts by a grad student named Matt, which was linked to by Tom. It features everything from a discussion of shaky physics in the new Indiana Jones movie to discussions of the physics or marksmanship, to an entire category of worked problems, with equations and everything.
OK…
pharyngula | May 24, 2008
We mammals have been beaten again. Shrimp have more sophisticated eyes than we do, with the ability to see things we can't, and I'm feeling a bit envious.
There are a couple of general properties of light that can be captured and measured with a light detector. One is the amplitude of the light wave, which we see as differences in the intensity of light. This is the most basic measurement of a photoreceptor, sensing the raw amount of energy being transmitted. Another property is wavelength, which we perceive as the color of light. Many mammals are incapable of detecting the wavelength,…
sb admin | May 23, 2008Over at sciencebasedmedicine.com, Mark Crislip has a great post on the history of medical advances. First, go read it. WAIT! Don't forget to come back and read the rest of my post! OK, you can go now.
Good. Welcome back.
There was some talk a while back about "the end of science". That was an interesting but ultimately fatally-flawed hypothesis.
Then Ben Stein decided that science isn't over, it's just evil. EEEEVILLLL!!!11!!
This is also, needless to say, a flawed hypothesis.
In the article you just read at sciencebasedmedicine.com, Dr. Crislip describes the progress made in…
jrosenhouse | May 22, 2008Check it out:
Self-medication may be the reason the blogosphere has taken off. Scientists (and writers) have long known about the therapeutic benefits of writing about personal experiences, thoughts and feelings. But besides serving as a stress-coping mechanism, expressive writing produces many physiological benefits. Research shows that it improves memory and sleep, boosts immune cell activity and reduces viral load in AIDS patients, and even speeds healing after surgery. A study in the February issue of the Oncologist reports that cancer patients who engaged in expressive writing just…
awild | May 22, 2008
Spring is swarm season for honeybees, and the feral population in Tucson is booming. We've got not one but two new colonies nesting in dead trees in our yard. I didn't do anything to attract them, they just moved in on their own.
My feelings about honey bees are mixed.
On one hand, I have many fond memories of working as a beekeeper back when I was in Peace Corps. There's something exhilarating about opening a hive, feeling the vibration of thousands of little wings, the scent of honey and wax thick in the air. Bees are charismatic creatures, and although I worked with them pretty…
drorzel | May 22, 2008The pinhead filling in for Colin Cowherd (himself a pinhead of epic proportions) yesterday on ESPN radio was unduly proud of himself for coming up with the following hypothetical (paraphrased from memory):
Suppose that you had a choice between having your favorite candidate win the presidential election, or having your favorite sports team win a championship. Which would you pick?
Even by the standards of hypotheticals on sports call-in shows, this is pretty stupid. After all, it's not really a fair comparison-- whatever psychological boost it may provide, your favorite sports team winning a…
awild | May 21, 2008Scott Solomon, who researches fungus-growing ants, has a brief piece in Slate Magazine on the Paratrechina Crazy Ants invading Houston.
I'm not convinced that this ant is anything different from Paratrechina fulva, a common South American species and the oldest name in that species complex. People have been calling the Houston invader "P. cf. pubens", but the taxonomy of the genus is so poor that it's difficult to say anything with confidence. Do you folks who've looked at specimens (that's you, James) have any thoughts about the identity of this ant?
ddobbs | May 21, 2008My (very short) story on a new omnidirectional treadmill for spatial cognition research is up at the Wired site:
An Omnidirectional Treadmill Means One Giant Leap for Virtual Reality.
...This April, a team based at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, unveiled the CyberWalk, an omnidirectional treadmill designed to serve as a VR-capable movement platform.
Treadmills have been tried in VR before, of course, but early models were unconvincing -- either too small to keep goggled wanderers on the platform or too slow, bouncy, or gap-ridden to feel the least…
oracknows | May 20, 2008ERV asks: What happens when a PI holding an NIH grant dies, given that PIs support post-docs, graduate students, and technicians in his or her lab?
In other words:
Or what would happen to me if Bossman got hit by a bus or got brain cancer.
Does the NIH have some sort of protocol for what to do when a PI dies? Do they just take the grant back and recycle it into a different award? Do they try to transfer it to someone else at the Uni who can do similar work?
Hell, screw the money, what happens to the ideas?? Thats what horrified me during our scare-- We were helping this fellow with a really…
drorzel | May 20, 2008Welcome to today's exciting episode of "How Big a Dork Am I?" Today, we'll be discussing the making of unnecessary models:
In this graph, the blue points represent the average mass in grams of a fetus at a given week of gestation, while the red line is the mass predicted by a simple model treating the fetus as a sphere of uniform density with a linearly increasing radius.
The "model" was set up by taking the 40-week length reported at BabyCenter, and dividing by two to get an approximate radius for the spherical baby. Then I assumed that the actual radius increased linearly from zero to the…
drorzel | May 18, 2008Some cheery Sunday morning reading from the Times, showing the perils of short-term thinking when it comes to staying ahead of agricultural pests:
The damage to rice crops, occurring at a time of scarcity and high prices, could have been prevented. Researchers at the International Rice Research Institute [in the Phillippines] say that they know how to create rice varieties resistant to the [brown rice hopper] but that budget cuts have prevented them from doing so.
This is a stark example of the many problems that are coming to light in the world's agricultural system. Experts say that during…
drorzel | May 16, 2008Over at Cocktail Party Physics, Jennifer Ouellette offers her Top Ten events at the upcoming World Science Festival in New York City the week after next. The full program is at the festival site, and it looks like there's even something for the stamp collectors. Probably to keep the cool physics-themed events from being overcrowded.
I would be all over this-- NYC is just a few hours away, after all-- were it not directly opposite DAMOP. Which offers its own comprehensive slate of physics programming, albeit with fewer celebrities.
If you're within range of either of these fine events, check…
drorzel | May 16, 2008We had a colloquium talk yesterday from the very energetic Jessica Clark of the American Physical Society's outreach office who talked about the many things that the APS does to bring positive physics experiences to a wide audience. It was a terrific talk, and brought to my attention a couple of programs I hadn't heard about before, aimed at introducing physics to a younger audience.
One of these, aimed at middle-school students and teachers is the "Physics Quest" puzzle activities:
PhysicsQuest is a middle school competition that consists of four physical science experiments centered on a…
pharyngula | May 15, 2008
By now, everyone must be familiar with the inside out organization of the cephalopod eye relative to ours: they have photoreceptors that face towards the light, while we have photoreceptors that are facing away from the light. There are other important differences, though, some of which came out in a recent Nature podcast with Adam Rutherford (which you can listen to here), which was prompted by a recent publication on the structure of squid rhodopsin.
Superficially, squid eyes resemble ours. Both are simple camera eyes with a lens that projects an image onto a retina, but the major details…
awild | May 15, 2008
Opamyrma hungvuong Yamane et al 2008
Vietnam
It isn't every day we get a whole new genus. In this week's Zootaxa, Seiki Yamane, Tuan Vet Bui, and Katsuyuki Eguchi report the discovery of Opamyrma, an amblyoponine ant from central Vietnam. The full article is behind Zootaxa's subscription barrier, but detailed specimen photos are already up at Antweb.
The ant subfamily Amblyoponinae is an ancient group. They diverged from the other ant lineages prior to the evolution of trophallaxis food-sharing behavior, and have instead adopted an odd and seemingly brutal way of passing food around the…