Science
drorzel | April 21, 2008There's a new "Ask a ScienceBlogger" question out:
"A question from a friend's 9-year old son:
What is in the air we breathe? What is it's chemical composition?"
The short answer to this is "a little bit of everything." Pretty much
any substance we have on Earth can be found in the atmosphere
somewhere. The atmosphere is a pretty big place-- roughly
1044 molecules worth of stuff (that's
100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, give or
take). In a collection that big, you'll find just about anything you
want.
All we can really do when asked about the composition of the…
awild | April 21, 2008
Areolate
In 1979, Rick Harris wrote a definitive paper illustrating the various terms used by taxonomists to describe the intricate patterns on the insect exoskeleton. His guide is tremendously helpful to those of us who struggle to decide if those ridges on the head of an ant are strigate or costate. Via Sifolinia, I now see that Harris's illustrations are available online:
A Glossary of Surface Sculpturing
Incidentally, Rick was the guy who taught me how to use a Scanning Electron Microscope, although at this point it'd be a minor miracle if I remembered any of it.
pharyngula | April 21, 2008There in the foaming welter of email constantly flooding my in-box was an actual, real, good, sincere question from someone who didn't understand how chromosome numbers could change over time — and he also asked with enough detail that I could actually see where his thinking was going awry. This is great! How could I not take time to answer?
So here's the question:
How did life evolve from one (I suspect) chromosome to... 64 in horses, or whatever organism you want to pick. How is it possible for a sexually reproducing population of organisms to change chromosome numbers over time?
Firstly:…
drorzel | April 21, 2008One of many parts of the FutureBaby! process that I was lamentably ignorant of is the idea of the hospital tour. When I first mentioned to colleagues that we were expecting, many of them (mostly women) asked "Where are you going to have the baby?"
My initial response was "How the hell should I know? In a hospital, I hope. Preferably not in the back of a cab." I always just assumed you went to whatever hospital was closest when things started happening. Probably because I grew up out in the sticks, where hospitals aren't exactly thick on the ground.
But no, this is a Major Decision-- people…
awild | April 20, 2008
Velvet ants- which aren't really ants at all- are wingless wasps that parasitize ground-nesting bees. They are attractive insects, bearing bright colors and cute frizzy hair. But in case you are ever tempted to pick up one of those cuddly-looking little guys, let the photo above serve as a reminder about what lies at the tail end: an unusually long, flexible stinger. As you can see, the wasp is capable of swinging it back over her shoulder, with perfect aim, to zing the forceps. The venom is potent, and in some parts of the U.S. these insects are called "Cow-Killers". As is always the…
awild | April 18, 2008Ben Stein's propaganda flick Expelled comes out today. Since other people have hashed the film to death, I won't write about Expelled except to make the following observation.
This is a graph showing the number of technical publications indexed in PubMed under the search terms "evolution" and "intelligent design". I threw in a third search term, "biochemistry", just to give a sense of how evolution sits relative to another large research field. Basically, the graph measures the productivity of a field in terms of scientific publications. In 2007, scientists produced 17 technical…
esiegel | April 18, 2008Bret Underwood, a friend of mine from my time in Madison, WI, saw my post on String Theory, and took issue with my statement that it wasn't testable. I'm still standing behind what I said, but let's address what Bret has to say.
I donât understand your argument above for why string theory is untestable. In fact, it seems to me you just outlined the best possible case for string theory! What you said above is that if I have a string theory construction of a phenomenon (say, the Standard Model or Inflation), which uses a set of parameters X, and makes some predictions, then I can find another…
drorzel | April 18, 2008(Because nothing brings in readers like a physics pedagogy post...)
Out in Minnesota, Arjendu is expressing high-level confusion about the business of lecturing:
As I've said a few times before in this blog, I prefer to let students read the text to get a preliminary take on physics content on their own, generate questions and confusions on which I focus during 'lecture', and then check their comprehension of these principles by working together on applying them via problem-solving -- and doing this in my presence so I can help them work out what they do and don't know.
I see this as…
pontiff | April 17, 2008David Baltimore and Ahmed Zewail, both Nobel dudes, have an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about the presidential candidates choosing not to participate in a debate over science and technology policy:
All three candidates declined. Apparently the top contenders for our nation's highest elective office have better things to do than explain to the public their views on securing America's future.
Of course they have better things to do: bowling and taking shots and being under phantom sniper fire! Don't these Nobel prize winners read Fafblog? Without bowling and shots, where will America's…
awild | April 17, 2008Christopher Taylor gives an update on imminent closure of the Utrecht Herbarium, as well as further explanation why this is very, very bad.
oracknows | April 17, 2008As I wing my way back home from San Diego, I've had a bit of time to digest what I saw and learned at the AACR meeting. Overall, it was an above average but definitely not outstanding meeting, and I may discuss specifics more at a later time. One key theme that seems to be increasingly emphasized is cancer prevention, and indeed the AACR launched a new journal, Cancer Prevention Research, dedicated to publishing high quality research on just that topic. This new emphasis on prevention is long overdue because once cancer has developed the cat is out of the bag, so to speak, and even our best…
catdynamics | April 16, 2008Weather forecasting is a tricky business.
It is a lot better than it used to be, but most of the time, for most places, you can't put much faith in forecasts much beyond 3-5 days.
Which is a big improvement on how it used to be, but one could still hope for better.
So... I was chatting to a met grad student, as one does, and he told me that the current forecasts are running into fine grain limits of initial condition data - the weather stations are too sparse and not always well located for the initial data needed to do medium term forecasts, the 5-10 day forecasts. Locations tend to be…
pharyngula | April 16, 2008Revere is thinking about how to grow meat without the animal. It's a cool idea that's been floating around in science fiction for a while now, but, well, of course it has problems, and Revere notes a couple.
The two biggest, as far as I can see from a quick perusal of the burgeoning literature, are finding a suitable nutrient to grow the cells in; and then growing tissue that has the proper texture for being a meat substitute. Animal meat is not just muscle cells but a complicated structure also containing connective tissue, blood and blood vessels, nerves and fat. Just growing up masses of…
drorzel | April 16, 2008Via Sheril, I see that the National Science Board has released a report on Science and Engineering Indicators 2008. It's chock full of useful and interesting information, particularly if you start poking around with the tables and figures, which are available for download.
This ought to produce all sorts of discussion around here, especially given that only 43% of respondants to a public survey correctly responded that humans evolved from other animals. This will undoubtedly be seen as evidence that the creationists are winning, and we must redouble our efforts to call them idiots on the…
awild | April 15, 2008
Forelius mccooki (small ants) & Pogonomyrmex desertorum
Tucson, Arizona
In last August's National Geographic, photographer Mark Moffett has a controversial photo essay depicting a large, motionless harvester ant being worked over by smaller Dorymyrmex workers. Moffett's interpretation of the behavior is this:
While observing seed-harvester ants on the desert flats west of Portal, Arizona, I noticed workers would approach a nest of a tiny, unnamed species of the genus Dorymyrmex. A harvester would rise up on her legs with abdomen lifted and jaws agape, seemingly frozen in place. Soon…
oracknows | April 15, 2008A certain truly badly done story is making its way through the skeptical blogosphere. It's a story that NPR did about a certain teenager who has decided that she doesn't believe the science behind global warming and has published a website to "debunk" it. What's bad about the story is not that a teenager decided she doesn't believe something. What's bad about the story is that it utterly fails to distinguish between a teenager showing actual skepticism (as in challenging an accepted contention based on sound reasoning and good science) as opposed to showing pseudoskepticism (as in looking for…
pontiff | April 15, 2008It was an unassuming blue-grey volume tucked away in the popular science section of the Siskiyou County Library. "Spacetime Physics" it announced proudly in gold letters across the front of the book. Published in 1965, the book looked as if it hadn't been touched in the decades since 1965. A quick opening of the book revealed diagrams of dogs floating beside rocket ships, infinite cubic lattices, and buses orbiting the Earth, all interspaced with a mathematical equations containing symbols the likes of which I'd never seen before. What was this strange book, and what, exactly, did those…
oracknows | April 15, 2008As you may know, Ben Stein's execrable crapfest of a movie, Expelled!: No Intelligence Allowed, slimes its way into theatres on Friday. From my perspective, the biggest, most vile lie pushed by Ben Stein and produce Mark Mathis is that it's a direct line from their hated "Darwinism" to the Holocaust, as I've pointed out twice before, but another major theme of the movie is that the poor, "truth-seeking" intelligent design creationists are ruthlessly "expelled" by those (pick one or more) atheistic/Stalinist/Nazi Darwinists.
Fortunately, there is a resource to counter Ben Stein's lies (and,…
awild | April 14, 2008
Daceton boltoni Azorsa & Sosa-Calvo 2008
Iquitos, Peru
If I had to make a list of the most beautiful ants in the world, the honey-colored trap-jaw ant Daceton armigerum would be near the top. Daceton is an unmistakable insect: large, graceful, spiny, with bulging eyes and a heart-shaped head. They live in the canopy of Amazonian rain forests and, like several other canopy ants, are able to glide back to a tree trunk if dislodged from their foraging trails. As the impressive jaws suggest, these ants are largely predatory.
Daceton has been known to myrmecologists by a single species, D…
pharyngula | April 14, 2008
I'm busy preparing my lecture for genetics this morning, in which I'm going to be talking about some chromosomal disorders … and I noticed that this summary of Fragile-X syndrome that was on the old site hadn't made it over here yet. A lot of the science stuff here actually gets used in my lectures, so they represent a kind of scattered online notes, so I figured I'd better put this one where I can find it.
I haven't even finished grading the last of the developmental biology papers, and already my brain is swiveling towards the genetics literature, as I get in the right frame of mind to…