Science
pharyngula | April 14, 2008Jay Hosler has a new book out, Optical Allusions(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). If you're familiar with his other books, Clan Apis(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) and The Sandwalk Adventures(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), you know what to expect: a comic book that takes its science seriously. Hosler has a fabulous knack for building serious content into a light and humorous medium, just the kind of approach we need to get wider distribution of science into the culture.
This one has a strange premise. Wrinkles the Wonder Brain is an animated, naked brain working for the Graeae Sisters, and he loses the one eye they…
awild | April 13, 2008
The Argentine Ant (Linepithema humile), a small brown ant about 2-3mm long, is one of the world's most damaging insects. This pernicious ant is spreading to warmer regions around the world from its natal habitat along South America's Paraná River. Linepithema humile can drive native arthropods to extinction, instigating changes that ripple through ecosystems. In California, horned lizard populations plummet. In South Africa, plant reproduction is disrupted. Worldwide, the Argentine ant is a persistent house and crop pest. This is not a good ant.
My Ph.D. dissertation, completed a few…
pharyngula | April 12, 2008Look: it's possibly the world's most annoying, boring video. Turn the sound down, it's a car driving in traffic with a siren howling.
Of course, if you look a little bit more closely, you might notice…nobody is driving! This is an exercise in robotics and computer vision, and it's one of the achievements that is winning the Franklin Institute Awards this week. Any lucky Philadelphians might want to make it a point to visit the Franklin Institute (which was one of our favorite museums when we lived in Philly) this week — they have a slate of events coming up associated with handing out these…
awild | April 11, 2008One of the most important collections of South American plants is being shut down. The Utrecht Herbarium in the Netherlands houses nearly 1 million specimens and 10,000 types. When the museum closes we will lose a wealth of knowledge about the flora of a diverse and endangered part of the world.
Read More and Sign the Petition.
Why does this closure bother me?
Public support for biological research is the reason why that field guide on your shelf costs $15.00, instead of the $100 or so you'd be paying if you had to foot the bill for all the research that book is based upon. Our knowledge…
drorzel | April 11, 2008With the "Vox Day" business winding down (one way or another), it's time to unwind with something less contentious and controversial: Framing! No-- seriously. Most of the really loud opponents have publically washed their hands of the whole topic, so I expect this will be relatively non-controversial. What could possibly go wrong?
Anyway, Janet is thinking about "framing" and the example of stem cells given in the Nisbet and Scheufele article in The Scientist (PDF here). She identifies three "core values" that framers on one side or the other might be trying to reach:
cures for diseases are…
awild | April 10, 2008Not much posting this week. I've been busy getting genetic data from a new batch of specimens for the Beetle Tree of Life project, a process that's always slower than I expect.
Fortunately it turns out that the internet has sites other than mine, and some of those even have interesting things to read and pretty pictures to look at. Here's what I recommend:
Christopher Taylor discusses the follicle mites that live in your skin.
Ajay Narendra has added some new Meranoplus photos to his ant gallery.
Aydin Ãrstan writes that the Nautilus is still evolving.
Mike Kaspari asks about books that…
pharyngula | April 10, 2008Check it out: it's yet another transitional form, a 92 million year old snake with two hindlimbs. Cool! Just last week I was told that none of these things exist.
drorzel | April 10, 2008Inside Higher Ed notes in passing that several NCAA Presidents are complaining about alcohol advertising during the NCAA Tournament. The source for this is a study by the Center for Science in the Public Interest:
According to CSPI's analysis of broadcasts of the semifinal and championship basketball games, the NCAA is exceeding the limits on beer ads it set for itself in 2005 of not more than 60 seconds per hour or not more than 120 seconds in any telecast. During the UCLA versus Memphis broadcast, CBS aired 200 seconds of beer advertising comprised of 15-, 20-, and 30-second spots for Bud…
ddobbs | April 9, 2008We've seen our brain on drugs. Here's the dope on brainy people on drugs.
Survey results of 1400 scientists (or Nature readers, anyway) on use of neuroenhancers
Figure from Nature, "Poll results: look who's doping"
With baseball's steroid scandals seemingly behind us now -- or at least considered less newsworthy -- the press has recently turned some of its steroidal attention to neuroenhancement among major league academics. The journal Nature has taken the lead here, publishing a commentary in early March by two Cambridge University researchers who "reported," as a nicely turned New York…
drorzel | April 9, 2008Over at Cosmic Variance, Julianne waxes rhapsodic about her calculator, a HP-15C. This is such an obvious Dorky Poll topic that I can't believe I didn't think of it earlier:
What sort of calculator do you use?
My students, particularly the future engineers, are always shocked by my answer:
I use a TI 30Xa. Actually, I don't know that off the top of my head-- I had to dig it out and look at it to come up with the model number. I think of it as "A $10 scientific calculator that I bought at Safeway."
This does everything I need, though-- it adds, subtracts, multiplies, divides, does square…
pontiff | April 8, 2008Whatever you do, Mr. and Mrs. Joe and Mary America, make sure to tell everyone you know not to go into science and engineering! You see those who major in science and engineering are certain to not get jobs, because, as many commenters love to point out, all those jobs are being exported overseas! But wait, what is this:
The overall unemployment rate of scientists and engineers in the United States dropped from 3.2% in 2003 to 2.5% in 2006...according to data from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Scientists and Engineers Statistical Data System (SESTAT). This is the lowest…
jrosenhouse | April 8, 2008Monty Hall strikes again!
Today's New York Times has this article, by John Tierney, about the latest wrinkle in the Monty Hall problem. According to M. Keith Chen, an economist at Yale University, the results of certain psychological studies are called into question by a sytematic error in their methodology. And the error, it seems, is rather similar to the one found in the classic wrong solution to the MHP:
The Monty Hall Problem has struck again, and this time it's not merely embarrassing mathematicians. If the calculations of a Yale economist are correct, there's a sneaky logical…
drorzel | April 8, 2008(This is the second of two background posts for a peer-reviewed research blogging post that has now slipped to tomorrow. I started writing it, but realized that it needed some more background information, which became this post. And now I don't have time to write the originally intended post...)
Making a quantum computer is a tricky business. The process of quantum computing requires the creation of both superposition states of individual quantum bits (in which the "qubit" is in some mixture of "0" and "1" at the same time) and also entangled states of different qubits (states where the state…
pharyngula | April 8, 2008Since I was sent this photo from the evo-devo conference by Kevin Emerson, I couldn't resist: this is the aftermath of two scientists duking it out in an intellectual arena.
Greg Wray, left, in the blue "Exons, Schmexons" t-shirt; Jerry Coyne in the red "I'm no CIS-sy" t-shirt.
Obviously, they had to wear different colored shirts so we could tell them apart in the maelstrom of the fray.
drorzel | April 7, 2008Having brought in a huge new audience at the end of last week-- partly through the "framing"/"screechy monkeys" things, but mostly because my What Everyone Should Know About Science post hit the front page on Reddit-- I figured I should take this opportunity to... Well, drive them all right the hell away again with a peer-reviewed physics post.
Unfortunately, I seem to have misplaced the papers I was going to write about, on experiments with qubits in diamond. They're probably on my desk at work, doing me no good at all. That's OK, though, because it would probably benefit from a little bit…
awild | April 7, 2008
Deserts are difficult places to live for more reasons than just drought and heat. During dry seasons deserts are relatively inactive, and there's not much around for animals to eat. To survive times of dearth, several lineages of desert ants have taken to harvesting plant seeds in the brief periods of bounty that follow rains. If stored properly, grains keep for years and can provide the colony with ample resources during times when the deserts are dry.
This past week the stubby carpet of spring grasses in our normally barren back yard started going to seed. After months of dormancy,…
oracknows | April 7, 2008This story, first brought to my attention by Drugmonkey, is something that I've been meaning to blog about since I first saw it. The reason, of course, should be obvious, given that my career is an example of the end product that the medical school described is going to be designed to produce: that of a physician-scientist:
The Scripps Research Institute and Scripps Health are working to set up what they hope will be the nation's first medical school entirely geared to training physicians for dual careers in research and patient care.
[...]
The Scripps institute must raise $150 million in…
drorzel | April 7, 2008When I was talking to my parents on the phone last night, my father told me about a guest op-ed in the Press and Sun-Bulletin that might be of interest to some ScienceBlogs readers and bloggers:
As if there aren't enough problems in the world, we are now on the verge of a phenomenon that will dwarf the projected scenarios of global warming. The cause is the alarming and accelerating loss of Earth's weight and mass by the burning of fossil fuels.
Every year that goes by, millions of tons of coal and millions of barrels of oil are burned. Nothing is left but ashes, soot, and gases, and there is…
pharyngula | April 6, 2008[Since I had to fly away early this morning and missed all these talks, I had to rely on regular commenter DanioPhD to fill in the gaps … so here's her summary:]
This morning's final series of talks each focused on a different phylum, but the unifying theme was one of bridging the processes of microevolution and macroevolution. The first talk after breakfast (and a long night of Scotch-drinkin' and story-swappin' prior to that) was Bernie Degnan of the University of Queensland. He summarized his work on Amphimedon queenslandica, a sponge species developed as a model of a representative…
awild | April 6, 2008
How does a newly speciating ant prevent backcrossing with its parental species? A new study in the journal Evolution by Schwander et al. investigates four hypotheses using the Pogonomyrmex rugosus/barbatus hybrid speciation system, finding support for three of them. Apparently the daughter species maintains its genetic distinctness from a parent species by mating at a different time, mating preferentially with its own species, and by having a much lowered ability to produce viable offspring.
In my opinion, the story of these hybrid harvester ant species is among the most interesting pieces…