Science
sb admin | April 6, 2008There's no such thing as a slow news day. There's a war in Iraq, another in Afganistan, a genocide in Sudan, a presidential campaign, and probably some right wing blowhard having fun in a public restroom somewhere.
So what the hell was the Times thinking with this one? The premise appears to be that blogging is so stressful, it can KILL!!111!one!! In fact the title is "In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop".
Let's examine that story. The premise is that some bloggers work so hard, under such pressure, that they just drop dead. There are many dangerous jobs out there…
pharyngula | April 5, 2008I'm going to get off a quick summary of this afternoon's talks, then I have to run down to the poster session to find out what the grad students have been doing. Are we having fun yet? I'm going to collapse in bed tonight, and then unfortunately I have to catch an early flight back home, so I'm going to miss a lot of cool stuff tomorrow.
First up after lunch was Deneen Wellik, who summarized her work with Hox genes and patterning the vertebrate axial skeleton. I'm spared some effort here — I already wrote up her paper, so read that for the whole story. In short, one of the confounding things…
pharyngula | April 5, 2008My brain is most wonderfully agitated, which is the good thing about going to these meetings. Scientists are perverse information junkies who love to get jarred by new ideas and strong arguments, and meetings like this are intense and challenging. I've only got a little time here before the next session, so let me rip through a short summary of my morning.
Hopi Hoekstra talked about Golden mice in them thar hills: the molecular basis of crypsis in Nebraskan deermice. This was an excellent example of the kind of approach Coyne advocated the previous evening: she has a very cool system in mice…
pharyngula | April 4, 2008So here I am at the IGERT Symposium on Evolution, Development, and Genomics, having a grand time, even if I did get called out in the very first talk. There were two keynote talks delivered this evening, both of which I was anticipating very much, and which represented the really good side of science: two differing points of view wrestling with each other for consensus and for testable, discriminating differences. They also had dueling t-shirts.
Here's the argument in brief. The functional part of the genome can be roughly broken down into two components: the coding regions, or the actual bit…
awild | April 4, 2008
Epicauta pardalis - spotted blister beetle
Tucson, Arizona
Here's a beetle so toxic it can kill a horse. The horse doesn't even need to ingest the beetle, it just needs to ingest something that the beetle bled on. Blister beetles produce the defensive compound cantharadin- the active ingredient of the aphrodesiac Spanish Fly- which they reflex-bleed out their joints when threatened:
photo details (top) Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens on a Canon 20D
f/13, 1/250 sec, ISO 100, indirect strobe in white box.
(bottom) Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon 20D
f/13, 1/250 sec, ISO 100, flash…
drorzel | April 4, 2008In the comments to yesterday's post about framing, Damian offers a long comment that doesn't actually contradict anything I said, but re-frames it in terms more complimentary to the Dawkins/ Myers side of things. I may deal with some of what he says over there (probably not today, though, as I have a class to teach), but I wanted to single out one particular part of his comment for response:
Nisbet has claimed repeatedly, and without much evidence I might add, that PZ and Dawkins are poor advocates for science. For a start, neither PZ or Dawkins has ever claimed to be an advocate (at least,…
drorzel | April 4, 2008The Perimeter Institute will be hosting a workshop in September on "Science in the 21st Century":
Times are changing. In the earlier days, we used to go to the library, today we search and archive our papers online. We have collaborations per email, hold telephone seminars, organize virtual networks, write blogs, and make our seminars available on the internet. Without any doubt, these technological developments influence the way science is done, and they also redefine our relation to the society we live in. Information exchange and management, the scientific community, and the society as a…
drorzel | April 3, 2008EurekAlert provides a sort of firehose feed of press releases, some of which contain really hilariously awkward phrases. This release about a graphene-based measurement of the fine structure constant is one of the all-time greats, though:
Prof Geim, who in 2004 discovered graphene with Dr Kostya Novoselov, a one-atom-thick gauze of carbon atoms resembling chicken wire, says: "Change this fine tuned number by only a few percent and the life would not be here because nuclear reactions in which carbon is generated from lighter elements in burning stars would be forbidden. No carbon means no life…
drorzel | April 3, 2008I really had intended for Tuesday's dog pictures to be my only comment on the recent framing debacle (well, Monday's expertise post was an oblique commentary on it, but nobody got that, which you can tell because the comments were civil and intelligent and interesting to read). But Chris Mooney is making a good-faith effort to clear things up with his current series, including an effort to define common ground, and he's getting absolutely pounded, for no good reason.
I think Chris and Matt Nisbet have made some tactical errors in making their case to ScienceBlogs, chief among them forgetting…
oracknows | April 2, 2008So there I was last night, in the Twilight Zone between wakefulness and sleep, Late Night With David Letterman on the television, blaring in the background. I was vaguely aware that John McCain was Letterman's guest for the evening and that they were chatting back and forth, Letterman asking the usual rather inane questions that entertainment-oriented talk show hosts often ask politicians and Presidential candidates when they have them on their shows and McCain was winding up to hit the softball questions out of the park.
Then I heard it, in the middle of a commentary about how the…
awild | April 1, 2008
If you watch this video about a new technology for visualizing insect fossils hidden in opaque amber, pay special attention around 0:36-0:44. There's a brief 3D image of what is clearly a well-preserved sphecomyrmine ant. The clip is excerpted from a detailed demonstration here, showing the insect in all its glory (warning: 57MB!). It's among the most detailed glimpses of a Sphecomyrmine yet.
Why is this ant interesting? Sphecomyrminae is in many respects a classic piece of evidence for the wasp ancestry of ants. It is an extinct Cretaceous subfamily that shows a few characteristics of…
catdynamics | April 1, 2008it is a busy news day, with a number of breakthroughs reported in different fields, and a lot of changes here at ScienceBlogs
I'll try to update as more reports come in
The Quantum Pontiff reports a potential breakthrough in quantum computing using bleeding edge fusion technology.
Virgle, a new joint venture between Virgin Galactic and Google, has bought Mars. Markets rose on the announcement.
There are rumours that the SEC was to investigate Google for insider trading, and that they had abused their privileged position at Ames to find out about the NASA breakthrough propulsion technology,…
jrosenhouse | March 31, 2008Nicholas Kristof has a good column in today's New York Times. Here's a taste:
From Singapore to Japan, politicians pretend to be smarter and better- educated than they actually are, because intellect is an asset at the polls. In the United States, almost alone among developed countries, politicians pretend to be less worldly and erudite than they are (Bill Clinton was masterful at hiding a brilliant mind behind folksy Arkansas sayings about pigs).
Alas, when a politician has the double disadvantage of obvious intelligence and an elite education and then on top of that tries to educate the…
sb admin | March 31, 2008...I really couldn't resist sharing some fun links. I guess you'd call it blogrolling.
First, someone got a hold of the über-seekrit Expelled:Leader's Guide, and started deconstructing it.
Next, Steve Novella once again eviscerates a wacky water-woo cult leader at NeuroLogica.
Panda Bear, M.D. has one of his usual lengthy must-reads.
Orac goes after the reductio ad Hitlerum arguments of Expelled.
Finally, N.B. explains why chemistry is everywhere, even in your hair.
oracknows | March 31, 2008I have to admit that this one fell off the radar, even for me. I hate to admit it, but it's true.
I'm talking about the Cancer Research Blog Carnival, which is being hosted by the Skeptical Alchemist this Friday.
So, those of you inclined to write about cancer and cancer research, help a blogger out and submit your work to the Skeptical Alchemist before Friday and then come back to check out the carnival then.
drorzel | March 31, 2008Academics of all sorts are highly protective of their scholarly territory. It's an unavoidable consequence of the process of becoming an academic-- I've often joked that getting a Ph.D. requires you to become the World's Leading Expert in something that nobody else cares about. To make it through grad school, no matter what discipline you're in, you need to really like what you're doing, and that produces a tendency to angrily attack anyone who trespasses on "your" turf.
There's an interesting difference, though, in the way that scholars from the humanities and socials sciences approach the…
awild | March 29, 2008Last year I mentioned the antics of Mr. Dewanand Makhan, an amateur taxonomist whose enthusiasm for publication rather outstrips any penchant for quality control. This week a team of myrmecologists has stepped in to reverse some of Makhan's errors:
All that [Makhan] has done is sample some of Surinameâs common species of Dacetini, and one common species of Basicerotini, and describe them all as new, without checking if any of them already had identities. His motives for writing this paper cannot be imagined and the total lack of investigation of previous endeavour defies understanding.…
oracknows | March 29, 2008Hilarious, particularly "big-pimpin'" Daddy Dennett:
I can't make up my mind if it's meant to skewer Dawkins or whether it's meant ironically as a way of making fun of ID creationists and how they view Dawkins...
oracknows | March 29, 2008Nasal drone Ben Stein, as you would be hard-pressed not to know if you are a regular reader of ScienceBlogs, is hosting what looks to be a truly execrable crap-fest called Expelled!: No Intelligence Allowed. The movie basically consists of two themes: (1) Whining about "intellectual oppression" by those evil "Darwinists" directed against any valiant "intelligent design" creationist or anyone else who "questions" Darwin and (2) lots of blaming the Holocaust and other atrocities (but mainly Hitler and the Holocaust) on "Darwinism," replete with lots of shots of Nazis, Ben Stein clumsily emoting…