Science
awild | March 19, 2008
In our front yard we've got a busy nest of Pogonomyrmex rugosus seed harvesting ants. Warming weather brought them out for the first time last week, and every now and again I go out to see what they're up to. Lots of digging, it seems.
Pogonomyrmex is greek for "Bearded Ant", named 150 years ago by Austrian myrmecologist Gustav Mayr for the thick brush of hairs on the underside of the head. Entomologists affectionately refer to these ubiquitous desert insects as "Pogos". What does the beard do?
It's a construction tool, and one that is especially helpful in dry, sandy climates. As anyone…
pharyngula | March 19, 2008
Fossils are cool, but some of us are interested in processes and structures that don't fossilize well. For instance, if you want to know more about the evolution of mammalian reproduction, you'd best not pin your hopes on the discovery of a series of fossilized placentas, or fossilized mammary glands … and although a few fossilized invertebrate embryos have been discovered, their preservation relied on conditions not found inside the rotting gut cavity of dead pregnant mammals.
You'd think this would mean we're right out of luck, but as it turns out, we have a place to turn to, a different…
drorzel | March 19, 2008"A" asks:
Given the chance, would you take a job at a major research-university, or do you enjoy teaching a lot and doing some research at your small liberal arts college?
My first answer is "no," though I guess it would depend on the terms of the offer. In general terms, though, I'm very happy with my job.
I went to a small liberal arts college, and really enjoyed the experience, so I actually went to grad school with the idea of getting a Ph.D. and then teaching at a small college. I've ended up pretty much exactly where I wanted to be-- well, OK, I'd probably be even happier at a certain…
drorzel | March 19, 2008As approximately six billion other blogs have noted, Arthur C. Clarke is dead. His obit in the Times runs to three pages, which is a good indicator of just how long and distinguished his life was.
My initial reaction is similar to Matt McIrvin's: it feels like the passing of an age. Bradbury and Pohl are of the same generation, but they don't feel like the same sort of writers as Clarke and Asimov and Heinlein, the ruling triumvirate of old-school SF.
I was never a huge fan of his fiction-- I went through Asimov and Heinlein phases, back in the day, but didn't get as deeply into Clarke. I'm…
pharyngula | March 18, 2008
You know how people can be going along, minding their own business, and then they see some cute big-eyed puppy and they go "Awwwww," and their hearts melt, and then it's all a big sloppy mushfest? I felt that way the other day, as I was meandering down some obscure byways of the developmental biology literature, and discovered the dicyemid mesozoa … an obscure phylum which I vaguely recall hearing about before, but had never seriously examined. After reading a few papers, I have to say that these creatures are much more lovable then mere puppy dogs. Look at this and say "Awwwww!"
Light…
oracknows | March 17, 2008One of the greatest threats to the preclinical research necessary for science-based medicine today is animal rights activism. The magnitude of the problem came to the forefront again last month with the news that animal rights terrorists tried to enter the home of a researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) whose research uses mice to study breast cancer and neurologic disease while she and her husband were having a birthday party for one of their children and assaulted her husband, who had gone to the front of the house to confront them. This unrelenting attack on the use…
awild | March 16, 2008
Pheidole creightoni major worker, California
After reading a couple times through Corrie Moreau's hot-off-the-press Pheidole evolution paper, I am pleased to give it a thumbs-up. The paper is behind a subscription barrier, so I have distilled the results into an informal summary:
Pheidole is one of the most important groups of ants. They are distinctive in always having at least two sharply-defined types of worker ants in the nest: minor workers that just sort of look like normal little ants, and the very front-heavy major workers with an enormous head and powerful jaws. Pheidole is…
drorzel | March 15, 2008Paul Krugman is now a famour economist, but many years ago, he was "an oppressed assistant professor, caught up in the academic rat race." So, he did what any good academic would do in that situation: he wrote a silly paper to cheer himself up. In this case, a paper discussing the issues that arise in interstellar trade because of realtivistic effects.
It's a brilliant bit of silliness. It's hard to pick a favorite bit, but this is pretty good:
To conclude this section, we should say something about the assumption that the trading planets lie in the same inertial frame. This will turn out to…
drorzel | March 14, 2008The next lab visit experiments I want to talk about are really the epitome of what I called the "NIST Paradigm" in an earlier post. These are experiments on "four-wave mixing" done by Colin McCormick (who I TA'd in freshman physics, back in the day), a post-doc in Paul Lett's lab at NIST. As Paul said when I visited, if they had had a better idea of the field they were dabbling in, they would've thought that what they were trying was impossible; thanks to their relative ignorance, though, they just plowed ahead, and accomplished something pretty impressive.
The basic scheme is laid out in…
awild | March 13, 2008
DEET is the main ingredient in most insect repellents. Slather it on and it's like magic; the mozzies just fly on by. Nothing else is as effective.
In spite of its utility, DEET is pretty nasty stuff. Depending on where you are in the world, you might be healthier just letting the bugs bite. It melts plastic, and I don't even want to think about what it does as it seeps into skin.
So, I was relieved this afternoon to read a report in this week's Science detailing the biochemical secrets behind DEET. Apparently, the chemical blocks an odor co-receptor called OR83b on insect antennae. When…
oracknows | March 13, 2008I happen to be in Chicago right now attending the annual meeting of the Society of Surgical Oncology. It's a meeting that I try to make it to almost every year, and usually it's a necessary update to my knowledge base. Consequently, I only just this morning noticed my fellow ScienceBloggers Mark Hoofnagle, Mark Chu-Carroll, and P.Z. Myers piling on the latest example of the sexist misogyny that is Vox Day, this time in (where else) WorldNetDaily, in an article entitled The real assault on science. Vox's article, in essence, views the application of Title IX to science education to increase…
drorzel | March 13, 2008As I mentioned a few days ago, I visited Luis Orozco's lab during our trip to DC last week. I already talked about his cavity QED stuff, but that's only one of the projects under development. He's also working on a next-generation apparatus for the laser cooling and trapping of francium, to be done at the TRIUMF accelerator in Vancouver-- francium is an element with no stable isotopes, and at most a few grams of it exist on the earth at any given moment. Luis and his students demonstrated the laser cooling of francium a few years back, using atoms made in an accelerator at Stony Brook out on…
drorzel | March 13, 2008Over at the new(ish) Of Two Minds, Shelley has posted a video giving advice on scientific presentations from a couple of guys at Michigan. They offer a few quick tips to giving better presentations:
Know your material well enough to give it without slides
Skip the outline (for short talks in particular)
Minimize text on slides
Make your figures big and visible
The central point is really to put the focus on the data, not the words or slides.
The one specific tip I would add to their list is this: When you put up a graph, you should clearly identify what is being plotted on what axes. The…
oracknows | March 13, 2008As an NIH-funded surgeon/scientist, I just had to read this report at BrokenPipeline.org when I became aware of it, courtesy of Bora and Drugmonkey. Basically, it describes how bleak the NIH funding situation has become, particularly for young investigators. The report (PDF) comes from several prominent research universities and warns that we are at risk of losing a generation of new biomedical researchers. Even taking into account the knowledge that this report is anything but unbiased (indeed, it is explicitly in favor of increased NIH funding), the situation it paints is still pretty grim…
awild | March 11, 2008
Coprophanaeus caroliae Edmonds 2008
Dung Beetle - Bolivia
Source: Edmonds, W.D. 2008. A new species of Coprophanaeus Olsoufieff (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae) from Bolivia. Zootaxa 1723: 42-46.
awild | March 11, 2008
Myrmecologist and artist Andrea Lucky sent me this picture, depicting her controversial view that Adam Ant was really a Myrmecia.
drorzel | March 11, 2008Another of the labs I visited while in DC was Steve Rolston's lab at the University of Maryland. This actually contains the apparatus I worked on as a graduate student, including many of the same quirky pieces of hardware-- Steve was the PI (Principal Investigator) for the metastable xenon lab in the Phillips group at NIST, and when he left NIST to take a faculty position at Maryland, he took the apparatus with him.
The xenon lab is now dedicated to work on ultracold plasma physics, which they were just starting when I graduated. The idea is that you can use laser cooling to accumulate a…
oracknows | March 11, 2008You may remember from yesterday that I wrote about a concerted propaganda effort by antivaccinationists to torture the facts and science behind a case of a girl with a rare mitochondrial disease whose condition may have been exacerbated by vaccination, resulting in an encephalopathy with some autism-like symptoms. Actually, I had had in mind an entirely different topic for yesterday, but news events drove me. Basically, I couldn't stand all the B.S. I saw emanating from antivaccinationists on news broadcasts and radio, and I had to do my little part to counter it. Fortunately (or…
drorzel | March 11, 2008The annual March Meeting of the American Physical Society is happening this week in New Orleans. This is the biggest physics conference of the year, by far, with close to 7,000 attendees-- despite what you might think from the Internet, the Condensed Matter crowd who attend the March Meeting significantly outnumber particle physicists and high-energy theorists.
I don't usually go to the March Meeting-- it's just too damn big. I went to the Centennial Meeting in Atlanta in 1999 (and gave an invited talk, in fact), and didn't care for it all that much. I prefer DAMOP, which is much smaller-- a…
awild | March 9, 2008
Strumigenys louisianae stalking a springtail
Tucson, Arizona
Non-native species should make a naturalist's skin crawl, but these ornate little trap-jaw ants are a guilty pleasure. Strumigenys louisianae is among the most widespread of the miniature trap-jaw ants, occurring naturally from the southeastern U.S. to northern Argentina. The desert climate in Tucson is too dry for Strumigenys, but they persist in lawns, gardens, and other places in town where irrigation raises the moisture levels. No one knows when or how they arrived, but it is likely the founding colonies stowed away in…