Science
drorzel | February 18, 2008Via slashdot, I learn that a couple of colleagues of mine have achieved nerd fame with an art project in which a robot acts out dreams.
"Is there video?" you ask. Silly reader! Of course there's video!
The deal here is that one of the two, Fernando Orellana, went to a sleep disorder center and spent a night hooked up to machines that tracked his eye motions and EEG. Then they mapped patterns in the data to specific robot actions, so an eye movemet up and to the left became a lift and turn of the robot's head, for example. Then they play the whole thing back through the robot.
It should be…
bioephemera | February 18, 2008Well, the 2008 AAAS Annual Meeting here in Boston was fun! I didn't expect that. I'm not a huge fan of scientific conferences because I have an extremely short attention span. And I haven't been blogging a lot - I'd rather just enjoy the frenzy. I've been averaging 4.5 hours of sleep a night, to the dismay of my roomies! But Discover has been blogging regularly, as have some of the Sciblings.
Saturday's highlight should have been the appearance by representatives of the Obama and Clinton campaigns, who spoke on the candidates' scientific policy positions. Sheril already summarized (update:…
drorzel | February 18, 2008I gave a talk at Boskone in the prime Sunday 10 am slot, on quantum teleportation. I read the opening dialogue from Chapter 8 of the book, and then did a half-hour (or so) explanation of the real physics behind quantum teleportation.
If you weren't one of the thirty-ish people who watched at least part of the presentation, you don't know what you missed. But you can get a little flavor of it by looking at the PDF version of my PowerPoint slides (1.1 MB). I think they're mostly comprehensible on their own, but even if they're not, there are cute dog pictures galore. So, you know, there's that…
esiegel | February 17, 2008Alright, folks, so last week I got this letter from a very good magician and television producer Anthony Owen from Objective Productions, the company partnered with Discovery Channel to make Dangerman in London:
Thank you for your recent email application for Dangerman.
If you are still interested in being considered for this role weâd like you to make a short video of yourself (no longer than 3 minutes). Tell us, on camera, why you would be the perfect Dangerman (or Woman) and explain the science behind a dangerous stunt in an entertaining way which would make sense to a non science-…
pharyngula | February 17, 2008
Since I wrote about the wacky creationist who couldn't wrap his mind around the idea that plants and animals are related, and since I generally do a poor job of discussing that important kingdom of the plants (I admit it, I'm a metazoan bigot…but I do try to overcome my biases), I thought I'd briefly mention an older review by Elliot Meyerowitz that compares developmental processes in plants and animals. The main message is that developmental processes, the mechanisms that assemble the multicellular whole, are very different in the two groups and are non-homologous, but don't get confused:…
bioephemera | February 17, 2008
Golden Age of Scientific Computing
Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute
In a Friday session at the AAAS conference here in Boston, Dr. Chris Johnson of Utah's Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute showed this short video encapsulating some of his team's striking 3D imaging innovations. He also made what I think is a very important point: that one of the biggest challenges in his field lies not in finding new technologies to capture details, but finding new ways to generate abstractions of data - images that don't just depict results for presentation, but help to clarify…
tqa | February 15, 2008
Last Thursday, I presented some data about three populations of an insect and asked you to try and figure out how many species scientists think these populations should be grouped into. On Monday, I added data from two more populations, and asked the same thing - try and figure out how many species are present. Now, I'm going to try and answer the question myself, and tell you what other scientists have said about these insects.
A quick review is probably in order before I get to the "answers":
The five populations are arranged in a line, with each separated from the next by a minimum…
bioephemera | February 13, 2008
Michelangelo's Creation of Adam
From Paluzzi et al., Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 2007
For a few years, Nature Reviews Neuroscience stuck to a humorous theme in its cover art: everyday objects that mimic brains. A dandelion, spilled wine, a rock, a cave painting: if you know what features to look for, a surprising number of things resemble brains. We are a species that sees faces on the Martian surface and the Moon; we're very good at pattern recognition, and it's probably evolutionarily better for our brains to err on the side of "recognizing" something that isn't there, than…
pontiff | February 13, 2008A website dedicated to chronicling the lives, injuries, and money lost due to a lack of critical thinking. Woah. Is it just me or is there is somethink kind of creepy about assembling this kind of website?
awild | February 12, 2008Not the real thing of course, but look how cute the plush version is:
The company GiantMicrobes has a delightful line of plush plagues and pestilences. I've pasted a few more below, but you really should visit their site.
grrlscientist | February 12, 2008tags: James Watson, racism, sexism, genetic engineering, seed media group, scienceblogs, Adam Bly
James Watson, 1962 Nobel Prize winner
for co-discovering the structure of DNA along with
Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins.
Yesterday, Adam Bly, founder, CEO and Editor-in-Chief of Seed Media Group, was interviewed by Carol Goar for an editorial about the Canadian government's dismissal of its national science adviser, Arthur Carty.
"Science is driving our global culture unlike ever before," Bly is cited as saying. "Now is not the time to send a signal -- domestically and internationally --…
awild | February 12, 2008Today is Charles Darwin's 199th birthday. Aussie blogger John Wilkins provides an eloquent summation of Darwin's significance:
So remember Darwin not as the discoverer of anything, but as the guy who set off a fruitful, active, complex and ultimately explanatory research program in biology, which continues to become ever more active. Don't make him a saint, an authority, or a hero. He's just a damned good scientist.
Other Darwin miscellanea on the web: For the celebration-minded, Darwinday.org lists local Darwin-related events. The Beagle Project aims to recreate the Voyage of the Beagle, in…
drorzel | February 12, 2008Chris and Sheril have been working tirelessly to make a Presidential Science Debate happen, and there's been real progress:
ScienceDebate2008 is now co-sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Academies, and the Council on Competitiveness. We were looking at venues, and finally settled on an offer from the Philadelphia-based Franklin Institute--named, of course, after one of this country's first and greatest scientists. We can't think of a more appropriate venue.
Our proposed date is April 18, 2008, which is just before the Pennyslvania primary. So…
tqa | February 11, 2008
On Thursday, I presented a species problem taken from a post over at my old blog. I presented data from experimental matings that were carried out among three insect populations, added a little bit of information about the appearance, behavior, and location of the populations. I asked you to tell me how many species these three populations represented, and promised that I'd give you the "official" answer today. I've decided, though, that it wouldn't be totally fair to answer the question just yet. You see, I withheld relevant data when I presented the original version of the question.
When…
pontiff | February 11, 2008The U.S. presidential candidates been invited to a debate on science. Will they come? I don't know, but the thought of Mike Huckabee using biblical references in discussing science could lead to some very fun sentences. For example, if he wanted to get apocrypha-l, when talking about the bioethics of artificial wombs, he could bring up the Gospel of Thomas 15:
Jesus said, "When you see one who was not born of woman, fall on your faces and worship. That one is your Father."
Of course, Mike Huckabee didn't major in math, so I worry that he won't attend for fear that the debate might test his…
drorzel | February 11, 2008I'm sitting at the computer, reading blogs, when the dog comes up to me. "Hey, can I ask a question?" she says.
"Sure, go ahead."
"What's the deal with evolution?"
"Evolution, huh? Well, I'm not a biologist, you understand, but the basic idea is that every creature we see today originated from simple creatures of the past, through a process of small changes over millions of years. Every individual of a species has slightly different traits, and if those traits happen to make them more likely to survive, then they are more likely to reproduce, and have offspring who will share those traits.…
pharyngula | February 7, 2008Our little grievance with a certain paper in Proteomics has made it to the attention of the Chronicle of Higher Ed. Some of the new info (there isn't a lot) is right here:
Michael J. Dunn, the editor of Proteomics and a professor at University College Dublin's Conway Institute of Biomolecular and Biomedical Research, told The Chronicle that "it's not our policy to promote creationism" and added that the journal might retract the article.
As was the case with a less-well-known journal that inadvertently published a creationist paper (The Chronicle, September 24, 2004), the paper in Proteomics…
oracknows | February 7, 2008Nooooo!
I thought I might be safe. It's been a really long time since I've had to hang my head in shame and contemplate covering it with a paper bag because of creationist pontifications of a fellow physician bringing shame upon our shared profession. It had even been longer since I had dealt with Dr. Geoffrey Simmons, a particularly clueless "intelligent design" creationist. And don't even get me started on the whole "Physicians and Surgeons Who Dissent from Darwinism" silliness started by the Discovery Institute.
Now P.Z. Myers informs me that Dr. Simmons is back and dumber than ever…