Science
pharyngula | January 24, 2008… you should check out their recent appearance together on Bloggingheads.
pharyngula | January 24, 2008We had Neil Shubin here last week, and now Jerry Coyne is guest-blogging at The Loom. I look forward to the day that I can just sit back and invite prominent scientists to do my work for me here.
Although, I have to say that while Coyne is largely correct, he's being a bit unfair. He's addressing Olivia Judson's recent article on "hopeful monsters", a concept Coyne and the majority of the biological community reject. I reject it, too, but I think there are some legitimate issues that are associated with the idea that are also all too often and unfortunately discarded.
One point that Coyne…
tqa | January 24, 2008
Over at Evolving Thoughts, John Wilkins has a post that criticizes a recently-published journal article. Normally, I agree with John - in fact, if it's true that the best measure of someone's intelligence is how often their views match yours, then John Wilkins is an absolute genius. But even Einstein had off-days, and (again, based on the agreement standard) I think this might have been one of John's.
The article in question, by paleontologists Sarda Sahney and Michael Benton, examines how long it took for ecosystems to recover after the end-Permian extinction. The dinosaurs weren't…
drorzel | January 24, 2008A little while ago, the Corporate Masters asked us to answer a couple of questions for possible inclusion in the first '08 issue of Seed. I originally posted this back in November, but got asked to take it down because the issue was hush-hush. The street date for the magazine in question was this week, though, and I busted up my wrist playing basketball yesterday, so I'm dragging it back out because typing hurts.
The question is:
What scientific development do you hope to be blogging or reading about in 2008?
The original question was more general, asking us just what we'd like to be…
pharyngula | January 23, 2008Because it is rather buried in the pile of comments at this point, I'll mention that
Neil Shubin did respond in his guest post — check it out.
grrlscientist | January 21, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, Female Scientists, science publishing, science blogging, gender bias, sexism, feminism
A microbiologist at work.
Image: East Bay AWIS.
In the wake of the Science Blogging Conference in North Carolina, which I was unable to attend due to financial reasons, The Scientist's blog published a piece today that asks "Do Women Blog About Science?" This article was written partially in response to the kerfuffle that was triggered last year after The Scientist asked what were their readers' favorite life science blogs. Several women, including me, noticed that they only…
pontiff | January 21, 2008Craig Barrett, the chairman of Intel has a scathing op-ed in the San Fransisco Chronicle on the recent spending omnibus and its effect on science funding (via Computing Research Policy Blog):
What are they thinking? When will they wake up? It may already be too late; but I genuinely think the citizenry of this country wants the United States to compete. If only our elected leaders weren't holding us back.
Of course, I can hear the cries already: typical liberal west coaster spouting more government spending. But, oh. Doh. Okay, well what can basic science research possibly lead to anyway.
awild | January 20, 2008So you like insects, but can't be bothered to get up from your computer to go look for some? Google earth to the rescue!
South of Tucson, Arizona (31°38.097'N 111°03.797'W) I found this lovely aerial image. Visualized from an elevation of about a kilometer and a half, it shows a hill just west of I-19 covered in freshly-sprouted grass. Except, there's this strange pattern of evenly-spaced polka-dots:
What could account for the speckles? Alien crop-circles? Bizarre gardening accidents?
Why no, those are the nest discs of one of our most conspicuous insects in the Sonoran desert, the red…
awild | January 18, 2008My review of myrmecologist Carl Rettenmeyer's DVD "Astonishing Army Ants" was published this morning in the journal Bioscience. Click below to read:
A Feast for the Initiated
The DVD runs about an hour and is available from armyantbiology.com.
pharyngula | January 17, 2008
The capybara is the current champion for rodents of unusual size — it weighs about 60kg (about 130 pounds); another large rodent is the pakarana, which weighs about a quarter of that. Either one is far too much rattiness for most people to want hanging around.
Now there's another king of the rodents: Josephoartigasia monesi, which is estimated to have tipped the scales at about 1000kg, over a ton. Don't worry about getting bigger rat traps; these beasties have been extinct for perhaps 2 million years. I've put a few pictures from the paper describing this new species below the fold.
This is…
awild | January 17, 2008
Here's a story about a parasitic nematode that turns black ants into ripe red berries. What's this about?
The parasite needs to get its eggs from an infected ant to healthy ants. Apparently it hasn't been successful the old-fashioned way, just broadcasting its eggs about the environment. Instead, these little worms have figured out a far more effective egg delivery vehicle: birds.
Ants of the genus Cephalotes often feed from bird droppings (for instance, see here). If a parasitic egg can get itself into a bird's digestive system, it'll wind up in a juicy fecal pellet where it may be…
ddobbs | January 17, 2008
I've written before, both here and in print, about how FDA policy and drug company practices have allowed drug makers to publish (and the FDA to base approval on) only the most flattering drug-trial results while keeping less-flattering studies in the drawer. Today a New England Journal of Medicine report shows how things change when you include the results from the drawer: The effectiveness of many SSRIs dives to near placebo-level. This despite that the companies design and conduct most of these trials in a way calculated to produce positive results.
When I wrote on this for Scientific…
oracknows | January 17, 2008Things are crazy now for me, both at home and at work. I mean really, really crazy. So crazy that even I, one of the most verbose bloggers out there, am forced to take two or three days off from my little addiction--I mean habit. Consequently, having foreseen that this time would come around these dates, I, Orac, your benevolent (and, above all verbose) blogger have thought of you, my readers. I realize the cries and lamentations that the lack of fresh material inevitably causes. That, I cannot completely obviate. However, I can ease the pain somewhat, and I can do this by continuing my…
drorzel | January 17, 2008The Washington Post has an article this morning headlined Navy Wins Exemption From Bush to Continue Sonar Exercises in Calif.:
The White House has exempted the Navy from two major environmental laws in an effort to free the service from a federal court's decision limiting the Navy's use of sonar in training exercises.
Environmentalists who had sued successfully to limit the Navy's use of loud, mid-frequency sonar -- which can be harmful to whales and other marine mammals -- said yesterday that the exemptions were unprecedented and could lead to a larger legal battle over the extent to which…
drorzel | January 16, 2008The second half of the NOVA special on "Absolute Zero" aired last night. Like the first installment, it was very well done, avoiding most of the traps of modern pop-science television. There were some mysterious shots of amusement park rides when they started talking about quantum mechanics, and I'm not sure why, but they kept the "re-enactments" to a minimum, and didn't overdo the CGI.
They also deserve special mention for not insulting the viewers' intelligence with constant recaps.
As you can guess from the title, this part of the story covered the history of attempts to reach ever-lower…
oracknows | January 16, 2008It's been a while since I've dealt with creationists trying to claim either that evolutionary theory is not relevant to the problem of microbial resistance to antibiotics or, even worse, making really bad medical recommendations on the basis of their interpretation of evolution.
This time around RPM has posted a nice article on Competitive Release and Antibiotic Resistance that suggests a possible way that we can use evolutionary theory to prolong the useful life of antibiotics before resistance evolves. The results explained by RPM remind me of an article I blogged about several months ago,…
ddobbs | January 16, 2008The public will soon start getting quicker access to research results it sponsors. From BioMed Central Blog : NIH Public Access Policy to become mandatory:
NIH Public Access Policy to become mandatory
Many open access advocates will already have heard that NIH's Public Access Policy, until now voluntary, is set to become mandatory following President Bush's approval on Dec 26th 2007 of the latest NIH appropriations bill, which includes the following wording:
"The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted…
ddobbs | January 15, 2008A new journal from the Nature Publishing Group (publishers of Nature, Nature Neuroscience, and other favorites of mine) has just started a journal about climate change, and to my delight they feature a story about climate change and Atlantic cod, an old love of mine from my time on the Gulf of Maine.
Atlantic cod, Gadus callarius Linneaus, by Goode, from the magnificent Bigelow and Schroeder, Fishes of the Gulf of Maine, 1953, the best field guide I've ever read, now online.
Cod aren't doing terribly well, because of overfishing and decimation of inshore spawning stocks, though some pockets…
pontiff | January 15, 2008Quantum Hoops, a movie about the Caltech basketball team, will be playing in Berkeley at the Landmark Shattuck Cinemas. Now if only we could get it up here in the Pacific Northwet.
pharyngula | January 15, 2008
Hagfish are wonderful, beautiful, interesting animals. They are particularly attractive to evolutionary biologists because they have some very suggestive features that look primitive: they have no jaws, and they have no pectoral girdle or paired pectoral fins. They have very poorly developed eyes, no epiphysis, and only one semicircular canal; lampreys, while also lacking jaws, at least have good eyes and two semicircular canals. How hagfish fit into the evolutionary tree is still an open question, however.
There is a strong temptation to see hagfish as representing an earlier grade of…