Science
drorzel | January 15, 2008The second part of the NOVA program Absolute Zero airs tonight on PBS stations. The first part, "The Conquest of Cold" covered the theory and technology of refrigeration, while this segment, "The Quest for Absolute Zero" will include all the fun atomic physics stuff leading up to the achievement of Bose-Einstein Condensation in 1995.
Check your local listings, and set your schedules appropriately.
grrlscientist | January 14, 2008tags: atheism, religion, science, evolution, humor
A reader sent me this list of atheist-positive anecdotes that have been seen either on a bumper sticker or a t-shirt. Of course, they are accurate as well as hilarious. Which ones are your favorites?
Top Fifty Atheist T-Shirt and Bumper Sticker Aphorisms
Abstinence Makes the Church Grow Fondlers
Honk If Your Religious Beliefs Make You An Asshole
Intelligent Design Makes My Monkey Cry
Too Stupid to Understand Science? Try Religion.
*There's A REASON Why Atheists Don't Fly Planes Into Buildings
"Worship Me or I Will Torture You…
pharyngula | January 14, 2008A lab at the University of Minnesota has done something cool: they've grown a functioning heart from stem cells. The problem with building complex organs in a lab is that their normal construction required an elaborate context in the developing embryo, something that is impossible to replicate, short of just growing the whole embryo. The Doris Taylor lab did something very clever: they took an adult rat or rabbit heart and stripped it of its cells, leaving behind a scaffold of nonliving connective tissue. Then they recellularized it with stem cells, and they differentiated appropriately to…
tqa | January 14, 2008
Today's big science news is the Messenger flyby of Mercury. The Messenger spacecraft is scheduled to do a flyby of the planet about four hours from now, en route to it's final destination - Mercury - which it will reach in 2011, after completing additional flybys of the planet Mercury in October, and the planet Mercury in 2009. (Apparently, the orbital dynamics of getting a spacecraft into orbit around a relatively small planet that's relatively close to a star are a bit complex.)
The main part of the scientific mission might not start for another few years, but there are still going to be…
razib | January 13, 2008Sign Up, Subscribe to the Feed and Learn More!
We've got 30 people signed up so far. I know more will come on board, so I'm looking forward to getting drowned in pure science in ~3 weeks.
Also, if you have a science themed blog post the link in the comments. Thinking about refurbishing the blogroll....
oracknows | January 12, 2008I don't really care if this is cynical viral marketing or not. I don't even care that half the science blogosphere has picked it up (with no doubt the other half to pile on in the next few days). This is just so frikkin' brilliant that I'm going to join in, lemming-like, too, heedless of whether I'm being manipulated by Bio-Rad or not:
A higher quality video can be found here.
"PCR, When you need to know who the daddy is."
Best. Lyric. Ever.
grrlscientist | January 12, 2008tags: Why Don't Penguins' Feet Freeze?, New Scientist, book review, science, trivia
Anyone who has ever claimed that science is boring has never spent any time talking with a scientist. However, some people have done so, and in the process, they ask lots of interesting questions such as; Why don't birds fall off their perches when they are asleep? How do you make transparent ice cubes like those in Scotch advertisements? What time is it at the North Pole? Why are traffic signals arranged red over amber over green whereas railroad signals are arranged green over amber over red? If you have…
drorzel | January 11, 2008It's been a while since I did one of these (see "How to Tell a True Lab Story" for an explanation), but yesterday's laser tech story reminded me of one.
The lab next to mine in grad school also used an argon ion laser to pump another laser, but they were much more cramped for table space than we were. Instead of putting the argon ion laser (which was about 6' long) on top of the table, they put it on a bench that slid under the optical table, then used mirrors to direct the beam up onto the table top. Since the ion laser is pretty much a black box, this worked great, and they could drag it…
tqa | January 11, 2008
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of…
razib | January 10, 2008Science Friday will have a show about ScienceDebate2008 this week. It will likely be on the NPR website tomorrow afternoon....
pontiff | January 10, 2008Mad about the funding cuts in science? Why not send an letter to those responsible?
Taken from an letter just sent out to members of the American Physical Society:
From: Arthur Bienenstock, President, the American Physical Society
To: Members of the American Physical Society
Re: Federal Funding Alert: http://www.aps.org/policy/tools/alerts
I am writing to request that you contact your elected representatives and let
them know that the 2008 federal budget deals a devastating blow to basic
research. You can make this contact quickly and easily at:
http://www.aps.org/policy/tools/…
pontiff | January 10, 2008
Birthday tributes: Da Optimizer, Da Theorizer, BILL GASARCH, Da Geomblog, and Good Math, Bad Math.
drorzel | January 9, 2008The first half of NOVA's Absolute Zero program aired last night, and I was able to watch the whole thing. Well, more or less-- it was a long day, so I was drifting off a little bit about fifteen minutes in, and didn't get all of the Michael Faraday story, but a phone call woke me up, and I watched the rest of it.
This half was mostly devoted to the history of ideas about cold, and the technology of making things cold. It didn't include any of the atomic physics topics of most immediate interest to me-- those will be in next week's installment-- but it did present a lot of fascinating…
drorzel | January 9, 2008I occasionally joke that some of the articles passing through my EurekAlert feed ought to be published in the Journal of "Well, Duh!", but I think this one takes the cake: Teens find the benefits of not having sex decline with age:
The study, reported in the January 2008 issue of the "American Journal of Public Health," studied teens from the fall of their ninth-grade year through the spring of their tenth-grade year.
Among teens who remained sexually inexperienced during the study, the percentage reporting only positive experiences from refraining from sex fell from 46 percent to 24 percent…
grrlscientist | January 9, 2008tags: Tangled Bank, blog carnivals
This is it, folks, the blog carnival that you've all been waiting for; Tangled Bank. The 96th edition has just been published, so get on over there for some science-y goodness.
catdynamics | January 9, 2008Chad speaks out on the upcoming, devastating, cuts in science and takes on Gordon over where the blame lies.
You may be surprised. Either way you ought to read it.
Here is my take on the issue, when the news came out last month...
The root cause of these cuts is with the White House - the budget process was stymied by their veto threats and by the "silent filibustering" of the individual budget bills in the Senate (where the Republicans threaten to withold "unanimous consent" for bringing the bill to a vote if they don't like it - which is a bluff to filibuster - and for some reason the…
drorzel | January 9, 2008Via a back channel, the Gardner Project of EniTech Research. They have an argon laser, so you know it's science!
(This is way too slick to be the work of real crazy people, and, of course, there's this ad... This is almost certainly either performance art or viral marketing for an upcoming tv show, but it's pretty amusing. Make sure to at least skim through the comments.)
tqa | January 8, 2008
Over the last couple of decades, a great deal of research has been done on the effect of global warming on coral reefs. The vast majority of that research has focused on the currently observed and potential future effects of climate change on reef-building corals. Coral, however, are not the only organisms that contribute to building a reef. A group of organisms known as the "coralline algae" also secrete calcium carbonate, and contribute to building up reefs. In a paper available online in advance of publication at Nature Geoscience, a group of researchers report on the results of an…
catdynamics | January 8, 2008Wegmans supermarkets withdraws all tobacco products from sale.
Wegmans is a mediums sized, family owned, chain of upmarket supermarkets, based in New York and surrounding states.
They are perennially on the "best companies to work for" list, and go for the organic high end crowd - kinda upstate Whole Foods, but with bit broader product base.
They are stopping tobacco sales at all stores, at their own initiative
Wegmans to Stop Selling Cigarettes
For Release: 01-04-2008
Contact Information:
Jo Natale, director of media relations 585-429-3627
Rochester, NY - It was announced today that…
pontiff | January 8, 2008Holy mother of quack science, Neuroquantology. But that withstanding, some of you real scientists should really satisfy their call for reviewers. I mean think how much fun you could have tearing holes in their papers :
We need additional reviewers:
Since in our interdisciplinary Journal we seek for holistic approach to science and particularly in neurobiology and consciousness studies, we strongly encourage authors that submit reviews that aim popularization of the recent advances of Quantum Field Theory (QFT), Relativity, String and Brane Theories, Evolution, Chaotic Dynamics, Nonlinear…