Science
tqa | January 8, 2008
Today is the 185th anniversary of Alfred Russel Wallace. He's best known, of course, as the young(ish) scientist who, while recovering from malaria somewhere in Indonesia, independently came up with the same ideas about evolution that Darwin had been working on for three decades, wrote them up, mailed them to Darwin, and catalyzed the old boy into finally getting the damn book written. In fact, that part of his career is so well known that it's hard to find any mention of Wallace that doesn't also bring up Darwin. Despite his enormous talents as a naturalist, he's almost always cast as…
pharyngula | January 8, 2008Morris has very hard water, so we're familiar with loading up the water softener in the basement with bags and bags of potassium chloride pellets. I didn't realize (but I should have) that the water softener is mildly radioactive. Cool! Nuclear physics is real!
awild | January 7, 2008
Common caricatures of Darwinian evolution evoke nature as a brutal force, one of ruthless competition in which the strongest prevail. In truth evolutionary processes can be much more nuanced. Under a wide array of conditions, species find Darwinian advantage in cooperative relationships.
Some of the most striking cases of evolutionary partnerships involve the planet's dominant primary producers, the plants, and the most abundant insects, the ants. Ants are exceptional predators, and several groups of plants have figured out that by housing and feeding resident ant colonies they gain a…
pharyngula | January 7, 2008I know most of you have already read it with your print subscription to Seed, but I'll mention it anyway: my last column can now be read on the web. This one is all about the weird, accidental, clumsy way segmentation patterns in flies are set up.
pontiff | January 4, 2008What with the U.S. presidential election dominating the news, could you ask for anything more this Friday than more politics blogging? Pain below the fold.
Gordon Watts asks a good question about the zeroing out of funding for the ITER. Treaties? We ain't got no treaties. We don't need no treaties! I don't have to show you any stinkin' treaties!!"
With Huckabee (What is Huck? Huck be a creationist and opponent of the separation of church and state) winning Iowa, I'm sure you'll be hearing for commentary about the "FairTax" (WAR IS PEACE!) If I'm taxed 30 cents on a dollar is that a 30…
awild | January 4, 2008
In the comments, James Trager brings to our attention his recent synonymy of the venerable Formica nitidiventris with Formica pallidefulva. This is one of the most common ants, and in my opinion one of the prettiest, in eastern North America. Many of us from the east learned of this ubiquitous species incorrectly as F. nitidiventris, so the synonymy may take some getting used to. In any case, the name nitidiventris is sunk, so you'll only make yourself look obsolete if you persist in using it.
The Trager et al (2007) revision of the Formica pallidefulva group is excellent, by the way.…
catdynamics | January 4, 2008"Why don't they make a birth control pill for men?"
Is what the SciBlog superiors gots to know this week.
Hah!
Clinical trials were done five years ago, it is simple, it works, should make an easy tablet...
Organon and Schering were doing development and projected it on the market by 2009.
but I don't see anything on their current Phase I/II/III trials lists, the product was supposed to be in Phase II in 2004.
Sounds like they gave up on the delivery method in 2006 and abandoned product development. Proof of concept though.
The real problem, however, is not on the technical side, which is…
grrlscientist | January 3, 2008tags: National Academy of Sciences Press, Science, Evolution, and Creationism, books
The National Academy of Sciences Press has revised their excellent book, Science, Evolution, and Creationism, which you can download for free. The book is a revision of an older version, which I own a hard copy of, and it has chapters on the nature of science, the evidence for evolution, and creationist claims. To receive the complete book as a free download [free PDF], you need to sign in, first. (You can get an 8-page summary PDF for free without signing in first).
pontiff | January 3, 2008From a letter sent to APS members by Michael S. Lubell the Director of Public Affairs for the American Physical Society some due outrage:
The Omnibus Bill is a disaster for the very sciences that our political leaders have repeatedly proclaimed essential for our national security, economic vitality and environmental stewardship. Several reports have suggested a picture less bleak, but they do not take into account the effects of either earmarks or inflation. In fact, numerous programs will have to be trimmed or canceled.
Hundreds of layoffs, furloughs and project shutdowns at Fermilab,…
drorzel | January 3, 2008As nearly everybody with a blog has already noted, the annual "World Question Center" question has been posted, with answers from the usual huge range of thinkers. This year's question:
When thinking changes your mind, that's philosophy.
When God changes your mind, that's faith.
When facts change your mind, that's science.
WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?
Science is based on evidence. What happens when the data change? How have scientific findings or arguments changed your mind?
I'd love to say something deep and thoughtful about the answers, but honestly, it's just too much. My…
pharyngula | January 2, 2008
Neurulation is a series of cell movements and shape changes, inductive interactions, and changes in gene expression that partitions tissues into a discrete neural tube. It is one of those early and significant morphogenetic events that define an important tissue, in this case the nervous system, and it's also an event that can easily go wrong, producing relatively common birth defects like holoprosencephaly and spina bifida. Neurulation has been a somewhat messy phenomenon for comparative embryology, too, because there are not only subtle differences between different vertebrate lineages in…
awild | December 31, 2007
This week the blogosphere is busy recapping 2007 with lists of top stories in politics, news, and celebrity haircuts. In all the hoopla surrounding year's end, somehow everyone seems to have forgotten the ants, even though the, um, fast-paced world of Myrmecology has made plenty of discoveries this year. In no particular order, here is my list of the most significant advances in Ant Science from 2007.
Argentine ants and Fire ants- two of the world's worst invasive species- keep each other in check in their common native range. The perennial mystery of invasive ants is why they are so…
razib | December 30, 2007Evolgen and Popgen Ramblings have put up posts where they criticize a parameter of the acceleration paper. John Hawks responds in the comments. But I thought this line was priceless:
Nah, you're not a dirty anti-adaptationist! All these labels are nonsense; all that is important is understanding the math involved -- something Gould never really seemed very interested in. The problem with purely verbal arguments is that there is no scorekeeper.: it's like Olympic ice dancing, or something.
A lot of the formalism in population genetics isn't that mentally taxing (although the derivations may…
ddobbs | December 28, 2007At Mind Matters, the expert-written blog I manage for Scientific American, I've posted a review of the material and papers we covered in that blog's first year. It was interesting to see how the blog echoed the interests of the larger neuroscientific world. The opener:
Mind Matters - The First Year
We did not, alas, make it to the Prague Museum, which is pictured above. But with the end of both the calendar year and Mind Matters' first year it seems a good time to look a back and see where we have been since launching in January.
There's more -- hormones, memory, W's decision-…
oracknows | December 28, 2007Lately, bloggers, including some of my fellow ScienceBloggers, have been expressing various concerns about the phenomenon that is Ron Paul, the Republican candidate who's ridden a wave of discontent to do surprisingly well in the polls leading up to the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries. First, Jake and Greg have pointed out that Ron Paul apparently does not accept the theory of evolution. The other day, Ed Brayton and Sara Robinson discussed a story about an open letter by Bill White, the leader of the American Socialist Workers' Party, in which White claimed that Paul and his aides…
awild | December 27, 2007If you've got weevils to identify, patience is a virtue. At current rates of taxonomic description it'll only take 650 more years to name all the weevil species.
oracknows | December 27, 2007It figures.
Some of the most interesting questions and posts showed up right before Christmas, just the time when I didn't have time to discuss and (hopefully) expand upon them. Neither, I'm guessing, did anyone else, which is unfortunate because this post was about an issue worth further discussion in the skeptical blogosphere. I'm talking about a post in which fellow ScienceBlogger Martin Rundkvist made this rather provocative observation about skepticism:
A discussion in the comments section of the recent Skeptics' Circle reminded me of something I learned only after years in the skeptical…
awild | December 23, 2007
Paraguay may be the world's most important country. Never mind that it is economically isolated and geopolitically forgettable. Rather, I measure importance by less trivial metrics, and by that of course I mean ants.
Paraguayan ants have changed the world. Many of the world's worst pest species evolved on the broad plains of the Paraná river before hitchhiking with human commerce to points abroad. The infamous fire ants in the southern U.S. originated on the Paraná, as did the Argentine Ants that plague California and Europe, along with a rogue's gallery of other trampy and invasive…
razib | December 22, 2007Are you getting enough vitamin D?:
The research, which is awaiting publication in a medical journal, found that 100 per cent of those of African origin were short of vitamin D, as were 93 per cent of South Asians (those of Indian or Pakistani origin), and 85 per cent of East Asians (those of Chinese, Indochinese or Filipino origin, among other countries).
...
Insufficient vitamin D amounts were also found among those of European ancestry, but were less widespread, at 34 per cent of those surveyed.
This is in Canada, very far north. That being said, if 93 percent of South Asians in Canada have…
catdynamics | December 22, 2007It turns out that parallel parking is surprisingly simple.
In theory.
I first encountered this as a homework problem in general relativity. Graduate level.
Since I believe it is still assigned as a homework problem, I will merely highlight the key points, and not provide the solution.
Consider the infinite real two dimensional plane (or a Mall parking lot, after closing).
You are in a vehicle, which can be idealised as a rectangle, width a, length b, with four wheels. For simplicity, assume only the front wheels turn, on a rigid axle, and the rear wheels provide traction displacing the…