Science
pharyngula | October 9, 2007
Early Cambrian shrimp! I just had to share this pretty little fellow, a newly described eucrustacean from the lower Cambrian, about 525 million years ago. It's small — the larva here is about 1.8mm long, and the adults are thought to have been 3mm long — but it was probably numerous, and I like to imagine clouds of these small arthropods swarming in ancient seas.
The head limbs are drawn in median view and the trunk limbs in lateral view.
There are a couple of notable things about this animal. One is that they're preserved in full 3-dimensional detail in an Orsten-type lagerstätte, which…
drorzel | October 9, 2007Here's another post to highlight a worthy proposal with a good science connection. "Little Scientists" is looking to bring marine habitats to pre-kindergarten students in Buffalo:
Animals and life sciences are of particular interest to young children, so we try to discover a lot about animals and habitats. We are also very lucky to have a partnership with the local science museum and students get a chance to visit at least once a year.
I am requesting science materials that will be housed in our classroom and not in the museum. For example, I would like my students to be able to handle books…
drorzel | October 9, 2007We're one week into the DonorsChoose challenge for this year, and readers of this blog have already contributed over $2,000 to help school teachers and students. Those of you who have contributed, thank you very much for your generosity.
We've still got $4,000 to go to reach the goal for the challenge, though, so there will be more than a few posts coming up to try to solicit new contributions. Today, I thought I would try to highlight a couple of the proposals in the challenge, to suggest some more concrete giving opportunities.
We'll start close to (my) home, with "Cruise the Forest", a…
catdynamics | October 9, 20072007 Nobel Prize in physics goes to Fert and Grünberg for Giant Magnetoresistance
Fert is at the University of Paris (sud) and Grünberg is at the Jülich research center.
This is a classic Nobel prize, since it is for relatively recent research that lead to immediate major practical application - modern hard disk drives, from iPods to your desktop - use GMR for coding the high information density expected nowadays
Here is the press release: good one - even if I spectacularly failed to predict it - I didn't think the Academy would award it so soon after discovery.
drorzel | October 9, 2007Having gotten that silly Medicine business out of the way, the Swedish Academy has moved on to the important Award, with the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics going to Albert Fert and Peter Grunberg for the discovery of Giant Magnetoresistance. This is one that people have been calling for for a while, now.
I'll try to give a more complete explanation of what this is and why it's important later, but I'm going to Boston with a student group today, and I need to run to catch the bus. I'll just note quickly that this should be applauded by blog readers, because GMR is an enabling technology for…
oracknows | October 8, 2007No IgNobels here, the 2007 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Mario R. Capecchi, Martin J. Evans, and Oliver Smithies for a technique that is so incredibly important to modern biomedical research that it's a wonder they didn't get the prize before:
This year's Nobel Laureates have made a series of ground-breaking discoveries concerning embryonic stem cells and DNA recombination in mammals. Their discoveries led to the creation of an immensely powerful technology referred to as gene targeting in mice. It is now being applied to virtually all areas of biomedicine - from…
tqa | October 8, 2007
One of the alleged facts that President Bush loves to point at when he's trying to justify his veto of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP) expansion is that the new bill would have allowed New York to enroll children from families making up to 400% of the federal poverty level. For a family of four, that works out to an annual income of about $83,000. The President and his staff appear to find $83,000 to be a very impressive number. It's certainly one that they talk about a heck of a lot - as far as I can tell, everyone from the White House who has said anything about the…
drorzel | October 8, 2007I somehow managed to lose track of time for a bit, and forgot that it was Nobel season until I saw this morning's announcement that the 2007 Nobel Prize in Medicine hase just been announced, going to Mario R. Capecchi, Sir Martin J. Evans, and Oliver Smithies,
for their discoveries of principles for introducing specific gene modifications in mice by the use of embryonic stem cells
Good thing they got the Nobel, because that sounds like the sort of icky, un-Godly work we wouldn't want to actually, you know, fund.
Anyway, the announcement of this prize means that the rest of the Nobels will be…
katie glasrud | October 7, 2007I have some thoughts on the topic of male and female dominance brought up by Blue_Expo.
In fact, it was the topic of a paper for my Evolution of Human Aggression class...
Females are under some different sexual selection pressures than males stemming from the fact that they are the limited sex. They can only produce a finite number of offspring and are heavily invested in their progeny. Perhaps this is the basis for the female dominance social hierarchies observed in bonobos (Parish et al., 1994) and hyenas (Jenks, 1995). In both these systems, offspring inherit their mother's rank and a…
pharyngula | October 7, 2007
I've written a long introduction to the work I'm about to describe, but here's the short summary: the parts of organisms are interlinked by what has historically been called laws of correlation, which are basically sets of rules that define the relationship between different characters. An individual attribute is not independent of all others: vary one feature, and as Darwin said, "other modifications, often of the most unexpected nature, will ensue".
Now here's a beautiful example: the regulation of the growth of mammalian molars. Teeth have long been a useful tool in systematics—especially…
oracknows | October 6, 2007Ah, yes, it's that time of year again. The winners of the 2007 IgNobel Prize have been announced. There have been several "worthy" winners, for example:
Mayu Yamamoto from Japan won the Ig Nobel prize in chemistry for her development of a novel way to extract vanillin, the main component in vanilla bean extract, from cow dung. In tribute to Yamamoto's achievement, Toscanni's imitated her achievement and distributed samples of the resulting ice cream to Nobel laureates seated on the stage. Loud chants of "Eat it! Eat it!" from the audience finally persuaded the skeptical Nobel laureates to try…
pharyngula | October 6, 2007Cuvier, and his British counterpart, Richard Owen, had an argument against evolution that you don't hear very often anymore. Cuvier called it the laws of correlation, and it was the idea that organisms were fixed and integrated wholes in which every character had a predetermined value set by all the other characters present.
In a word, the form of the tooth involves that of the condyle; that of the shoulder-blade; that of the claws: just as the equation of a curve involves all its properties. And just as by taking each property separately, and making it the base of a separate equation, we…
oracknows | October 6, 2007I know I've said before that I don't really "get" the whole cephalopod thing that P. Z. has, but I wonder if he's heard of this little thing:
Monday, October 8 is Unofficial International Cephalopod Awareness Day.
Certainly, I hadn't.
tqa | October 5, 2007
Last week, I had a picture of a live spider for you to identify. Most of the guesses came quickly, and were absolutely correct - the spider in the picture was a Spiny-Backed Orbweaver. This week's arthropod might be a little more challenging.
The picture below features a pinned museum specimen, and was taken through a light microscope at about 40x magnification. The edge of a quarter appears in the photo for scale. The species in question is unique to the island of Hawaii, and is found on the wetter slopes of the younger volcanoes.
Good luck. I'll post either the answer (if someone…
catdynamics | October 5, 2007Hillary Clinton gave a science policy speech at the Carnegie Institute
Now with new improved policy list...
Text is here
Doesn't say if she took questions.
Predictable kick offs on stem cells and climate change.
Wonkish, very solid.
Restore science advisor, OTA, depoliticize agencies and advisory committees.
Increase funding for NSF, DoE, DoD research.
She likes NASA Earth Science and aeronautics.
She enquired about being an astronaut! Iiiinteresting.
That's a damn good speech, very clintonesque, well researched.
It is also interesting that it is being given at all at this stage of the…
tqa | October 5, 2007
I've spent part of this morning doing some fairly serious research on health insurance in the United States, and who doesn't have it. My curiosity on the subject was stirred up by a couple of things: after looking at a lot of DonorsChoose proposals from schools with high poverty rates, poverty is on my mind; and the President's veto of the Children's Health Insurance Program expansion got me thinking about what it actually means to be poor in this country, and what (if any) relationship the official poverty threshold has to actually being able to afford to provide for your family.
I was…
drorzel | October 5, 2007Inside Higher Ed has a puzzling opinion piece about science and math education by W. Robert Connor of the Teagle Foundation. It's not his arguemtn that's puzzling, though-- that part is perfectly clear, hard to disagree with:
Public and private funders have spent billions of dollars -- sometimes wastefully -- on education initiatives like those in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) disciplines without rigorous assessment and evaluation. Not asking for documented results when so much money is on the line misses a golden opportunity to determine whether such programs are…
catdynamics | October 4, 2007Mikulski-Hutchison put in extra billion into NASA appropriations in Senate
and HR3737 - House votes to save Arecibo - doesn't come with money, just orders to NSF.
I bow in awe to Cornell's powers.
tqa | October 4, 2007
I can't begin to thank the people who have donated to the DonorsChoose campaign enough. As of today - four days into the campaign - we've raised $1045. That's more than was contributed during all of last year's 15-day campaign. That's absolutely fantastic.
As of now, all four of the projects that I picked have been fully funded, but we haven't hit the goal yet. (Either someone donated to one of the projects through this campaign without receiving credit, or someone donated to one of the projects independently of the campaign.) At this point, we're still about $550 short of my goal for the…
drorzel | October 4, 2007The Institute of Physics is the UK's main organization of physicists (sort of like the American Physical Society), and yesterday, they announced their awards for 2007. The full list of winners is only available as a Word file, for some odd reason, but it's a distinguished group.
The prizes are headed by the brand-new Isaac Newton medal, which was awarded to Anton Zeilinger of the University of Vienna for his pioneering work on the uses of quantum entanglement:
His achievements include the first demonstration of quantum communication based on the entanglement of photons in 1995, the first "…