Science
tqa | October 3, 2007
There are times when I wish I was a right-wing hack. If I was, I could let the title of this post stand just as it is, and attack the President for his lack of support for military families. It is true, after all. He did just veto such an act. In fact, he did it twice! Our President, a man who uses the military as a backdrop for a photo op at least once a month, just vetoed both "The Support for Injured Servicemembers Act" and "The Military Family Job Protection Act."
If I was one of the many cogs in the Right-Wing Noise Machine, I would be able to take those facts - those incontrovertibly…
drorzel | October 3, 2007The new issue of Physics World is out, and features a bunch of Sputnik-anniversary stories. Among them is a long piece on science on the International Space Station:
Exponentially over budget, plagued by technical glitches and some seven years behind schedule, critics have always found the International Space Station (ISS) to be an easy target. Since NASA first began discussing the station's forerunner some 25 years ago, many astrophysicists and planetary scientists have viewed the ISS as an orbiting "white elephant" siphoning funds from more scientifically adventurous space missions.
But…
drorzel | October 2, 2007Speaking of cryptic particle physcis results, noted rumor-monger Tommaso Dorigo has a rather long post about the ongoing Higgs search. It basically boils down to "There are new results due to be released soon, and I'm not going to talk about them," which wouldn't seem to require 2000 words, but there you go.
Anyway, if you're anxiously following the search for the Higgs boson, he's hinting away about the upcoming update to the small signal that created a bit of a stir back in January. If there's anything to it, that would be really exciting, but for now, only people within CDF know, and they'…
tqa | October 2, 2007
For those of you who haven't looked over at the sidebar, the DonorsChoose campaign is off to a start that far exceeded my wildest expectations. Yesterday, five donors kicked in an outstanding $687.06. That's more in one day than I had targeted for the entire drive last year, and enough to bring us more than 40% of the way to the total. To everyone who's donated so far, thank you very much.
Some of the other blogs at scienceblogs are offering incentives to donors. I'm trying to think of something, and promise that I'll get some sort of idea up in the next day or two. There are also some…
drorzel | October 2, 2007Natalie Angier has a piece in the Times this morning about the loss of a beloved pet cat:
Cleo was almost 16 years old, she'd been sick, and her death was no surprise. Still, when I returned to a home without cats, without pets of any sort, I was startled by my grief -- not so much its intensity as its specificity.
It was very different from the catastrophic grief I'd felt when I was 19 and my father died, and all sense, color and flooring dropped from my days. This was a sorrow of details, of minor rhythms and assumptions that I hadn't really been aware of until, suddenly, they were…
pharyngula | October 1, 2007
All of us mammals have pretty much the same set of genes, yet obviously there have to be some significant differences to differentiate a man from a mouse. What we currently think is a major source of morphological diversity is in the cis regulatory regions; that is, stretches of DNA outside the actual coding region of the gene that are responsible for switching the gene on and off. We might all have hair, but where we differ is when and where mice and men grow it on their bodies, and that is under the control of these regulatory elements.
A new paper by Fondon and Garner suggests that there…
tqa | October 1, 2007
DonorsChoose is a fantastic organization. Individual teachers submit proposals for things they'd like to do in their classroom, but can't afford to do. People can go to DonorsChoose, pick projects that they like, and donate money directly to those projects. You truly know where your money is going to go, and you can see what a big difference even a small donation can make.
Last year, we had a major Scienceblogs funding drive for DonorsChoose. Our readers - you - were absolutely fantastic. In just 15 days, we managed to raise more than 23,000 dollars - not counting the 10,000 dollars in…
pharyngula | October 1, 2007Casey Luskin has to be a bit of an embarrassment to the IDists…at least, he would be, if the IDists had anyone competent with whom to compare him. I tore down a previous example of Luskin's incompetence at genetics, and now he's gone and done it again. He complains about an article by Richard Dawkins that explains how gene duplication and divergence are processes that lead to the evolution of new information in the genome. Luskin, who I suspect has never taken a single biology class in his life, thinks he can rebut the story. He fails miserably in everything except revealing his own ignorance…
pharyngula | September 30, 2007Cosma has to go and show off with a magisterial demonstration of why he is the smartest man on the internet: he's written an exceptionally thorough description of heritability and IQ. It's not a light read (statistics and genetics!), but it's probably the most informative thing I've read in a month or more.
I'm sure I'm going to have to read it a few more times before I've absorbed it all.
tqa | September 29, 2007
A couple of weeks ago, I posted two ridiculous quotes that are found in the Bob Jones textbook that's involved in the California Creationism lawsuit. I'm still wading through these texts and Behe's report explaining why it's really a very good book for high school students to use to learn biology. It's a slow process, and a painful one, but I've found another couple of outstanding quotes to share with you.
This time, I'm including three different types of quote. There are a couple where the authors say things have absolutely nothing to do with science of any kind (and are totally out to…
oracknows | September 29, 2007Science and medicine are beautiful things. The range of knowledge and research that can be encompassed under their rubric is truly astounding. Indeed, some scientists have all the luck. Some scientists seem to have all the luck. Some scientists seem able to latch onto the best projects:
London, England (CNS) - There is one scientist who is using his knowledge of anatomy to help Hollywood look even more perfect.
Patrick Mallucci has thoroughly researched pictures of celebrity women to compile images of the best looking breasts. His work is supposed to help plastic surgeons create the perfect…
drorzel | September 29, 2007America's Finest News Source has the last word in generic science articles:
According to the scientists, the electromagnetic science-maker will make atoms move and spin around very quickly, though spectators at the hearing said afterward they could not account for how one could get some atoms to move around faster than other ones if everything is made of atoms anyway. In addition, the scientists said that the device would be several miles in circumference, which puzzled onlookers who had long assumed that atoms were tiny. Despite these apparent inconsistencies, the scientists, in Rep. Gordon'…
drorzel | September 29, 2007From the "You Read Too Much SF" file: I was really disappointed by the press release that went with the headline:
Mysterious energy burst stuns astronomers
A headline like that really ought to involve bodies strewn about a remote observatory, and enigmatic alien forces roaming free, perhaps being hunted by menacing government agents. Sadly, it just refers to some sort of surprisingly large radio emitter in the very distant reaches of the universe.
denialism | September 28, 2007National Geographic brings us the "best science images of 2007" which includes this amazing CT reconstruction of the nose and sinuses.
Science magazine has the full set, but is behind a paywall.
Via BoingBoing and Neurophilosophy
oracknows | September 28, 2007
In looking back at all the various bizarre incarnations of woo that I've covered during the last year or so since I started doing Your Friday Dose of Woo, I was wondering if there was a form of woo that I had not covered yet. Woo seems to come in several forms, such as energy woo, water woo, pH woo, "detoxification" woo, religious woo, and psychic woo, among others, with certain themes that just keep recurring over and over. I'm sure there's enough material there for a Ph.D. thesis on the classification of woo, if some intrepid graduate student were interested. For this week, I was looking…
oracknows | September 27, 2007Damn that Factitian! Now he's gone too far! In hosting the 70th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle, he's revealed some of the deepest darkest secrets of the Skeptical Atheistic Darwinist Scientific Conspiracy to Conquer All (SADSCCA), also known as The Conspiracy Factory in some circles. And you'll never believe who the leader of the conspiracy from whom we all take our marching orders is!
I may have to become more insolent and less respectful. After all, our leader has commanded it:
Yes. Put Orac on it. And someone tell him to stop being so respectful, and more insolent. I prefer the insolence…
grrlscientist | September 27, 2007tags: blog carnivals, nature, science, medicine, tangled bank
Good news, everyone; the 89th edition of The Tangled Bank blog carnival is now available for you to enjoy. Sorry I am late with this announcement, but you know, shit is what happens as you try to life your life.
catdynamics | September 27, 2007strange allegation that NASA climate scientist, James Hansen, was "paid" by the Soros foundation...
NASAwatch points to an op-ed in Investor's Business Daily where they claim:
"How many people, for instance, know that James Hansen, a man billed as a lonely "NASA whistleblower" standing up to the mighty U.S. government, was really funded by Soros' Open Society Institute , which gave him "legal and media advice"?"
That's right, Hansen was packaged for the media by Soros' flagship "philanthropy," by as much as $720,000, most likely under the OSI's "politicization of science" program.
Huh?…
drorzel | September 27, 2007The New York Times is commemorating the 50th anniversary of Sputnik with a huge clump of articles about, well, space. I'm a little surprised that I haven't seen more said about these-- they turned up in my RSS feeds on Tuesday, but I've been both busy and slightly ill, and haven't gotten around to blogging them until now. I guess it's further evidence that space is no longer inherently cool. That, or there are just too many damn biologists on my blogroll.
Anyway, there's a bunch of retrospective material that I didn't really bother with, along with four pieces with more of a current…
oracknows | September 26, 2007I hadn't thought of this possible consequence of global warming before if homeopathy were actually true, but it's frightening to contemplate.
Fortunately, I think that even in this case the level of dilution wouldn't be enough.