Science
denialism | September 6, 2007Another update on Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), the surprisingly devastating attack on the honeybee that occurred last year that was responsible for huge losses of bee colonies and a great deal of concern about crops pollinated by this insect.
Originally we mocked the idea that CCD was caused by global warming and alarmist calls from people like Bill Maher that suggested a correlation between CCD and cell phone use (ha!). Critical at the time were initial experiments showing that irradiation of hives allowed recolonization, suggesting an infectious process. Now it seems this has been…
pharyngula | September 6, 2007
The vertebrate jaw is a product of evolution — we have a serially repeated array of pharyngeal structures as embryos (and fish retain them in all their bony glory as gill arches), and the anterior most arch is modified during our development to form the jaws. The fact that they're serially repeated raises an interesting possibility: what if, instead of just the one developing into a jaw, others were transformed as well? You could have a whole series of jaws!
One animal has done exactly that. The moray eel has modified one of the more posterior pharyngeal arches into a second pair of jaws,…
oracknows | September 6, 2007Due to a death in the family, I have to go back into the vaults of the old blog for some more reposts. Regular blogging should resume in a day or two. This particular post first appeared on January 13, 2006.
A couple of days ago, I took a bit of issue with Kevin, MD for an off-handed remark he had made welcoming us academic physicians "to the real world" in response to an article about how demoralized and depressed young academicians have become due to the increasing encroachment of financial pressures and demands to generate more clinical income. I gently pointed out to him that we have been…
pharyngula | September 6, 2007
When we look at the face of another person, we can recognize specific features that have familial resemblances. In my family, for instance, I can recognize a "Myers nose" that my grandmother and my father and some of my siblings and kids have, and it's different than my wife's or my mother's nose. These are subtle differences in shape—a bit of a curve, a knob, a seam—and their inheritance suggests that these differences are specified somehow in the DNA. If you think about it, though…how can whether the profile of a nose is straight or curved be encoded in a linear stretch of nucleotides? The…
tqa | September 4, 2007
When it comes to teaching first and second graders about things, nothing beats the classroom pet. The little kids learn so many important things. They learn about animals. They learn about responsibility, and about the importance of taking care of things. And they learn about death.
A lot.
It's now the second week of school, and my son's second grade class is on its second hamster. We're scheduled to take the hamster home the last weekend of October. Anyone want to start a pool on what number hamster gets to take refuge in our house?
oracknows | September 3, 2007John is sick and tired of antievolutionists. Who can blame him? As he points out, they are utterly immune to evidence or reason:
I was wrong. Very wrong. Information isn't what makes people change their minds. Experience is, and generally nobody has much experience of the facts of biology that underwrite evolution. The so-called "deficit model" of the public understanding of science, which assumes that all they need is more information, is false.
I could also point out that this is the very reason that alternative medicine to this day so regularly trumps scientific, evidence-based medicine in…
oracknows | September 1, 2007Vacation time! While Orac is off in London recharging his circuits and contemplating the linguistic tricks of limericks and jokes or the glory of black holes, he's rerunning some old stuff from his original Blogspot blog. This particular post first appeared on June 3, 2005. Enjoy!
Grrr.
I was browsing one of my favorite science blogs, Pharyngula, enjoying PZ's evisceration of a clueless creationist foolish enough to resurrect once again that long-debunked hoary old creationist canard that evolution is somehow not consistent with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, when I saw this in the…
bergman | August 31, 2007If you're on the west coast tonight and are willing to stay up late or wake up early, you have the chance to see the Aurigid meteor shower. This shower is fairly unique because it arises from a comet with a period of around 900 years. Some people have even claimed that there's a chance this could be spectacular, but these predictions are often wrong. After the disappointing Perseids, I'd love to be able to stay up for this one, but I'm still on the east coast. Ah well. Maybe some other shower.
denialism | August 31, 2007Leave it to AEI writing for the WSJ editorial page to allege a grand conspiracy of the government against pharmaceutical companies. Their proof? The government wants to compare the efficacy of new drugs to older ones to make sure they're actually better.
The reauthorization of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (Schip), created in 1997 to cover children from lower-income families who make too much to qualify for Medicaid, is up for renewal this fall. Tucked into page 414, section 904 of the House bill is a provision to spend more than $300 million to establish a new federal "…
oracknows | August 29, 2007Vacation time! While Orac is off in London recharging his circuits and contemplating the linguistic tricks of limericks and jokes or the glory of black holes, he's rerunning some old stuff from his original Blogspot blog. This particular post first appeared on June 15, 2005. Enjoy!
One of the criticisms of "intelligent design" (ID) creationism is that it doesn't really offer any new theory or even hypothesis to replace the theory of evolution, which it seeks to supplant (at least in the public schools). It merely exaggerates perceived weaknesses in evolutionary theory and misrepresents…
denialism | August 28, 2007There's a nice little article in the Washington Post on mice in research. It's interesting the things you learn from a piece like this. For instance, I never realized the origin of the black 6 line was from essentially a hobby breeder in New England. I also like the little slide show of various mouse strains. I recognize most of them, in particular, the ob/ob obese mouse (he's easy to pick out).
Light stuff but interesting for those who do mouse work. And I couldn't resist making an lolmouse:
razib | August 28, 2007I was talking with a friend of mine who is an economist about science, and the great productivity in modern societies which allows for the perpetuation of narrow specialties in scholarship. I repeated to him my own hunch that if all scientists who were alive today disappeared and the next generation of aspiring scholars had only books and other instructional materials to go on, science would simply disappear as an enterprise. The point I was trying to get across is that scientific ideas are contingent upon a particular cultural framework. That is, science is a culture. And that culture is…
pharyngula | August 28, 2007Once we've defeated the creationists (hah!), we're going to have to manage the next problem: well-meaning but ill-informed animal rights activists. Nick describes a recent article that tries to claim we can reduce animal use in labs — and it even has a couple of respectable scientists signing on to that nonsense.
And it really is nonsense. We don't understand everything that is going on inside animals, and to figure it out, we actually need to look inside them. There's no other way. If you want to examine patterns of gene expression inside the developing mouse brain, you have to extract their…
denialism | August 28, 2007It's that time again. Bora's got the scoop on this new organization PRISM (Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine). They purport to be the saviors of scientific publishing, protecting us from the evil of open access. But how much do you want to bet they're the same old industry lobbying group, disguising themselves as actors in the public interest? Well, there's an easy way to tell. Let's apply the deck of cards!
There's not a lot to work with yet, but I think we've got some classics to go after right away. After all, we have an industry group - the publishers -…
pharyngula | August 28, 2007Look into this one, everyone: the Coalition on the Public Understanding of Science (COPUS), another attempt to coordinate efforts to improve public outreach and science education. They have some worthy goals:
Building the COPUS network - Underpinning the COPUS effort is a growing network of organizations and individuals who share a common goal: engaging sectors of the public in science and increasing their appreciation and understanding of the scientific enterprise. Find out more about participating in the COPUS Network.
Developing state-level benchmark science-indicator reports on the…
oracknows | August 28, 2007Vacation time! While Orac is gone recharging his circuits and contemplating the linguistic tricks of limericks and jokes or the glory of black holes, he's rerunning some old stuff from his original Blogspot blog. This particular post first appeared on January 16, 2006. Enjoy!
During my usual weekly perusal of the New York Times, I was surprised to come across this rather perceptive article by Nicholas Wade in which he discusses the difference between "frontier" science and "textbook" science. No, I wasn't surprised because Nicholas Wade wrote a perceptive article, but rather because it was…
catdynamics | August 26, 2007Why IS Stephen Colbert just like a Sufi Master Mystic?
That is one of the questions that pop up when a "liberal yankee buddhist" and a "conservative agnostic southern scientist" collaborate to write a book.
"Seeking Truth: Living with Doubt"
by Steven Fortney and Marshall Onellion
ISBN: 978-1-4343-1872-5
Author House
www.seekingtruth.info
Seriously, I was half-way through this book when the last of the Harry Potter's arrived (I'm a purist and order the english adult editions in hardback to avoid bowdlerized versions), but I finished this book first.
The book is an attempt to draw lines in…
bergman | August 25, 2007For those of you willing to stay up late, there will be a total eclipse of the moon on August 28 visible to various extents over most of the western hemisphere and some of east Asia. The show is a little late for me (some might call it early) as I'm on the east coast right now, but if you're up for it, enjoy. After the jump are two photos I took of a total lunar eclipse on 10/27/04:
pharyngula | August 24, 2007
Some of you may have never seen an arthropod embryo (or any embryo, for that matter). You're missing something: embryos are gorgeous and dynamic and just all around wonderful, so let's correct that lack. Here are two photographs of an insect and a spider embryo. The one on the left is a grasshopper, Schistocerca nitens at about a third of the way through development; the one on the right is Achaearanea tepidariorum. Both are lying on their backs, or dorsal side, with their legs wiggling up towards you.
There are differences in the photographic technique — one is an SEM, the other is a DAPI-…
jrosenhouse | August 23, 2007Perhaps you've heard of Andrew Keen? He showed up on Colbert recently to discuss his new book The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture.
One of his points is that bloggers in particular are mere amateurs who inevitably coarsen the public debate and threaten professional journalistic enterprises with their ceaseless and ill-informed attacks.
This, of course is total nonsense.
You can always find dark corners of the internet where ignoramuses get into silly flame wars with one another. But the best blogs, and the ones that generate most of the traffic, are…