Science
pharyngula | August 2, 2007Abbie of ERV has made her first guest post on the Panda's Thumb, and it's a good one. Go see how Behe was wrong and there are documented genetic and biochemical changes in the evolution of HIV, including the evolution of new molecular machinery.
pharyngula | August 2, 2007My last Seed column is online. Print media feels a little weird — it's like I wrote that one long ago, the one I finished earlier in July is going to print right now (and will be out in mid-August), and I'm already working on the column after that. It's like looking at old history for me.
It's also an old story for you subscribers. It's just those who haven't subscribed yet who are months behind the times. So when are you people going to join the rest of us…in the future?
catdynamics | August 2, 2007Not to be confused with either the corgies, or Icelandic Roast Beagles with schmear and lax
The Beagle Project is building a replica of HMS Beagle and going to retrace its celebrated voyage, with added science bonus, to commemorate Darwin's imminent 200th birthday.
The project's web pages are currently squatting here but insist they will be moving to their new home real soon now.
It is a great idea, and should attract some good publicity, be also interesting to see what new science they do; be interesting to duplicate Craig Venter's recent yacht trip sampling oceanic micro-biodiversity, as…
pharyngula | August 1, 2007Since I was asked what a cnidarian "head" is in reference to this work on multi-headed cnidarians, I'll answer. In short, they don't have one.
Longer answer: the paper in PLoS describes a procedure for generating homeotic mutations in cnidarians by manipulating the expression of Cnox genes in hydrozoans. Knock outs of various cnidarian Hox-like genes and the medusae develop extra manubriae, or the tentacled part at the oral end of the animal, which the authors colloquially call "heads" (and they do usually put the word in quotes). These structures aren't homologous to the things we consider…
pharyngula | July 31, 2007This is a short video clip of myotome formation in a zebrafish embryo — it's the subject of an upcoming column in Seed, so I'm putting a short visual aid here.
You can Download the Quicktime movie (620K), or you can watch it via YouTube. Watch closely, it's short and it flies by!
If you're totally mystified still, let me orient you. Here's a whole zebrafish embryo. There's a large yolk filling most of the center of the image, and the embryo itself arcs along the dorsal side, stretching from where I've labeled the eye to the tailbud.
Along the length of the trunk, you might be able to see…
denialism | July 29, 2007We already knew from former Surgeon General Carmona's testimony that this was happening, but now the WaPo brings us
a specific example of science being squelched by a political appointee. It's not only inappropriate, but just despicable.
A surgeon general's report in 2006 that called on Americans to help tackle global health problems has been kept from the public by a Bush political appointee without any background or expertise in medicine or public health, chiefly because the report did not promote the administration's policy accomplishments, according to current and former public health…
pharyngula | July 27, 2007I'd reconciled myself to the fact that the sun will die in about 5 billion years — time enough to get all the important stuff done, I thought — but now Chris Mims tells me we've only got 12 million years. I mean, that's like going to the doctor, and he says, "Good news, Mr Myers, you're going to live to be 90" and then he calls you up a little later and says "whoops, little slip up there, you've got a month to live." It's not good news.
The story is a bit speculative—we've long known that there are these very rough periodic extinctions in the fossil record, and now a few wild-eyed…
pharyngula | July 27, 2007High school education makes a difference, but not quite in the way I'd hoped or expected. A recent correlational study looked at the effects of more discipline-specific education at the high school level on grades in college. That is, if a student took heaps of physics as a high school student, how much will it help her in biology, chemistry, and physics? We'd expect that it should help the student perform better in college physics — she has a head start, after all — but one might naively hope that better mastery of a foundational science like physics would also help with chemistry and…
oracknows | July 27, 2007Time is important. Our life is measured in it, and there's no way to reverse it. How we use our allotted time on this planet is, of course, the most important question that anyone ever faces. But how to measure time? It all seems so obvious, doesn't it? You have years, which are divided into 365 days with a leap year every four years to make up for the fact that a year isn't exactly 365 days. You're good to go, at least for as long a period of time as anyone could expect. That's all you could expect from any calendar, right?
Wrong.
If you're a woo-meister, you know that a calendar could do so…
pharyngula | July 26, 2007A few years ago, everyone was in a tizzy over the discovery of Flores Man, curious hominin remains found on an Indonesian island that had a number of astonishing features: they were relatively recent, less than 20,000 years old; they were not modern humans, but of unsettled affinity, with some even arguing that they were like australopithecines; and just as weird, they were tiny, a people only about 3 feet tall with a cranial capacity comparable to a chimpanzee's. This was sensational. Then on top of that, add more controversy with some people claiming that the investigators had it all wrong…
drorzel | July 26, 2007There's a story about theft of supplies at NASA in the Times today. It's an eight-paragraph wire service blurb, which wouldn't be worth a mention, but for this:
In one instance documented by the accountability office, an unidentified worker explained the fate of a missing laptop, worth $4,265:
"This computer, although assigned to me, was being used on board the International Space Station. I was informed that it was tossed overboard to be burned up in the atmosphere when it failed."
That's absolutely brilliant. If you're going to steal overpriced laptops from the government, do it with style…
pharyngula | July 25, 2007Feeling pragmatic? Is your focus entirely practical, on what works and what will get the job done? Are you one of those fighters for evolutionary biology who waves away all the theory and the abstractions and the strange experimental manipulations, and thinks the best argument for evolution is the fact that it works and is important? This book, The Evolving World: Evolution in Everyday Life(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) by David Mindell, does make you sit down and learn a little history and philosophy to start off, but the focus throughout is on the application of evolution to the real world. It…
drorzel | July 25, 2007Some time back, I was offered a review copy of Why the Sky Is Blue by Götz Hoeppe by Princeton University Press. Looking at their web site, I noticed a forthcoming book by an emeritus professor at my alma mater, so I asked if they'd send me a copy of that, too. I'm all about the free books.
The Grand Contraption is an excellent example of what I call a Smart People Book, in which the author pulls together a wide range of material to take an exhaustive look at some topic or another, and basically show what a smart person he or she is. This particular book is subtitled "The World as Myth,…
denialism | July 24, 2007Between electronic "smog" and their incessant bleating that every weather event is due to global warming, I have come to the conclusion that the Independent, with stories like this one, are trying to bring down the science of global warming from the inside.
It's official: the heavier rainfall in Britain is being caused by climate change, a major new scientific study will reveal this week, as the country reels from summer downpours of unprecedented ferocity.
More intense rainstorms across parts of the northern hemisphere are being generated by man-made global warming, the study has established…
pharyngula | July 20, 2007Of course it would be Phil who would remind me: today is the 38th anniversary of the first manned landing on the moon. I remember lying on my stomach on the floor with my chin in my hands, watching TV in the way only 12 year olds can and which would nowadays leave me wondering if I'll be able to get up again, the front door open, a summer breeze blowing through the screen, the sound of someone down the street mowing their lawns, and right there in front of me, in this ordinary day in a boring little small town, I saw these grainy echos of a human being stepping onto the moon. We can do that.…
drorzel | July 20, 2007Inside Higher Ed reports on two new NSF studies showing a decline in American scientific publishing. Sort of.
What the studies found, however, was that besides the well-known decrease in the relative share of journal articles originating from the United States, there was a slowdown in absolute numbers as well. This "plateau," as the reports call it, began in the early 1990s and stands in marked contrast to at least the two previous decades' worth of American research.
The flattening of growth in science and engineering publishing -- it has "essentially remained constant since 1992,"…
catdynamics | July 19, 2007Prof Nina Fedoroff is to become Chief Scientist at the State Department and science advisor to Condoleezza Rice
Good week for Nina, she got the National Medal for Science yesterday
Prof Fedoroff is a prominent biologist and an advocate of genetic engineering of plants and animals, in particular for food crops to improve yield and nutritional quality.
She is the author of Mendel in the Kitchen
A very interesting, shorter article on the issue appears in the current issue of Penn State Science Journal, here is a link to the online version
The most interesting point she makes is on how little…
drorzel | July 19, 2007Speaking of dubious and oft-cited "Laws", I've run into a number of citations of "Clarke's Laws" recently. Of course, these were apparently subliminal mentions, because I can't seem to locate any of them again, but it put the subject in my mind, which is partly why I was primed to be annoyed by the subject of the previous post.
Anyway, "Clarke's Laws" are statements by the noted science fiction writer (and, no doubt, personal friend and mentor of Jonathan Vos Post, which I really don't want to hear about in comments) Arthur C. Clarke:
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that…
catdynamics | July 18, 2007The incoherent ponderer has interesting advice on efficiency in research
Take note.
"All of this pondering seems to confirm my earlier thinking that ambition, "killer instinct" and honest self-assessment skills are often more important than being smart or even hard working."
It doesn't hurt to be hard working, and it may be useful to be smart also.
oracknows | July 18, 2007The other day, in the course of posting about some deceptive quote-mining by someone who doesn't accept the science indicating that secondhand smoke is a health danger, I referenced the uber-crank of crank websites, Forces.org, a website so cranky that it denies not just health dangers from secondhand smoke, but rather that even smoking causes cancer in smokers!
Naturally, such a site was irresistable to Mark over at the denialism blog and he has some fun with it.
Sit back and enjoy.
Oh, and as has happened on my posts about the data supporting health dangers from secondhand smoke and about…