Science
oracknows | July 18, 2007I really shouldn't do it.
I really shouldn't go perusing the blog of the house organ of the Discovery Institute's propaganda arm, Evolution News & Views, as I did yesterday. I'm not as young as I used to be, have a family history of cardiovascular disease, and am not in the greatest of shape. Reading idiocy such as what regularly appears there surely cannot be good for my blood pressure or my general health, nor can it be good for my mind. Still, for you I nonetheless delve deeply into the muck of logical fallacies, half-truths, distortions, and misinformation that spews forth from the…
denialism | July 18, 2007This article in PLoS caught my eye today. It's entitled, "Calories Do Not Explain Extension of Life Span by Dietary Restriction in Drosophila", and is an extension of the body of science showing that caloric restriction in a variety of animals, from fruit flies to non-human primates, may dramatically extend life-span.
Currently the mechanism is not well understood, but this surprising new result suggests that rather than absolute calorie restriction, decreased protein intake may be more critical for this beneficial effect.
In this study, fruit flies were fed a mixture of carbohydrate and…
pharyngula | July 16, 2007One of the traditional ways to explain a scientific subject is the historical approach: start at the beginning of the endeavor and explain why people asked the questions they did, how they answered them, and how each answer blossomed into new potential. It's a popular way of teaching science, too, because it emphasizes the process that leads to new discovery. Middle World: The Restless Heart of Matter and Life(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Haw, exemplifies the technique. Not only is it effective, but this one slim book manages to begin with a simple, curious observation in 1827 and ends up…
drorzel | July 16, 2007The Powers That Be at Seed were kind enough to send all the ScienceBlogs bloggers copies of the new book by Natalie Angier, The Canon, which is being pushed fairly hard by the publisher. I've been reading a lot more pop-science stuff recently, for self-interested reasons, and this was pretty attractive, so I carried it around for a while, reading bits and pieces in restaurants while Kate was away, and eventually finished it during our Michigan vacation.
The book is subtitled "A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science," and Angier has set herself a large task: to present the…
pharyngula | July 16, 2007As a major fan of Natalie Angier, I was well-disposed to favor The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) — and overall, my opinion of the book is favorable. I'm afraid, though, that it's filling a very narrow niche and most of my readers here won't be interested in it…but some of you may find it just right.
As you might guess from the title, the premise of the book is a reaction to a peculiar snobbery of many of the educated elite. Science is mechanics; it's engineering; it's greasy hands and strange smells; it's a place of childish enthusiasms. It…
oracknows | July 15, 2007I'm afraid I must reluctantly take fellow SB'er Mark Hoofnagle to task here, because he appears to have allowed himself to get a bit carried away when it comes to throwing around the label of "denialist."
In an otherwise excellent takedown of some really bad propaganda in the Wall Street Journal editorial page, he did something below the usual high standards of his blog. He casually and offhandedly lumped Paul Offit in with the other "denialists" that he was castigating, based on this editorial about Michael Moore's new movie Sicko. It's something that most people probably wouldn't have…
oracknows | July 14, 2007While perusing my comments yesterday, I became aware of what looks like a promising new blog, Occam's Trowel by Scott Prinster. Check out his self-description:
Scott Prinster is continuing his graduate studies in the History of Science department at the University of Wisconsin. His current interest is in the interaction of religion and science in the pre- and early Reformation period in Eastern Europe, especially as part of the movements known as the Radical Reformation. Scott has also been a Unitarian Universalist minister for 12 years, and has served congregations in Michigan and here in…
pharyngula | July 14, 2007You can listen in on George Johnson's and Sean Carroll's conversation at Bloggingheads right now. I'm doing this next week with John Horgan, so I should have closed my eyes—Sean is so much prettier than I am.
Don't let that stop you, though. It's interesting stuff throughout, and one of the better dialogs I've seen on bloggingheads.
oracknows | July 14, 2007The last couple of days have been a bit surreal, haven't they?
After all, how often does this box of blinking lights get into a blog altercation with a Libertarian comic over global warming? Actually, it was a commentary on bad reasoning, but global warming happened to be the topic. In the aftermath of my referring you, my readers, to comic Tim Slagle's blog piece "rebutting" me and to another piece by him in which he used some--shall we say?--creative chemistry and thermodynamics to support a political argument, I'm not sure if I should feel guilty or not. This guilt exists mainly because I…
pharyngula | July 13, 2007
If you've been reading that fascinating graphic novel, Y: The Last Man(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), you know the premise: a mysterious disease has swept over the planet and bloodily killed every male mammal except two, a human named Yorick and a monkey named Ampersand. Substantial parts of it are biologically nearly impossible: the wide cross-species susceptibility, the near instantaneous lethality, and the simultaneity of its effect everywhere (there are also all kinds of weird correlations with other sort of magical putative causes, which may be red herrings). On the other hand, the…
oracknows | July 13, 2007
Case in point: Soon to be Dr. Brian May of Queen. After 33 years, he's now going be an astrophysicist.
Rock on, Brian!
pharyngula | July 12, 2007
Sometimes, I confess, this whole common descent thing gets in the way and is really annoying. What we've learned over the years is that the evolution of life on earth is constrained by historical factors at every turn; every animal bears this wonderfully powerful toolbox of common developmental genes, inherited from pre-Cambrian ancestors, and it's getting rather predictable that every time you open up some fundamental aspect of developmental pattern formation in a zebrafish, for instance, it is a modified echo of something we also see in a fruit fly. Sometimes you just want to see what…
drorzel | July 12, 2007There's a new paper in Nature announcing the detection of water vapor in the atmosphere of a "hot Jupiter" orbiting a distant star. There's also a story on Physics Web and a press release from the Spitzer Telescope group, if you'd like some stuff you can read without a subscription to Nature.
The idea here is that the planet passes between its star and Earth every couple of days, causing a dimming of the light from the star. The researchers looked at the first part of that dimming, which is when the light is passing through the edge of the atmosphere, and measured the amount of light in a few…
catdynamics | July 10, 2007duh
I'll grab the original paper soon as I can see it on Proc Roy Soc (Lockwood and Frölich in press)
PS: here is a pointer to the paper itself
here is the full text - pdf (subscription)
It is a nice compact paper - good summary of recent history and proposed mechanisms, then a very straightforward look at the data set over the last 40 years - figures 1 and 3 really tell the story.
View image
Figure 3 as a pop-up image, reproduced from Proceedings of the Royal Society A, 10.1098/rspa.2007.1880
http://www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk/content/h844264320314105/
"Recent oppositely directed trends…
razib | July 10, 2007Chad's response to Dave Ng's meme attempt asking people about their own field and relationship to other fields included this:
I'm particularly not envious of biology, in which every result seems to be messy and contingent. Everything has a hundred confounding factors, and all the results seem to be statistical. Clean and unambiguous results are rare, and that would drive me absolutely crazy. They're one small step removed from social science.
Chad admitted in the comments that he was just trying to foment some conflict for entertainment value. But I'll bite because this is a "teachable…
pharyngula | July 10, 2007We now have a draft of the sea anemone genome, and it is revealing tantalizing details of metazoan evolution. The subject is the starlet anemone, Nematostella vectensis, a beautiful little animal that is also an up-and-coming star of developmental biology research.
(click for larger image)Nematostella development. a. unfertilized egg (~200 micron diameter) with sperm head; b. early cleavage stage; c. blastula; d. gastrula; e. planula; f. juvenile polyp; g. adult stained with DAPI to show nematocysts with a zoom in on the tentacle in the inset; h, i. confocal images of a tentacle bud stage and…
oracknows | July 10, 2007I'm devastated.
Truly and totally devastated emotionally and intellectually. Indeed, I don't know how I'll ever be able to recover, how I'll ever be able to live down the shame and go on with my career.
What could bring me to this point, you ask? I'll tell you. Everybody's favorite creationist neurosurgeon and dualist Dr.Michael Egnor thinks I'm "unprofessional."
Worse, he does it while agreeing with Pat Sullivan's article in which Pat asserts that "Darwinism" has what he calls a "marketing problem," in essence seemingly saying that, because he can't understand "Darwinism" but can understand…
drorzel | July 10, 2007Dave at the World's Fair is trying to start a "meme" based on a Science Creative Quarterly piece about physics envy among biologists and vice versa. He's asking other science bloggers whether there's another field that they wish they were working in.
While I have occasionally joked that if I had it to do over, I would become a biologist studying coral reefs, so I could justify spending my sabbaticals snorkeling in the tropics, I'm really very happy doing what I do (at least when things work). I enjoy experimental work, I like the fact that my lab is fairly self-contained, and I think AMO…
pharyngula | July 9, 2007David Ng is asking if biologists have physics envy, which is both a common and a peculiar question (short answer: no, physicists should have biology envy). Then he follows up with a few brief questions to determine if scientists are actually pining away, wishing they'd gone into some different field … and here are my answers.
1. What's your current scientific specialty?
Developmental biology.
2. Were you originally pursuing a different academic course? If so, what was it?
I started my undergraduate career with a general interest in marine biology, but quickly focused on neurobiology and…
pharyngula | July 9, 2007These kinds of calculations are always handy. Larry Moran estimates the number of novel mutations you carry: the textbooks say about 300, he calculates something over 120. So next time a creationist tells you all mutations are deleterious, just tell him he's a mutant himself with somewhere around a few hundred random nucleotide changes from either of his parents. What Larry doesn't mention in this estimate, but I know he's familiar with the idea, is that most of those mutations will be neutral: about 95% will fall into junk DNA, many won't affect the amino acid sequence of any proteins,…