Science
pharyngula | July 8, 2007I'm home from our vacation, and our painfully tiring redeye flight from Seattle, and I get a treat right as I step through the door: a copy of Natalie Angier's The Canon(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) arrived in the mail while I was away. What did I do? Right after we got all the luggage into the house, I flopped down on the bed with it and read it until the lack of sleep caught up with me — and it's good enough that I actually made it through the first two chapters before passing out. It's a passionate and enthusiastic survey of basic principles in science, and it's fun to read.
Then I discovered…
pharyngula | July 7, 2007This video is one of the most effective criticisms of Ham's horrible little monument to ignorance in Kentucky — it's a geological tour of the rocks the “museum” is built upon. It seems the creationists chose to build on some beautifully fossil-rich Ordovician layers.
It convinces me that if I were in the Cincinnati area I'd rather kick around in the hills around the area than to waste my time in a pile of bunk.
ddobbs | July 7, 2007
My article on Williams syndrome and human sociability is now on the New York Times Magazine web site, at
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/08/magazine/08sociability-t.html
This was one of the more enthrallling stories I've worked on. Williams syndrome rises from a genetic deletion of about 20-25 of our 30,000 genes, and those who have it can be pretty much counted on to be quite gregarious and social. How can a deletion amplify a trait? Is their sociability actually increased, or simply left less fettered?
As the story relates, research into Williams has addressed these questions, throwing…
pharyngula | July 7, 2007Who's chattier, men or women? This is a simple study that strapped microphones onto subjects that turned on for 30 seconds every 12.5 minutes so that the investigators could do word counts. Here's the final tally of the average number of words spoken per day:
Men: 15,669 ± 8343
Women: 16,215 ± 7301
There's no significant difference between the two.
Mehl MR, Vazire S, Ramírez-Esparza N, Slatcher RB, Pennebaker JW (2007) Are Women Really More Talkative Than Men? Science 317:82.
drorzel | July 7, 2007Andre at Biocurious points out an interesting piece in Nature. They interviewed four prominent SF authors--Paul McAuley, Ken Macleod, Joan Slonczewski, and Peter Watts about biology in science fiction. The resulting article is a good read, with lots of interesting anecdotes and examples, and if you go to the supplementary information page for the article, you can get a longer version, including bits that were cut out of the print edition.
That is, of course, assuming that you are surfing the Web from an institution that happens to have a site license for Nature, or have a personal…
oracknows | July 6, 2007Thanks to a commenter going by the 'nym of djm, I found in a comment yet another hilarious example of how credulity towards pseudoscience of one form often goes hand-in-hand with other forms of pseudoscience. It looks as though the "intelligent design" creationists are down with Steorn's claimed free energy machine as "evidence" against materialism:
Steorn's findings totally undermine the basic premise of materialism, simply by demonstrating a confirmed physical effect that materialists predict cannot happen. These clever Irish researchers have demonstrated that the principles of…
oracknows | July 6, 2007It was a rough day yesterday. I spent a long time in the O.R. It was one of those days that I couldn't figure out what happened. The number of operations that I had to do should have allowed me to finish operating by around 2 PM, leaving me time to do other things that needed to get done. But between delays in getting a patient back from nuclear medicine, long turnover times between cases, and a case that took me nearly two hours longer than it should have, it was well after 5 PM by the time I was done--and I still had a bunch of work to do. I'm not complaining; these things happen and there…
drorzel | July 5, 2007Just in time to drive parents into a panic for the rest of the summer, the New York Times has a big article about sunscreen:
Dr. [James] Spencer [a dermatologist in Florida] said that an S.P.F. 15 product screens about 94 percent of UVB rays while an S.P.F. 30 product screens 97 percent. Manufacturers determine the S.P.F. by dividing how many minutes it takes lab volunteers to burn wearing a thick layer of the product by the minutes they take to burn without the product.
But people rarely get the level of S.P.F. listed because labels do not explain how much to use, said Dr. Vincent A. DeLeo…
catdynamics | July 4, 2007Bush may like to think he is non-abelian, but we know he has a nilpotent subgroup.
Not only does he have a nilpotent subset of ideals, but the interesection of his prime ideals is nilradical!
Phbt!
pharyngula | July 4, 2007Hey, if you've been wondering what the sex symbols of science blogging look like, here's your chance: a video of some bloggin' microbiologists hanging out in Toronto.
Although, that title … it's hard to imagine an uglier word than "blog," but they managed to coin one.
drorzel | July 3, 2007There have been a number of true and non-silly stories about astronomy and cosmology recently, which I'll collect here as penance for the earlier silly post:
Some theorists at Penn State have constructed a Loop Quantum Gravity model that they claim allows for an oscillating universe with no singularities. In one of those psychology-of-the-press moments, the PSU press release accentuates the positive, with the headline "What happened before the Big Bang?" Meanwhile, the IOP Physics Web news item goes negative: "'Cosmic forgetfulness' shrouds time before the Big Bang" (referring to the model…
oracknows | July 3, 2007One thing that's become obvious to me over the last few years that I've been engaged in dealing with various forms of pseudoscience, alternative medicine, and conspiracy theories is that people who are prone to credulity to one form of pseudoscience, the paranormal, or other crankery tend to be prone to credulity towards multiple forms of crankery. For example, Phillip Johnson, one of the "luminaries" of the "intelligent design" creationism movement is also a full-blown HIV denialist who doesn't accept the science that demonstrates that HIV causes AIDS. Another example is Dr. Lorraine Day,…
drorzel | July 3, 2007The New York Times today has a story about a different sort of summer camp:
Students with a passion for all things explosive and proof of United States citizenship pay a $450 fee that covers food, lodging and incidentals like dynamite. In the course of a week, the 22 students at this session set off a wall of fire, blasted water out of a pond, blew up a tree stump and obliterated a watermelon. They set off explosive charges in the school's mine and finished off the week by creating their own fireworks show for their parents.
The Summer Explosives Camp actually feeds into a program at the…
oracknows | July 2, 2007I thought I knew all the good websites to get information about cancer research and research funding opportunities. Perusing Medical Writing, Editing, & Grantsmanship, I found I was wrong.
Check out the National Cancer Institute's Cancer Research Portfolio.
It lets cancer researchers search quickly for funding opportunities, what cancer-related projects are already funded, and peruse a number of other resources. It even has a link to the International Cancer Research Portfolio, where you can search for funded projects and research opportunities covered by the American Cancer Society, the…
oracknows | July 2, 2007About a month ago, I did a facetious throwaway piece about "homeopathic enchantments" being used by one of my favorite comic characters (who, alas, no longer has his own comic series), namely Doctor Strange, the Sorcerer Supreme. Given that it was not intended as anything other than a lark, I was rather surprised when it generated a long discussion thread fueled by a homeopath named Dana Ullman, who showed up in the comments and argued with me and several of my best regular commenters. He kept the discussion thread going far longer than the average thread on this blog, provoking annoyance on…
drorzel | July 1, 2007Via PZ, a blog on biology and science fiction is griping that biology gets no respect, and links to a Jack Cohen article complaining that authors and filmmakers don't take biology seriously I was particularly struck by this bit:
Authors, film producers and directors, special-effects teams go to physicists, especially astrophysicists, to check that their worlds are workable, credible; they go to astronomers to check how far from their sun a planet should be, and so on. They even go to chemists to check atmospheres, rocket fuels, pheromones (apparently they're not biology....), even the…
pharyngula | June 30, 2007Peggy has an excellent discusion of the peculiar attitudes towards biology held by physicists and engineers, which includes this wonderful complaint by Jack Cohen:
In summer 2002, I was at the Cheltenham Festival of Science. Lots of biologists presenting, for sure. But… one very popular event was a presentation by three famous astronomers: 'Is There Life Out There?' I prefaced my first question to them by a little imaginative scenario: three biologists discussing the properties of the black hole in the middle of our galaxy. It was very clear that the astronomers really believed that they…
catdynamics | June 30, 2007a question in one of the comments to the "Extreme Solar System" threads, was to the effect of - "when will the embargoed/unpublished stuff come out and the rest of us know"?
well, depends...
some of the items were in press or submitted to Nature/Science - these will come out in a matter of weeks, or maybe an ApJL in a few months for the submitted stuff if the editorial board is in a mood that day
some of the results are robust, but the papers have not yet been written, so it will be a while - depends on travel and teaching schedules, co-ordination with co-authors and lazy irresponsible…
razib | June 29, 2007Chris of Mixing Memory has a must read post up about the normal distribution. The man did the tedious work of encoding mathematical notation and symbolism into HTML, so he should take a bow.
drorzel | June 29, 2007Steinn checks in from his Mediterranean vacation with not one, not two, but three reports from the conference on Extreme Solar Systems, and a hint of maybe more to come.
The big news here, as far as I can see, is that they're starting to find more low mass planets, and more planets with long orbital periods. These are both the result of technical improvements-- the sensitivity of the planet-finding techniques has improved as people get more practice, enabling more low-mass detections, and as Steinn puts it, "things are piling up at multi-year periods as the searches go on for long enough to…