Science
drorzel | June 29, 2007Via EurekAlert, next weekend will see a soccer demonstration by nanoscale robots at the RoboCup competition in Atlanta. This is "nano" in the usual sense of "hundreds if not thousands of nanowhatevers," of course, and they're not exactly playing soccer:
The soccer nanobots (nanoscale robots) operate under an optical microscope, are controlled by remote electronics using visual feedback and are viewed on a monitor. While they are a few tens of micrometers to a few hundred micrometers long, the robots are considered "nanoscale" because their masses range from a few nanograms to a few hundred…
oracknows | June 27, 2007You may have noticed that I haven't commented much on Michael Behe's recent book, The Edge of Evolution, other than to bemoan its presence in the Evolution section of the University of Chicago Barnes & Noble. I have, however, read with some amusement some of the reviews. The most recent is one by--who else?--Richard Dawkins in the New York Times. Because it's behind the Times Select pay wall, I'll just give you a couple of the best quotes. First, he dismisses Behe's most famous book, Darwin's Black Box:
In "Darwin's Black Box," Behe simply asserted without justification that particular…
jrosenhouse | June 27, 2007Blogging over at The Huffington Post, my SciBling Chris Mooney has an excellent post up on the subject of global warming. He is responding to this op-ed from Emily Yoffe, a writer for Slate. Yoffe was trying to present herself as the calm, clear-thinking purveryor of common -sense against the blinkered alarmism of people like Al Gore. Mooney does an excellent job of showing she has little idea what she is talking about.
For example, Yoffe writes:
Thanks to all the heat-mongering, it's supposed to be a sign I'm in denial because I refuse to trust a weather prediction for August 2080, when…
oracknows | June 26, 2007If you're not into the ins and outs of applying for NIH funding, this one may be a bit too wonky for you. I'm linking, however, to a rather interesting discussion of how to go about getting funding from the NIH in this presently hostile funding climate. One spot-on point is this in reference to letters of support from mentors:
A senior study section member in the audience confirmed this - but added that the letters must clearly demonstrate that the mentor (or whoever) has read the R01 and helped refine the narrative ... a glowing letter of support appended to an unfundable narrative backfires…
pharyngula | June 26, 2007The NY Times has pulled out all the stops today and has dedicated their entire science section to the subject of evolution. They've got pieces by some of the best science journalists around, like Carl Zimmer, Cornelia Dean (although in this case, it's a lot of nattering on about how the soul fits into evolution—not recommended), and Natalie Angier, and they've also drafted a few scientists. There's a video of Sean Carroll summarizing evo-devo, and perhaps the most interesting article of them all is by Douglas Erwin, in which he speculates about whether the new ideas percolating throughout the…
pharyngula | June 25, 2007The operation was a success. Later, the duck, with his new human brain, went on to become the leader of a great flock. Irwin, however, was ostracized by his friends and family and eventually just wandered south.
Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is worried. He's afraid we're going to put a human brain in a rodent's head. No, really — it's not just a joke in a cartoon. He seriously wants to suppress research in transgenic and chimeric animals "before a mouse really does come up and ask for a cookie." Now, seriously, his worry isn't that mice…
oracknows | June 25, 2007Longtime readers of this blog may recall Pat Sullivan, Jr. He first popped up as a commenter here two years ago, when I first dove into applying skepticism and critical thinking to the pseudoscientific contention that vaccines in general or the thimerosal preservatives in vaccines cause autism. He's a true believer in the mercury militia and, even to this day, posts on his blog about the unsupported belief that vaccines cause autism somehow. Eventually, he "outed me"--and no doubt will do so again when he notices traffic coming in from this post (yawn). In any case, I haven't really thought…
jrosenhouse | June 24, 2007P.Z. Myers has a very helpful post up explaining the biological details behind the Michael Behe quote mine I reported on here. Basically, Behe's treatment of the subject was even worse than I realized. Recall that Behe was arguing that straightforward reasoning from Darwinian principles led certain mathematicians astray in resolving problems related to morphogenesis. Myers replies as follows:
But there are other problems with Behe's claim. What he's about to explain are not “basic features of life”, but the specifics of metazoan pattern formation. We know already that there are multiple…
oracknows | June 24, 2007Ever think you have the worst job?
Take a gander at these worst jobs in science.
A couple of examples:
Job #10: Whale feces researcher.
Job #5: Coursework carcass preparer.
Maybe it's just me, but several of these jobs don't sound that bad.
Except the whale feces researcher.
pharyngula | June 23, 2007
The general pattern of developing positional information in Drosophila starts out relatively simply and gets increasingly complicated as time goes by. Initially, there is a very broad distribution of a gradient of a maternal morphogen. That morphogen then triggers the expression of narrower (but still fairly broad) bands of aperiodic gap genes. The next step in this process is to turn on sets of genes in narrow, periodic bands that correspond to body segments. This next set of genes are called the pair-rule genes, because they do something surprising and rather neat: they are turned on in…
catdynamics | June 22, 2007The incoherent ponderer ponders the joys of doing physics as a professor at a research university...
but to offset his irrational exuberance, he points to the classic "two geeks" post by Steve Hsu
Ouch.
Read the comments.
The first one, on the analogy with art careers is a point frequently made, there is a good point there, but it is incomplete and misses half the point.
Steve also has a current pointer to discussion on grad engineering recruitment in US programs
Ouch. Ouch.
Steve has also discovered Ted Chiang, (and here and here) which is a good thing.
But Rob reminds us why we really do…
drorzel | June 22, 2007The great media relations debate is starting to wind down, but there's still a bit of life in it. In particular, I want to comment on something that Bora said, that was amplified on by Melinda Barton. Here's Bora's comment:
Everyone is afraid to use the F word, but the underlying tension is, at its core, the same as in the discussion of Framing Science:
The scientists want to educate.
The journalists want to inform (if not outright entertain, or at least use entertaining hooks in order to inform).
There is a difference between the two goals. The former demands accuracy. The latter demands…
pharyngula | June 22, 2007Mark Morford is wonderfully excited about the prospects for biological research, and I don't blame him. Consider what the world was like in 1900 and how physics and engineering changed it by 2000; from horse-and-buggy and steam locomotive to interstates and jet planes, from telegraph to world-wide communication networks. We're going to see a revolution of that magnitude in the coming century, too, and you can expect biology and medicine to be at the forefront. Well, maybe. As Morford writes, the alternative is to
…hold tight to the leaky life raft of inflexible ideology (hello, organized…
denialism | June 21, 2007Those who are interested in the Colony-Collapse Disorder phenomenon will probably enjoy this paper from PLoS entitled "What's Killing American Honey Bees?" It lays out the history of mass bee die-offs - which have been recorded extensively by apiarists, and discusses whether or not major concern needs to be paid to the problem.
I still suspect that rather than this being a new problem it's likely part of a normal pattern of fluctuation that has been observed in the record. While this swing is extreme, it's early to suggest that this is an impending or prolonged disaster based on the history…
denialism | June 21, 2007Greg Laden writes a very nice tangled bank. It's a model for what a good carnival post should look like I think. And he was kind enough to link our discussion of Uncommon Descent's remarkable ability to predict the past.
Definitely worth a click.
drorzel | June 20, 2007Tara's post about science journalism has sparked a lively discussion, with John Wilkins, Chris Mooney and Carl Zimmer joining Jennifer Ouellette in defending science journalists. Interestingly, this all sprang up yesterday, on a day when I wound up appearing on tv.
Yesterday morning, while I was running around dealing with my summer research students, one of my colleagues came into the lab, and asked me if I wanted to be on tv. There had been a call from one of the local tv stations, looking for someone to talk about the expansion of gases, and the request had been passed down the power…
catdynamics | June 19, 2007Depends...
When I were a lad, we would occasionally get dismissed from school, particularly in early spring, usually at noon.
These were known as "Sun"-days, and were those rare days on which the sun shone in a clear blue sky and the temperatures reached a balmy 10-15 C (50-60F you heathens).
This is because, as everyone knows, 8-12 year olds should be out soaking up the sunshine in free outdoor play whenever they can, synthesizing themselves some vitamine D, not stuck behind school desks all afternoon.
Of course, when I were a lad, I also ventured to southern latitudes (Morocco, if you must…
pharyngula | June 19, 2007Wish I could be there.
It's a day of writing, of car repair, of trips to the airport (we're shipping Skatje off to a work camp…shhhh, don't tell her, she thinks she's going 'camping'), and little low level aggravations, like being locked out of my office because they're waxing the floors. So, sure, I wouldn't mind a little African geology trip right now.
pharyngula | June 17, 2007Hank Fox has brought a significant problem to my attention, one that I've addressed before: one of the consequences of growing American cowardice and these trumped-up Wars on Terror and Drugs (let's call them what they are: a War on Civil Liberties) is that science and science education are collateral damage. Memepunks has an excellent post on this subject:
In an attempt to curb the production of crystal meth, more than 30 states have now outlawed or require registration for common lab equipment. In Texas, you need to register the purchase of Erlenmeyer flasks or three-necked beakers. The…
oracknows | June 16, 2007I must confess that I never really grokked the whole "LOL Cat" thing. I must admit to being a bit puzzled by the phenomenon when it metastasized to ScienceBlogs and some of my fellow SBers applied it to creationists, spurred on by Mark H at denialism.com (althogh I must admit that I nonetheless found the first entry in this post to be particularly amusing).
I should have known that it wouldn't be long before the phenomenon attacked one of my favorite SF/fantasy shows of all time, Doctor Who. So, here they are, LOL Doctor Who Cat Macros. A few that I found amusing are below the fold…