Science
stoat | June 15, 2007David J.C. MacKay has a draft book out online, http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/ , which is worth a browse. He is due to give a talk here in a bit, which should prove interesting.
The book is an attempt to look at renewable energy from a broad-brush numbers point of view (in which I suspect it does a rather better jobs than "Heat" by Monbiot). But the bit I want to look at is the "offsetting" section, p143 onwards, the Story of Joan and Thambo. Joan flies in a plane, and offsets her emissions by helping Thambo keep warm by not burning his pile of coal. This seems fair enough: she…
catdynamics | June 13, 2007House subcommittee on Science and Related Agencies has marked up its appropriations bill
Looking good...
They give NASA and extra $290 million, majority for Science.
Sounds like they also plan to put in the barriers between line item spending in NASA, to preclude some divisions (exploration) raiding others (science and aeronautics).
We'll see what the Senate does.
NSF is on target for doubling, according to this, which would be another decent sized increase in its budget. Again both details in which divisions get the moolah will matter, as will what the Senate has to say. But this is a good…
oracknows | June 13, 2007Via Boing-Boing, I learn that Don Herbert, a.k.a. "Mr. Wizard," has died.
He lived to a ripe old age of 89. Perhaps the best tribute to him is this:
"Over the years, Don has been personally responsible for more people going into the sciences than any other single person in this country," George Tressel, a National Science Foundation official, said in 1989.
"I fully realize the number is virtually endless when I talk to scientists," he said. "They all say that Mr. Wizard taught them to think."
A greater accomplishment in science is hard to imagine.
R.I.P., Mr. Wizard.
oracknows | June 13, 2007Yesterday, I discussed how pseudoscience--nay, antiscience--may well triumph over science in the Autism Omnibus trial presently going on. One reason that this might happen is because of the primacy of feelings over evidence among the plaintiffs, to whose power even the Special Masters running the trial are not entirely immune. As a fellow human being, I can somewhat understand this tendency in the parents of autistic children. After all, the parent-child bond is one of the strongest there is, making it difficult for even the most rationalistic parent to think clearly when it comes to their…
oracknows | June 12, 2007Many of my fellow SBers have blogged about the Gallup poll showing just how scientifically ignorant Americans, and in particular Republicans, are:
PRINCETON, NJ -- The majority of Republicans in the United States do not believe the theory of evolution is true and do not believe that humans evolved over millions of years from less advanced forms of life. This suggests that when three Republican presidential candidates at a May debate stated they did not believe in evolution, they were generally in sync with the bulk of the rank-and-file Republicans whose nomination they are seeking to obtain.…
drorzel | June 12, 2007Clifford Johnson is pointing to a pair of stories about extrasolar planets. One is a news piece about the "flood" of new discoveries, and the other is a Top 10 list from space.com (warning: irritating web design).
This provides a good excuse to roll out a blog suggestion from Ron Walsworth, who pointed out a possible connection to the ultra-stable lasers that Jun Ye and Jim Bergquist talked about on the first day of last week's conference. He suggested that, in the future, these ultra-stable lasers may be useful not only for comparing clocks on Earth, but as a crucial reference to help detect…
denialism | June 12, 2007
As promised, I'm going through the three papers from last week about the re-programming of adult cells into an embryonic-like phenotype. Since it is three papers I'll go through first what's common to all three, and then what each group did special.
First of all, let's summarize the method one more time.
Background
All of these papers are based on the "rational identification" of 4 critical transcription factors by Yamanaka in 2006. What they did was take 20 proteins that drive the expression of other genes that were known to be in embryonic stem cells, and added them to adult cells to…
pharyngula | June 11, 2007
Since I asked for it, and since so many were promptly forthcoming with a copy, I'd better give you a quick summary. Kubodera et al. have formally published their observations of the eight-armed deep sea squid, Taningia danae, that were in the news last February. There isn't much new information in the papers; it's all based on a handful of video observations of hunting squid in their native habitat, so it's more on the side of anecdote than anything else right now. It's still just plain cool.
That photo is of their video gear. It's a platform with lights and cameras that's lowered on a cable…
drorzel | June 10, 2007For the third year running, the after-dinner speaker at DAMOP was a politician-- a Canadian one, this time, former MP Preston Manning (who also has his own official web site). I was a little surprised to see him described as a "right-wing populist" because he sounded very reasonable, but on reflection, this is Canada, and a right-wing populist Canadian probably maps to a moderate Democrat in the US.
His talk was on "the importance of scientists being able to communicate with politicians and the public, and how we can do a better job at such communications." In other words, as Nathan Lundblad…
oracknows | June 9, 2007This is what Orac would look like this weekend if he were his blog mascot and if those piles of papers surrounding him were NIH grants.
Yes, NIH Study Section time is coming up in less than two weeks. It's grant review crunch time, and this is how I will be spending the remainder of my weekend, other than taking an hour or two to mow the lawn and the occasional sanity break to blog. Fortunately, the grant load this cycle is not too bad for my study section compared to some past cycles. If I really push (excuse the term), I should be able to get more than half the remaining grants taken…
pharyngula | June 7, 2007No, actually they don't — but they do have some proteins that are essential components of synapses, and it tells us something important about the evolution of the nervous system. A new paper by Sakarya et al. really isn't particularly revolutionary, but it is very interesting, and it does confirm something many of us suspected.
First, in case you don't know what I'm talking about, here's a synapse:
A synapse is a kind of gateway for the transmission of electrical impulses in the nervous system. What's portrayed above is the terminal of a generic neuron; electrical signals travel down from…
oracknows | June 6, 2007Date: June 4, 2007, 2 PM CDST
Place: University of Chicago's bookstore
Depressing. At what is supposed to be a bastion of science, we find Michael Behe's latest tripe on the same bookshelves as Stephen Jay Gould's books (see the shelf below). On the other hand, Creatures of Accident looks potentially interesting.
Still, I'm disappointed that this book isn't in the philosophy or religion section--where it belongs.
oracknows | June 6, 2007Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that it's been quite a while since I've featured the antics of a certain character who's become a bit of the bête noire of my fellow surgeons. I'm referring, of course, to Dr. Michael Egnor, a renowned neurosurgeon from SUNY Stony Brook who's made 2007 a very embarrassing year indeed for surgeons like me who accept evolution as a valid scientific theory, as, in fact, the entire underpinning of modern biological and medical sciences. Starting back in March, having whetted his appetite for looking foolish by jumping into the comments of a posts in…
jrosenhouse | June 4, 2007Meanwhile, the Gonzalez case continues. The President of ISU has turned down Gonzalez's appeal:
Because the issue of tenure is a personnel matter, I am not able to share the detailed rationale for the decision, although that has been provided to Dr. Gonzalez. But I can outline the areas of focus of my review where I gave special attention to his overall record of scientific accomplishment while an assistant professor at Iowa State, since that gives the best indication of future achievement. I specifically considered refereed publications, his level of success in attracting research funding…
pharyngula | June 4, 2007These are some carnivals of science—read about invertebrates, genes, or genetics this morning.
Circus of the Spineless #21
Gene Genie
Mendel's Garden #15
pharyngula | June 3, 2007One of the common principles used to characterize the rules of growth in developing systems is the idea of allometry. Here, I'll briefly summarize the concept with a few clear illustrations and a tiny amount of simple math.
"Allometry" means "different growth or measurement", and it refers to the fact that different body parts grow at different rates during development—we aren't simply linearly scaled up versions of our younger selves, but instead we have different proportions. One vivid and familiar example is the growth of our heads. Look at a baby, and their heads and eyes seem huge…
pharyngula | June 2, 2007In chapter 14 of the Origin of Species, Darwin wondered about the whole process of metamorphosis. Some species undergo radical transformations from embryo to adult, passing through larval stages that are very different from the adult, while others proceed directly to the adult form. This process of metamorphosis is of great interest to both developmental and evolutionary biologists, because what we see are major transitions in form not over long periods of time, but within a single generation.
We are so much accustomed to see a difference in structure between
the embryo and the adult, that we…
oracknows | June 2, 2007Infophilia finds Dr. Michael Egnor's invocation of the Stalin Zombie from a couple of months ago and tears it apart.
Come to think of it, Egnor's been laying down some silliness about evolution lately. I had been restraining myself from commenting due to my previous oversaturation blogging about his antics, but I think I've given the blog a suitably long Egnor-free interval that it might be time to have some dismayed fun with our creationist neurosurgeon again...
razib | June 2, 2007People often assume I'm a "genetic determinist" because of my close attention to the interface of our species' biology and behavior. I'm also focused on evolutionary science, a discipline where noise, error, and diversity generated by a constellation of variables is assumed (and to some extent, essential). From my interest in the latter it can be easily inferred that I don't think there is anything necessarily deterministic about how mind and society manifest themselves over the course of development. Rather, an understanding of human nature can make us aware of the constraints and biases…
catdynamics | June 1, 2007It is ok to piss in the forest.
It is natural, the bear behind you does it too, the plants need the water, and you're even recycling some valuable nitrogen and salt compounds.
It is not ok for 8 million people to take a piss in Central Park.
This is why climate change is important.
The problem is not the working schlob in his SUV, the problem is that he is one of a hundred million.
We exhale carbon dioxide, and that is ok. What is not ok is that we dump several gigatons of carbon in CO2 into the atmosphere every year for many decades.
This is not a matter of marxist theory or liberal…