Science
drorzel | May 9, 2007I was expounding on my dislike of the routine questions being asked of Wesley Clark last night (see previous post) to a colleague from Math, who suggested "Which do you prefer, C or Fortran? And if you use Fortran, do you declare all your variables?" as an alternative to boring policy questions that produce nothing but rehearsed answers. Clearly, this is a niche that needs to be explored, thus today's Dorky Poll:
What great geek controversy should Presidential candidates be asked about?
Because, really, how could you consider voting for a man (or woman) without knowing his (or her) position…
pharyngula | May 8, 2007My previous contributions to the basic concepts in science collection were on gastrulation and neurulation, so let's add the next stage, and the one I named the blog after: the pharyngula.
First, though, a few general remarks on developmental stages. In some ways, these are somewhat arbitrary: development is an ongoing process, a real continuum, and what we're doing is picking recognizable moments where we think we see real transitions and highlighting those as significant markers. They can be somewhat fuzzy, although in early development in particular, when the organism is simple, we can…
pharyngula | May 8, 2007This afternoon, I'm traveling to the Twin Cities again. Ricardo Azevedo is giving a talk at 4:00 in 150 Ecology at UMTC on "Sex, robustness and epistasis". The title has one of those buzzwords that always makes me perk up and pay attention. You know the one I mean. Mmmmmmm, "epistasis".
oracknows | May 8, 2007In rapid succession after the last pontificating and bloviating article claiming that there will never be a cure for cancer because it would be too financially disastrous to the medical economy, I've been made aware of another pontificating and bloviating article decrying the state of cancer research today, entitled Curing Cancer: Running on Vapor, Remedy: More Brainpower, Less Hype, by George L. Gabor Miklos, Ph.D. and Phillip J. Baird, M.D., Ph.D. On first glance, it looks like a bold proposal for a necessary change of direction in our cancer research effort. Sadly, it doesn't deliver on…
drorzel | May 7, 2007Over in LiveJournal Land, James Nicoll is pining for the good old days:
I'm going through one of my "I would kill for some new SF" phases, SF in this case being defined in a narrow and idiosyncratic way. In particular, I want the modern version of those old SF stories where SF writers, having just read some startling New Fact [Black holes could be very small! Mercury isn't tide-locked! The Galilean moons are far more interesting than we thought!], would craft some thrilling tale intended to highlight whatever it was that the author had just learned.
I suspect this is mostly due to James's…
oracknows | May 7, 2007Readers who don't like me might think that the title of this post refers to what I am about to write. I know, the title perfectly encapsulates the verbose style that is my stock and trade. In reality, though, it's referring to a couple of articles floating around the blogosphere of which I've become aware and about which I've been meaning discuss because of their similarities. One is a pretty worthless piece of conspiracy-mongering; the other, although it makes some appropriate criticisms of how we go about cancer research, comes to a wildly incorrect conclusion about what we should be doing…
pharyngula | May 6, 2007If you're trying to come up with names for an exotic element with amazing properties for that comic book, fantasy novel, or role-playing game you're writing, here's a list of apocryphal elements (there's also a similar list with more details). These are all genuine false alarms from the world of science, guaranteed to have been generated from the twisted minds of actual chemists and physicists.
We really need elements called Ultimium and Extremium. Neokosmium isn't bad, either.
oracknows | May 6, 2007I know this one's been circulating around the Internet for a while now, but it's so perfect that I can't resist posting it here.
Pure genius, particularly the paper upon which the above talk was based!
pharyngula | May 6, 2007It's strange (but typical) how creationists will simply make up an answer to that question that trivializes the number of discovered fossils — the latest is DaveScot, who claims they "wouldn't fill a single coffin." Afarensis tallies them up. Would you be surprised to learn that DaveScot was making it all up?
razib | May 4, 2007The post below about the decline of biological anthropology as a concentration at Harvard elicited many responses. To some extent the columnist was framing the argument in a Two Cultures fashion. This is an expansive and thoroughgoing argument. I am personally unaware of the direct benefits of studying mathematics and English Literature simultaneously, though I do know that my old secondary school experimented with mixing subjects such as physics and history after my graduation. But though I am unclear as to the direct benefits, I think that the indirect long term fruit can be substantial…
pharyngula | May 4, 2007Way back in the early 19th century, Geoffroy St. Hilaire argued for a radical idea, that vertebrates and most invertebrates were inverted copies of each other. Vertebrates have a dorsal nerve cord and ventral heart, while an insect has a ventral nerve cord and dorsal heart. Could it be that there was a common plan, and that one difference is simply that one is upside down relative to the other? It was an interesting idea, but it didn't hold up at the time; critics could just enumerate the multitude of differences observable between arthropods and vertebrates and drown out an apparent…
jrosenhouse | May 3, 2007Via Larry Moran I came across this article, from the journal Cell, about the growth of the science blogosphere:
There are close to 50 million weblogs or blogs for short. Blogs provide an online discussion forum for issues of current interest and are updated regularly with new short articles on which readers can comment.
The Pew Internet and American Life Project (http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP%20Bloggers%20Report%20July%2019%202…), an initiative of the Pew Research Center, reports that 8% of Internet users in the United States, or 12 million American adults, keep a blog and 39% read one…
drorzel | May 3, 2007Two links to things promoting science on the web:
1) What's the Greatest Innovation? Spiked online asked a bunch of famous people to describe the greatest innovation in their field, and compiled the responses. As with most of these things, there's some interesting stuff in the responses, and a lot of predictable answers of the form "The greatest innovation is the one that led to my personal research."
2) String Theory in Two Minutes or Less. Some time back, Discover ran a contest for videos describing string theory in two minutes or less, and they've put the top entries up on the web for a…
oracknows | May 3, 2007If there's one undeniable aspect of "intelligent design" creationism advocates, it is their ability to twist and misrepresent science and any discussions of evolution to their own ends. Be it Dr. Michael Egnor's twisting of history to claim that eugenics is based on Darwinism, rather than the artificial selection (or, as we snarky ones like to call it, intelligent design), claims that "Darwinism" is a tautology and irrelevant to the question of antimicrobial resistance, or blaming evolution for atheism, the decline of Western mores, and, if you believe the ID advocates, bad breath, key to the…
catdynamics | May 2, 2007The "pet food poison' has clearly entered the human food chain.
Definitely through animal feed for chickens and pigs raised for human consumption, and quite likely through direct contamination of food additives - gluten and grain/vegetable protein additives
The acute symptoms in cats and dogs are fairly well known, and seem to end in kidney failure and a painful death.
Question is whether melamine, and whatever additional toxins or toxic breakdown products and metabolites may be involved, are causing either acute or chronic illness in humans.
Suspected effects are kidney problems, possible…
catdynamics | May 2, 2007Pay more to unknowingly feed congealed urine to your loved ones.
So large corporations can make fractionally more money.
It is one of these framing issues, see.
More problems with pet food.
Recall expanded and clear that contaminated "protein" made it into the human food chain.
To cut a long story short, since this is all over the media; chinese producers figured they could inflate the nitrogen assay of vegetable protein by adding cheap nitrogenous compounds.
A favourite seems to be Melamine - a polymer of cyanamide, very high nitrogen content by mass. For extra layman yuck factor, it is…
catdynamics | May 2, 2007I see Mathematica has announced a new release
I went through a period, pre release 1.0, when I used Mathematica's precursor rather heavily, in conjuntion with Maple (basically if the two produced the same results I used it, after sanity checks, if they didn't I sent in a bug report to Mathematica...)
I was also taken by their early graphics capabilities, which for the time were rather good.
Then I stopped using symbolic manipulators on a regular basis - and I never really used Mathematica's numerical capabilities except for occasional need for arbitary precision arithmetic.
So... what is the…
pharyngula | May 2, 2007Oh, I hate these difficult questions.
If you're a professor and you want to change the world, what do you do? In 1993--quit and become an activist. In 2007—start a blog.
Or so it seems. PZ Myers blogging at Pharyngula is probably doing more for evolution than PZ Myers publishing papers in scientific journals. Is that true PZ?
No.
Hmmm, I guess it wasn't so difficult after all!
Just to expand a little bit, though: it's definitely not true that I'm now doing a better job of increasing the scientific understanding of evolution. I'm not discovering anything new (well, except that I do have an…
pharyngula | May 1, 2007I'm sure you've already heard about it, so I'm a little redundant to bring it up — Carl Zimmer has a spiffy article in the NY Times about duck phalluses. No, that's not quite right; the most interesting part of the story was the bit about duck oviducts. Female ducks have been evolving increasingly convoluted oviducts to baffle the efforts of duck rapists to inseminate them, and male ducks have been evolving concomitantly long phalluses to thread the maze and deliver sperm to the ovaries.
I'd heard about these huge intromittent organs in ducks before, but this is another fascinating revelation…
oracknows | May 1, 2007There are times when, as a scientist, I look at an idea and its execution and simply stand in awe. It's particularly satisfying when it's a relatively simple idea that could conceivably do a lot of good for a lot of patients. Oddly enough, whether it's because I've been out of the loop or because it hasn't garnered that much attention in the blogosphere (not even here in ScienceBlogs), but I only just heard of it now. It's a new drug in phase II clinical trials that has the potential to obviate or reverse the effects of a wide variety of genetic mutations that cause human disease:
A pill that…