Science
pharyngula | March 21, 2007Here's a clever (I think) observation in the efforts to eradicate malaria: the mosquitos that transmit malaria are also infected with the disease-causing parasite, so maybe if we cure malaria in mosquitos, it will end one intermediate step in the transmission chain. It sounds like a crazy idea, but recent experiments suggest that it might just work. It's got the advantage of allowing the use of transgenic techniques on the mosquito population, where you don't have to worry about patient's rights or whether a few of your experimental subjects will die during the procedure, and you can just let…
evolgen | March 21, 2007SECOND ROUND PREVIEW | PRESS CENTER | PRINTABLE BRACKETS
Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to our comprehensive coverage of the second round of the Science Spring Showdown. We had two great games yesterday, and we have two more match ups today. The game between Phylogenetics and Unipotent is just underway, and the final game of the round, between HIV and Psychology, is coming up this afternoon.
Jim Pipetman: Yesterday's first game, between the top seeded Invertebrates and the ninth seeded Surgeons, turned out like most of the experts predicted. The Surgeons came into the game bragging about…
catdynamics | March 20, 2007As widely reported in the media, a number of cat and dog foods were recalled in the US after a common supplier decided there was a problem with their new wheat gluten supplier (a common additive).
10 animals (9 cats apparently) are known to have died, probably many more undiagnosed.
Cause of death is kidney failure - symptoms include large frequent urination, vomiting, lethargy and weight loss.
MenuFoods apparently switched suppliers (to a low bidder?) just before christmas '06, and food from early dec '06 to early '07 is liable.
Reports are that tests on animals with known contaminated…
oracknows | March 20, 2007Day four and still no answer to the challenge.
I think I agree with some of my readers who've complained about this; I'll cut back on the frequency of reminders to something less than every day...
oracknows | March 20, 2007The longer I maintain this blog, the more I find unexpected (to me, at least) intersections and relationships between various topics that I write about. Of course, a lot of it simply has to do with the fact that one of the overarching themes of this blog is skepticism and critical thinking, which leads one to seek patterns in various pseudoscience, but sometimes it's a little more interesting than that. For example, a couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about the "individualization" of treatments in "alternative" medicine and how it's largely a sham that alt-med practitioners claim that their…
catdynamics | March 19, 2007I am counter to the old saying that you can't squeeze blood from stone, having been a proud member of the Red Cross "gallon club" and counting.
But I am now not permitted to give blood in the US, as I found out on the afternoon of September 11th, thinking myself re-eligible to donate, after a minor hiatus...
Harry at Crooked Timber explains:
I too fail the following eligibility test:
From January 1, 1980, through December 31, 1996, you spent (visited or lived) a cumulative time of 3 months or more, in the United Kingdom (UK)
Now, unlike Harry I am not a vegetarian (I have reasons to…
pharyngula | March 19, 2007I'm joining Larry Moran in applying the thumbscrews to John Logsdon, who has just started a new blog. He's got to do more than just one short tease of a post!
oracknows | March 19, 2007Two days ago, I posted a challenge to Dr. Egnor and clarified that challenge yesterday.
Thus far, there has been no answer.
I'm still waiting.
pharyngula | March 19, 2007The Lynn Margulis blog tour has moved on to Memoirs of a Skepchick—if you weren't satisfied with her answers here, you can try again.
drorzel | March 19, 2007I'm giving an exam this morning, and I needed to get to work early to make copies, so I didn't have time for lengthy, insightful blogging. So here's a dorky poll.
This one needs a little background. A post-doc in my old group at NIST used to say that he always wished he had a prehensile tail, because there are lots of situations where you need a third hand. It doesn't have to be a very good hand, but when you're doing experimental work, you frequently wind up holding a flashlight in your mouth, while attempting to connect two wires in an awkward position, and it would be good to have a tail…
evolgen | March 18, 2007Dr. Wayne Grody is a molecular biologist at UCLA. But his part-time job sounds like a lot more fun: "technical advisor on a number of motion picture and television productions". He's the guy responsible for giving Eddie Murphy's Professor Klump character a ginormous research lab despite the fact that he worked at a small liberal arts college. To Grody's credit, however, he did try to plant thermal cyclers, which the director found "visually boring". But, according to Grody, scientists account for such a small proportion of TV viewers and movie-goers that scientific accuracy isn't much of a…
oracknows | March 18, 2007Yesterday, at the end of a post about the fallacious statements about evolution that Dr. Mike Egnor, a Professor of Neurosurgery, has been routinely serving up at the Discovery Institute, I made a challenge. I think I'll repeat it daily for a while until we see if he's up to answering it. It should be a very easy challenge for him to meet, given the number of times that he has made the two assertions that I plan to challenge him about.
Here are the two assertions that Dr. Egnor has made on more than one occasion, but most recently on Friday, and I'll quote him directly:
In fact, most research…
pharyngula | March 17, 2007You really should take a closer look at this map of publication links between scientific disciplines. Here's the description:
This map was constructed by sorting roughly 800,000 published papers into 776 different scientific paradigms (shown as pale circular nodes) based on how often the papers were cited together by authors of other papers. Links (curved black lines) were made between the paradigms that shared papers, then treated as rubber bands, holding similar paradigms nearer one another when a physical simulation forced every paradigm to repel every other; thus the layout derives…
evolgen | March 17, 20071st ROUND RESULTS | PRESS CENTER | PRINTABLE BRACKETS
After the excitement of the first round action in the Octopus region, we can only hope that the second round is half as dynamic. The big upset last round saw Unipotent knocking off Totipotent. There has also been an interesting twist, as Internal Medicine was disqualified for a positive steroid test. That means Surgery advances to play the Invertebrates. In the other matches this round, we will see Genomics take on Photosynthesis, Unipotent challenge Phylogenetics, and HIV play Psychology.
#1 Invertebrates vs. #9 Internal Medicine #8…
oracknows | March 17, 2007Agh!
I say: Agh! Again.
Remember how it was just a mere three days ago that I administered some Respectful Insolence⢠to Dr. Michael Egnor, the Energizer Bunny of jaw-droppingly, appallingly ignorant anti-evolution posturing based on his apparently nonexistent understanding of what the theory of evolution actually says? Remember how I said how much I sincerely hoped that I could ignore him for a while? I really did mean it at the time.
Really, I did.
And then Afarensis and Mike Dunford had to and let me know that Dr. Egnor's at it yet again.
Dr. Egnor just won't stop, and as a fellow surgeon…
pharyngula | March 16, 2007
The latest Nature reveals a new primitive mammal fossil collected in the Mesozoic strata of the Yan mountains of China. It's small and unprepossessing, but it has at least two noteworthy novelties, and first among them is that it represents another step in the transition from the reptilian to the mammalian jaw and ear.
Here's the beautiful little beast; as you can see, it's very small, and we need to look very closely at some details of its morphology to see what's special about it.
(click for larger image)Main part of the holotype (Nanjing University-Paleontology NJU-P06001A). b, Skeletal…
evolgen | March 16, 20071st ROUND RESULTS | PRESS CENTER | PRINTABLE BRACKETS
The results are in from the first round in the Octopus Region of the Science Spring Showdown hosted at the World's Fair. By seed, there were three upsets, but the nine seed Internal Medicine knocking off eight seed Surgery was hardly a surprise (although the 107-76 score was a wider margin than many of the experts predicted). The win by 14 seeded Unipotent over the three seed, Totipotent, on the other hand, was quite a shocker, with many people attributing the victory to the definitive coaching style of the Unipotent's lead general,…
evolgen | March 15, 2007I'm really digging the interviews with high profile scientists that Current Biology has been publishing. Last November I quoted their interview with Michael Ashburner (ie, he who will not pose with Prof. Steve Steve) on his thoughts on open access publishing and pointed out that they were being published in a non-open access journal. In the most recent issue, they interview Stephen O'Brien, head of the Laboratory of Genomic Diversity at the National Cancer Institute. O'Brien was trained as a Drosophila geneticist, and now works on topics as diverse as cheetah population genetics and HIV…
drorzel | March 15, 2007After a short post-March Meeting lag, Physics World is back to announcing really cool physics results, this time highlighting a paper in Nature (subscription required) by a French group who have observed the birth and death of photons in a cavity. I'm not sure how it is that the French came to dominate quantum optics, but between Serge Haroche and Alain Aspect, most of the coolest experiments in the field seem to have been done in France.
In this particular case, they set up a superconducting resonant cavity for microwaves. Basically, this is like two mirrors facing one another, and a photon…
catdynamics | March 14, 2007In the building where I usually work, there are four doors on the ground floor.
The main front door, that I usually exit during the day; a back door that I usually enter and leave at the ends of the day; and a left and right side door.
The door to the left leads to a parking lot, with no sidewalk right where the cars turn into the lot entrance, but it is closer to the post office and coffee; the door to the right leads to a nice sidewalk, but it is set back from the main road, and closer to the downtown restaurants.
Two summers ago, the front door was blocked for many weeks by road…