Science
pharyngula | January 13, 2007The heathen at IIDB are talking about squid—it's infectious, I tell you, and the godless seem especially susceptible—and in particular about this interesting paper on squid fisheries. Squid are on the rise, and are impressively numerous.
We can get an idea of the abundance of squid in the world's ocean by considering the consumption of cephalopods (mainly squid) from just one cephalopod predator the sperm whale. Sperm whales alone are estimated to consume in excess of 100 million tonnes of cephalopods a year. This is equivalent to the total world fishery catch and probably exceeds half the…
catdynamics | January 12, 2007I'm up anyway...
Magnitude 8.1 +/- 0.2 earthquake off the Kurile islands in the north pacific.
Tsunami warnings for east coast of Japan's northern island and for parts of Alaska.
Parts of Russia and various islands also under a tsunami watch
We'll hear in the morning if anything happened. Hm, residents somewhere (Japan?) ordered to flee to higher ground, I wonder if buoy data is in?
drorzel | January 12, 2007In a back-channel discussion among ScienceBloggers, John Wilkins suggested that it might be interesting to do occasional posts on really basic concepts in our fields-- the sort of jargon terms that become so ingrained that we toss them around without realizing it, and end up confusing people. A lot of these terms often have a technical meaning that is subtly (or not-so-subtly) different from the use of the word in everyday language, which provides a further complication.
The original example given was "vector," which turns up a lot in mathematical discussions, and loses a lot of people (it's…
pharyngula | January 10, 2007
I'm teaching a course in neurobiology this term, and it's strange how it warps my brain; suddenly I find myself reaching more and more for papers on the nervous system in my reading. It's not about just keeping up with the subjects I have to present in lectures (although there is that, too), but also with unconsciously gravitating toward the subject in my casual reading, too.
"Unconsciously"…which brings up the question of exactly what consciousness is. One of the papers I put on the pile on my desk was on exactly that subject: Evolution of the neural basis of consciousness: a bird-mammal…
catdynamics | January 9, 2007FASEB has put together a resource package to defend evolution and fight intelligent design.
Seen in Science, Support Evolution Education is here
pharyngula | January 9, 2007
If you've seen BladeRunner, you know the short soliloquy at the end by one of the android replicants, Roy, as he's about to expire from a genetically programmed early death.
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams…glitter in the dark near Tanhauser Gate. All those…moments will be lost…in time, like tears…in rain. Time…to die."
There's an interesting idea here, that death can be an intrinsic property of our existence, a kind of internal mortality clock that is always ticking away, and eventually our time will run out…
drorzel | January 9, 2007A lot of people have commented on this New York Times article on science budgets, mostly echoing the author's lament about the negative effects of operating at 2006 funding levels. I really don't have much to add to that, but it's worth reminding people where the blame for this belongs:
Last year, Congress passed just 2 of 11 spending bills -- for the military and domestic security -- and froze all other federal spending at 2006 levels. Factoring in inflation, the budgets translate into reductions of about 3 percent to 4 percent for most fields of science and engineering.
Congressional…
oracknows | January 9, 2007It is with a bit of trepidation that I write about this.
The reason, for anyone who reads ScienceBlogs specifically or science blogs in general, should be obvious. Richard Dawkins is such a polarizing figure with a penchant for stirring things up with regards to the most deeply held beliefs of both the religious and atheists, that he has all too often served as a flashpoint for battles between secularism and religion or a convenient excuse for the two most popular of my fellow ScienceBloggers to indulge their mutual animosity publicly. Posting about Dawkins, whether you defend or criticize…
evolgen | January 8, 2007The NYTimes reports on the impending budget crunch at US science funding agencies. The last Congress only passed spending bills for the military and domestic security, leaving nine others at the same level as the previous year. If we take inflation into account, the stagnant budgets result in a decrease in funding of 3-4% for most federal science and engineering programs.
Congressional Democrats do not plant to update the unfinished spending bills, and will extend them in their current state through September. (To learn how to petition your congressional representatives to increase funding…
drorzel | January 8, 2007Paul Davies's forthcoming book Cosmic Jackpot is subtitled "Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life," so you know that he's not going after small questions, here. The book is a lengthy and detailed discussion of what he terms the "Goldilocks Enigma," and what others refer to as "fine-tuning"-- basically, how do you account for the fact that the universe allows us to exist? A small change in the values of any of the constants of nature would very likely make it impossible for life as we know it to exist. And yet, here we are-- so how did that happen?
Though this book won't be released for a…
pharyngula | January 8, 2007
As we are so often reminded by proponents of Intelligent Design creationism, we contain molecular "machines" and "motors". They don't really explain how these motors came to be other than to foist the problem off on some invisible unspecified Designer, which is a poor way to do science—it's more of a way to make excuses to not do science.
Evolution, on the other hand, provides a useful framework for trying to address the problem of the origin of molecular motors. We have a theory—common descent—that makes specific predictions—that there will be a nested hierarchy of differences between…
oracknows | January 7, 2007I like this T-shirt design!
Perhaps our Seed overlords would spring for sufficient funds to clothe all of us ScienceBloggers in this fine garb.
(Via Boing Boing.)
pharyngula | January 6, 2007Rather than burning out, I decided I just needed a happy fun day at the SICB meetings, so I put away the notepad and flitted about from session to session to check out a semi-random subset of the diverse talks available here. So I listened to talks on jaw articulations and feeding mechanisms in cartilaginous fishes; the direct developing frog, Eleutherodactylus coqui; Hox gene expression in the fins of Polyodon (which was really cool—that curious HoxD gene flip across the digits may be a primitive condition, rather than a derived tetrapod state); biomechanical properties of spider webs; the…
pharyngula | January 6, 2007Everyone can stop now, my brain is full. Seriously, this is a painful meeting: my usual strategy at science meetings is to be picky and see just a few talks in a few sessions, to avoid burnout…but at this one, I go to one session and sit through the whole thing, and at the breaks I look at the program and moan over the concurrent sessions I have to be missing. I have to come to SICB more often, that's for sure.
I do have one major complaint, though: PowerPoint abuse. The evolution of slides has continued apace since my graduate school days, when one slide was one photograph, developed in a…
catdynamics | January 5, 2007Information Processing does an interesting riff on the human genome, and how to quantify variations in alleles and whether clustering in allele frequence maps to morphological typing.
This is a very "physics view" of genomics, and I suspect that there will be some interesting counterpoints.
I will chicken out of the fight by claiming "more data is needed", in particular on correlations in allele variations, not just the mere fact that there is some clustering.
drorzel | January 5, 2007Via Tobia Buckell, Jeff Bezos is looking for a few good geeks:
Blue Origin; Blue Origin wants you! Actually, Blue Origin needs you and wants to hire you ... assuming you're a hard working, technically gifted, team-oriented, experienced aerospace engineer or engineering leader. If you might be interested in joining us, please keep reading.
We're working, patiently and step-by-step, to lower the cost of spaceflight so that many people can afford to go and so that we humans can better continue exploring the solar system. Accomplishing this mission will take a long time, and we're working on it…
pharyngula | January 4, 2007Here's what I heard this morning. Wonderful stuff, all of it, and I'm having a grand time. This is a quick summary, and now I have to rush back to the meeting for more.
S. Kuratani: Craniofacial evolution from a developmental perspective. This was a lamprey and hagfish talk, comparing them to vertebrates. Hox gene expression patterns in lamprey, which assign anterior-posterior positional information, are very similar to those in vertebrates, but there is no temporal colinearity—timing is all over the place. There is no apparent dorsal-ventral patterning of Dlx gene expresion. They've…
drorzel | January 4, 2007The Times has an article announcing the discovery of methane lakes on Titan:
The discovery, reported yesterday by an international team of researchers, was made by a radar survey of Titan's high northern latitudes by the Cassini spacecraft, which has been orbiting Saturn and its retinue of satellites since July 2004. One of the mission's major objectives is the investigation of Titan's environment, thought to be a frigid version of conditions on the primordial Earth.
The radar imaging system detected more than 75 dark patches in the landscape near Titan's northern polar region, the scientists…
evolgen | January 3, 2007But where is halfway?
The Scientist has published an article by Mary Woolley, president of Research!America, on communicating science to the general public. The basic premise is that scientific literacy must increase, and scientists must perform the outreach in order to increase the science literacy of the average American. But what is the basal level of understanding that scientists can expect from the general public? To where are we expected to increase the scientific literacy? In other words, how much ground must we cover?
From the example Woolley gives, the prospects look bleak:
Consider…