Science
drorzel | January 2, 2007Some time back, Dave Munger called me out for the one sentence challenge, originally phrased thusly:
Physicist Richard Feynman once said that if all knowledge about physics was about to expire the one sentence he would tell the future is that "Everything is made of atoms". What one sentence would you tell the future about your own area?
Dave, as a writer, offers "Omit needless words." Over at Cosmic Variance, Risa responds with the much less elegant: "The Universe began, about 13.7 billion years ago, as a hot, dense soup of elementary particles, and has been expanding, cooling, and clumping…
drorzel | January 1, 2007As usual, John Brockman has asked a large number of prominent science types to answer a broad and general question, and posted the results to the Web. This year's question:
WHAT ARE YOU OPTIMISTIC ABOUT? WHY?
Many of the answers are of the form "I am optimistic that my personal research topic or political obsession will transform the world for the better," but not as many as I feared. A large number of physics types talk about the LHC and other experiments that are expected to come on line this year, and predict a new "Golden Age" for particle physics.
I haven't read all of them (or, really…
drorzel | December 29, 2006James Nicoll, one of my go-to sources for odd information about space related issues, is attempting to determine whether it's true that space enthusiasm is for older people. Unsurprisingly, given who he is and what he writes about, his comments have turned up lots of examples of people born after 1980 who are wild for space travel. I think the term is "selection bias."
My readership is probably somewhat less space-crazed than his, but I doubt you all would be a representative sample, either. If you've got opinions on the subject, though, go leave him a comment. Or leave one here.
(Update:…
pharyngula | December 27, 2006Allow me to introduce you to a whole gigantic superclade with which many of you may not be familiar, and some other groups in the grand hierarchy of animal evolution that I've mentioned quite a few times before, but would like to clear the fog with some simple definitions. Consider this a brief primer in some major animal groupings. Here's a greatly simplified cladogram; I've left off quite a few groups to make the story simple.
I have a frequently admitted bias: I'm most interested in the evolution and development of the Metazoa, or the multicellular animals. I don't follow the literature…
oracknows | December 27, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on April 27, 2005.
Since I've started blogging, I notice things that I probably wouldn't have noticed before. I suspect it's…
oracknows | December 26, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on January 21, 2006.
I know I'm a bit of a stickler, a curmudgeon, if you will, when it comes to medicine. Call me crazy, but…
oracknows | December 26, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on March 7, 2005 after I arrived home from a meeting.
I'm back at home. The meeting went fairly well and my talk was well-received.
Surgical meetings are odd beasts.…
jrosenhouse | December 26, 2006Actually, many of the questions Marilyn vos Savant got asked in her column are positively ingenious. They also provide a lot of food for thought. Here are a few that caught my eye. As always, feel free to hash them out in the comments:
I need glasses to see things at a distance. When I look in the mirror, I can see my face clearly. When I look at the things reflected in the room behind me, they appear fuzzy, yet the distance is an illusion, and all objects reflected are an equal distance from my eyes. Can you tell me why this is so?
If you had a completely enclosed truck with birds…
pharyngula | December 23, 2006Almost ten years ago, there was a spectacular fossil discovery in China: microfossils, tiny organisms preserved by phosphatization, that revealed amazing levels of fine detail. These specimens were identified as early animal embryos on the basis of a number of properties.
The cells were dimpled and shaped by adjoining cells, suggesting a flexible membrane—not a cell wall. This rules out algae, fungi, and plants.
The number of cells within each specimen was usually a power of 2. This is something we typically see in cleaving embryos, the sequence from 1 to 2 to 4 to 8 to 16 cells.
They were…
pharyngula | December 21, 2006
I've just read the article on the parthenogenetic Komodo dragons in Nature, and it's very cool. They've analyzed the genetics of the eggs that have failed to develop (the remainder are expected to hatch in January) and determined that they were definitely produced without the aid of a male.
We analysed the parentage of the eggs and offspring by genetic fingerprinting. In the clutches of both females, we found that all offspring produced in the absence of males were parthenogens: the overall combined clutch genotype reconstructed that of their mother exactly. Although all offspring were…
oracknows | December 21, 2006Sure, I know The Jesus Lizard is a band, but scientists have now found a lizard worthy of the name.
Well, not exactly. Perhaps this particular lizard would be better considered the Mary Lizard.
evolgen | December 21, 2006
The Public Library of Science (PLoS), an open access, web-based publisher, has launched its newest venture, PLoS ONE. PLoS ONE aims to bring scientific publishing into the Web 2.0 era, with a simple interface for commenting on published research articles. This feature is not unique to PLoS ONE, as the Nature blogs and BioMed Central both allow commenting on articles. What makes the site unique are the annotation features, personalize alerts, and rating of journal articles. Whereas the previous implementations of commenting on journal articles were an accessory to the publishing process, PLoS…
pharyngula | December 21, 2006
What are the key ingredients for making a multicellular animal, or metazoan? A couple of the fundamental elements are:
A mechanism to allow informative interactions between cells. You don't want all the cells to be the same, you want them to communicate with one another and set up different fates. This is a process called cell signaling and the underlying process of turning a signal into a different pattern of gene or metabolic activity is called signal transduction.
Patterns of differing cell adhesion. But of course! The cells of your multicellular animal better stick together, or the…
drorzel | December 21, 2006One of the fun things about following science news through the Eurekalert press release aggregator is that work done by big collaborations tends to show up multiple times, in slightly different forms. Take, for example, the gamma-ray-burst results being released in Nature this week, which show up no less than five times: one, two, three, four, five. It's entirely possible that I missed some others, too.
Each of those releases is written by the press office at a different institution, and each tries to make it sound like the people at their university made the most important contribution to…
oracknows | December 20, 2006Tangled Bank #69 has been posted at Salto Sobrius. Martin is labeling it the War on Christmas Edition. He's joking. At least, I think he's joking...
oracknows | December 20, 2006Today is the tenth anniversary of Carl Sagan's death from myelodysplasia at the too-young age of 62. On this day, as part of the Carl Sagan Memorial Blogathon (more here), I'd like to explore three observations about Sagan.
First and foremost, Carl Sagan was brilliant at expressing the sense of wonder at the universe and how amazingly fortunate we are to be able to perceive it. Even as scientists, we often get lost in the nitty gritty and the details of what we are doing. It's all too easy to lose sight of the forest through the trees and forget about just how amazingly beautiful and complex…
pharyngula | December 20, 2006I'm joining in on the Carl Sagan Memorial blog-a-thon, but I can't offer unstinting praise. Sagan wrote about biology now and then, and every time he irritated me; I always felt like arguing with him about some detail that bugged me, and I think that was actually among his virtues—he was a scientist you cared enough about to want to criticize, and he also addressed questions wide and deep enough that we all felt like this curious astronomer was touching on our part of the universe.
Here's one example, a short excerpt from my favorite Sagan book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in…
drorzel | December 20, 2006A couple of the women behind Inkycircus have decided to launch a new online science magazine, called Inkling. As they put it, their mission is:
[to] cover the science that pervades our life, makes us laugh, and helps us choose our breakfast foods.
If you like the stuff you see in Seed, you'll find similar things in Inkling. Check it out.
pharyngula | December 19, 2006Once upon a time, in Paris in 1830, Etienne Geoffroy St. Hilaire debated Georges Léopole Chrétien Frédéric Dagobert,
Baron Cuvier on the subject of the unity of organismal form. Geoffroy favored the idea of a deep homology, that all animals shared a common archetype: invertebrates with their ventral nerve cord and dorsal hearts were inverted vertebrates, which have a dorsal nerve cord and ventral hearts, and that both were built around or within an idealized vertebra. While a thought-provoking idea, Geoffroy lacked the substantial evidence to make a persuasive case—he had to rely on fairly…
oracknows | December 19, 2006
Here's a great idea:
I was staying in a hotel in New York earlier this year, and I noticed that as well as the usual Gideon's bible, there was also a copy of the Quran. So that got me thinking - why limit the principle to religious books, why not get some science in there too?
So, I've decided that from now on, whenever I stay in a hotel room, I'm going to leave behind a copy of ... The Origin of Species...
And now ... I'd like to call on everyone who reads this to do the same thing - next time you stay in a hotel, leave behind a copy of this seminal work. After all - what's the cost of one…