Science
drorzel | December 7, 2006There have been a couple of science funding items in Inside Higher Ed in the last few days, one suggestiong prizes to spur research, and the other reporting that most people aren't convinced there's a crisis:
Generally, the public appreciates some of the message of the reports going out -- that the United States is likely to face heightened competition from other countries. And the public generally thinks those who do go into science and math deserve support and more scholarships. But as to whether more students should be encouraged to do so, and whether non-science students should graduate…
pharyngula | December 6, 2006Go read Effect Measure on the recent events in the case of the Tripoli Six. This is the story of a team of health care workers who were blamed for an outbreak of HIV among young patients at a Libyan hospital—they've been tried in a kangaroo court and face very unpleasant prospects.
Now, in a powerful reply to the Libyan accusations, Nature has published the results of a detailed analysis of the viruses afflicting the children, and the story is clear: the cause of the outbreak was the poor hygiene present at the hospital before the six workers arrived. Here are the major conclusions of the…
pharyngula | December 6, 2006
Take a voyage with Captain Collins on the 68th Tangled Bank expedition. No squid or pirates were spotted this time, but it's still fascinating stuff.
pharyngula | December 5, 2006Synthesis is a good thing: Mark Chu-Carroll finds a similarity between Notch signaling and something mysterious called The Itai-Rodeh solution. It's not surprising that similar algorithms might arise by design and by evolution—which is why the IDists have to demonstrate something unique to their assertions for which a mechanism without a designer cannot account.
drorzel | December 5, 2006It's more or less traditional for magazines and tv shows to do some sort of year-end wrap-up. As this blog is now hosted by a magazine, I suppose I ought to follow suit. Of course, compiling "Year's Best" lists is a highly subjective business, requiring a lot of information gathering, so I'll throw this open to my readers before compiling my own highly biased list.
So, a call for nominations:
In your opinion, what is the most important, influential, or exciting development in astronomy in 2006?
This could be a new observation, a new type of observation technique, or it could be an exciting…
drorzel | December 5, 2006It's more or less traditional for magazines and tv shows to do some sort of year-end wrap-up. As this blog is now hosted by a magazine, I suppose I ought to follow suit. Of course, compiling "Year's Best" lists is a highly subjective business, requiring a lot of information gathering, so I'll throw this open to my readers before compiling my own highly biased list.
So, a call for nominations:
In your opinion, what is the most important, influential, or exciting development in physics in 2006?
This could be a new experimental measurement, or it could be an exciting new theoretical development…
pharyngula | December 4, 2006
One of my favorite signal transduction pathways (what? You didn't know that true nerds had favorite molecular pathways?) is the one mediated by the receptor Notch. Notch is one of those genes in the metazoan toolkit that keeps popping up in all kinds of different contexts—it's the adjustable wrench of the toolbox, something that handles a general problem very well and therefore gets reused over and over again, and the list of places where it is expressed in Drosophila is impressive.
The general problem that Notch solves is the resolution of a binary decision in cell fate, one where a few…
oracknows | December 4, 2006Note: If you're not familiar with the Hitler Zombie, here are two posts to introduce you to the creature, with the most recent installment of his terror here, in which Orac narrowly escaped the creature.
And, now, the adventures (if you can call them that) continue....
PRELUDE: SEVERAL MONTHS AGO
It was a dreary, overcast day, as so many days were there, with the clouds seeming to reach down to engulf everything with a wet chill that went straight to the bone.
An eminent professor sat in his study typing. Gray-haired, bright-eyed, and very professorial in appearance and bearing right down…
catdynamics | December 1, 2006Religion is ubiquitous, rational, adaptive and wrong.
It is not inherently in opposition to science in general, but it often is.
Science needs to figure out how to deal with this, because most religions will not.
Most all human societies are religious, in the sense that there is a general semi-coherent consensus view on some creation myth, the existence of deities with supernatural powers, and ability and motive to intervene in human affairs.
One can infer that religion is adaptive - the details do not matter, the ubiquity of religion suggests strongly that it provides significant fitness to…
oracknows | December 1, 2006Yesterday, I explained why a study that purports to show that psychotic patients tended to vote for President Bush in the 2004 election and is presently making the rounds to snarky gloating through the left-wing blogosphere is so utterly flawed that almost certainly does not mean what the author claims it does, given the data dredging, small sample size, and the failure even to consider alternative hypotheses to explain the observations. In my discussion, I complained that I had only found one skeptical take on the study among the credulous acceptance and use of the study to imply (or…
razib | November 30, 2006In his presentation for Beyond Belief 2006 Neil deGrasse Tyson offered Isaac Newton as his candidate for the most brilliant intellectual ever. Because he is trained as a physicist Tyson can be accused of some bias, but the impact on him personally was pretty obvious, he was emotionally moved just comprehending Newton's genius. Myself, I would tend to agree with Tyson though these things are always subject to the various weights on your parameters. Who would you offer up? Of the ancients I believe that Archimedes is likely to have been a magician in the mold of Newton. Here is what the…
pharyngula | November 30, 2006I found these on youtube, a couple of nice cartoony animations of the development of the urogenital system. This is one of the weirder modules in organogenesis, I think; many strange things go on that are relics of ancestral states. We actually build three pairs of kidneys—pronephros, mesonephros, and metanephros—and throw each one away in succession, except the last. Both sexes form paramesonephric (or Müllerian) ducts, in blue in the animation, and these form the core of the female plumbing, but again, males basically throw it away and use a more primitive duct (the mesonephric or Wolffian…
pharyngula | November 29, 2006Since Nick Matzke has become a fanboy, and Larry Moran has never heard of him, I thought I'd mention that I've liked Neil deGrasse Tyson's column (titled "Universe") in Natural History for a long time. It is generally on astronomy/astrophysics/cosmology, so it's far afield from my usual comfort zone, but I don't mind stretching my brain now and then. I've put a few excerpts from one column below the fold here that I thought was particularly good, from the November 2005 issue. It's titled "The perimeter of ignorance", and subtitled "a boundary where scientists face a choice: invoke a deity or…
catdynamics | November 29, 2006What's the funniest lab accident you've ever had?...
What is this "lab" thing of which you speak?
Does a spilled diet pepsi on a brand new keyboard count?
I got a papercut once... nah, Not Funny!
Hey, once when we were walking our neighbour's lab, the leash wrapped itself around the Big Kid's ankles, and then this squirrel came bounding along, you see...
There was this unscheduled power outage once...
pharyngula | November 28, 2006
Ah, Aplysia. Also known as the sea hare, Aplysia is a common preparation used in neurobiology labs; it's a good sized beastie with the interesting defense mechanism of spewing out clouds of mucusy slime and purple ink when agitated. I well remember coming into the physiology lab in the morning to find a big bucket full of squirming muscular slugs in a pool of vivid purple goo. And then I'd reach in to grab one, and they were all velvety soft and undulating and engulfing my whole arm in this thick, slick, wet, slippery knot of rippling smooth muscle…
Ahem. Well. Let me compose myself for a…
catdynamics | November 27, 2006The Litvinenko murder brought to mind an old sophomoric debate that floated among my acquaintances for some time.
The physical sciences enable killing. That is their core realism, that scientific knowledge is real in so far as it can be applied to kill.
The philosophy of science has an interesting history and an infuriatingly inconclusive current status.
Operationally, a lot of scientists go through their daily tasks under naive realism assumptions, yet when pressed the case for realism is no better than it ever was, or at least it still has the old flaws that undermined it.
Many years ago,…
pharyngula | November 27, 2006This is a troubling development, and perhaps some members of the National Science Teachers Association in the readership here know something about it. They seem to be in the pocket of the oil industry.
In tomorrow’s Washington Post, global warming activist Laurie David writes about her effort to donate 50,000 free DVD copies of An Inconvenient Truth (which she co-produced) to the National Science Teachers Association. The Association refused to accept the DVDs:
In their e-mail rejection, they expressed concern that other “special interests” might ask to distribute materials, too; they said…
catdynamics | November 25, 2006As widely reported, Polonium 210 was used to murder former russian spy Litvinenko
A pure alpha emitter, Po-210 is a curiously elegant and vicious assassination method.
It has to be handled with extreme care, but as a pure alpha emitter with short half-life (138 days) it can easily be shielded, and thus avoid detection. It is a final isotope in the decay chain, next stop is lead-206 which is stable.
The dose required is only about 0.1 micrograms.
It is soluble in acids and relatively easily volatilised. Sounds like Litvinenko ingested it.
Newspaper reports suggest it is hard to come by and…
pharyngula | November 22, 2006New artwork at Olduvai George's place: it's the start of a series on cetacean evolution.
evolgen | November 22, 2006Who would you nominate for Scientist Laureate, if such a position existed?
That's the question they are asking us this week. And everyone is answering E.O. Wilson. This, of course, comes with the caveat that if Carl Sagan were alive today, he'd be the obvious choice.
If we can't get Carl Sagan, why not go after the guy Nick Matzke calls "the new Carl Sagan"? Nick's post is in response to this article in the NYTimes about the Beyond Belief meeting -- where science, religion, and atheism were discussed. Nick thinks Neil deGrasse Tyson stood out because, instead of attacking the religious or…