Science
pharyngula | October 27, 2006
Our regularly scheduled host has been incommunicado, but fortunately, Josh Rosenau heroically stepped into the breach and has delivered a last-minute Tangled Bank #65 to us.
catdynamics | October 27, 2006What's the most underfunded scientific field that shouldn't be underfunded?...
Mine!
Me!Me!Me!
Seriously.
pharyngula | October 26, 2006The remains of Lucy, the famous fossil australopithecine, are going to be touring the US for the next few years. Start lining up. It's opening in Houston.
The six-year tour will also go to Washington, New York, Denver and Chicago. Officials said six other U.S. cities may be on the tour. But they would not release the names, saying all the details had not yet been ironed out.
Minneapolis, maybe? I hope? Otherwise I'm going to have to make a trip to Chicago.
No word yet on whether the Answers in Genesis museum near Cincinnati will be bidding on the exhibit.
oracknows | October 26, 2006The Skeptics' Circle has been hosted in many places and in many forms, but leave it to Kev at Left Brain/Right Brain to bring it to the one place that it's been hosted before.
We're talking Heaven, people.
Naturally, the assembled skeptics were a bit disconcerted by this particular venue, as amusingly recounted by Kev:
It was one of the greatest moments of my life. Persuading a bunch of Skeptics' to affirm their belief in the blood of Jesus in order to attend a conference in Heaven. Admittedly, they didn't look very happy about it, but it worked. Skeptics' in Heaven. Marvellous.
Once the…
oracknows | October 25, 2006This one's for you, Afarensis (all in good fun, of course--well, for the most part, anyway):
Here's Jeff Suppan, pitcher for the Cardinals (who, it just so happens, will be starting game four of the World Series tonight) appearing prominently along with Patricia Heaton, Jim Caviezel, and other celebrities in a predictably lame "response" ad to the ad that Michael J. Fox made supporting the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate Claire McCaskill. Fox made the original ad because McCaskill supports removing the ban on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research that destroys embryos to…
pharyngula | October 24, 2006
Warren sent me link from The Indigestible, wondering if I was interested in these kinds of speculative questions about the existence of alien life. Why, yes I am...and even wrote something along the same lines a few years ago, coming to the same conclusions: I think intelligent extraterrestrials are unlikely.
My reasons are below the fold. Of course, I will retract my opinion immediately when Klaatu lands.
DarkSyd asks a question:
The Fermi Paradox is a conundrum proposed by pioneer physicist Enrico Fermi that questions the likelihood of Intelligent Extraterrestrial life. It begins with the…
pharyngula | October 24, 2006
There is a treasure trove in China: the well-preserved phosphatized embryos of the Doushantuo formation, a sampling of the developmental events in ancient metazoans between 551 and 635 million years ago. These are splendid specimens that give us a peek at some awesomely fragile organisms, and modern technology helps by giving us new tools, like x-ray computed tomography (CT), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), thin-section petrography, synchrotron X-ray tomographic microscopy (SRXTM), and computer-aided visualization, that allow us to dig into the fine detail inside these delicate…
jrosenhouse | October 23, 2006As an amusing follow-up to Friday's post, have a look at this lengthy op-ed from McGill University physicist Jim Cline, in The Ottawa Citizen. Here's an excerpt:
Why is it that string theory has become such a favoured paradigm? Have theoretical physicists deluded themselves? Have they been pressured by social forces to blind themselves to other possible theories? Is there a behind-the-scenes string-theory conspiracy that is propping up a pseudoscientific house of cards?
We could ask a similar question about cars. Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that Hondas have been the most…
pharyngula | October 23, 2006Physiologists have been studying the activity of shrimp on a treadmill—the movie is charming, especially if you like an excess of whirling limbs.
You can tell it's not a Bally's ad by the absence of lycra and proudly outthrust breasts.
oracknows | October 23, 2006Having been out of town a lot the last couple of weeks, I haven't read the New York Times Magazine the last couple of Sundays. It's a magazine that I either read cover to cover or toss aside having read only The Ethicist, something that usually happens when it delves into some annoying hipster topic or lets the fashion and food stuff expand to fill too much of the magazine. This week, I came across an article that made me think: What should be the penalty for academic misconduct in science? Consider the case of Dr. Eric Poehlman:
On a rainy afternoon in June, Eric Poehlman stood before a…
drorzel | October 22, 2006The New York Times Magazine this week has a troubling story of scientific misconduct, involving the fraudulent research of Eric Poehlman:
Before his fall from grace, Poehlman oversaw a lab where nearly a dozen students and postdoctoral researchers carried out his projects. His research earned him recognition among his peers and invitations to speak at conferences around the world. And he made nearly $140,000, one of the top salaries at the University of Vermont. All of that began to change six years ago, when [Walter] DeNino [a technician in Poehlman's lab] took his concerns about anomalies…
pharyngula | October 21, 2006The Seed mothership wants to know, "What is the best science TV show of all time?"
There's one program that comes immediately to mind…
Jacob Bronowski's Ascent of Man.
It is said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That is false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that…
jrosenhouse | October 20, 2006As several other SB'ers have already noted, physicist Brian Greene offers this defense of string theory in today's New York Times. He concludes:
I have worked on string theory for more than 20 years because I believe it provides the most powerful framework for constructing the long-sought unified theory. Nonetheless, should an inconsistency be found, or should future studies reveal an insuperable barrier to making contact with experimental data, or should new discoveries reveal a superior approach, I'd change my research focus, and I have little doubt that most string theorists would too.…
drorzel | October 20, 2006Having made reference to the referee system in my post about a paper being accepted, this seems like a good point to dust off an old post about the peer review system in physics.
Like many of the other Classic Edition posts I've put up here, this one dates from July of 2002. Apparently, I wrote a lot of stuff about physics in July of 2002.
Anyway, the original text is below the fold, if you'd like a look inside the sausage factory that is the scientific publishing process...
I've just been asked to referee a journal article, for the fourth time in the last seven months. Since "peer review" is…
evolgen | October 20, 2006The Idiot Box is contributing toward our search for the next science rockstar:
Filling Carl Sagan's shoes will be tough, but someone's gotta do it. Click on the image to the see the rest of the suggestions.
drorzel | October 20, 2006The New York Times today has a story about Web-based classes offering virtual labs, and whether they should count for AP credit:
As part of a broader audit of the thousands of high school courses that display its Advanced Placement trademark, the [College Board] has recruited panels of university professors and experts in Internet-based learning to scrutinize the quality of online laboratories used in Web-based A.P. science courses.
"Professors are saying that simulations can be really good, that they use them to supplement their own lab work, but that they'd be concerned about giving…
evolgen | October 19, 2006Check out this gem from the London Times:
Fraud may also be good for science, according to Steve Fuller, Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. Since most scientific duplicity involves researchers "idealising" results that they probably would eventually have achieved anyway, such fact-fiddling actually oils the wheels of discovery. He even questions whether it should be labelled fraud at all.
Fuller does draw the line at drug studies, where people could be physically harmed if researchers fudged data. But everything else is fair game. Take the recent discovery of the heaviest…
pharyngula | October 19, 2006Here's another tetrapodomorph fish to consternate the creationists. These Devonian/Carboniferous animals just keep popping up to fill in the gaps in the evolutionary history of the tetrapod transition to the land—the last one was Tiktaalik.
Skull in lateral view.
This lovely beastie is more fish than frog, as you can tell—it was a marine fish, 384-380 million years old, from Australia, and it was beautifully preserved. Gogonasus is not a new species, but the extraction and analysis of a new specimen has caused its position in the evolutionary tree to be reevaluated.
Here's a little more…
pharyngula | October 19, 2006Yes! You can now read the complete works of Charles Darwin free, online. Since an original copy of The Origin will set you back roughly $50,000, last I heard, this is a really good deal.
drorzel | October 18, 2006Well, at least, the physics of the new NBA basketball, at any rate...
For those who haven't heard the story already, the NBA is changing the style of the basketballs used in its games this season. They're moving away from the traditional leather basketballs to a new synthetic material, which is supposed to hold up better to wear and tear.
Predictably enough, most of the players hate the new ball, and Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has gone so far as to enlist physicists to look into the situation:
Jim Horwitz is chair of the physics department at UT-Arlington, and Kaushik De is the project leader…