Science
oracknows | October 5, 2006Well, the winners of the the evil Doppelganger of the Nobel Prizes, a. k. a. the Ig Nobel Prizes, have been announced, and more worthy winners I can't think of:
BOSTON, Massachusetts (AP) -- The sound sets teeth on edge, makes skin crawl and sends a shiver down the spine. Just thinking about it gives some people the heebie-jeebies.
But what is it about the sound of fingernails scratching a blackboard that elicits such a universal reaction?
Randolph Blake and two colleagues think they know -- the sound's frequency level.
Their research has earned them an Ig Nobel, the annual award given at…
pharyngula | October 5, 2006The US has done wonderfully well in collecting Nobel prizes this year, but there's no reason to be complacent. There's a lot of momentum in our science establishment, the result of solid support for many years, but there are troubling signs that the engines of our advance, the young minds of the next generation, aren't going to be propelling us as well. Take this report by science educators, for instance:
"We are the best in the world at what we do at the top end, and we are mediocre — or worse — at the bottom end," said Jon Miller, of Michigan State University, who studies the role of…
pharyngula | October 5, 2006Here's a marvelous idea: a race to sequence 100 people's genomes in 100 days, with a nominal prize of 10 million dollars. As a tool to motivate the discovery of new technologies and gain prestige, I approve. It's unfortunate that it is so anthropocentric, though. A similar contest to sequence 100 species genomes in 100 days would be much cooler, and would contribute far more to our understanding.
They've also got a second 100 genomes to sequence that will be drawn from a pool of celebrities. I have reservations there; the ones named seem to be mainly people who happen to be filthy rich (i.e…
pharyngula | October 5, 2006You may have heard about that odd hothead mutation in Arabidopsis that seemed to be violating a few principles of basic genetics—there was an unexpectedly high frequency of revertants that suggested there might be a reservoir of conserved genetic information outside the genome. Reed Cartwright proposed an alternative explanation, that gamete selection could skew the results. Now the latest reports suggest that the bias was an artifact of foreign pollenization (which I think is interesting in itself. Life is damned good at sneaking its genes in wherever it can.)
Anyway, if that's all…
oracknows | October 5, 2006Over the last week or so, several of my fellow ScienceBloggers made predictions about who would win the Nobel Prize in Medicine/Physiology. The prize, as we know now, was awarded to Andrew Fire and Craig Mello for their discovery of RNA interference (known as RNAi, for short). I also share some of Jake's questioning as to why Greg Hannon or Tom Tuschl, both of whom played a role in discovering RNAi and making the early advances in the field, were shut out. Whatever the reasons, this particular award is of great interest to me because it's the first Nobel Prize awarded for a discovery that was…
pharyngula | October 5, 2006
Ultrasound imaging technology is coming along so fast that you can now get a near-real time, moderate resolution image of a living fetus. Unfortunately, this new technology is also having an unfortunate consequence.
Sophisticated ultrasound scans that show foetuses as early as 12 weeks appearing to "walk" in the womb have had a dangerous impact on the public debate over abortion, leading doctors and scientists said yesterday.
The emotive photographs, taken with new fourdimensional imaging technology, have created a misleading impression that foetuses become viable and potentially self-aware…
oracknows | October 4, 2006Pareidolia is everywhere, as you know. We see Jesus or Mary on trees, pieces of toast, and on sheet metal.
Finally, though, through the wonder of science, we finally see some Jesus pareidolia in a molecular biology lab!
Are you ready for Jesus on a polyacrylimide gel used to separate proteins?
I consider it a most holy sign that Alex's next attempt at an immunoprecipitation will be a success.
drorzel | October 4, 2006The Paper of Record provides the Story of Record for yesterday's Nobel Prize in Physics for Mather and Smoot, including recent photographs of both. One of my favorite bits of the 1997 Nobel was seeing the media circus that went on around the Prize-- I'll put some amusing anecdotes into another post.
All the usual blogger suspects have weighed in with comments, including but not limited to Sean, Rob, Steinn, Clifford, and Jennifer Ouellette. Most of them took the time to find the appropriate COBE graphics to illustrate their posts, which I was too lazy to do.
Janet Stemwedel deserves special…
pharyngula | October 4, 2006The Science Pundit has a collection of graphics and movies illustrating echinoderm locomotion. Tube feet are spiffy.
drorzel | October 4, 2006The Chemistry Nobel Prize was announced this morning, and goes to only one guy (which is somehwat unusual in this age of massively collaborative science): Roger D. Kornberg of Stanford University, "for his studies of the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription".
I am very much not a chemist, so all I can really do is sound those words out, and get that "eukarote" is a term for a type of organism, and "transcription" usually seems to involve DNA, so this must have something to do with getting messages from DNA to other parts of the cell. Well, OK, I can also read the press release, which…
pharyngula | October 3, 2006
How we sense the world has, ultimately, a cellular and molecular basis. We have these big brains that do amazingly sophisticated processing to interpret the flood of sensory information pouring in through our eyes, our skin, our ears, our noses…but when it gets right down to it, the proximate cause is the arrival of some chemical or mechanical or energetic stimulus at a cell, which then transforms the impact of the external world into ionic and electrical and chemical changes. This is a process called sensory signaling, or sensory signal transduction.
While we have multiple sensory…
oracknows | October 3, 2006I knew there was a reason that I don't often blog about politics, and yesterday reminded me of it. Maybe I should have just launched another enthusiastic debunking of the distortions and outright false information put out by antivaccination advocates like Dawn Winkler. Instead, I thought it might be educational to return to a topic that I haven't revisited in a while, so-called HIV/AIDS "dissidents." These cranks resemble antivaxers in their fast-and-loose approach to and cherry-picking of the data, along with some outright misrepresentations of studies.
They're at it again.
This time around…
drorzel | October 3, 2006Hot off the presses: The Nobel Prize in Physics goes to John C. Mather and George Smoot "for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation." This is recent enough that they don't even have much on the Nobel site, but happily for me, it's something I know a tiny bit about.
The prize here is for the COBE ("Cosmic Microwave Background Explorer") mission back in the early 1990's, which made extremely precise measurements of the radiation left over from the Big Bang (the discovery of which led to a previous Nobel for Penzias and Wilson). Mather…
pharyngula | October 2, 2006Andrew Fire and Craig Mello, for the discovery of RNAi. Read Pure Pedantry for an explanation for why this is important.
I'll also mention that Carl Zimmer presents his take on this award…and wouldn't you know it, evolution has its greasy fingerprints all over it.
I must also promote an excellent comment from Andy Groves:
I've said it before, and I'll say it again for the benefit of ID supporters out there - this is what a real scientific revolution looks like. Fire and Mello published their paper in 1998 (two years after "Darwin's Black Box" came out, for those who are interested). Since…
pharyngula | October 1, 2006A couple of science carnivals will liven up your Sunday evening:
Bio::Blogs #4
The Synapse 1(8)
pharyngula | October 1, 2006Once again this year, I'm setting up our Café Scientifique-Morris, which is going to be held on the last Tuesday of each month of the university school year. This time around, that means the first one falls on…Halloween! So we're going to do something fun for that one: maybe some costumes, lots of clips from classic horror movies, I definitely think we're going to need some bubbling retorts of colored fluids, and the chemistry department is tentatively going to provide some treats (ice cream made with liquid nitrogen—chemistry and treats don't usually go together in people's heads, I know.)…
pharyngula | September 30, 2006Here's a prediction for you: the image below is going to appear in a lot of textbooks in the near future.
(click for larger image)Confocal image of septuple in situ hybridization exhibiting the spatial expression of Hox gene transcripts in a developing Drosophila embryo. Stage 11 germband extended embryo (anterior to the left) is stained for labial (lab), Deformed (Dfd), Sex combs reduced (Scr), Antennapedia (Antp), Ultrabithorax (Ubx), abdominal-A (abd-A), Abdominal-B (Abd-B). Their orthologous relationships to vertebrate Hox homology groups are indicated below each gene.
That's a technical…
pharyngula | September 29, 2006The work of Craig McClain (of Deep-Sea News) is written up in Science Daily—it's cool stuff. Also notable is that it is illustrated with a photo of a giant isopod…one of those creatures Kent Hovind calls a trilobite, and uses to support his contention that the earth is only 6000 years old (Look! Trilobites still live in the Arctic! Idjit.)
pharyngula | September 29, 2006Forgive me, but I'll inflict a few more zebrafish videos on you. YouTube makes this fun and easy, and I'm going to be giving my students instruction in video micrography next week, so it's good practice.
This is a more detailed look at what's going on in the embryo. Using a 40x objective, we zoom in on a patch of cells near the surface of a 4-hour-old embryo—this is a generic tissue called the blastoderm. We just record activity with an 1800-fold time compression for a few hours to see what the cells are doing. The movie below displays typical, baseline activity: the cells are jostling about…
pharyngula | September 28, 2006Ah, the evils of strong drink. Or weak drink. You all know that you shouldn't drink alcohol to excess during pregnancy, and the reason is that it can affect fetal development. We take zebrafish eggs and put them on a real bender: we soak them in various concentrations of alcohol (which are hard to compare with human blood alcohol levels, I'm afraid, but trust me: these are such gross levels of ethanol that mere humans would be dead and pickled. Fish are tough), and let them stew for hours. Since fish development is much, much faster than human development, it's rather like having a woman…