Science
pharyngula | September 14, 2006
We are all familiar with the idea that there are strikingly different kinds of eyes in animals: insects have compound eyes with multiple facets, while we vertebrates have simple lens eyes. It seems like a simple evolutionary distinction, with arthropods exhibiting one pattern and vertebrates another, but the story isn't as clean and simple as all that. Protostomes exhibit a variety of different kinds of eyes, leading to the suggestion that eyes have evolved independently many times; in addition, eyes differ in more than just their apparent organization, and there are some significant…
oracknows | September 14, 2006I hadn't planned on writing about this again after yesterday. The subject is profoundly depressing to those of us needing to compete for declining NIH grant resources with only a 9% chance of success the first time. However, given that Your Friday Dose of Woo will make an appearance tomorrow to make everything all right; that is, assuming that my O.R. day tomorrow isn't too stressful. After all, there's little better to lift your spirits than a bit of amusing woo, you know.
In any case, a commenter named Theodore Price said:
Orac, maybe (almost certainly not actually) you didn't mean it this…
drorzel | September 14, 2006Over at Science and Reason, Charles Daney has launched a new blog carnival, focussing on physical science and technology issues. I rarely remember to participate in these things-- the deadlines just go whooshing by, like deadlines do-- but the general concept is pretty popular, and we need more physical science blogging on the Interweb. There are, what, nine different bio-themed blog carnivals? There should be at least one about physics...
And there's some good stuff in the first issue, now available: Philosophia Naturalis #1. So check it out, and if you have a better memory than I do, send…
jrosenhouse | September 13, 2006One of the nice things about being a big shot science blogger is that publishers frequently send you free books to review. In fact, lately they've been arriving a lot faster than I can read them.
One book that turned up recently in my mailbox was Coming to Life: How Genes Drive Development, by Nobel Laureate Christianne Nusslein-Volhard. My friends, this is one fantastic book.
The book's main purpose is to explain what is currently known about the processes by which a fertilized egg develops, under the direction of the genes, into an organism. Nusslein-Volhard's writing is reminiscent of…
pharyngula | September 13, 2006
Everyone knows the story of Konrad Lorenz and his goslings, right? It was a demonstration of imprinting: when young animals are exposed to a stimulus at a critical time, they can fix on it; Lorenz studied this phenomenon in geese, which if they saw him shortly after hatching, would treat him like their mother, following him around on his walks. Similarly, many animals seem to experience sexual imprinting, where they acquire the sexual preferences that will be expressed later on.
I just ran across a charming short letter about imprinting in cephalopods, and somehow the story seems so…
catdynamics | September 13, 2006Tangled Bank #62 - this time with nifty cartoons
At Hairy Museum of Natural History
pharyngula | September 13, 2006True confession: I try to watch the medical drama House when I can. It's lead character is an acerbic and brilliant atheist M.D. (played by Hugh Laurie, a comedic actor—which was a smart casting decision), and the humor is snarky and dark. That's just the kind of thing I enjoy. It's been going downhill, I think, because the episodes have gotten far too predictable—there's always a weird illness which is handled via increasingly wild semi-random diagnoses that always, and I definitely mean always, ends with the complete cure of the patient. The infallibility is wearing a little thin.
Last…
pharyngula | September 13, 2006
The newest edition of the Tangled Bank, Tangled Bank #62—Travel Bingo edition, is now up at the Hairy Museum of Natural History. The editor went all out for this one and made custom icons for each entry: don't you wish you'd submitted something now?
oracknows | September 13, 2006I was going to blog about this a couple of days ago, but the Scientific Activist beat me to it, leading to a heads-up from PZ Myers. Never let it be said that a little thing like that stopped me from putting my two cents in. Besides, I think I bring a certain perspective that hasn't been addressed thus far about this subject, namely the declining success rates for applications for R01 grants from the NIH. For one thing, I have an R01. I'm about a year and a half into a five year grant, which means that I have about two and a half years or so before I have to go for renewal. Consequently, I…
drorzel | September 13, 2006Dylan Stiles is blogging from the American Chemical Society meeting, as only he can. He's got three daily summary posts up (one, two, three), with more presumably on the way for however long the meeting lasts.
Personally, I can't make heads or tails of the scientific content, so I can't tell you whether any of the stuff he's posting about is actually interesting to normal humans. He's way into it, though, which makes even the incomprehensible bits fun to read. Or maybe I'm just sleep-deprived.
pharyngula | September 12, 2006May I direct your attention this way? If you really want to make a case that GW Bush has been hurting American science, look where it really counts: follow the money. The Scientific Activist has the numbers, and it's rather dramatic how research funding has dwindled over the years.
pharyngula | September 12, 2006This week, my students are thinking about SIDS,
aging,
Christiane Nusslein-Volhard,
oncogenes,
hunger,
individuality,
worm movies,
obesity,
sunscreen, and whether to
divide or die. A fairly typical set of undergraduate concerns, right?
They've all also been reading chapters 3 and 4 of Carroll's Endless Forms Most Beautiful, and their summaries are here: α,
β,
γ,
δ,
ε, and
ζ.
If you missed it, here's Last week's digest and a brief explanation of what it's all about.
pharyngula | September 12, 2006I'm a little surprised at the convergence of interest in this news report of a conserved mechanism of organizing the nervous system—I've gotten a half-dozen requests to explain what it all means. Is there a rising consciousness about evo-devo issues? What's caused the sudden focus on this one paper?
It doesn't really matter, I suppose. It's an interesting observation about how both arthropods and vertebrates seem to partition regions along the dorso-ventral axis of the nervous system using exactly the same set of molecules, a remarkable degree of similarity that supports the idea of a common…
catdynamics | September 12, 2006Interesting Boston study just published, claiming that the travel restrictions after 9/11 caused a two week postponement in the peak of the 2001/2 influenze season.
Some lessons there.
catdynamics | September 12, 2006There is an interesting SciBlog back-and-forth going on about the "pipeline" problem and retention of underrepresented subset of physical sciencists.
The discussion raises some interesting points, but I want to pick on one small item: the question of intro classes and entry into major.
Does anyone see significant intake into physical science majors from the large non-major oriented intro classes?
Seriously.
I can not think of a single student in our major in the last decade that I know came to us through an intro class. They were either pre-committed to the major, or were in a related…
oracknows | September 12, 2006As much as I try to deny it, I can't anymore. Now that I'm on the wrong side of 40, I have to face what we all eventually have to face, the fact that we will age and that our physical and some of our mental abilities will decline. For some of us, the decline will be slow, and we will retain much of our previous abilities into our 60's, 70's, and even 80's. For others, the decline may not be so slow. We all have experience seeing people in their 50's or 60's who look and move as though they are in the 80's, and we all hope that we will be in the former group, retaining most of our physical and…
catdynamics | September 11, 2006Joel Achenbach of the Achenblog at the Washington Post is worried about science press releases:
Eight is Enough: Achenblog
Question Scientific Authority
The latter is about our press release on a paper that came out in Science last friday.
Here is the original primary press release on EurekAlert.org.
To get some sense over the degree of "control" the scientists have over press releases, note that the press release spells my name incorrectly, and provides an incorrect institutional affiliation!
That is just for perspective. I've been involved in a number of press releases, some of which have…
catdynamics | September 11, 2006Noticed a number of dead birds on the walk to and through campus today.
Maybe I just notice these things more nowadays.
Or, maybe it is the change to cooler weather.
In the meantime here is something to cheer you up
Deaths continue to double each year.
Simplest explanation is that it is growing exponentially in birds (or some other host) with a low co-efficient for transmission to humans, that is constant.
If human-to-human transmission became efficient, the doubling time would suddenly shrink to something like 1-2 weeks.
Else, the incidence in birds must saturate and we'll see a leveling off…
pharyngula | September 10, 2006Both Proper Study of Mankind and Thoughts in a Haystack have summaries of this bizarre paper that was published in Science last week, showing a connection between a sense of cleanliness and ethical thought. I guess it's not surprising that physical sensations impinge on unconscious decisions, but it is interesting in that it hooks into some cultural rituals. I'm not at all clear on what it means, though: should I skip out on taking a shower so I'll feel more compelled to do good in thought and deed to compensate, or should I do pre-emptive washing so I won't be hindered from skullduggery?
pharyngula | September 10, 2006
I've been tinkering with a lovely software tool, the 3D Virtual Embryo, which you can down download from ANISEED (Ascidian Network of In Situ Expression and Embryological Data). Yes, you: it's free, it runs under Java, and you can get the source and versions compiled for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. It contains a set of data on ascidian development—cell shapes, gene expression, proteins, etc., all rendered in 3 dimensions and color, and with the user able to interact with the data, spinning it around and highlighting and annotating. It's beautiful!
Unfortunately, as I was experimenting with…