Science
evolgen | August 14, 2006...like who? I'm really late on this, but Dan has asked us to name some rock-star scientists. He suggested Nobel Laureate David Baltimore. Baltimore isn't a rock-star because of his guitar chops or his rotating drum kit. If you want one of those, you can have Dexter Holland. Baltimore is a science advocate -- a public figure who fights against politicians abusing science and pushes for valuable science funding.
Who else would you consider a rock-star scientist? Carl Sagan would be a good one, but he's D-E-D, dead. David Suzuki is another good option, and he's still alive. So is that…
pharyngula | August 14, 2006Tanystylum bealensis male, ventral view, showing eggs and instar 1 (protonymphon) on
ovigerous legs. in. 1, instar 1 (protonymphon); pa, palp; pr, proboscis; 1, first walking leg; 2, second
walking leg; 3, third walking leg; 4, fourth walking leg.
Surely, you haven't had enough information about pycnogonids yet, have you? Here's another species, Tanystylum bealensis, collected off the British Columbian coast. That's a ventral view of the male, and those bunches of grapes everywhere are eggs and babies—males do the childcare in this group. These animals also live in relatively shallow water,…
catdynamics | August 14, 2006Grauniad reports Britain is in danger of running out of scientists:
commoditity markets in Europe spiked sharply on the news, with the ten year future contract on physicists rising 20% in early morning trading; spot markets also rose sharply, with PhD chemists leading the rally to $274.18 per hour in early morning trading (for the benchmark liberal educated physical chemists favoured by industry).
In the US after an initial spike in morning trading, the early gains were erased by the announcement that India was releasing some of its strategic stockpile of computer scientists, and news that…
oracknows | August 12, 2006After my experience with using (or, as at least one of my readers has suggested, misusing) my blog to get an article to which my university does not provide online access, it occurred to me just how much our means of accessing the scientific literature has changed in the last decade and just how radical those changes have been. Again, those who are old farts with me may remember that a little more than 10 years ago at the institution where I did my residency, we could do electronic searches of the Medline database, but it wasn't over the Internet. Basically, the library bought access to…
oracknows | August 12, 2006Thanks to those who sent me a copy of the article I requested. Sadly, the library at my university has some rather large holes in its online collection. Even some fairly common journals are not represented. I'll have to read it this weekend. You'll all get personal e-mails from me later today, after I finish rounding on our service.
As for finding the paper online at the author's website, personally, I find that to be a very uncommon situation, although I have had some luck in the past e-mailing corresponding authors. This is much the same as in the old days, when we old geezers would…
oracknows | August 11, 2006Here's a humble request of my readers. I'm looking for an article in a journal to which my university library does not offer online access. I'm interested in reading it, but not so interested that I'm wililng to pay the $40 to download it. If necessary, I can get it via interlibrary loan, but they'll just send me a poorly photocopied hard copy, possibly even a FAX. The article on evolution and cancer; so you can see why I might be interested. This is the article:
B. J. Crespi and Summers, K. Positive selection in the evolution of cancer. Biol Rev Camb Philos Soc. 81(3):407-24 (2006).
Would…
catdynamics | August 11, 2006I wasn't going to mention it, but Tara made me...
A public policy report in today's Science shows the popular acceptance of evolution for 34 different nations, and wouldn't you know it: Iceland is #1
This is the image from Science magazine, linked through from their website under fair use.
United States, as Tara notes, is second - from the bottom, right ahead of Turkey but behind Cyprus.
I have to confess I am a bit surprised - Iceland is clustered with the usual Scandinavian liberal nations, but I wouldn't have figured us being on top, would have expected a rank lower down near Norway.…
oracknows | August 9, 2006I got this in my e-mail the other day that may be of interest to folks interested in countering the pseudoscience of "intelligent design" creationism:
I would like to announce the birth of CommentsOnID, a Pile-blog and ask for support.
A Pile-blog is a blog intended to offer unmoderated comments and trackbacks space, related to blogposts from blogs where moderation/censure or even absence of comments and trackbacks is the rule.
This particular Pile-blog concerns pro-ID blogs/blogposts. It was setup to circumvent the censorship practiced at the time by Dembski and DaveScot and now by Denyse O'…
pharyngula | August 9, 2006That Moonie creationist with a degree in developmental biology, Jonathan Wells, floated an actual hypothesis a while back: he postulated that the centrioles were little turbines that generated a force with their rotation. I never saw it as much of a support for Intelligent Design; it was an idea about how centrioles function that did not rule out that they arose by evolutionary mechanisms. Wells seemed to think it was significant because he was inspired by an analogy with a human artifact, but la de da…I don't think benzene rings are actually made of snakes, despite Kekule's inspiration.…
pharyngula | August 9, 2006Jake Young has a good discussion of gender differences and performance in the sciences. His conclusion is one I agree with: there are real differences between men's and women's brains, but they are not of a sort to account for the differences in representation in scientific fields. For that, we have to go to culture, and the imposition of extrinsic limits on what people are allowed to do.
drorzel | August 9, 2006The latest jobs in science post has prompted a lot of responses, several of them arguing that we need to expand the definition of acceptable careers for Ph.D. scientists. For example, there's Nicholas Condon in comments:
When I hear this incessant handwringing about jobs in "science," it seems like it frequently comes from people with two characteristics: they seem to believe that the only viable destination for a Ph.D. scientist is a professorship, and they who work in subfields that are oversupplied (biology) or have very limited non-academic employment opportunitites (HEP) and they mistake…
drorzel | August 9, 2006I had a bunch of students over for dinner last night, and while I was busy with that, stuff happened in the world. I hate that.
Of course, there's been a lot of energy expended on trivia like primary elections, but that's not what I'm talking about. The important news all has to do with physics.
First, via His Holiness, Peter Zoller has been awarded the Dirac Medal from the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics. It's not as big a deal as the Nobel Prize, or anything, but it's well-deserved recognition, both for Zoller and for the quantum computing sorts of topics he works…
catdynamics | August 9, 2006Random interesting snippets... Grauniad has a sudden burst of interesting science articles and features!
Blogger are busy as always.
interesting Grauniad article on ALMA
also an interesting teaser on ELT
the science weekly podcast for this week also looks good - climate porn, Hawking on survival and space, and a skeptic
Backreaction has trouble with strings, bigfeet and Lee
Rob worries about the distance to M33 - Stanek et al (not the Angry One) find it to be further away than previously estimated - intriguing, and goes with the anomalies in LMC distance moduli, but I don't think it will…
pharyngula | August 8, 2006Alex has a quick cheat sheet for the different kinds of RNA…but wait! Where's mtRNA?
catdynamics | August 8, 2006PP brings up the infamous Katz letter, and Chad furthers the discussion.
It is topical, although the source is quite dated. Check out the discussion at Chad's place, I am too jaded to pontificate right now.
PS: Is anyone really offering $35k for postdocs still?
pharyngula | August 8, 2006
I've been getting swamped with links to this hot article, "Evolution reversed in mice," including one from my brother (hi, Mike!). It really is excellent and provocative and interesting work from Tvrdik and Capecchi, but the news slant is simply weird—they didn't take "a mouse back in time," nor did they "reverse evolution." They restored the regulatory state of one of the Hox genes to a condition like that found half a billion years ago, and got a viable mouse; it gives us information about the specializations that occurred in these genes after their duplication early in chordate history. I…
drorzel | August 8, 2006Jonathan Katz's "Don't Become a Scientist" has bubbled to the surface again, turning up at P.P. Cook's Tangent Space a few days ago. I can't recall what, if anything, I said about this that last time it came around, but I'll make a few comments here, in light of the recent discussions about jobs in science.
As you can guess from the title, the piece is a long rant aimed at getting students not to go to graduate school in science. It's an unremitting tale of anecdotal woe:
American universities train roughly twice as many Ph.D.s as there are jobs for them. When something, or someone, is a glut…
oracknows | August 8, 2006Our Seed overlords beckon:
What movie do you think does something admirable (though not necessarily accurate) regarding science? Bonus points for answering whether the chosen movie is any good generally....
This one's a bit of a toughy. First off, I waited too long to answer it, which means that other ScienceBloggers have copped answers that I had thought of, movies such as Real Genius and Apollo 13. Those were definitely among the first movies that came to mind. Even though the science itself in Real Genius is downright silly, its celebration of the joys of being a science geek is infectious…
drorzel | August 8, 2006If you're in the habit of reading science blogs, you've probably already seen Mark Trodden's article on the science of coffee, including a chemical analysis of the contents of espresso. You might be asking "Is there nothing these science types won't analyze?"
Apparently not, as Dylan Stiles demonstrates. Now there is somebody who needs to get out of the lab for a while. Take a walk, read a book, just don't take NMR spectra of anything for a few days.