Science
drorzel | July 18, 2006The article about physicists in movies cited previously had one other thing worth commenting on: the fictional portrayal of the practice of science:
All these films illustrate a fundamental pattern for movie science. Rarely is the central scientific concept utterly incorrect, but filmmakers are obviously more interested in creating entertaining stories that sell tickets than in presenting a lesson in elementary physics. They also know that scenes of scientists at a lab bench do not generally make for gripping movie moments. Indeed, the need for drama often pushes the basic scientific idea to…
catdynamics | July 18, 2006The title of my Phd Thesis was:
Dynamics of Neutron Stars and Binaries in Globular Clusters
or, Ménages à trois: revitalizing burnt out degenerates through partner swapping
This was not the best PhD thesis title ever, by a long shot.
The sub-title was actually an "in-joke", it was the working title of our Nature paper (Nature editors reserve the right to retitle papers for their audience, so a working title was good to have).
When I submitted, the sub-title was printed on the inside cover, and the Caltech Graduate Office, in a payback for many hours of Graduate Student Council liasion work…
pharyngula | July 18, 2006A reader sent me copy of a letter that will be published in Science this week, criticizing the dishonest tactics of the anti-scientific adult stem cell "advocates" (in quotes because they aren't really science advocates of any kind—they're only using it as an issue to limit stem cell research.) Anyway, it raises the interesting question of who you're going to believe: scientists with expertise in the issues under discussion, or a flunky for Sam Brownback and shill for the religious right?
Adult Stem Cell Treatments for Diseases?
Shane Smith, William Neaves, Steven Teitelbaum
Opponents of…
oracknows | July 18, 2006Over the weekend, between bouts of rounding on patients and seeing consults (I was on call), I perused the Last 24 Hours channel on the ScienceBlogs homepage, when I came across a fellow SB'er discussing a recent paper in Science about evolution. It was a study of the finches of the Galapagos Islands by Princeton evolutionary biologists Peter and Rosemary Grant. Being a physician and not a hardcore evolutionary biologist, I must confess that I don't always get into the nitty-gritty of how biologists study evolution, but this was a compelling story that was fairly easy for me to understand. I…
pharyngula | July 18, 2006
Carl Zimmer wrote on evolution in jellyfish, with the fascinating conclusion that they bear greater molecular complexity than was previously thought. He cited a recent challenging review by Seipel and Schmid that discusses the evolution of triploblasty in the metazoa—it made me rethink some of my assumptions about germ layer phylogeny, anyway, so I thought I'd try to summarize it here. The story is clear, but I realized as I started to put it together that jeez, but we developmental biologists use a lot of jargon. If this is going to make any sense to anyone else, I'm going to have to step…
pharyngula | July 17, 2006I'm taking it easy here in the fabulous Van Dusen mansion, a bed and breakfast where I'm staying tonight, and I thought I'd browse through the stem cell legislation that's being considered in the senate right now. It's strange: one substantive bill has come up from the House, and all of a sudden two more bills have been proposed on the floor of the Senate.
Here's the interesting one. H.R.810: Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act of 2005, proposed by Congressman Mike Castle, a Delaware Republican who isn't too thrilled with Bush's promise to veto his bill, actually does something substantial. It…
catdynamics | July 17, 2006Shamelessly cribbing from the CosmicVariance gang, DataMining has a fascinating blogosphere connectivity web image
Fascinating stuff, be fun to explore where the Scienceblogs are - hopefully cut above the morass of poliblogs at the bottom right...
Am also very curious about the edge nodes, expect to spend some late night time fiddling with this and updating random insights.
Note: the data list is old - from June 2005, so a lot of sparse links will be outdated.
catdynamics | July 17, 2006Just for yonks, I grabbed the WHO confirmed Avian Flu cases list and did a little plot of cumulative cases vs time...
The blue curve is cumulative cases; the red curve is cumulative deaths.
The date is the approximate date of WHO report, with 28 Jan 2004 as the zero date (11 cases, 8 deaths). The dates are approximate because I just counted months between the slightly uneven spaced report dates and assigned 30 days per month. Since the data is coarse grained this should not matter over this length time span.
If you fit it with an exponential, the doubling time is just about one year.
If I…
oracknows | July 17, 2006Many of the bloggers here at ScienceBlogs lament about the woeful state of science knowledge among the U.S. public. This ignorance about the basics of science and the scientific method has been blamed on many things, whether it be the poor quality of science education in the public schools, an all-too-prevalent view of science as not being "sexy" or "interesting," and the rise of a distinct antiscience bias, particularly in the present administration. Many of us have also lamented at one time or another about how this ignorance allows pseudoscientific belief systems like "intelligent design"…
pharyngula | July 17, 2006
Do vertebrate embryos exhibit significant variation in their early development? Yes, they do—in particular, the earliest stages show distinct differences that mainly reflect differences in maternal investment and that cause significant distortions of early morphology during gastrulation. However, these earliest patterns represent workarounds, strategies to accommodate one variable (the amount of yolk in the egg), and the animals subsequently reorganize to put tissues into a canonical arrangement. Observations of gene expression during gastrulation are revealing deeper similarities that are…
pharyngula | July 14, 2006Eugenie Scott is going to have to increase the length of her list of scientists out to "destroy religion." Larry Moran (fans of Talk.Origins will recognize the name) has posted an article, Theistic Evolution: The Fallacy of the Middle Ground.
There is no continuum between science and non-science. You can't practice methodological naturalism 99% of the time and still claim to be a scientist. It's all or nothing. Either your explanations of the natural world are scientific or they are not.
It's too bad his site isn't set up like a blog—you can't make comments there, so you'll have to settle…
drorzel | July 14, 2006I was scheduled for a deeply unpleasant medical test yesterday, which I thought was going to leave me lots of time for blogging. yesterday afternoon and this morning. The preliminary test turned out to be so unpleasant (if anybody ever offers to stick a tube through your nose into your stomach, decline politely) that I didn't go through with the test, and, in fact, was kind of wiped out all last night. Hence, yesterday's light blogging, and today's lazy blogging.
One of the controversial things that China Miéville said on the Readercon panels I went to was to sort of dismiss the whole idea…
pharyngula | July 13, 2006Yesterday, I reposted an article on homology within the neck and shoulder, which describes an interesting technique of using patterns of gene expression to identify homologous cellular pools; the idea is that we can discern homology more clearly by looking more closely at the molecular mechanisms, rather than focusing on final morphology and tissue derivation. Trust me, if you don't want to read it all—it's cool stuff, and one of the interesting points they make is that they've traced the fate of a particular bone not found in us mammals, but common in our pre-synapsid ancestors, the…
pharyngula | July 12, 2006(click for larger image)
A new report in this week's Nature clears up a mystery about an enigmatic fossil from the Cambrian. This small creature has been pegged as everything from a chordate to a polychaete, but a detailed analysis has determined that it has a key feature, a radula, that places it firmly in the molluscan lineage. It was a kind of small Cambrian slug that crawled over matted sheets of algae and bacteria, scraping away a meal.
Here it is, a most unprepossessing creature. It was small (less than a 5 inches long), a flattened oval with few striking features, with a small mouth…
pharyngula | July 12, 2006
Neck anatomy has long terrified me. Way back when I was a grad student, my lab studied the organization and development of the hindbrain, which was relatively tidy and segmental; my research was studying the organization and development of the spinal cord, which was also tidy and segmental. The cervical region, though, was complicated territory. It's a kind of transitional zone between two simple patterns, and all kinds of elaborate nuclei and new cell types and structural organizations flowered there. I drew a line at the fifth spinal segment and said I'm not even going to look further…
pharyngula | July 11, 2006It's July in Minnesota, and you know what that means: bugs. Clouds of bugs. Some people complain, but I generally rationalize a large population of fecund invertebrates as simply a sign of a healthy ecosystem, so yeah, we've got bugs, but it's good for us.
Except for those mosquitoes. It's hard to think charitably of some invertebrates when you're lying in bed at night and you hear…that…high-pitched whine rising as the nearly invisible little blood-sucker buzzes by your exposed flesh. Now, in a discovery calculated to increase my irritation, I learn that the little bastards are singing a love…
catdynamics | July 10, 2006It is the Tesla Sesquicentennial!
Happy Birthday!
No, not this Tesla, that Tesla
As his SI unit celebrates he was clearly a very intense guy.
Though I don't know that he was really 10,000 Gauss!
Coturnix is the Source for all things Tesla
pharyngula | July 10, 2006George W Bush hasn't vetoed a single bill in all these long, long years of his presidency. Guess what issue might finally convince him to move?
He's willing to veto any expansion of stem cell research.
That's our George. Science isn't part of his base, so he'll willingly throw that away to make the church-based ignoramuses happy. Zygotes must be spared! It's the ones that have been born that can be used as cannon fodder.
pharyngula | July 10, 2006It's his birthday, and Coturnix has gathered about eleventy billion links to Tesliana (Teslaniana? Is there a word for this, or am I just making things up?)
pharyngula | July 10, 2006Carel Brest van Kempen has extracted a few fascinating quotes from an old book he has. It's titled Creative and Sexual Science, by a phrenologist and physiologist from 1870, and it contains some wonderful old examples of folk genetics.
President Bush would be pleased:
"Human and animal hybrids are denounced most terribly in the Bible; obviously because the mixing up of man with beast, or one beast species with another, deteriorates. Universal amalgamation would be disastrous."
Although, unfortunately, he then goes on to use this as an argument against miscegenation.
Another lesson is that…