Science
pharyngula | July 4, 2006Here I am, in the upper midwest, and I still haven't made it to the Field Museum in Chicago—Chicago is just far enough away that I can't quite make the trip, and it's close enough that it doesn't sound at all exotic. I just have to rely on other people's accounts. (I've also noticed that Megatherium is a spectacular specimen.)
tqa | July 3, 2006
The ScienceBlogs Bloggers' Challenge was wildly successful, raising well over 30,000 dollars in 15 days to fund education projects at individual schools. The challenge here at The Questionable Authority was also successful, bringing in a bit over $650.00, meeting the goal that I set.
Thanks to all of the donors to both my own little contribution and to the broader challenge.
pharyngula | July 2, 2006The science blogosphere must be getting big if it can support biology subspecialty carnivals: now you can read collections of posts about just bioinformatics or genetics. And here I thought a general science carnival might be too narrow to draw in a wide readership, way back in the dark ages!
pharyngula | July 1, 2006First, I was impressed that homosexuals had such immense power that they could trigger earthquakes, but then, darn it, someone had to actually look at the data.
pharyngula | June 30, 2006Once upon a time, as a young undergraduate, I took a course in neurobiology (which turned out to be rather influential in my life, but that's another story). The professor, Johnny Palka, took pains at the beginning to explain to his class full of pre-meds and other such riff-raff that the course was going to study how the brain works, and that we were going to be looking at invertebrates almost exclusively—and he had to carefully reassure them that flies and squid actually did have brains, very good brains, and that he almost took it as a personal offense when his students implied that they…
pharyngula | June 29, 2006I suppose this is a kind of threat—an archaic and quaint threat, but I'm sure some people take it seriously—but the Catholic church has made a strong statement against embryonic stem cell research.
The Vatican stepped up its fight against embryonic stem cell research on Wednesday, saying that scientists involved in such work would be excommunicated.
Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, head of the Vatican department dealing with family affairs, said in a magazine interview that "destroying human embryos is equivalent to an abortion... it's the same thing".
"Excommunication applies to all women,…
catdynamics | June 28, 2006ScienceBlogger asks: "What are some unsung successes that have occurred as a result of using science to guide policy?"
Um, errr...
Ok, since the place is full of bio/med/geo types, lets narrow the field to astro and space.
Astronomers have been extremely successful in guiding space science policy, at least through to 2005, through the little know advisory committees and various NRC, AAS and APS small, high prestige, ad hoc committees that make recommendations like "the decadal survey" and how astro and physics should interplay their priorities, like Quarks to Cosmos.
These are major…
catdynamics | June 28, 2006
From space.com
Vandenberg AFB launched an NRO sat on a Delta 4 last night.
Launch was scheduled around 8 pm, I had dinner obligations but we sat outside and I was facing the right way, less than perfect angle, but still.
Actual launch was 8:33, so I missed the burn, saw the sunset reflect off the trail as it broke up and realised I had missed it. Still a beautiful sight, with a new moon on the horizon over the ocean.
This rather nice flickr photo is almost exactly like the view I had, just substitute the foreground with a roofline of a mexican restaurant.
I, of course, didn't bring a…
pharyngula | June 28, 2006
Maybe half of my audience here will be familiar with this problem. You're a man, and you're hauling this massive, ummm, package around in your pants everywhere you go. Other men fear you, while the women worship you…yet at the same time, your e-mail is stuffed to bursting with strange people making friendly offers to help you make it even bigger. It's a dilemma; you think you would be even more godlike if only it were larger, but could there possibly be any downside to it? (There is a bit of folk wisdom that inflating it drains all the blood from the brain, but this is clearly false. Men who…
pharyngula | June 27, 2006
One of many open questions in evolution is the nature of bilaterian origins—when the first bilaterally symmetrical common ancestor (the Last Common Bilaterian, or LCB) to all of us mammals and insects and molluscs and polychaetes and so forth arose, and what it looked like. We know it had to have been small, soft, and wormlike, and that it lived over 600 million years ago, but unfortunately, it wasn't the kind of beast likely to be preserved in fossil deposits.
We do have a tool to help us get a glimpse of it, though: the analysis of extant organisms, searching for those common features that…
drorzel | June 27, 2006An open thread comment over at Making Light triggered a discussion of what words and phrases could serve as reliable markers of SF fandom. (It continues for a good while, but at times is nearly buried in discussion of Japanese knotweed.).
This got me to wondering about what phrases would serve as similar markers for scientists-- that is, what are the words or phrases that would reliably mark someone as a scientist (other than a tendency to start sentences with "So, ...")?
My best guess for a general science phrase would be some variant of "[really hard thing] is left as an exercise for the…
drorzel | June 27, 2006Via Cosmic Variance, news of the Shaw Prize in Astronomy for 2006:
Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess, and Brian Schmidt are awarded the Shaw Prize in Astronomy 2006 in recognition of their leadership roles on the two teams that made the remarkable discovery of an acceleration in the rate of the expansion of the universe. Such an effect had been known theoretically since shortly after Einstein applied his theory of general relativity to cosmology, but the general belief, including Einstein¡¦s own assessment, was that the cosmological constant had no basis in reality. Thus, the 1998 announcement of…
drorzel | June 26, 2006I've got a grant proposal to review, and a progress report to write for one of my own grants, so you're getting short, link-y physics blogging:
- The Strings 2006 conference has ended, with the participants apparently deciding to keep up with this "string theory" thing (maybe you've heard of it?) for a little while longer. Talk slides from many of the speakers are available here. Of course, if you can understand them, you probably already knew that, and if you didn't know that, you probably won't get much from the slides, but there you go.
- The Wall Street Journal piece talking about Peter…
pharyngula | June 25, 2006
After visiting the Body Worlds exhibit today, my short summary is that it was disappointing, but it wasn't all bad.
I'll get the complaints over first. Here's the thing: I like my biology wet. It's supposed to be vital and dynamic and messy and complicated, but it all ties together into a lovely integrated whole. A collection of plastinated cadavers is precisely the opposite of what I enjoy about the science: it's dead and static and distressingly dry. Seriously, when you've got a kidney on a table, it should look meaty and quiver a bit and lie there in a nice saucy pool of blood—it shouldn'…
oracknows | June 25, 2006Lord Runolfr recently reminded me of a bit of wisdom, courtesy of the Doctor (fourth Doctor, played by Tom Baker) from the episode entitled The Face of Evil. Here's the quote:
You know, the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit their views. Which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.
Apply this quote as you see fit. It certainly rings true.
It also reminds me of some other good Doctor Who quotes:
'Oil? An emergency? Ha! It's about time the people who run…
pharyngula | June 24, 2006Here's a dilemma: I think Ron Numbers, the philosopher and historian of science, is a smart fellow and a net asset to the opposition to creationism, and I agree with him that a diversity of approaches to the issue is a good thing. My opinion could change, though, because I am experiencing considerable exasperation with the apologists for religion on the evolution side, and this interview with Numbers isn't helping things. Here's an example of the kind of nonsense that drives me nuts.
QUESTION: Are scientists in general atheistic?
MR. NUMBERS: The public often gets the impression that most…
pharyngula | June 23, 2006Two short articles in this week's Science link the orb-weaving spiders back to a common ancestor in the Early Cretaceous, with both physical and molecular evidence. What we have is a 110-million-year-old piece of amber that preserves a piece of an orb web and some captured prey, and a new comparative study of spider silk proteins that ties together the two orb-weaving lineages, the Araneoidea and the Deinopoidea, and dates their last common ancestor to 136 million years ago.
Araneoids and Deinopoids build similar looking webs—a radial frame supporting a sticky spiral—but they differ in how…
pharyngula | June 23, 2006Cosmology is almost as interesting as developmental biology, and now you can read a short summary of the origins of the universe at Daily Kos.
oracknows | June 22, 2006In the light of recently discovered possible chicanery on the part of Mark Geier and his dubious IRB, I found this report by John Leavitt very interesting:
My interest in inserting bacterial genes into mammalian cells stemmed from a paper published in Nature in 1971 by NIH scientists, Carl Merril, Mark Geier, and John Petricciani, entitled "Bacterial Virus Gene Expression in Human Cells." (Nature 233:398-400). Merril and colleagues presented experiments that claimed to show that a bacterial gene encoding galactosyltransferase, transduced into a bacteriophage DNA molecule, could be '…
drorzel | June 22, 2006I'm not about to stay up all night to post to every channel on the front page, but I will make a brief appearance in the "Culture Wars" channel, not my usual space, to note two science and religion items:
1) Rob Knop offers lecture slides on the scientific method, and the difference between scientific and religious approaches.
2) A new blog, See You at Enceladus offers a slightly different take on Why Creationism Is Stupid (below the fold):
This is what scientists been doing for the last 300 years or so. They been that "listen" to what the universe has to say about history. In fact, ideally…