Science
drorzel | April 7, 2006Mark Chu-Carroll has a very nice discussion of what "extra dimensions" actually mean in theories like string theory. It's not the same thing that hack SF authors mean when they talk about "dimensions" in which the Nazis won WWII (that's "multiverse theory" or possibly "landscapeology" or possibly "late-night stoner bullshit"):
A better way to explain, but a slightly less intuitive one is to not separate dimensions quite so much. The set of dimensions in a space is the number of pieces of information that you need to identify a unique location in that space.
On a plane, you can put down a…
evolgen | April 6, 2006Andre at BioCurious has checked out the authorship of the Tiktaalik papers and concluded that the grad students got jobbed, PhD comics style:
Another thing I noticed is that only the supervisors are listed as authors on the two papers they published. I know there were many grad students also involved in the project because Daeschler showed a picture of someone fighting off a dust storm trying to get gear from a landing helicopter and he joked that that's what they're for. At least, I thought he was joking... Maybe it's a palaeontology thing, but if this was say, a particle physics paper, all…
pharyngula | April 6, 2006There has been an oddly evasive struggle going on in Washington DC for the last several years. We have a safe, easy method of emergency contraception that has been turned into a political football, with Republicans playing their usual role of criminally stupid thugs, trying to crush a simple idea: Plan B contraception. It illustrates exactly how the Religious Right is trying to intrude on your private life, and in particular, how they want to control women.
I'll explain how Plan B works, but to do so I'm going to have to explain some basics of the hormonal control of the menstrual cycle.
This…
pharyngula | April 6, 2006
I just put of copy of "Embrace your inner fish" outside my office door. I want it on a T-shirt now.
(via The Austringer)
pharyngula | April 5, 2006My wife thought this story about left-handed snails having a competitive advantage, in that they seem to be better able to escape predation by right-handed crabs, was pretty cool. She also recalled that I'd scribbled up something about snail handedness before, so to jump on the bandwagon, I've brought those stories over from the old site.
The handedness of snail shells is a consequence of early spiral cleavages in the blastula. It's a classic old story in developmental biology—everyone ought to know it!
There was also a story last year about shell chirality in Euhadra. There, it wasn't a…
pharyngula | April 5, 2006
Since Coturnix turned me on to this paper on snail chirality in PLoS (pdf), I had to sit down and learn something new this afternoon.
Chirality is a fascinating aspect of bilaterian morphology. We have characteristic asymmetries—differences between the left and right sides of our bodies—that are prescribed by genetic factors. Snails are particularly interesting examples because snail shells have an obvious handedness, with either a left-(sinistral) or right-handed (dextral) twist, and that handedness derives from the arrangement of cell divisions very early in development.
Sinistral (left)…
pharyngula | April 5, 2006
Developmental biologists are acutely interested in asymmetries in development: they are visible cues to some underlying regional differences. For instance, we'd like to know the molecules and interactions involved in taking a seemingly featureless sphere, the egg, and specifying one side to go on to form a head, and the the opposite side to form a tail. We'd like to understand why our back (or dorsal) side looks different from our belly (or ventral) side. One particularly intriguing distinction, though, is the left-right axis. For the most part, left and right are nearly identical, mirror-…
pharyngula | April 5, 2006Paleontologists have uncovered yet another specimen in the lineage leading to modern tetrapods, creating more gaps that will need to be filled. It's a Sisyphean job, working as an evolutionist.
This creature is called Tiktaalik roseae, and it was discovered in a project that was specifically launched to find a predicted intermediate form between a distinctly fish-like organism, Panderichthys, and the distinctly tetrapod-like organisms, Acanthostega and Ichthyostega. From the review article by Ahlberg and Clack, we get this summary of Tiktaalik's importance:
First, it demonstrates the…
drorzel | April 5, 2006As someone who has derived a surprising amount of blog traffic from posting about weight loss, I feel like I really ought to say something about Alas, A Blog's case against dieting (which I first noticed via a Dave Munger comment). It's a comprehensive collection of data (with graphs, so it must be Science) used to argue that the current weight-loss mania is all a bunch of crap, summarized thusly:
1) No weight-loss diet has every been scientifically shown to produce substantial long-term weight loss in any but a tiny minority of dieters.
2) Whether or not a weight-loss diet "works," people…
evolgen | April 4, 2006Seed is sponsoring their first ever writing contest. The topic:
Amidst emerging competitive threats from abroad (China and India in particular) and heated debates over intelligent design, stem cells and climate change: What is the future of science in America? What should the US do to preserve and build upon its role as a leader in scientific innovation?
The top three essays will win cash prizes and be published by Seed.
drorzel | April 4, 2006The post title is a famous William Gibson quote, referring to the tendency of high-tech gadgets to be put to uses the manufacturers never expected. By "the Street," he meant people in general, with maybe a slant toward the sort of underclass element he focusses on in his books, but he might well have been referring to bored grad students. Witness Dylan Stiles and the Man-o-Meter, which assigns a numerical value to machismo, based on your skill at, in the words of one commenter, fellating a digital manometer.
We didn't get up to that much of this sort of foolishness in my lab, in part because…
pharyngula | April 4, 2006Pianka speaks out. Nick Matzke has a good post on Pianka at the Thumb, addressing the smear campaign against him*. He links to an interview with the good Dr—what he's saying is simple sense, common in the biological community, and he's not endorsing mass murder…he's talking about conservation and planning ahead. Mims is a "crazy kook" who distorted the story and turned it into screaming match.
Get used to it. This is part of the right-wing strategy to attack the academy: when scientists honestly state bad news (and there is much bad news, and it's growing), they are going to be rabidly…
oracknows | April 4, 2006Having gone to two meetings in less than two weeks, I've noticed something different about how I approach meetings. Surgical meetings often reflect the truly bizarre nature of surgeon personalities. For example, the meeting in San Diego that I went to had one session that started at--I kid you not--6 AM. True, they did lure us in with a full breakfast, the only session that offered more than coffee and the occasional snack, but even for a surgeon getting up to show up at such an early session is a bit brutal. Back when I was younger, I would actually get up to go to that session, because it…
pharyngula | April 3, 2006There are these fossilized embryos from the Ediacaran, approximately 570 million years ago, that have been uncovered in the Doushantuo formation in China. I've mentioned them before, and as you can see below, they are genuinely spectacular.
Parapandorina raphospissa
But, you know, I work with comparable fresh embryos all the time, and I can tell you that they are incredibly fragile—it's easy to damage them and watch them pop (that's a 2.3MB Quicktime movie), and dead embryos die and decay with amazing speed, minutes to hours. Dead cells release enzymes that trigger a process called autolysis…
evolgen | April 3, 2006It looks like the United States is not the only nation sending molecular markers into orbit. From the New York Times:
The spacecraft is small by world standards -- a microsatellite of a few hundred pounds. Launched in October by the Russians for an oil-rich client, it orbits the earth once every 99 minutes and reportedly has a camera for peering down on large swaths of land.
The punch line comes in the next paragraph: the satellite is owned by Iran. No report as to whether it's a CA or AT repeat.
pharyngula | April 3, 2006The Pianka situation is getting very, very ugly. I've been chatting with a member of the Texas Academy of Science, and people there are getting death threats over it. Here's one example of the kind of email they're getting:
While Heinrich Himmler's "final solution" was limited to exterminating the Jews,
Dr. Eric R. Pianka promotes a FINAL SOLUTION for 90% of earth's population. In
accepting the 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist award, Heir Pianka was
interrupted with applause and received a standing ovation.
"Soylent Green is people." And the way cinema's futurist society dealt
with over…
pharyngula | April 1, 2006Some fields of science are so wide open, such virgin swamps of unexplored territory, that it takes some radically divergent approaches to make any headway. There will always be opinionated, strong-minded investigators who charge in deeply and narrowly, committed to their pet theories, and there will also be others who consolidate information and try to synthesize the variety of approaches taken. There are dead ends and areas of solid progress, and there is much flailing about until the promising leads are discovered.
Origins of life research is such an unsettled frontier. I wouldn't want to…
oracknows | April 1, 2006Sadly, unlike my post a couple of hours ago, this is not an April Fools jest.
Evolgen previously reported on the success of the Specter-Harkin Amendment in the Senate to change a completely flat National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget containing actual real cuts to the budget of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to one with a modest increase in fiscal year 2007. Both the American Association of Cancer Research (AACR) and Genetics Society of America both weighed in when the budget was sent to the House in order to garner support in committee for adding an amendment similar to the Specter…
oracknows | April 1, 2006You know, after all these years as a scientist, physician, and skeptic, I've been wondering. Perhaps it's time to undergo a reassessment of my and philosophy. I've always been a bit of a curmudgeon, and it hasn't really gotten me anywhere. My words appear to have no impact on the credulous.
For example, perhaps I've been a bit harder than I should be on purveyors of dubious alternative medicine. Millions of people use it every day. Would they use it if there weren't anything to it? I think not. After all, look at all those testimonials for chelation therapy, Reiki therapy, Chinese energy…
oracknows | March 31, 2006Congrats are in order to fellow blogger Phil Plait (a.k.a. The Bad Astronomer) whose blog Bad Astronomy (a misnomer if ever there was one, given the amount of good astronomy he regularly writes about) garnered a favorable mention in the Netwatch section of Science.
Hopefully this will bring Bad Astronomy to more of the masses.