Science
pharyngula | January 24, 2006Cory Doctorow visited the Nature offices, and gave what sounds like a very thought-provoking talk. It's all about the past and future of intellectual property, the net as a tool for creating relationships between authors and readers, and some odd legal maneuverings on the horizon.
pharyngula | January 24, 2006
Majikthise reports that an Australian couple has found a $295,000 lump of ambergris on a beach. Ambergris is cool stuff, so let me add to it's splendor by bringing up two scientific views of it.
First, let's hear from the chemists:
Since ancient times, ambergris has been one of the most highly valued perfumery materials. It is secreted in the stomach or intestinal tract of the sperm whale and released into the sea in the form of a grey to black stone-like mass. When exposed to sunlight, air and sea water, the material gradually fades to a light grey or creamy yellow colour and, at the same…
drorzel | January 24, 2006The first and oldest of the experiments in the Top Eleven is actually a two-fer: Galileo Galilei is nominated both for the discovery of the moons of Jupiter, and for his experiments on the motion of falling objects.
Who: Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), the great Italian physicist, astronomer, and general Renaissance man.
When: He's known to have made the first observations of the moons of Jupiter around 1610. The dates of the experiments on accelerated objects are fuzzier, but around the same time.
What: Shortly after obtaining a telescope (after its invention by Dutch astronomers), Galileo…
drorzel | January 24, 2006Evil elves have apparently snuck into the house in the middle of the night, and stuffed my sinuses with cotton and motor oil (the dog is sitting here muttering "I told you there were evil elves out there but did you listen? 'Stop barking at nothing,' you said..." Or maybe that's the drugs.). This sort of cuts down on my ability to think Deep Thoughts and post the results here.
I can, however, carry out mechanical tasks like tallying the nominations for the Greatest Physics Experiment (to go with Clifford's Greatest Physics Paper on the theory side). The list of experiments mentioned by at…
pharyngula | January 24, 2006
First, a tiny bit of quantitative morphological data you can find in just about any comparative anatomy text:
mammal
number of vertebrae
cervical
thoracic
lumbar
sacral
caudal
horse
7
18
6
5
15-21
cow
7
13
6
5
18-20
sheep
7
13
6-7
4
16-18
pig
7
14-15
6-7
4
20-23
dog
7
13
7
3
20-23
human
7
12
5
5
3-4
The number of thoracic vertebrae varies quite a bit, from 9 in a species
of whale to 25 in sloths. The numbers of lumbar, sacral, and more caudal vertebrae also show considerable variation. At the same time, there is a surprising amount of invariance in the number of cervical…
pharyngula | January 23, 2006Since I mentioned yesterday that penis size mattered, upon stumbling on this article about the horrific effects of a trematode infestation, I thought everyone might enjoy a grim and vivid picture of what trematodes can do to a poor, innocent mollusc.
This is a photo of a trematode, or fluke. Trematodes are parasitic flatworms with very complex life cycles; this particular one is a cercaria, or tailed larva. They swim about and infest various hosts at various stages, proliferating and spreading through tissues, before moving on to infect the next host in their cycle.
This particular trematode…
drorzel | January 23, 2006Thursday night, I needed to work late, so rather than upset the dog by going home for dinner, and then leaving, I went for sushi at a local restaurant. I had a very pleasant meal, which I spent reading through the first few chapters of the textbook I plan to use for my Quantum Optics class next term (to make sure it will work for my purposes), and listening to the woman at the table next to me talk to her kids (ages 7 and 9, and cutely overactive).
Eventually, the kids wandered off to go pester the sushi chef (they're apparently regulars), and their mother asked me "What is it you're reading…
pharyngula | January 22, 2006I hate those commercials on cable TV for Enz*te, that fake "male enhancement" product that promises a "boost of confidence" for all the guys who take their little pill. I don't believe it, of course—it's probably a concoction of sawdust and rat droppings. But the phenomenon of male confidence as a function of the size of their physical attributes might just have some validity.
AL Basolo, who did some well-known work on mate preference in swordtails a few years ago (short answer: lady swordtails prefer males with longer swords), has a couple of new papers on the subject. She has looked at…
drorzel | January 22, 2006It's depressingly typical of my life that we would get BoingBoing-ed on a weekend when I'm visiting the in-laws...
I've gotten a bunch of responses to my earlier request for "Great Experiments" in other areas of science, and I thought I'd collect the links in one post (many of them show up as TrackBacks to the original post, but some don't):
RPM's list of Best Biology Experiments/Discoveries on Evolgen.
Razib at Gene Expression offers another set of biology discoveries.
Dave and Greta Munger agree on a single great cognitive science experiment (with nifty graphics!)
Tara at Aetiology lists…
ddobbs | January 20, 2006As a story in today’s ScienceNow [subscription required] by the indefatigable Jennifer Couzin details, the last week has brought more “expressions of concern” from leading journals over prominent papers written by leading scientists. The latest concern regards papers in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2001 and 2004 and The Lancet in 2004 about oral cancer research done by Jon Sudbø of Oslo’s Norwegian Radium Hospital.
The papers had claimed to make progress in distinguishing which mouth lesions are most at risk for developing into cancer — a breakthrough that might make earlier…
pharyngula | January 20, 2006DarkSyde has another of his Science Friday interviews on dKos—this time with the gang at Real Climate.
pharyngula | January 19, 2006
Nematostella, the starlet anemone, is a nifty new model system for evo-devo work that I've mentioned a few times before—in articles on "Bilateral symmetry in a sea anemone" and "A complex regulatory network in a diploblast"—and now I see that there is a website dedicated to the starlet anemone and a genomics database, StellaBase. It's taking off!
pharyngula | January 19, 2006
Variation is common, and often lingers in places where it is unexpected. The drawing to the left is from West-Eberhard's Developmental Plasticity and Evolution(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and illustrates six common variations in the branching pattern of the aortic arch in humans. These are differences that have no known significance to our lives, and aren't even visible except in the hopefully rare situations in which a surgeon opens our chests.
This is the kind of phenomenon in which I've become increasingly interested. I work with a model system, the zebrafish, and supposedly one of the…
pharyngula | January 19, 2006
There's a lovely article in this week's Nature documenting a transitional stage in tetrapod evolution (you know, those forms the creationists like to say don't exist), and a) Nature provides a publicly accessible review of the finding, and b) the primary author is already a weblogger! Perhaps there will come a day when I'm obsolete and willl just have to turn my hand to blogging about what I had for lunch.
For an extra super-duper dose of delicious comeuppance, though, take a look at this thread on the Panda's Thumb. I wrote about Panderichthys, and a creationist ("Ghost of Paley") comes…
pharyngula | January 19, 2006Hey! I'm supposed to host the Circus of the Spineless next week (I think on 29 January), and I've only received one submission so far! Someone must have written something somewhere about invertebrates, right? There is a set of rules for submissions, but it's going to be simple: I'll accept anything about any organisms outside the class Vertebrata.
I'll spell it out. You can write about the phyla Acanthocephala, Acoelomorpha, Annelida, Arthropoda, Brachiopoda, Bryozoa, Chaetognatha, Cnidaria, Ctenophora, Cycliophora, Echinodermata, Echiura, Entoprocta, Gastrotricha, Gnathostomulida,…
pharyngula | January 18, 2006Open Thread
I'm doing some traveling and touristy things with grrlscientist today, on top of somehow coping with the first week of classes (physiology and our freshman seminar in biological principles), and attending Drinking Liberally at the 331 Club tonight. I also have to get tickets to the Prairie Home Companion show that will be taped here at UMM on 11 February…it all adds up to me being a little scattered and distracted and otherwise occupied for much of today. You all are just going to have to fend for yourselves for a bit.
Here is a short list of things I should write about, but won't…
drorzel | January 17, 2006Newton's Principia has won the prestigious Cosmic Variance Greatest Paper contest, with Dirac's theory of the electron coming in second. I'm still accepting nominations for the greatest physics experiment ever (probably until the weekend, when I'll have time to do something with the list...).
Thinking about this, it occurs to me that this might be a good topic for some cross-ScienceBlogs discussion, if any of my co-bloggers are interested. I've got a decent idea of what the great experiments in physics are, but I'm pretty hazy on what would be considered the short list in the other fields we…
pharyngula | January 16, 2006This is a post originally made on the old Pharyngula website; I'll be reposting some of these now and then to bring them aboard the new site.
There are a number of reasons why the current theory of evolution should be regarded as incomplete. The central one is that while "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution", some important disciplines within biology, development and physiology, have only been weakly integrated into the theory.
Raff (1996) in his book The Shape of Life(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) gives some of the historical reasons for the divorce of evolution and…
pharyngula | January 16, 2006The Hwang Woo Suk stem cell research scandal has triggered quite a bit of concerned introspection in the scientific community. Orac has some useful comments on a good article in the NY Times that makes the distinction between "frontier science" and "textbook science", where much of the current stem cell research is clearly on the frontier.
Much of science at the very frontiers turns out not to be correct. However, the way it is all too often reported in the press is that it is correct. We in science understand the difference between textbook science and the sort of frontier science that makes…
pharyngula | January 14, 2006Bredocaris admirabilis
Ooooh, there's a gorgeous gallery of Orsten fossils online. These are some very pretty SEMs of tiny Cambrian animals, preserved in a kind of rock called Orsten, or stinkstone (apparently, the high sulfur content of the rock makes it smell awful). What are Orsten fossils?
Orsten fossils in the strict sense are spectacular minute secondarily phosphatised (apatitic) fossils, among them many Crustacea of different evolutionary levels, but also other arthropods and nemathelminths. The largest fragments we have do not exceed two mm. Orsten-type fossils, on the other hand,…