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gregladen | May 10, 2011UC Davis Prof Steps Down from Chair-ship over his own misogynist treatment of grad students:
A while back
...a department chair in the veterinary school at the University of California at Davis had polled a class on what grade he should give to a student who had to miss some quizzes because she had given birth.
This week,
... the university released a statement from Edward Feldman, chair of the medicine and epidemiology department, in which he apologized for the incident in his class, and said that he was complying with the university's request to step down as chair.
source
Birthers are…
gregladen | May 8, 2011We explore the changing ways that medicine and culture have treated pregnancy and childbirth. We'll talk with doctor and medical journalist Randi Hutter Epstein, about her book Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth From the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank. And on another edition of Everything You Know is Sort Of Wrong, Greg Laden looks at common misconceptions about life expectancy.
CLICK HERE!!!
heathero | May 8, 2011
As many of you are no doubt aware, both mitochondria and chloroplasts are thought to have come to us via microbial endosymbiosis (that is one cell living within another) with prokaryokes. Some photosynthetic bacteria eons ago found itself nestled inside another cell, realized it was a pretty sweet place to call home, and viola - a new cell organelle was born. OK fine, that is a bit of an oversimplification. The endosymbiotic theory is a bit more complicated, but that's the general idea. The details of how a symbiont over time could lose its unique identity and became a part of the host…
krandall | May 6, 2011Today, NASA announced three future key missions preselected as part of the Discovery program named GEMS, TiME and Comet Hopper. This is an important announcement, which was eagerly expected by our community.
The NASA Discovery program is a low-cost mission ($425 million FY2010) program aimed at developing and supporting a well-defined and narrow-range science mission in the field of planetary exploration. Discovery is a dynamic and highly valuable program which had led to a lot of well-known missions with a wide range of scientific goals including (adapted from Visions & Voyages Decadal…
gregladen | May 5, 2011This will be of interest to many of you:
Karen Stollznow and Elizabeth Loftus Join the Board
Amherst, NY-May 5, 2011-The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) welcomes two additions to its executive council. Karen Stollznow and Elizabeth Loftus recently accepted posts.
Karen Stollznow has spent over a decade investigating pseudoscientific and paranormal beliefs and practices, including ghosts, aura reading, psychics, medical intuitives, alternatives therapies, mediums, faith healing, conspiracy theories, cults, pareidolia (seeing faces on places other than heads), religion, haunted houses,…
stoat | May 5, 2011 However, I'm inclined to think that he isn't a tosser, just naive (as someone said, I don't think Tim understands the policy world very well). He looks a bit naive in his picture, doesn't he? And that is a sure-fire way to tell. But maybe that is me being naive. Well, let me tell you and you can make up your own mind.
Assuming you can be bothered, go off and read his piece in Nature: 2 °C or not 2 °C? That is the climate question (you ought to; please don't rely on my biased reporting of him :-). Tim has a laudable aim: he wants to ensure that global efforts to tackle the climate problem…
gregladen | May 5, 2011May 5th, 1961. Freedom 7. The United States took its first small step on its journey to the moon...
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Do you hear the nervousness in his voice? I think the whole thing got a bit more causal, but not necessarily much safer, later on in the space program.
"I had not realized the intensity of the emotions and feelings that so many people had for me, the other astronauts, the whole damned manned space program. This was the first sense of adulation, a sense of public response, a sense of public expression of thanks for…
gregladen | May 5, 2011May 5th. The Mexican holiday Cinco de Mayo falls on the fifth this year. Auspicious? No. Calendric. But the fifth of May is a day on which interesting things tend to have happened. For Mexico, this is the day on which the Mexican army defeated the French army at Puebla in 1862. Strangely, the holiday is celebrated in the United States to a greater degree than in Mexico. Go figure.
This is also the International Day of Reason, and this is also the day that John Scopes was arrested for teaching evolution in Dayton, Tennessee, in the year 1925. That led to the famous "Scopes Monkey Trial…
pronald | May 2, 2011
For more information on Gunilla and Finn's farm, puppies, and sheep dog training click here.
mspringer | May 2, 2011Some initial thoughts, on a beautiful day in a palpably better world without Osama:
1. I'm astonished he was still alive. I was certain he died from an anonymous bomb or health problems sometime between '01 and '04. He hadn't released any tapes or videos with unambiguous confirmation of when they were recorded, and the general consensus was that al-Qaida was now a fully decentralized organization that had adjusted to operating without him. The fact that he wasn't dead meant that, unlike his suicide bombers and guerrillas, he had basically abandoned his own cause to live in (very) quiet luxury…
gregladen | May 1, 2011President Obama spoke at 10:36 CT.
He gave a quick review of 9/11 and of ten years of work by military and counter-terrorism professionals, citing accomplishments as well as failure to catch Osama bin Laden.
President Obama made capture/killing of bin Laden top CIA priority. In August, they picked up a lead that then took months to run to ground, leading to a compound deep inside Pakistan. The operation to capture him was authorized last week. Today, the operation was carried out in Abbottabad, Pakistan, 150km north of Islamabad. No US casualties. There was a firefight in which bin…
cwilcox | May 1, 2011Osama Bin Laden is dead. At least, that's what we've been told, and I tend to believe such things.
But how do they know it's him? Well, they have the visual evidence and the body, for one. But to be certain it's not a look-a-like, the government has taken steps above and beyond to make sure they've got who they think they have: DNA analysis.
Now, I'm not entirely sure what DNA analysis has been done, but I can say this for certain - whatever method they used could be completed in a matter of hours given a lab ready to go and focused solely on this. Using commonplace PCR methods - which, for…
gregladen | April 30, 2011John Hunter puts all the problems of the world on a 4'x5' plywood board -- and lets his 4th-graders solve them. At TED2011, he explains how his World Peace Game engages schoolkids, and why the complex lessons it teaches -- spontaneous, and always surprising -- go further than classroom lectures can.
pharyngula | April 29, 2011
As you know by now, we're in a fierce competition between myself, the mega-behemoth of godless blogging, against a ragtag flock of motley pee-wee bloggers, all to raise money for Camp Quest.
I am privy to certain emails that have been flying, I should mention, and they reveal that my opposition are scoundrels and rapscallions. They see defeat staring them in the face, and they have a desperate plan: they hope to recruit more atheists to their team, to try and outnumber me even further…not that it will help.
In the face of this threat, I have no choice: I sought out allies of my own. And…
gregladen | April 29, 2011Medical ethicist Harvey Fineberg shows us three paths forward for the ever-evolving human species: to stop evolving completely, to evolve naturally -- or to control the next steps of human evolution, using genetic modification, to make ourselves smarter, faster, better. Neo-evolution is within our grasp. What will we do with it?
Bullshit or brilliant?
sciencepunk | April 29, 2011Thanks to W. W. Norton & Co. for passing me a copy of The Art of Immersion, by Wired's Frank Rose. The book deals with one of my favourite subjects: storytelling, and how technology is shaping the way we tell stories. After four pages I had to put it down and fetch a pen and paper to keep track of all the ideas it was conjouring in my mind. And that was just the preface! So I thought it would be fair to write a quick review.
The brilliance of The Art of Immersion, to me as a story-teller, is that Rose only hints at the application of the technologies he discusses. With a few well-…
pharyngula | April 28, 2011Coral Ridge Ministries, that awful fundagelical organization founded by D. James Kennedy, has "discovered" a couple of former workers willing to testify about the evil practices of Planned Parenthood.
"They have an abortion budget and they have a certain number of patients that you have to perform abortions on every month, and there's a dollar amount attached to each woman."
Everett's business plan included outreach in schools with talks given to break down children's natural modesty and promote Everett and her clinic associates as trusted authorities for all things sexual.
Everett…
gregladen | April 28, 2011The feeling of security and the reality of security don't always match, says computer-security expert Bruce Schneier. At TEDxPSU, he explains why we spend billions addressing news story risks, like the "security theater" now playing at your local airport, while neglecting more probable risks -- and how we can break this pattern.
gregladen | April 27, 2011ERV joined Scienceblogs on this day in 2008. Seems like only a couple of years ago. Happy Anniversary, ERV!