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krandall | August 3, 2010Don Backer, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley who discovered the first millisecond pulsar, died on July 25. He was director of Berkeley's Radio Astronomy Laboratory and the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) in Hat Creek, California - a collection of 42 dishes that recently began scanning the sky and searching for extraterrestrial intelligence.
"Memories of a special moment with Don Backer"
By Jill Tarter
Don and I had only a few glancing interactions from the time we were engineering physics students at Cornell until one memorable day in 1982. On that day I pulled my…
dr. dolittle | August 3, 2010 I dread packing and flying, but on the planner for August is the 2010 APS Intersociety Meeting: Global Change and Global Science: Comparative Physiology in a Changing World http://the-aps.org/meetings/aps/comparative/index.htm. A must-do meeting for me.
The theme of the meeting is how comparative and evolutionary animal physiologists can contribute to understanding the consequences of global change and how understanding global change requires broad, global science. Seems as if this is the first conference of any type to focus mainly on the effects of global climate change on animal…
gregladen | August 3, 2010Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
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jgoldman | August 3, 2010
Welcome to the 26th edition of the Carnival of Evolution!
To begin, consider the adaptive rhymes of evolution from the Digital Cuttlefish.
There was a LOT of evolutionary blogging this month, so let's just jump right in to the rest, shall we?
Let's start with animals (This is the Thoughtful Animal blog, after all.)
Zen Faulkes at Neurodojo starts us out with a sweet tale of a lizard in a life-boat. He asks, "How old would you expect the Bermuda skink lineage to be? 'Well, the island's only two million years old, so it's got to be younger than that.' " The answer may surprise you. And,…
dr. dolittle | August 3, 2010
Okay, so I am searching the internet looking for information on the reproductive physiology of chickens...and I come across this crazy story of how some chickens are half male and half female. Sounds like an advertisement for a new science fiction movie, doesn't it? After doing some research on the issue (i.e. Googling it), it turns out that this is not a promotion for a movie after all. Scientists from the Roslin Institute at the University Edinburgh have been studying this mysterious rare occurrence of what they call "cell autonomous sex identity", or CASI. According to an article in…
gregladen | August 2, 2010A new mammal species has been discovered in Madagascar, and is described here on Tetrapod Zoology. It is NOT a primate.
Brian Switek reviews Shooting in the Wild: An Insider's Account of Making Movies in the Animal Kingdom, an important book that "an in-depth look at wild animals on film, covering the history of wildlife documentaries, safety issues, and the never-ending pressure to obtain the "money shot."" (booklist). Brian's review, which I highly recommend, is HERE.
The PLoS Blog Pick of the Month for July has been announced, and it's a post by Hannah Waters of Culturing Science on…
gregladen | August 2, 2010When: Thursday, September 2, 2010, 7:30 p.m.
Where: The Emory Math & Science Center, 400 Dowman Dr., Atlanta, GA 30322
Proceeds to go to Light the Night - the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society
Please join the Atlanta Skeptics on Thursday, September 2, 2010 for stargazing, food, drinks and conversations with astronomers. We are once again hosting a star party to celebrate the beauty of the universe around us while raising money for a great cause.
Astronomers Pamela Gay and Fraser Cain will be hosting the event, leading guests in exploration of the skies, and discussing what we see. Musician…
gboustead | August 2, 2010
Hey gang! Remember when we set up a model of the new James Webb Space Telescope in Battery Park? If you don't, the people at Behind the James Webb Space Telescope have produced the cool little video above about the telescope's visit to NYC and the World Science Festival.
gregladen | August 2, 2010Then played back real slow:
Whoa.
Click here to find out who did this, why, and what it all means.
goodmath | August 2, 2010 Finally, at long last, I can tell you what I've been up to with finding a new home for this blog. I've created a new, community-based science blogging site, called Scientopia. With the help of many wonderful people, we're ready. We launched this morning. So to continue following GM/BM - along with the work of many other wonderful bloggers, like Scicurious, Grrlscientist, Mike Dunford, Dr. Skyskull, and lots of others, come on over to Scientopia, the new home of Good Math/Bad Math"/a>.
nisbetmc | August 2, 2010A few stories from over the weekend that raise decades-old questions about the connection between media and violence as well as the role that media play in the construction of social identity.
--WPost leads its Sunday edition with a feature alleging a spike in visits to Colonial Williamsburg from Tea Party sympathizers. One enthusiast asks the role-playing George Washington: "General, when is it appropriate to resort to arms to fight for our liberty?"
--The Post's Dan Milbank, relying heavily on releases from Media Matters for America, draws a correlation between several recent arrests for…
dolittle | August 2, 2010This is my first blog, so bear with me. I asked a friend of mine how I should begin it, and he said, "tell them why they should care about what you will write about." Fair enough.
I teach at a major university in the west. My area of specialty is the comparative physiology of glucose and fatty acid regulation. I specialize in this area because diabetes is such a prevalent concern in the United States. I accepted the invitation to blog on comparative physiology in the hopes that the discussion about this branch of science could grow broader and deeper via the blogosphere. For others thirsting…
dgmacarthur | August 2, 2010The whole idea of actually paying to read mainstream news online is rather alien to me, having grown up immersed in a world of free content readily available via Google News. Indeed, I can't help but see free news as some kind of inviolable human right.
Thus when the Times recently set up a paywall blocking free access to all of its online content (including its blogs), I was faced with a serious dilemma: there are only a few mainstream science journalists in the world who write sensibly about genetics, and my favourite example (Mark Henderson) was now locked away behind a web-form requiring…
gregladen | August 1, 2010Alex
Bonnie
Colin
Danielle
Earl
Fiona
Gaston
Hermine
Igor
Julia
Karl
Lisa
Matthew
Nicole
Otto
Paula
Richard
Shary
Tomas
Virginie
Walter
gregladen | August 1, 2010Wrong.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
gregladen | July 31, 2010On April 1, Lisa Jackson, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, announced strong new guidance on mountaintop removal permits, which, if applied rigorously, could prohibit most MTR operations and the resulting toxic dumping into streams and valleys.
However, two weeks ago Lisa Jackson's U.S. Environmental Protection Agency gave the Army Corps of Engineers a green light for the Pine Creek mine permit, a mountaintop removal (MTR) mining site in Logan County, W.Va. This is the first permit decision the EPA has issued under the new mountaintop mining guidelines, which came out last April…
gregladen | July 31, 2010Plankton, base of ocean food web, in big decline
Worldwide phytoplankton levels are down 40 percent since the 1950s, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The likely cause is global warming, which makes it hard for the plant plankton to get vital nutrients, researchers say.
Hottest Decade on Record
The past decade was the hottest recorded, part of an unequivocal pattern of warming dating back 50 years, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report declared on Wednesday.
The annual "State of the Climate" report drew on the findings more than 300 climate…