Uncategorized
mrosenberg | June 24, 2010What is it that drives people to public health in general and to EIS in particular? Public health is notorious for being the lowest paid medical specialty of all. In addiiton, when you work to prevent diseases and injuries you don't have identified patients the way you do when you are treating patients. So why would anyone do this?
gregladen | June 24, 2010Is it possible for all the oxygen molecules in the room, which are moving around randomly, to randomly all move to one corner so everyone is breathing just nitrogen for a while and they die?
Is is possible for a World Cup soccer game to have a score of, say, 24 to one?
Is is possible for a tennis match to go on for several days because, after all, there is no limit on how many times they can bounce the ball back and forth across the net?
Yes.
mspringer | June 24, 2010I'm not normally much of a soccer fan, but the World Cup doesn't happen every day and it's pretty interesting to see all the excitement and high level of play. I personally think the rules need a little tweaking to reduce the tendency toward 0-0 and 1-1 ties, but I suppose the sport couldn't have so many billions of fans without doing something right.
In honor of the World Cup, let's do a quick example of just how tough the game can be. In soccer of course the players are generally prohibited from touching the ball with their hands - hence, football in most of the world. But in fact the…
cwilcox | June 24, 2010My weekly dose of cute this week follows on my last post. They are, of course, my two adorable cousins, which I think are the cutest Homo sapiens ever. :)
gregladen | June 24, 2010Peter Tyack of Woods Hole talks about a hidden wonder of the sea: underwater sound. Onstage at Mission Blue, he explains the amazing ways whales use sound and song to communicate across hundreds of miles of ocean.
pharyngula | June 24, 2010The fundraiser that will decide whether Big Dave and I will have to shave off our beards has passed the halfway mark — you have donated £805.33 for Barnardo's children's charity — but I notice that some people are still voting "no beard", and we can't have that. To counter these weak sallies into beardlessness, I'm going to have to regularly remind you of glorious beards, and today we start at the top.
That's right, people with beards have that aura of great majesty and power, just like Jehovah. Would you ask God to shave? Look at that glorious beard — it's almost as good as Dan Dennett's.…
gregladen | June 23, 2010The podcast for The Cosmetics Cop: Paula Begoun has materialized here.
Paula Begoun is the bestselling author of "The Beauty Bible" and "Don't Go To The Cosmetics Counter Without Me." We'll examine the science behind some popular beauty products, and find out what real research says about makeup myths.
That also includes this segment: The Amazing Meeting with Austin Luton, Jeff Wagg and K.O. Myers
This Friday:'s show is:
Transhumanism
We explore the predictions and the problems in the quest to "enhance" human beings. We're joined by George Dvorsky of Sentient Developments and the Institute…
gregladen | June 23, 2010If so, would you please take this survey? It is for a friend of mine who is working on a research project regarding what looks to me like "framing" in IT management.
We'll beat him up later for the framing bit.
Anyway, click here to do the survey thing. Thanks.
agelman | June 23, 2010Maggie Fox writes:
Brain scans may be able to predict what you will do better than you can yourself . . . They found a way to interpret "real time" brain images to show whether people who viewed messages about using sunscreen would actually use sunscreen during the following week.
The scans were more accurate than the volunteers were, Emily Falk and colleagues at the University of California Los Angeles reported in the Journal of Neuroscience. . . .
About half the volunteers had correctly predicted whether they would use sunscreen. The research team analyzed and re-analyzed the MRI scans to…
kcollins | June 23, 2010
Do you have what it takes to be a Nerd Girl? Do you want to use your engineering skills to make a difference? Do you want to change the way the world views women in engineering? Do you want to be a part of a major movement to provide young girls with positive role models, while building an amazing resume?
The Nerd Girls are now casting for the NEW TV SERIES produced by MPH Entertainment, best known for their Emmy-nominated hit show "Dog Whisperer with Cesar Milan." Dr. Karen Panetta, founder of Nerd Girls, has been encouraging young women to change their world through science, technology,…
kbonham | June 23, 2010[This post was originally published at webeasties.wordpress.com on]
As I've noted before, our bodies are riddled with microbes - there are more of them than there are of us (if you go by shear number). But where do they come from? Each individual has a complex ecosystem of commensal (harmless) microbes that live on our skin, in our nose, mouth, ears and gut, and we lay the foundations for this ecosystem at birth. According to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Accademy of Sciences (PNAS), different methods of birth (traditional vs cesarean section) have very different outcomes in…
cwilcox | June 23, 2010"Christie! Christie!" My four-year old cousin tugs eagerly on my jacket. "I wanna see the fishes."
Mouse (on the left) and Tuna (on the right),
my two adorable cousins
"Ok, Tuna, we can go see the fish."
My little cousin loves the word 'tuna'. She says it all the time. Tuna, tuna, tuna. Everything is a tuna-face or a tuna-head. She doesn't even like tuna (she doesn't eat it), but she loves the sound of the word rolling off her tongue. Finally, her nanny threatened that if she kept saying 'tuna,' we'd have to start calling her it. My ever so adorable cousin's response was, of course, "TUNA!"…
gregladen | June 22, 2010Did you know that there is a mite problem? Among other things, they appear to have infested the dog food supply chain, and it may even be that through this vector, mites may affect both humans and dogs with allergy more widely than previously. This is an interesting emerging disease, in a way.
To start to get a grasp on this squishy problem (squishy because mites are weakly sclerotized, obviously) check out this post: Mold Mites at Jafsica.com.
gregladen | June 22, 2010Can prayer reduce the number of abortions?
One of the most interesting stories in evolutionary biology is reviewed by Larry Moran: On the Origin of the Double Membrane in Mitochondria and Chloroplasts
At least one bad idea by Big Oil has been stopped.
sb admin | June 22, 2010by Nathalie A. Cabrol
I realize how immodest the title of this first blog may sound and it is certainly not my intention to convince anybody that I will answer this question in the limited space allowed here or even in a lifetime. My hope is, instead, to stir thoughts and invite an exchange of diverse perspectives to make this a thread that we can all pull from time to time. It is an immense subject debated in an abundant literature, but discussing it is certainly not the exclusive privilege of those called explorers. All beings, from the greatest minds to the simplest forms of life on this…
krandall | June 22, 2010by Nathalie A. Cabrol
I realize how immodest the title of this first blog may sound and it is certainly not my intention to convince anybody that I will answer this question in the limited space allowed here or even in a lifetime. My hope is, instead, to stir thoughts and invite an exchange of diverse perspectives to make this a thread that we can all pull from time to time. It is an immense subject debated in an abundant literature, but discussing it is certainly not the exclusive privilege of those called explorers. All beings, from the greatest minds to the simplest forms of life on this…
gregladen | June 22, 2010
Biologist fears Gulf oil threat to dolphins
"We will brace for the worst if the oil comes here, but we don't think there is any protection we can give to the dolphins if it does. What will happen if they can't move away from it? It scares the hell out of me," Randall Wells said in a telephone interview this morning, shortly after returning to his Sarasota laboratory after a morning on the water conducting an emergency survey of dolphins he has studied since 1970.
source
gregladen | June 22, 2010In graphic design, Marian Bantjes says, throwing your individuality into a project is heresy. She explains how she built her career doing just that, bringing her signature delicate illustrations to storefronts, valentines and even genetic diagrams.
cortex | June 22, 2010I have a complicated relationship with my GPS unit. On the one hand, it rarely works. Here's what happened the last time I turned it on. First, there was a five minute delay while it searched for the satellite signal. Then, it couldn't find the street I was searching for. Then, it found the street but lost the satellite signal. Then, it regained the signal but sent me in the wrong direction. And then, after I'd already gotten accurate directions off my phone, the GPS unit finally decided that it knew where I was going. In other words, the device sucks.
But here's the funny part: I still use…