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gregladen | May 19, 2010How to Be a Cute Chick and Make People Do What You Want Them to Do With Your Sex Appeal
mspringer | May 19, 2010Space Shuttle mission STS-132 is currently orbiting over our heads. It's scheduled to land a week from now. After that, there's two more launches and that will be that for the program. At that point the US will officially be out of the business of launching people into orbit, and there's not a lot of prospect of getting back into that business in the near future. I don't really regret the end of the shuttle program as such - it was never a really good human spaceflight strategy - but it's a real shame we have nothing to replace it.
Oh well. To commemorate STS-132, how about a quick physics…
gregladen | May 19, 2010Accuracy when making criticisms is important. See this discussion, which is an extension of this.
gregladen | May 18, 2010And so does twitter, apparently.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
gregladen | May 18, 2010Today's math curriculum is teaching students to expect -- and excel at -- paint-by-numbers classwork, robbing kids of a skill more important than solving problems: formulating them. At TEDxNYED, Dan Meyer shows classroom-tested math exercises that prompt students to stop and think.
awild | May 18, 2010Who was that dashing ant of mystery and intrigue?
Tetramorium simillimum is a small myrmicine that has tramped around the globe with human commerce, quietly inserting itself into native ecosystems. Like most insect species, little is known about its behavior or its interactions with other species.
JasonC gets a clean sweep: ten points for correctly guessing the genus and species.
gregladen | May 18, 2010Despite her best efforts, comedian Julia Sweeney is forced to tell a little white lie when her 8-year-old begins learning about frog reproduction -- and starts to ask some very smart questions.
Use the phrase "how it evolved" as often as possible.
gregladen | May 18, 2010William Li presents a new way to think about treating cancer and other diseases: anti-angiogenesis, preventing the growth of blood vessels that feed a tumor. The crucial first (and best) step: Eating cancer-fighting foods that cut off the supply lines and beat cancer at its own game.
Woo? Or the real thing?
gregladen | May 18, 2010We all know the arguments that being vegetarian is better for the environment and for the animals -- but in a carnivorous culture, it can be hard to make the change. Graham Hill has a powerful, pragmatic suggestion: Be a weekday veg.
His comments about emissions are spurious and misleading. But some of his points are valid. What do you think?
cwilcox | May 18, 2010We (both science bloggers and scientists) often talk about how to bring science into pop culture, both in terms of educating the public as well as making science something people like and care about. What methods work best, and how do we make science "cool" and "interesting" to everyone? What groups are doing it right? In my opinion, the Symphony of Science has hit the nail on the head.
The Symphony of Science is a musical project headed by John Boswell designed to deliver scientific knowledge and philosophy in musical form. And, to put it simply, they're all beautiful. Here's one of my…
cortex | May 18, 2010Mo over at Neurophilosophy has an excellent summary of a new paper on near misses and addictive gambling:
Henry Chase and Luke Clark of the Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute in Cambridge have previously found that the brain responds to near miss gambling outcomes in much the same way it does to as winning. In moderate gamblers, both types of outcome activate the reward circuitry, and although near miss events are experienced to be somewhat less rewarding than wins, they nevertheless increase the desire and motivation to gamble. For games involving skill, near misses indicate an…
sb admin | May 17, 2010So a week back or so, a number of friends read an article about death by rectal eel and immediately thought of me. For those of you who missed the story, it went a little something like this:
* Chinese man gets drunk with friends and passes out
* Friends think it would be hilarious to insert a large living swamp eel into the man's butt while he is unconscious
* Hilarity does not ensue. In fact, the man dies. Chinese doctor says the eel "consumed the man's bowels"
The article was widely reported in major news outlets like CNN and the Times, but I am linking instead to the UK edition of…
cortex | May 17, 2010Since I've been traveling in a foreign country for the last week - I was sipping sugary tea all over Turkey - I thought this article, published last year in McSweeney's Panorama newspaper, was slightly relevant. If nothing else, it's my personal attempt to justify both the annoying burdens of travel (especially foreign travel) and the self-indulgence of an extended vacation. I'm linking to the version of the article that was reprinted in the Observer, since that's online:
It's 4.15 in the morning and my alarm clock has just stolen away a lovely dream. My eyes are open but my pupils are still…
gregladen | May 17, 2010Effect Measure, clearly one of the best blogs on Scienceblogs.com or anywhere, is closing shop. Go say goodbye.
sb admin | May 17, 2010
You may have noticed things look a little different around here.
We’ve gussied up for the 2010 iteration of our flagship festival, which officially went on sale last week. There are still a few bugs we’re ironing out on the site (please bear with us!) and a couple of exciting programs yet to be announced, but the important thing is that tickets are now on sale. And if previous years are any indication (2008 and 2009), you may want to hurry to reserve your seats. Tickets tend to sell out very quickly.
There’s a LOT to be excited about this year. Let's see, where to begin...
Legendary…
gboustead | May 17, 2010
You may have noticed things look a little different around here.
We’ve gussied up for the 2010 iteration of our flagship festival, which officially went on sale last week. There are still a few bugs we’re ironing out on the site (please bear with us!) and a couple of exciting programs yet to be announced, but the important thing is that tickets are now on sale. And if previous years are any indication (2008 and 2009), you may want to hurry to reserve your seats. Tickets tend to sell out very quickly.
There’s a LOT to be excited about this year. Let's see, where to begin...
Legendary…
zooillogix | May 17, 2010Ann Littlewood is a one-time zoo keeper and now-time murder mystery writer whose stories take place in and around zoos. An awesome combination if you ask me. I'm very much looking forward to reading her upcoming book, Did Not Survive, but in the interim, I will wear my dog as a hat.
As you can see in this artfully composed camera phone pic, Ann provided me with a classic shot glass from the Oregon Coast Aquarium and Julia Goolia provided me a Louisville Zoo shot glass, bringing my total collection to... a lot:
Adventure Aquarium
Aquarium of the Bay
Baton Rouge Zoo
Birch Aquarium at Scripps…
tlambert | May 16, 2010By popular request. Comments from Brent and folks arguing with him are cluttering up more useful discussions. All comments by Brent and responses to comments by Brent should go in this thread. I can't move comments in MT, so I'll just delete comments that appear in the wrong thread.