Uncategorized
sb admin | September 10, 2009President Obama's address to Congress last night on health care had its high points and low points. You can tune into your favorite spin-masters to hear those recaps. My favorite part of the President's speech was when he spoke of our "large-heartedness" and our ability to put ourselves in the shoes of others to offer assistance, provide comfort and seek justice. He started by reminiscing about Senator Edward Kennedy, reminding us that this his commitment to improving our healthcare system wasÂ
"born not of some rigid ideology, but of his own experience. It was the experience of…
cortex | September 10, 2009Given recent discussions on this blog on the neuroscience of marijuana, I thought this brand new paper on stress and the cannabinoid receptor was extremely interesting. The Israeli scientists demonstrated that microinjecting an agonist of the CB1 receptor (a primary binding site of THC, the active ingredient in pot) significantly reduced the elevation of stress hormones in response to scary stressors. They researchers argue that their evidence "supports a wide therapeutic application for cannabinoids in the treatment of conditions associated with the inappropriate retention of aversive…
gregladen | September 10, 2009Repost
Life Science Teachers: Take special note!
This is not yet an error in the mainstream press, but there is an error afoot, currently represented in the widely read slashdot, which I imagine will propagate. The purpose of this post is to alert you to this problem and prepare you for the occasion when you run into a wackaloon creationist waving their arms around and screaming "Carbon dating does not work! It's been proven." This story also has a Global Warming Denialism component.
What I'm going to do here is give you the basic facts, then the misinterpreted text.
We start with the…
mspringer | September 10, 2009All right, time for an actual example of this gravitational force law I've been ruminating on for the last two days. Today we'll look at an alternate version of the gravitational potential that's truly screwy:
The first thing to notice is that it's not finite as r becomes very large. Among other things, that means there's no such thing as an escape velocity in a universe with this kind of gravity. What goes up really must come down.
To say more, we ought to take a look at the effective potential, which takes into account the angular momentum of the orbiting object. We'll write that…
gregladen | September 10, 2009Rob Miller is running against Republican Joe Wilson. Who's that? He's the guy who yelled "you lie" at Obama on international TV.
Click here to give money
grrlscientist | September 9, 2009
Image: Sneer Review.
The current Antarctic Trip Vote count is as follows; 6072 - 1891 - 1810 - 1241 - 1232 out of 583 candidates registered. I am in third place and sloooowly creeping up on second place. With less than 3 weeks remaining, things are heating up and voting is changing rapidly as previous voters reassign their votes and new voters cast theirs for the first time. Many tens of thousands of votes have already been cast in this competition, so if the people who have cast their votes already decide to change them, they can significantly affect the outcome of this competition. The…
gregladen | September 9, 2009Is that a lot or a little?
PAX organizers say they have confirmed nearly 100 cases of H1N1 virus infections, or swine flu, in the wake of the Seattle videogame convention, which drew approximately 75,000 gamers to the Washington State Convention and Trade Center between Sept. 4 and 6.
source
So, that's about one tenth of one percent of the people reporting likely swine flue (H1N1). That would be a very mild flu season, but since its a weekend and not a season, it may be a large number. On the other hand, small samples are highly variable. What you'd need to do is to find ten or twenty…
ejohnson | September 9, 2009Below, Michelle Borkin answers the second of our three questions.
I think every field is ripe for cross-disciplinary research, but in particular fields that share common broad problems or challenges. For example, with data visualization the specific field of science might be different but the visualization requirements can be very similar. In this case, techniques developed to visualize data in one field can be applied to another field. I have worked for the past few years on one such interdisciplinary collaboration, the Astronomical Medicine project where astronomers and radiologists have…
gregladen | September 9, 2009My friend Virginia Hughes is asking this question on her blog pursuant to a conference she is going to. She has a survey she'd like people to take. The survey takes about 15 seconds so please go and help her out.
For background: Virginia was the blog herder for Scienceblogs.com for a while. She's quite a good science writer and has a blog you should put on your RSS thingie.
gregladen | September 9, 2009The following video is mercifully missing its sound. Go to 1 minute and start watching there.
From the youtube site:
At 2:00 in the morning, five guys broke into the Marlton, New Jersey Apple Store and in 31 seconds flat they leave with 23 MacBook Pros, 14 iPhones and 9 iPod touches.
mspringer | September 9, 2009One of the first great discoveries of modern physics was Newton writing down the equation for the force of gravity between two massive objects. The discovery was monumental not because it was complicated, but because it was profound. You can state the law in plain English very briefly. "The gravitational force between two objects is equal to their masses multiplied together, divided by the square of the distance between them, and multiplied by a particular universal constant to get the overall scale right."
This is the way things are, classically. But as far as we know there's nothing…
cortex | September 9, 2009What happens when a memory disappears? Once upon a time, I could actually recall the details of organic chemistry. But then I took the class final and promptly forgot every piece of information related to the chemical properties of the carbon atom. This raises the obvious question: What does it mean to forget? Do we actually delete our memories, like an unwanted computer file expunged from the hard drive? Or does the memory always remain, a persistent neuronal ensemble that we just forget how to find?
A new paper in Neuron by scientists at UC-Irvine and Princeton suggests the latter…
gregladen | September 9, 2009a repost
Fossils of a newly discovered species of dinosaur -- a 10-meter-long, elephant-weight predator -- were discovered in 1996 along the banks of Argentina's Rio Colorado, and are now being reported after a long period of careful study. This dinosaur dates to about 85 million years (which falls within the Cretaceous period).
Perhaps the most interesting feature of Aerosteon riocoloradensis is that it demonstrates the evolution of a bird-like respiratory system in an animal that is definitely not bird-like in most other ways. Indeed, the authors of this paper imply that this dinosaur'…
cwilcox | September 9, 2009Last night I had this wonderful dream. It was a normal day in just about every way except I had this amazing ability. When I jumped, I was able to leap great distances and almost fly. No wings were involved - it was almost like I was able to levitate, and slowly drift between places. It was a very calm, serene feeling.
Perhaps that's how the mice in Dr. Liu's lab felt. Advances in Space Research has published online today an accepted manuscript where researchers levitated mice. And, according to their observations, the mice took to the free-floating existence quite readily.
The team first…
dgmacarthur | September 9, 2009My esteemed blogging colleague Ginny Hughes will be presenting at next week's Cold Spring Harbor Personal Genomes meeting (which I, sadly, will not be attending) on genetic testing for psychiatric diseases. As part of preparing for this she'd like to get a sense of the level of interest in this type of testing.
If you have 30 seconds to spare, please help her out by filling in this very brief survey.
Subscribe to Genetic Future.
Follow Daniel on Twitter.
sb admin | September 9, 2009by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure
One of the most feared outcomes of infection with influenza is Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS; in less severe form it mahy be called Acute Lung Injury, ALI). For reasons we still do not understand, cells deep in the lung that are involved in gas exchange (oxygen and carbon dioxide) become so damaged that the basic work of supplying the body with enough oxygen for life and getting rid of the carbon dioxide generated by metabolism is too much for the patient and either some intervention to relieve the lungs of some of the work is made or…
grrlscientist | September 8, 2009
Image: Sneer Review.
The current Antarctic Trip Vote count is as follows; 5979 - 1884 - 1775 - 1231 - 1212 out of 579 candidates registered. I am in third place and sloooowly creeping up on second place. With less than 4 weeks remaining, things are heating up and voting is changing rapidly as previous voters reassign their votes and new voters cast theirs for the first time. Many tens of thousands of votes have already been cast in this competition, so if the people who have cast their votes already decide to change them, they can significantly affect the outcome of this competition. The…
gregladen | September 8, 2009Nye ran afoul of the faithful by remarking that it is not true that the moon generates its own light as opposed to reflecting light. This contradicted Genesis 1:16, which says quite clearly (if only Nye bothered to read it) that "God made two great lights -- the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars." Fortunately, there were educated people in the audience who proceeded to boo Nye and walk out. One woman with three children reportedly screamed "We believe in God!" while storming out.
Details here.
gregladen | September 8, 2009Then it will probably veer north, spin down, and by the end of the weekend be a bit wet spot in the middle of nowhere.
But, I thought you'd enjoy a picture of this tropical storm itting rignt now closer to West Africa than any other continental region.
gregladen | September 8, 2009Well, actually, a bunch of questions, and its about fund raising.
If memory serves (memory enhanced by little birds that tell me things), it is in the fall that many Sciencebloggers engage in the DonorsChoice 2009 fund raising effort.
Last year was my first opportunity to do this, having joined scienceblogs during the previous effort rather than before. I chose to not engage in this activity last year for a few reasons, but mainly because of the election. I assumed that there were limited funds "out there" (in YOUR pockets) and I felt that if I was going to push for people dropping silver…