Uncategorized
gregladen | August 30, 2009The DSCC just sent me this nice video:
Ted's passing means the passing of an era. He said "the dream live on" but he also made the dream happen by unabashedly embracing liberal ideals while at the same time working tirelessly across political factions to make things happen. Now, I'm afraid the dream will just be a dream unless other Senators begin to take on this role. I hope the DSCC invests primarily in Senatorial candidates that are as like Kennedy as possible in this regard .
This is the DSCC web site.
grrlscientist | August 30, 2009
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is a blog carnival that celebrates the best science, nature and medical writing targeted specifically to the public that has been published in the blogosphere within the past 60 days. To send your submissions to Scientia Pro Publica, either use this automated submission form or use the cute little widget on the right (sometimes that widget doesn't upload when the mother site is sick). Be sure to include the URL or "…
grrlscientist | August 29, 2009The current Antarctic Trip Vote count is as follows; 5370 - 1817 - 1569 - 1202 - 1117 out of 533 candidates registered. I am in third place and sloooowly creeping up on second place. With less than 6 weeks remaining (especially if the Quark site crashes), 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 top four…
gregladen | August 29, 2009In August, Goddard added 4,128 new-generation Intel "Nehalem" processors to its Discover high-end computing system. The upgraded Discover will serve as the centerpiece of a new climate simulation capability at Goddard. Discover will host NASA's modeling contributions to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the leading scientific organization for assessing climate change, and other national and international climate initiatives.
And they're adding another 4,128 in a couple of months. This will be the first major. Nehalem based climate simulation project. Details here.
gregladen | August 29, 2009Research from Bristol:
Doctors and lawyers are more likely to come from wealthy backgrounds according to new research from the Department of Economics that indicates that the 'social gap' that prevents poorer people from entering the top professions is becoming more pronounced over time.
Using data on family income and IQ in childhood drawn from the National Child Development Survey (NCDS), which tracks a representative sample of the population born in 1958, and the British Cohort Study (BCS), which follows people born in 1970, the research shows that professions such as law and medicine…
pharyngula | August 29, 2009The fundamentalist community has a strong interest for some bizarre reason in converting homosexuals into heterosexuals. They consider homosexuality nothing but a bad personal choice, and therefore all gay people need is a little Jesus and they'll switch back to finding the other sex more attractive.
It never seems to occur to them that that implies that their own sexual orientation would then be an arbitrary matter of a trained esthetic, and that that would imply that they should be easily flipped into homosexuality themselves (probably with a little Satan). It's strange: I'd be rather upset…
grrlscientist | August 28, 2009
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is a blog carnival that celebrates the best science, nature and medical writing targeted specifically to the public that has been published in the blogosphere within the past 60 days. To send your submissions to Scientia Pro Publica, either use this automated submission form or use the cute little widget on the right (sometimes that widget doesn't upload when the mother site is sick). Be sure to include the URL or "…
grrlscientist | August 28, 2009The current Antarctic Trip Vote count is as follows; 5015 - 1814 - 1558 - 1202 - 1117 out of 528 candidates registered. I am in third place and sloooowly creeping up on second place. With less than 6 weeks remaining (especially if the Quark site crashes), 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 top four…
gregladen | August 28, 2009I posted a photo of a itty bitty molecule that is making the news these days ... the photo, not the molecule ... but I didn't have much to say about it except that it was cool. Ethan Siegel has picked up the thread and explains what it is we are looking at.
I myself have used the little needle thingie in research, but the tip of the one I used was more like an actual needle made of a zillion metal molecules so we could only image things like primate teeth or cut marks on bones. This one is a little different...
gregladen | August 28, 2009DURHAM, N.C. -- Two Duke University education experts have serious concerns about the Obama administration's proposal to link teacher evaluations to student tests scores as a criterion for how much federal stimulus money states will receive for K-12 education.
Friday (Aug. 28) is the deadline to submit public comments on the proposal that will disperse more than $4 billion in grants. The U.S. Department of Education has said it will issue its final rules sometime after the deadline.
Helen F. Ladd, the Edgar Thompson Professor of Public Policy at Duke, says that while student test scores play…
gregladen | August 28, 2009Atomic bonds are too small to see, right? Well, what do you suppose THIS is a picture of!?!?!?
That B&W structure is an actual image of a molecule and its atomic bonds. The first of its kind, in fact, and a breakthrough for the crazy IBM scientists in Zurich who spent 20 straight hours staring at the "specimen"--which in this case was a 1.4 nanometer-long pentacene molecule comprised of 22 carbon atoms and 14 hydrogen atoms.
You can actually make out each of those atoms and their bonds, and it's thanks to this: An atomic force microscope.
Details here
hat tip: Ben
gregladen | August 28, 2009Trials are staring on a new cancer vaccine.
The melanoma trial is being conducted at New York University Medical Center, while the ovarian cancer vaccine trial is at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, N.Y. The trials are assessing the safety and the anti-tumor immune response of the so-called NY-ESO-1 recombinant protein cancer vaccine alone and in combination with other agents, according to the Cancer Research Institute (CRI), an organization that has recently given $450,000 to Cornell to support vaccine production at the Bioproduction Facility. The facility is a partnership…
mspringer | August 28, 2009We've seen that it's pretty easy to determine your latitude using the sun as a reference point. All you need is a shadow and chart that was easily available to sailors of previous centuries and you're set. Finding your longitude is another story. The reason for the difference in difficulty is one of time. The sun varies very little in its north-south position from day to day, but it varies enormously in its east-west position by virtue of the whole "rising and setting" thing. It's easy to look up on a chart to find a correction factor that varies day-by-day, but when you need a…
grrlscientist | August 27, 2009The current Antarctic Trip Vote count is as follows; 4764 - 1809 - 1529 - 1202 - 1116 out of 524 candidates registered. I am in third place and sloooowly creeping up on second place. With less than 6 weeks remaining (especially if the Quark site crashes), 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 top four…
grrlscientist | August 27, 2009
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is a blog carnival that celebrates the best science, nature and medical writing targeted specifically to the public that has been published in the blogosphere within the past 60 days. To send your submissions to Scientia Pro Publica, either use this automated submission form or use the cute little widget on the right (sometimes that widget doesn't upload when the mother site is sick). Be sure to include the URL or "…
tlambert | August 27, 2009Carmen writes about a cult:
It's adherents called themselves followers of the Way. It was lead by a charismatic leader who was a faith healer and miracle worker who claimed to be of divine origin and who said his words and actions were directed by God. He said he was chosen before the beginning of creation to warn everyone of that generation that the world was about to end. He warned that only those who belonged to his elite group would be saved.
You'll have to click through to find out which cult it is.
gregladen | August 27, 2009I could just point you to Bloggingheads for this, but it might not be there. In any event, much more fun than Michael Behe on Bloggingheads or anywhere else is THIS POST by ERV telling us about how she is not pregnant.
Confused? Just go look at the post and stop complaining.
gregladen | August 27, 2009Well, not really, but if on line CBT takes off, how will we know when they make the switch?
Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) seems to be effective when delivered online in real time by a therapist, with benefits maintained over 8 months. This method of delivery could broaden access to CBT in primary care. These are the conclusions of an article in this week's Global Mental Health special edition of The Lancet, written by Dr David Kessler, NIHR National School for Primary Care Research, University of Bristol and colleagues.
source
grrlscientist | August 27, 2009
Over the last few weeks, the support staff at ScienceBlogs have been making plans to add a new dimension to the ScienceBlogs experience. In the next three to four weeks, they'll be creating and unveiling a user registration program with Six Apart, the makers of Movable Type, over the entire network.
This feature will allow readers to sign in, create a profile, track discussions they're interested in, customize their content, and interact with one another directly. ScienceBlogs will also be introducing other benefits for registered readers such as entry into prize drawings and possible…