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gregladen | August 20, 2009
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grrlscientist | August 19, 2009The current Antarctic Trip Vote count is as follows; 3877 - 1741 - 1441 - 1165 - 1114 out of 498 candidates registered. I am in third place and sloooowly creeping up on second place. With only 6 weeks remaining, voting is changing rapidly as previous voters reassign their votes and new voters cast theirs for the first time. The top four vote-getters are receiving most of these votes, so I need your votes more than ever to recapture first place, so please ask your friends and relatives to vote for me now!
According to Prisca Campbell, the marketing manager for Quark, there is an interview for…
gregladen | August 19, 2009
That is totally my old neighborhood. A shame to see so many trees down. A good day for people in the roofing business, though.
I also think that from now on a basic course in videography should be required of all humans.
razib | August 19, 2009Americans know that the Ogallala Aquifer is important, and declining. This is much more of an issue in India, Satellites Unlock Secret To Northern India's Vanishing Water:
Using satellite data, UC Irvine and NASA hydrologists have found that groundwater beneath northern India has been receding by as much as 1 foot per year over the past decade - and they believe human consumption is almost entirely to blame.
Here's a map of the population density of India by district:
And now a map of the change in the levels of groundwater (red = decline, blue = increase):
The original letter to Nature,…
gregladen | August 19, 2009There are so many books that changed me and my life for better or worse. I wish I could write long, slavering love letters to all of their authors. I guess I am already, in a way. But, for the sake of space, I will stick with just one: Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh.
A new guest post at Quiche Moraine ...
cortex | August 19, 2009Alison Gopnik, a psychologist and philosopher at UC-Berkeley, has a wonderful op-ed over at the NY Times on the surprising intelligence of infants:
New studies demonstrate that babies and very young children know, observe, explore, imagine and learn more than we would ever have thought possible. In some ways, they are smarter than adults.
Three recent experiments show that even the youngest children have sophisticated and powerful learning abilities. Last year, Fei Xu and Vashti Garcia at the University of British Columbia proved that babies could understand probabilities. Eight-month-old…
gregladen | August 19, 2009Julia is over at her mom's house this morning, so she called and wished Amanda and me a happy anniversary. So it is confirmed! Today is our anniversary! Happy Anniversary to us!
grrlscientist | August 19, 2009I just learned that this blog has been included in the Forensic Science Schools' list of the Top Ten Female Science Bloggers. You should check out their list, since several of my colleagues are also included -- one of whom is male, heh.
gregladen | August 19, 2009Join me, if you will, in a moment of utter, deep cynicism. That would mean you thinking, for just a moment, exactly like I think every second of the day. This will be painful for you, unless you are already where I am.....
Read more ....
mspringer | August 19, 2009All right, the answer to yesterday's question about the maximum speed of a stadium wave, as many commenters rightly said, is "as fast as you want." The comments went into some depth on this, and I like the way Zifnab put it:
I mean, if you've got two independent agents doing their thing, the "speed" between the two just gets faster the farther apart they are. But if they have no relation to one another... what are we even asking? If our imaginary stadium is the size of the Milky Way Galaxy and the seats are stars and you stand up on Alpha Centari and I stand up on the Sun less than 4 years…
grrlscientist | August 18, 2009The current Antarctic Trip Vote count is as follows; 3848 - 1710 - 1424 - 1157 - 1113 out of 496 candidates registered. I am in third place and sloooowly creeping up on second place. With only 6 weeks remaining, voting is changing rapidly as previous voters reassign their votes and new voters cast theirs for the first time. The top four vote-getters are receiving most of these votes, so I need your votes more than ever to recapture first place, so please ask your friends and relatives to vote for me now!
If you've already voted, then please encourage your family, friends, colleagues and…
gregladen | August 18, 2009It is a Favre Favre Better thing than we have ever done before.... Absolutely Favrtabulous. That's how Minnesotans are talking today. I hope they stop soon.
gregladen | August 18, 2009... at public rallies and events. For the record, these gun nuts showing up at Town Halls causes my normally middle of the road attitude about gun ownership to shift, one more time, towards enforced gun control. If this requires a change in the constitution, then so be it.
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gregladen | August 18, 2009So she can do this.
Hat Tip: Alice. Check out Alice's post to learn about what is actually happening in this video.
grrlscientist | August 18, 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 "…
cortex | August 18, 2009Natalie Angier has an excellent column on the self-defeating feedback loop triggered by chronic stress. According to a new paper, when mice are chronically stressed, they end up reverting to habit and routine, even though these same habits are what led to the chronic stress in the first place:
Reporting earlier this summer in the journal Science, Nuno Sousa of the Life and Health Sciences Research Institute at the University of Minho in Portugal and his colleagues described experiments in which chronically stressed rats lost their elastic rat cunning and instead fell back on familiar routines…
grrlscientist | August 17, 2009The current Antarctic Trip Vote count is as follows; 3831 - 1661 - 1394 - 1147 - 1113 out of 491 candidates registered. I am now in third place, and sloooowly creeping up on second place. But I need your votes more than ever to recapture first place, so please ask your friends and relatives to vote for me now!
If you've already voted, then please encourage your family, friends, colleagues and neighbors to vote for the person whom you think would be best for this unique job: traveling to Antarctica for the month of February 2010 and writing about it for the public on a blog. Here is my 300-…