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gregladen | February 19, 2009If Arnold was a bovine, he'd look like this.
Now, the lady cows say that they find this disgusting, but all the boy cows don't believe that and are intimidated nonetheless.
But seriously, this looks to me like a mutation that we've known about for some time, and published versions of mice that look like this cow (but with cute little ears and a different tail) are also out there somewhere. Imagine this mutation in a human. Would that be a Neanderthal? Sort of?
Story here.
cortex | February 19, 2009Being on book tour means that I watch way too much SportsCenter, since that's what I do when I can't sleep. And so, because it's mid-February, I've noticed that the ESPN anchors are already talking endlessly about March Madness, college basketball and brackets. (Of course, this is also because they have little else to talk about. Football season is over, baseball has yet to begin, and the NBA is mired in its mid-season lull.) What most impresses me about the college basketball analysts is that they act like they're actual analysts, that there's some logical structure to the college basketball…
sb admin | February 19, 2009Yesterday, the New York Times published an article by Cara Buckley on young adults who lack health insurance. Although theyâre often referred to as âyoung invincibles,â most of the people profiled in the article donât actually think they wonât need medical care. They donât have insurance because they canât afford it.
The article highlights an important problem â young adults often lack an affordable insurance option once theyâre off their parentsâ plans â but the lasting images from it are of people trying to make do without doctors. One 29-year-old musician told Buckley that heâd been unable…
rallain | February 19, 2009I saw this some time ago, probably in The Teaching Professor online magazine thingy. The basic idea is to leave your class alone when they are having a discussion. I have done this a couple of times. Yesterday was the first time this semester. Here is the deal. In this class (Physics for Elementary Education Majors), they collect evidence and build models. For that day, the experiments were giving students evidence about what happens to a fan cart when the strength of the fan changes and what happens when the mass of the cart changes.
When it came time to discuss the ideas, I made sure…
sb admin | February 19, 2009DC-area readers, mark your calendars: Alison Bass, an award-winning journalist and Pulitzer Prize nominee, will be here at George Washington University on Wednesday, March 18th, to speak about why the system of drug research and development in the United States is seriously flawed and what reforms are needed.
Wednesday, March 18, 4:30pm
GWU-SPHHS Health Policy Department
2021 K St. NW, Ste. 800, Washington, DC
Bass is the author of Side Effects: A Prosecutor, a Whistleblower, and a Bestselling Antidepressant on Trial; copies will be available for purchase and signing at the event. The book…
mspringer | February 19, 2009If it's zero degrees outside and it becomes twice as cold it was before, what is the temperature?
Usually it's presented as a joke. I'd like to consider some alternative interpretations.
1) It could literally mean the number denoting temperature divided by two. This has a number of unfortunate features. For one, it depends on the temperature scale. Half of zero is zero, but if you're at zero Celsius you're not at zero Fahrenheit. Worse, if the temperature is less than zero then half the temperature is going to be hotter.
2) It could mean the number for the temperature divided by two, but…
gregladen | February 19, 2009I asked our vet this morning whether she thought our pets somehow understood that we thought we were doing them a kindness when we brought them into the vet to be euthanized. I thought it was mostly a rhetorical question at the time, a way of stalling, a way to avoid crying, which I hadn't thought I was going to do but did anyway, and a way, maybe, to beg for absolution.
... at Quiche Moraine, guest post by Heather Rosa.
pharyngula | February 18, 2009Christopher Hitchens is visiting Lebanon, where he was his bold bad self and defaced a poster for the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, and was beaten up for the act. I don't often agree with his politics, but the guy has massive brass.
mspringer | February 18, 2009Excellent job on yesterday's physics problem. Several people got the right answer, and in lieu of answering it again myself I'm going to let commenter arne fill us in:
Well, electrostatics follow the principle of superposition. We can see that the problem is symmetrical under the choice of loaded side. We know that if we apply the same voltage to all the sides we will have uniform potential inside the cube.
Therefor each loaded side contributes one sixth of the voltage in the middle. (Here we used superposition and symmetry)
Thus with only one loaded side we will have one sixth of the one…
cortex | February 17, 2009Paul Ekman, the eminent scientist behind micro facial expressions, dissects the unconscious tics of deceit used by A-Rod:
Ms. Couric asked Mr. Rodriguez if he had ever been tempted to use illegal drugs. He answered with a simple "No" accompanied by what might be a microfear expression, according to Dr. Ekman - a horizontal stretching of the lips that is often an effort to conceal fearfulness.
"The fear of being disbelieved is the same as fear of being caught," Dr. Ekman said. "He is afraid that we're not going to believe it."
Mr. Rodriguez's lips stretch in a similar way when he talks of his…
grrlscientist | February 17, 2009I have been ill, so I've not been able to access the internet consistently since I do not have my own connection, so I am somewhat late in notifying you about the latest blog carnivals that are available for you to read.
The Giant's Shoulders, issue 8, has been published. This blog carnival focuses on science that is based on "classic" scientific papers, although entries that describe current discoveries that confirm "classic" predictions (such as my contribution) are also included.
rallain | February 17, 2009I previously talked about textbooks and how there is clearly a problem. The CK-12 Foundation is trying to do something about this problem with the flexbook. Basically, the flexbook allows teachers to create their own text by combining different free content. You can customize a book that closely meets the needs of the class.
I think this is a great step in the right direction. One problem that immediately popped into my head was "how would a high school teacher get this approved?" Someone at the conference (he didn't have a name badge on) said "well, I am old enough, I just do whatever I…
illconsidered | February 17, 2009Thanks to Crakar14, I came across this article from the India Times online:
In a major breakthrough that could help in the fight against global warming, a team of five Indian scientists from four institutes of the country have discovered a naturally occurring bacteria which converts carbon dioxide (CO2) into a compound found in limestone and chalk.
Based on this, Crakar thinks we should just continue business as usual and forget this whole global warming scare thing. (Oh, btw, that's what he thought that before too)
Now, I don't know anything more than what it says in the article, but it…
mspringer | February 17, 2009Mind if I give the readers who've taken an electrostatics class something to noodle over?
Consider a cubic box consisting of six sides of which five are held at a uniform potential of 0 volts. The top side is held at a uniform 100 volts. What is the potential at the center of the cube?
Here's a hint: The hard way is pretty hard. There is an easy way, and it's very easy.
It's a classic example of one of the most important principles in physics - laziness. Ok, that's a joke. What it's actually an example of is the idea that sometimes the formally general mathematics obscures the important…
sb admin | February 17, 2009by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure
The plant in Blakely, Georgia that was the apparent source of the salmonella peanut butter outbreak didn't make peanut butter for retail consumption. It made bulk peanut butter and peanut butter paste which became an ingredient in many other products. The number of products is now around 2000, the largest product recall in US history. So if you bought peanut butter retail you're safe, right? Not so fast.
The Peanut Corporation of America (RIP; filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy Friday) owned another plant in the Texas panhandle. Maybe you didn't know…
cortex | February 16, 2009The brain is like a Swiss Army knife, stuffed full of different mental tools that are well suited to different situations. Sometimes, we want to flex the prefrontal cortex, and really exert our rational muscles. And then there are other situations (like picking a strawberry jam) where thinking too much can be a real problem, and we should rely instead of the subtle signals emanating from the emotional brain.
It's no surprise that how we think - the particular mode of thought that we lean on at any given moment - can be influenced by our surroundings. For instance, when men are shown revealing…
cortex | February 16, 2009Self-promotion alert! If you're allergic to self-aggrandizing blog posts, then you'll probably want to stop reading now. But just a quick note to remind interested people that I'll be in the Bay Area this week, talking about decision-making, before returning to the East Coast and holding events in NYC and Boston next week. Also, there have been some nice reviews of How We Decide in recent days. In the San Francisco Chronicle, Robert Burton (author of the excellent "On Being Certain) says:
Lehrer offers real substance by going short on agenda and overreaching simplifications and being long on…
mspringer | February 16, 2009Despite the title, this isn't about those the politics of science, or even the science of politics. It's about talking in public.
Watching President Obama's first press conference, I was struck as I usually am by the sheer uselessness of it all. The press either asks bilious trivialities (baseball steroids, the usefulness of "bipartisanship", etc) or thinly veiled "gotcha" traps generally in service of the reporter's ideology (Helen Thomas' hilariously transparent nuke question, etc). In return, the politicians answer with lengthy and meandering essays on nothing which still nonetheless…
nisbetmc | February 16, 2009The Obama administration had a rough start to its communication strategy on the stimulus plan, going from no message to a catastrophe frame, only at the last minute shifting to a more effective focus on localized benefits and impacts. If the Stimulus plan was a tough challenge to communicate, framing its success will be even tougher. Measuring impacts will be complex and uncertain, their interpretation will be ideologically driven, and a wide range of groups will be actively working to define its success or failure, including journalists.
At New York magazine, John Heilemann offers an apt…