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edyong | February 8, 2009Unless you've been living in a cave for the last few months (and even caves have wi-fi now surely?), you'll have noticed that it's Darwin's bicentennial on February 12. To celebrate, I will be posting a series of eight consecutive articles, each one focusing on a different aspect of evolutionary biology.
As per usual, each one focuses on a single research paper. Four are reposts drawn from the old site and four will be fresh posts based on papers that have come out just this week.
It's my way of marking the occasion without too much hyperbole or melodrama. The point is that 150 years later…
gregladen | February 7, 2009I heard these folks talking on the radio. It is all very interesting. Here's a piece in Science by Greg Miller:
If you're thinking of hiring a tax accountant, you might want to note the color of his office. According to a new study, the color red can improve performance on detail-oriented tasks--a desirable thing if your goal is an accurate return. However, if you're hoping to pare down your tax bill with any possible deductions, no matter how far-fetched, you might look for an accountant with a blue office--that color boosts creativity, the researchers report.
Previous research on how color…
gregladen | February 7, 2009North American gray wolves that crisscross the frozen tundra after migrating caribou tend to be light colored, blending in with snow and ice. But dark wolves are common in forests, possibly because there they can slink through the woods unnoticed. Geneticists have pinpointed the gene variant that imparts this black fur and determined that it comes from domestic dogs that interbred with their wily cousins thousands of years ago.
cool. more here.
gregladen | February 7, 2009
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dgmacarthur | February 7, 2009Katherine Kelly is a molecular biology major at Princeton University currently writing her senior thesis on personal genome services. As part of her research she would like to interview customers of 23andMe and Navigenics about their experiences of the personal genomics process.
The problem: although she can find plenty of 23andMe customers, she is yet to identify a single customer of Navigenics.
If you are a Navigenics customer that is not financially involved with Navigenics in any way, and would be happy to answer a few
questions (over the phone if possible) about your experience taking…
gregladen | February 7, 2009I don't normally do cephelopods, but I cam across this one and thought you'all might find it ... interesting:
Source.
gregladen | February 7, 2009Miami school officials can remove from library shelves a book about Cuba that depicts smiling children in communist uniforms but avoids mention of problems in the country, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday.
The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the Miami-Dade County School District wouldn't be infringing freedom of speech rights by removing 49 copies of "Vamos a Cuba" and its English-language version, "A Visit to Cuba," from its libraries. The board has argued that the books, for children ages 5 to 8, present an inaccurate view of life in Cuba.
.. so, the court decides the accuracy…
cortex | February 7, 2009One of the case studies I use in How We Decide when discussing the dangers of information overload concerns the diagnosis of back pain. Before the introduction of MRI's in the late 1980s, doctors were forced to rely on X-rays when diagnosing back pain. X-rays provide doctors with a limited amount of information, since they only reveal the bones and spinal column. As a result, back pain remained a mostly mysterious phenomenon, and most patients were prescribed bed rest. Nevertheless, this simple treatment plan was still extremely effective. Even when nothing was done to the lower back, about…
mspringer | February 7, 2009And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand.
- Revelation 6:5
Well if everyone's going to talk about the financial crisis like it's the end of the world we might as well be literary about it.
The ScienceBlogs homepage has a somewhat panicky roundup of sciencebloggers who're looking for free cash concerned about the future of science in America. And all kidding aside, they've got a point. So far as I can see, there's three reasons to include a lot of science…
gregladen | February 7, 2009Good morning. First, briefly, we have a podcast of yesterday's radio show here, a brand new book review of Scott's Evolution vs. Creationism here, and a new Congo Memoir here.
The minimal funding levels for science in the currently debated bill have been replaced, owing to activities of Senators Nelso, Collins, Lieberman, Specter, Snowe and even Minority Leader Reid. The exact details of the bill are here.
Most of the changes are pretty spectacular. The NASA budget has shifted from 1.5 billion minus 750 million, but will now be cut by only 200 million. NSF, NOAA and other budgets have…
cortex | February 6, 2009Just a quick note about some of the upcoming events on the book tour, which kicks off this Monday in Seattle. I hope to see you there!
February 9, Seattle Town Hall, 7:30 PM
February 10, Powell's Books, Portland 7:30 PM
February 11, UCSB, 7:30 PM
February 12, Los Angeles Public Library, 7 PM
February 16, Art Center College of Design, 1 PM
February 16, The Book Works, Del Mar, 7 PM
February 17, West Portal Bookstore, San Francisco 7 PM
February 18, International House, UC Berkeley
February 19, Commonwealth Club, San Francisco 6:30 PM
February 21, Barnes & Noble, Manchester, NH 3 PM…
gregladen | February 6, 2009I am hosting The Giant's Shoulders this month. Please get me your submissions by the 15th. Hint: Darwin's birthday is this month. Hint: Darwin was a giant. Do Darwin!
Send submissions via the blog carnival submission thingie.
Berry Go Round #13: Winter-Tough is here, at Watching The World Wake Up.
The Carnival of the Blue #21 is here, at The Oyster's Garter.
Brain Blogging, Forty-Third Edition is here, at Brain Blogger.
I and the Bird #93: The Compelling Nature of Birds is at Vickie Henderson's place.
Grand Rounds 5(20) is at Not Totally Rad.
Festival of the Trees 32 is at…
mspringer | February 6, 2009Continuing our "basic concepts with no math" series, here's one of the most important for quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics.
To start, imagine a billiards table. It has an assortment of billiard balls, each numbered and colored differently. You can imagine randomly knocking them around the table, sort of in analogy to gas molecules bouncing around a room. As we've discussed, it's very likely that on average the balls will be distributed more or less evenly around the table. You will rarely just happen to end up with all of them on one side of the table. By pure chance it might…
cortex | February 6, 2009That was fun!
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A few random notes:
1) I can't bring myself to watch the clip. Which reminds me of my brilliant idea for an fMRI experiment: show people videos of themselves in a scanner and see what brain areas turn on. Presto: you've found the neural correlates of self-loathing. I'm betting on the insula.
2) It was totally surreal being on the set of a show you watch every night. Like walking into your television or…
pharyngula | February 6, 2009When a blogger named Zeno proudly announces that his blog, Halfway There, is about to reach the landmark of 250,000 hits, doesn't that imply that he'll never ever reach 500,000 hits?
cwilcox | February 6, 2009Thanks to Panda's Thumb and Biochemical Soul I've been informed of some sneaky senatorial crap going down in DC. Here's the info:
Science Getting the Shaft
US Senators Ben Nelson (D-NE) and Susan Collins (R-ME) are proposing to cut the stimulus/spending package by roughly 10%. Their staff have identified several âuselessâ programs included in the bill, and it appears that they consider science funding to be one of those useless pursuits.
Over the last 50 years, much of our economic development has been driven by science, and at a time when the US is faced with losing its scientific dominance…
cwilcox | February 5, 2009Ok, to date, all the paraites I've mentioned are invertebrates. So, to be fair, I'm going to make the next two weeks parasites that are vertebrates - after all, it's not like having a backbone makes you somehow a nicer animal.
Take the pearlfish.
I first heard about the pearlfish in my freshman year of college during an Invert Bio course, when it became the brunt of nerdy bio jokes. Technically, by just calling it a "pearlfish", I'm not being very specific - pearlfish refers to any member of the Carapidae family, a group of 6" long eel-looking fish. Most, in general, just happen to live in…
sciencepunk | February 5, 2009News just in: London's LBC 97.3 radio are using legal chill in an attempt to silence Dr Ben Goldacre's criticism of their scaremongering over the MMR vaccine.
Britain is currently in the midst of a measles epidemic due to a sharp drop in the takeup of MMR. Why? Because certain sections the media have been relentlessly fear-mongering over the supposed link between the jab and autism, despite the fact that there is absolutely no evidence to support this claim. Even now, after most of the panic has subsided, some people insist on banging that hollow drum.
Kids are dying, and now those…