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grrlscientist | September 16, 2008
I receive a fair number of books to review each week, so I thought I should do what several magazines and other publications do; list those books that have arrived in my mailbox so you know that this is the pool of books from which I will be reading and reviewing on my blog.
Lost Land of the Dodo: An Ecological History of Mauritius, Reunion & Rodrigues by Anthony Sheke and Julian Hume (New Haven and London: Yale University Press; 2008).
Table of Contents:
Geography of the Mascarenes
First contact
The pristine islands
Where did the Dodo come from?
Early settlement
United under…
ddobbs | September 16, 2008
Here's one completely new to me:
Today's VSL:Science link calls attention to tardigrades (aka "water bears," for reasons apparent in the YouTube video above), which are barely visible invertebrates that live on mosses and lichens -- and through virtually anything.
They are virtually indestructible. In recent years, scientists have subjected tardigrades (which are also known as water bears) to extreme temperatures, ranging from 155ºC to –200ºC. They’ve deprived the creatures of food and water for years at a time and zapped them with incredibly toxic levels of radiation. But, just like a…
zooillogix | September 16, 2008Basically this session is about making a media story out of a zoo or aquarium's conservation efforts. I'm making a story out of making a story.
Challenging Media Myths About White Sharks
Speaker: Karen Jeffries, Monterey Bay Aquarium
The Monterey Bay Aquarium examined the possibility of exhibiting a great white shark in an effort to change perceptions of an animal most commonly associated with the movie Jaws. The husbandry challenges were formidable. Of the 37 previous attempts to exhibit a great white, all had died quickly, the oldest living only 16 days.
The PR challenges were also…
zooillogix | September 16, 2008After the keynote, Jack Hanna, Director Emeritus of the Columbus Zoo, received the AZA R Marlin Perkins Award for Professional Excellence. For those of you who don't know him, Hanna is a regular guest on morning news shows, late night talk shows, and pretty much anyone with a TV show and a desk in-between. He typically brings an assortment of animal ambassadors with him. He also stars in his own TV show, Into the Wild.
Classic Hanna
For a guy who sometimes comes off as hoaky (to me) on TV, Hanna in person was sincere and humble. Apparently his college president called him into his office as…
cortex | September 16, 2008How much can we learn about disease from studying genetics? A few months ago, Nature published an interesting article on the possible impossibility of ever finding the faulty genes behind many mental illnesses. Today, Nicholas Wade in the Times had an interesting article on the skeptical geneticist David Goldstein:
Goldstein says the effort to nail down the genetics of most common diseases is not working. "There is absolutely no question," he said, "that for the whole hope of personalized medicine, the news has been just about as bleak as it could be."
Of the HapMap and other techniques…
mspringer | September 16, 2008Yesterday some of my fellow students and I had this homework assignment which, long story short, amounted to doing some changes of variables. One part of the problem in particular was not very transparent until we realized we were missing a factor of a Jacobian.
"I'm just going to write 'The Jacobian enters in a natural way' and present the conclusion as an accomplished fact.", one of my friends said. Obviously it didn't enter in anything approaching like a natural way, but if there's one thing hard science books and papers like to do, it's talk about hard stuff like it was easy. In that…
grrlscientist | September 15, 2008Blog carnivals are a great way to see a wide variety of ideas and opinions on a variety of subjects. So here's a few newly published blog carnivals for you to peruse;
Total Mind and Body Fitness, issue 67.
Review Bloggers Carnival, 27th edition. This blog carnival focuses on any sort of review, from product reviews to book reviews. I'll bet you can guess which sort of thing I reviewed for this carnival ..
Carnival of Finance issue 21. This is a huge blog carnival, filled with all sorts of money advice.
grrlscientist | September 15, 2008tags: annual science communication conference, ScienceOnline'09, SciO09, Sigma Xi, Research Triangle Park, science blogging conference, nature blog writing
You are all cordially invited to the third annual ScienceOnline'09 conference which is scheduled for 16-18 January 2009 at the Sigma Xi Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. I am determined that I will be present this year, and that I will speak about something useful while I am there! So far, things look promising because my topic suggestions have been met with positive feedback. (Since I am so optimistic, I have already…
ioelrich | September 15, 2008Welcome to Seed's latest blog, Vote for Science. Seed set this blog up to cover science, science policy, and science politics relevant to the November election. The current plan is that the blog will run only until the election. Maybe it will continue. We shall see. I have been told I am a "guest blogger," which means, I think, that I will disappear when the blog disappears. I am a chemist/physicist by training and have worked in science and R&D policy. I am now heading up the Strategic Security Program at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), but my views expressed here do…
cortex | September 15, 2008I think this experiment helps explains a rather disturbing amount of our political discourse. What it neatly demonstrates is that the main reason so many campaigns traffic in dishonest allegations and pseudofacts is that, when it comes to voters, the facts don't really matter. Most of us are just partisan hacks:
Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler provided two groups of volunteers with the Bush administration's prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. One group was given a refutation -- the comprehensive 2004 Duelfer report that concluded that Iraq did not…
ddobbs | September 15, 2008Quite bizarre. No evidence one way or another whether (or how) this might actually affect us. But it's an odd thing to ponder.
Via Furious Seasons, I'll just let him deliver it:
September 12, 2008
The AP Finds Even More Pharma Products In America's Water Supply
Back in March, the AP's investigative unit uncovered the fact that the water supplies of many American cities contained small amounts of pharmaceutcials, including hormones and mood stabilizers. Now, the AP has uncovered even more medications in urban water supplies, adding 17 more big cities to its list (for example, Reno, Nev.,…
cortex | September 15, 2008Infinite Jest was one of those books that changed my life as a geeky adolescent and then proved to be rather unreadable a few years later. Nevertheless, I've always made a point of reading everything DFW ever wrote. I think of him whenever I cram a digression into a footnote, or delight in the scholarly look of an endnote shyly interrupting text. There aren't too many postmodernists who say things like this:
"We all suffer alone in the real world...True empathy's impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character's pain, we might then also more…
cortex | September 15, 2008This makes me sad:
When gasoline prices shot up this year, Peggy Seemann thought about saving the $10 she spends weekly on lottery tickets.
But the prospect that the $10 could become $100 million or more was too appealing. So rather than stop buying Mega Millions tickets, Ms. Seemann, 50, who lives in suburban Chicago and works in advertising sales for a financial Web site, saved money instead by packing her lunch a few days a week, keeping alive her dreams of hitting a jackpot and retiring as a multimillionaire.
"With companies tightening and not giving cost-of-living increases, you have to…
cortex | September 15, 2008A few months ago, when it looked as if the financial maelstrom had mostly passed - after the Bear Stearns bailout, things calmed down - I decided to write an article about Read Montague and the weird habits of dopamine neurons. While these brain cells are often used to explain the computation of rewards, until I visited Montague's lab I had no idea that dopamine neurons could also help explain the perpetual cycle of boom and bust on Wall Street.
The experiment went like this: Each subject was given $100 and some basic information about the "current" state of the stock market. After choosing…
grrlscientist | September 14, 2008There are 305,140,705 people in the United States of America, and US Census Bureau statistics reveal that there are at least 88,799 different last names and 5,163 different first names in common use in the United States. Some names are more common than others. For example, there are 50,389 John Smiths, 1,066 James Bonds, 115 Harry Potters (but only one or fewer Hermione Grangers, Luna Lovegoods, Ronald Weasleys, Virginia Weasleys, Neville Longbottoms, Draco Malfoys, Severus Snapes and Albus Dumbledores), 512 people named George Bushs (as if one wasn't horrible enough!), and 32 people named…
mspringer | September 13, 2008One of my favorite writers, the extraordinary David Foster Wallace, is dead after ending his own life. He was 46.
My first exposure to his work was his beautiful mathematics book Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity. He brought his extraordinary skill as a narrative fiction writer to the story of the development of the mathematical concept of infinity, and doing so in a way that does not fall victim to the excessive simplification that plagues so much of science writing. It's equally engaging for the mathematically naive and the mathematically sophisticated, with one or two…
gregladen | September 13, 2008With vibrant video clips captured by submarines, David Gallo takes us to some of Earth's darkest, most violent, toxic and beautiful habitats, the valleys and volcanic ridges of the oceans' depths, where life is bizarre, resilient and shockingly abundant.
gregladen | September 13, 2008
Carnival of Mathematics
Carnival of the Recipes
The 95th Skeptics' Circle
The 64th Carnival of Feminists
New and Exciting in PLoS ONE
Friday Ark #208
Carnival of the Liberals #73
Carnival of Cinema
Carnival of the Green #144!
Carnival of Food and Travel : #3
Welcome To The 142nd Festival Of Frugality
Kiddie Carnival of Education
CARNIVAL OF THE GODLESS #100
Carnival of Space - Universe from A to Z
grrlscientist | September 13, 2008Hey, this is really fun: I just learned that my blog is included in the list, "101 Women Bloggers to Watch, Fall 2008" by WE magazine for women. If you like reading women's blogs, this is a great list to refer to, since there are 100 others listed there to choose from!
gregladen | September 13, 2008Do not click THIS. Don't. And if you do click it, do not follow the link. Just don't.
But if you do follow the link, don't press "play," and if you do press play make sure there are no children or nuns around.
Enjoy.