Uncategorized
cwilcox | September 1, 2008Here's a somewhat-comprehensive list of posts of mine that have been selected as Editor's Selections:
03.30.2011 Is Bigger Really Better? chosen by Dr. Peter Janiszewski
12.23.2010 Fish Have Feelings (And They Can Be Seen In Their DNA) chosen by Jarrett Byrnes
10.04.2010 The Ig Nobels Have Been Announced! chosen by Dr. Skyskull
09.16.2010 Testosterone Levels In Carcharhinus leucas: Is It All Bull? chosen by Jarrett Byrnes
09.08.2010 Busting Marine Myths: Sharks DO Get Cancer! chosen by Peter Janiszewski
06.21.2010 Reflections on the Gulf Oil Spill: Conversations With My Grandpa chosen by…
kevin z | September 1, 2008Over at The Saipan Blog. Excellent Collection of ocean-related articles. Learn about the proposed Mariana Trench National Monument and how Bush supports it! Kudos to Angelo for this edition of the Carnival of the Blue and all his hard work promoting the creation of the monument.
Extra: Just read this letter to editor regarding the NY Times article on the new alvin:
" Re "New Sphere in Exploring the Abyss" (Aug. 26): I am heartened by the push to deeper ocean frontiers promised by the development of the new subs. Every such exploration yields unimagined life forms and provides us astronomers…
mspringer | September 1, 2008Fundamentally, you can start off with the Standard Model. It's not perfect, but it's a pretty good description of the particles and forces of nature especially at the mostly low energies of our soar system. Using quantum mechanics you can built up those particles into distinct nuclei, and calculate how they can fuse to form new nuclei. Tack on even a rudimentary Newtonian understanding of gravity and you're already able to describe stars from scratch.
Keep going with atoms and eventually things move out of the physics building into the chemistry building as those atoms combine to form…
cortex | September 1, 2008Sorry for the radio silence - I've been out and about doing some reporting. But I've got a story in the Sunday Boston Globe on the benefits of daydreaming and the default network:
Teresa Belton, a research associate at East Anglia University in England, first got interested in daydreaming while reading a collection of stories written by children in elementary school. Although Belton encouraged the students to write about whatever they wanted, she was startled by just how uninspired most of the stories were.
"The tales tended to be very tedious and unimaginative," Belton says, "as if the…
kevin z | September 1, 2008While Deep Sea News is still preparing our new home, spackling the cracks, painting the walls, sanitizing the fridge, throwing out the empties form the last tenant's going away party, unpacking the boxes and otherwise getting settled in, other people are keeping on top of things in our ocean world!
Toxel has sexy designs for both a collapsible surfboard AND the Volitan Futuristic Lightweight Boat!! Check out the concept video:
Mike Haubrich follows an awesome expedition to the Cayman Trench.
The North and South American continents joined up just three million years ago, but before then…
sciencewoman | August 31, 2008From Wikipedia:
Labor Day is a United States federal holiday observed on the first Monday in September. The holiday originated in 1882 as the Central Labor Union (of New York City) sought to create "a day off for the working citizens".
Congress made Labor Day a federal holiday in 1894.[1] All fifty states have made Labor Day a state holiday.
Traditionally, Labor Day is celebrated by most Americans as the symbolic end of the summer.
Classes started last week, so the summer has already come to an end in my neck of the woods. It seems kind of silly to have a three day weekend after the first…
gregladen | August 31, 2008A new species of giant clam has been discovered in the Red Sea.
Fossils suggest that, about 125,000 years ago, the species Tridacna costata accounted for more than 80% of the area's giant clams.
The species may now be critically endangered, researchers report in Current Biology journal.
BBC
edyong | August 31, 2008Welcome to the eighth edition of Berry Go Round, the carnival that celebrates the blogosphere's coverage of all things botanical. I'm not going to try and top Bora's magnificent LOLPlant effort, so without further ado, here's the good stuff:
A Neotropical Savanna on the beautiful Bamboo Orchid and the Cojoba tree, whose beans look like a coral snake
Seeds Aside chimes in with a post on the pornographic world of orchid flowers
Many orchid flowers are just plain porn (to hymenoptera, I mean). But how far can the little critters be deceived in their mating attempt? In the Australian…
pharyngula | August 30, 2008Everyone must read this article about ‘Joel's Army’ and be afraid. It's a movement by radical Dominionists to build an informal paramilitary organization (at this time, it seems to be more attitude than organization) to prepare to fight to impose a kind of Christian fascism on the world. It may be a group small in number (but not that small, I fear), but they have a lot of fanaticism and lunacy to amplify their power.
Todd Bentley has a long night ahead of him, resurrecting the dead, healing the blind, and exploding cancerous tumors. Since April 3, the 32-year-old, heavily tattooed, body-…
kevin z | August 30, 2008Sheril reports that Barack Obama has taken up the challenge and answered the 14 questions posed by the ScienceDebate08 coalition. These 14 issues run the gamut from space to health to security and education. In particular to myself and you the reader, there was one very important question about the ocean's health:
9. Ocean Health. Scientists estimate that some 75 percent of the world's fisheries are in serious decline and habitats around the world like coral reefs are seriously threatened. What steps, if any, should the United States take during your presidency to protect ocean health?
"…
gregladen | August 30, 2008This may be premature by an hour or two, and if so, I'll update again, but there is enough new information on Gustav to provide an update.
Gustav is now a Category Four Hurricane and is bearing down on Cuba. The hurricane will strike the northern Gulf coast as a serious, possibly major storm. I have heard from contacts in industry in the region that the presumption of a major hurricane is in effect and the shipping industry and other industries are in the process of shutting down. There are also news reports that I have not checked that LA Parishes in the vicinity are under mandatory…
mikethemadbiologist | August 30, 2008Two years ago, ScienceBlogling Afarensis told us about McCain's VP nominee Sarah Palin's creationist streak:
Palin said she thought there was value in discussing alternatives.
"It's OK to let kids know that there are theories out there," she said in the interview. "They gain information just by being in a discussion."
That was how she was brought up, she said. Her father was a public school science teacher.
"My dad did talk a lot about his theories of evolution," she said. "He would show us fossils and say, 'How old do you think these are?' "
Asked for her personal views on evolution, Palin…
mspringer | August 30, 2008First, a Public Service Announcement: As a decade-long former south Louisiana resident who was in Baton Rouge for Katrina, I have some advice. If you're in Louisiana anywhere south of about Alexandria, now's the time to start packing. You might be ok sticking around till Saturday night or possibly Sunday morning to see if it turns, but that's really pushing it. If you're actually in New Orleans you should leave now regardless. Now to our regularly scheduled post.
Science. On TV it goes something like this: Scientist gets brilliant idea. Scientist goes to lab, puts serious expression…
mspringer | August 29, 2008I really loathe politics, and have mostly tried to avoid writing about it. But finally something interesting has happened, and it's worth a brief comment.
In physics we like to talk about symmetry. Conservation laws and symmetry are intimately related, and you can learn a lot about one by studying the other. One of the more interesting examples of this is parity. Parity basically means reversing left and right - if you do an experiment and then rebuild the entire thing backwards, everything happens as you'd expect. If you take a picture of a physical process and flip the picture in…
edyong | August 29, 2008Quick note: I'm hosting the plant carnival Berry Go Round this month, and you have 2 days to send me any interesting posts you've written or found. I'll stick something up on Sunday.
Cheers,
Ed
kevin z | August 29, 2008I couldn't resist. FAILBlog has the original entry, a screenshot from a forum by someone who has a plan to stop sea level rise, an outcome of global warming. Here is what the text says:
"I was watching inconvenient truth the other day and theres the bit where it shows the sea level rising really high and flooding most of the world. Well i live near the sea, and don't want to drown, so i got to thinking. Maybe if we lower the sea level a bit, when the water level rises then it won't rise high enough to flood.
Anyway, heres the plan. Everyone who can should take a bucket of sea water and pour…
mspringer | August 29, 2008Top 10 lists are silly. But they're fun, which is why there's so many of them. In a week or two, I'm going to start a brief biographical series with a little bit of information on the lives and works of the great physicists.
The top 3 are obvious (Well, to me anyway). The top 5 - I think I have a decent idea what my opinions are. The top 10? Things start to get kind of fuzzy. There's a few dozen people who could make a pretty good case for being considered among the truly great physicists. But these lists are as much about who's not in them as who is. And heck, maybe we'll even make…
kevin z | August 29, 2008
Just another lazy friday afternoon. I don't know about you, but i felt more relaxed after listening to that, almost sleepy. Maybe you need a little sting to wake you up after that? (below the fold)
petnoyer | August 29, 2008
Living polyp of a Swiftia sp. sea fan. Photo credit: Peter Etnoyer, HRI.
Many deep-water animals have never been photographed alive in their natural habitat, they're known only from their pickled state. Dried, dusty, and broken specimens fill museum drawers. "Living specimen photography" captures vital information before a specimen is collected. Remember to "snap" before you snip. It brings those dusty drawers to life!
Swiftia sp. is a dark loving, azooxanthellate sea fan, one of many 'asymbiotes' in the twilight zone of the West Atlantic. The living colony's color and morphology is seen…
kevin z | August 28, 2008Eric over at that brilliant invertablog, The Other 95%, is hosting the next edition of Linnaeus' Legacy. It is a blog carnival about taxonomy, biodiversity and systematics. The current edition is at A DC Birding Blog. You have 1 week to get in those submissions! Go here to submit.