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cmcclain | August 14, 2008I'm sorry but I am going to ruin the rest of your day, week, month, and year. I don't like packaging conservation messages in the negative but I fail to see any good spin for this. I was going to do a large write up about shifting baselines and Jeremy Jackson's wonderfully written (as always) paper occurring recently in PNAS as part of special issue addressing biodiversity and biodiversity loss. However, Jeremy provides a table that brings home the message that far excels anything I could write here.
Get the message?
cortex | August 14, 2008There's a very cool study in the latest Nature Neuroscience that looks at how professional basketball players make predictions about whether or not a shot will go in. Obviously, this is a key skill, as being able to anticipate the position of a basketball gives players additional time to jostle for a rebound.
The experiment went like this: 10 basketball players, 10 coaches and 10 sportswriters, plus a group of complete basketball novices watched a video clip of a player attempting a free throw. (You can watch the videos here.) Not surprisingly, the players were significantly better at…
gregladen | August 14, 2008Finally, Bigfoot has been found.
bigfoot
It is reported that Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer, of Georgia, have found a bigfoot body, over seven feet tall. They've put bigfoot into a freezer, snapped a few grainy photographs, and will let the rest of us see it some time in the future.
Bigfoot expert Tom Biscardi has seen the find and assures us that it is genuine.
A limited amount of information will be released at a press conference on Friday.
This bigfoot has ...
... reddish hair and black-grey eyes. [and] flat feet - similar to a human's - and a footprint that spans over 40cm.
Mr…
cortex | August 14, 2008It's a nightmarish scenario: after a car crash, a man is brought into a hospital with a severe injury to his frontal lobes. When he wakes up, the doctors realize that their patient is missing one crucial mental faculty: his memory has been erased. He has no idea who he is, or even where he came from.
"There was a bundle of clothing that came in with him when he entered the hospital, and in there we found a voter registration card from Mexico," Felix says.
The ID had a name -- Omar -- and a picture. But as he healed after surgery, the patient no longer looked like the picture. And when the…
mspringer | August 14, 2008I think it's time for a good old practice problem. This is a pretty basic one, which you might encounter as a freshman physics major. The general concept of dealing with inelastic collisions is one that you never escape, and from special relativity to quantum mechanics this type of thing keeps appearing in new contexts. This particular problem is from an old GRE practice exam, but I think solving it is kosher since it's not original to them and you can't copyright facts.
In a nonrelativistic, one-dimensional collision, a particle of mass 2m collides with a particle of mass m at rest. If…
kevin z | August 14, 2008Click on image to embiggen and go to source website.
Hat tip to Eric via Dinochick.
gregladen | August 13, 2008
The Four Stone Hearth #47--Unasked Questions Edition is at a most unlikely place, Almost Diamonds.
Carnival Of The Recipes is at "I've Got a Little Space to Fill"
Get scared at The Boneyard #22 at Laelaps.
The Carnival of Cinema: Episode 86 - Blogger of the Paradise is at Good News Film Reviews
Carnival of the Liberals LXXI - Talking Points Edition is at Submitted to a Candid World
93rd Skeptics Circle is at City of Skeptics
New and Exciting in PLoS ONE is at A Blog Around the Clock
Step right up to the Carnival of Education at Joanne Jacobs
Calls for Submission:
Praxis # 1. Check out…
grrlscientist | August 13, 2008I am recovering -- too slowly -- from what appears to be a pinched nerve in my neck. I have been trapped in a cloud of agony since Sunday (well, Saturday, actually, but the alcohol kinda blurred that memory), barely able to move, but in so much pain that I was unable to remain still and unable to sleep. I have been taking tremendous amounts of ibuprofen (as many as ten in an hour) to reduce the pain to barely tolerable levels, but it hasn't worked very well. As you might remember, my left arm is nearly useless because I am recovering from a fractured left shoulder. But this nerve thing has…
mspringer | August 13, 2008MarkCC on Good Math, Bad Math has been posting lately on encryption and privacy. As usual, technology has increased the number of ways the government can read your mail, but it has also increased the ways you can hide your communications as well. Modern open-source encryption is very secure and all other things being equal it's much harder for the government to read encrypted email than it is for the government to open an envelope old-style. To read encrypted email, realistically the government is going to have to surreptitiously bug your computer and get your password, which (for the…
grrlscientist | August 13, 2008I know that a couple of you have completed Seed Media's ScienceBlogs Reader Survey, but they need to hear from more of you. The linked survey takes only twenty minutes of your life to complete, and everyone (except me, boo!) who completes the survey will be added to a drawing for prizes: an iPhone 3G, a MacBook Air and a 40GB Apple TV. Personally, I think that my readers need to share their prizes with me. I sure would like an iPhone or a MacBook Air! Or heck, I'd even go for an Apple TV, even though I've never owned a TV and am not sure I want to change my life to fit around a TV. ..
sciencetolife | August 13, 2008This article was brought to my attention by the male minority (we have 2 men and 8 women) in my lab. They suggested that the article supports their plea to recruit more men into the lab in order to neutralize the excessive female-ness that they are exposed to every day. They are grossly exaggerating, of course. Nevertheless, here are excerpts from the article.
University of Illinois researchers report this week that chronic exposure to estradiol, the main estrogen in the body, diminishes some cognitive functions. Rats exposed to a steady dose of estradiol were impaired on tasks involving…
cortex | August 13, 2008My profile of Read Montague and the dopamine prediction-error hypothesis is now online. I wanted to write this article for two main reasons. First of all, I think the dopamine story is incredibly exciting and remains one of the best examples of how subtle shifts in neural firing rates can allow the brain make sense of the real world. Yes, I know there are caveats, but the prediction-error hypothesis is still a very powerful paradigm. Wolfram Schultz should win a Nobel Prize.
Secondly, there's so much crappy fMRI research out there - and it always get so much press attention - that I wanted to…
mspringer | August 13, 2008In quantum mechanics, particles like electrons can be observed in one of two spin states: up or down. The theory, however, doesn't require the state to be completely determined before we look at it. Any given electron doesn't have to be in one of those spin eigenstates; it can be in a superposition of spin up and spin down. It's like Schroedinger's cat being in a superposition of alive and dead, but less dramatic. For instance, a particular electron may be in a state which has a probability of 60% of being in an up state and 40% of being in the down state. Once measured it will…
cortex | August 13, 2008Sometimes, I wish America had British libel laws. This sort of dishonesty masquerading as "scholarship" makes me furious:
Mr. Corsi has released a new attack book painting Senator Barack Obama, the Democrats' presumed presidential nominee, as a stealth radical liberal who has tried to cover up "extensive connections to Islam" -- Mr. Obama is Christian -- and questioning whether his admitted experimentation with drugs in high school and college ever ceased.
Significant parts of the book, whose subtitle is "Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality," have already been challenged as…
kevin z | August 12, 2008
G4TV's coverage of the manly hit game Harpooned, brought to us by phisrow who left a comment on the last whale post. You can visit the harpooned.org and download the game to see how *real* scientific research is done (windows only)!
petnoyer | August 12, 2008Michael Phelps is faster than a flounder. He swims about 6 mph. But what if he was fighting currents, swimming upstream, and jumping dams? Salmon, dolphin, and blue shark are all faster. Salmon swim 8 mph. Maybe Mike could take them in a sprint. Swordfish and sailfish top the scales at 60 mph.
Jennifer Viegas' "Born Animal" blog runs the stats at Discovery News.
cortex | August 12, 2008Some new research sheds light on why chili plants are spicy:
It has been thought that the chemicals known as capsaicinoids, which surround the seeds and give peppers their characteristic heat, are the chili's way of deterring microbes. But if so, then microbial infestation should bring selective pressure on chilis -- the more bugs, the hotter the peppers should be.
That has never been shown in the wild. Now, however, in a study of wild chili plants, Joshua J. Tewksbury of the University of Washington and colleagues show that the variation in heat reflects the risk that the plants will be…
mspringer | August 12, 2008Sunday night I was thinking about what to write for Monday morning and settled on the moment of inertia of the tires on a vehicle. If I may say so, it's a pretty good illustration for an interesting topic. Friction was a possible hitch for my proposed experiment, but I figured that cars were specifically designed to minimize friction, and both cars and tires are pretty heavy. Surely friction can be ignored safely. I wrote up the post in about half an hour and went to bed feeling pleased with myself.
Well. I know from experience that physics Ph.D. holders are not infallible even when…
cortex | August 12, 2008I was on The Takeaway this morning talking about the ineffectiveness of Human Growth Hormone (HGH) and the potency of the placebo effect. Even though most studies demonstrate that HGH does little to enhance athletic performance, world class athletes continue to take the banned hormone. Why? Because they're convinced that HGH is effective. As a result, the drug gives them a mental edge - because athletes expect to perform better, they do perform better. The illusion of an advantage, if it's sincerely believed, can be a real advantage.
Here's more on why I'm in favor of taking HGH off the…
kevin z | August 12, 2008YEAH!!!!! One of my favorite conferences (naturally) put up the first curricular for the 4th International Symposium on Chemosynthesis-Based Ecosystems. It was formerly called the International Symposium on Vent and Seep Biology, renamed to accommodate whale falls and emphasize the common link to these amazing deep sea habitats. The conference occurs every 3 years. I went in 2005 when it was in La Jolla and it was very interesting! Most of the papers are preliminary results from works in progress and it is very grad-student friendly offering many opportunities to interact with leading PI's in…