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gregladen | August 9, 2008
Four Stone Hearth #45 - Caves, Graves and Audio-files Edition is at Remote Central.
I and the Bird #81 is at The Marvelous in Nature.
The glorious 46th ed of 4SH is at Testimony of the Spade.
Aggregator of news about infectious diseases
The Carnival of Cinema: Episode 86 - Blogger of the Paradise is at Good News Film Reviews
Carnival of the Recipes - Harvest Recipes is at Lisa's Cookbook.
mspringer | August 9, 2008This is K2. 11 people died this month trying to climb it.
At 28,251 ft (8,611 meters), K2 is the second highest mountain on this planet, and is technically a much more difficult climb than Everest. I've never climbed anything higher than a few hundred feet. Even a passenger jet slashing through the darkness will not reach much higher. To me the appeal of climbing is manifest in photographs like that one. The stern and austere beauty of these peaks is the closest even the most adventurous people can get to something like Buzz Aldrin's magnificent desolation.
In some respects K2 is more…
zooillogix | August 8, 2008The French love their raw oysters. In fact, the French consume the most herpes, I mean oysters, per capita in the world; an average of 2kg! That's a lot of raw oyster.
Well the French were horrified to learn last week that their care-free raw oystering lifestyle had finally hit the rocks. 40 to 100 percent of oysters aged 12 to 18 months have died this summer in all but one of the regions breeding beds. After a few weeks of research, French scientists have determined that their oyster population is unhealthy because they have been too well fed, an irony that only French oysters were…
cmcclain | August 8, 2008
It may have not smelled like a new car but it definitely smelled new. Yes we did get a new ROV here at MBARI! The new ROV will replace the beloved Tiburon that has been here since 1997 exploring every nook and cranny of the Northeast Pacific.
Why the new ROV? Because we can! Serious though the new ROV is more powerful and will able to carry heavier science equipment. However, the new ROV is currently nameless. A list of possible names is being compiled based on suggestions from MBARI's staff and visitors to MBARI's open house. You can feel free to suggest some name here and I will…
petnoyer | August 8, 2008There are a few theories about why sea turtles make occasional excursions into very deep (> 1000 m) waters of the bathyal zone. These involve escape from predation, thermoregulation, and prey availability. In the first two scenarios, sharks are fewer in deep-water, so turtles can evade predation and "cool off" at the same time. Like ladies tanning on the balcony. In the third scenario, sea turtles are foraging. New research suggests this theory is half-right.
We touched on this a year ago during Megavertebrate Week noting the abundance of deep sponges in certain habitats in the comment…
cortex | August 8, 2008Dr. Felix Rey was the first doctor to diagnose Vincent Van Gogh with epilepsy, after the artist was hospitalized following this bizarre incident:
When Gauguin left their house, van Gogh followed and approached him with an open razor, was repelled, went home, and cut off part of his left earlobe, which he then presented to Rachel, his favorite prostitute. The police were alerted; he was found unconscious at his home and was hospitalized. There he lapsed into an acute psychotic state with agitation, hallucinations, and delusions that required 3 days of solitary confinement. He retained no…
mspringer | August 8, 2008The Intro Physics II final exam was this week. The signs were all there.
1. It was a summer class. Therefore a fairly high proportion of the students were taking it again after having failed it previously.
2. The class switched professors two weeks before the final. The first professor is a skilled scientist but, well, not necessarily as gifted in passing his skills to his students.
3. The second professor made the final exam from scratch.
I just finished grading three problems worth of the final exam (the other two TAs are taking care of the rest), and I think the exam can be safely…
cmcclain | August 8, 2008
Home decorations to make you feel guilty. No if they only would make these in the form of floor mats for SUV's.
Link via Neatorama via Like Cool
petnoyer | August 8, 2008Rick MacPherson hosts this week's TGIF video at Malaria, Bedbugs, Sea Lice, and Sunsets. He is advertising the Pelagic Magic Black Water Dive, a special night dive from Jack's Diving Locker in Kona, Hawaii where you can hang on a string in 60ft. of water with a little flashlight. The dive boat's called Sharkbait. Just kidding. Rick has a poll asking whether he should raise the courage, but the video shows at least two dozen stunning reasons to try it.
gregladen | August 8, 2008Health Wonk Review at Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review
New and Exciting in PLoS ONE at A Blog Around the Clock
The NBTS edition of carnival of homeschooling at The Homeschool Cafe
Change of Shift: Volume 3, Number 3 at Emergiblog
Carnival of Education at Pass the Torch
Tangled Bank #111 at Denialism Blog
The 62nd Carnival of Feminsts! at Rage Against the Man-Chine
Linnaeus' Legacy #10 at A DC Birding Blog
petnoyer | August 7, 2008
Welker Seamount peaks around 700m depth in the Northeast Pacific. Pillow lava is pictured here at 2700m depth, indicating an eruption on the seamount flank. The base is ~3500m. Gorgonians have settled nearby. Unidentified hexactinellid sponges with crabs and anemones are part of the habitat. This one below is relatively large. The lasers are set 10cm apart. This is one of many similar microhabitats at this depth range on the Northeast Pacific seamounts. Every sponge is an island.
These image are from Alvin Dive 4033 on the NOAA Gulf of Alaska 2004 Expedition, courtesy of NOAA's Office of…
grrlscientist | August 7, 2008Some of you might know that starting tomorrow, a dozen or so of the ScienceBlog peeps are meeting in NYC. Unfortunately, I cannot tell you who they are (only they are allowed to reveal themselves), but most of them have told you they will be in NYC already, so you probably know who is here for the get-together, with perhaps one or two exceptions. Anyway, this year, I have a digital camera, so I am seeking requests from you -- what sorts of pictures would you be interested to see? Which ScienceBlogger would you like me to photograph wearing a lampshade? Would you like to see the Seed Offices?…
grrlscientist | August 7, 2008Here's a few blog carnivals for you to read;
Tangled Bank, issue 111 -- eleventy-one! I think that's good luck in Hobbiton, right? Anyway, this blog carnival focuses on science, nature and medicine.
Carnival of the Vanities, 7 August 2008 issue. This is the original blog carnival, the first one in the whole wide world, and it links to the best writing in the blogosphere, regardless of topic.
Rants, the 6 August 2008 issue. You know you want to read it, yes you do!
cortex | August 7, 2008I was on the Brian Lehrer show (no relation) this morning talking about insight, firefighters and the right hemisphere. Give it a listen. And I'm curious how readers engineer their own insights. Warm showers? Long walks? Richard Feynman preferred strip clubs, a cognitive strategy I have yet to test.
mspringer | August 7, 2008In 1909, Ernest Rutherford (actually his grad students) shot subatomic particles at gold atoms to try to probe the insides of those atoms. To his surprise, he found that instead of being one continuous glob, atoms actually had most of their mass concentrated in a small nucleus at the center of the atom. This quickly developed into the idea that the atom was like a tiny solar system: massive heavy thing at the center, orbited by electrons. Like this, except replace the planets with electrons and erase all that messy stuff like asteroids and the Kupier belt.
Now the parts of an atom are far…
cortex | August 7, 2008One of the great themes of post-Darwinian science is the inter-relatedness of life. From the perspective of our neurons, there is little difference between a human and a rat, or even a sea slug. All animals use the same ionic cells and the same neurotransmitters. Pain receptors in different species share a similar design. Blood and flesh and skin are always constructed of the same elemental stuff. We share 98 percent of our genome with chimps.
The distinctions are just as murky from the perspective of behavior. Ants exhibit altruism. Parrots use symbolic logic. Gorillas mourn the death of a…
mspringer | August 6, 2008There's an interesting question in the comments of the last solar sail post:
I have a question that's been bugging me about solar sails for ages: what about the fact that light pressure falls off over distance? Every time I see the idea discussed, this is never mentioned...
He's right. As the sail gets farther from the sun, the intensity of the light reaching the sail diminishes. By the same token, the sun's gravitational force is diminishing as well. To keep going, the radiation pressure has to be greater than the force from the sun's gravity.
Where I0 is the power output of the sun (3.…
cortex | August 6, 2008This ridiculously adorable video cheered me up today:
Via Ezra Klein and Zooillogix
cortex | August 6, 2008Over at Mind Matters we recently featured an interesting article by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Adina Roskies (two philosophers at Dartmouth) reviewing a recent paper by Joshua Greene, et. al. The paper tested the dual-process model of morality, which argues that every moral decision is the result of a tug-of-war between the "rational" brain (centered in the prefrontal cortex) and the "emotional" brain, rooted in areas like the amygdala and insula.
In their study Greene et al. give subjects difficult moral dilemmas in which one alternative leads to better consequences (such as more lives…
grrlscientist | August 6, 2008Here's a few blog carnivals for you to enjoy;
StoryBlogging Carnival, issue XC. This carnival features blog essays that tell a story.
Carnival of the Feminists, 62nd edition. This blog carnival focuses on feminism and increasing the exposure of news that affects the welfare of women.
Linnaeus' Legacy, issue ten. This relatively new blog carnival links to articles about taxonomy and biodiversity.