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petnoyer | July 25, 2008
Deep Sea News' Friday edition has a new mission - to "restore" small black and white figures from obscure scientific journals to their original color, hoping to give these images a new life and audience online. The paper's citation will be included. Please contact us if you have something to share.
The image of Phakellia sponge is from the Johnson Sea Link submersible surveys of a Florida bioherm at 171 m depth in the west Atlantic. The sponge is about 2 ft tall.
I like it because it's a good example of convergent evolution. You have to ask yourself, is Phakellia a sea-fan imposter? Or vice…
petnoyer | July 25, 2008
This is an exterior shot of the submersible that collected and photographed the Phakellia sp. sponge from 170 m depth off Florida in the Friday deep-sea picture above. The video was lifted from the NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration webpage for the Johnson Sea-link submersible. Go there to learn more.
moleculeoftheday | July 24, 2008Choline is an ubiquitous vitamin. Interestingly, it makes a number of "deep-melting eutectics" with other dirt-common chemicals like Urea.
When complexed in lecithin, it makes a nice edible detergent. Mayonnaise wouldn't be possible without it!
gregladen | July 24, 2008The following video is NOT for the feint of heart. Not. If your hear is feint, go away. Now. I am not kidding. You have been warned.
Obviously, the rocking chair is going to move. But notice that the clothing (at least I think it is clothing, not a person) on the bed to the right is moving a little the whole time. Also, the rocking chair is moving, I think, almost imperceptibly. Is there a string attached to it?
grrlscientist | July 24, 2008Here is an incomplete list of blog carnivals that have recently been published for your reading pleasure;
Carnival of the Vanities, the 24 July edition. This is the original blog carnival which served to showcase excellent writing in the blogosphere, and thus, it has no topic beyond that.
I and the Bird, issue number 80. This blog carnival focuses on bird watching and bird identification, although some of us tempt them to stray into other, more interesting ornithological topics with our contributions.
Carnival of Education, issue 181. This blog carnival focuses on issues and topics…
cortex | July 24, 2008A new paper in one of my favorite journals, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, tries to reverse-engineer the tricks of magicians to learn about the blind spots of the brain. Wired Science explains:
Magic tricks may look simple, but they exploit cognitive patterns that scientists are only beginning to understand. Now some psychologists are considering how they can use magic to advance our understanding of the brain -- and perhaps help inoculate us against advertising.
"For most of the past century, [magic tricks have] been ignored, even though the effects are large, replicable, and experienced by…
cortex | July 24, 2008John Donne, in this stanza from The Ecstasy, seems to anticipate the double helix:
Our hands were firmly cemented
By a fast balm which thence did spring
Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
Our eyes upon one double string;
So to intergraft our hands, as yet
Was all the means to make us one,
And pictures in our eyes to get
Was all our propagation.
Obviously, this says more about the perfect metaphor of the double helix than Donne's intuitive knowledge of genetics. DNA really is the ideal molecule for the text of life: it's so stylish, elegant and, as Donne points out, poetic.
Thanks Sara!
petnoyer | July 23, 2008
In an alarming trend, the practice of "dynamite" or "bomb" fishing has spread recently to Central America. Reports are coming in that hawksbill turtles are being blasted to death by explosive fishermen working in the Biosphere Reserve of the Bahia de Jiquilisco, El Salvador. At least seven turtles have been found dead, according to Michael Liles, Sea Turtle Conservation Project Coordinator for Fundacion Zoologica de El Salvador (FUNZEL).
The use of explosives is exterminating all species of larvae, juvenile and adult fish, as well as crustaceous, mollusks, sea turtles, and other species of…
kevin z | July 23, 2008Nature News reports:
"Many of the research projects launched as part of the International Polar Year (IPY), which runs from March 2007 to March 2009, are under threat because of the steep rise in marine-fuel costs. Hundreds of Arctic and Antarctic scientists face uncertainty as polar science programmes worldwide are curtailed, postponed or cancelled.
The price of a barrel of oil has more than doubled since March 2007, from US$60 to $140 now. High energy costs are a problem for research in most fields, but logistically complicated research operations in remote polar regions are more affected…
cortex | July 23, 2008Funny stuff from McSweeney's:
General relativity is your high-school girlfriend all grown up. Man, she is amazing. You sort of regret not keeping in touch. She hates quantum mechanics for obscure reasons.
Cosmology is the girl that doesn't really date, but has lots of hot friends. Some people date cosmology just to hang out with her friends.
Can we come up with a similar list for the brain sciences? I think you could replace quantum mechanics with brain imaging and perhaps substitute electrophysiology for general relativity.
Via kottke
cortex | July 23, 2008Over at Mind Matters, the expert blog I curate at Scientific American, we're currently featuring a really interesting article by On Amir on the cognitive cost of making decisions:
For instance, it's long been recognized that strenuous cognitive tasks--such as taking the SAT--can make it harder to focus later on. But recent results suggests that these taxing mental activities may be much broader in scope-and may even involve the very common activity of making choices itself. In a series of experiments and field studies, University of Minnesota psychologist Kathleen Vohs and colleagues…
petnoyer | July 23, 2008We can't joke around too much about this Hurricane Dolly, I'm afraid. The weather is not terrible here in Corpus, but conditions are rapidly deteriorating in Brownsville. We now have reports of tornado warnings in nearby counties, and confirmed power outages for more than 9000 people.
News reports are forecasting an incredible amount of rain (up to 15 inches). If i remember right, that would be the equivalent of a 5 foot snowstorm in the Northeast.
From the Associated Press:
Dolly, upgraded from a tropical storm Tuesday, had sustained winds of 95 mph, just short of becoming a Category 2…
cortex | July 23, 2008Look up charming in a dictionary and I'm pretty sure you'll see this video:
Because we like to link everything to the brain over here at the Frontal Cortex, it's worth mentioning that the number four also represents the outer limits of our numerical brain. Here's Stanislas Dehaene, a leading researcher on the neuroscience of math:
Dehaene conjectured that, when we see numerals or hear number words, our brains automatically map them onto a number line that grows increasingly fuzzy above 3 or 4. He found that no amount of training can change this. "It is a basic structural property of how our…
petnoyer | July 22, 2008I am liveblogging Hurricane Dolly from Corpus Christi, Texas. It's raining here in the Coastal Bend. Not too much wind. Thanks to the storm we have a "snow day" at school. Plus, I don't have to water the lawn for a week. Things are looking up, but flooding is forecast for the region, so there could still be trouble.
My wife brought a camera to the supermarket last night to document the supermarket's reaction to the storm here in South Texas. We expected large pallets of drinking water, but there's no evidence of profiteering. Rather, it seems there was a run on sliced bread and tuna fish.…
petnoyer | July 22, 2008
Newsflash! This just in from the Weather Channel:
Dolly has strengthened to become the second hurricane of the 2008 Atlantic hurricane season. It has maximum sustained winds of 75 mph; a category one hurricane.
Hurricane Dolly may continue to strengthen tonight and tomorrow morning before landfall. It is expected to make landfall along the northern Mexico or southern Texas Gulf Coast by Wednesday morning or during the midday hours.
Join me for a warm cup of coffee as I evaluate local conditions, and decide whether or not its safe for my family to leave the house tomorrow morning. To go…
petnoyer | July 22, 2008
Clouds can be a sailor's best friend. Given, you'd have to be an awfully lonely sailor, and probably have to scratch a half dozen unmentionables off the list before you ever got to "clouds", but, ... hey, some modern sailors keep a nice cloud book with them in the navigation room. OK? It helps to whiddle away the hours on a quiet sea spent waiting for the research submersible team to break the surface. Really. Ask anybody.
Anyways, in anticipation of the approaching Tropical Storm Dolly, I trekked down to Corpus Christi Bay around 2pm to see how the cloud cover had changed with the…
cmcclain | July 22, 2008BrianR at Clastic Detritus brought my attention to a new wonderful bathymetric map of the globe. Despite his questionable loyalty to volcanoes, Brian knows a good map when he sees one and I agree that this one is indeed beautiful. GEBCO (General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans) is an initiative joining the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission and International Hydrographic Organization. You can get the high res version of the above here.
kevin z | July 22, 2008
I wrote this Sunday evening playing my baritone ukelele. I overlayed the guitar and a small banjo solo (with effects). Its fun to overlay instruments in separate tracks and play around with them. I don't very often because it is time-consuming.
I am happy to take requests, suggestions for parodies (I'm working on Every Whale Has A Bone set to Every Rose Has A Thorn...), or put life into your own lyrics. Just send me an email!
Drowning
Chorus:
(I Sing tonight and I'll sing it out loud
For those depths will not let me go
A song for the dark, no echo and how
Do I stop from sinking below)
Kissed…
cortex | July 22, 2008This kid is a poster child for deliberate practice:
Marc Yu, a 9-year-old piano prodigy from Pasadena, Calif., recently played at a benefit for victims of the earthquake in Sichuan, China. And he didn't play "Row, Row, Row Your Boat." He played a piece that Chopin wrote for victims of the Polish-Russian war, the composer's "Nocturne in C Minor."
"My legs are long enough for the pedal, but still my legs aren't straight," Marc says. "I sometimes have to sit close to the piano or stretch my legs." He says his left hand can reach an octave, but his right hand isn't quite there yet.
Marc says he…