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kevin z | April 8, 2008To take our knitting challenge? Or are you waiting for us to raise the stakes a little? To refresh your memory, I challenged knitting readers to create a Bone-Devouring Zombie Worm with Dwarf Male in a previous post. Since the males are internal it would be cool to have a flap where you can open it to see the dwarf male giving up the spermie. Below is a figure from the article with the female ('D') with eggs traveling up the oviduct (white blotches). In 'E' the arrows point to 2 dwarf males, the 'fronds' (aka palps, labeled p) are topmost part of the organism.
To add to the pot, Craig said…
gregladen | April 8, 2008Iandthebird #72 is at Ecobirder Wow, this is a good one, and coming to us from Minnesota no less...
Festival of The Trees #22 is at Arvores vivas em Nossas Vidas.
Learning in the Great Outdoors Blog Carnival: Environmental Education Week Edition is at The Heard of Harmony
Zooillogix has the latest Carnival of the Blue, in this case, number Eleven
Carnival of the Cities is at A DC Birding Blog
sb admin | April 8, 2008Major public health organizations are drawing attention to climate changeâs effects on health: the American Public Health Association has chosen âClimate Change: Our Health in the Balanceâ as the theme for National Public Health Week (April 7-13), and the World Health Organization used World Health Day (April 7th) to remind us that weâre already starting to see climate changeâs effects on health, and itâs not pretty. We can expect to see more deadly weather events, like Hurricane Katrina and the 2003 European heat wave, as well as more widespread and severe outbreaks of Rift Valley fever,…
gregladen | April 8, 2008Whence public access policy, and why?
Flashback. The year is some time in the 1980s. The place, southern Indiana. The setting: A meeting of the Society of Africanist Archaeologists.
We are being given a presentation, in the business meeting, by a publisher. The publisher points out that the maintenance of a journal (as we had been doing) is expensive and difficult, and the most efficient way to carry out this onerous task was to have the professional publishers do it. The society was promised that members would have inexpensive subscription rates to the journal, perhaps even free…
pharyngula | April 8, 2008Perhaps you've heard of carbon offsets: the idea that if you're going to do something that will release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, you also buy or support something that will sequester an equivalent amount of carbon. It's a rational way to compensate for necessary activities and keep your damage to the environment neutral.
Well, how about stupid offsets? Let's say you're going to do something that will increase the net amount of stupidity in the universe, like, say, paying to watch some inane creationist propaganda film because you're curious about just how bad it can be. You can,…
gregladen | April 8, 2008I've not been good about posting current carnivals over the last week or so ... thus, some catching up:
Scientiae Carnival: Fools and Foolishness at Women in Science
The Second Carnival Of Mathematics: The Math Geeks are Coming to Town! at Good Math Bad Math
Tangled Bank #102 at Further Thoughts
Carnival of the Green at Conserve Plastic Bags
Circus of the Spineless at from Archaea to Zeaxonthol
Encephalon Goes to Paris (Hilton) at Of Two Minds
MedBlogs Grand Rounds 4:28 at GruntDoc
cmcclain | April 8, 2008I hope everyone has completed (or will very soon) the last challenge. I myself finally built up the nerve to brave the cold water of Monterey to enjoy the local subtidal life. As a birthday present, I decided to pursue my dive master master and thus have been spending a lot of my time in the water. All I have to say is that diving off Monterey is some of the most spectacular diving I have ever done. It is also some of the coldest with yesterday's balmy water temperature of 47 degrees. The diversity and density of life here, especially the nudibranchs, is amazing. The most exciting part…
kevin z | April 8, 2008The latest from Archie McPhee: Frogmen vs. Radioactive Octopus. Makes a great present to that little deep sea diver for the summer beach holiday!
"During a routine underwater expedition, these unfortunate frogmen were attacked by a giant radioactive octopus! Will their harpoon guns, daggers and pruning shears be enough to defeat this terror of the deep or will they all be eaten alive? Each set includes twelve, 2-1/2" hard vinyl frogmen and one, 9" soft vinyl octopus that glows in the dark!"
thescian | April 8, 2008A few lines from the poem by Louis MacNeice.
It's no go the Government grants, it's no go the elections,
Sit on your arse for fifty years and hang your hat on a pension.
It's no go my honey love, it's no go my poppet;
Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit.
The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall forever,
But if you break the bloody glass you won't hold up the weather.
grrlscientist | April 8, 2008tags: Mesopotamia, Rudyard Kipling, poetry, National Poetry Month
April is National Poetry Month, and I plan to post one poem per day, every day this month (If you have a favorite poem that you'd like me to share, feel free to email it to me). Today's poem was suggested by a reader and friend who writes that "my favourite poet is Kipling; sad to say, this [poem] is as appropriate today as it was 91 years ago. The question is still valid and I fear we'll do nothing, as our ancestors did nothing, those who embroiled us in the war will retire in comfort and assumed honour. The dead will lie…
cortex | April 7, 2008For those who might be interested (hi mom!): I'll be on the Leonard Lopate show on WNYC show early this afternoon, around 1 pm. I'll be talking about veal stock, glutamic acid and umami, so I suggest that you eat lunch before listening, or else the subject will make you even hungrier.
grrlscientist | April 7, 2008So I spent the day in the hospital, having x-rays taken of my skull and face and arm and ribs and then having doctors poke and squeeze and waggle my aching and broken appendages through the air. So this leads me to the familiar "I have good news and I have bad news" game ..
The good news: Nothing else is broken! I guess I should always land on my skull when I fall, since nothing bad happened afterall. I am sure in a lot of pain, though. I am glad that I still have some ultram left (and can refill the prescription one last time next week, too).
The bad news: It going to cost many many…
razib | April 7, 2008He's a damn frequentist! (the big issue is that he's not a philosopher, not that there's anything wrong with it....)
gregladen | April 7, 2008Remember the Science Diversity Meme? We had fun coming up with the names of women in science. Well, the meme has now mutated into a summary of itself. Here.
pharyngula | April 7, 2008By participating in popular entertainment. Richard Dawkins is going to appear on Dr Who!. I know one fan of both who's going to be pleased.
I hope they also got a guest appearance by Lalla Ward…
cortex | April 7, 2008Here's Junot Diaz, talking about his writing process:
It was an incredibly difficult struggle. I tell a lot of young people I work with that nothing should be more inspirational than my dumb ass. It took me 11 years to struggle through one dumb book, and every day you just want to give up. But you don't find out you're an artist because you do something really well. You find out you're an artist because when you fail you have something within you--strength or belief or just craziness--that picks you back up again.
One of the criticisms of my book, and it's a criticism I take rather seriously…
grrlscientist | April 7, 2008tags: At the Quinte Hotel, Al Purdy, poetry, National Poetry Month
April is National Poetry Month, and I plan to post one poem per day, every day, this month (If you have a favorite poem that you'd like me to share, feel free to email it to me). Today's poem, one that I've never read before now, was suggested by a reader, who said it is his favorite. Also includes streaming video of the poem being performed/read by Gord Downie of The Tragically Hip [5:18].
-- Al Purdy, Beyond Remembering: The Collected Poems of Al Purdy (Harbour; 2000).
grrlscientist | April 7, 2008You are really not going to believe this. I fell AGAIN this past Saturday while crossing the street. I landed on my left side and my head hit the corner of the curb so I have a huge bruise on the side of my skull just above my ear that is between four and five inches long and I experience a sharp pain in the teeth in my upper jaw any time I think I will chew something. My broken left wing is astonishingly (breathtakingly!) painful and might possibly be re-injured and my ribs hurt so terribly that I can barely move or breathe.
According to the statistics, most people spend more money in the…
kevin z | April 7, 2008The eleventh edition of the Carnival of the Blue, the best of the last month's ocean blogging, is up at the ever inimitable Zooillogix. This month is complete with HOT MOLLUSK ACTION!1!!!!11!1!!!!!!11!
I'm just fear for poor Miriam after reading she might have perverted, cannabilistic mollusks on her tail wanting to break the species barrier.... oh where is a lolz when you need one...
NOEZ!!! Run Miriam!! Run!!!1!1 Someone call the army!!11!!!!
cmcclain | April 6, 2008
Several years ago as a young graduate student I was privy to gossip about a supposed site near Puerto Rico where pharmaceutical waste was dumped in the ocean. A senior scientist in my field told me that antibiotics in the waste killed off most of the natural microbes occurring in the water column and on the seafloor. That was all the specifics I received at the time. In the ten years since then I have thought about this off and on, but I was unable to uncover any further information. In January, I was searching for an article on a wholly different topic and finally stumbled across a…