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cmcclain | March 20, 2008More from Deepscape...
Image 61 of sandy sediments at 970m in the Faroe-Shetland Channel with stalked glass sponges (white spots top), an unidentified fish, and numerous invertebrate burrows.
moleculeoftheday | March 20, 2008As I've discussed in the past, certain dyes can detect radiation, stain DNA, sense solvent polarity, or (in olden times!) color the Chicago River green. This one can make a laser!
With sufficiently fluorescent dyes, you can actually take a laser and use it to "pump" a jet of a dye that absorbs the laser wavelength, and get a longer (lower energy) wavelength out. This often makes a mess - rooms with dye lasers seem to make it about five minutes before someone spills one of these day-glo lasing mediums on the floor.
MoTD science club: here's a polycarbonate bottle cast with a pink dye with an…
gregladen | March 20, 2008The Carnival of Education # 163: Spring Break Edition is up at So, You Want to Teach?
kevin z | March 20, 2008
CNN reports:
"Although the vessels were once viewed as a quirky sideshow in the drug war, they are becoming faster, more seaworthy, and capable of carrying bigger loads of drugs than earlier models, according to those charged with catching them.
"They tend to be one of a kind," U.S. Coast Guard Commandant Thad Allen said. "They cost up to a million dollars to produce. Sometimes they are put together in pieces and then reassembled in other locations. They're very difficult to locate."
The boats are built in the Colombian jungle. They sail largely beneath the surface of the water but cannot…
cortex | March 20, 2008Over at Mind Matters, the expert blog I curate at Scientific American, we've had some really good posts lately. The most recent post, by Maryanne Wolf (author of that other Proust book on neuroscience, Proust and the Squid), Mirit Barzillai and Elizabeth Norton, looks at the reading brain. They discuss a recent paper by Laurent Cohen, Stanislas Dehaene and colleagues. (Look here for a recent profile of Dehaene in the New Yorker.)
The late, eminent cognitive scientist David Swinney of UCSD described how it is only in the acquisition of routines that later become automatic that we can see…
grrlscientist | March 20, 2008Good news: yesterday, I wrote an essay about Arthur C. Clarke for SEED magazine and it was published on their on-line site today. I am so pleased that something I wrote was finally recognized as being worthy of publication "for reals", although, now that I read it today, there are a dozen things that I'd like to fix and change (this is why blog writing is superior to other forms of writing: we are allowed to edit our pieces until they satisfy us).
On the other hand, I wrote that piece in only a few hours -- devoting two hours to an essay that I threw away after I'd finished it, and another…
cmcclain | March 20, 2008Sheril over at The Intersection seems to be confused about what the coolest invertebrate is. She goes so far as to call out PZ about his hyper-infatuation with Cephalopods. Let's face it there is no way an echinoderm, especially a holothurian, can come anywhere near the coolness of a Mollusk. There is a reason why we at DSN have a whole category here dedicated to Cephalopods and not one dedicate to our water-vascularized friends. It's just hard to get excited about a sea cucumber that either feeds on sediment muck or filters muck out of the water column and not much else. Or an organism…
cmcclain | March 20, 2008From CNN...
A woman sunbathing on a boat died after a stingray leaped from the water off the Florida Keys on Thursday and struck her, officials said.
kevin z | March 20, 2008I think this graphic illustrates Craig's last Just One Thing Challenge.
Hat tip to Gear Junkie's Daily Dose blog via GT.
gregladen | March 20, 2008Tangled bank number 101 is now up at Tangled Up in Bank Guy (that's not really the name of the blog, but I thought I'd try a little play on words there...
petnoyer | March 19, 2008
Ongoing discussion about the potential effects of ocean acidification on deep-sea corals has me wondering about the case of acid rain in North American lakes. This is something we understand much better. Environment Canada has a great looking and informative Freshwater Website that includes this handy graphic here.
Isn't it amazing that acid rain can have almost the same pH as battery acid? And that freshwater fish can survive in such a large range of conditions? I find it remarkable. Of course, you won't find "freshwater corals" in any lake, so its just food for thought, a bit like…
esiegel | March 19, 2008This was the third and final piece of the puzzle that led to the acceptance of the Big Bang and the rejection of all alternatives: the discovery of the background radiation left over from the Big Bang.
The "leading theory" before this was discovered was the Steady-State theory. Sure, they knew of Hubble Expansion. But they hemmed and hawed and said, "well, the Universe is expanding, but there must be something that happens that keeps creating new matter for free, and that's why the Universe can expand in a steady-state theory." So, they made one thing up to explain that (which violates the…
grrlscientist | March 19, 2008tags: blog carnivals, Carnival of Education
The 163rd edition of the Carnival of Education is now available for you to enjoy. Wow, it's spring break already?
cortex | March 19, 2008First, watch this:
Then read the poem it inspired, which was written by one of my favorite poets, Wislawa Szymborska:
The Experiment
As a short subject before the main feature -
in which the actors did their best
to make me cry and even laugh -
we were shown an interesting experiment
involving a head.
The head
a minute earlier was still attached to...
but now it was cut off.
Everyone could see that it didn't have a body.
The tubes dangling from the neck hooked it up to a machine
that kept its blood circulating.
The head
was doing just fine.
Without showing pain or even surprise,
it followed…
gregladen | March 19, 2008Indeed, the evolutionary history of the mammalian way of providing nutrients for young is difficult to ascertain on the basis of the usual techniques: Fossils and comparative anatomy. The soft parts involved don't fossilize well, and there are not enough "intermediates" living today to develop a plausible story of the evolutionary transitions linking egg-laying to live birth and lactation.
A new study recently published in PLoS Biology brings us a long way towards understanding this set of evolutionary events.
PLoS provides an "Author Summary" for published papers, which are sometimes,…
cortex | March 19, 2008I guess I should make it clear that, contrary to the title of my talk, Kanye West isn't really a neuroscientist. (Conveying irony via the internet isn't easy. Although it's still amusing to imagine him, in full rapper regalia, doing minipreps and PCR's.) So what does Kanye have to do with the brain? Well, I use one of his songs to illuminate the basic cognitive mechanisms underlying the perception of music. I think one of the benefits of looking at art through the optic of neuroscience is that you can see all sorts of surprising connections. You can see that a rap star uses the same basic…
cortex | March 19, 2008Flying back from Little Rock, I had the pleasure of sitting next to a 68 year old man who had never flown on a plane before. For most of us, traveling through the air at 400 mph on a steel bird has become such a routine, banal, tiresome, frustrating experience that it's nice to be reminded of the incredible aspects of flight. The laws of physics are rather impressive.
There's also something deeply infectious about the state of wonder. I couldn't help but share, at least a little bit, the awe of the man sitting next to me. He thought the cotton ball clouds were gorgeous and loved the look of…
grrlscientist | March 19, 2008I am very excited because one of my friends, a professor of ornithology at Kansas State University, has invited me to visit him and his female companion in Kansas! Specifically, I will be staying for one week in "the Little Apple" as the city is apparently known. I will bring my binoculars, camera and laptop, so I will be posting updates and pictures whenever possible. My hosts have wifi, so I will be able to easily stay in touch on my blog.
So this is my tenative itinerary, for those who are interested, and for those who might be in the area and wish to meet;
Tuesday (25 March): arrive at…