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gregladen | March 10, 2008I've been pressured to supply a photograph of Dancing Boys to gender balance the Dancing Girls provided earlier. I can do this. But you have to understand, that Dancing Boys and Dancing Girls are not the same thing. Dancing Boys in Drag are like Dancing Girls, but otherwise, Dancing Boys are usually a bunch of frat symps at a kegger. At least that's what you get when you put "Dancing Boys" into the Google Box.
So if you want Boys in Drag, you may be out of luck this time around. But I did find a viable alternative to frat symps at the kegger. Feast your eyes:
DANCING BOYS!!!!!
cmcclain | March 10, 2008
I have finally gotten around to creating a list of deep-sea themed books, with some others thrown in at Amazon. Some of you will recognize a handful of the titles that have been reviewed here. Others will be new. As I find new books, and feel free to recommend some, I will post here noting I updated the list. The list includes in no certain order:
1. Deep-Sea Biology: A Natural History of Organisms at the Deep-Sea Floor "The 'blue bible' of deep-sea biology. Despite it being 15 years old, still an authority. Great for the educated public, undergraduates, graduate students, and Ph.D.'…
cortex | March 10, 2008This is crazy stuff:
A new study finds that moths can remember things they learned when they were caterpillars -- even though the process of metamorphosis essentially turns their brains and bodies to soup.
The implications of the PLOS study extend far beyond the world of moths and butterflies. For instance, one of the fundamental (and unresolved) mysteries of memory is how our memories persist. The cells of the brain, like all cells, are in constant flux. The average half-life of a brain protein is only 14 days. Our hippocampal neurons die, and are reborn, the mind in a constant state of…
cortex | March 10, 2008Cognitive Daily has a typically great review of some recent research connecting blood glucose levels and self-control:
Matthew Gailliot, along with Baumeister and six other researchers, asked 103 psychology students to fast for three hours before watching a video [the video required subjects to ignore salient stimuli, much like the stroop task]. Half the students were told to ignore the words, while the rest weren't required to exercise any self-control. Blood glucose levels were measured before and after this task. The students exercising self-control had significantly lower glucose levels…
grrlscientist | March 9, 2008
An interior view of "my" beloved coffee shop,
taken about two weeks ago, when I was healthier than I am today.
Image: GrrlScientist 2008. [Do you really want this in wallpaper size?].
I've had enough excitement for one day today. I went out to take care of some "cat clients" (gotta keep the pennies coming in, especially now!), stopped by my watering hole that is in the cats' neighborhood to say hello to my pals there (I drank only coffee, for the record), and then caught the train home after I tried again to photograph a special image for PZ's birthday gift (it is scheduled to appear at…
cmcclain | March 9, 2008
Quotes from Beebe'sHalf-Mile Down in which he describes his and Otis Barton's 1934 descent to 3,028 feet off Bermuda. To reach this depth the two placed themselves into a self-designed 4,500lb sphere about five feet in diameter raised and lowered from a ship by a cable.
One thing we cannot escape-forever afterward, throughout all our life, the memory of the magic of water and its life, of the home which was once our own-this will never leave us
Yet I fine that I must continue to write about it, if only to prove how utterly inadequate language is to translate vividly, feeling and sensations…
tqa | March 9, 2008
The President devoted yesterday's radio address to explaining why he vetoed the Intelligence bill Congress sent him. He concluded the address with the following gem:
We have no higher responsibility than stopping terrorist attacks. And this is no time for Congress to abandon practices that have a proven track record of keeping America safe.
What are these practices that our terrorist-loving Congresscritters so nicely asked the President to abandon? They're nothing special - just you're run-of-the-mill-Spanish-Inquisition-torture-type-stuff.
It's frustrating enough watching the…
pharyngula | March 8, 2008Important news!
Daylight Saving TIme begins at 2am on Sunday, 8 March. Remember to set your clocks ahead one hour.
You better set those clocks correctly so you can catch Atheists Talk radio at 9am. This week, it's interviews with some of the bigwigs of American Atheists.
Yeah, it's my birthday on Sunday. I'll be of the age that means I have three 17 year olds yammering at each other in my cranium, and I'm going to celebrate it with a quiet day spent getting some writing done.
kevin z | March 8, 2008Research and exploration into our deep oceans has resulted in a magnitude of benefits to society from medicinal compounds to improved navigation and mapping equipment. It is not often you hear about connections between the deep sea and sports though. TimesOnline UK reports:
British scientists prospecting the world's deep-sea basins for oil have discovered that the same technique can be applied to catch drug cheats in sport.
The innovative steroid test developed by researchers at Imperial College, London, and the University of Nottingham uses a process known as hydropyrolysis to detect levels…
kevin z | March 8, 2008I know I was supposed to be live blogging the conference, but there is just so much to do and see here the ASLO Ocean Sciences conference! Running from 9am to 7:30pm with 16 concurrent sessions and over 4000 participants this meeting was huge. So I am going to pick a few highlights from the meeting.
Charlyene Bachraty presented work on modeling biogeographic dispersal at hydrothermal vents. Based on a multivariate regression tree of species distributions, she determined 6 vent biogeographic provinces. Though some of her work suffers from sampling effort bias (as is true in most of the deep…
grrlscientist | March 7, 2008tags: blog carnivals, Linnaeus' Legacy
The 5th edition of Linnaeus' Legacy is now available for you to enjoy. This is a new blog carnival that focuses on taxonomy and biodiversity and is published each month. Happily, it appears to be growing with each edition -- so be sure to go there and give the contributors some encouragement!
grrlscientist | March 7, 2008A few of you have been writing, wondering if I would give a medical update on my broken wing on my blog, so since I have wifi finally, here I am (well, it is actually 3am right now, this is scheduled to publish much later in the day). Basically, I am still in a lot of pain but I ran out of the most powerful pain reliever, percocet (oxycodone), so now I am stuck taking ibuprofen and Tylenol #3 -- neither of which works for longer than one to one-and-a-half hours. Sometimes, I take the full dose of these meds every two hours instead of every six as I am supposed to do, but when I do that, the…
thescian | March 7, 2008A discussion about why 42 is the answer to everything at the BBC:
...The answer can be interpreted in two ways. One is that it is a bad joke, implying that there simply is no answer, no meaning, no sense in the universe, and you would be no worse off if you jumped into the nearest black hole.
But the other interpretation is that the joke was wise. It shows that seeking numerical answers to questions of meaning is itself the problem. Digits, like a four and a two, can no more do it than a string of digits could represent the poetry of Shakespeare.
Shakespeare's work was the product of a life,…
cortex | March 7, 2008It's a new pilot program in a few dozen New York City schools: students are given cash rewards in exchange for higher test scores. Jennifer Medina reports:
The fourth graders squirmed in their seats, waiting for their prizes. In a few minutes, they would learn how much money they had earned for their scores on recent reading and math exams. Some would receive nearly $50 for acing the standardized tests, a small fortune for many at this school, P.S. 188 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
When the rewards were handed out, Jazmin Roman was eager to celebrate her $39.72. She whispered to her…
gregladen | March 7, 2008Midges, baseball fans recall, are the gnat-like insects that rose from Lake Erie last October and descended upon Chamberlain in the bottom of the eighth inning of a playoff game against the Cleveland Indians, distracting him into throwing two wild pitches. Cleveland scored the tying run without a hit. The Yankees eventually lost the game and eventually the series.
During mating season, the air at Lake Myvatn can also be thick with male midges, each hovering, waiting for a female to join him. "It's a like a fog, a brown dense fog that just rises around the lake," said Anthony R. Ives, a…
cmcclain | March 6, 2008
Giant Isopods Ate My Well-Known Brand of Corn Chip
They will attack you when your sleeping!
Everything is better when narrated by Sir David Attenborough