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cmcclain | January 7, 2008From The Hindu news is that The Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Oceanography will be overseeing the construction of a new 4,000 ton research vessel dedicated to deep-sea exploration. If my estimates from the web are right, then this new vessel will be considerably smaller than the two major research vessels Dayang Yihao at 5600 tons and the icebreaker Xuelong at 21025 tons currently in service. More details here as they come in.
grrlscientist | January 7, 2008tags: Learning in the Great Outdoors, blog carnivals
The 8th edition of Learning in the Great Outdoors is now available for you to read and enjoy. Best of all, they included one of my submissions, although it is an older one, but you might not have read it.
cmcclain | January 7, 2008It truly is the year of the Giant Isopod. Questionable Content has these great T-shirts in a variety of sizes for about $20 including shipping. Hopefully, they will send me an XXL (yeah I'm a big boy) for "review".
cmcclain | January 7, 2008I am totally addicted to Mark Powell's blogfish. In part I view this relationship as a bit masochistic as the posts are always filled with bad news (e.g. CO2 poisoning is killing the ocean & YOU are probably contaminated with toxic pesticides). Over the weekend (thanks for ruining my Saturday), Mark posted on the recent decision of the Minerals Management Service to lease large areas in the Chukchi Sea area of the Arctic Ocean for oil and gas exploration. Yeah! He includes this gem:
"MMS, by its own admission, has stated that oil spills are likely from its proposal to open up the…
gregladen | January 7, 2008At the Bell Museum of Natural History
Cafe Scientifique: Looking at Lichens
Tuesday, January 8, 2008; 6 p.m.
Kitty Cat Klub, Dinkytown
We've all seen lichens growing on rocks, trees, or buildings. Yet their unusual and complex structure often goes unnoticed. Though they appear to be a single entity, lichens are actually complex and versatile organisms. Bell Museum Curator of Lichens, Imke Schmitte, will discuss the evolution of lichens, which species provide food, medicines and clothing dyes, and which help out nature by cleaning the air and adding color to the landscape.
Cafe…
gregladen | January 7, 2008High school robotics competition kicks off
Some 35,000 high school students from over 1500 high schools in eight countries today began competing in the annual US FIRST student robotics contest.
This year's competition, dubbed "FIRST Overdrive," challenges the student teams to build semi-autonomous robots that will move 40-inch diameter inflatable balls around a playing field and score the most points.
The Evolution of Altruism in Robots
Despite the fact that many fundamentalists believe morals come directly from god, scientists have long known that it's not just humans who are capable of…
laelaps | January 7, 2008
From De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (1543) by Andreas Vesalius
In 1646, the first edition of Sir Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia epidemica (or Vulgar Errors) first went into print, Browne's volume being an attempt to refute many of the erroneous "received tenets and commonly presumed truths" that would not go away despite their inaccuracy. Among the bevy of fallacious notions included in the book was a subject that often was a point of contention at the time; if the Biblical Eve was derived from one of Adam's ribs, from which side was the rib taken and therefore shouldn't the sexes…
cortex | January 7, 2008A lovely appreciation:
I received the news in an email almost exactly a year ago. As so often in recent years, Rorty voiced his resignation at the "war president" Bush, whose policies deeply aggrieved him, the patriot who had always sought to "achieve" his country. After three or four paragraphs of sarcastic analysis came the unexpected sentence: " Alas, I have come down with the same disease that killed Derrida." As if to attenuate the reader's shock, he added in jest that his daughter felt this kind of cancer must come from "reading too much Heidegger."
via 3qd
cortex | January 7, 2008Sometimes, I feel like the only journalist/blogger in New Hampshire who isn't writing about politics. My street is littered with campaign signs, from Kucinich to Huckabee, that have been stuck haphazardly into the snow. My recycling bin is full of glossy campaign mailers. In the last 48 hours, Obama has appeared at the local high school and Richardson showed up at my favorite pub. McCain practically lives in my zipcode.
Over the last year, I've had the privilege of attending numerous political events. (And I say this as someone who grew up in LA and lived in NYC and never, ever saw a…
gregladen | January 7, 2008I'm currently working on a project to assemble species names for various uses, and came across this interesting post by Podblack Cat on Podblack Blog. The author explores the interesting variants of species names of interesting species...
What about a spider called Draculoides bramstokeri? Or the sand-crab Albunea groeningi, named after Matt 'The Simpsons' Groening? A big winner in terms of nomenclature nods would have to be Frank Zappa, who has at least five different species named after him... one because the orb-weaver spider, Pachygnatha zappa, features abdominal marking that resembles…
jlynch | January 6, 2008Events
1610 - Galileo Galilei observes the four largest moons (the Galilean moons) of Jupiter for the first time.
Births
1834 - Johann Philipp Reis, German physicist and inventor
1925 - Gerald Durrell, British naturalist
1941 - John E. Walker, English chemist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1786 - Jean-Ãtienne Guettard, French physician and scientist
1878 - François-Vincent Raspail, French chemist
1893 - Jožef Stefan, Slovenian physicist
1984 - Alfred Kastler, French physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
1998 - Vladimir Prelog, Croatian chemist and Nobel Prize laureate
cortex | January 4, 2008Daniel Davies has compiled a smart list of arguments that he is no longer going to have. He explains:
While not necessarily claiming to have the definitive truth on these subjects, my views are no longer up for argument, pending absolutely spectacular new evidence. I've had a number of arguments on all of these points over the last year; I've heard all sides, and I've made up my mind. If anyone has an argument which they genuinely believe to be new, go ahead, but don't expect much. Please note also that I am no longer interested in methodological debates over the merits of statistical studies…
cortex | January 4, 2008A new book, Shock Therapy, has recently been published, which offers a contrarian take on the history of electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT. I haven't read the book, but Barron Lerner reviews it in Slate:
The authors believe that electroconvulsive therapy is incredibly effective. And yet for decades, a severely depressed patient--even one on the brink of suicide--might not have been offered the therapy, or if her doctors had proposed it, she or her family might well have declined it. In explaining why, the authors demonstrate that though we may assume medical treatments get adopted or rejected…
cmcclain | January 4, 2008
Host Tom Cavanagh (TV's Ed, Scrubs) discovers that author John Steinbeck was also a marine biologist He donated lots of specimens to the Smithsonian's museum of natural history.
nisbetmc | January 4, 2008In an editorial at this week's Science, editor Donald Kennedy raises concerns that religion has come to dominate the presidential race and argues that instead science should have an equal if not more prominent place on the election agenda. This week's issue of Science features statements on science policy by most of the major presidential candidates. Here's how Kennedy ends his editorial:
Given this new focus on religious disclosure, what does this U.S. election have to do with science? Everything. The candidates should be asked hard questions about science policy, including questions about…
petnoyer | January 3, 2008The deep-sea pickings are sparse this year at the Society for Comparative and Integrative Biology in San Antonio, TX. That's OK, It's a great meeting. "Horizontal", my advisor says, "not vertical." I'm learning about the flights of damselflies, hummingbirds, and bumblebees in between lectures on blue crab signaling and octopus middens.
My day started with a terrific review of fluorescence in the deep-sea by Mikhail Matz at UT-Austin, and ended with a sonics enhanced award lecture on the nature of stomatopod and lobster sounds by Sheila Patek at UC Berkeley. Patek gave a great review of her…
cmcclain | January 3, 2008
Fans of Steinbeck will recall that the fishing boat that he and Ed Ricketts took to the Sea of Cortez was named the Western Flyer. Her modern day namesake here at MBARI is quite a different ship indeed. The R/V Western Flyer is small water plane twin hull design (SWATH), fancy way of saying she is twin hulled. At 117ft, she can handle a compliment of 26 (10 crew, 5 ROV Tiburon crew, and 11 scientists) for around 2 weeks. If specs get you excited as they do me, they are here.
click above for larger photo
pharyngula | January 3, 2008I believe "pharyngula" has a Greek root, so it's only natural that someone would translate one of my posts into Greek.
(via Too Many Tribbles)
grrlscientist | January 3, 2008tags: books, Open Laboratory
I know that you all are dying to begin collecting the Open Lab anthologies, so I wanted to let you know that this is still possible because the inaugural edition, Open Laboratory 2006: The Best Science Writing in the Blogosphere, is still available for you to purchase. The funds raised from the sale of this volume support the Annual Science Blog Conference, which is held in North Carolina. You can purchase this book either as a electronic download ($8.69) or as a hard copy ($19.95).
The 2007 edition of this anthology will be available on amazon.com a couple of…