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cmcclain | October 11, 2007
What else can you say? More famous people here. More on Captain James Cook here!
cmcclain | October 11, 2007When I am diving, I have the tendency to get a little bored. Coral reefs...yeah,yeah...brightly-colored fish...yawn...charismatic invertebrates...ho-hum...sharks, octopods, communing with nature, etc. My dives are always missing something. Maybe they would be better with a soundtrack. Songs with crescendos to liven up the rather boring scene. But how do I get the music down there. Luckily, there is the aqua radio! Obviously, I am going to need this as well.
cortex | October 11, 2007Alex Ross brings my attention to a recent letter in Science:
"...Watanabe and Sato [Behav. Processes 47, 1 (1999)] have shown that Java sparrows can discriminate between Bach's French Suite no. 5 in G minor and Arnold Schoenberg's Suite for Piano opus 25. The birds were also able to generalize new music by Bach (Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D major) and Schoenberg (Five Orchestra Pieces, Opus 16) and artists in similar categories, i.e., Vivaldi and Elliott Carter. In these experiments, music by Bach and Vivaldi was considered classical music, while the music of Schoenberg and Carter was…
cmcclain | October 10, 2007
Whale-fall communities are one of the most unique habitats in the deep oceans. When a whale dies and sinks to the ocean floor, it represents a carbon-rich parcel that contrasts sharply to the food-poor desert around. Whale carcasses attract both opportunistic, and typically scavenging, species who feed on anything. In addition, there are a suite of species that are specially adapted to whale carcasses like the bone-eating worms. Whale falls were first discovered in 1989 by Craig Smith and team and just two short years after a fossil whale fall was found. These fossil whale-fall…
cmcclain | October 10, 2007...that is if you forget that they are gas-guzzling uber machines spewing carbon dioxide.
Aerosols produced by the exhaust from large oceanic vessels often produce a thin line of clouds trailing miles behind a ship, an aerosol indirect effect (above). This effect is usually split into two processes:
the first indirect effect, whereby an increase in aerosols causes an increase in droplet concentration and a decrease in droplet size for fixed liquid water content (Twomey, 1974), and the second indirect effect, whereby the reduction in cloud droplet size affects the precipitation efficiency…
cmcclain | October 10, 2007I was very excited today to see that during my absence we reached the 2007 DSN Education Fundapalooza goal of $1100. We funded 3 classroom projects and made a dent in the fourth. I cannot begin to express the importance of this to me and how grateful I am for all your donations. Those of you who donated forward along your email receipt for Donor's Choose and I will randomly select three of you for our give aways.
cmcclain | October 10, 2007Maybe another reason for scientist to carry Glocks in the field.
A boat carrying six scientists from Waltair-Vishkhapatnam-based regional centre attached to Goa-based National Institute of Oceanography (NIO) was attacked two days ago off Yermal coast in Udupi district of Karnataka, top level officials confirmed. The assailants arrived in two different native crafts, got into the NIO boat and took away the geo-physical survey instruments after a brief scuffle, a NIO spokesman stated. The NIO officials, who were yet to confirm whether the act is a case of piracy or of loot for petty gains,…
grrlscientist | October 10, 2007tags: tangled bank, blog carnival
Hey you guys, the blog carnival that you've all been waiting for is now available for you to read and enjoy! The 90th edition of Tangled Bank is now available so go over there and see what science-y goodness the author has been able to collect.
cortex | October 10, 2007Or at least they play the ultimatum game more rationally than humans:
German researchers have demonstrated chimpanzees make choices that protect their self-interest more consistently than do humans.
Researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig studied the chimp's choices by using an economic game with two players. In the game, a human or chimpanzee who receives something of value can offer to share it with another.
If the proposed share is rejected, neither player gets anything.
Humans typically make offers close to 50 percent of the reward. They also…
petnoyer | October 10, 2007The Chosun Ilbo reports that Korea is joining an exclusive club of countries now bottling deep-sea water, along with U.S., Japan, Norway and Taiwan. The deep-sea water industry claims health benefits to the deep-sea water because it's "clean and bacteria free". Craig hates the idea of this stuff, but he tried deep water from Kona, and he liked it.
The first bottled deep sea water made its debut in Korea on Thursday, with the launch of CJ's Ulleung Mine-water.
The drinking water is processed from sea water that is pumped from a depth of 650 m below the surface of the East Sea off Ulleung…
grrlscientist | October 9, 2007
Image: Brent Ward; Sedgwick County Zoo.
Thanks to a friend, who shall remain unnamed, it looks like I will be adding a bird to my flock, a species that I bred for many years before I left Seattle for NYC (a species that I gave up when I moved to pursue a career that seems to have gone nowhere, unless you think of the Coriolis Effect, as it applies to a swirling toilet, as "going somewhere").
To say the least, I have missed my birds so terribly, so deeply, so desperately at times, that this one little guy (girl?) will add a little something to the stillness that my vanished flock of…
grrlscientist | October 9, 2007The 33rd edition of Encephalon was just published and they included one of my essays. As you might remember, I hosted the previous edition of Encephalon so be sure to visit this issue as well!
laelaps | October 9, 2007Category: Anthropology
As I mentioned just prior to my move to Sb, I spent this past Saturday at NYU at the "Evolutionary Anthropology at the Interface" conference, which was primarily a celebration of the work of Cliff Jolly. I'm still a bit over my head when it comes to knowing the full "Who's Who" of evolutionary anthropology, but I do know that Cliff Jolly is most well known for his "seed-eaters" hypothesis of human origins, in which extant baboons (Papio sp.) are proposed to be better primates to study when considering primate origins and a seed-eating diet is put forward as one of the…
moleculeoftheday | October 9, 2007Retene is an aromatic molecule that occurs when forest fires happen - burning trees makes it.
The isopropyl is a dead giveaway for a terpene, which are ubiquitous among natural products (and their forest-fire synthesized derivatives).
It makes a picrate, too!
pharyngula | October 9, 2007I just had an odd idea for another of those blog memes, and this is very much an experiment. It may be too complex to last long, but I just want to toss it out and see if anything interesting happens; it's one where the answers may be interesting in one way, but the structure of the questions might be interesting in another way. Here are the instructions:
The Pharyngula mutating genre meme
There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…". Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out…
laelaps | October 8, 2007The finalists for the CollegeScholarship.com $10,000 scholarship have been announced, and SB's [I stand corrected, excuse the faux pas] Sb's own Shelley of Retrospectacle is one of them! Make sure that you go over to the voting page (the contest from here on out depends on votes from readers like you) and vote for Shelley (and tell all your friends too).
Also of note are two other science bloggers in the long list of 20, The Big Room (and little things in it) and Anthropology.net. I was hoping to make the finals myself, but even though I didn't make it I have something to shoot for next time…
grrlscientist | October 8, 2007tags: books, blog carnival
The 7 October 2007 Books Carnival is now available. I am pleased to say that they included two submissions from me, so be sure to go there and let them know how much you appreciate their hard work of putting this together for all of us to enjoy by reading the links they've collected!
sciencewoman | October 8, 2007Wow! I originally picked five projects to include in my DonorsChoose challenge, and within a few days, one of the projects was fully funded thanks to my readers and other donors around the country. As of right now, four of the six projects currently in my challenge have been fully funded, and I'm going to have to pick some more projects to tickle your generous impulses.
Let me share with you the feedback I've gotten from teachers whose challenges I donated to:
Pond Biology: a universe in a drop of water is now becoming a reality for the students of Mr. Enguidanos, who wrote you this note:…
blue_expo | October 8, 2007A two hour presentation was given at a local church last night by creation scientist whom I won't name. This presentation overall lacked direction and seemed to jump from one topic to another without really stopping to make a point. About a third of the presentation was about dinosaur diversity, talking briefly about neat features that a variety of dinosaurs have. Various weather phenomena that could have caused the flood described in Genesis were vaguely presented without any solid background or logic. Fossils were also discussed, again without really any rhyme or reason.
There were two…
laelaps | October 8, 2007
Close-up of a cuttlefish, taken at Disney's "Living Seas" exhibit
The holidays seem to be coming earlier every year, and today is International Cephalopod Awareness Day! Indeed, it's always a good thing to be aware of cephalopods (it's 12 PM, do you know where Architeuthis is?), especially since the consequences of not being so can be rather painful, or at least very inky. Even if you can't celebrate the day via your own blog, why not pick up some cephalopod-based literature? I'm going with Hanlon & Messenger's Cephalopod Behaviour, but whatever you do, be sure to see PZ's collection…