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grrlscientist | September 4, 2007tags: cats, kittens, blog carnivals
There are a couple cat-oriented carnivasls available for you to enjoy. The first one is the 180th edition of The Carnival of Cats. The other one is a relatively new one, Bad Kitty Cat Chaos, which was having issues being published due to power outages over the weekend. Be sure to check them out!
grrlscientist | September 4, 2007I am ill and have been so for a couple days now, so I won't be writing as much as I usually do until I start feeling better. This is mainly because I don't feel well enough to make my usual trek to the library, and I lack a stable wifi connection from my apartment. I am sorry about this, but I did want to let you all know that I am thinking about you.
petnoyer | September 4, 2007
Seafloor mining continues to gain popularity in response to discoveries of diamond beds off Namibia and mineral deposits off Papua New Guinea and New Zealand. Today the Cape Business News announced another player bidding for these deep riches, the Cape Town based Marine and Mineral Projects. The company was responsible for the construction of the remote crawler used on the Peace in Africa, a De Beers Consolidated Mines owned ship that was converted into a floating diamond mine in a mammoth two year project. An example of a deep-sea crawler is shown above from Seascape Company. The full…
tqa | September 3, 2007
Over the last few days, I reposted a series of four articles that I wrote two years ago. Those articles discuss a California lawsuit filed by a group of Christian schools against the University of California. They are suing in an attempt to force UC to recognize some of their classes as meeting the requirements that UC sets for high school students who are applying for admission to the system. Several subjects are involved in the suit, but as a biologist I'm mostly interested in the biology courses that are involved.
At the moment, the next scheduled event in the case comes on September…
grrlscientist | September 3, 2007tags: books, writing, blog carnivals
For those of you who love to read, the 3 September edition of the Carnival for Literary Junkies is now available. This carnival includes book reviews, literary criticism and some writing as well. It's a nice way to wrap up your farewell to summer.
grrlscientist | September 2, 2007tags: insanity, blog carnivals
The Labor Day edition of The Carnival of the Insanities is now ready for you to enjoy. This carnival highlights the insane, the bizarre, the ridiculous, and the completely absurd are highlighted for you to read about.
pharyngula | September 1, 2007Everyone needs to go try and cheer up that poor lonely atheist, Tangled Up In Blue Guy. It was his birthday yesterday and everyone in the world forgot.
I can't console him. He's an atheist, which means it is entirely true that most of the people in the world hate him and want to strap him to a big stick and set him on fire, and I'm an atheist which, as we all know, means I'm insensitive and uncaring. Sorry. I hope one or two Christians, the only people capable of being nice, stumble across this message and find their way over there to offer him some friendship.
And invite him to their big…
pharyngula | September 1, 2007Now he has gone and won a Hugo!
I've wondered since security has gotten so arbitrary and weird — do the Hugo winners have trouble getting home, since they have to fly with what looks like a small metallic missile in their luggage?
grrlscientist | August 31, 2007tags: books, linguistics,Steven Pinker
"Cathartic swearing," is analogous to the earsplitting shrieks of rats, cats, and monkeys, and is part of a primal, embedded rage circuit, and likely evolved to startle and unnerve an attacker, according to Steven Pinker. Pinker is a professor of psychology at Harvard University and the author of a book entitled The Stuff of Thought (2007) that will appear in your bookstores within a week or so.
"If you want to intimidate someone," Pinker says, "then talking about sexual acts he does with his mother and advising him to engage in various other…
tqa | August 31, 2007
Lucy went on display today at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, and there was no way I could resist paying her a visit. I went in to the exhibit with very mixed feelings about it. A lot of people, including quite a few scientists I respect, have been extremely vocal in their opposition to the exhibit. Richard Leakey called the trip "a form of prostitution" and "a gross exploitation of the ancestors of humanity." Several museums have refused to display the fossil, and the Ethiopian community is calling for a boycott of the exhibit.
Their concerns are hardly unreasonable. Lucy's bones…
grrlscientist | August 31, 2007tags: feminist, online quiz
You Are 93% Feminist
You are a total feminist. This doesn't mean you're a man hater (in fact, you may be a man).
You just think that men and women should be treated equally. It's a simple idea but somehow complicated for the world to put into action.
Are You a Feminist?
I guess this result is not surprising, eh? I also assume that you are going to fit into the "feminist" category as well, since you are reading this blog.
petnoyer | August 31, 2007Let's make Friday a special occaision here at Deep Sea News. Last Friday we posted a geeky fish video and an online video game, along with the usual photo. Folks were so thankful for the entertainment that our gross national product probably dropped by one millionth of one percent. We should make it a tradition, out of respect for our European friends, if not ourselves.
Whatever happened to Fridays back in the American 70's, you know, with wall posters of kitty cats hanging from a limb saying "Hang On, Baby Friday's Coming" rather than foggy mountain vista's saying "Inspire. Achieve"?…
petnoyer | August 30, 2007
A microscopic baby octopus was collected in plankton samples from a 2005 expedition to the Sargasso Sea.
National Geographic posts more photos at their website here.
cmcclain | August 30, 2007Stumbled upon the site Catalogue of Organisms for those with an inordinate fondness for systematics. It's high on the geek-o-meter which is probably why I love it so much. You got to love a site that dedicates a whole post to Gastrotrichs. Christopher as done a couple posts on deep-sea fish, the personal favorite Gonostomatidae* and the Saccopharyngiformes.
*Scroll down and see if the names in references look familiar
tqa | August 30, 2007
Michael Majerus has spent countless hours conducting research on the Peppered Moth (Biston betularia). He's observed them in the field, bred them in the lab, watched them get eaten by things, kept careful count of the things that he's seen, and, recently, given a talk about his findings. Jonathan Wells has spent, to the best of my knowledge, absolutely no time doing any actual research on natural selection or moths, but that certainly didn't stop him from launching a full-throated attack on Majerus.
In this attack, Wells manages to misrepresent a lot of things. This should come as no…
tqa | August 30, 2007
From the archives - the following article was originally posted on my old blog back in August of 2005. For reasons that will become clear shortly, I've been reposting this series of stories over here. This is the final old post, and I'll have a follow-up post on more current events going up shortly. In that post, I will respond to the comment that someone from the Association for Christian Schools International just left on two of the reposted articles.
As I continued my review of the complaint filed in the California creationist lawsuit, I came to a passage that was completely stunning…
cmcclain | August 30, 2007...of ten strangers, picked to be on the same expedition, 5 scientists and 5 evangicals working together to find out what happens, when people stop being polite, and start getting real...
A group of five scientists and five evangelical leaders began traveling together on August 25th to observe first- hand the dramatic effects of climate change on local people and on the land, ocean, plants, and wildlife of the nation's northernmost state.
"The goal of our trip is to witness together what human-caused climate change is doing to our world," said co-leader of the trip Eric Chivian, who shared…
petnoyer | August 30, 2007Think of the changing seasons around you, and the way plants and animals respond to these changes. Trees change color in response to decreasing light levels. Birds migrate, and bears go into hibernation as winter approaches. So, we wonder, what are the seasonal cues in the abyss? Are summer days longer than winter days in the deep-sea? What's the ocean equivalent of rainfall, anyhow?
If you've read Craig McClain's "25 Things You Should Know About the Deep-Sea" you know that a) the deep sea-floor is not a stable environment and b) processes and patterns are linked to surface production.…
grrlscientist | August 30, 2007tags: science, nature, medicine, Tangled Bank, blog carnivals
The 87th edition of The Tangled Bank is now available for you to enjoy. This blog carnival is the original blog carnival that focuses on science, nature and medicine and it links to a variety of contributions that you will want to read.
tqa | August 30, 2007
From the archives - the following article was originally posted on my old blog back in August of 2005. For reasons that will become clear shortly, I've been reposting this series of stories over here. There's one more after this, and I'll have that up over here later today.
Someone named Emma kindly provided a couple of links to PDF files relevant to the California creationist lawsuit. One of the links is to a propaganda piece written by the Association of Christian Schools International, which is the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit. The second link is to a copy of the actual complaint that…