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grrlscientist | August 29, 2007tags: Australia, blog carnivals
The August 29th edition of the Carnival of Australia is now available for you to enjoy. This blog carnival covers all aspects of Australian life, from environment to indigenous issues, from culture to technology. Be sure to go there and give them some support by reading their linked articles!
tqa | August 29, 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'm going to repost this and a couple of follow-ups to the story over here.
In a post earlier today, I noted that a group of creationists are suing the University of California system in order to force UC to accept several of their classes that are currently not considered adequate. One of the courses in question is biology. As I already pointed out, UC is not discriminating against Christians by refusing to accept the class; it is simply living…
tqa | August 29, 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'm going to repost this and a couple of follow-ups to the story over here.
It appears that yet another creationism-related lawsuit is in the works. This time, the venue is in California, and it is the Creationists who are doing the suing. Apparently, the Association of Christian Schools International and Calvary Chapel Christian School of Murietta are no longer satisfied with being able to teach their students creationism instead of real…
cmcclain | August 29, 2007A great website called howtoons produces cartoon how-to guides to build a variety of thing to teach children, and adults, basics of engineering and science. My favorite is the Soda Bottle Submarine. When I am back ashore I plan on building a whole fleet and taking over the world.
cmcclain | August 29, 2007
Bornrich.org, which is not a site I visit often, as a list of the most popular luxury submarines. Most of these we have covered before. There is just something about the name and design of the Proteus that draws me in.
The 65-feet Proteus is exceptional and is capable of offering the ultimate in underwater luxury. It can accommodate up to fourteen divers on the fore and aft deck who can submerge with the vessel while eight people can sit inside the dry cabin for magnificent viewing.
clock | August 29, 2007See the entire comic strip here, as this is just the panel most relevant to yesterday's news:
grrlscientist | August 28, 2007tags: lunar eclipse, astronomy
Total eclipse of the Moon 16 September 1997.
Image: Lorenzo Lovato.
Tonight's forecast calls for a 100-percent chance of the moon becoming as blood, with an 80-percent chance of a scattered Apocalypse tomorrow.
As mostly everyone in the United States, and especially as everyone on the West Coast knows, this morning at 337am was the height of a full lunar eclipse, which is when the moon turns blood red. A lunar eclipse occurs when the sun, earth and moon are directly aligned: when the earth's shadow passes over the moon. This gives the moon a brownish or…
petnoyer | August 28, 2007
Poor Aussies in Sydney got nailed by a giant mixture of salts, chemicals, dead plants, decomposed fish and excretions from seaweed that whipped up into a froth by storms off Queensland. The giant sea foam buried beaches and buildings, and stretches for 30 meters out into the Pacific. The kids are apparently playing in it, trying to surf it, and dancing about having a good old time.
Read about it and see more pictures of Cappucino Beach here at the Daily Mail .
tqa | August 28, 2007
Daniel Dennett just wrote an article on chess-playing computers and Artificial Intelligence, and a few bloggers are already talking about it. I'm sort of surprised that the concept is getting so much attention. To me, the answer to the question, "does a computer that can play chess demonstrate artificial intelligence" is obvious: it does, but only in a very trivial sense.
Discussions of the methods used by chess-playing computers and how they compare (or don't) to the way(s) that the human brain plays chess are interesting, but I don't really find them all that relevant to the whole "…
petnoyer | August 28, 2007The Census of Marine Life on Seamounts (CenSeam) project released Newsletter No 8 earlier this month. Visit their website to download this and other editions. This particular issue is one of their most extensive newsletters ever, featuring interesting stories and articles about:
-A photographic image collection and analysis workshop in Great Britain
-MBARI's open-source Video and Annotation Reference System (VARS)
-The deepwater "fish spas" of the Kermadec-Tonga Arc
-Longline sampling for deep-sea fishes on seamounts near the Azores
-A new online data portal from Global Biodiversity…
tqa | August 28, 2007
It's always a good day when I can blog about profit hungry companies trying to protect their profit margins or about some group using sleazy tactics to try to get special interest legislation passed or blocked. Today is a very good day - I get to do both at the same time. That's right, folks, the Association of American Publishers is so worried about the damage that whole evil open access thing might cause to their profit the integrity of research that they've set up their very own astroturf -oops, I meant grassroots- group to protect us from this growing problem. Someone, somewhere is…
petnoyer | August 27, 2007Increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leads to more dissolved CO2 in the world's oceans. In turn this will increase the hydrogen ion concentration in seawater, and lower pH from pre-industrial levels (8.179) to present day levels (8.104) in a process known as "ocean acidification". Note that even projected pH levels of 7.824 in 2050 are still above neutral. Regardless, many scientists are concerned that calcifying marine organisms like corals, mollusks, echinoderms and coccolithophores will be vulnerable to dissolution under the projected 'less alkaline' regime.
A new study…
grrlscientist | August 26, 2007tags: natural science, blog carnivals
The first edition of the new Natural Sciences blog carnival is now available for your reading pleasure. Be sure to drop in and give them support by reading the linked stories! You will be glad that you did.
grrlscientist | August 26, 2007tags: PRISM, open access, OA
Because you are here and reading this blog, I assume that you value being informed about science and having the opportunity to access original research articles yourself, if you so choose. However, not everyone agrees that providing the public access to this information is important, nevermind that most of this research is paid for by the public with their tax dollars. PRISM, the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine, is a group of scientific and medical activists who are fighting against Open Access (OA) for research articles. They claim…
grrlscientist | August 26, 2007Sometime last night, my blog received its one millionth visitor. I had predicted that the one millionth visitor would arrive here in approximately two weeks' time, but thanks to slashdot, which linked to one of my stories, it happened earlier. I am so pleased and impressed with this blog and especially with you! Thanks for reading my essays and commenting, I truly appreciate that!
mixingmemory | August 25, 2007First, Seed is hosting a 500,000th Comment Contest, with a trip to "the greatest science city in the world," which you can vote on here. So be sure to vote and then comment a lot, preferably here at Mixing Memory.
Second, via Advances in the History of Psychology, I learned of an article in Teaching Psychology on "the 40 most well-known and commonly-cited classic studies would still be appropriate to include in a contemporary first course in psychology." Over at Advances, they list the top 10. I don't mean to brag, but #1 is a cognitive paper, as were 3 of the others in the top 10. Cognitive…
pharyngula | August 24, 2007I've heard of Hirschsprung's Disease as an academically interesting instance of a developmental failure of nerve migration, but you really must read about the human cost of the disease — innocent little babies (and their parents) should never have to suffer this much. Chris Chatham is spreading the word about an expensive nutritional product, Omegaven, that has the potential to alleviate one symptom — liver failure due to the need for sustained IV feeding — and the idea is to encourage clinical testing so the treatment can be more widely used and supported by insurance companies. Let's raise…
tqa | August 24, 2007
Most of yesterday's news about Iraq focused - to the extent that today's media can be said to "focus" on anything - on our President's latest inept attempt to explain why we need to keep troops in Iraq, and on the inapt historical comparisons he drew during this predictably incoherent and inarticulate "policy" address. The deaths of fourteen soldiers - ten from Hawaii and four from Ft. Lewis - in a helicopter that crashed while returning from a mission were almost lost in the shuffle, and are only considered to be noteworthy at all because the fourteen died in a single incident. The death of…
grrlscientist | August 24, 2007tags: Spanish, langauges, online quiz
You Passed 8th Grade Spanish
Congratulations, you got 8/8 correct!
Could You Pass 8th Grade Spanish?
How did you do? Did you think this online quiz was reflective of what one needs to know in eighth grade Spanish?
petnoyer | August 24, 2007
Between the online game with the ROV and this movie from YouTube, you'll be sure to get no work done today.
This "Fish Guys" movie is a very funny short film about graduate pursuits in museum collections from the 48 Hour Film Project. That means the whole thing was conceived and produced within 48 hours. The script is based on a journal article, and it works, believe it or not!
Directed by Trey Stokes. Filmed on location at LA County Natural History Museum.