Uncategorized
revere | April 28, 2007The Atlanata Journal Constitution, hometown paper of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (aka, "CDC") continues to lift the rocks and uncover the stuff beneath. In the latest installment it has obtained an internal memo from CDC's international health office to CDC Director Dr. Julie Gerberding about the problems in filling overseas posts (see also this post summarizing things at DailyKos by my Wiki partner, DemFromCT). The memo is long but revealing. One of the chief obstacles resides in a political office at the Department of Health and Human Services headed by George H.…
nisbetmc | April 27, 2007
On Friday, May 4, I will be back at my doctoral alma mater to give the following presentation sponsored by the Dept. of Communication. Readers at Cornell or in the area are welcome to turn out. Chris Mooney and I will have an announcement about other forthcoming talks very soon.
Framing Science: The Road to 2008 and Beyond
Matthew C. Nisbet, Ph.D.
Friday May 4
130 to 3:00pm
211 Kennedy Hall
Over the past several years, in debates over evolution, embryonic stem cell research, and climate change, it has become increasingly apparent that scientific knowledge, alone, does not suffice to win…
pharyngula | April 27, 2007Randy Olson is putting together the DVD extras for the release of Flock of Dodos, and he's gathering photos of showings of the movie. Did anyone out there take photos at the February screening at the Bell Museum? Let me know, or just mail them to me.
Uh-oh — we're under some time pressure. The deadline is today!
cmcclain | April 27, 2007The twilight zone is a section of water extending from the euphotic zone down to 1000m. A new study demonstrates that this region acts like a gate and that little makes it to the seafloor.
...carbon dioxide --taken up by photosynthesizing marine plants in the sunlit ocean surface layer--does not necessarily sink to the depths, where it is stored and prevented from re-entering the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas.
Instead, organisms in the twilight zone consume the material (50-80%) long before it reaches the murky depths. Understanding these processes are important for predicting the role of…
jjacquet | April 27, 2007The waters around Galapagos are home to more than 500 species of fish, 17% of which are endemic. In 1998, the Ecuadorian government extended the Galapagos Marine Reserve from its 15-mile radius to a 40-mile radius surrounding the archipelago. The reserve now encompasses 133,000 square kilometers of ocean and 1,300 square kilometers of coastline, inflating the reserve's status to the third largest marine reserve in the world. With this expansion also came the complete ban of industrial fishing (though artisanal fishing is still allowed). But both the marine and terrestrial elements of the…
petnoyer | April 26, 2007
This crystal was recovered from the preserved tissue of a bamboo coral collected from Alaska's Aleutian Islands in the 1850's. Bamboo corals are deep-sea gorgonians (or sea fans) in the family Isididae. They can be found as deep as 3500m in the Northeast Pacific. This particular bamboo coral is stored in the archives of the Invertebrate Zoology Department at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC.
The crystal in the image is about 100 microns across, or one-tenth of a millimeter. On the right you'll see the laminar tuberculated texture of a tiny…
grrlscientist | April 26, 2007tags: honeybees, insects, agribusiness, colony collapse disorder, CCD
Domestic honeybee, Apis mellifera.
Image: Scott Bauer, USDA, ARS.
Contrary to what the cell phone alarmists would have you believe, a team of scientists recently identified a virus and a parasite that might be the cause of the recent and sudden collapse of honeybee colonies throughout the United States and Europe. The team, from Edgewood Chemical Biological Center and University of California San Francisco, used a new technology, the Integrated Virus Detection System (IVDS), which was designed for military use to rapidly…
cmcclain | April 26, 2007
Approximately 55 million years ago it was very bad to be a deep-sea animal. First the ocean temperature was rising. At the surface, temperatures rose anywhere from 5-10 degrees and in the deep around 5 degrees. The chemistry of the water also changed significantly. Oxygen became depleted. The ocean became more acidic. Global currents were altered such that deep-water upwelled in the Northern Hemisphere instead of the Southern for ~100,000 years.
This event is used to mark the end of the Paleocene and the start of the Eocene and thus the event is called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal…
apalazzo | April 26, 2007It looks like I'll be giving a talk at our inaugural meeting on May 15th. More details to come shortly.
See this previous post.
cmcclain | April 26, 2007
Lucernaria janetae (Cnidaria: Staurozoa: Lucernariidae)
Stauromedusae are not entirely uncommon, but not entirely common either. In fact "stalked jellyfish", as they are sometimes known, are very rare in the deep sea and only about 50 species are described (5). Only one other has been reported from abyssal depths (Lucernaria bathyphila). These strange jellies are making more appearances along the East Pacific Rise.
"A Lucernaria ... may be compared in form to a goblet or a funnel with double walls" (6)
Description L. janetae was described in 2005 from specimens at 8N on…
cmcclain | April 26, 2007It appears that the vessel rolled in heavy seas while the chef was slicing food causing a knife to lacerate his abdomen.
From iafrica.com
petnoyer | April 26, 2007
Mr. Leatherback reports that we have a winner in the Great Turtle Race. A sea-turtle named Billie made the trek from Coast Rica to the Galapagos in ten days. Billie was sponsored by the Offield Center for Billfish Studies.
Meanwhile, Yahoo's "Turtleocity" set the record for deepest diving turtle in the race with an incredible dive to 2,789 ft (850m)! Wow. There be jellies, we presume.
Read more here.
pharyngula | April 26, 2007The Wellcome Trust has published a short pamphlet to inform young students about evolution. I haven't had a chance to look at it carefully yet, but it looks like an interesting combination of a fairly wordy presentation and lots of color and flash. You can download a pdf of Evolution: The Big Picture for yourself; would it be a useful tool to catch student's eyes and get the basics across to them?
Out of 16 pages, 4 are dedicated to the conflict between science and religion. It doesn't come right out and say that religion is bad, and it even makes the usual waffley about how some scientists…
grrlscientist | April 25, 2007tags: blog carnivals
The 78th issue of Tangled Bank is now available for your reading pleasure. They included several pieces that I wrote, too.
cmcclain | April 25, 2007
In the past, I have made the statement on DSN that there can be no such thing as a sustainable deep-sea fishery. My reasons for this are that
Deep-sea fish are slow growing and long lived due to the cold temperatures of deep water.
This results in low turnover, or replacement, of commercially important, large individuals in the population. In other words, we harvest fishy grandmothers and grandfathers and we have to wait awhile before a new batch of grandparents comes around. Hey grandparents just don't grow on trees!
While we could theoretically have a healthy fishery the turnover…
tqa | April 25, 2007
From last night's Daily Show - it's right at the end of the video embedded below the fold.
McCain: You tell any enemy when you're leaving, and they'll say, "Right, fine, we'll just wait until you leave and we'll take over."
Stewart: But that assumes that we're fighting one enemy...
McCain: That's not too complicated
Stewart: . ... they're fighting each other. It's not. We're there keeping them from killing each other. We're not surrendering to an enemy that's defeated us. We're saying, how do you quell a civil war when it's not your country?
McCain: I'm saying that we're paying a very…
nisbetmc | April 25, 2007In an op-ed today at the Sydney Morning Herald, Australia's paper of record, Chris Mooney weighs in with more on our framing science thesis. Chris has been on the road in Australia the past few weeks, talking about his forthcoming book as well as our arguments relative to effective science communication.
ably | April 25, 2007
Paul J. Steinhardt
Paul J. Steinhardt is the Albert Einstein Professor in Science at Princeton University and is on the faculty in the Department of Physics and in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences. He received his B.S. in Physics at Caltech in 1974; his M.A. in Physics in 1975 and Ph.D. in Physics in 1978 at Harvard University. He was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows from 1978-81 and on the faculty of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania from 1981-98, where he was Mary Amanda Wood Professor from 1989-98. He is a Fellow in the…
grrlscientist | April 24, 2007tags: turkey, birds, behavior, ethology
A day-old chicken chick sits beside a male turkey that hatched and played mother to it at a farm in central Albania, Fushe Kruje, some 25 km (16 miles) from Tirana. The turkey, previously known for its fighting ability, incubated some chicken eggs until they were hatched then looked after them, residents said.
I wonder what this bird's hormonal mileu looks like?
Image and story: Reuters
voltagegate | April 24, 2007"Shortsighted men... in their greed and selfishness will, if permitted, rob our country of half its charm by their reckless extermination of all useful and beautiful wild things."
-Theodore Roosevelt