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grrlscientist | January 12, 2007The bird flu has had some good effects: In an effort to avoid bird flu, the EU has permanently stopped the importation of wild birds, including psittacines. They now will allow only captive-bred birds from approved countries to be imported and sold in the EU. This move will serve to protect many wild populations of birds and parrots that have been over-exploited by the pet trade.
About 60% of the birds caught for import died before they reached Europe from poor handling or disease, Britain's Royal Society for the Protection of Birds said.
Furthermore, to prevent the movement of avian…
nisbetmc | January 12, 2007What was the impact of Bush's Iraq speech? Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post has an excellent round up of media and pundit reaction to the president's primetime TV appearance. Meanwhile, ABC News and CBS News have posted revealing results from overnight polls.
Yet the most entertaining, if not the least scientifically valid guage of public response comes by way of Slate magazine. The online commentary site partnered with HCD Research, a market-research company, in a project to investigate "real time" viewer reaction to Bush's Tuesday night speech. HCD surveys people over the Internet by…
tqa | January 12, 2007When people hear the word Drosophila, the image that pops most readily to mind (for those who know what Drosophila are) almost certainly involves scientists working in the lab. There's good reason for that, of course. Lots of Drosophila are used in the lab. Go to any university in the world that has a research program in the life sciences, and you will probably find at least one lab that works with these cute little dipterans. In the last year alone, xx papers have been indexed in PubMed with the word Drosophila in the title.
Given that, it can be easy to forget that Drosophila might have an…
pharyngula | January 11, 2007Gary Farber of Amygdala is in a crisis, both financially and in his health. This is such a waste: Gary is one of the all time great online raconteurs with a long history of bloggy productivity and the respect of swarms of other internet personalities. If someone were setting up a weblog franchise similar to scienceblogs, they ought to snap him up to anchor their site—he's that good. And at this point, the tiny amount he's asking for means he'll work for cheap.
Help him out however you can. And if you're looking for an interesting and provocative commentator, hire him!
ddobbs | January 11, 2007
The wattle bird, one of several Australian species that have been myteriously
dying around the town of Esperance.
_______________________________________________________________________________
As a former Texan, I took special notice last week when I heard Austin officials temporarily closed the downtown after finding several dozen birds of different species dead there. They never figured out what killed them; poison was the best bet.
Now comes the story of thousands of birds, again of many species, dying in Australia:
Birds fall from sky over town
By Amanda O'Brien
The Australian…
integrityofscience | January 11, 2007Earlier this week, a special report in the Oregonian uncovered the recent efforts by the White House and Pentagon to stymie the Environmental Protection Agency's efforts to recommend safe levels of perchlorate (a component in solid rocket fuel) for water. Alex Pulaski reports in "Pentagon pressured EPA on perchlorate" (part 2 of a 3 part series) that industry, financial, and political interests trumped the EPA's analysis (hat-tip to Joe DiGangi).
Under pressure from the U.S. Defense Department and contractors facing potential cleanup costs in the billions of dollars, the Bush administration…
grrlscientist | January 10, 2007So I have been back in my apartment for approximately 48 hours and already I have experienced the joys of having a nonfunctioning shower/bathtub because the hot water faucet cannot be manipulated into the "on" position even using a pair of pliars, and today, I found a leak in my ceiling that eventually took out a three foot in diameter section of paster that landed on my already soaked journals, destroying them.
The building super, who has got to the the worst building super on the planet because he doesn't fix anything except when under extreme duress -- and even then, he only does a half-…
tqa | January 10, 2007Over the last few years, I've become an increasingly more reluctant supporter of this war. Initially, I am ashamed to admit, I really didn't think that the administration would use classified information to lie to the American public, and I really did believe their claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I listened carefully to Colin Powell's UN speech, and I believed him. Based on that, although I did not think that Hussain would give his weapons to terrorists, I did think that he was too unpredictable and dangerous to be allowed to continue to have those weapons. Obviously, I was…
purepedantry | January 10, 2007I just wanted to plug something else on ScienceBlogs really quick. Chris Chatham at Developing Intelligence is running a multi-part series on the prefrontal cortex (PFC). The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that is responsible for what neuroscientists call "executive functions." Executive functions are things like planning and not acting like a jackass.
Anyway, since I just moved to a lab that studies the PFC, I am really enjoying his posts.
Yesterday he gave a introductory piece and today he explores neural cascades. Definitely worth the read.
nisbetmc | January 10, 2007
Despite my misgivings about the vast commercialization of college athletics, and its impact on university culture, I did tune in to at least parts of Monday night's BCS championship game. Just in case you were one of the 20 million or so viewers wondering how star OSU receiver Ted Ginn might have injured his ankle after returning the opening kickoff 95 yards for a touchdown...the picture above, captured by the Columbus Dispatch, tells it all, and the paper has the scoop here. Consider this the "soft journalism" post of the week.
tqa | January 10, 2007In Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, the universe runs on narrativium - the element that ensures that things follow the demands of the story. It's narrativium that mandates that the little old lady in the woods is a witch, narrativium that demands that a third son, attempting a task that killed two older brothers, succeed, and narrativium that ensures that the million-to-one chance succeeds 99% of the time. In The Science of Discworld 2, Pratchett and co-authors Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen point out that storytelling is a key characteristic of humans, and that it has been essential to our…
petnoyer | January 9, 2007The Ocean FilmFest begins its fourth year in San Francisco January 20-21. My second resolution is to make this the last year I miss it. At least one of these films features the deep.
Aquanauts,
Jerome Scemla , 53 min, France
The real Captain Nemo: exploration of the deep ocean from William Beebe's bathysphere in the 1930s, through the deep dive in the Mariana Trench of Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh in 1960, to the recent dives of Robert Ballard in Alvin and the robot Jason to hydrothermal vents along the mid-oceanic rifts. (subtitled) -- KH
grrlscientist | January 9, 2007Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time:
And all out yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
-- William Shakespeare, from Macbeth, Act V Scene V
.
tags: Shakespeare, Tomorrow,poetry, literature
tqa | January 9, 2007Earlier today, I visited Westminister Abbey for the first time. It's an interesting place, and despite the fairly steep (10 pound) admissions charge, well worth the visit. It takes a while just to walk through, and on the way you go past some truly remarkable bits of history. Right near the end of my visit, I found myself standing in front of a very plain, white marble tombstone. Unlike many of the stones there, this one was very simple. Just a name - Charles Robert Darwin - a date of birth, and a date of death. Nothing more - no record of the accomplishments that gained him the honor of a…
sb admin | January 9, 2007We're going to start sending out a weekly digest of blog posts via email. If you'd like to sign up, send an email to thepumphandle [at] gmail [dot] com with "subscribe" in the subject line.
grrlscientist | January 8, 2007A large flock of dead grackles, sparrows and pigeons scared the poop out of Texas officials, causing the shutdown of a 10 block area in downtown Austin, Texas this morning. People dressed in Hazmat suits cleared up the birds, whose bodies will be tested to identify the cause of their untimely deaths.
Some experts said the most likely cause of the die-off was a deliberate poisoning. "It happens quite frequently," said Greg Butcher, director of bird conservation at the National Audubon Society in Washington.
Grackles are a crowlike bird regarded as a major pest in Texas, with Austin sidewalks…
nisbetmc | January 8, 2007
As a follow up to a previous post, NPR runs this story on the use of "surge" to describe the Administration's plan for more of the same in Iraq, featuring an interview with linguist Deborah Tannen.
Earlier this week, CNN's Jack Cafferty called the Administration's bluff, describing the use of "surge" as masking their intentions to escalate the war in Iraq. See the clip above.
Here's my question: If journalists are well aware of the strategic and misleading nature of the term, why do they continue to use it in all their reports? Sometimes you just have to scratch your head and wonder.
tqa | January 8, 2007Mike the Mad Biologist has some thoughts about some things that Nancy Pelosi said on Face the Nation over the weekend. In particular, Mike is concerned about Pelosi's declaration that the Democrats support increasing the size of the military:
Do we really need to expand the military? If we weren't bogged down in Operation Iraqi Clusterf**k, we wouldn't need 30,000 additional troops.
[Emphasis in original; minor edit for family-friendliness mine]
Actually, we'd need the troops even if we weren't involved in Iraq. Following the end of the cold war, we massively decreased the size of the…
tqa | January 8, 2007Just in case either or my readers was wondering, the lack of posts recently has been due to travel - I'm writing this in the lounge in a hotel near Paddington Station, and won't be back to my usual haunts for another week or so. I'm taking copious notes about this trip, and I've been doing a fair bit of reading, so volume should go up again after I get back to Honolulu. I'm going to try to schedule a few posts tonight so that there are things going up over while I'm gone.