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gregladen | May 21, 2012A while back, the National Geographic Society entered into an agreement with Seed Media Group, the latter being the owner and operator of Scienceblogs.com. This agreement had to do with advertising (simple version: NGS will broker the ad space on Scienceblogs) and branding (simple version: Scienceblogs.com will look all golden-yellowy and otherwise be updated to have National Geographic stuff on it). There really aren't any major interactions to speak of other than this, yet, though you may have noticed if you read NGS's blog that Scienceblog posts are often linked to over there.
But…
jrosenhouse | May 21, 2012ScienceBlogs is moving to a new publishing platform this evening. As of 7:00 tonight, any comments left here will not be transferred to the new site. Regular blogging will resume as soon as the transfer is complete. Sorry about the inconvenience.
gregladen | May 21, 2012Missouri, the "Show Me State," had two bills in the state house that wuld have promoted Intelligent Design in the public school science class. The legislature adjourned a couple of days ago without advancing the bills, and that is how a bill dies. RIP bad bills in Missouri.
Meanwhile, in New Jersey, Evolution is Real! The Asbury Park (as in The Boss) carried out a poll along with Monmouth University which asked if citizens "believe in" evolution. 51% said yes, 42% said no, and 7% said they didn't know. I would apply a 1% correction to that to account for Snarky Skeptics who would say "Believe…
gregladen | May 21, 2012Science Magazine is running a "Science Voices" series of short essays by members of the science community on the topic of Human Conflict. So far there are four or five, and they cover conflict from a wide range of perspectives. You can see them all here.
I've written one on conflict in the blogosphere which will probably be up on the Sciencemag site by the time you read this.
The topics I touched on in my short essay are very familiar to you as readers of this and other blogs, and they mostly have to do with social and to a lesser extent political problem in "meatspace" and how those…
jhalper | May 20, 2012You might not think of cell suicide as a sexy subject - but it is actually quite hot. Cells off themselves for any number of reasons: In embryonic development, cell suicide helps shape the growing organism. In adults, suicide is the last resort of a cell whose DNA is too damaged to repair, and its death prevents cancer, among other things. You can think of cell suicide as a prerequisite for the existence of multicellular life.
Prof. Atan Gross has, for the past several years, been focusing on a pair of cell suicide proteins - BID and ATM. The more Gross studies these proteins, the more…
gregladen | May 19, 2012Here's the attempted Launch this morning of the SpaceX rocket ship, which would have been the first non governmental flight to the International Space Station. Listen to the chatter to learn all sorts of great jargon!
Details here.
gregladen | May 17, 2012Fewer White People than Other-Than-White-People are being born in the US, which means eventually there won't be too many white people. It's about time.
Almost all societies in the world allow, often encourage, marriage between cousins. There are reasons for this which I shall blog about if you remind me to. But for now, here is a discussion on the topic you will find interesting.
More on those climate change billboards.
gregladen | May 17, 2012At some point, while I was in graduate school, it became apparent that I was going to study the problem of finding one's way around. Navigation, orientation, mental maps, sense of direction, knowledge of the landscape, and related ideas must be linked to how people who live off the land survive, and I was studying the foraging ecology of Efe Pygmies in the Ituri Forest. One of the things I realized early on is that it is very easy to find something in the rain forest, as long as one simple thing is true: You already know where it is. Otherwise, you are sunk.
Wait, what does this have to do…
gregladen | May 14, 2012Scott Hanselman has a post on "old people icons" that don't make sense any more. This is one of those posts I've always wanted two write but never got to (or have I? ... can't remember).
The most obvious one is of course the floppy disk for "Save" long abandoned by Gnome and replaced with a down arrow (which makes zero sense, but whatever). One I had not thought of is the radio button, which of course matches those old radios with the buttons... The radio button as a convention in a dialog box makes total sense in and of itself. Calling it a radio button is of course atavistic.
He…
gregladen | May 13, 2012Recording live today on Skeptically Speaking:
This week, we're looking at some of the ways motherhood changes the brain and the body. Kayt Sukel, author of Dirty Minds: How Our Brains Influence Love, Sex, and Relationships, returns to explain the neurological effects of pregnancy and motherhood. And on the podcast, we're joined by Dr. Katie Hinde, Director of Harvard's Comparative Lactation Laboratory, to discuss the biology of lactation and breastfeeding.
We record live with Kayt Sukel on Sunday, May 13 at 6 pm MT. The podcast will be available to download at 9 pm MT on Friday, May 18.
For…
gregladen | May 12, 2012No! A surprising number of toddlers who manage to get their way through a window opening to fall to the pavement below live. Something just over three thousand toddlers do this every year in the US.
Here in Minneapolis, we had our first reported case for the Spring Season of a toddler falling out of a window. The window had a screen in it but that did not stop the child, in Nordeast, from flying out the window after a bad bounce jumping on the bed. He fell three stories. He'll live. He probably bounced off a few things on the way to the ground. This event reminded me to repost this item…
tlambert | May 10, 2012Michael Asten continues The Australian's war on science. In his latest piece (Google "Science hijacked at school level") Asten complains that secondary science education is not paying attention to the views of Ian Plimer on climate change.
Perusal of the resources for secondary school physics students provided by the Australian Institute of Physics (Vic) Education Committee suggests some of our science educators have indeed lost the ability to teach objective and open-minded scientific inquiry.
Web resources relating to climate science provided by this committee contain at least three…
gregladen | May 10, 2012Dear loyal readers, quiet lurkers, constant commeters, and trolls,
On or before the 24th of May (hopefully not later) Scienceblogs.com will under The Branding. The Branding is not a phenomenon found in a cultish horror movie involving corn and a school bus, nor will it involve British schoolboys or a buried alien spacecraft. The Branding is when National Geographic's "brand" is imprinted on this site, and we become something of a National Geographic project. From that point forward several things will be different on this blog, some of which I'll mention below.
Between now and then there…
gregladen | May 9, 2012From the Raw Story:
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People around the blogosphere are griping about this. They don't like it. They are saying things like "it should have happened sooner" or "why didn't he do this sooner" or "I'm still mad" or "oh, that's just becuase it became obvious that he had to change is position for political reasons."
The first most obvious fact about any political change like this is that it should have happened sooner. Congratulations for noticing that, you should get a PhD in political science. The second…
gregladen | May 9, 2012The Nazis in Greece, who over the weekend gained some seats in Parliament, are likely to continue to be a factor in a new election experts say will likely be held in about a month or so. These are the real deal ... apparently they self identify as Nazis but the party name is "Golden Dawn" and they have a record of violence and nastiness. They even do the Nazi salute and everything.
Here's the thing: Their web site is hosted on Wordpress, and Wordpress has a policy that should actually exclude them from using that resource. For this reason, people who dislike Nazis are invited to SIGN A…
gregladen | May 9, 2012Anybody live, camp or cabin near the Lost 40 or the Boundary Waters? Let these people know.
More of the story here