ejohnson
Posts by this author
October 19, 2009
As SciWo explained to daughter Minnow last week in a video on Sciencewomen, lakes, ponds, oceans and other natural bodies of water are as ecologically important as they are beautiful. But the ecological health of many is severely compromised due to widespread pollution, global warming, ocean…
October 19, 2009
Last week, ScienceBloggers celebrated Earth Science Week with a flood of geocentric posts. This year's theme this was Understanding Climate, and was the basis for a whole host of events in the coming days. Tuesday was No Child Left Inside Day, dedicated to taking kids outside to learn and play. If…
October 19, 2009
The world of X-ray photography is a very interesting place and surprises are often found in every image. X-rays are similar to Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) in the sense that the collected images are only black and white. To take these image I use a scientific X-ray machine at a local…
October 13, 2009
This is how.
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This image was provided by Ted Kinsman for Photo Synthesis.
October 13, 2009
Women's taste in men varies naturally with their menstrual cycle--during the more fertile period, they are more drawn to a square jawline, heavy brow, facial symmetry, and other signs of masculinity. But a new study by a team of British biologists shows that women taking birth control are not…
October 12, 2009
Early Friday morning, NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, collided with the Moon at a speed of 5,600 miles per hour, in hopes that debris stirred up by the impact would provide valuable data about how much water might be hidden in craters near the lunar poles. While…
October 9, 2009
Photo by Ted Kinsman, as seen on Photo Synthesis.
Far from being a world of sterile white labs and colorless data, science offers some of the most spectacular imagery imaginable. Take the microscopic guppy embryo, a finalist in Nikon's 2009 Small World contest, which Frank Swain shares on…
October 8, 2009
In the use of immunopharmacotherapy to treat drug abuse, antigenic molecules are hitched to molecules of the drug to stimulate a future immune response against the drug itself; as DrugMonkey reported this week, a recently published paper offers hopeful evidence that it could be a potentially…
October 8, 2009
What moves human beings to innovate measures of security? History will tell us that the most inventive and industrious times are fraught with warfare, uncertainty, and widespread fear. Greg Laden, a longtime ScienceBlogger, helps tackle this topic this month on the new Collective Imagination blog…
October 6, 2009
With high speed photography, I can use a high voltage spark to create a flash of only 1/1,000,000th of a second in duration. The problem is that there are not a lot of things that move this fast that such a flash is required to stop the motion. Bullets are such a subject requiring a very high…
October 6, 2009
Announcement of the 2009 Nobel Prize winners began Monday morning with the prize in Physiology or Medicine. The prize was shared between two American and one Australian-American researchers who identified a vital mechanism in genetic operations of cells--Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider, and Jack…
October 5, 2009
This week kicked off the 2009 Donors Choose Social Media Challenge--a program ScienceBloggers take part in annually to help public school teachers build scientific literacy, engagement, and excitement among their students. DonorsChoose.org is an online charity where public school teachers from…
October 1, 2009
There's no denying that sex is important for most creatures biologically. For humans, the biological imperative of sex has seeped into our psyches over thousands of years worth of evolution, making it more essential than we realize. On The Frontal Cortex, Jonah Lehrer reports on a new column in…
October 1, 2009
This week, ScienceBloggers are full of ideas to better the practice of research science. In Scicurious's perfect lab, negative data--data that doesn't support a study's hypothesis--would be every bit as publishable as data that confirms it. In Janet Stemwedel's perfect lab, animal researchers would…
September 29, 2009
Ligers are known in popular culture for being pretty much Napoleon Dynamite's favorite animal, but a lesser known fact is that the lion-tiger hybrids are actually the largest of the big cats, more massive than either parent due to a quirk of genetics. As Razib explains on Gene Expression, parental…
September 28, 2009
I have photographed jugglers several times in the past for physics text books. I have been impressed with the level of skill some jugglers can obtain. It is difficult enough to juggle three balls, four is more difficult, and fire is a another story. When objects move in a circle they…
September 28, 2009
Last June, scientists were thrilled to find evidence of ice on Mars. Now, the galaxy is again proving to be more abundant in water than believed. Data from the Moon Mineralogy Mapper instrument aboard the Indian satellite Chandrayaan-1 has revealed that the surface of the Moon may be covered in…
September 23, 2009
This week, Eruptions' Erik Klemetti sparked interest in the recent rumblings heard coming from Mt. Rainier in Washington State when he responded to a reader's comment on increased seismic activity in the area over the past month. Klemetti's response post, which reported on concrete facts…
September 23, 2009
I often get asked to photograph odd things, more times than not the project changes when an art director decides to take a different path for an article. Such requests are a great source of ideas.
In this case a request was for triboluminescence. This is where my background in physics and optics…
September 22, 2009
Should science writers and communicators drop the "technical jargon" in order to popularize science for the masses? What can major players in science culture do to maximize science's "cool factor," communicating important issues to the public at large? These questions were posed by Chris Mooney…
September 17, 2009
Most Americans are familiar with Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, but less well known is his personal struggle with the conflicting ideologies of science and religion. A new film from producer Jeremy Thomas, Creation, aims to tell the story of Darwin's life through the cinematic…
September 15, 2009
A scanning electron microscope image of a monarch butterfly wing.
Since a scanning electron microscope only collects a black and white image (representing intensity of electrons) the image must be colorized with photoshop. The colors are fairly close to the real colors of the wing.
The wing is…
September 15, 2009
Dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures are one of the first things that capture kids' interest in science, but the fascination doesn't end with childhood. Paleontology takes the spotlight on ScienceBlogs this week, where bloggers are highlighting its presence in the media and current events,…
September 14, 2009
Humans have voracious appetites--for food and drink, stability and comfort, emotional fulfillment. How we satisfy those appetites is the subject of several posts on ScienceBlogs this week. On Neurotopia, Scicurious discusses an fMRI study that looks at how certain brain regions are activated when…
September 10, 2009
Can the elegant models of mathematics and physics be applied to something so intrinsically complicated as the economic behavior of individuals? When economist Paul Krugman argued in The New York Times Magazine last week that the failure of economists to predict the current economic crisis was due…
September 9, 2009
Below, Michelle Borkin answers the second of our three questions.
I think every field is ripe for cross-disciplinary research, but in particular fields that share common broad problems or challenges. For example, with data visualization the specific field of science might be different but the…
September 9, 2009
Darwin's On the Origin of Species is the book that introduced the theory of evolution by natural selection and launched the field of evolutionary biology. But the text itself evolved, too, from the first edition published in 1859 to the sixth in 1872. Chapters were shortened and lengthened, words…
September 9, 2009
This weekend, ScienceBloggers discussed the virtues and downfalls of a world run on modern nuclear power. Benjamin Cohen sparked the dialogue on The World's Fair with an interview with author and environmentalist Rebecca Solnit, famous for her opposition to nuclear power. Within just a few hours,…
September 8, 2009
In the latest installment of Bloggingheads.tv Science Saturdays, ScienceBloggers Greg Laden and David Dobbs discuss David's book Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral.
September 8, 2009
Labor Day marks the traditional transition into fall. It also boasts some of the busiest days for moviegoers, and ScienceBloggers have early reviews of two of the season's films. The Primate Diaries takes a critical look at Peter Jackson's blockbuster film District 9 through the eyes of an…