jtoney
Posts by this author
December 30, 2010
If you'll forgive the whimsy of this posting:
What's your favorite drink for New Year's?
I was intrigued by a series of images posted by The Telegraph of various drinks of choice. The screenshot above is described as:
Cocktails can have fruit and soft drinks in them which contain citric acids…
December 30, 2010
Photo source.
As you prepare for your New Year's celebration, here's something to consider: researchers have found that having more friends may play a role in whether you identify yourself as a liberal or a conservative.
How did they determine this?
The researchers studied a group of about 2,000…
December 29, 2010
Walt Disney Pictures
Did I not say that science can be beautiful?
Consider Disney's latest animated film, "Tangled." How does one simulate human hair, taking into account sheen and reflection of light, not to mention bending? In the earlier days of animation, these drawings were done by hand by…
December 29, 2010
I have been exploring our "Brain's Atlas" introduced in my recent post and discovered an extraordinary resource: the Relationship Viewer. A snapshot is shown to the right, appearing as a spiraling multi-colored pin wheel.
This interactive viewer developed by the research group of Dr. Arthur W.…
December 28, 2010
There has been a media storm over Sarah Palin's "invention" of the word "refudiate" as an ersatz term for repudiate. In her own words, as reported today in The Huffington Post: {apparently she blamed the "typo" on her Blackberry...not inconceivable.}
"I pressed an F instead of a P and people…
December 27, 2010
If you thought the human genome project was impressive its scope and scale. think about the human connectome project.
I recently shared with you the fruit fly brain atlas, comprised of about 100,000 neurons, and compared it to the human brain with some 100 billion neurons.
The first high…
December 27, 2010
By inspire*dream*create*, Rachel Souza's Flickr Photostream
I realize that I am a new blogger for this site, and have enjoyed the challenge of sharing some of the latest scientific breakthroughs as they are happening. I have enjoyed reading some of my fellow bloggers, "Sciblings," learning about…
December 26, 2010
If you are fascinated with word usage, I suggest you try a powerful new tool, Google NGram Viewer. According to the website:
What's all this do?
When you enter phrases into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, it displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books (e.g., "…
December 25, 2010
Jennifer Daniel and Sandi Daniel, The New York Times image
THERE you are, peacefully reading an article or watching a video on the Internet. You finish, find it thought-provoking, and scroll down to the comments section to see what other people thought. And there, lurking among dozens of well-…
December 24, 2010
Today's announcement of a giveaway of 2,011 Nike shoes...well well!
Give it a try!www.sharecare.com/static/nike giveaway
If you are an Oprah fan, you already know that she will be launching a new network on New Year's Day 2011. Oprah has recruited a "dream team" of go-to experts:
Dr. Phil, Suze…
December 24, 2010
The IBM 705 Data Processing System, introduced in 1954.
The 705 would rarely run more than 3 or 4 hours without a major breakdown. It was not unusual to encounter a 705 that was ablaze." This should give all of us pause the next time our PC crashes!
What is your family's history? Have you ever…
December 23, 2010
Stephen Rees' Flickr photostream
My email Inbox is a nightmare. It currently has hundreds of unread messages, a combination of unwanted solicitations, complaints and demands upon my time and resources. It is a seemingly Herculean task to manage it in my attempts to focus on top priorities.
Today…
December 23, 2010
No, I am not a Scrooge or a Grinch, just a pragmatist.
The holiday season is, for many, a reminder of tales of miracles, whether of the story of the birth of Christ as a savior, of Chanukah's menorah that was lit for eight days with only enough oil for a single day, Bodhi Day to honor the…
December 22, 2010
David Reich/Nature
The entire genome of the Denisovans was extracted from a tooth and finger bone.
The film "Little Fockers" is coming out this week, and I look forward to brilliant performances from Robert DiNero, Ben Stiller, Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand to name a few. If you will…
December 21, 2010
"We also discovered that science is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no one has ever done before."
With my academic training and years of reflecting on how to teach science, I don't think I could develop a more compelling statement than this, written by a group of elementary school…
December 21, 2010
Jurvetson's Flickr photostream
Do you think that there should be universal access to the internet, regardless of how it is accessed? Should the internet be regulated by the federal government? If so, to what extent? Is "Net Neutrality" possible? For now, "neutrality" when it comes to…
December 20, 2010
In a stunning finding, scientists found evidence in northern Spain of cannibalism by Neanderthals. Some 1,800 bone fragments were used for DNA analysis to support their hypothesis. According to The New York Times report,
Spanish scientists who analyzed the bones and DNA report the gruesome…
December 20, 2010
Inspired by my earlier posting on the fruit fly brain:
I received a nice "holiday gift" from a researcher at the National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) in Taiwan, Terry C.-W. Yeh. NCHC and the Brain Research Center at the National Tsing Hua University created the FlyCircuit…
December 19, 2010
Genesis - h.koppdelaney's Flickr photostream Creative Commons
As reported in today's The New York Times, a case will be reviewed by a federal judge in Kentucky this February to determine whether an academic astronomer was denied a position because of religious faith. According to the report,…
December 18, 2010
My recent posting, The Fruit Fly Brain Atlas Emerges generated quite a bit of interest from readers, perhaps because most of us are visual learners, including myself. One reader's comment reminded me how fun it was to explore the FlyCircuit database. It's easy to register; once you're in, you…
December 17, 2010
From time to time, my office receives publisher's copies of books, uninvited and not upon my request. Today, a copy of Jay Hosler's "Evolution: The Story of LIfe on Earth" arrived. {The hubris of explaining the "story of life on earth" is unimaginable to me, but that's another story.} This…
December 16, 2010
Scientists including the news media in the process of discovery is a volatile affair, as we have all witnessed recently. My fellow bloggers on ScienceBlogs, We Beasties, discussed the role of bloggers and scientists in the process of the NASA scientists announcing their discovery of "arsenic-based…
December 16, 2010
Adult human breast stem cells (red) are found in ductal regions. Lineage-restricted progenitor cell types (green) reside outside
Scientists based at a medical center in Berlin have accomplished something extraordinary: they have used stem cells to prevent viruses to grow in a patient infected…
December 16, 2010
As an antidote to recent postings about Christmas on Pharyngula, which have nothing to do with science or holiday cheer, I would like to share with you a wonderful innovative example of bridging science and technology with the arts: the Virtual Choir.
Composer Eric Whitacre embarked upon an…
December 15, 2010
Photo: Flickr Scott Beale / Laughing Squid
This morning, TIME magazine announced their choice for Person of the Year: Founder of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg. I am one amongst more than 500 million users worldwide that have used the power of online social networking to not only connect with others…
December 14, 2010
As reported in today's Science Times of The New York Times, a research group in Taiwan led by Dr. Ann-Shyn Chiang has accomplished something that was unimaginable when I was a graduate student in the 1980's: they have created the first atlas of the brain of a fruit fly at the resolution of a…
December 14, 2010
Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, announced the top ten Tweets of 2010 - yes, it's that annual ritual of lists. Anyone whom might doubt the influence of Twitter might consider that in 2010, so far, more than 25 billion Tweets have been sent.
The number one Tweet was written by NBC's Ann Curry:
In…
December 13, 2010
NBC photo
Contestants on NBC's "Biggest Loser"
In Woody Allen’s Sleeper, Miles awakens after a 200-year sleep, to a world in which healthy food choices have become topsy-turvy:
Dr. Melik: (listing items Miles had requested for breakfast): "... wheat germ, organic honey, and... Tiger's Milk."
Dr.…
December 10, 2010
The ceremony of Liu Xiaobo's Nobel Peace Prize was filled with symbolism, as the award was placed in an empty chair as the recipient remained in prison for, as some say, expressing his civil rights. Liu Xiaobo embodies the pursuit of freedom within a communist system that by definition constrains…
December 9, 2010
This is a powerful portrayal of how we have used Google to access information, summarized for 2010 in less than three minutes. I simply had to share this with ScienceBlogs readers, with acknowledgement from Mashable.
From the Mashable article:
"In terms of news searches, Haiti proved the most…