purepedantry

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March 9, 2009
In the Economist, they have a piece in "honor" of the 100th year anniversary of the first attempts to render drugs illegal. After looking at the evidence, they take a dim view of the drug war's effectiveness: A HUNDRED years ago a group of foreign diplomats gathered in Shanghai for the first-ever…
March 6, 2009
I caught this story (with an accompanying video) over at Mind Hacks and Neuron Culture about this poor woman from the UK who fell unconscious from a viral infection in her brain stem. Using fMRI, a doctor at Cambridge named Adrian Owen showed that she still had residual brain functions such as…
March 5, 2009
This is pretty funny. It is a song honoring the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) that parodies "We are the world." (Check below the fold.) Hat-tip: TierneyLab
March 5, 2009
Caught this bad description of an otherwise very interesting study at Science Daily: Neuroscientists at Georgetown University Medical Center have, for the first time, shown what brain activity looks like when someone anticipates an action or sensory input which soon follows. In the February 25…
March 2, 2009
One of the impediments to the adoption of a solar alternative to fossil fuels is that solar panels are relatively expensive to make. A big benchmark to making them competitive is to get their cost of production per Watt produced comparable to energy produced by fossil fuels. A company in Arizona,…
February 27, 2009
There are some people who argue that the Internet increases the size of people's social networks by lowering the transaction costs of interacting with people. Facebook -- as a dataset -- is handy for determining whether this is true. Everyone on Facebook has friends with whom you communicate on…
February 20, 2009
As scientists await Obama reauthorizing federal funding of embryonic stem cell research and the FDA approves the first clinical trials using embryonic stem cell treatments, there is an important case report that highlights the potential safety issues with putting stem cells in humans. Amariglio et…
February 19, 2009
Here is a lesson in why defensive medicine should be avoided: it costs a lot, it doesn't help patients, and it has the potential to hurt them. Chou et al. published a study in the Lancet showing that in patients presenting with lower back pain without serious clinical symptoms (more on this in a…
February 18, 2009
Rather than funding new grants, most of the fiscal stimulus to NIH will be going to grants that have already been reviewed. From Science Insider: The National Institutes of Health will dedicate most of its $8.2 billion for research from the economic stimulus bill to funding grant applications it…
February 18, 2009
An article by Evan Mills, a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, points out that scientific buildings use a lot more energy than average: Improving energy productivity is a doubly worthy challenge, given that those making the biggest contributions to the science of…
February 17, 2009
Economic historian, Gregory Clark, details why times have changed for academic economists: The current recession has revealed the weaknesses in the structures of modern capitalism. But it also revealed as useless the mathematical contortions of academic economics. There is no totemic power. This…
February 17, 2009
Submarines collide: In a freak accident, two submarines carrying nuclear missiles, one French and the other British, collided while submerged on operational patrols in the Atlantic early this month, the British and French defense ministries said Monday. Both vessels returned damaged but otherwise…
February 12, 2009
The Geithner Treasury plan for rescuing the banking system (more here) is getting panned on both sides of the aisle for being excessively vague. Megan McArdle: Tim Geithner reveals that the Treasury has a plan to fix the problems in our broken capital markets by . . . er . . . fixing them. ... The…
February 12, 2009
SEA (again) has the details of the result of the House and Senate conference bill for economic stimulus. Here are the parts related to science: Provides $3 billion for the National Science Foundation, for basic research in fundamental science and engineering - which spurs discovery and innovation…
February 12, 2009
A trio of Federal judges have ruled against three separate plaintiffs who alleged that vaccines caused their child's autism: These three decisions, each looking into a different theory as to how vaccines might have injured the children, are expected to guide the outcomes of all those claims. The…
February 12, 2009
I don't have much to say about the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth. I have always accepted the notion of evolution as a precondition to all other understanding in biology. Without evolution, all the patterns and apparent unity in life is rendered into incomprehensible gibberish. Darwin did…
February 12, 2009
To celebrate the 200th Anniversary of Darwin's birth, the NYTimes has a video of singing Darwin scholar, Richard Milner. Check it out.
February 12, 2009
Alzheimer's research is an ongoing field. Although we know a lot more than we used to, we still don't entirely understand why the accumulation of proteins in Alzheimer's disease kills neurons or renders them non-functional. One intriguing part of the explanation may be offered by Varvel et al.…
February 10, 2009
Check out this hysterical rant by Conan about Boron misreporting (below the fold). Hat-tip: Wired Science
February 10, 2009
Head over to BBC News to see some cool and extremely rare footage of Narwhals during migration.
February 9, 2009
There was a case like Terry Schiavo's in Italy that is triggering a genuine constitutional crisis. Eluana Englaro, who had been on a feeding tube in a persistent vegetative state, for 17 years passed away last night after her father ordered her feeding tube removed. But this was not before…
February 9, 2009
From CNN: Of the 800 Americans surveyed from Feb. 7-8, 48% said the plan would help "some," and 16% said they felt the stimulus bill would help the economy "a lot." Only 16% said the bill would not help at all, and another 20% said it would not help much. But 55% of respondents said that even the…
February 9, 2009
Long, long ago on a website far, far away (OK, 2006 on Blogcritics.org) before I joined ScienceBlogs, I used to do weekly or biweekly roundups of science, health and tech in the news. In these I would make no attempt whatsoever to interpret or even accurately represent the articles involved.…
February 8, 2009
This cartoon at the Economist makes a good point.
February 8, 2009
Check out this video by reason.tv below the fold. If you find it hard to achieve and maintain growth, maybe Stimulis is right for you.
February 7, 2009
Over at SEA they have a point-by-point description of the Senate economic stimulus bill. Obviously what is actually passed will be sorted out in conference committee but here is what is included about science: Science: National Science Foundation (NSF) Research: $1.2 billion total for NSF…
February 6, 2009
David Goldston, writing in Nature, echoes a point I have been trying to make about the science provisions of the economic stimulus package. He lists some reasons why scientists should be wary of getting our funding this way: First, being included in the stimulus measure could turn science spending…
February 6, 2009
This guy has clearly not read about the broken window fallacy: Times were so tough for window repairman Timothy Carl Klenke, police say, that he decided to take proactive measures: He armed himself with a slingshot and began cruising around the city, shattering at least five windows and car…
February 4, 2009
Imagine the size of the mice it would eat: Named Titanoboa cerrejonensis by its discoverers, the size of the snake's vertebrae suggest it weighed 1140 kg (2,500 pounds) and measured 13 metres (42.7 feet) nose to tail tip. A report describing the find appears in this week's Nature. Drs Jason Head…
February 3, 2009
Smaller chimps may use grooming rather than aggression as a means to rise in their social hierarchy: The finding was gleaned from 10 years of observing dominant male chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, looking at behaviors they used to compete for alpha male status relative to their size…