purepedantry
Posts by this author
Two poems for this week because they are short.
Conscientious Objector
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
I shall die, but
that is all that I shall do for Death.
I hear him leading his horse out of the stall;
I hear the clatter on the barn-floor.
He is in haste; he has business in Cuba,
business in the…
This is the question that I get all the time in family gatherings. Well, maybe not in those words. Usually it is phrased as "How can I not get Alzheimer's? Because that would be a bummer...for me..."
People are concerned about the issue of cognitive decline with aging -- both with pathological…
A UK charity called Sense About Science is taking on celebrities who misrepresent scientific reality:
MELINDA MESSENGER, TV PRESENTER
"Why should I allow my body or my children to be filled with man-made chemicals, when I don't know what the health effects of these substances will be."
Dr John…
Pat Robertson is up to his old fun:
In what has become an annual tradition of prognostications, religious broadcaster Pat Robertson said Tuesday God has told him that a terrorist attack on the United States would result in "mass killing" late in 2007.
"I'm not necessarily saying it's going to be…
Grrrr. Tell me if this article bugs you as much as it does me:
Social Dementia' Decimates Special Neurons
By Michael Balter
Being human has its pluses and minuses. Our cognitive powers are superior to that of other animals, and we can act consciously to alter our destinies. On the other hand, our…
Men with no sons have an increased risk of prostate cancer in relation to those with at least one son:
The researchers in the Mailman School's Department of Epidemiology analyzed the relative risk of prostate cancer by the sex of offspring among fathers registered in a family-based research cohort…
Cartoon Physics, part 1
by Nick Flynn
Children under, say, ten, shouldn't know
that the universe is ever-expanding,
inexorably pushing into the vacuum, galaxies
swallowed by galaxies, whole
solar systems collapsing, all of it
acted out in silence. At ten we are still learning
the rules of cartoon…
Prion diseases such as mad cow disease or Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) are caused when normal proteins adopt an adverse conformational state. The protein sequence is the same as a normal protein; it has just adopted a conformation that causes it to aggregate or do other bad things.…
Who knew:
While public perception may frame surfing as a dangerous sport, new research begs to differ. In the first study of its kind, researchers have computed the rate of injury among competitive surfers and found they are less prone to harm than collegiate soccer or basketball players. Led by…
The FDA -- after years of twiddling their thumbs because of the irrational fears of "consumer" groups -- has finally approved cloned food for human consumption:
After years of delay, the Food and Drug Administration tentatively concluded yesterday that milk and meat from some cloned farm animals…
Wired Magazine has the Foot-in-Mouth Awards for 2006. My personal favorite:
"They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand those…
The Economist has an article that wonders whether new knowledge into neuroscience and more particularly social pathologies will erode our belief in free will. I roll my eyes every time I read an article like this one, mostly because they tend to express an uniformed view about how the brain works…
Poem of the Week is a bit late because of the holiday, but I think it is worth it.
The World Is a Beautiful Place
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't mind happiness
not always being
so very much fun
if you don't mind a touch of hell
now and then
just…
If you hadn't heard yet, Time's Person of the Year is...well...You. The thrust of their argument is that New Media is user-generated media, and sites like blogs, MySpace, and YouTube are changing the way that we create and distribute information. It has a totally tacky mirror on the front cover…
This is never going to end:
A lawmaker introduced a bill on Tuesday that would make Massachusetts the first U.S. state to ban artificial trans fats from restaurants, closely following New York City's ban of the artery-clogging oils.
"We have an opportunity to vastly improve public health by…
There is some good stuff on Scienceblogs right now:
Evolgen has an article about how the oft quoted 1% genetic difference between chimps and humans may hide much larger differences due to copy number and expression differences.
Jonah Lehrer reports on how the function of dreams may be to replay and…
German scientists have created a metamaterial with a negative refractive index for far red light:
The trick is to assemble an array of electronic components that resonate with the electric and magnetic fields of the light waves as they pass through. These materials are unlike any conventional…
Americans are not waiting until marriage to have sex:
More than nine out of 10 Americans, men and women alike, have had premarital sex, according to a new study. The high rates extend even to women born in the 1940s, challenging perceptions that people were more chaste in the past.
"This is reality…
I wrote before about how I think the NY trans-fat ban is scientifically supportable but not particularly the government's business. Here is interesting speculation in Free Exchange:
Banning trans fats in restaurants, but not in grocery stores, doesn't make sense. I guess the supermarket lobby is…
They must have interesting Christmas parties:
A tiny, six-legged critter that suspends all biological activity when the going gets tough may hold answers to a better way to cryopreserve human eggs, researchers say.
Tardigrades, also called water bears, can survive Himalayan heights or ocean depths…
This has to be one of the funnier press releases I have ever read, but it is also about something of environmental importance. Researchers in Australia are experimenting with marine life in coral reefs to see how to prevent weeds from taking over:
A masked marauder has emerged unexpectedly from…
Yet again, a drug company is playing damage control for failing to come clean about a drug's side effects. It makes me so mad when companies do stuff like this because it is such a preventable problem. In this case, the drug in question is Zyprexa (olanzapine) -- presently one of the go-to drugs…
In honor of the holidays, here is a poem by Robert Frost. My English teacher in high school used to have this theory that this poem is actually about Santa Claus. Look closely and you will catch the references.
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
by Robert Frost
Whose woods these are I think I…
Check out the caricature of all the ScienceBloggers in the new issue of Seed. I would be the one in the top right with the tie -- the only with a tie. That will teach me to send them a nice photo...
On Wednesday evening, Senator Tim Johnson (D) -- the junior Senator from South Dakota -- suffered what appeared to be a stroke and was rushed to the hospital. At the hospital, he was diagnosed with intracerebral hemorrhaging as the result of a burst arteriovenous malformation. He underwent…
There has always been a bit of a debate as to whether the vesicles in the presynaptic nerve terminal that contain transmitter are just near the presynaptic membrane or are in fact hemifused with it.
At the presynapse, vesicles containing neurotransmitter are prepared and aligned by the presynaptic…
This is actually not a silly question. Birth control pills on the market such as Seasonale allow women to postpone having their period for three months and to only have four periods total per year. The way these oral contraceptives (OCs) work is relatively simple. Monthly birth control includes…
Everyone always emphasizes the evangelical Right as running the Republican Party, but David Kirby and David Boaz -- writing in TCS -- argue that Republicans ignore the libertarian vote at their peril:
In the past, our research shows, most libertarians voted Republican -- 72 percent for George W.…
You know the story of Persephone right.
Here is a clever poem about it by Louise Gluck.
A Myth of Devotion
by Louise Gluck
When Hades decided he loved this girl
he built for her a duplicate of earth,
everything the same, down to the meadow,
but with a bed added.
Everything the same, including…