purepedantry
Posts by this author
June 21, 2006
New Scientist's Invention blog reports on a new way to save lives during crash landings. An inventor in Bangkok thinks it would be a good idea to load the planes with explosives on one wing to slow the sliding of an out of control airplane:
Normally, when a crash landing is inevitable and no…
June 21, 2006
Future Pundit reports on research that demonstrates -- shockingly enough -- that vegetables are good for you. Alert the media I say!
Anyway, I wouldn't even mention it, but I love this line by him:
Most people do not eat an optimal amount of vegetables. Another report providing yet more evidence…
June 21, 2006
Will Jake be doing all these posts from this issue of Nature? Perhaps...
This issue of Nature also has an editorial related to some Asian countries' recent decision to pay researchers for publishing papers:
South Korea has become the latest country to offer scientists cash prizes for publications…
June 21, 2006
For some reason I have been seeing lots of neuroeconomics articles lately. Maybe it is because people enjoy using that prefix. This article caught my eye because I have been reading off the reservation -- a history of economics by Mark Skousen -- who in spite of a rather lengthy "Keynes is a…
June 21, 2006
I am doing an all-nighter at the lab -- I know, how deliciously freshmen history paper of me. I also have a lot of free time as I am waiting for RT-PCRs to finish. Thus, I have decided to post something in every channel of Scienceblogs in one flurry of all-night bloggery. So watch for them. I…
June 19, 2006
I have a bagillion things to do this week, but I would note that many of the other bloggers on this site are running a fundraiser for DonorsChoose. DonorsChoose raises money so that teachers can do science projects with kids -- hopefully involving explosions though I have not independently…
June 19, 2006
A study by researcher David Holben in the latest Preventing Chronic Disease (never heard of it) shows that so-called "food insecure" Appalachians are more likely to be obese and have obesity-related disease.
This puzzling statement can be clarified somewhat by changing the phrase "food insecure"…
June 19, 2006
PLoS Medicine is reporting a paper that compares the declining suicide rate in the US to the increasing number of prozac prescriptions since the drug's introduction in 1988. They find that the two are very well correlated:
The steady decline in suicide rates for both men and women is associated…
June 19, 2006
Hot. I want some, and I am not even a girl.
June 19, 2006
How is it that all the PIs (Tara, PZ, Orac et al.), various grad students, post-docs, etc. find time to fulfill their primary objectives (day jobs) and blog so prolifically?...
We can answer this with a multiple choice question...
Jake manages to find time to blog because
A) he writes while waiting…
June 18, 2006
The Scientific Activist has a post on chemistry to create little people looking chemicals. I don't remember chemistry being nearly this cool.
June 18, 2006
There are Nerd Gods in the movie Word Play. I am not talking about rock gods or leaders of men or even Adonises of the human form. I am talking about Nerd Gods. Nerds of such startling nerditry that when they go up on stage women in thick glasses throw their underwired bras at them.
Would you…
June 18, 2006
As promised I have a response to this article in the New York Times (I had to spend a couple days marshalling my evidence). I thought I would summarize some evidence about what we know from behavioral genetics so you could understand why I think this article was so wrong. I have tried to classify…
June 15, 2006
The Synapse now has a permanent page with some kickass clip art for icons. Click on The Synapse at the top of this page. Check back often for the newest issue and submission guidelines. The current submission date is the 25th of June.
UPDATE: By the way (I am so skatterbrained), we are not the…
June 15, 2006
I was totally incensed by this article in the New York Times, largely because the science quoted -- what little there was in between the anecdotes -- was truly attrocious, ignorant of alternative views, and completely missing the point.
When I get a free moment I will provide some clear examples of…
June 15, 2006
I love science. New Scientist reports a study looking at brain activation during the female orgasm. The results are let us say interesting.
His team recruited 13 healthy heterosexual women and their partners. The women were asked to lie with their heads in a PET scanner while the team compared…
June 15, 2006
SciAm's Invention is reporting the filing of a patent for a vomit ejector -- a ultrasonic pulse that irritates the wall of the trachea triggering the patient too cough:
Patients who overdose on drugs or alcohol can easily drown on their own vomit because they are too intoxicated to cough. Doctors…
June 14, 2006
This article points out that trans-fats not only clutter up your arteries but also make you fatter over the long run. That is unfortunate.
What is more unfortunate however is the picture in this article. How sad is it to be "fat person clip art"?
June 14, 2006
I think that the Miller Amendment is well intentioned, but I have some concerns. If you don't know what the Miller Amendment is Nick is all over that.
Here is my concern. How is such an amendment to be enforced? If the means of enforcement is either by Senate hearings or by judicial prosecution…
June 14, 2006
Carl Zimmer at The Loom has a simply must read post on three species of butterflies. Scientists believed that one species might be a hybrid of the other two, so they set out to test it by making the species all over again.
This is really important stuff because it goes against a common argument vs…
June 14, 2006
A new International Labor Organization (which I don't think is part of the Communist Party but sure as hell sounds like it is) study shows that at-work violence is increasing in basically every country surveyed except England and the US:
A 2000 survey of the then-15 Member States of the European…
June 14, 2006
Baboons show handedness in communicative gestures, tending to be right-handed. This paper analyzed the handedness of baboons to see if they were more likely to use their right or their left hands for communication.
Here is a key figure.
We know that there is a connection between handedness and…
June 14, 2006
GrrlScientist displays one of her favorite animals -- the Okapi.
Personally I think it looks suspiciously similar to the result of a profane, drunken hookup between a zebra and a giraffe. I wonder who rolled over only to be shocked that morning -- my guess is the zebra...
How would that even work…
June 13, 2006
This paper shows that leptin injections into the hippocampus improves memory in a T-maze footshock avoidance and step down inhibitory avoidance tasks. It caught my eye because I just finished a course in behavioral neuroscience, but I have never for the life of me thought the two were related.…
June 13, 2006
Researchers report that drinking coffee cuts the risk of cirrhosis of the liver from alcohol -- by 22 percent per cup each day -- but they stopped short of saying doctors should prescribe coffee for that reason.
The report from the Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program in Oakland, California, was…
June 12, 2006
Polar bears in the southern Beaufort Sea may be turning to cannibalism because longer seasons without ice keep them from getting to their natural food, a new study by American and Canadian scientists has found.
The study reviewed three examples of polar bears preying on each other from January to…
June 12, 2006
Focus on the Family, a conservative social organization located in Colorado Springs, CO, has decided to oppose the mandatory vaccination of young girls for Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), a virus linked to the formation of cervical cancer. Recently the FDA has approved a vaccine for two of the high…
June 12, 2006
Nick from The Scientific Activist has busted out a salient article from the archives related to the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006. I think he gives a fair treatment to the Act and its implications. As he is giving it a qualified endorsement, I thought I would chime in on the Con…
June 11, 2006
Hi all you Neuroscience bloggers out there. I -- and many of the other neuroscience-related bloggers on this site -- sense a strong need for a neuroscience carnival -- a way to regularly collect all of our valuable posts in a predigested form. So I am asking you to submit your best neuroscience…