Physical Sciences
loom | April 27, 2007Here's a story that should be getting lots of press but apparently isn't: a new study indicates that plants don't release lots of methane gas.
You may perhaps recall a lot of attention paid to methane from plants back in January 2006. A team of scientists (mostly from the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics)reported in Nature that they had found evidence that plants release huge amounts of the gas--perhaps accounting for ten to thirty percent of all the methane found in the atmosphere.
The result was big news for several reasons. It was a surprise just in terms of basic biology--…
ably | April 25, 2007
Paul J. Steinhardt
Paul J. Steinhardt is the Albert Einstein Professor in Science at Princeton University and is on the faculty in the Department of Physics and in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences. He received his B.S. in Physics at Caltech in 1974; his M.A. in Physics in 1975 and Ph.D. in Physics in 1978 at Harvard University. He was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows from 1978-81 and on the faculty of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania from 1981-98, where he was Mary Amanda Wood Professor from 1989-98. He is a Fellow in the…
drorzel | April 20, 2007Since I'm going to be voting for the Hugos this year, I feel obliged to actually read as many of the nominated books as possible, and Michael Flynn's Eifelheim was readily available, so I picked up a copy and read it a little while back.
The novel mixes two plot threads, one in a near-future setting, the other in medieval Germany in 1348, just before the Black Death. The modern thread concerns a couple of academics, a physicist studying new theories of time and space, and a historian looking into the mysterious abandonment of a place called "Eifelheim" in Germany. The medieval thread tells…
bushwells | April 16, 2007I freely admit it. I routinely destroy my neoencephalon by watching all manner of crap on television. I am not one of those overweening snobs who daintily curl an upper lip as I sneer, "I never watch television." I love popular culture, and frankly, find a dose of mindless television to be relaxing, and occasionally thought-provoking.
Warning: This is recycled bonobo scat from the long defunct Refuge, ca. Nov. 5, 2005.
Such occurred recently when I watched the imaginatively titled, "Vampire Bats" featuring the unconquerable Lucy Lawless. Although I was not a devotee, I enjoyed watching…
dmunger | April 10, 2007These days, it seems like everyone's got a science book. Not a small number of them end up on my desk -- apparently Cognitive Daily is "important" enough that publicists feel a review from us is worth the cost of printing and mailing me a book. But just because they send me the book doesn't mean I have to review it. Often I simply ignore these books, putting them on my shelf or throwing them away. The most recent book I've received, however, is so bad that I couldn't just ignore it: this book is actually instructive -- of how NOT to write a science book. Reading just a few chapters of this…
thusspakezuska | April 6, 2007This is the third of several discussion posts for Week 3 of Feminist Theory and the Joy of Science. You can find all posts for this course by going to the archives and clicking on Joy of Science in the Category section.
This post deals with the readings by Subramaniam and by Margolis, Fisher, & Miller (MFM). (Summaries are available here.)
I really wish that all of you could read "Snow Brown and the Seven Detergents". There is actually a pdf version on the internet but I'm not linking to it because it seems to be a pirated version. First of it, it attributes authorship to Sue Rosser…
thusspakezuska | April 6, 2007This is the second of several discussion posts for Week 3 of Feminist Theory and the Joy of Science. You can find all posts for this course by going to the archives and clicking on Joy of Science in the Category section.
This post deals with the readings by Margolis, Fisher, & Miller (MFM), and Hynes. (Summaries are available here.)
Why might women want to become scientists or engineers? Do their motivations and interest differ from that of men? If so, is the difference in intensity or in kind?
In the two papers by Hynes and by MFM, we read about women's early interest in science…
cortex | April 6, 2007Matsuzaka looked impressive in his MLB debut. He had 10 strikeouts in 7 innings and only threw 108 pitches. I'm still not convinced he's worth $103.1 million, but the weak Kansas City lineup looked pretty dazed and confused.
Matsuzaka's genius, I think, is to create as much batter uncertainty as possible. He's one of the few pitchers who really uses psychology to his benefit. Take, for example, the much hyped gyroball. Such a pitch probably doesn't even exist. But that doesn't even matter: as long as batters think it might exist, they have to think about it, and batters don't have time to…
oracknows | April 4, 2007Well, well, well, well.
I hadn't expected it. I really hadn't. After just shy of three weeks since I first made my challenge to Dr. Egnor to put up or shut up regarding certain claims of his that the "design inference" has been "of great value" in medicine and results in "the best medical research," I had pretty much given up trying to get an answer out of him. I had come to assume that either (1) Dr. Egnor had been either unaware of my challenge (although I tended to doubt it, given how many echoed it, or (2) he was simply ignoring it in favor of posting some amazingly bad reasoning. To…
apalazzo | March 30, 2007There is a divide within the biological sciences, those that are concerned with proximal causes and those concerned with ultimate causes. For every question in biology there are two answers.
Ultimate causes have to do mostly with the "why?"s. Why was this structure selected for? But not always. What advantage did this gene give to the organism? Do synonymous mutations give a selection advantage?
Proximal causes have mostly "how" questions. How does this protein work? How does a cell cycle check point function? How does this synonymous mutation affect protein folding?
Another way of thinking…
drorzel | March 29, 2007Steve Gimbel at Philosopher's Playground is calling for the abolition of lab classes:>p>
As an undergrad I majored in both philosophy and physics and I have a confession my former physics profs will surely not like -- everything I know about physics, I learned from my theory classes. You see, science classes come in two flavors. There are theory classes where a prof stands in front of the room and lectures and then there are lab classes where for many hours, students walk in ill-prepared and tried to figure out which one of these things we've never seen before is a potentiometer, fumble…
jstemwedel | March 28, 2007Steve Gimbel has a provocative post that suggests the costs of undergraduate lab classes may outweigh the benefits. Quoth Steve:
[E]verything I know about physics, I learned from my theory classes. You see, science classes come in two flavors. There are theory classes where a prof stands in front of the room and lectures and then there are lab classes where for many hours, students walk in ill-prepared and tried to figure out which one of these things we've never seen before is a potentiometer, fumble their way through procedures that yield results that are not even close to what they were…
jrosenhouse | March 27, 2007Read Part One of this series here.
At this point Strobel and Meyer left the stage. The room grew dark, and a video came on the large screen to my left. It was an excerpt from the The Privileged Planet, based on the book of the same title. The book was written by astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez and theologian Jay Richards, and represented yet another gloss on the fine-tuning argument.
Richards was the next speaker. I had not read The Privileged Planet when it was published, and therefore was only vaguely familiar with its arguments. After hearing Richards speak, I'm not inclined to buy…
drorzel | March 22, 2007There's an article in Inside Higher Ed today on the problem of college readiness:
We must come together in postsecondary education on many of these points if we are to prepare far greater numbers of students for college. ACT Inc. estimates that 60 percent to 70 percent of its test takers are not well-prepared for college study. Considering that only about half of students who enroll in college actually earn a degree or certificate, we must find ways to confront this problem. Research shows that most future job opportunities in the U.S. will require some level of college study or career…
neurotopia | March 15, 2007Yet again, another Jesus flare-up. Rob Knop posted his personal religious views and the prophetical shit hath hit the fan. I swear the science and spirituality debate is like a bad case of hemorrhoids.
Some of us just never had these problems that result from self-identification. I stress the self part because, as Chris Rowan points out, the whole discussion really is about how individuals reconcile their personal views with physical realities. We only run into problems when we start trying to pigeon-hole everybody else.
Which is why when it comes to my personal beliefs/lack thereof,…
oracknows | March 15, 2007You may recall Dr. Lorraine Day, the former Chief of Orthopedic Surgery at San Francisco General Hospital in the 1980's who, after developing breast cancer, became a consummate altie, selling various dubious "natural, alternative therapies for all diseases, including cancer and AIDS." Somewhere along the line, sadly, she also became a rabid anti-Semite and Holocaust denier. I've had an interest in her conspiracy-mongering for a while now, because she's the perfect storm of two of my biggest interests: "alternative medicine" and Holocaust denial. I used to refer to her as purveying both…
apalazzo | March 14, 2007I've been so busy. But I have 15 minutes to spare and so I'll attempt to give a quit session of Tid Bits (including a mention of The Daily Transcript in ... Nature!):
Others seek more of a balance, such as the cell-biologist postdoc author of The Daily Transcript (http://scienceblogs.com/transcript), who mentions other blogs that detail "the woes of postdoc-hood" as well as what it takes to be a pioneering scientist. Apart from linking to both, the blog expands on the second, discussing the "fine line between doggedness and dogma".
(Thanks Tara for the heads up.)
So what else is out there…
drorzel | March 14, 2007The winners of the 2007 Intel Science Talent Search have been announced. First prize goes to physics, as is right and proper:
Mary Masterman, 17, of Oklahoma City, submitted a physics project to the Intel Science Talent Search describing the spectrograph system she built for $300 at home (commercial units can cost $20,000 to $100,000). Mary found that machining the parts and aligning the optics (lenses from a microscope and a camera) were particularly challenging. Her Littrow spectrograph splits light, like a prism, and uses a camera to record the resulting Raman spectra - a specific…
goodmath | March 13, 2007 In the comments to another post, Blake Stacey gave me a pointer to a really obnoxious article, called "A New Theory of the Universe", by a Robert Lanza, published in the American Scholar. Lanza's article is a rotten piece of new-age gibberish, with all of the usual hallmarks: lots of woo, all sorts of babble about how important consciousness is, random nonsensical babblings about quantum physics, and of course, bad math.
Lanza's "theory" (if one wants to be generous enough to call it that) is that life is a fundamental, in fact the fundamental guiding force of the entire universe. His…
catdynamics | March 12, 2007The NASA ROSES-2007 is out.
This is the omnibus announcement of opportunity/request for proposals for most of th in-house activities for the science mission directorate - everything from evolutionary biolology through test of relativity via the moon and mars - but it doesn't include the great observatory proposals - Hubble, Spitzer, Chandra have their own solicitations and support structure.
One of the few surviving fundamental science categories, as distinct from mission oriented proposals, is the Astrophysics Theory Program - which basically covers theoretical research which is not mission…