Physical Sciences
ksharpe | June 7, 2006Ask a Big Question, get...fewer answers. But really well-considered, provocative ones.
This week, the ScienceBloggers mulled:
"Do you think there is a brain drain going on (i.e. foreign scientists not coming to work and study in the U.S. like they used to, because of new immigration rules and the general unpopularity of the U.S.) If so, what are its implications? Is there anything we can do about it?"
Read on for their relplies.
Most of the bloggers pointed out the question isn't asking about a "brain drain" as it's most commonly defined -- rather, it's asking whether the influx of foreign…
dmunger | June 7, 2006Synesthesia -- the ability to experience a sensation like vision in another mode, like hearing -- is thought to be quite rare. Yet all of us have the ability to combine sensory modes, and we do it every day. The modes we combine just happen to be ones we don't think about as often: taste and smell.
While vision gets the lion's share of attention in perception research, research on olfaction and taste has begun to be more prominent. However, though we know that the senses of taste and smell interact, few studies have explored the interaction between the two sensory modes. The problem is that…
drorzel | June 6, 2006Another week, another "Ask a ScienceBlogger" question. This week, the topic is the putative "brain drain" caused by recent US policies:
Do you think there is a brain drain going on (i.e. foreign scientists not coming to work and study in the U.S. like they used to, because of new immigration rules and the general unpopularity of the U.S.) If so, what are its implications? Is there anything we can do about it?
This is really three questions, with a fourth sort of assumed on the way to the third. Answers below the fold.
The first question is "Is there a 'brain drain' going on?" That one, I can…
grrlscientist | June 6, 2006The Mothership asks;
Question: Do you think there is a brain drain going on (i.e.; foreign scientists not coming to work and study in the U.S. like they used to, because of new immigration rules and the general unpopularity of the U.S.) If so, what are its implications? Is there anything we can do about it?
The short story: From my own personal experience, approximately half of my scientific colleagues at the postdoc level are foreigners, and I have never in my life, worked in a lab that was monolingual (and honestly, I cannot imagine working in such a boring environment ever again as those I…
tsmith | May 23, 2006NBC's science and health correspondent, Robert Bazell, has an opinion piece today on MSNBC: Stop whining about intelligent design.
Scientists should stop whining about threats to the teaching of evolution and spend more time discussing values.
I should note here that most of the piece is strongly supportive of teaching evolution. Bazell presents a very brief overview of the history of anti-evolutionism in America, and notes that "serious efforts in biology and medicine can no more ignore evolution than airplane designers can ignore gravity." So, he's not messing around or giving any…
stcynic | May 18, 2006DI flak Jonathan Witt is back with yet another criticism of Judge Jones' ruling in Kitzmiller, this one no more compelling than the 13,582,196 criticisms the DI has already offered (many of them contradictory, of course). It's chock full of bad arguments and nutty goodness, so let's get started.
In keeping with that trope, Jones suggests that intelligent design is just biblical creationism repackaged after a 1987 Supreme Court decision against biblical creationism.* If Jones had read key briefs submitted to him, he would know that the intelligent design arguments in biology pre-date that…
jlynch | May 18, 2006Ed linked to a set of 45 "SIgns you might be an ID supporter" and this caught my eye:
35. You resent the implication that ID assumes the Designer has to be supernatural. After all, He could have been a space alien, right?
34. You believe that the laws of Nature, the fundamental constants of physics, and the configuration of the solar system with respect to the rest of the cosmos, all show signs of having been intelligently designed to make it possible for us to exist and to study Nature.
33. You believe both of the above simultaneously, though you can't quite explain how a space alien could…
cevans | May 15, 2006
Growing up, I watched a lot of television. Not the good stuff, mind you: rather, I would gambol home from elementary school to watch hours of Designing Women re-runs and then laugh uproariously at Step By Step while enacting my early OCD tendencies in elaborate Lucky Charms marshmellow seperation projects. In retrospect, I realize that I could have been playing soccer or going to sleep-away camp. My bearing witness to the worst television programming of early 1990s, however, has probably shaped me in ways I am yet to fully understand.
For example, I am haunted to this day by a "Cablevision…
pharyngula | May 14, 2006Darksyde takes on the teaching of creationism in Missouri…let's see if readers here are clever enough to see the dishonesty in this quote.
[Mike] Riddle had been invited to Potosi High and John A. Evans Middle School by Randy Davis, superintendent of the Potosi-RIII school district, and his board to discuss science with science students. During an hour-long presentation, Riddle ... prodded the students to question established scientific principals and theories and encouraged them to think about a career in science.
Questioning scientific principles and theories is a good thing, and it's also…
drorzel | May 4, 2006Dr. What Now? has a nice and timely post about helping students prepare for oral presentations, something I'll be doing myself this morning, in preparation for the annual undergraduate research symposium on campus Friday. Of course, being a humanist, what she means by oral presentation is a completely different thing than the PowerPoint slide shows that we do in the sciences:
She did a run-through, and then we sat down together and reworked the first three pages to set up the project more clearly and helpfully for her listeners, and then we designed a handout to help her audience situate her…
drorzel | April 27, 2006The big physics story of the day is bound to be this new report on American particle physics:
The United States should be prepared to spend up to half a billion dollars in the next five years to ensure that a giant particle accelerator now being designed by a worldwide consortium of scientists can be built on American soil, the panel said. If that does not happen, particle physics, the quest for the fundamental forces and constituents of nature, will wither in this country, it said.
You might assume that, as a physicist, I'm all in favor of this-- half a billion is a lot of money, after all…
apalazzo | April 25, 2006(Just to remind you all - I'm away on holiday and I've pre-scheduled the publication of several posts from my old blog at blogspot. This next entry was one that I got a lot of 'tsks, tsks" for - it was intrended tio be a tad toungue & cheek. Incidentally the values of the various h-indexes listed here must have gone up.)
About a month ago I had a conversation with my thesis advisor about the h-index. It is a new method, proposed by Jorge E. Hirsch of UCSD to quantitatively measure a scientist's influence. His proposal was published in PNAS and Nature had a little report on it. Here's a…
joshua roebke | April 21, 2006A while back, I wrote what some might call a fairly provocative article on the promiscuity of famous physicists entitled Getting Physical. Besides getting picked up by a porn site or two and this possibly NSFW link (So what if you've been on Slashdot? How many science articles can claim this distinction, huh?), I received quite a few responses from some rather aghast SEED lovers questioning the veracity of my claims.
Let me just say this: I am equally SHOCKED. You fell into that tired stereotype that scientists are all asexual freezy pops? Sorry people, don't want to ruin your next…
razib | April 14, 2006As a follow up to my post below, here is a comment over at Uncertain Principles:
Being a lowly biologist myself, I will just note that there is a long tradition of physicists making important contributions in biology (Schroedinger, Pauling), but I can't think of any reverse cases -- that is, biologists who made important discoveries in physics. (That doesn't, of course, mean that there aren't any, and I'd love to hear about some.)
As a point of fact, Linus Pauling was originally a physical chemist. If physical chemists are classed with the physicists I think many biochemistry majors will…
razib | April 13, 2006Alex and PZ point me to this quote from one John Barrow:
When Selfish Gene author Richard Dawkins challenged physicist John Barrow on his formulation of the constants of nature at last summer's Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship lectures, Barrow laughed and said, "You have a problem with these ideas, Richard, because you're not really a scientist. You're a biologist."
Ouch!!! Many physical scientists look down on life scientists. I had a friend, who shall remain nameless (who knows his own name) who was habitually contemptuous of the likes of life scientists. I was only a righteous…
oracknows | April 11, 2006OK, I've been prodded enough!
Yes, I've been aware of the study purporting to present good anecdotal case reports showing that there might be something to the hypothesis that megadoses of vitamin C can cure cancer where other therapies fail. I've also been aware of an in vitro study that suggested selective toxicity of vitamin C to tumor cells compared to normal cells. I've even been meaning to write about since I first saw it a couple of weeks ago, but the AACR intervened, as did a number of other topics, and, like so many other topics that I want to write about but somehow never find the…
tsmith | April 10, 2006I wrote previously about a recent study that found all sorts of bacterial diversity in a place once thought to be rather barren--the human stomach. One of the species they discovered appeared to be related to an extremophile--microbes that live in extreme environments (in this case, a relative of one that could withstand incredibly high doses of radiation). A new story from the BBC reports the discovery of another extremophile in a place one may not expect it (or at least, may not expect the one they found):
Researchers have found traces of a heat-loving bacterium that may live beneath a…
ksharpe | April 7, 2006Earlier this week I asked about the best science books of all time.
Today, a related question crossed my mind: what novels do scientists like to read...and why?
A couple of years ago, I took a grad-school English class devoted to postmodern fiction. Six weeks of the thirteen-week semester were devoted to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. And I remember hearing along the way that Gravity's Rainbow was supposedly huge with engineers and physicists. In one way, this surprised me: I'm a literature nerd by training and temperament--a professional reader, ferchrissake--and I found Gravity's…
pharyngula | April 5, 2006Brian Alters, of McGill University, had a grant proposal turned down for an unusual reason.
In denying his request, the research council's peer-review committee recently sent Mr. Alters a letter explaining he'd failed to "substantiate the premise" of his study.
It said he hadn't provided "adequate justification for the assumption in the proposal that the theory of evolution, and not intelligent-design theory, was correct."
Oh, well…another researcher with a grant that hasn't been funded, trying to rationalize his failure. We need to see the whole letter—surely he must have just lifted that…
stcynic | April 3, 2006Mark Creech, head of the Christian Action League, has replied to an article in Seed Magazine about the Clergy Letter Project and continued to spread the nonsense that I fisked a few weeks ago. In fact, some of it is even worse. He also defends the DI's infamous list of scientists, most of whom are not in relevant scientific fields. He writes:
Moreover, West argues the single largest group of the signers was biologists (154 of the 514). He adds: "Of course the list also includes many scientists specializing in chemistry, physics, engineering, mathematics/statistics, and related disciplines.…