clock | December 18, 2008A very sad story:
What started for me as an amusing collection of photos -- who takes photos every day for eighteen years? -- ended with a shock. Who was this man? How did his photos end up on the web? I went on a two-day hunt, examined the source code of the website, and tried various Google tricks.
Finally my investigation turned up the photographer as Jamie Livingston, and he did indeed take a photo every day for eighteen years, until the day he died, using a Polaroid SX-70 camera. He called the project "Photo of the Day" and presumably planned to collect them at some point -- had he lived…
clock | December 18, 2008Jeff Cohen put them all together:
For years I have been intrigued by the local celebrations across America where they "drop," or in many cases lower, something from above to ring in the New Year. Many of these traditions are relatively recent and are based on the ball dropping in New York's Times Square. I have been blogging about these celebrations since 2005, especially the quirky ones. I used to just stumble across them by chance, but eventually I discovered a wikipedia article that seemed to do a comprehensive job of listing them all. It also provides lots of links to the celebrations'…
clock | December 18, 2008Kausik Datta asks:
There may be someone among us who has had this happen to him or her at some point or other: You embark on a new project in uncharted territories with gusto, your goal being gathering preliminary data that would aid generation of a hypothesis. You get data, analyze trends, feel excited, write it up and send it to YFJ (your favorite journal) - and the journal rejects it, saying, variously, "the scope of the study does not suit this journal", "the data presented are too preliminary", or the devastating "the research contains no novel finding".
On another side, you want to work…
clock | December 18, 2008Get involved:
There are many reasons to celebrate science. With the many seminal anniversaries that are on the horizon in 2009, it seemed only logical that we should celebrate them as a community! From astronomy to zoology we are all here - ready to support public understanding of the process and nature of science in an exploration of "how we know what we know."
clock | December 18, 2008Probably not:
Rumors swirl, but a Swedish prosecutor will only confirm a "preliminary investigation" into allegations that pharma giant AstraZeneca fixed the Nobels for financial gain.
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As for the Nobels, as scurrilous as the charges may sound, there is little evidence to support them. First off, AstraZeneca's ties to the anti-HPV vaccine are tenuous at best: In 2007 it purchased a company called MedImmune, which had developed the viruslike particle (VLP) technology licensed for use in Merck's Gardasil and GlaxoSmithKline's Cervarix vaccines -- both designed to…
clock | December 18, 2008Give it a try. Keep refreshing the page and you'll get compliments like:
"May your succulent earlobes ever flap about my knees like a thousand wooden pigeons fleeing the local sawmill."
"Wend you not to wreak annihilable havoc with my tumefascent transmitters and turgid devices. "
"If you were a camel your humps would be esoterically bald from overuse."
"Madam! How your enormous foreskin shades me from the sun! "
"A kitten's growl would not come near the plights of your spoken voice."
"Your eyelids refract the turgid limnations of an eel trapped in flickering cinematographic paralysis."
"If…
clock | December 18, 2008The entries for the PLoS ONE Second Birthday Synchroblogging Competition have been coming in all day. Here are the posts I found so far. If you have posted and your post is not on this list, let me know by e-mail. I will keep updating this post and moving it to the top until the competition closes at dawn tomorrow:
Ed Yong of Not Exactly Rocket Science: Predatory slime mould freezes prey in large groups about the article: Exploitation of Other Social Amoebae by Dictyostelium caveatum
Scicurious of Neurotopia (version 2.0): Why Did the Dolphin Carry a Sponge? about the article: Why Do…
clock | December 18, 2008Listen here to the The December 16, 2008 David E. Barmes Global Health Lecture given by Dr.Harold Varmus:
Harold Varmus, former Director of the National Institutes of Health and co-recipient of a Nobel Prize for studies of the genetic basis of cancer, is President of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. Dr. Varmus chairs the Scientific Board of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Grand Challenges in Global Health program and leads the Advisory Committee for the Global Health Division. He was a member of the World Health Organization (WHO) Commission on Macroeconomics…
clock | December 18, 2008...his periodic system of elements would look like this:
To see large, go here.
clock | December 18, 2008The Schutz Family recently arrived in Belgrade and are blogging the experience. Read the posts about Sounds of Serbia and Survivor, Serbian Style to begin with....
Hat-tip: Victor
clock | December 18, 2008Starting High School One Hour Later May Reduce Teen Traffic Accidents:
A new study shows that after a one-hour delay of school start times, teens increased their average nightly hours of sleep and decreased their "catch-up sleep" on the weekends, and they were involved in fewer auto accidents.
Low Dose Of Caffeine When Pregnant May Damage Heart Of Offspring For A Lifetime:
A new study shows that the equivalent of one dose of caffeine (just two cups of coffee) ingested during pregnancy may be enough to affect fetal heart development and then reduce heart function over the entire lifespan of…
clock | December 18, 2008Beaked Whales' Tusks Evolved Through Sexual Selection Process:
For years, scientists have wondered why only males of the rarely seen family of beaked whales have "tusks," since they are squid-eaters and in many of the species, these elaborately modified teeth seem to actually interfere with feeding. A newly published study help explain the evolutionary origin of these distinctive "tusks" in beaked whales, a rather mysterious family of whales that live in the deep oceans. Although the tusks are known to be used in competition between males, another purpose seems to be to attract female beaked…
clock | December 18, 2008Bob Grant, over on The Scientist's blog, describes a recent kerfuffle over a Cell paper and what it says about peer-review. The 40 comments on the post are already there with some interesting additional perspectives:
Improper citation, disregard for antecedent research, and shoddy experimentation - those are just a few of the allegations levied against a recent research paper written by a team of Stanford University scientists.
One of the paper's chief critics, University of Cambridge biologist Peter Lawrence, says that the problems with the publication exemplify a broader problem in…
clock | December 17, 2008When the leadership is right and the time is right, the people can always be counted upon to follow - to the end at all costs.
- Harold J. Seymour
clock | December 17, 2008Top sci-fi authors discuss the future of technology :
Science fiction isn't (as a rule) about predicting the future, and science fiction writers aren't trying to predict it.
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But many science fiction stories are set in the future, which means they need to include the future of technology (or present reasons why things haven't changed). That is, they have to extrapolate from "what/where things have been and are" to "what/where might be."
We invited noted science fiction authors Larry Niven, Robert Sawyer, Nancy Kress and Charles Stross to share their thoughts on technology-related…
clock | December 17, 2008From The Scientist: Flagging fraud:
A team of French life sciences grad students has launched an online repository of fraudulent scientific papers, and is calling on researchers to report studies tainted by misconduct.
The website -- called Scientific Red Cards -- is still in a beta version, but once it's fully operational it should help the scientific community police the literature even when problems slip past journal editors, the students claim.
The database might also prevent researchers from citing papers that they don't even realize are fraudulent, said Claire Ribrault, a PhD student in…
clock | December 17, 2008This was the unbeatable UK hit in 1981. I was in the UK for two months that summer and this song was #1 on the charts throughout that time: