clock | December 17, 2008The 102nd Skeptics' Circle: [Bleeping] Edition is up on Happy Jihad's House of Pancakes
The 202nd Carnival of Education is up on Steve Spangler's blog
The 155th Carnival of Homeschooling is up on Small World
clock | December 17, 2008Michael Pollan will be on NPR's Morning Edition tomorrow:
I'll be on NPR's Morning Edition, talking about the new Secretary of
Agriculture, former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack.
What can I say? It's a good day for corn.
Less good for us eaters, perhaps. Perhaps the most disappointing thing
about this morning's press conference is that neither Tom Vilsack nor
President-Elect Obama uttered the words "food" or "eaters." Vilsack
does not have the record of a reformer. He supported the expansion of
CAFO agriculture in Iowa (gutting local control to do it) and is much
loved by the biotech industry, who…
clock | December 17, 2008Peter McGrath, Michael Barton and Mike Haubrich brought my attention to a new book by Adrian Desmond and James Moore. Their previous biography of Darwin is arguably the best (and there are hundreds of Darwin biographies out there, many more to be published next year as well). The new book, Darwin's Sacred Cause is a result of a lot of study by the duo, especially since the publication of all the Darwin's correspondence. The new thesis is that the driving force behind Darwin's work on evolution was his disgust with racism:
"This book, by Darwin's most celebrated modern biographers, gives a…
clock | December 17, 2008Hmmm so it seems that we have to abandon some old cherished beliefs:
Scientists debunk the myth that you lose most heat through your head:
When it comes to wrapping up on a cold winter's day, a cosy hat is obligatory. After all, most of our body heat is lost through our heads - or so we are led to believe.
Closer inspection of heat loss in the hatless, however, reveals the claim to be nonsense, say scientists who have dispelled this and five other modern myths.
They traced the origins of the hat-wearing advice back to a US army survival manual from 1970 which strongly recommended covering the…
clock | December 17, 2008Oh-oh, Olivia Judson is not up-to-speed on Open Access, Open Science and Science 2.0 stuff - though the article is interesting and thought-provoking:
As a system, it was a little clumsy -- photocopying was a bore, and if I wanted to spend a couple of months writing somewhere other than my office, I had to take boxes of papers with me -- but it worked. I knew what I had and where it was.
Then the scientific journals went digital. And my system collapsed.
On the good side, instead of hauling dusty volumes off shelves and standing over the photocopier, I sit comfortably in my office, downloading…
clock | December 17, 2008That's interesting:
Croatia currently has over 400,000 users on Facebook and that is more than a 15 percent growth over last month according to our own internal statistics. Facebook tends to be one of the first locations that younger generations turn to for expressing their political frustrations. There is no doubt that Facebook will continue to be a center for political expression.
Svetlana Gladkova suggests that the primary reason he was arrested was not simply that he created the Facebook group but that, "he is actually the president of one of the local branches of the youth of SDP (social…
clock | December 17, 2008This guy is an impostor! He is (or was) a soccer player, but if you google his name, most of the first 100 search hits are not about him at all.... (smile).
clock | December 17, 2008There are 13 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Perinatal Caffeine, Acting on Maternal Adenosine A1 Receptors, Causes Long-Lasting Behavioral Changes in Mouse Offspring:
There are lingering concerns about caffeine consumption during pregnancy or the early…
clock | December 17, 2008New Species Of Prehistoric Giants Discovered In The Sahara:
Dinosaur hunters on a month-long expedition to the Sahara desert have returned home in time for Christmas with more than they ever dreamed of finding. They have unearthed not one but two possible new species of extinct animals. Their success marks one of the most exciting discoveries to come out of Africa for 50 years.
Goose Eggs May Help Polar Bears Weather Climate Change:
As polar bears adapt to a warming Arctic--a frozen seascape that cleaves earlier each spring--they may find relief in an unlikely source: snow goose eggs. New…
clock | December 16, 2008Sometimes we want to get away from the busy and hectic city life to find solace in the raging waves of the ocean pounding on the rocks or the turbulent splashing of a bubbling waterfall. At other times we are amazed by the immovable silence of a mountain
- Stuti Garg
clock | December 16, 2008There are 12 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
An Examination of Morphometric Variations in a Neotropical Toad Population (Proceratophrys cristiceps, Amphibia, Anura, Cycloramphidae):
The species Proceratophrys cristiceps belongs to the genus Proceratophrys…
clock | December 16, 2008Despite online debates - which one is better: Twitter or FriendFeed, sometimes serious, sometimes tongue-in-cheek - the fact is that these are two different animals altogether. Asking one to make a choice between the two is like asking one to make a choice between e-mail and YouTube - those are two different services that do different things. Thus, they are to be used differently.
Twitter is a communications tool (or a 'human application'). You can broadcast (one-to-many), you can eavesdrop (many-to-one) or you can converse (one-to-one, either in public or through Direct Messages). But most…
clock | December 16, 2008Are you writing your posts yet? Hurry up, the PLoS ONE Second Birthday Synchroblogging Competition is in two days!
There are also just a couple of days left to vote in the 2008 Edublog Awards, so if you have not done it yet, do it now.
And be patient with us - there are many, many good entries to choose from for The Open Laboratory 2008. The judging process is going on smoothly and the winners will be announced pretty soon.
clock | December 16, 2008Predecessor of Cows, The Aurochs, Were Still Living In The Netherlands Around AD 600:
Archaeological researchers at the University of Groningen have discovered that the aurochs, the predecessor of our present-day cow, lived in the Netherlands for longer than originally assumed. Remains of bones recently retrieved from a horn core found in Holwerd (Friesland, Netherlands), show that the aurochs became extinct in around AD 600 and not in the fourth century.
Ocean Fish Farming Harms Wild Fish, Study Says:
Farming of fish in ocean cages is fundamentally harmful to wild fish, according to an essay…
clock | December 15, 2008If falsehood, like truth, had but one face, we would be more on equal terms. For we would consider the contrary of what the liar said to be certain. But the opposite of truth has a hundred thousand faces and an infinite field.
- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
clock | December 15, 2008There are a bunch of cool new articles in PLoS Medicine, PLoS Biology and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases today. Take a look:
The Dirty War Index: Statistical Issues, Feasibility, and Interpretation:
In this issue of PLoS Medicine, Madelyn Hsiao-Rei Hicks and Michael Spagat propose a new quantitative tool [1] in the emerging field of human security sciences [2]. Quantitative data about people's insecurity can lead to objective knowledge about many of the contexts of violence in the world today. Thus developing quantitative tools for use in this domain is important.
Hicks and Spagat's tool…
clock | December 15, 2008Today's Rocketboom mentions the NCSU symposium on obese zoo animals and links to me:
Cool!
clock | December 15, 2008The Giant's Shoulders #6 is up on Rigorous Trivialities
The December edition of Oekologie is up on Greg Laden's blog
Carnival of the green #158 is up on The christian environmentalist
clock | December 15, 2008Pawel tried, for a year, to be a freelance scientist. While the experiment did not work, in a sense that it had to end, he has learned a lot from the experience. And all of us following his experience also learned a lot about the current state of the world. And I do not think this has anything to do with Pawel living in Poland - I doubt this would have been any different if he was in the USA or elsewhere.
You all know that I am a big fan of telecommuting and coworking and one of the doomsayers about the future existence of the institution of 'The Office'. And you also know that I am a…