clock | November 28, 2008
Social Amoeba Seek Kin Association:
Starving "social amoebae" called Dictyostelium discoideum seek the support of "kin" when they form multi-cellular organisms made up of dead stalks and living spores, said researchers from Baylor College of Medicine and Rice University in Houston in a report that appears online today in the open-access journal Public Library of Science Biology.
Adult Brain Neurons Can Remodel Connections:
Overturning a century of prevailing thought, scientists are finding that neurons in the adult brain can remodel their connections. In work reported in the Nov. 24 online…
clock | November 27, 2008Already the writers are complaining that there is too much freedom. They need some pressure. The worse your daily life, the better your art. If you have to be careful because of oppression and censorship, this pressure produces diamonds.
- Tatyana Tolstaya
clock | November 27, 2008Serbian Ministry of Health, as part of their fight against AIDS, inserted a condom inside a women's magazine this month. The condom is German-made, named "Bumper-Bumper" and in a fun-looking package:
[Image from]
The timing is unfortunate (I'm sure it was planned months in advance and was too difficult to pull back at the last moment) - this was mailed out just 2-3 days after a guy in Belgrade killed his wife - a pretty brutal case of domestic violence that everyone is talking about (this is not something that happens often there).
Question #1: Why are condoms not sent to men? Are the…
clock | November 27, 2008
The Friday page for the ScienceOnline09 is not up to date yet, but will be soon.
What is planned?
In the morning, there will be something related to coffee - Coffee Science of sorts. Place and time TBA.
For lunches, you are free to organize yourselves by editing the Friday page.
In the afternoon, we will have a set of Lab Tours starting at 2:30pm and ending around 4pm. BRITE and NC Museum of Natural Science are already set in stone. Several others are still in the process of finalizing the details (e.g., how many participants, etc.). We will soon have the complete list up on the wiki so…
clock | November 27, 2008The online drive has already produced 10 donors. Let's see if we can up that number a little....
clock | November 27, 2008How Did Turtles Get Their Shells? Oldest Known Turtle Fossil, 220 Million Years Old, Give Clues:
With hard bony shells to shelter and protect them, turtles are unique and have long posed a mystery to scientists who wonder how such an elegant body structure came to be. Since the age of dinosaurs, turtles have looked pretty much as they do now with their shells intact, and scientists lacked conclusive evidence to support competing evolutionary theories. Now with the discovery in China of the oldest known turtle fossil, estimated at 220- million-years-old, scientists have a clearer picture of…
clock | November 26, 2008Today, we need a nation of Minutemen, citizens who are not only prepared to take arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as the basic purpose of their daily life and who are willing to consciously work and sacrifice for that freedom.
- John Fitzgerald Kennedy
clock | November 26, 2008
A few days ago, Peggy and Stephanie asked the blogosphere a few questions about the relationship between science and Science Fiction. They want to use the insights from the responses to run their session - Science Fiction on Science Blogs - at the ScienceOnline09 meeting in January.
They got lots of responses - interesting reads for the long holiday weekend:
Responses from the SF Writer Point of View
Sean Craven @ Renaissance Oaf
Simon Haynes @ Spacejock News
Arvind Mishra @ Science Fiction in India
JesterJoker @ Sa Souvraya Niende Misain Ye
Kelly McCullough @ Wyrdsmiths
Mike Brotherton…
clock | November 26, 2008Now I finally understand the lyrics! Joan Baez was really singing to Bob about prehistoric turtles!
clock | November 26, 2008That is the Discover Magazine's series of articles, which includes:
The 10 Most Influential People in Science
20 Best Brains Under 40
Teen Genius: 5 Promising Scientists Under 20
...and more (the series, as the numbers above do not add up to 50, must still be in progress).
clock | November 26, 2008Here - a compilation of ten facts:
Congratulations, liberal/progressive/terrorist! This is the first Thanksgiving in eight years where you represent the political majority. Because you know who voted with you? Oh, just fifty-three percent of the United States of America. HELL YEAH! Who's a member of the fringe lunatic this holiday season? Not you!
But what happens if your right-wing relatives still want to debate the outcome of the election? Defang your conservative loved ones with these ten helpful facts!:
But since when are facts supposed to be of any interest to Republicans? Their modus…
clock | November 26, 2008As expected, the entries have been flying in over the past few days. Keep them coming! You have only 3 or so days left to dig through your Archives for your best posts since December 20th 2007 and submit them. Submit one, or two, or several - no problem. Or ask your readers to submit for you.
Only submissions received through this form are valid.
Then take a look at your favourite bloggers and pick some of their best posts - don't worry, we can deal with duplicate entries. Do not forget new and up-coming blogs - they may not know about the anthology - and submit their stuff as well.
As we…
clock | November 26, 2008What do you think? I think he has not seen change.gov and change.org yet, as they undermine his (otherwise useful) argument. But you have to read (or listen to) the entire thing - it is long and below are a few short snippets:
Noam Chomsky: "What Next? The Elections, the Economy, and the World":
.....And I agree with it. It was a historic election. To have a black family in the white house is a momentous achievement. In fact, it's historic in a broader sense. The two Democratic candidates were an African-American and a woman. Both remarkable achievements. We go back say 40 years, it would…
clock | November 26, 2008I and the Bird #89 is up on Bird Ecology Study Group
The 152nd Carnival of Homeschooling is up on The Common Room
clock | November 26, 2008It's Thanksgiving tomorrow and the question (of the title of this post) pops up on the internets again. See SciCurious and Janet for the latest local offerings.
Short answer: we don't know.
But there is endless speculation about it, each taking into account bits and pieces of information that we know about tryptophan and related physiology. The hypotheses tend to focus on:
a) Tryptophan itself, i.e., how it can get from food, through the intestine, through the bloodstream, to the brain and what it would do once there.
b) Serotonin, as a product of tryptophan metabolism, and how it can be…
clock | November 26, 2008StoryCorps is declaring November 28, 2008 the first annual National Day of Listening:
This holiday season, ask the people around you about their lives -- it could be your grandmother, a teacher, or someone from the neighborhood. By listening to their stories, you will be telling them that they matter and they won't ever be forgotten. It may be the most meaningful time you spend this year.
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This Thanksgiving, StoryCorps asks you to start a new holiday tradition--set aside one hour on Friday, November 28th, to record a conversation with someone important to you. You can interview anyone…
clock | November 26, 2008Inspired by The Open Laboratory, the Gamers in the blogosphere are planning to do something similar - the Open Game Table.
If you are a gaming blogger, take a look and participate....
clock | November 26, 2008Hmmm, juxtaposing these three posts is thought-provoking....what is education all about? Is the 'coolness' factor overpowering the 'usefulness' factor? Thoughts?
Planning to Share versus Just Sharing:
But inevitably, with a very few exceptions, these projects spend an enormous amount of time defining what is to be shared, figuring out how to share it, setting up the mechanisms to share it, and then...not really sharing much. Or sharing once but costing so much time, effort or money that they do not get sustained. Does this sound familiar to anyone else? I don't feel like this phenomenon is…
clock | November 26, 2008
Jurassic Turtles Could Swim:
Around 164 million years ago the earliest aquatic turtles lived in lakes and lagoons on the Isle of Skye, Scotland, according to new research. Recent scientific fieldwork led by researchers from UCL and the Natural History Museum on Skye, an island off the north-western coast of Scotland, discovered a block of rock containing fossils that have been recognised as a new species of primitive turtle Eileanchelys waldmani.
'Gray's Paradox' Solved: Researchers Discover Secret Of Speedy Dolphins:
There was something peculiar about dolphins that stumped prolific British…