Academics
pharyngula | December 8, 2007American River College has, as most colleges do, a student body organization that is elected by the students. They recently had their elections, and got a bit of a surprise: the right-wing Christian group had organized, appealed to the student on the basis of their shared religious beliefs, and swept the election. It also helped that they could call on ethnic identities — Sacramento apparently has had an influx of Slavic immigrants with an odd(er) and often rather nasty form of the Christian cult. These are the Slavic Christian groups that are hysterically homophobic—it's evident on their…
pharyngula | December 6, 2007Dear students of Biol 4003: Neurobiology—
EXTRA CREDIT? You haven't even turned in your final lab reports, and you're already asking for extra credit? This speaks of a serious lack of confidence, and I don't know that I should pander to your low self-esteem. Tell me instead that your work on the final exam and the last lab report will dazzle me so much that giving you a mere "A" will be insufficient, and I'll have to come to your homes and clean your house to make up the difference.
Besides, didn't anyone ever tell you that a cluttered lab is an active, happy lab?
And that tank with the…
pharyngula | December 6, 2007What is wrong with the teachers in New Hampshire? They just endorsed Clinton for the Democratic candidate, and Huckabee for the Republicans. Huckabee is a deranged young earth creationist! Did the NEA just spit in the face of its science teachers? How could they possibly support a creationist?
Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor, was the only Republican candidate to speak at the national NEA meeting in Philadelphia in July. His campaign also courted the New Hampshire chapter, and he was the only GOP candidate to meet with chapter officials, a source with the New Hampshire union said.
Oh.…
katie glasrud | December 3, 2007Well... it's about that time. You know, the end of the semester where you start every project you've had the semester to complete. At least that's what I'm doing. I finally made some headway on my Neuro project during the past few weeks. I'm sleep depriving zebrafish; I had planned to devise a scheme using streams of bubbles that work on some obnoxious structure to generate a regular disturbance (alright it was PZ's idea). However I finally admitted defeat about the same time I shattered a water heater and realized I had gotten nowhere.
Desperately I went to a local farm supply store to look…
lua yar | December 3, 2007Today in class we learned about the functioning of olfactory nerves. It was really quite interesting, especially to find out how the olfactory system is organized. Let's begin in the nasal cavity. Here, present in the mucus layer, are projections of the olfactory receptor cells. Each receptor cell is only capable of binding to one specific type of odorant molecule. These receptor cells travel through the porous bone separating the skull from the nasal cavity, and feed into a specific glomerulus. Glomeruli are located in the olfactory bulb, and have multiple receptors feeding into them.…
pharyngula | November 28, 2007T. Ryan Gregory has announced that you can now read the inaugural issue of Evolution: Education and Outreach, which includes his own article.
This is the new journal set up by Niles and Gregory Eldredge (father and son) to "provide direct linkage between the worlds of scientific
research and the K-16 classroom." It is definitely one every science teacher should be watching.
pharyngula | November 27, 2007Hey, look here: we have an ad in The Chronicle of Higher Education:
Position: Tenure-Track Position in Biology
Institution: University of Minnesota at Morris
Location: Minnesota
Date posted: 11/19/2007
Biology: The University of Minnesota, Morris seeks to fill a tenure-track position in vertebrate biology beginning August 18, 2008. Duties include: teaching undergraduate vertebrate systematics or natural history and sophomore level human physiology; curating and maintaining the discipline's vertebrate collection; contributing to the university's general education program; advising…
pharyngula | November 27, 2007Those sneaky alumni organizations — they've always got new angles on how to get to you. The alumni magazine for the University of Oregon has a writeup on me and a current member of the UO faculty, Mark Thoma. Apparently, we are Cyber Scholars, professors who use the blogosphere to teach the world. I think we need some new academic robes to go with that designation — preferably something in silver fabrics, and with a jetpack.
bright_lights | November 23, 2007Today I'm looking at synaesthesia, but more specifically lexical-gustatory synaesthesia in which certain phonemes (smallest unit of speech such as the /l/ sound in jelly) trigger specific tastes. For example, in Jamie Ward and Julia Simner's (2003) report, Lexical-gustatory synaesthesia: linguistic and conceptual factors, a case study was done on a forty year old business man who reported tasting specific tastes in response to certain phonemes. In this case the man reported tasting cake when the phoneme /k/ was used in a word. Synaesthesia is thought to occur due to the crossing over or…
lua yar | November 20, 2007I was happily absorbed in my slightly vegetative stupor on the couch when my roommate walked into the room and starting talking about physics. Ugh, physics, I thought, but I politely listened as she began talking about lenses, specifically how they are related to sight. It is common knowledge that the images we see are inverted on the retina, and then further processed. However, my roommate was discussing experiments done on humans that inverted their vision by 180 degrees and found that, though at first they could not function normally, eventually they adapted. I thought this was fascinating…
pharyngula | November 17, 2007The good Lynch of Stranger Fruit was honored as the CASE/Carnegie Professor of the Year awardee for Arizona. Everyone go applaud!
bright_lights | November 16, 2007This week I've been diving in a little more into doing some actual research myself. Nothing breakthrough mind you, just some simple experiment to sort of understand the world around and inside of me a little better. My partner and I are looking into how the optic nerve develops inside of zebra fish and how its development may be affected by developing the fish in total darkness. We are trying to stain 1-2 day old zebra fish with Dye-I by simply poking the dye into the retina with any sort of small sharp object we can find. We'll then separate the groups of stained fish into those that develop…
pharyngula | November 14, 2007ScienceWoman has exactly the right idea on combining academia with the profession of being a human being. I was amused at the part of her manifesto that says she'll draw the line at a moderate work-week of 50-60 hours — it's a good goal, but it's strange how it's simply taken for granted that academics will put in those 10+ hour workdays.
bright_lights | November 10, 2007We've been talking quite a bit about how information is processed in our brains so that a specific reflexes and cognitive actions can be produced. It's also the end of the cross country season and my mind has been mixing the two. Take Steve Prefontaine (one of the greatest American long distance runners of all time) for example. I was watching a video clip of Prefontaine running and paused it right as he was putting his foot down and picking his other leg up. He doesn't extend his leg out very far. Instead, he lifts his knee up so that he can drive his pronated foot into the ground just under…
lua yar | October 30, 2007I found an article about new brain cells that I thought was really interesting. Researchers at the Yale School of Medicine discovered the mechanism behind how new neural cells are integrated into the adult brain. It turns out that new neural cells take a while to mature and fully integrate themselves into existing neural networks in the brain. While they are maturing, they rely on signals from other brain regions so that they do not disturb ongoing functions of the brain. They can receive input from these other regions for up to 10 days before they are ready to make any of their own outputs.…
pharyngula | October 30, 2007This is a troubling story if you just read the right-wing perspective: a student at Hamline University (an excellent liberal arts college in the Twin Cities) was suspended for writing a letter to the university administration. That shouldn't happen, I'd say — we want to encourage free speech. Even if the student seems to be a bit of a far-right nut, and if the letter was supporting that lunatic idea that school massacres wouldn't happen if everyone were carrying a concealed weapon, people should have the privilege of expressing their opinions.
So I read John Leo's opinion piece on the issue…
pharyngula | October 29, 2007
This is the last time I'll pester you, I promise. The DonorsChoose challenge ends after the end of this month, and we've done well. We met my goal of raising $20,000 dollars, 200 freethinkers have stepped up to make donations, and 30 of my 31 chosen projects have been fully funded. That does mean that there is one project that isn't quite there yet: Embryology in the Classroom is $292 shy of completion. If a few more could chip in a few more dollars, we can achieve perfection.
Good work, everyone!
bright_lights | October 26, 2007Hello again, it's been a while so I thought I'd drop in a comment or two about what I've found recently in the news about neurobio. I've lately been reading about neurotransmitters and how they bind to sites in specific neurons, instigating depolarization across the membrane of the neuron and allowing for an action potential to communicate to hundreds of thousands of other neurons. This communication between neurons in the central nervous system is relayed into actions in the peripheral nervous system resulting in behavior. But how is this synchronized? What neuron does what? What must be…
pharyngula | October 25, 2007If you're still interested in weighing in on whether the academic meetings in San Diego should go on in the wake of fires in Southern California, Terra Sigillata has a thread on that very subject.
I promise the small meeting I'm planning to attend won't clog up the freeways.
pharyngula | October 25, 2007
See that little thermometer to the right? It says we've met our challenge of raising $20,000 for school kids. However, I actually picked a number of projects that required more money than that, and we still have 3 projects that are not fully funded — and they're the embryology/developmental biology grants! We've got less than a week left, so it would be very nice if people would kick in the last few donations to complete these last few requests.
A Chicken Is Hatching!!
Which Came First....The Chicken Or The Egg?
Embryology in the Classroom
We're very, very close and time is running…