Aliens! I Seen 'Em!
mikethemadbiologist | February 24, 2011I'm a bit late to this story (although STOOPID does age well...), but Kansas Republican state representative Connie O'Brien had a minor bigot eruption--she apparently has a fool-proof way to identify illegal immigrants:
She explained that she took her son to a financial aid office, and as she was waiting in line, she believed there was a girl waiting in line with them who was "not originally from this country." Fellow committee member Rep. Sean Gatewood (D-KS) asked O'Brien how she knew this student was "illegal." O'Brien replied that she knew because the student "wasn't black, she wasn't…
mikethemadbiologist | December 6, 2010I don't see the need to redescribe the recent paper about the discovery of bacteria that can might replace, in extremis, phosphorus with arsenic, which was overhyped by NASA, was poorly covered by most journalists, and which has compromising methodological problems (for good coverage, read here, here, and here; and snark). But what the paper does demonstrate is the importance of culturing microorganisms, knowledge about which is becoming rapidly lost by younger scientists.
With the advent of DNA-based, culture-independent techniques, where we can look at the DNA and RNA of microbes without…
mikethemadbiologist | December 9, 2008It would seem to me that if Obama is serious about reaching out to Republicans, keeping Sheila Bair on as head of FDIC is a no-brainer. Yet Treasury nominee Geithner does not support her. I can't figure out what Bair did wrong (and I'm not being snarky). Consider:
Geithner became increasingly wary of Bair as she worked with the other regulatory agencies on emergency bailouts of banks in recent months. The New York fed chief has been concerned that Bair was more worried about keeping the FDIC's insurance program protected than she was about the entire financial system, one person said.
Bair…
mikethemadbiologist | November 22, 2008
There's a neat Discovery News article about Gromia sphaerica, a very large testate amoeba:
A distant relative of microscopic amoebas, the grape-sized Gromia sphaerica was discovered once before, lying motionless at the bottom of the Arabian Sea. But when Mikhail Matz of the University of Texas at Austin and a group of researchers stumbled across a group of G. sphaerica off the coast of the Bahamas, the creatures were leaving trails behind them up to 50 centimeters (20 inches) long in the mud....
At up to three centimeters (1.2 inches) in diameter, they're also enormous compared to most of…
mikethemadbiologist | August 5, 2008Glenn Greenwald asks a lot of good questions about the recent turns in the anthrax case. I'll get to Greenwald's specific questions at the end of the post, but all of Greenwald's questions could have innocuous answers.
At this point, however, one would be a fool to, at least, not consider that something nefarious is going on--the only time I've been wrong about the Bush administration is when I've thought, "No, they couldn't do that." Over at Pissed on Politics, here's one vein of off-the-wall speculation (italics mine):
Ok, here is what I think happened: Some persons in the bowels of our…
mikethemadbiologist | March 22, 2008Flasing back to my marine biology days, International Polar Year researchers have discovered all sorts of neato critters (sadly, I can't find any pictures):
Scientists who conducted the most comprehensive survey to date of New Zealand's Antarctic waters were surprised by the size of some specimens found, including jellyfish with 12-foot tentacles and 2-foot-wide starfish.
A 2,000-mile journey through the Ross Sea that ended Thursday has also potentially turned up several new species, including as many as eight new mollusks.
...Hanchet singled out the discovery of "fields" of sea lilies that…
mikethemadbiologist | September 3, 2007Tom Pennington/Fort Worth Star-Telegram, via Associated Press
First, rock snot. Now, giant spider webs that cover acres. One more screwy thing, and I'm stocking up on canned goods. From the New York Times:
Most spiders are solitary creatures. So the discovery of a vast web crawling with millions of spiders that is spreading across several acres of a North Texas park is causing a stir among scientists, and park visitors.
Sheets of web have encased several mature oak trees and are thick enough in places to block out the sun along a nature trail at Lake Tawakoni State Park, near this town…
mikethemadbiologist | August 23, 2007It probably doesn't look like Marvin. (from here)
The data haven't been released yet, but that's what CNN is reporting:
The soil on Mars may contain microbial life, according to a new interpretation of data first collected more than 30 years ago.
The search for life on Mars appeared to hit a dead end in 1976 when Viking landers touched down on the red planet and failed to detect biological activity.
But Joop Houtkooper of the University of Giessen, Germany, said on Friday the spacecraft may in fact have found signs of a weird life form based on hydrogen peroxide on the subfreezing, arid…