biology
esiegel | July 31, 2014“The atoms come into my brain, dance a dance, and then go out — there are always new atoms, but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday.” -Richard Feynman
It took 13.8 billion years of cosmic evolution, billions of years of biological evolution and astronomical numbers of events unfolding exactly as they have to give rise to you and me. And yet, here we are, collections of tens of trillions of cells and some 10^28 atoms.
Image credit: Ed Uthman.
Yet even though we don't often think of it, each one of those atoms has its own, unique cosmic story. It's too great…
esiegel | July 1, 2014“Since stars appear to be suns, and suns, according to the common opinion, are bodies that serve to enlighten, warm, and sustain a system of planets, we may have an idea of the numberless globes that serve for the habitation of living creatures.” -William Herschel
When you look up at the stars in the night sky -- bright and dim, young and old, near and far -- can you help but wonder which ones of them might house life of any variety? And if so, how similar or different it might be from that on Earth? It's one of the greatest as-of-yet unanswered questions in all of science.
Illustration…
oracknows | June 15, 2014Deepak Chopra isn't very happy right now. In fact, he appears downright pissed off right now, particularly at skeptics, so much so that he's issued a hilariously fatuous "challenge" to James Randi (a.k.a.) The Amazing Randi on You Tube entitled Deepak Chopra's One Million Dollar Challenge to Skeptics:
Yes, apparently with The Amazing Meeting (a.k.a. TAM) less than four weeks away, Chopra is looking to stir the pot a little bit with his usual blend of Choprawoo about consciousness and mind-body dualism and how nasty skeptics can't accept the paranormal and the healing powre of "intent." It's…
sastyk | June 13, 2014
(Some of my kids watching sheep mothering their babies)
Over the last decade a whole lot of babies have been born on my farm or brought home to it. We have had calves, chicks, kids (goat), kids (human), ducklings, goslings, kits and lambs. One of the most fascinating revelations of this is just how variable the instinct for parenting is among animals. Among closely related goats, for example, we have had among our best mothers, and our single worst one, a doe so dim that she would stand there screaming for her baby but refuse to move any closer to the baby who was screaming just as…
oracknows | May 26, 2014Regular readers might be wondering why my output was—shall we say?—less extensive last week than it usually is. I even skipped a weekday and then followed it up with a recycled post from my not-so-super-secret other blog, altered to be a bit more, yes, Insolent. The answer is a single word: Grants. I had a grant deadline. That's basically past now. However, today is a holiday, and, besides taking some time to pay tribute to those who have made the ultimate sacrifice for our country, I also plan on taking a day off from full-scale blogging as well. Fortunately, there are a couple of links to…
esiegel | May 18, 2014“My therapist told me the way to achieve true inner peace is to finish what I start. So far today, I have finished 2 bags of M&M’s and a chocolate cake. I feel better already.” -Dave Barry
They say that the milk chocolate melts in your mouth, not in your hand, but the colored candy shell will seriously melt pretty much on anything even close to body temperature. As Great Lake Swimmers would sing, it's pretty difficult to avoid the
Changing Colours.
Image credit: Jenefur (presumably of her 3-year-old daughter) of http://jenefur.wordpress.com/2008/11/15/mms/.
But what if you're a bee?…
carlyo | April 25, 2014
Guest Blog By Lek KadeliActing Assistant Administrator in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Office of Research and Development (ORD)
Each spring around the same time that so much of the country is swept up in the “madness” of amateur basketball tournaments, a dedicated team of employees at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency are finishing up preparations to host student teams for another hard-fought college challenge: EPA’s P3 student design competition for sustainability.
While participants may not grab national headlines, the long-term benefits of their efforts have the…
carlyo | April 25, 2014
Guest Blog By David BolinskyFounder and Creative Director of e*mersion Studio
In 1962, when I was ten, my family and I had the rare privilege of exploring the ancient caves of Lascaux in southern France to see 17,000 year-old Paleolithic paintings close up. Though sadly no longer open for public viewing, these iconic works changed me forever. In his film ‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams’, Werner Herzog documented limestone galleries of astonishing thirty-thousand-year-old artwork in the French Chauvet Pont d’Arc.
Having practiced the visualization of science for nearly forty years, I resonate with…
esiegel | March 6, 2014“All the problems of the world could be settled easily if men were only willing to think. The trouble is that men very often resort to all sorts of devices in order not to think, because thinking is such hard work.” -Thomas J. Watson
You’ll frequently hear people say, “the science is settled.” Scientifically speaking, can it ever be? (And yes, what follows below is meant to be an inflammatory image.)
Image credit: Ramirez of the Weekly Standard, via http://www.IBDeditorials.com/cartoons.
Let's take a look at five major instances -- gravitation, evolution, the Big Bang, germ theory and…
esiegel | February 28, 2014“You can’t get there by bus, only by hard work and risk and by not quite knowing what you’re doing. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover will be yourself.” -Alan Alda
Alan Alda recently challenged scientists to explain this simple question to 11-year-olds in less than 300 words. Could you do it?
It seems like a straightforward enough proposition; after all, we surely know it when we see it.
Image credit: Jessica at Ways of Wanderers, via http://waysofwanderers.com/colourful-flower-fields-biei/.
But there are some very tight constraints on this contest: you must be…
esiegel | February 20, 2014“If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens… Where Is Everybody?” -Stephen Webb
If stars, planets, and biological processes are so common in the Universe, then where is everyone?
Image credit: NASA / Space Shuttle Atlantis mission 110.
Here on Earth, we take for granted how easy it was for life to form. Our world has been around for some four-and-a-half billion years, and the oldest records of life go back to nearly the oldest rocks: 3.8 billion years ago.
But if we ran the "experiment" of having a Solar System similar to our own form in the Universe over and over again, how many times would…
oracknows | February 4, 2014I had originally planned on writing about a different topic today, but, as is so often the case in blogging, something came up that caught my attention, much as the errant thought of a squirrel distracts Dug the Dog. Well, actually, I had to go to an evening meeting for work last night and by the time I came home even the Plexiglass box of blinking lights didn't have enough of a charge left to deliver up fresh Insolence. Fortunately, there's some almost fresh Insolence from the other day that can be repurposed, something that seems imperative since one of the targets of today's Insolence is…
esiegel | January 24, 2014"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on." -Robert Frost
Well, here we are, at the end of the week, and you know what that means: another Ask Ethan column! This week, I've been asked about the same thing by many different people, so I'll credit it to Patrick E. and Matt T., who want to know:
I'm curious to hear your take on this: the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics applied to the origin of life.
For those of you who haven't heard, this is what they're talking about.
Image credit: Richard A. Cunha, Thereza A. Soares, Victor H. Rusu, Frederico J.S. Pontes, Eduardo…
esiegel | December 27, 2013"Never waste your time trying to explain who you are to people who are committed to misunderstanding you." -Dream Hampton
Perhaps no word in the English language generates as much misunderstanding as the word theory. In scientific circles, this word has a very specific meaning that's different from everyday use, and -- as a theoretical astrophysicist myself -- I feel it's my duty to help explain exactly what we mean when we use it. In this week’s Ask Ethan column, I'm pleased to pull out of our question/suggestion box the question of Ripley, who asks:
I often see that because there is no "100…
oracknows | December 19, 2013I remember during medical school that more than one of my faculty used to have a regularly repeated crack that the only thing that taking vitamin supplements could do for you was to produce expensive pee. My first year in medical school was nearly thirty years ago now; so it's been a long time. During the nearly three decades since I first entered medical school, I have yet to see any evidence to persuade me otherwise. If you eat a well-rounded diet, you don't need vitamin supplementation. Of course, none of that stops the supplement manufacturers from trying to convince us that taking…
oracknows | December 6, 2013Well, wouldn't you know it? Mike Adams thinks he's an actual scientist!
Regular readers are all too familiar with Mike Adams, a.k.a. The Health Ranger, arguably the most quacktastic site on the Internet. Sure, Joe Mercola is probably the most trafficked quackery site on the Internet, but, being number two (or number three or four, I'm not sure), Mike Adams definitely tries harder. In addition, Joe Mercola steers mostly clear of politics and non-medical pseudoscience. Sure, he promotes just as much quackery as Mike Adams does, if not more, but he doesn't delve into Tea Party-drenched New World…
esiegel | November 13, 2013"Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living." -Omar N. Bradley
Nuclear physics is one of the most daunting, emotionally charged phrases in all of science. You can hardly say the words without the image of a mushroom cloud popping into most people's heads, followed by the devastations of radiation sickness and lingering radioactivity.
Image credit: National Archives image (208-N-43888), Charles Levy, of the Nagasaki bomb.
But -- as a physicist -- that's not what I think of at all.
Think…
dr. dolittle | November 7, 2013
I am already starting to get excited about the 2014 Experimental Biology conference in San Diego next April. The program for comparative physiology is expected to be very good!
If you are a graduate student or postdoc submitting an abstract on comparative physiology for the meeting, don't forget to apply for the new Dr. Dolittle travel award. For more information, visit the Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology Section's webpage. All materials for the travel award including your abstract and blog are due by December 6th!
oracknows | October 7, 2013When it comes to Twitter, I run hot and cold. I'll frequently go weeks when I barely touch my Twitter account, and nothing gets posted there except automatic Tweets linking to my new posts. Then something will happen, and suddenly I'll post 20 Tweets in a day. Rinse, lather, repeat. I guess I'm just too verbose for Twitter or I just don't grok it the way I do blogging. Either that, or I do enough social media that adding Twitter is just one bit of social media too far. That's why I tell people that Twitter is not a good way to get my attention if that is your goal. It might be days, if not…
esiegel | October 5, 2013“Is there anything more beautiful than a beautiful, beautiful flamingo, flying across in front of a beautiful sunset? And he's carrying a beautiful rose in his beak, and also he's carrying a very beautiful painting with his feet. And also, you're drunk.” -Jack Handy
The diversity of the world's animals is one of the most fantastic natural marvels that life on Earth has delivered. From the sea to land to the air, there's no shortage of wonders to explore. Today, though, I want to talk to you about one of the most bizarre sights of nature, as the 1989 supergroup Strength in Numbers once played…