History
terrasig | March 6, 2010When I first started my independent academic laboratory in 1992, it was in a brand new facility across the parking lot from a then 40-year-old building named in honor of the woman to the right. I took on a big teaching load from day one and while I had some cash left from the $50,000 start-up package, I didn't hire a technician immediately. So it fell upon me to do all the ordering of the basic supplies to get the operation rolling. No problem, right? I ordered much of my own stuff as a postdoc so it should be no problem to get everything I need to start the lab from scratch.
One of the…
sciencepunk | March 5, 2010After a brief insurrection by their blue collar offspring, zombies, vampires have once more regained their prominence as the monster supreme, leaping out at us from every bookshelf, cinema screen and TV set. What better time then for Mark Jenkins to unleash his accomplished study of the bloodsucker legend, Vampire Forensics.
Published through National Geographic Books and accompanied by a television documentary, Vampire Forensics delves into the long history of the vampire, one which began millennia before a certain Bram Stoker set pen to parchment. Drawing upon the latest research in…
emjohnson | March 5, 2010Nuuchaanulth Ceremonial Curtainfrom the Family of Naasḳuu-isaḳs of the Hupacasath Nation
Human beings around the world honor their dead and the memories of their relatives. We have enacted special rituals related to the handling of human remains from the sacred funeral pyres of India to the professionalized aseptic embalming practices of the United States. Even more so, the treatment of the dead by outsiders is something that can generate outrage. Consider the media controversy when Al-Jazeera aired footage of coalition soldiers who had been killed by Iraqi militants or the hanging of…
razib | March 2, 2010'Hero of Ukraine' Splits Nation, Inside and Out:
Half a century after his death at the hands of the K.G.B., Stepan Bandera, a World War II partisan, has not lost his ability to rally Ukrainians against Russia -- and against each other.
Monuments to Mr. Bandera have sprung up across western Ukraine, his fight for the country's independence glowingly recounted to schoolchildren on field trips, as if he were the George Washington of Ukrainian nationalism. But in eastern Ukraine and as far away as Moscow and Brussels, Mr. Bandera is reviled as a Nazi puppet.
This disputed legacy has ensured him a…
emjohnson | March 1, 2010It's wonderful to see that my Open Letter to the Animal Liberation Front has generated discussion on this important topic. The issue as I see it is really quite simple and boils down to two essential issues: the benefits to science versus the ethics of invasive animal experimentation. The British Medical Journal study and BUAV report (pdf) that I cited hold the position that the harm done to animals, particularly primates, is out of proportion to the benefits that come from such research. Furthermore, our current understanding about primate cognition, emotional complexity, and their rich…
emjohnson | February 25, 2010 Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulip, Rembrandt (1632)I have been extremely ill this week which has prevented me from posting as often as I would have liked. However, I have been keeping up on the suggestions offered to explain the nearly 300-year-old medical mystery involving "hairy crustaceous substances" voided in a woman's urine. Of all the potential explanations for this phenomenon I think Quinn O. nailed it with his diagnosis of pilimiction as the result of a dermoid tumor. In doing a little research on this condition I discovered that this is caused when an abnormal growth develops…
pharyngula | February 21, 2010Renew America, the bizarrely, deeply, weirdly conservative web site founded by Alan Keyes, really had to struggle to find someone crazier than Pastor Grant Swank and Fred Hutchison and Bryan Fischer and Wes Vernon (let alone Alan Keyes himself), but they have succeeded. They have Linda Kimball writing for them. She has written the strangest history of evolutionary biology ever — I think she was stoned out of her mind and hallucinating when she made this one up. It's called "Evolutionism: the dying West's science of magic and madness". The title alone is enough to hint at the weirdness within…
terrasig | February 21, 2010Younger readers and readers outside the southern United States may not completely grasp my preoccupation with the Jim Crow segregation era "sit-ins" over the last several months. These non-violent acts of civil disobedience in the 1950s and 60s challenged the "separate, but equal" provisions for public facilities that were upheld in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson US Supreme Court decision and continued more than a decade after the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Buses, trains, waiting terminals, restrooms, water fountains, and areas of private businesses were kept separate for whites and blacks (…
emjohnson | February 18, 2010(updated below)
Image: Henri Gervex (1852-1929) Doctor Preau Operating at the St. Louis Hospital.Honoured SIR and MADAM,
In researching the history of science one often comes across bizarre claims about the natural world that reveals the limit of knowledge available to researchers of the past. However, sometimes a case comes up that seems to be a genuine mystery even today. Such is the case for this eighteenth-century woman who was afflicted for two years with what her doctor referred to as "hairy crustaceous substances" that were voided in her urine.
On July 16, 1733 a Mr.…
oracknows | February 17, 2010I happened to be listening to the Holocaust Denial On Trial podcast yesterday, specifically this episode which is a recording of a speech given by Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt about Holocaust denial and her experiences being sued for libel in Britain by arch Holocaust denier David Irving, who, much like the British Chiropractic Association taking advantage of the U.K.'s highly plaintiff-friendly libel laws to sue Simon Singh for libel now, took advantage of those same libel laws back in the late 1990s to sue Deborah Lipstadt. In the speech, she takes a position that I have argued on…
aardvarchaeology | February 15, 2010The somewhat elusive central thesis of M.C. Jenkins's new book Vampire Forensics is that original European vampire folklore was based upon misinterpretation of the slow decay that occurs when you bury a body deep. Particularly so during epidemics, when upon discovery an unusually well-preserved corpse might be made into a scapegoat to explain why people were dying. Disregarding the whole Bela Lugosi cape-and-accent thing, a vampire was originally a restless corpse that drained the health of the living -- not necessarily by actually sucking their blood.
The book is mistitled: its long opening…
razib | February 14, 2010A few weeks ago I remarked on the relatively high current defense spending for the United States. In hindsight I think this was somewhat unfair, the proportion of the budget that the United States spends on defense is rather small in a world-historical context. I was reminded of this by a datum in The Age of Confucian Rule: The Song Transformation of China (highly recommended by the way), even this exceedingly civilian dynasty allocated ~80% of its budgetary outlays toward military expenses. Historical surveys of the Roman Empire also infer that most of the expenditure was directed toward…
emjohnson | February 13, 2010 Haitian girl wearing the Disney princess shirt made in her country. Image: BBC NewsInter Press Service has just begun a new series focusing on the development loans to Haiti and the strings attached that have effectively removed the Haitian government from managing their own affairs. I spoke with IPS reporter William Fisher last week and this morning appeared on WZBC in Boston to discuss this story. This is the little known history of Haiti and forms the backdrop to why the earthquake that hit this island nation has been so devastating.
According to Fisher's article:
It is an unusual…
pharyngula | February 12, 2010
It's Charles Darwin's birthday today, I hope you all have plans to celebrate. I think I'm going to just stay home and try to get over my bad case of toomuchtravelitis, and also…CRASH A POLL! Go get 'em, everyone.
Do you accept Charles Darwin's theory of evolution?
Yes
(65%)
No
(35%)
cagapakis | February 10, 2010"The history of any given technology is extraordinarily complex."
--Rob Carlson, Biology is Technology.
Analyzing the history of a technology requires a complex look at the social, economic, and political context in which it emerged, and the reciprocal influences that the developing technology exerts on these factors. Predicting what the future of a technology will be like, how it will affect the economy and understanding the potential risks and payoffs is much much harder. Rob Carlson's new book, Biology is Technology: The Promise, Peril, and New Business of…
grrlscientist | February 5, 2010tags: A Brief History of the United States of America, humor, funny,comedy, African-Americans, Black Americans, guns, KKK, Ku Klux Klan, NRA, National Rifle Association, racism, streaming video
This video explains the intimate relationship between guns, freedom and racism. Yes, I know there are exceptions to this guns-freedom-racism link, but I grew up among morons like this, and I couldn't escape from their festering hatred fast enough.
milhayser | February 4, 2010
On February 2, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by ScienceBlogger Rebecca Skloot was officially published. If you haven't heard, everyone who has read this book has wonderful things to say. Dr. Isis on On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess declares it "the single best piece of non-fiction I have ever read. It is one of the most important stories of the last 100 years and should be required reading for every scientist and physician-in-training." Henrietta Lacks was a poor Southern tobacco farmer whose cervical cancer cells gave rise to the first immortal human cell line. Long…
emjohnson | February 3, 2010As people who have been following the issue are well aware, there is a crisis of scientific literacy in the United States. Unscientific America may have had a poor explanation for why the problem exists, but it effectively announced the severity of the problem to a wide audience. To combat this problem it will take a a great diversity of tactics including education, popular culture, involved parenting, economics and political will. Everyone who cares about this issue should use the skills they have to both draw attention to the crisis of scientific literacy and seek positive solutions.
One…
milhayser | February 1, 2010
On Starts With A Bang, Ethan Siegel presents us with an interstellar mystery. As the single brightest star in the sky, Sirius has been well-known since ancient times. But while Sirius is unmistakably blue, several historical records describe Sirius as red. Two thousand years is not enough time for a normal star to change color, so what could have happened? Simple human error? Changing atmospheric conditions? A roving Bok Globule? Or does Sirius's companion dwarf star suggest an even more incredible explanation? In a separate post, Ethan says he won't miss NASA's Constellation program…
milhayser | January 29, 2010
We inspire each other with our everyday actions and attitudes--monkey see, monkey do. On The Frontal Cortex, Jonah Lehrer describes an experiment in which individuals who observed their peers choosing carrots over cookies were more likely to make the same thoughtful choice themselves. Jonah explains that self-control "contains a large social component" and plays a very important role in our development. But what can you do when everyone beats their heads against the same wall? On Aardvarchaeology, Martin Rundkvist recounts the "tragicomical" history of bog reclamation, which has…