Life Science
drorzel | August 6, 2009(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of David Syzdek, a wildlife biologist.)
1) What is your non-academic job?
I work as a wildlife biologist for a large water utility in a Western state.
2) What is your science background?
BS in Environmental…
drorzel | May 11, 2009Everybody I know who has back problems swears up and down that sleeping on a really firm mattress is key. My father used to have a big plywood board under his side of the mattress, so that his side of the bed would be less soft (I think they have since bought a new mattress that is uniformly hard).
So, why is it that every time I sleep on a mattress that's firmer than the one we have here, my lower back locks up so badly that it's an hour before I can walk comfortably? And when I get back to our relatively soft bed, my back feels fine in the morning?
I suppose this could be some sort of grand…
drorzel | May 6, 2009I'm waiting for the toaster when the dog trots into the kitchen. "You should give me some bacon!" she says.
"Why is that?" I ask.
"To prevent swine flu!"
"Look, there's no chance that I'm going to get swine flu from eating pork products. I know you saw some people on the Internet saying that they're not eating pork because of the flu, but those people are idiots."
"Not you, silly," she says. "You should give me bacon so that I don't get swine flu."
"What are you talking about?" It's much too early in the morning for this sort of thing.
"It's like with the shots, at the Bad Place." She really…
drorzel | April 28, 2009Yesterday, EurekAlert served up a press release titled New blow for dinosaur-killing asteroid theory, reporting on Gerta Keller of Princeton, who says that the Chicxulub crater isn't really from the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs. Keller thinks the crater had nothing to do with the extinction event, and claims to have found evidence that the impact was as much as 300,000 years before the dinosaurs died out.
One or two of the quotes in the piece sounded kind of snotty for a scientific report, but I marked this down as something to look at later. Later in the day, Ethan "Nitro"…
drorzel | April 27, 2009I'd like to interrupt the ongoing discussion of how we're in the early chapters of The Stand for a quick question about what really matters: the cute behaviors of my dog.
There's probably a technical term for that thing dogs do where their back legs twitch when you scratch them in just the right spot. I'm not sure what it would be, though-- Kate and I tend to use "reflex arc" as a shorthand, but when I was a kid it was described to me as the equivalent of tickling a dog, so I tend to think of it that way.
Anyway, we give Emmy Advantix as a flea and tick preventative, which works really well.…
drorzel | March 14, 2009One of my colleagues in biology just finished his Comparative Vertebrate anatomy course. For the final class projects, he has teams of students make little videos presenting the results of their research into some aspect of vertebrate anatomy. Such as, for example, this Sesame Street episode on flying snakes:
The full set of videos are available on Scott's YouTube page, labelled "2009 - CVA." The fake "Colbert Report" segment on polar bears even has a blooper reel.
If you're looking for a way to kill a few minutes in a biology-themed activity, you could do a lot worse than watching these.
drorzel | March 12, 2009There's a really good article from Martin Rees in the latest issue of Seed, on the scientific challenges that won't be affected by the LHC:
The LHC hasn't yet provided its first results, the much-anticipated answers to questions we've been asking for so long. But they should surely come in 2009, bringing us closer to understanding the bedrock nature of particles, space, and timeâ--âtoward a unified theory of the basic forces. This would push forward a program that started with Newton (who showed that the force that made the apple fall was same one holding the planets in orbit), and continued…
drorzel | February 18, 2009I've already mentioned two of the program items I was on at Boskone (global warming and quantum physics for dogs). I should at least comment on the other two, "Physics: What We Don't Understand" and "Is Science Addicted to Randomness?" They both featured me and Geoff Landis, but other than that were very different.
"Physics: What We Don't Understand" took off from a column by John Cramer from ten years ago, laying out seven big problems in (astro)physics that hadn't been solved. We talked about how some of Cramer's items have been more or less solved (gamma-ray bursts, solar neutrinos, and…
drorzel | February 12, 2009It's Darwin's 200th birthday today, and SteelyKid is wearing her ladybug outfit to celebrate:
If you can't make it out, the outfit is pink, and covered with little pink and orange ladybugs. The feet are larger ladybugs, complete with antennae.
Why is this an appropriate Dawrin's Birthday outfit, you ask?
Because God is inordinately fond of beetles.
drorzel | February 2, 2009There's a mini media blitz underway promoting Denis Dutton's new book The Art Instinct. He was on the Colbert Report last week, he's reviewed in the Times, and he's featured in this week's Bloggingheads Science Saturday:
While it's kind of entertaining to listen to John Horgan struggling to get a word in edgewise, I'm kind of skeptical about the book. Dutton's argument is that human aesthetics are, contrary to the claims of the academic art establishment, more universal than socially constructed, and can best be understood through evolution. Or, to be more precise, through evolutionary…
drorzel | January 18, 2009Looking for a way to kill some time on a Sunday morning? You could do worse than yesterday's bloggingheads.tv Science Saturday conversation between Chris Mooney and Carl Zimmer:
It's a wide-ranging conversation, covering what to expect from the Obama administration, artifical life, the possibility of life on Mars, Sanjay Gupta, and the future of science in the media. It's like a Sunday-morning talk show, only with smart people.
drorzel | January 14, 2009A few years ago, the after-dinner speaker at the DAMOP conference banquet was Presidential Science Advisor John Marburger. As I wrote at the time, I think it's safe to say that he didn't make a positive impression on the audience. It also sparked a rather lively discussion afterwards, that some people speculated was the reason for the veiled threats we got the next year.
The Corporate Masters have just published an exclusive post-election interview with Marburger. I read it with some interest, mostly to see if it would change my impression of him.
I have to say, it didn't. Not only does he…
amillikan | November 17, 2008Technology
Technology channel photo. Nam June Paik's "Electronic Superhighway" at the National Portrait Gallery - Smithsonian - Washington DC. From Flickr, by frozenchipmunk
This week's reader reaction quote on the Technology channel comes from a discussion on Gene Expression about the rise of communication technologies over the past few years and how our behavior (and our expectations) has changed along with it.
ScienceBlogger Razib wrote about an experience he had 3-4 years ago:
I recall a woman loudly talking about her boyfriend leaving her, and the consequent emotional devastation,…
drorzel | October 21, 2008Lots of people talk about "Science 2.0" and "crowdsourcing" and the like. EurekAlert provides a story about taking it to the next level:
Nalini Nadkarni of Evergreen State College currently advises a team of researchers who sport shaved heads, tattooed biceps and prison-issued garb rather than the lab coats and khakis typically worn by researchers. Why is Nadkarni's team composed of such apparently iconoclastic researchers? Because all of her researchers are inmates at Cedar Creek Corrections Center, a medium security prison in Littlerock, Washington.
With partial funding from the National…
drorzel | September 15, 2008Via Brian and John, John Cleese's take on genetic determinism:
All the best social commentary comes from comedians, these days.
drorzel | May 24, 2008A colleague in Biology had his Comparative Vertebrate Anatomy class make videos explaining something they studied in class. He's posted the results to YouTube and Facebook, so the students can see them, but thanks to the magic of the Internet, you, too, can learn about the bite force of bats from a college student in a ski mask and rubber wings:
Other videos cover muscle retention in burrowing tree frogs, brachycardia in penguins, hypoxemia in penguins, and prey localization in sharks.
It's pretty amazing what the kids these days get up to, with their cameras and their editing software and…
drorzel | May 20, 2008Welcome to today's exciting episode of "How Big a Dork Am I?" Today, we'll be discussing the making of unnecessary models:
In this graph, the blue points represent the average mass in grams of a fetus at a given week of gestation, while the red line is the mass predicted by a simple model treating the fetus as a sphere of uniform density with a linearly increasing radius.
The "model" was set up by taking the 40-week length reported at BabyCenter, and dividing by two to get an approximate radius for the spherical baby. Then I assumed that the actual radius increased linearly from zero to the…
drorzel | May 5, 2008The sports talk shows today were all abuzz with chatter about the death of second-place finisher Eight Belles at the Kentucky Derby, with no end of hand-wringing and moralizing about the nature of horse racing. I have to admit, I find the whole thing a little puzzling.
I'm not puzzled that people are upset-- I get that bit. What has always baffled me about this is the sheer fragility of horses-- I've never understood why the "Horse" chapter of the vet textbook is all "Shoot," as the famous Far Side cartoon has it.
So, bio types, help me out, here. Why is it that a broken ankle is fatal for a…
drorzel | April 11, 2008With the "Vox Day" business winding down (one way or another), it's time to unwind with something less contentious and controversial: Framing! No-- seriously. Most of the really loud opponents have publically washed their hands of the whole topic, so I expect this will be relatively non-controversial. What could possibly go wrong?
Anyway, Janet is thinking about "framing" and the example of stem cells given in the Nisbet and Scheufele article in The Scientist (PDF here). She identifies three "core values" that framers on one side or the other might be trying to reach:
cures for diseases are…
drorzel | March 9, 2008Kate was attending a workshop run by the National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG, a wonderful acronym) in Washington, DC this Wednesday and Thursday, and when she told me that, I said "Hey, I'm not teaching this term, why don't I tag along?" So, we extended the trip a little bit, and made it a family vacation (because, after all, it's going to be a while before we take any more long trips...).
While Kate did generally attorney-like things all day Wednesday and Thursday morning, I visited labs at NIST and UMD, about which more later. After her workshop was done, we decided to take…