Science Culture

Yesterday, I posted a memorial for Ron Mardigian, an enthusiastic champion of science education at Bio-Rad. Today, I scanned RPM's blog and what do I see? A choir! Bio-Rad has produced a really funny music video. It reminds me of the music video from "We are the World," except some members of the choir are holding PCR machines and singing about the wonders of PCR! Scientists for Better PCR is a really cute video, with a catchy tune, and it's fun to watch. If you're teaching about PCR, I highly recommend showing it to your class.
From the original lolcats: moar funny pictures
Usually, I wait until the end of December to take care of holiday-related shopping and shipping. This year, I've resolved to do better. This year, I'm hoping to ship holiday gifts before Christmas. Fortunately, my SciBlings have come up with lots of great holiday recommendations to help you share science gifts with those you like and love. I've compiled some of those suggestions here and I'll keep adding new ones as the month proceeds and people post them.http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2007/11/get_your_larry_craig_doll.php Before we indulge the material world though, I'm going to…
One of the greatest shocks when I started working in industry was the realization that the peer-reviewed paper, the most valuable form of currency in the academic world, was valued so little. In academics, there is a well-established reward system for getting your work published in peer-reviewed journals. Whether or you not get hired, get money to do research, get to keep your job (i.e. get tenure), all depend on depend on your ability to get papers written and accepted by your peers. (Community colleges are an exception to this, there it's your teaching abilities that matter, not your…
I've been reading quite a bit lately about Universities setting up virtual classrooms in Second Life, so when Bertalan Meskó from ScienceRoll invited me to come give a poster, I decided it was time to take the plunge. Besides, I'm going to be teaching an on-line bioinformatics course this spring for Austin Community College, so this seemed like a good time to find out what the fuss is all about. Tomorrow, Bora Zivkovic (A Blog Around the Clock) and I will be the first ScienceBloggers (that I know of) to give poster presentations in Second Life. Our talk will be at 4 pm GMT, 12 noon EDT, and…
What's the connection?(image from Newton TAB blog) I have to admit, I don't know. But, I do know where you can find out. Dr. Gerard Cangelosi, from the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute, will be speaking about tuberculosis, godzilla, and XDR-TB, Monday night, 7 pm at the Pub at Ravenna Third Place as part of Science on Tap. tags: tuberculosis, informal science education, Science on Tap, Science in Seattle
The New York Times' Sandra Blakeslee reports today that a group of researchers has managed to induce the famous "out-of-body" feeling that sometimes accompanies near-death experiences. So goes another piece of evidence for the "soul." They employed virtual reality gear to play havoc the senses: Usually these sensory streams, which include vision, touch, balance and the sense of where one's body is positioned in space, work together seamlessly, Dr. Botvinick said. But when the information coming from the sensory sources does not match up, the sense of being embodied as a whole comes apart. The…
Drug Monkey has an interesting take on an article that I wrote the other day about publishing in biology. I find it amusing that in some fields it's the most important to be first author and in others, it's the most important to be the last author, and sometimes we publish papers together in the same journals, and the people who read the article - gasp - probably never know! Drug Monkey says we should let the reviewers decide on the authorship order. I disagree, though. To paraphrase one of DM's commenters, the reviewers can't know who did what. And, sometimes researchers don't…
Last week I found a bug in the new NCBI BLAST interface. Of course, I reported it to the NCBI help desk so it will probably get fixed sometime soon. But it occurred to me, especially after seeing people joke about whether computer science is really a science or not, that it might surprise people to learn how much of the scientific method goes into testing software and doing digital biology. tags: blast, software testing, scientific method, science education What happens when the scientific method isn't used? I wrote earlier in January about applying scientific principles from the wet…
Is the case for open access truly "open and shut"? Will open access impede science by limiting genetic studies with families? tags: genetics, genetic privacy, bioethics, open access Microsoft's brave new world The April ALPSP conference began with songs for the open access choir. Microsoft's Lee Dirks painted visions of a utopian future where everything will be open, labs shall be judged by the worthiness of their databases, and even scientists will learn to share. According to Dirks, "Open access to scientific content, specifically data, will become the norm." Since I've had a few data…
We can't stop arguing about framing, can we? I've been pondering the subject much of late, especially while I waited these past four days for Duke Power to get us back on the grid following Sunday's windstorm, and I think I've got something relevant to contribute. I know Matt Nisbet has got lots of social science research that suggests people's eyes glaze over when a scientist uses data to explain something, but that's not my experience. Which is: As some may recall, I'm a member of The Climate Project, a team of some 1,000 volunteers that Al Gore trained to present his Keynote/PowerPoint…
Fellow SciBloggers Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbet have a short essay in this week's Science that says scientists need to adopt the "framing" strategy that right-wing propagandists have been so successful with over the past couple of decades -- if science is ever to trump the neo-conservative claptrap that infects global warming and evolution debates, among other important public policy issues. It's generating a lot of attention in these parts of the blogosphere and throughout the scientific community, I expect. Subscribers can read the whole thing but the publicly accessible one-line summary is…
A friend of mine, who has a pretty well-exercised brain, tried to get under my skin the other day by invoking the specter of climate change "alarmists," suggesting that we've been there before and should reserve a fair bit of skepticism for anyone who says the sky is falling. Which is true, to a point. No one wants to be dismissed as an alarmist. But then he brought up Paul Ehrlich and the famous "population bomb" as a classic example of alarmism that amounted to nothing. I fear my friend has bought into one of those fables that continues to dog the environmental movement. This post is an…
This week's Nature explores the growth of university-level instruction in that most incredible of non-conventional medical therapeutic techniques, homeopathy. That's troubling enough, but apparently it's only a part of an even more disturbing trend: the granting of BSc degrees, by otherwise respectable institutions of higher learning, in fields that don't even qualify as pseudo-scientific, let alone science-oriented. Among the new science degrees one can earn in the UK are: Geography of Mountain Leadership, Staffordshire University Hospitality Management, Manchester Metropolitan University…
Just because you were right yesterday doesn't mean you're going to be right tomorrow. Even if you're one of the most important contributors to biology, like Lynn Margulis, there's no reason anyone should keep paying attention to you if you abandon the skeptical foundation of the scientific method. I doubt that Margulis, she of the endosymbiotic theory that revolutionized evolutionary biology a few years back, cares what people think of her, but she sure has undermined her reputation with what I would say are some poorly chosen words in a guest post at Pharyngula. Margulis' theory that…
Every now and then, a science story comes along that reminds me just how full of awe and wonder the real world is. This particular story is a few weeks old, but it didn't seem to generate a lot of attention when it came out, so I will. Astronomers and physicists using the Cornell-managed Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico have discovered radio interpulses from the Crab Nebula pulsar that feature never-before-seen radio emission spectra. This leads scientists to speculate this could be the first cosmic object with a third magnetic pole. A third pole? How weird and wonderful. Such musings…
Absent anything original to add to the millions of words that have been written about Charles Darwin, on this Darwin Day I'm going to quote from one of his acolytes, Richard Dawkins. In his book The God Delusion, Dawkins runs with, rather than away from, the notion that a proper understanding of evolution through natural selection prods the reader closer to a secular, rational view of the universe. In other words, the fundamentalists are right: Darwinism can lead to atheism. From page 116: Natural selection not only explains the whole of life; it also raises our consciousness to the power of…
First, you've got to hand it Richard Branson. Say what you want about his contradictory ways -- promoting wasteful extravagance while saving the planet from the products of those wasteful ways -- but his choice of brand name was brilliant. And it gives newspaper editors and bloggers an irresistible headline for anything he does. This time, it's a generous, $25-million prize for anyone who can come up with a way to scrub the atmosphere of all that nasty carbon dioxide we (including his transportation businesses) are pumping out. Overseeing the innovations are James Hansen, the noted climate…
Going on four years back, a couple of Californians decided the secular/atheist/agnostic/skeptic community needed a catchy name in the same way the homosexual community purloined the term "gay" as part of its evolution toward mainstream acceptance. They came up with "bright," as in "I'm a bright" and quickly won qualified endorsements from the likes of atheist/agnostic/skeptic luminaries Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins. A website was thrown together, and a brief flurry of media attention from the few journalists who pay attention to such things followed. But after that, a whole not of…
Carl Sagan died 10 years ago today, I''d rather celebrate his birth, but there's this Carl Sagan Memorial Blogathon going on and I can hardly resist making a mention. With Sagan's passing, the world lost one of its leading champions of reason, but also one of its most eloquent describers of the wonders of the universe. Anyone who hasn't had a chance to read his Demon-Haunted World - Science as a Candle in the Dark, should get a copy now. Here's a favorite quote from same: "Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or…