Science
grrlscientist | May 29, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
The next edition of Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) will publish Monday and as usual, it is seeking submissions and hosts! Can you help by sending URLs for your own or others' well-written science, medicine, and nature blog essays to me or by volunteering to host this carnival on your blog?
Scientia Pro Publica is a traveling blog carnival that celebrates the best science, environment, nature and medical writing that has been published in the…
grrlscientist | May 28, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
The next edition of Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) will publish Monday and as usual, it is seeking submissions and hosts! Can you help by sending URLs for your own or others' well-written science, medicine, and nature blog essays to me or by volunteering to host this carnival on your blog?
Scientia Pro Publica is a traveling blog carnival that celebrates the best science, environment, nature and medical writing that has been published in the…
grrlscientist | May 27, 2010tags: Doctor Who Theme Song Accompanied by Tesla Coils, music video, DIY, Do-It-Yourself, science, physics, music, performing arts, weird, offbeat, Tesla Coils, ArcAttack, Maker Faire 2010, streaming video
The musical group, ArcAttack, constructed a set of Tesla Coils that they use to perform "an electrifying" live performance at Maker Faire 2010, held in San Mateo, California. Maker Faire is an event created by Make Magazine to "celebrate arts, crafts, engineering, science projects and the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset."
According to the filmographer, the HVDJ pumps music through a PA system…
bioephemera | May 27, 2010Edge.org has invited comments on Craig Venter's synthetic bacterium from thinkers like Freeman Dyson, George Dyson, and our very own PZ Myers. Nassim Taleb is particularly pessimistic:
If I understand this well, to the creationists, this should be an insult to God; but, further, to the evolutionist, this is certainly an insult to evolution. And to the risk manager/probabilist, like myself & my peers, this is an insult to human Prudence, the beginning of the mother-of-all exposure to Black Swans. Let me explain.
Evolution (in complex systems) proceeds by undirected, convex bricolage or…
drorzel | May 27, 2010Since I sort of implied a series in the previous post, and I have no better ideas, here's a look at Thursday's DAMOP program:
Thursday Morning, 8am (yes, they start having talks at 8am. It's a great trial.)
Session J1 Novel Probes of Ultracold Atom Gases
Chair: David Weiss, Pennsylvania State University Room: Imperial East
Invited Speakers: Cheng Chin, Markus Greiner, Kaden Hazzard, Tin-Lun Ho
Session J2 Coherent Control with Optical Frequency Combs
Chair: Linda Young, Argonne National Laboratory Room: Imperial Center
Invited Speakers: J. Ye, Moshe Shapiro, W. Campbell, …
bioephemera | May 26, 2010
Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as if It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority: this could be awesome, or very very bad. I can't wait to find out.
drorzel | May 26, 2010The conference I'm at this week is the annual meeting of the Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics of the American Physical Society (which this year is joint with the Canadian version, the Division of Atomic and Molecular Physics and Photon Interactions, or "DAMPΦ." The Greek letter is a recent addition-- as recently as 2001, they were just DAMP.). As the name suggests, this is a meeting covering a wide range of topics, and in some ways is like two or three meetings running in parallel in the same space.
You can see the different threads very clearly if you look at the different…
oracknows | May 26, 2010I've had a lot of fun thus far this week expressing more than a bit of schadenfreude over Andrew Wakefield's being ignominiously stripped of his medical license in the U.K. by the General Medical Council, not to mention pointing out the quackfest that is Autism One, I feel the need for a brief break from the anti-vaccine craziness. This is as good a time as any to take care of some leftover business from last week that I had planned on writing about but gotten distracted by all the deliciously bad news for the anti-vaccine movement. Besides, what will be going on in Grant Park in Chicago this…
grrlscientist | May 25, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
The next edition of Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) will publish Monday and as usual, it is seeking submissions and hosts! Can you help by sending URLs for your own or others' well-written science, medicine, and nature blog essays to me or by volunteering to host this carnival on your blog?
Scientia Pro Publica is a traveling blog carnival that celebrates the best science, environment, nature and medical writing that has been published in the…
catdynamics | May 24, 2010I am visiting the lovely Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, again.
Last thursday we had an unusual occurrence, the ocean farted.
I am staying at the new visitors' cottages at Coal Point
- by the way, if you're the type to visit KITP, and a lot of you are, you know who you are... then I highly recommend the West Cottages.
Anyway, Coal Point is so named, because it is the site of the largest natural oil seepage known - about 100 barrels per day! That is about 1% of the likely leak rate at Deepwater Horizons in the Gulf of Mexico - and it is open to the Pacific, pretty much.
The oil…
drorzel | May 24, 2010This is the presentation I gave to the International Baccalaureate class from Schenectady High School today. I tend to re-use talk titles a lot, but this is substantially different than the last talk with this title, as the previous group had read How to Teach Physics to Your Dog first. For this group, I spent more time on applications, and took out a few details.
What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics
View more presentations from Chad Orzel.
We were pressed for time, so I ended up not being able to show the video embedded in the next-to-last slide (this one), which is a shame.…
drorzel | May 24, 2010I'm leaving for DAMOP tomorrow, and did a presentation for local high-schoolers today, so everything is in chaos here. Thus, a poll to pass the time, inspired by my current activities:
The best part of going to a conference is:online survey
The word "best" naturally implies a single item, so choose only one.
bioephemera | May 24, 2010
As you may know, the Phylo (Phylomon) project is crowdsourcing a collection of ecology-based trading and gaming cards, in the hopes of supplying kids with a more engaging way of learning and thinking about their environment. And here's a timely addition: the Oil Spill, with very nice artwork by Stephanie Tan. Scientist-artist types: have ideas, or artwork, to contribute to Phylomon? Check out their website for more info!
catdynamics | May 23, 2010there are rumours that the well head at the seafloor at deepwater horizons blew out late sunday night and oil leakage increased significantly
see discussion at the Oil Drum
this is rather bad, if true
BP video link from remote operated sub
see also Monkeyfister blog - with lots of image screen grabs
grrlscientist | May 23, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
~ Arnold Lobel [1933-1987] author of many popular children's books.
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited…
drorzel | May 23, 2010As mentioned previously, I have an inexplicable fondness for the "Ancient Aliens" show on the History channel. It's such a bizarre mishmash of every crazy idea out there in the UFO community that it ends up being hilarious where it ought to be just reprehensible.
To give you an idea of the wackiness, the episode they re-ran last night featured a guy whose job title was "Biblical archaeologist," which is usually incredibly dodgy-- most of the people appearing on the History channel with that job title are trying to use archeology to demonstrate the literal truth of some Old Testament story. On…
awild | May 21, 2010
Asphinctopone pilosa Hawkes 2010
The discovery of new insect species continues apace. Today, the online journal Zootaxa presents this pretty little ponerine from Tanzania, described by Peter Hawkes.
Asphinctopone is a rather poorly-known genus previously collected only in the tropical forests of West Africa. Asphinctopone pilosa is larger than the other described species and the first record from East Africa, extending the range of the lineage thousands of kilometers to the east.
source: Hawkes, P.G. 2010. A new species of Asphinctopone (Hymenoptera: Formicidae: Ponerinae) from Tanzania.…
drorzel | May 21, 2010I didn't see it live, but thanks to the wonders of the Internet, you can see Tom O'Brian of NIST talking about measurement on the Rachel Maddow show last night:
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Tom used to have an office not far from the lab I worked in at NIST, and has a background in laser stuff, so he's got to be a good guy for this. This was in honor of World Metrology Day, celebrating the hundred-and-mumbleth anniversary of the signing of the Convention on the Meter yesterday. Ironically, all the numbers Tom cites are given in English units.
So,…
grrlscientist | May 20, 2010tags: Richard Feynman Explains Electricity, science, physics, imagination, hot, offbeat, Electricity, jiggling atoms, physical laws, Richard Feynman, streaming video
Physicist Richard Feynman visits the dentist and wonders about the amazing phenomenon of electricity.
From the BBC TV series 'Fun to Imagine' (1983).
pharyngula | May 20, 2010Get in the mood for this bit of news, the synthesis of an artificial organism by Craig Venter's research team.
Here's the equivalent of that twitching hand of Frankenstein's monster:
Those are two colonies of Mycoplasma mycoides, their nucleoids containing entirely synthesized DNA. You can tell because the synthesized DNA contained a lacZ gene for beta-galactosidase, making the pretty blue product. That's one of the indicators that the artificial chromosome is functioning inside the cell; the DNA was also encoded with recognizable watermarks, and they also used a cell of a different…