Science
pharyngula | May 20, 2010We're hearing the first stirrings of a big story: Craig Venter may have created the first organism with an artificially synthesized genome. Conceptually, building a strand of DNA and inserting it into a cell stripped of its genome is completely unsurprising — of course it will work, a cell is just chemistry — but it is a huge technical accomplishment.
Carl Zimmer has more background. I want to see the paper.
grrlscientist | May 19, 2010tags: Richard Feynman Explains Magnets and 'Why?' Questions, science, physics, magnet, forces, offbeat, ice, slippery, physical laws, Richard Feynman, streaming video
Physicist Richard Feynman tries to explain to a non-scientist just how difficult it can be to answer certain questions in lay terms! A classic example of Feynman's clarity of thought, powers of explanation and intellectual honesty - his refusal to 'cheat'.
From the BBC TV series 'Fun to Imagine' (1983).
bioephemera | May 19, 2010Der Mensch als Industriepalast [Man as Industrial Palace] from Henning Lederer on Vimeo.
So awesome! Fritz Kahn's poster reimagined as an animation by Henning Lederer. Via Bora.
drorzel | May 19, 2010I spent yesterday going over proposed copy edits to Anglicise How to Teach Physics to Your Dog for the forthcoming UK edition, which adds "Quantum" to the title, and will have all new cover art, etc. This means that clergy in the book are now permitted to marry, all book property belonging to the Catholic Church has been seized by the Crown, and an "s" has been added to "math" every time it appears (weirdly, it doesn't seem to actually pluralize the word, leading to the jarring construction "maths is" in several places). My favorite parts of the changes:
The evil squirrel in Chapter 10 gets…
grrlscientist | May 18, 2010tags: Richard Feynman Explains Rubber Bands, science, physics, imagination, hot, offbeat, rubber bands, jiggling atoms, physical laws, Richard Feynman, streaming video
Physicist Richard Feynman thinks more about the 'jiggling' of atoms, and about rubber bands and how they 'work'. "The world is a dynamic mess of jiggling things, if you look at it right", says Richard Feynman.
bioephemera | May 18, 2010They're using DNA tests for everything now - even to catch canine vandals and their miscreant owners.
Robert Frost was right: good forensics make good neighbors.
drorzel | May 18, 2010It's been a very long day, so I'm lying on the couch watching
"Pardon the Interruption" on ESPN. They're having a boring
conversation about baseball, and I'm just drifting off into a pleasant
doze when:
"Fear! Fire! Foes! Awake! Fear! Fire! Foes! Awake!"
I jolt awake. "What are you barking at?!?" I yell at the dog, who
is standing in the middle of the living room, baying at nothing. She
stops.
"Scary things!"
The room is empty. "There's nothing here," I say, and then hear a
car door slam. I look outside, and see the mathematician next door
heading into his house. "Were you barking at Bill? He…
drorzel | May 18, 2010There's a Dennis Overbye article in the Times today with the Web headline "From Fermilab, a New Clue to Explain Human Existence?" which I like to think of as a back-handed tribute to the person who linked to an interview with Sean Carroll by calling him "The cosmologist, not the scientist." This is the secret of human existence explained by science, not biology.
The physics issue in question is why we have more matter than antimatter in the universe, as symmetry would seem to demand they be created in equal amounts in the Big Bang. Had that happened, though, all of the matter should've…
bioephemera | May 18, 2010
Somebody in charge of pulling flickr illustrations for Wired's website has a good eye - they used this photo by Stephen Hampshire. A quick visit to flickr, and it turns out the photo is of Hampshire's homemade version of a DIY project originally described by Neil Fraser: a wooden cube brain map/puzzle. Fraser summarized his creation thus:
Last month I took a left-right MRI scan, reconstructed it, and rerendered top-bottom and front-back scans. It was interesting to manipulate the data and extract information which while previously present, was not previously visible. Another method to…
grrlscientist | May 17, 2010tags: Richard Feynman Explains Jiggling Atoms, science, physics, imagination, hot, offbeat, fire, jiggling atoms, physical laws, Richard Feynman, streaming video
Physicist Richard Feynman talks more about jiggling atoms and heat, and about what fire is.
From the BBC TV series 'Fun to Imagine' (1983).
drorzel | May 17, 2010Matt's Sunday Function this week is a weird one, a series that is only conditionally convergent:
So the sum of the infinite series, by inexorable logic, is both ln(2) and ln(2)/2. How is this possible?
Of course it isn't. The flaw in our logic is the assumption that the series has a definite sum - in the mathematical parlance, that it's absolutely convergent. This series is not, it's only conditionally convergent. In fact you can show (the great G.F.B. Riemann was the first) that with judicious rearrangement, you can get this series to converge to anything at all. As such it's only…
drorzel | May 17, 2010SteelyKid's every-so-often bath was last night, and as always, she was fascinated by scooping up water in a hexagonal cup thing that's part of one of her bath toys, and watching it drain out. Which is completely understandable-- not just because she's a baby, but because there's a bunch of physics at work, here.
I realize this is trampling on Rhett's territory, but I made a little video showing the physics part (in the sink, not the tub, because I don't want to have the pay the therapy bills that would come from posting video of SteelyKid in the tub):
The explanation is laid out in the video…
grrlscientist | May 16, 2010tags: Richard Feynman Explains Jiggling Atoms, science, physics, imagination, hot, offbeat, cold, jiggling atoms, physical laws, Richard Feynman, streaming video
Physicist Richard Feynman thinks aloud about atoms and how they jiggle, and how we perceive that jiggling as 'hot' and 'cold'.
From the BBC TV series 'Fun to Imagine' (1983).
bioephemera | May 16, 2010I ran across first one, then two articles on the scientific benefits of failure in the past few weeks: this one by Jonah Lehrer for Wired (originally out in December), and this one by W. Barksdale Maynard for the April issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly. Odd - or maybe not so odd; with the economy crashing down, oil rigs blowing up, etc., it's awfully reassuring to reflect on the good side of screwups.
Lehrer's piece begins by debunking an overly romantic and simplistic view of science, in which experiments come out the way you expect (ha):
Dunbar came away from his in vivo studies with an…
grrlscientist | May 16, 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 16, 2010A few upcoming events related to How to Teach Physics to Your Dog:
The big one is that I'll be aprt of the "Author's Alley" portion of the World Science Festival Street Fair in New York City on Sunday, June 6th. The last couple of these have coincided with out-of-town trips for me, so I'm glad to get to go to this year's World Science Festival, which includes a whole bunch of cool-sounding stuff. The Street Fair is an eight-hour affair, while I'll only be signing books for an hour or so during that span; I'll post a more specific time when I get it.
On Sunday, June 19th, I'll be signing…
grrlscientist | May 15, 2010tags: Richard Feynman Talks About Doubt, Uncertainty and Religion, science, imagination, religion, god, doubt, uncertainty, beliefs, Richard Feynman, streaming video
Physicist Richard Feynman talks about the improbability of the existence of a god, and his thoughts about the mythologies that form the basis of religion.
grrlscientist | May 15, 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 15, 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…
awild | May 14, 2010
Bits and pieces of an ongoing project to sequence the genome of the leafcutter ant Atta cephalotes have started going up on Genbank- Have a look!
Of course, these are just raw strings of nucleotides that haven't yet been annotated or analyzed in any meaningful way. The real science won't begin until researchers begin testing hypotheses against the data. But the raw material is there, and this is the first sequence from the ant genome projects to see the light of day. Exciting stuff!