Science
Hey, everyone! The new ScienceBlogs main page has been launched, and the Seed nerd-kings have added a whole new crop of blogs here. Take a browse, you might discover some new favorites.
After the recent struggles trying to keep up with the traffic on this site, you wouldn't think I'd feel compelled to go trolling for more visitors, but isn't that the nature of weblogging? The only point to it all is to rack up a bigger score than the next guy, as if we were playing pinball. So what's a good ploy? As Lauren has cleverly pointed out, sex sells. And while it may be estrogen week, I'm going to buck the trend, since we all know what's really important for weblog popularity: penises.
So I was just browsing through some fun journals (Integrative and Comparative Biology, always…
It's been a while since I did a True Lab Story, and it seems like an appropriate sort of topic for a rainy Friday when I have grades to finish. I'm running out of really good personal anecdotes, but there are still a few left before I have to move entirely to hearsay. And who knows, maybe I'll break something in spectacular fashion between now and then...
Anyway, lab safety offices are a rich source of True Lab Stories. Not just because they have to clean up from the really spectacular disasters, but also because their desire to prevent disasters sometimes leads to inflexible applications of…
In a promising experiment, Nature reports that it is beginning a trial in which it will evaluate submitted papers through two tracks, one using its current, traditional closed peer review system and another using open peer review. As the blog O'Reilly Radar notes, this is a highly encouraging and significant trial, and one with Nature's aggressive and creative exploration of how the Internet can enhance and improve scientific publishing. The O'Reilly article, well worth reading (and short), reports Nature's open peer review will allow anyone in a paper's field to comment on a submitted…
The fugu is a famous fish, at least as a Japanese sushi dish containing a potentially lethal neurotoxin that was featured on an episode of The Simpsons. Fugu is a member of the pufferfish group, which have another claim to fame: an extremely small genome, roughly a tenth the size of that of other vertebrates. The genome of several species of pufferfish is being sequenced, and the latest issue of Nature announces the completion of a draft sequence for the green spotted pufferfish, Tetraodon nigroviridis, a small freshwater species.
Tetraodon has about the same number of genes as we do, 20,…
Creationists are fond of the "it can't happen" argument: they like to point to things like the complexity of the eye or intricate cell lineages and invent bogus rules like "irreducible complexity" so they can claim evolution is impossible. In particular, it's easy for them to take any single organism in isolation and go oooh, aaah over its elaborate detail, and then segue into the argument from personal incredulity.
Two things, one natural and one artificial, help them do this. Organisms are incredibly complicated, there is no denying it. This should be no solace to the anti-evolutionists,…
Over at Gene Expression, Razib responds to my brain drain comments in a way that provokes some twinges of Liberal Guilt:
Second, Chad like many others points to the issue of foreign scientists allowing us (Americans) to be complacent about nourishing home grown talent. I don't totally dismiss this, there are probably many doctors and lawyers out there who could be scientists if the incentives were right (Ph.D. scientists are one of the least compensated groups in relation to how much education they have). But, I would frankly rather focus on tightening labor supply on the low end of the…
The cover of the May 27 New Scientist bluntly asks, regarding climate change, “What Does It Take?” What will it take, that is, to convince our political leaders to start braking the accelerating runaway train we’ve created in global warming? I won’t review the (overwhelming) evidence here; for that, see some of the good writing on climate change lately, such as Mark Bowen’s Thin Ice or Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe. My concern here is not the evidence but our failure to act on it. Global warming is serving, in a way that, say, evolution doesn’t, as a test of science and…
Another week, another "Ask a ScienceBlogger" question. This week, the topic is the putative "brain drain" caused by recent US policies:
Do you think there is a brain drain going on (i.e. foreign scientists not coming to work and study in the U.S. like they used to, because of new immigration rules and the general unpopularity of the U.S.) If so, what are its implications? Is there anything we can do about it?
This is really three questions, with a fourth sort of assumed on the way to the third. Answers below the fold.
The first question is "Is there a 'brain drain' going on?" That one, I can…
Last night, I had to read this book RPM mentioned. It's not very long—about 100 pages, counting a preface, an epilogue, and an afterward, and it has lots of pictures—but be warned: it's very inside baseball.
The book is Won for All: How the Drosophila Genome Was Sequenced(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) by Michael Ashburner, and its subject is the rush to sequence the Drosophila genome in 1998-1999. It's a rather strange twist on what I expected, though. While the subtitle says "How the Drosophila Genome Was Sequenced," there is almost no science at all in the body of the book; instead, it's all about…
Via The Onion (where else):
TALLAHASSEE, FL--Only months after abandoning a tenured position at Lehigh University, maverick chemist Theodore Hapner managed to disprove two of the three laws of thermodynamics and show that gold is a noxious gas, turning the world of science--defined for centuries by exhaustive research, painstaking observation, and hard-won theories--completely on its head.
The brash chemist, who conducts independent research from his houseboat, has infuriated peers by refusing to "play by the rules of Socrates, Bacon, and Galileo," calling test results as he sees them,…
No, Dr. Mayr did not dislike the beach. That's just how all the kids are saying, "You ain't down with the shit I'm doing." Anyway, read this post attacking the physicists for calling us stamp collectors on a blog with a very cumbersome name. MissPrism puts a throw-away link at the end of the post to Roger Lewin's 1982 interview with Mayr (available here if you have a subscription to JSTOR). I actually like MissPrism's post better than Lewin's article, so you're not missing much if you can't get access to the Mayr interview. I have some quotes from Mayr, and my responses, below the fold.
Both…
from New Scientist, 30 May 2006:
Wild birds have helped transmit the deadly H5N1 bird flu across Eurasia, a meeting of 300 scientists at the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) concluded on Wednesday. But killing them to prevent further spread of the disease is not the answer, they warn.
I wrote an article about this in Audubon this spring, concluding from the divided and tenuous opinions and facts then that wild birds almost certainly did help spread avian flu. Since then, opinion among scientists has swung a couple of times as the evidence bounced about. The appearance of infected…
Let me tell you about this Achilles tendinitis I've got.
My first couple of steps in the morning are flaming agony. After working it and gingerly stretching for a while, it subsides to a dull ache, and I'm good for about a half hour of cautious hobbling. After that, though, the pain builds and builds, until it's like slamming my heel down on a white hot knife.
I'm not saying this because I'm fishing for sympathy. I spent over an hour and a half today limping through the Darwin exhibit at the AMNH. The pain I suffered through tells you a) how stupid I am to overdo it (I'm paying for it now, I…
Since Evolgen recognizes the importance of evo-devo, I'll return the favor: bioinformatics is going to be critical to the evo-devo research program, which to date has emphasized the "devo" part with much work on model systems, but is going to put increasing demands on comparative molecular information from genomics and bioinformatics to fulfill the promise of the "evo" part. I'm sitting on a plane flying east, and to pass the time I've been reading a very nice review of the concept of modularity in evo-devo by Paula Mabee (also a fish developmental biologist, and also working in a small…
The Art of Science exhibition has many lovely pictures in the galleries, but I think my favorite is this image of Nodal expression in zebrafish.
Via a fellow SB'er , I find this video by the Protane Clan. It's so-well....--unusual that I thought my readers might find it interesting (and maybe even entertaining), even though the actual rapping is kind of lame. If you've already seen this thanks to The Daily Transcript, feel free to move on. Otherwise, check it out and tell me what you think!
I'm not sure that this is the greatest way to be teaching protein synthesis...
After writing about the dilution of those "dangerous" kids' chemistry sets, I find that Nature has just published a news article wondering how dangerous chemistry actually is.
Something that felt like an earthquake hit the French town of Mulhouse on 24 March. The explosion at the National Institution of Higher Learning in Chemistry (ENSCMu) killed Dominique Burget, a 41-year-old photochemist. It also sent ripples of concern around the world.
Although official investigations are expected to last until the end of the year, it appears that residues of the flammable gas ethene in a pressure…
Hey, gang! Who remembers these?
I know that Gary does, and of course, so does the Disgruntled Chemist. Those old sheet metal boxes containing an assortment of strange chemicals in vials and test tubes and alcohol burners were a rite of passage for my generation and thereabouts. There was stuff in there that would burn, or blow up, or stain the furniture irreparably, or kill someone…that was the fun and the thrill of it all. I had one, although I quickly moved on to more ghoulish occupations (most of the boys I knew could be separated into several tracks: the ones fascinated with road kill,…