Science
razib | May 31, 2006Percentage of Students Earning Degrees in Science and Math Has Fallen, GAO Tells Lawmakers ($$$), but this is all you need to know:
The GAO reported that 27 percent of students obtained degrees in those fields, which are known as the STEM disciplines, in the 2003-4 academic year, compared with 32 percent in 1994-95. It also noted that the number of degrees obtained in engineering, the biological sciences, and certain technical fields declined in the past decade. The number of graduate degrees awarded in the STEM fields also declined, it said.
Percentage is crucial. More & more people go…
razib | May 31, 2006Apropos of this week's Ask a Science Blogger, AMERICANS SUPPORT FREE ACCESS TO RESEARCH. Not that their opinion matters!
drorzel | May 31, 2006We had an interesting colloquium yesterday from Mark Walker, a colleague in the History department, on the subject of Peter Debye, a Dutch chemist and Nobel laureate. It seems that a book published last year on Einstein in the Netherlands included some material accusing Debye of being a Nazi collaborator, which touched off a major controversy. The University of Utrecht renamed their Debye Institute, and Maastrichty University removed Debye's name from a scientific research prize.
The main point of the talk is pretty well summarized in the piece Mark co-wrote for the German Physical Society (…
pharyngula | May 31, 2006Fellow scienceblogger Evolgen has seen the light—evo-devo is wonderful. He's attending a meeting and listening to some of the bigwigs in the field talk about their work, in particular some research on the evolution of gene regulation. While noting that this is clearly important stuff, he also mentions some of the bickering going on about the relative importance of changes in cis regulatory elements (CREs) vs. trans acting elements, transcription factors. I've got a longer write-up of the subject, but if you don't want to read all of that, the issue is about where the cool stuff in the…
pharyngula | May 26, 2006
One of the most evocative creatures of the Cambrian is Anomalocaris, an arthropod with a pair of prominent, articulated appendages at the front of its head. Those things are called great appendages, and they were thought to be unique to certain groups of arthropods that are now extinct. A while back, I reported on a study of pycnogonids, the sea spiders, that appeared to show that that might not be the case: on the basis of neural organization and innervation, that study showed that the way pycnogonid chelifores (a pair of large, fang-like structures at the front of the head) were innervated…
pharyngula | May 26, 2006
I'm going to introduce you to either a fascinating question or a throbbing headache in evolution, depending on how interested you are in peculiar details of arthropod anatomy (Mrs Tilton may have just perked up, but the rest of you may resume napping). The issue is tagmosis.
The evolutionary foundation for the organization of many animal body plans is segmental—we are made of rings of similar stuff, repeated over and over again along our body length. That's sufficient to make a creature like a tapeworm or a leech (well, almost—leeches have sophisticated specializations), but there are…
drorzel | May 26, 2006It's not really all that flame-tastic, but Janet has a nice post on the women in science thing, taking off from yesterday's post, and my comment that I don't really have the energy to wage a "women in science" flamewar at the moment. If you do have the energy, head over to Janet's blog. But read her post before getting too fired up, because she makes some interesting points about nerd culture and gender issues.
drorzel | May 25, 2006Scott Aaronson takes up the eternal question of why there are so few women in science. His contribution to the nature/ nurture side of the debate is particularly noteworthy:
To put the point differently: suppose (hypothetically) that what repelled women from computer science were all the vending-machine-fueled all-nighters, empty pizza boxes stacked to the ceiling, napping coders drooling on the office futon, etc.; and indeed that men would be repelled by such things as well, were it not for a particular gene on the Y chromosome called PGSTY-8. In that case, would the "cause" of the gender…
pharyngula | May 24, 2006This story bugs me. It's a heartwarming tale of an inspiring teacher in an inner city school, who gets young kids motivated to learn science. Or does he?
These are elementary school kids, so they're young and maybe the most important thing is that some enthusiasm for the subject is instilled…but I also see a lot of simplistic thinking, a reliance on rote memorization of trivialities, and stuff that is just plain wrong. I have to disagree with the article: the kids are learning discipline, but they sure aren't learning science.
"Name one main kind of organism on Earth," White is saying to two…
pharyngula | May 24, 2006I have another short piece commissioned by Forbes magazine in one of their special reports. The section is called "Work Is…", and there are some provocative ideas in there. My own article is answering the question, "Do Animals Work?" and as you might guess, the answer is yes. I think I got one of the easier topics, actually.
pharyngula | May 24, 2006I saw it first at Virge's place, but Mike Snider is also on the blogroll and I would have gotten to it eventually…but hey, if you're a fan of fossil tetrapods and poetry, here's a treat: a Tiktaalik sonnet. You can also view some drafts of its construction, which is developmentally interesting, I think, and not quite as messy as chopping up embryos.
I think my title reveals why I'll leave the poesy to the pros.
oracknows | May 24, 2006One annoying thing about the blogosphere for someone like me is that a lot of things that I want to write about pop up during the day, when I'm at work. Blogging is all about immediacy and time. Wait too long to write about a topic, and the moment's passed. For me, by the time I get home in the evening, even though someone may have e-mailed me an article that they thought I'd like to comment on, I often find myself refraining from jumping into the fray, simply because so many have already commented on it already. This problem is magnified (for me, at least) by belonging to ScienceBlogs,…
pharyngula | May 23, 2006
I just learned (via John Lynch) about a paper on cetacean limbs that combines developmental biology and paleontology, and makes a lovely argument about the mechanisms behind the evolution of whale morphology. It is an analysis of the molecular determinants of limb formation in modern dolphins, coupled to a comparison of fossil whale limbs, and a reasonable inference about the pattern of change that was responsible for their evolution.
One important point I'd like to make is that even though what we see in the morphology is a pattern of loss—whale hindlimbs show a historical progression over…
pharyngula | May 22, 2006Chad reports a not-so-subtle message from a science conference:
The annoying thing was the peripheral message-- she took pains to state several times that both Democrats and Republicans in Congress support science, in a tone that basically came across as chiding us for thinking otherwise. That was annoying by itself, but at the very end of the talk, she specifically warned against taking partisan positions, citing the letter supporting John Kerry that was signed by a couple dozen Nobel laureates as something that made it harder to keep science funding. She said that after that, when she met…
pharyngula | May 22, 2006
I'm going to briefly summarize an interesting new article on cnidarian Hox genes…unfortunately, it requires a bit of background to put it in context, so bear with me for a moment.
First you need to understand what Hox genes are. They are transcription factors that use a particular DNA binding motif (called a homeobox), and they are found in clusters and expressed colinearly. What that means is that you find the Hox genes that are essential for specifying positional information along the length of the body in a group on a chromosome, and they are organized in order on the chromosome in the…
drorzel | May 22, 2006A scientific conference like DAMOP almost always includes a conference banquet (to which people may or may not bring dates), usually the last night of the meeting, where everybody gets together to eat massive quantities of catered food and drink massive amounts of wine supplied by the conference. The quality of these ranges from your standard rubber chicken sort of fare to the multi-course gourmet meal (with a different bottle of wine for each course) provided at a conference I attended in Bordeaux.
DAMOP does all right in the food department, though you're not going to get real gourmet fare…
drorzel | May 22, 2006The problem with scheduling something like last week's Ask a ScienceBlogger for a time when I'm out of town is that any interesting discussions that turn up in comments are sort of artificially shortened because I can't hold up my end of the conversation from a remote site. I do want to respond (below the fold) to a couple of points that were raised in the comments, though, mostly having to do with my skepticism about the Singularity.
(Side note on literary matters: When I wrote dismissively that the Singularity is a silly idea, I didn't realize that I was going to spend the flight down to…
oracknows | May 22, 2006Geez, who could have seen this one coming?
Straight from the Discovery Institute's blog regarding atheist and Holocaust denier Larry Darby in reference to his activities against ID in Alabama, Casey Luskin bloviates:
An outspoken opponent of the bill has been activist Larry Darby. Mr. Darby's vehement opposition to the Alabama Academic Freedom Bill was on full display at a House Education hearing back on April 29, 2004. According to reports I have received, committee chair, Rep. Yvonne Kennedy (D), did not allow citizens to testify for the bill. But for some reason she let Mr. Darby alone…
razib | May 20, 2006Rik asks:
Off topic... what's the best argument you've read, contra Dawkins and Dennett, that Christianity is compatible with the scientific worldview?
I had to mull this over because I didn't have a "pat" response. The short of it is that I like have my cake and eat it when it comes to science vs. religion, I think that both the confrontationists (Dawkins et. al.) and reconciliationists (Gould et. al.) go too far. Mostly, this is because I think that "religion" and to a lesser extent "science" can mean different things, and a subset of the pairwise associations will naturally contradict…
pharyngula | May 19, 2006
Four of my favorite things are development, evolution, and breasts, and now I have an article that ties them all together in one pretty package. It's a speculative story at this point, but the weight of the evidence marshaled in support of the premise is impressive: the mammalian breast first evolved as an immunoprotective gland that produced bacteriocidal secretions to protect the skin and secondarily eggs and infants, and that lactation is a highly derived kind of inflammation response. That mammary glands may have had their origin as inflamed glands suppurating mucus may not be the most…