Science
pharyngula | May 9, 2006It's another traveling day for me! I'm off to Minneapolis for a few meetings, and also this important event tonight:
Café Scientifique
Antibiotics in Agriculture
with Timna Wyckoff
Tuesday, May 9, 6-8 p.m.
Varsity Theater, Dinkytown
Free. Must be 18 or older to attend.
The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that more than 70% of the antibiotics produced each year in the U.S. are used in livestock production. How exactly are antibiotics used in agriculture? Do those uses lead to bacterial resistance? Does this have an impact on human health? Timna Wyckoff, assistant professor of biology…
drorzel | May 9, 2006One of the perks of my job is that sometimes people send me books for free. Granted, these are mostly introductory physics textbooks, which tend not to be page-turners, but I'm a big fan of books, and I'm a big fan of free stuff, so free books are great.
Thus, when I was contacted by someone from Houghton Mifflin offering me a free copy of their new 100 Science Words Every College Graduate Should Know if I'd say something about it on the blog, of course I agreed. The specific book almost doesn't matter-- this is the sort of behavior I want to encourage among the publishing community: send me…
pharyngula | May 8, 2006
The Wnt genes produce signalling proteins that play important roles in early development, regulating cell proliferation, differentiation and migration. It's hugely important, used in everything from early axis specification in the embryo to fine-tuning axon pathfinding in the nervous system. The way they work is that the Wnt proteins are secreted by cells, and they then bind to receptors on other cells (one receptor is named Frizzled, and others are LRP-5 and 6), which then, by a chain of cytoplasmic signalling events, removes β-catenin from a degradation pathway and promotes its import into…
pharyngula | May 8, 2006
One of the hallmark characters of animals is the presence of a specific cluster of genes that are responsible for staking out the spatial domains of the body plan along the longitudinal axis. These are the Hox genes; they are recognizable by virtue of the presence of a 60 amino acid long DNA binding region called the homeodomain, by similarities in sequence, by their role as regulatory genes expressed early in development, by the restriction of their expression to bands of tissue, by their clustering in the genome to a single location, and by the remarkable collinearity of their organization…
pharyngula | May 8, 2006
There are quite a few genes that are known to be highly conserved in both sequence and function in animals. Among these are the various Hox genes, which are expressed in an ordered pattern along the length of the organism and which define positional information along the anterior-posterior axis; and another is decapentaplegic (dpp) which is one of several conserved genes that define the dorsal-ventral axis. Together, these sets of genes establish the front-back and top-bottom axes of the animal, which in turn establishes bilaterality—this specifically laid out three-dimensional organization…
drorzel | May 8, 2006Derek Lowe offers another Law of the Lab, and it's a good one:
Today's law is: You are in real trouble if someone knows more about your project than you do. That's a realization that hits people at some point in their graduate school career - preferably not much past the midpoint. It marks the transition from being a student to being a working scientist.
Back in grad school, I had a slightly different spin on this. I used to say that getting a Ph.D. requires that you become the World's Leading Expert in something that nobody else cares that much about. It's a cynical spin on the same basic…
pharyngula | May 8, 2006The Cambrian vendobiont S. psygmoglena, gen.sp.nov., composite photo of part and counterpart to show both upper and lower surfaces.
From the pre-Cambrian and early Cambrian, we have a collection of enigmatic fossils: the small shellies appear to be bits and pieces of partially shelled animals; there are trace fossils, the tracks of small, soft-bodied wormlike animals; and there are the very peculiar Edicaran vendobionts, which look like fronds and fans and pleated or quilted sheets. In the Cambrian, of course, we find somewhat more familiar creatures—sure, they're weird and different, but we…
pharyngula | May 7, 2006These darn philosophers—how dare they make you think, even when you disagree with much of what they say? Peter Singer is one of those infuriating people who sometimes sounds so silly, but still makes a strong case.
He has an interview in Salon—if you don't want to fuss with their ads, I've put an interesting excerpt below the fold. Maybe it's time for me to get back to vegetarianism…
Second factoid: 284 gallons of oil go into fattening a 1,250-pound cow for slaughter?
That's a figure from David Pimentel, a Cornell ecologist. The fossil fuel goes into the fertilizer used to fertilize these…
evolgen | May 6, 2006Grrl Scientist got a complementary copy of the Daily Kos science e-book. She's got a review of it here. Does reality have a liberal bias? Anyway, she also got into a screening of Flock of Dodos. She doesn't have a review up, but she did post some comments here. Apparently Randy Olson is familiar with blogs about science (ie, Carl Zimmer's site), but he doesn't know about blogs written by scientists. If Olson does read ScienceBlogs, here's a message: have a screening in Pennsylvania.
oracknows | May 6, 2006Continuing to some extent a theme from the other day, I wish my textbooks had read like this one.
I have to say, this is the first time I've ever seen the term ménage à trois in a science textbook. It's also used as a surprisingly good analogy, although I wonder how the author would know about what constitutes a "successful" ménage à trois.
pharyngula | May 6, 2006Our Seed Overlords have asked a question (our answering is entirely voluntary, if you were wondering, and we're only answering because it is an interesting question): "if you could cause one invention from the last hundred years never to have been made at all, which would it be, and why?"
Several of my colleagues here have coughed up answers—Adventures in Ethics and Science (with a particularly appropriate entry),
Afarensis,
Evolgen,
Living the Scientific Life, and
Stranger Fruit—but I'm going to be a little bit contrary and question the question.
My answer is "none."
I don't see most of…
drorzel | May 4, 2006Since people have asked about the outcome of the Mike and Mike "Mount Sportsmore" thing that kicked off yesterday's post about iconic scientists, I made it a point to catch their final list today:
Muhammed Ali
Babe Ruth
Michael Jordan
Wayne Gretzky
They specifically put Jackie Robinson off in a special category of his own ("looking down from above"). Gretzky was apaprently the choice in a fan vote, beating out Secretariat, Jesse Owens, and Jim Brown. No mention of Pele at all, as far as I could tell.
Meanwhile, over in the "Mount Rushmore of Science" thread, the nomination geenrating the most…
drorzel | May 3, 2006On the way in to work, I was listening to ESPN radio's Mike & Mike show, and they were discussing "Mount Sportsmore," that is, the Mount Rushmore of sports. They had two of the four spots filled with Babe Ruth and Muhammed Ali, and were debating baseball players for the other two (which is stupid-- the other two are Wayne Gretzky and Michael Jordan).
This raises the question, though, of who belongs on the Mount Rushmore of Science: Who are the four most iconic scientists out there, who deserve to be memorialized in titanic stone sculptures, ideally on the Moon or somewhere similarly cool…
pharyngula | May 3, 2006Then don't read about hyena births. Puppies ripping their way through clitorises does not make a pretty picture.
drorzel | May 2, 2006A couple of good science stories in today's New York Times:
First, an article on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). The current news hook, weirdly, appears to be a recent calculation of the expected magnitude of the signal resulting from the collision and merger of two black holes. Why this merits a long article, I'm not sure-- I was under the impression that they already had a decent idea of the expected signal sizes-- but it's a decent article.
The other story will probably get more play, as it's about the deathless topic of problems with peer review. As others…
oracknows | May 2, 2006Yesterday was May Day, and Catallarchy has posted its annual Day of Remembrance for for the victims of Communism.
Of particular interest to readers of this blog is a rather extensive article about just what can happen when political ideology is allowed to warp science, specifically what happened to science under Communism because of Trofim Lysenko:
Lysenko's doctrines were an unholy merger of Lamarckism with Stalinism: the infinite malleability of man was mirrored by the infinite malleability of plants. (Lysenko claimed that if you grew plants incrementally further and further North each year…
razib | May 1, 2006The New York Times has an article that reviews the problems with peer review. I don't know what to think, as it has something of the "and the other side says" air to it, never really coming to any conclusion. There's a lot of shoddy crap being published in stuff like the Tuvan Journal of Entomology, and always has been, but the big issue is when crap gets into Science and Nature. Ultimately science is a social enterprise based on trust and long term self-correction. There's a lot of noise in the system, but I don't see any other alternative out there.
One issue that I've been wondering…
pharyngula | May 1, 2006Lisa Jardine is a historian who clearly understands how science works:
The thought uppermost in my mind was how odd it is that non-scientists think of science as being about certainties and absolute truth. Whereas scientists are actually quite tentative—they simply try to arrive at the best fit between the experimental findings so far and a general principle.
Read the rest. She ties together the ideals of how science should be carried out with a story from Pepys and an unscrupulous sea captain and modern day creationists—excellent stuff!
pharyngula | May 1, 2006How else can you explain why those adorable screaming moonbats at the Daily Kos have come up with a science book? I'm kind of dismayed that good science has become a partisan issue, but don't blame us—our side puts out stuff like Kosmos: You Are Here, while the righties seem to have a surfeit of Lotts and Bethells.
pharyngula | April 30, 2006
In previous articles about fly development, I'd gone from the maternal gradient to genes that are expressed in alternating stripes (pair-rule genes), and mentioned some genes (the segment polarity genes) that are expressed in every segment. The end result is the development of a segmented animal: one made up of a repeated series of morphological modules, all the same.
Building an animal with repeated elements like that is a wonderfully versatile strategy for making an organism larger without making it too much more complicated, but it's not the whole story. Just repeating the same bits over…