Science
drorzel | April 28, 2006We had 45 responses to yesterday's poll/quiz question-- thank you to all who participated. The breakdown of answers was, by a quick count:
How do you report your answer in a lab report?
0 votes A) 4.371928645 +/- 0.0316479825 m/s
3 votes B) 4.372 +/- 0.03165 m/s
18 votes C) 4.372 +/- 0.032 m/s
21 votes D) 4.37 +/- 0.03 m/s
2 votes E) Some other answer that I will explain in comments.
So, it's a narrow victory for D, among ScienceBlogs readers.
The correct answer and the reason for the poll are below the fold.
As far as I'm concerned, the correct answer is D). There's absolutely no reason…
pharyngula | April 27, 2006This strange fish is Euphanerops longaevus, which is one of two species of 370 million year old jawless fishes (the other is Endeiolepis aneri, and the paper suggests that they may actually represent differently preserved members of the same species). These are soft-bodied animals that are usually poorly preserved, and are of interest because they seem to have some properties in common with both the lampreys and the gnathostomes, or jawed fishes. Their exact position in the vertebrate family tree is problematic, and the experts go back and forth on it; sometimes they are grouped with the…
drorzel | April 27, 2006The big physics story of the day is bound to be this new report on American particle physics:
The United States should be prepared to spend up to half a billion dollars in the next five years to ensure that a giant particle accelerator now being designed by a worldwide consortium of scientists can be built on American soil, the panel said. If that does not happen, particle physics, the quest for the fundamental forces and constituents of nature, will wither in this country, it said.
You might assume that, as a physicist, I'm all in favor of this-- half a billion is a lot of money, after all…
drorzel | April 27, 2006Have you ever wondered about the accuracy of the descriptions in chemical manuals of what different compounds smell like? "Sure," you say, "the book says that this smells like cheese, but does that really help me in my daily life?"
Well, worry no more. Dylan Stiles does the experiment so you don't have to.
(If you haven't responded to the poll question below, please consider it...)
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drorzel | April 27, 2006Imagine that you are doing a physics lab to measure the velocity of a small projectile. After making a bunch of measurements to four significant figures, and doing a bunch of arithmetic, you get a value of 4.371928645 m/s. After yet more gruelling math, you find the uncertainty associated with this number to be 0.0316479825 m/s.
How do you report your answer in a lab report?
(There was talk a while back about getting ScienceBlogs some fancy poll software that would allow me to do this with radio buttons and automatic counting, but I don't know how to do that yet, and I'm curious about the…
pharyngula | April 26, 2006Paul Nelson has been twittering about ORFans for some time now—he seems to precede his talks by threatening to make us evolutionists tremble in our boots by bringing them up, but he never seems to follow through. Ian Musgrave got tired of waiting for him to give us a coherent creationist argument about them, and has gone ahead and cut him off at the knees by explaining the place of ORFans in evolution.
In case you're baffled by the jargon, "ORF" is an Open Reading Frame, or a stretch of DNA bracketed by a start and stop codon; it's a kind of bare minimum criterion for recognizing an actual…
drorzel | April 26, 2006Bora/ coturnix over at Science and Politics has generated a lot of conversation via his taxonomy of science blog posts, mostly relating to the call for people to start publishing data and hypotheses on blogs. Much of the discussion that I've seen centers on the question of "scooping" (see, for example, here and here), but there's a wide range of reaction linked from the end of the original post.
Bora seems to regard it as a Bad Thing that people don't post data (though I should note that I did post some data during the Week in the Lab-- calibration data only, granted, but it's data...). I don…
pharyngula | April 26, 2006
The latest edition of the Tangled Bank is coming straight to you from Coruscant…and the opening text is almost as long as the latest from Lucas, although fortunately it doesn't say anything about the trade federation and boring treaties.
oracknows | April 26, 2006Oh, boy.
Last week, as part of my series Medicine and Evolution, I mentioned the blog of a homeschooled medical student who also happens to be a young earth creationist and used her as an example of why I feared that credulity towards a a pseudoscience that is so obviously wrong based on the empirical evidence, so easily debunked with so little effort is an indicator of credulity when it comes to other forms of pseudoscience, like quackery. I hadn't really planned on mentioning her again any time soon, or even ever, as I thought my point had been made.
Then a reader had to point out to me…
drorzel | April 26, 2006The people (well, person) who brought you the physics blog aggregator Mixed States have now rolled out a new biology-themed blog aggregator: Recombinants.
At the moment, it only has about six feeds going into it, and the content is about 70% PZ Myers, so head over there and suggest some biology feeds to be added to the mix.
razib | April 25, 2006Evolgen says:
Let's focus on two things: the hypothetical deductive method and essential information that you must know to be able to read the science section of a newspaper.
Hm. Amen. Sort of. Scientists in many fields needed to be straight-jacketed into the "hypothetico-deductive" model for a reason. I remember a phylogeneticist telling a group of us why the hypothetico-deductive method was crucial in his own work, before his time taxonomists would get into arguments where they would justify their opinion about systematic relationships with an operational "Cuz I said so!" Testing…
evolgen | April 25, 2006Via BioCurious comes this article on ten "science question[s] every high school graduate should be able to answer." Read the list -- most of the questions are bullshit. Ok, they aren't bullshit, but they are trivia. "What percentage of the earth is covered by water?" "What sorts of signals does the brain use to communicate sensations, thoughts and actions?" "Why is the sky blue?" "How old are the oldest fossils on earth?" I'll take potpourri for $400, Alex. Here are some questions every high school graduate should be able to answer:
What is a hypothesis?
What is a theory?
What is…
pharyngula | April 25, 2006This really is an excellent review of three books in the field of evo-devo—
From DNA to Diversity: Molecular Genetics and the Evolution of Animal Design (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll),
Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and
The Plausibility of Life:Resolving Darwin's Dilemma (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)—all highly recommended by me and the NY Times. The nice thing about this review, too, is that it gives a short summary of the field and its growing importance.
drorzel | April 25, 2006Via BioCurious, a list of science questions every high school graduate should be able to answer:
What percentage of the earth is covered by water?
What sorts of signals does the brain use to communicate sensations, thoughts and actions?
Did dinosaurs and humans ever exist at the same time?
What is Darwin’s theory of the origin of species?
Why does a year consist of 365 days, and a day of 24 hours?
Why is the sky blue?
What causes a rainbow?
What is it that makes diseases caused by viruses and bacteria hard to treat?
How old are the oldest fossils on earth?
Why do we put salt on sidewalks…
pharyngula | April 25, 2006We're having our last Café Scientifique Morris of the 2005-2006 school year tonight, at 6:00, at the Common Cup Coffeehouse here in beautiful downtown Morris, Minnesota. Our speaker is Mark Logan of the Mathematics discipline, who's going to be talking about "Origami in Math and Science"—that wonderful interdisciplinary stuff we liberal arts colleges do so well, tying together math and art.
It's a good thing we're doing it tonight so that we don't suck away Sean Carroll's audience for the Café Scientifique Chicago tomorrow.
oracknows | April 25, 2006I had wanted to proceed to part 5 of my Medicine and Evolution series, but, frankly, I wasn't much in the mood for anything serious over the weekend, and, let's face it, that case of the blog blahs continued even into yesterday. Otherwise I would have done my blog buds Abel Pharmboy and Bora more of a solid and tackled this a bit earlier, rather than posting about Jack Chick parodies and fluff about a possible new Star Trek movie.
Spurred on by Bora over at Science and Politics, Abel Pharmboy at Terra Sigillata has been discussing scienceblogging, whether it would be a good idea for science…
pharyngula | April 25, 2006Sciencebase has a short article on a potential new aphrodisiac. It's called PT-141, or bremelanotide, or Ac-Nle-cyclo[Asp-His-D-Phe-Arg-Trp-Lys]-OH ("PT-141" is the useful search term if you want to hit up PubMed), and it's a melanocortin agonist that works directly on the brain. It can be delivered as a nasal spray. It works on men, promoting erections, and it also seems to be effective on women, increasing sexual appetite.
"A dose of PT-141 results, in most cases, in a stirring in the loins in as little as 15 minutes," reports Julian Dibbell, "Women, according to one set of results, feel…
pharyngula | April 22, 2006John Wilkins has an excellent linky post on the subject of race. My position on the issue is Richard Lewontin's (seen here in a RealAudio lecture by Richard Lewontin), and more succinctly stated by Wilkins:
So, do I think there are races in biology as well as culture? No. Nothing I have seen indicates that humans nicely group into distinct populations of less than the 54 found by Feldman's group (probably a lot more - for instance, Papua New Guinea is not represented in their sample set). And this leads us to the paper by the Human Race and Ethnicity Working Group (rare to see a paper that…
pharyngula | April 21, 2006At least someone found my idea of reinventing humanity inspiring: Nemo Ramjet rendered this version of of my hexapodal sapient.
It's different than I would have pictured it—the way I juggled about the functionality of the head, I think the face would not have been at all recognizable as human—but the cool thing about imaginations is that ours are all different.
By the way, Nemo says he's drawn him in the midst of a religious argument, railing against the possibility that humanity could exist in anything other than this divine form, modeled on his God.
drorzel | April 21, 2006Over at the Seed editors blog, Maggie Wittlin asks who's the most overlooked scientist:
Which scientist (in your field or beyond) has been most seriously shafted? This could be taken two ways:
Who deserves to be more recognized, revered and renowned today than he or she is?
Who got passed over, ridiculed, etc. the most while he or she was alive?
It's a little ironic that I can point to a nice magazine profle of my nominee, but I would have to say Ralph Alpher. As a grad student, Alpher realized that the Big Bang should've left an echo in the form of an all-pervading radiation field, and even…