Science
razib | April 14, 2006As a follow up to my post below, here is a comment over at Uncertain Principles:
Being a lowly biologist myself, I will just note that there is a long tradition of physicists making important contributions in biology (Schroedinger, Pauling), but I can't think of any reverse cases -- that is, biologists who made important discoveries in physics. (That doesn't, of course, mean that there aren't any, and I'd love to hear about some.)
As a point of fact, Linus Pauling was originally a physical chemist. If physical chemists are classed with the physicists I think many biochemistry majors will…
pharyngula | April 14, 2006Science asks awkward questions, doesn't it? I got a link to a recent paper in the BMJ (thanks, SEF!) that asks one of those questions—can fetuses feel pain?—and then takes it apart clinically, coming up with an answer that will make some adults feel pain: that answer is no.
The first step is to work out when the machinery of the nervous system is first present, and when it is simply possible for the fetus to detect unpleasant stimuli. The nervous system has its beginnings early in development, with neurulation at around 3 weeks after fertilization, but it is initially little more than a…
pharyngula | April 14, 2006Science fairs usually have a few pleasant surprises, a lot of ho-hum projects done by rote with little thought (sometimes clearly done the night before), and a few stinkers that reveal nothing but the student's ignorance. The science teachers are supposed to screen the project proposals to prevent that from happening, though, so the really bad projects usually don't get through. There's also a hierarchy: local to county or regional to state, and only the best are supposed to progress. State science fairs usually have some very impressive work and some that might be naive, but at least the…
razib | April 13, 2006Alex and PZ point me to this quote from one John Barrow:
When Selfish Gene author Richard Dawkins challenged physicist John Barrow on his formulation of the constants of nature at last summer's Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship lectures, Barrow laughed and said, "You have a problem with these ideas, Richard, because you're not really a scientist. You're a biologist."
Ouch!!! Many physical scientists look down on life scientists. I had a friend, who shall remain nameless (who knows his own name) who was habitually contemptuous of the likes of life scientists. I was only a righteous…
evolgen | April 13, 2006William Harris came to my university to perpetuate misconceptions last September. I intended to write a summary of the experience, but I could never muster enough anti-venom to deal with his poison. In lieu of a formal treatment of Harris's bullshit, I've decided to (quite tardily) present a short description of what makes a discipline science. This is inspired by my inability get Harris to acknowledge that all scientific disciplines invoke observable causes to the events they attempt to explain. More after the jump.
I will refrain from comparing supernatural and naturalistic explanations…
pharyngula | April 12, 2006John Lynch beat me to this story about catfish feeding on land, so I'll be brief. It shows how the eel catfish, Channallabes apus, can manage to take an aquatic feeding structure and use it to capture terrestrial meals. Many fish rely on suction feeding: gape the mouth widely and drop the pharyngeal floor, and the resulting increase in volume of the oral cavity just sucks in whatever is in front of the animal. That doesn't work well at all in the air, of course—try putting your face a few inches in front of a hamburger, inhale abruptly, and see how close you come to sucking in your meal. So…
pharyngula | April 12, 2006A very cool idea: portray the Evolutionary Timeline on a web page, drawing it so that one pixel equals 30,000 years.
Go to the page and just keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling…
pharyngula | April 12, 2006Martin Brazeau is looking for volunteers to spend July in Atlantic Canada helping him split rocks, looking for Late Devonian to Early Carboniferous fossils. Let's see…I wonder if the family would mind if I abandoned them for a month? I don't have any important responsibilities, do I?
drorzel | April 12, 2006Back when ScienceBlogs was all new and shiny, I did a couple of posts asking questions of the other bloggers. I got involved with other things after a while, and stopped posting those, so I'm not sure this will still work, but here's a question for other ScienceBloggers, or science bloggers in general, that I thought of when I was writing about science books:
What topic or phenomenon that's generally in your area do you really wish people would stop asking you about?
I don't mean a major political controversy that you have a strong opinion about, but might be tired of (so no "creationism"…
drorzel | April 12, 2006The Kuiper Belt Controversy continues, with the lastest round showing up in the Times today: Planet Discovered Last Year, Thought to Be Larger Than Pluto, Proves Roughly the Same Size:
The object -- still unnamed more than a year after its discovery but tagged with the temporary designation 2003 UB313 and nicknamed Xena by the discoverer -- covered an area only 1.5 pixels wide in the digital image, taken by the space telescope in December. But that was enough to extract the diameter: 1,490 miles, give or take 60 miles.
A previous estimate by a team of German researchers, based on measurements…
pharyngula | April 11, 2006The "neurotheologist" Michael Persinger is a fellow with an interesting idea: that the sensation of god is a product of activity in the brain. He induces activity in the brain with electromagnetic fields, and some people feel a sense of oneness with the universe or that aliens are peering over their shoulder.
Richard Dawkins is an infamous atheist who needs no introduction here.
Put the two together, have Persinger strap his electromagnetic helmet on Dawkins' head and stimulate the temporal lobes, the apparent seat of spiritual sensation, and what happens?
Nothing.
Horizon introduced Dr…
drorzel | April 11, 2006One of the features I always like in the print edition of Seed is the lab notebook pictorial. Every month (or, at least, all three of the months that I've looked at the print edition), they publish a reproduction of a page or two from the lab notebook of a working scientist. It's sort of cool to see how they differ from one field to another, while remaining largely the same.
Back when I was doing the "A Week in the Lab" series of posts, somebody asked me about my own lab notebooks. I present here the reason why Seed is never likely to ask me to supply notebook pages for their monthly feature…
drorzel | April 11, 2006On a note related to the previous entry, Inside Higher Ed had a longer story about Carl Wieman leaving Colorado for Canada (following in the footsteps of his post-docs?), another guy putting his money where his mouth is:
First, he contributed $250,000 of his Nobel Prize award to the Physics Education Technology Fund supporting classroom initiatives at CU-Boulder. He hoped it would prompt other donations, but the momentum never materialized.
Last year, during his sabbatical, Wieman wrote 35 proposals for funding for teaching projects. All he got was one small grant from the National Science…
drorzel | April 11, 2006There's a nice profile of Randy Olson, the biologist-turned filmmaker behind A Flock of Dodos, which takes a hard look at both sides of the creationism wars:
The biologist, Randy Olson, accepts that there is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution as an explanation for the diversity and complexity of life on earth. He agrees that intelligent design's embrace of a supernatural "agent" puts it outside the realm of science.
But when he watches the advocates of intelligent design at work, he sees pleasant people who speak plainly, convincingly and with humor. When scientists…
pharyngula | April 10, 2006
This morning I got a question in e-mail, asking if I'd heard of a particular paper. Of course I had, it's a very fun bit of research...and then I realized I'd never mentioned it on the weblog before. I guess it's because it's focused entirely on the phylum Chordata, specifically one rather peculiar species—Homo sapiens. I probably just assumed nobody would be interested, because there aren't any arthropods or molluscs in it.
The paper is all about visualizing the arrangement of organs during coitus. People have tried to figure out how the pieces all fit together internally using cadavers…
pharyngula | April 10, 2006Ian Musgrave does a wonderful job explaining the recent Science paper on the evolution of hormone binding sites. This is the work that Behe has called "piddling", and claims that it has no relevance to the evolvability of complex biochemical systems. Ian takes this idea apart with a quick tour of the wandering goalposts of irreducible complexity:
Behe and the Discovery Insitute have reacted quickly and negatively to this paper. But in doing so they display a curious amnesia. Behe says:
I certainly would not classify their system as IC. The IC systems I discussed in Darwin's Black Box contain…
pharyngula | April 10, 2006After I summarized how Plan B contraception works, I'm still getting letters confusing it with RU486. RU486 induces abortions. Plan B does not. RU486 is the opposite of Plan B.
Remember that what Plan B is is an artificially high dose of progesterone (it actually uses a progesterone analog, but it's effectively the same.) Progesterone is a hormone that maintains the uterine lining in a nice, rich, spongy, receptive state, and it also suppresses another hormone, LH, that is what triggers ovulation. Plan B keeps the uterus primed for implantation, but tells the ovary to hold its fire and not…
pharyngula | April 9, 2006It's been a long day for me—I made yet another of those long drives into Minneapolis and back. It was worth it, though. We had the first meeting of a new group, Minnesota Citizens for Science Education; I think it's going to be a useful resource for the state. It consists of several of us college professor types, plenty of K-12 educators, and a few business people, and we're all going to be working together over the next few months to put together information to further the cause of good science teaching in Minnesota.
Details will have to wait, though. We'll be aiming for a formal…
drorzel | April 7, 2006Katherine Sharpe asked about the best science books ever, as a proxy for "what got you into science?" I wasn't able to give a really good answer to that question, but I will share a science-related anecdote from when I was a kid.
There's a good chance that this will come off as either painfully dorky or just plain cloying, so I'll put it below the fold, lest it damage my street cred.
(Shut up.)
When I was a kid, I watched a Nova special on dinosaurs-- it must have been in 1981 or so, when I would've been ten-- which presented the asteroid-impact theory of dinosaur extinction. The theory was…
drorzel | April 7, 2006Over at the new Seed blog, here on ScienceBlogs, Katherine Sharpe asks about the best science books ever (a topic that was also discussed at Cosmic Variance some time back.
I've been sort of swamped this week, but that's only part of the reason why I haven't responded. The main reason is a shameful secret:
(Below the fold... Isn't this suspenseful?)
The fact is, I don't read many pop-science books, and I never really have. I'm not sure why that was in the past, but these days, it just seems too much like work. Not "work" in the sense of being difficult, but "work" in the sense of "this is how…