Science
pharyngula | March 16, 2006Nah, I thought this has got to be a joke:
The Pentagon's defence scientists want to create an army of cyber-insects that can be remotely controlled to check out explosives and send transmissions.
But no…there is actually a DARPA call for proposals.
DARPA seeks innovative proposals to develop technology to create insect-cyborgs, possibly enabled by intimately integrating microsystems within insects, during their early stages of metamorphoses. The healing processes from one metamorphic stage to the next stage are expected to yield more reliable bio-electromechanical interface to insects, as…
oracknows | March 13, 2006{NOTE: Here is the post that was delayed last week due to my announcement of arson at the Holocaust History Project.}
It occurs to me that I haven't done much straight science blogging lately. Yes, debunking pseudoscience and quackery is fun, useful, and has the potential to educate people about how science is misused, but this is ScienceBlogs. Since arriving here four weeks ago, I haven't fulfilled my quota of science blogging, and it's time to remedy that.
Fortunately, while perusing a recent issue of Cancer Research, I found just the ticket, something that would let me discuss science and…
evolgen | March 12, 2006Hot on the heels of Chad's project to find the greatest physics experiment ever (see, also, his call for the greatest experiment or discovery in other fields), The Science Creative Quarterly settles the debate the only logical way possible: a single elimination cage match tournament.
pharyngula | March 10, 2006I must purge the mailbox of a few worthy links…so here they are.
There are a couple of calls for submissions:
The Tangled Bank
Carnival of Liberals
I and the Bird
A few carnivals I failed to mention this week:
Carnival of the feminists
Carnival of Education
Freethought Filter is back up and running again!
Darksyde addresses the Fermi "paradox". I don't think it's a paradox at all, and that the answer from his list is the rarity solution.
pharyngula | March 9, 2006There were all kinds of rumors today (from Drudge, of all places) that NASA was going to announce some major discovery related to life elsewhere in the solar system. While that would be incredibly cool, I was dubious—anyone remember the Martian "bacteria"? NASA has a rather poor reputation for this sort of thing.
Anyway, Bad Astronomy has the actual news: it's interesting, but the media blew it way out of proportion. Plumes of water (they think) have been observed on Enceladus, a moon of Saturn.
I'd be more enthused if the earlier hype hadn't switched on my skeptical gland and flooded my…
pharyngula | March 9, 2006
Remember Snuppy, the cloned puppy? He's been living under a cloud for a while now, since one of his creators was Woo-Suk Hwang, the Korean scientist who was found to have faked data and exploited his workers, and there was concern that perhaps the dog cloning experiment was also tainted.
Put those fears to rest. Two groups of researchers have independently analyzed Snuppy and its putative clone parent, and both agree that it is most likely a clone. The nuclear markers between the two were identical, while mitochondrial markers were different—exactly what you'd expect in this kind of clone,…
pharyngula | March 9, 2006My morning was spent at the local high school today, talking to the biology classes about the evidence for evolution. This wasn't in response to any specific worries—in fact, talking to the instructor, it's clear that they're doing a decent job of covering the basic concepts here already—but that my daughter is in the class, and she thought it would be fun to have her Dad join in the conversation. I will say that it was very obliging of the Chronicle of Higher Ed to publish this today:
In a packed IMAX theater in St. Louis last month, a middle-school teacher took the stage and lectured some…
pharyngula | March 7, 2006
I'm teaching my developmental biology course this afternoon, and I have a slightly peculiar approach to the teaching the subject. One of the difficulties with introducing undergraduates to an immense and complicated topic like development is that there is a continual war between making sure they're introduced to the all-important details, and stepping back and giving them the big picture of the process. I do this explicitly by dividing my week; Mondays are lecture days where I stand up and talk about Molecule X interacting with Molecule Y in Tissue Z, and we go over textbook stuff. I'm…
drorzel | March 7, 2006Via BioCurious, the Public Library of Science offers an op-ed titled Ten Simple Rules for Getting Published. The advice is aimed at biologists, but it's broadly applicable. I especially like:
Rule 4: If you do not write well in the English language, take lessons early; it will be invaluable later.
This is not just about grammar, but more importantly comprehension. The best papers are those in which complex ideas are expressed in a way that those who are less than immersed in the field can understand. Have you noticed that the most renowned scientists often give the most logical and simply…
stoat | March 4, 2006Venturing onto thin ground for me, and giving the stringy folk a chance to patronise me in return. So... I've been reading Kuhn, the structure of scientific revolutions. An interesting book, which I shall blog about in a bit. In some ways its a bit like reading Leviathan, but in reverse.
So: the basic point is: that scientists do "normal" science for most of the time, until enough observations pile up that simply cannot be explained under the current theory, or until complications in the theory needed to explain obs piles up, and eventually someone comes up with a blindingly novel viewpoint,…
pharyngula | March 3, 2006Darksyde's latest Science Friday is an interview with Michael Grunwald on the subject of the Florida Everglades. It's a mostly bad news with threads of forlorn hope scattered throughout, like most environmental news.
The bad news is that the ecosystem is in a state of near-collapse. Lake Okeechobee is going to hell; it's the color of espresso. The Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie estuaries are just gross. And CERP is already way over budget, behind schedule, and off track; Congress is losing interest in funding it. The good news is that there are signs that Floridians are beginning to recognize…
drorzel | March 3, 2006Via Matt McIrvin (whose earlier entry on "Nerd Bravado" is also a must-read), the best explanation I've heard so far of the whole "Why are there so few women in scinece?" debate: they got better jobs:
One of my students, we'll call him Bill, in an introductory computer science class said that he wanted to be a biologist when he grew up. What biologists had Bill met? They were all professors at MIT and about half of them had won the Nobel Prize. This is hardly an average sample of people who went to Biology graduate school! Fortunately, Bill was a tall good-looking fellow. He managed to score…
oracknows | March 3, 2006Occasionally, while perusing EurekAlert!, I come across studies that I like to call "Well, duh!" studies because they seem to come to conclusions that are mind-numbingly obvious. For example, this one:
If women want the best possible service at a clothing store, they had better be looking fashionable and well-groomed before they hit the mall.
A new study found that well-dressed and groomed women received the friendliest and, in some cases, fastest service from salesclerks.
Researchers secretly observed interactions between customers and salesclerks at three large-sized women's clothing stores…
pharyngula | March 2, 2006
I've been savoring this lovely used book I picked up a little while ago, The Book of Spiders and Scorpions by Rod Preston-Mafham, and am appreciating more than the fact that it is full of beautiful photography of spiders and lots of general information on arachnid behavior and physiology; it's also true that spiders are awfully sexy beasts. They are playful and romantic and kinky and enthusiastic and ferocious and savage and exotic, and really know how to have a good time. I thought I'd share a few of the pretty pictures and details of the arachnid sex life with the readers of Pharyngula—so…
pharyngula | March 1, 2006If you live near Austin, on 9 March there will be A Debate on the History of Life on Earth with Sahotra Sarkar and Paul Nelson. I scowl disapprovingly on the debate format: it means half the time is going to be wasted with some creationist babbling on stage. The topic, "Can the history of life on Earth be explained by purely natural processes?", doesn't sound particularly promising, and simply invites the creationist to say "no", although he won't have any evidence to support that conclusion. Go to hear Sarkar, though, which should be interesting.
New Yorkers can attend the Bridges symposium…
pharyngula | March 1, 2006Powerline. Round about these parts, that name is pretty much a synonym for stupid, and I see they're doing a good job of maintaining their reputation. You'd think they'd learn that whenever they step into the domain of science, their level of ignorance is even more palpably apparent than usual.
Their latest embarrassment was prompted by an egregiously idiotic article from Michael Fumento, which catalogs an error-filled collection of so-called biases in science. The assrocket's conclusion?
The moral of the story is that the leading scientific journals have been taken over by liberals who value…
oracknows | February 27, 2006
I love blog carnivals.
In fact, I love 'em so much that I hosted four of them took one over when its creator decided to retire from blogging.
But here's one that PZ, RPM, Afarensis, and all of the other ScienceBloggers inclined to defend evolution will want to wander over to see just how inane some creationist arguments can be. Indeed, the Pooflinger has already targeted them for some particularly ripe debunkings:
Yesterday marked the launch of an entirely new carnival over at Radaractive called, amusingly, the "Darwin Is Dead" carnival. Oh yeah: and it began with a whopping five (count 'em…
pharyngula | February 27, 2006Bone is a sophisticated substance, much more than just a rock-like mineral in an interesting shape. It's a living tissue, invested with cells dedicated to continually remodeling the mineral matrix. That matrix is also an intricate material, threaded with fibers of a protein, type II collagen, that give it a much greater toughness—it's like fiberglass, a relatively brittle substance given resilience and strength with tough threads woven within it. Bone is also significantly linked to cartilage, both in development and evolution, with earlier forms having a cartilaginous skeleton that is…