Science
oracknows | February 24, 2006One of the greatest challenges in medicine can sometimes be to convince a patient that the results of scientific and medical research apply to them, or, at the very least, to explain how such results apply. A couple of days ago, in an article the New York Times, Dr. Abigail Zuker, proposed one reason why this might be, beginning with a discussion with her mother in which she tries to convince her of the benefit of exercise, even in the elderly, a concept that her mother would have none of:
"Studies," she says, dripping scorn. "Don't give me studies. Look at Tee. Look at all the exercise she…
drorzel | February 24, 2006The votes are in, and have been carefully tabulated by our bleary-eyed accounting firm (that is, me-- I would've posted last night, but I went to see Chuck D speak (because I'm down with the old-school rap), and he went on for more than two hours...) . What looked like a runaway victory for Michelson and Morley actually tightened up quite a bit, thanks to a late surge by Michael Faraday:
Michelson-Morley: 23
Faraday: 19
Rutherford: 10
Galileo: 9
Roemer: 9
Aspect: 8.5
Hertz: 3
Cavendish: 2.5
Newton: 2
Hubble: 2
Mössbauer: 1
A total of 89 people voted, 90 if you count the one write-in vote for…
pharyngula | February 23, 2006This week's issue of Science contains a very strongly worded statement about the utility of evolutionary biology in medicine, and calls for an increase in education about evolution at all levels of the medical curriculum, from high school to med school. I've put the whole thing below the fold—it's good reading.
Medicine Needs Evolution
The citation of "Evolution in Action" as Science's 2005 breakthrough of the year confirms that evolution is the vibrant foundation for all biology. Its contributions to understanding
infectious disease and genetics are widely recognized, but its full potential…
pharyngula | February 23, 2006Say hello to Castorocauda lutrasimilis, a primitive mammalioform from the middle Jurassic—164 million years ago. Despite its great age, it has evidence of fur and guard hairs still preserved in the fossil, and was rather large for its time. It's estimated to have weighed about 500g (about a pound) and was over 400mm (over a foot) long in life, and as you can see from the reconstruction, shows signs of being aquatic. In size and lifestyle, it probably resembled the modern platypus.
Holotype of Castorocauda lutrasimilis [Jinzhou Museum of Paleontology (JZMP) 04-117]. (A) Photograph of the…
pharyngula | February 23, 2006The inaugural edition of the Carnival of the Animalcules is up. It's almost lunchtime, though, and you might want to wait until after you've eaten…especially before reading the one about fast-food toilet water.
pharyngula | February 23, 2006Maybe I shouldn't bring this up, since the last couple of lectures in my physiology class have been a swift overview of brain organization and function, and my students probably think I have sounded exactly like Pinky and the Brain singing about neuroanatomy. Only less entertaining. And at a ridiculous hour of the morning.
(via Mind Hacks)
drorzel | February 22, 2006Buried beneath some unseemly but justified squee-ing, Scalzi links to an article about "counterfactal computation", an experiment in which the group of Paul Kwiat group at Illinois managed to find the results of a quantum computation without running the computer at all. Really, there's not much to say to that other than "Whoa."
The article describing the experiment is slated to be published in Nature, so I don't have access to it yet, but I'll try to put together an explanation when I get a copy. The experiment involves a phenomenon know as the "Quantum Zeno Effect," though, which deserves a…
pharyngula | February 22, 2006Ah, the life of the female giant Australian cuttlefish…males fight for her affections, and during the mating season she will have sex with 2-8 different males each day, with an average total of 17 copulations per day. She can be picky, too, and rejects most of the mating attempts (yet still manages to mate up to 40 times a day). It must be a good life.
Males have a rougher time of it, I would think. There are many more males than females, and so it's a struggle to get access to one; the bigger, stronger males will guard females, acting as a consort, and use aggressive displays to chase off…
pharyngula | February 22, 2006
My daughter is learning about evolution in high school right now, and the problem isn't with the instructor, who is fine, but her peers, who complain that they don't see the connections. She mentioned specifically yesterday that the teacher had shown a cladogram of the relationships between crocodilians, birds, and mammals, and that a number of students insisted that there was no similarity between a bird and an alligator.
I may have to send this news article to school with her: investigators have found that a mutation in chickens causes them to develop teeth—and the teeth resemble those of…
drorzel | February 21, 2006I really don't mean to turn the whole blog over to all algebra, all the time, but Richard Cohen's idiocy has proved to be a good jumping-off point for a lot of interesting discussions (and a surprising number of comments, links, and TrackBacks...). The other ScienceBlogs comment on the whole thing that I'd like to address comes from Janet Stemwedel at Adventures in Ethics and Science, who asks about the student whose plight started this whole thing:Were there just so many kids to get through, and so little in the way of support (on the extra-help/shifting to a different course/evaluating for…
pharyngula | February 20, 2006Matthew Nisbet has a good list of things we ought to be doing. Number one on the list is what I also think is the biggest thing we have to do:
SCIENCE EDUCATION REMAINS CENTRALLY IMPORTANT.
And I have to admit that educating you, the readers of this weblog, is actually a small part of the task. The real job lies with our public school teachers—they're the ones shaping the education of the next generation—and no matter what we do right now, the evolution-creation struggle in the public consciousness is going to be going on for at least the next 20 years. It's very easy to wreck a school and…
drorzel | February 20, 2006(It's Presidents' Day, so remember to vote!)
Razib over at Gene Expression offers some thoughts on the algebra issue, in which he suggests some historical perspective: The ancient Greeks were not unintelligent, so the fact that many of us (rightly I believe) take symbolic algebra for granted as a necessary feature of our cognitive landscape is something to reflect upon. Maths that we assume to be fundamental elements of our mental toolkits would have been beyond the very conception of the most brilliant minds of our species over one thousand years ago.
I'm not really happy with this, because…
pharyngula | February 20, 2006As part of the ongoing migration to the new site, I've brought over some strangely popular articles: Tentacle sex, Tentacle sex, part deux, Squid nuptial dances, and Octopus sex. All across the world, people are wondering what the etiquette is if they should find themselves in a romantic situation with an amorous cephalopod, and it is my duty to provide the answers.
If only I'd thought of bringing these over last week, in time for Valentine's Day. I hope no one made any beastly gaffes because they couldn't find these articles in time…
pharyngula | February 18, 2006
Once upon a time, I was one of those nerds who hung around Radio Shack and played about with LEDs and resistors and capacitors; I know how to solder and I took my first old 8-bit computer apart and put it back together again with "improvements." In grad school I was in a neuroscience department, so I know about electrodes and ground wires and FETs and amplifiers and stimulators. Here's something else I know: those generic components in this picture don't do much on their own. You can work out the electrical properties of each piece, but a radio or computer or stereo is much, much more than a…
pharyngula | February 17, 2006Argonauta nodosa
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | February 16, 2006Take a group of seventh graders and ask them to draw pictures of and describe scientists: as you might expect, you get a bunch of pictures of lab coats and adjectives like "dorky". Take those same seventh graders and introduce them to some real scientists, and the descriptions change.
OK, if I had been one of the scientists they might still use the word "dorky", but in general, it's true that meeting scientists will almost always change people's perceptions of them.
Sir Oolius makes a good point: some of these cartoons of scientists suggest we ought to be rioting. I'm a little uncomfortable…
oracknows | February 16, 2006I've always had an interest in archaeology. Indeed, one of the elective courses that I most enjoyed in college was a prehistoric archaeology course. All of this shows why the following interests me.
Through a scientific analysis of ancient cave art, it's been found that human nature hasn't changed much in 35,000 years:
Many art historians and anthropologists believe Paleolithic cave wall art was done by accomplished shaman-artists, but mixed in with the finer paintings are graffiti-like scenes of sex and hunting.
An analysis of thousands of paintings from the late Pleistocene epoch suggests…
drorzel | February 15, 2006A continuation of the lecture transcription/ working out of idea for Boskone that I started in the previous post. There's a greater chance that I say something stupid about quantum measurement in this part, but you'll have to look below the fold to find out...
At the end of the previous post, I wrote:We can verify this by doing the experiment with single particles, and what we see is exactly the prediction of quantum theory. If we send one electron at a time toward a set of slits, and detect the electron position on the far side, we see individual electrons arriving one at a time, in an…
drorzel | February 14, 2006I'm teaching our sophomore-level modern physics course this term, which goes by the title "Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and Their Applications." The first mid-term was a couple of weeks ago, on Relativity (special, not general), and the second mid-term is tomorrow, on Quantum Mechanics, and then we get three weeks of applications (basically, whatever topics out of atomic, molecular, solid state, nuclear, and particle physics I can manage to fit in).
I like to end the quantum section with one lecture on superposition and measurement, which isn't covered particularly well in the book. It's…