Science
carlyo | April 20, 2014Guest Blog by Dr. Catherine Mohr
Senior Director of Medical Research, Intuitive Surgical
USA Science & Engineering Festival X-STEM Speaker
I work on surgical robots - at the intersection of cool, high tech, and helping people get well. One of the things I like most is that my job changes every day as I look for new technologies that might help us improve patient outcomes. For example, one day we may play with new kinds of lasers for cutting bone, the next we are looking for new less invasive ways of accessing the body to do more effective surgeries, and the next we are looking out 10 to…
drorzel | April 17, 2014As I've mentioned here before, I do a lot of work these days in my local Starbucks. This is slightly ironic, as I don't like coffee-- instead, I order tea, which I put in an insulated travel mug. I tend to get the tea, carry the mug back to the table, and let it steep while I boot up the laptop, then pull the teabags out. I get a hot water refill after I finish the first mug, and take it over to campus if I'm going in that day, and those generally carries me through the morning.
At some point, I noticed that when I had the cap on, I tended to end up with a small puddle of liquid next to the…
drorzel | April 16, 2014The last couple of days have been ridiculously hectic, but Rhett and I did manage to record another episode of Uncertain Dots, our twelfth:
This time out, we talk about labs, undergrad research, kids doing chores, weather, student course evaluations, and I didn't really rant about superheroes. Relevant to the weather thing, I offer the "featured image" up top, showing last night's snow at Chateau Steelypips. Spring in New England, baby!
pharyngula | April 15, 2014He hates Tiktaalik. He hates it so much he even has a hard time spelling its name correctly.
Tikaalik is again being popularized through the new PBS series "Your Inner Fish.'' it's really a desperate con job on the part of evolutionists who can't defend their evolutionary fictional story.
He actually surprises me a little bit: one of his arguments that it can't possibly be a transitional form is that it is only a fossil. That's one I hadn't heard before. So extinct species can't be evidence for evolution anymore, because only living species count?
Because it belongs to the group of lobe…
pharyngula | April 15, 2014Virginia Hughes tells us about techniques to look inside the zebrafish brain. The gang at HHMI are using two photon imaging and clever image analysis to get very clear, sharp images of fluorescent neurons.
Oy, that's pretty. This old codger did some of that stuff, many years ago, but you know what we had to do? Point injections of tracer dyes, followed by serial sectioning and reconstruction. Early on we use injections of horseradish peroxidase into, for instance, the muscle, so that neurons in transit through the lesion site would pick up the enzyme…and then we'd have to fix and process…
drorzel | April 15, 2014I'm not really a comic-book guy, but I've watched a bunch of comic-book movies recently. Kate was really fired up for the new Captain America movie, so I finally got around to watching the first one as background for that, then when I was sleep-deprived last week I watched the second Thor movie via on-demand cable, then Sunday evening Kate and I went to see Captain America: The Winter Soldier in the theater (her second time watching it-- she's really fired up).
Mostly, this has served to confirm that I'm not a comic-book guy. I'm just not invested enough in the idea of a movie about these…
drorzel | April 14, 2014
A diabolical psychologist brings a mathematician in for an experiment. The mathematician is seated in a chair on a track leading to a bed on which there is an extremely attractive person of the appropriate gender, completely naked. The psychologist explains "This person will do absolutely anything you want, subject to one condition: every five minutes, we will move your chair across one-half of the distance separating you."
The mathematician explodes in outrage. "What! It'll take an infinite time to get there. This is torture!" They storm out.
The next experimental subject is a physicist,…
catdynamics | April 12, 2014A frightening fraction of my open tabs are some of Bee's posts at Backreaction - so to save my browsers, I dump them here for further future perusal:
Are irreproducible scientific results okay and just business as usual?
Shut up and let me think
Should the Nobel Prize be given to collaborations and institution?
Women in Science, Again?
Science Martketing needs Consumer Feedback
Does Modern Science Discourage Creativity?
The comeback of massive gravity?
Can Planck Stars Exist?
Book review: “The Theoretical Minimum – Quantum Mechanics” By Susskind and Friedman
Do we live in a…
catdynamics | April 11, 2014In times past we have lovingly tracked the proposal frenzy as the near annual Hubble Space Telescope proposal deadline approaches.
As was noted by Julianne several years ago, and confirmed over the last half dozen cycles, the shape of the curve of number of submitted proposals as a function of time until the deadline is nearly invariant.
Interestingly, the total number of proposals also does not change much, some dips and spikes with the loss and availability of instruments, but the total is near stationary and some measure of the statistical saturation of the ability of astronomers to put…
carlyo | April 11, 2014The National Science Foundation returns to sponsor the USA Science & Engineering Festival and will showcase an incredible group of exhibits at the NSF and Friends Pavilion! Visit the National Science Foundation's exhibit area to explore tsunami waves, mind control, robots, spiders, cranberry acids, crazy physics experiments and more! Stage performances, a wearable tech fashion show and interactive activities will entertain and engage visitors of all ages.
Listed below is a sampling of the fun and excitement you can expect at the NSF & Friends Pavilion:
Wild Lives in Your Own Back…
carlyo | April 9, 2014
You've heard the saying: Science is truly all around us. Get ready to discover how accurate this maxim really is as Science Buddies, an award-winning, non-profit resource in STEM for students, joins the USA Science & Engineering Festival as a major sponsor. Moreover, don't miss Science Buddies' exciting, hands-on exhibits for kids at the Festival Expo, which include delving into the physics of catapult launching and how to build your own robot "bugs" that follow light!
It's a natural fit for us at Science Buddies to join with the Festival in sharing projects that encourage kids to keep…
drorzel | April 9, 2014No, this isn't another blog post lamenting the fact that music writing gets far more attention than science writing. If anything, it's a bit of an argument that science writing ought to be less like popular music writing.
On Twitter this past weekend Jim Henley, one of the few bloggers I consider "old school" (the name of this blog was influenced by his Unqualified Offerings, though he's mostly stepped back from that) had a long series of tweets about pop-music writing, responding to some arguments that music criticism has degenerated and hardly has anything to do with music any more. Jim…
drorzel | April 8, 2014We took a week off last week because Rhett was away on a Secret Mission, but we're back and better than ever this week. More uncertain! More dotty! Or something!
Topics for this week include oblique references to Rhett's mission, some discussion of the Geocentric Janeway debacle, good and bad places to have a conference, why you shouldn't eat conference center food, why more physicists aren't on Twitter, and blogger gatherings.
Here's a link to the Stealth Creationists and Illinois Nazis story I alluded to. It's from 2007, after the blogging dinosaurs but before the blogging armored sloths.
drorzel | April 7, 2014Another Monday, another recap of a new episode of the Cosmos reboot. This one was all about optics, and much of it was excellent. This was in part due to the fact that its first couple of historical segments focused on non-Western figures, and I don't know as much about their background to be able to nitpick. First up was Mozi, a Chinese philosopher from circa 400BCE, who may have been the first to demonstrate the camera obscura technique of projecting images from a pinhole in the wall of a dark room. He was followed by ibn al-Haytham, circa 1000CE, who did the first fairly complete analysis…
carlyo | April 4, 2014Don't miss the opportunity to learn about the science of the paranormal from X-STEM Speaker Dr. Joe Schwarcz at the X-STEM Extreme STEM Symposium on April 24 ! Hear from this noted professor of chemistry from Canada's McGill University and how he uses his multi-faceted skills as a chemical scientist, magician, author, food expert and motivational speaker to inspire kids in science in fascinating ways! Learn how to register for the X-STEM Symposium by clicking this link.
He's known to his many students and fans simply as "Dr. Joe," but then Joe Schwarcz, professor of chemistry, has always kept…
catdynamics | April 3, 2014In the great tradition of tracking Amazing Norwegian Meteorite Stories, we bring you:
Meteorite almost hits Norwegian skydiver
h/t Stjörnufræðivefurinn
Short Norwegian version...
drorzel | April 2, 2014I've lost track of who on social media pointed me to this, but this blog post about testimony to the Michigan Legislature is a brilliant demonstration of what's so difficult about teaching even simple subjects. Deborah Ball, the Dean of the education school at the University of Michigan gives the legislators a simple grading exercise from elementary school math. The video here is worth a watch:
(This also includes one of the greatest failed SNL references ever. It flops badly enough that the guy responsible is nearly as embarrassed as he ought to be...)
The problem she's illustrating is one…
carlyo | April 1, 2014By Travis Earles, Lockheed Martin Senior Manager, Advanced Material and Nanotechnology Initiatives
“Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were.”
-Carl Sagan, famed astronomer, astrophysicist and cosmologist
Imagine a world where we have the ability to understand and control matter at the nanoscale, where unique phenomena enable novel applications. A world where novel materials enable entirely new approaches to design and production that is faster and better than ever before.
The nanotechnology exhibits at the upcoming USA Science & Engineering Festival will provide a…
drorzel | April 1, 2014It's the time of year where colleges and grad schools are making admissions decisions, and faculty job search season is winding down (for tenure-track positions in physics, anyway-- our search for a visiting professor for next year is still underway). In the spirit of the season, then, Matt "Dean Dad" Reed asks about the writing of reference letters.
Given how much letters can count, I’m struck that we almost never talk about how to write them. They’re a genre of their own.
For example, I’ve been told -- and I don’t know how true this is -- that without a FERPA waiver, it’s illegal to…
drorzel | March 31, 2014The fourth episode of the Cosmos reboot aired last night, and as I said on Twitter it was a beautiful demonstration of why I'm finding this show intensely frustrating. There were flashes of brilliance, but also quite a few bits that left me shaking my head. Thus fitting the pattern of the previous episodes-- I didn't comment on last week's, because I was taking a break, but it had the same sorts of issues, too-- so I guess that's just what this show is.
Again, there was some very good stuff-- the opening framing device with William Herschel talking about ghosts was great, and Tyson's tour…