Science
illconsidered | July 7, 2011I have been remiss in not bringing this excellent resource to the attention of AFTIC readers earlier. From the invaluable Skeptical Science website comes a brilliant interactive history of climate science.
Any comments on the choices for classification? I think it over counts skeptic and neutral papers.
pharyngula | July 7, 2011I found a recent paper in Nature fascinating, but why is hard to describe — you need to understand a fair amount of general molecular biology and development to see what's interesting about it. So those of you who already do may be a little bored with this explanation, because I've got to build it up slowly and hope I don't lose everyone else along the way. Patience! If you're a real smartie-pants, just jump ahead and read the original paper in Nature.
A little general background.
Let's begin with an abstract map of a small piece of a strand of DNA. This is a region of fly DNA that encodes a…
catdynamics | July 6, 2011As everybody knows, there is one thing you must never do before launch, and that is name it.
Total jinx.
Not of course that we are superstitious, that'd be silly.
Some of us just cringed when the Next Generation Space Telescope was given a proper name by an over keen administrator while still in pre-pre phase A.
Still, we muddle along, and so it goes.
Then came the delays, and cost overruns, and reviews and reports.
Not all of it was NASA's fault - I have clear memories of Congress vacillating for a year or two on authorizing use of a foreign heavy launcher, even though it was clear the…
catdynamics | July 6, 2011Well, it was a good four centuries or so, but after a good run, one of the older watches on the Rhine is coming to an end.
Word came in mid-June that the Dutch government cuts were going to lead to some "consolidation" in astronomy, and that Utrecht would be cut.
We were asked not to kick up a fuzz about it, for local political reasons, but soon enough the story spread:
One Small Step broke the story,
with the e-Astronomer also chiming in.
Official response of the Astronomical Institute is here.
So, Dutch academia is facing "austerity" - 20% cuts in particular for Utrecht University, and,…
drorzel | July 6, 2011Today's Links Dump came late because I was at the meeting of the APS's Committee on Informing the Public. We apologize for the inconvenience, but I was too busy acquiring this critically important scientific data:
What is that, you ask? It's this:
That's the Superman roller coaster at the Six Flags America park outside of DC, which is where we're meeting this time. Lots of amusement parks do Physics Days as outreach programs, so we did the Physics Day thing ourselves, wearing ugly blue vests holding accelerometers on the major rides. Of course, the vest-mounted accelerometer I was wearing…
pharyngula | July 6, 2011Phil Senter has published the most deviously underhanded, sneaky, subtle undermining of the creationist position I've ever seen, and I applaud him for it. What he did was to take them seriously, something I could never do, and treat their various publications that ape the form of the scientific literature as if they actually were real science papers, and apply their methods consistently to an analysis of taxonomy. So on the one hand, it's bizarre and disturbing to see the like of Ken Ham, Jerry Bergman, and Henry Morris get actual scientific citations, but on the other hand, seeing their…
oracknows | July 5, 2011Darn it all!
I knew they'd find us out. I just knew it:
Actually, I'm happy. Our diversion has worked. While the conspiracy loons will be protesting the lesser of two meetings, the real work in crushing conspiracies and ensuring our world domination will be some 600 miles away in Las Vegas at The Amaz!ng Meeting 9.
A pity, though, that I and my fellow skeptical conspirators can't be two places at once. The discussions of toxic murder meters, mandated vaccines, aerial toxins, and starting perpetual wars in order to assure progress towards a World Government and Hitlerian New World Order…
drorzel | July 5, 2011The fourth content area from my whirlwind overview of DAMOP is "traditional" AMO physics. This was the hardest to talk about in my talk, because I know it the least well, but ironically, that makes it really easy to write up here, because I don't have much to say about it.
Where the other areas were largely about using atomic, molecular, and optical physics to do stuff (simulating condensed matter systems, generating coherent x-rays, demonstrating cool quantum effects), this sub-sub-field is concerned with directly investigating the properties of atoms and molecules, usually by bouncing other…
drorzel | July 5, 2011I'm going to be at an amusement park tomorrow, for a meeting of the APS's Committee on Informing the Public, which oversees the APS outreach program. Why an amusement park? Because a common outreach-type program is to do a Physics Day at an amusement park and talk about the physics of roller coasters and the like. And why should we miss out on all that fun? we have a responsibility to make sure that the physics content of these programs is sound.
As part of this, I'll be going on a bunch of rides-- for SCIENCE, mind you-- and it occurs to me that while the park or the APS may supply some sort…
oracknows | July 4, 2011I saw this story on Friday and almost couldn't wait the weekend to blog about it. However, since the conference that was brought to my attention isn't until November, I ultimately decided that it would keep. At least until now.
This story is about Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health. Unlike some bloggers, personally, as a physician and scientist I don't much care about what religion Dr. Collins ascribes to. Unlike some writers such as Sam Harris, most definitely do not consider his strong Christian faith a disqualification for holding the position that he now…
bioephemera | July 3, 2011From the Smithsonian, a short video about using technology to virtually reassemble ancient art from fragments long carried away and dispersed:
Majestic sixth-century Chinese Buddhist sculpture is combined with 3-D imaging technology in this exploration of one of the most important groups of Buddhist devotional sites in early medieval China. Carved into the mountains of northern China, the Buddhist cave temples of Xiangtangshan were the crowning cultural achievement of the Northern Qi dynasty (550-77 CE). Once home to a magnificent array of sculptures--monumental Buddhas, divine attendant…
drorzel | July 1, 2011Third of the five research categories within DAMOP that I talked about is Quantum Phenomena. This is a little bit of a catch-all, as there are a few different things going on in this area. They are all unified, though, by the fact that they end up making quantum mechanical effects manifest in some way, either as a means to an end, or just for the sake of showing that quantum mechanics is really weird.
What do I mean "making quantum mechanical effects manifest?" Basically, demonstrating one of the essential elements that I talked about last year: showing the wave nature of matter,…
drorzel | June 30, 2011The second in the DAMOP research categories I talked about is "Extreme Lasers," a name I was somewhat hesitant to use, as every time I see "Extreme [noun]," I get a flash of Stephen Colbert doing air guitar. It is, however, the appropriate term, because these laser systems push the limits of what's possible both in terms of the pulse duration (attosecond pulses are common, with 1as = 0.000000000000000001 s) and the pulse intensity (1014 W/cm2 is a typical order-of-magnitude, and some systems get much higher than that).
One of the main tricks for generating these ultra-short pulses is to do…
pharyngula | June 30, 2011I got a letter from a creationist today, claiming that "Darwinism is falsified," based on an article in Nature. It's kind of amazing; this article was just published today, and the metaphorical digital ink on it is barely metaphorically dry, and creationists are already busily mangling it.
It's a good article describing some recent fossil discoveries, found in a 515 million year old deposit in South Australia. Matthew Cobb has already summarized the paper, so I'll be brief on the details, but it's very cool. What was found was a collection of arthropod eye impressions, probably from cast-off…
drorzel | June 29, 2011The first of the five categories of active research at DAMOP that I described in yesterday's post is "Ultracold Matter." The starting point for this category of research is laser cooling to get a gas of atoms down to microkelvin temperatures (that is, a few millionths of a degree above absolute zero. Evaporative cooling can then be used to bring the atoms down to nanokelvin temperatures, reaching the regime of "quantum degeneracy." This is, very roughly speaking, the point where the quantum wavelength of the atoms becomes comparable to the spacing between atoms in the gas, at which point the…
drorzel | June 29, 2011Out in Minnesota, Melissa expresses some high-level confusion over the preference for people with a small-college background:
In the past few months, I have been involved in several conversations where someone mentioned that a particular faculty member or administrator was or was not an alum of a small liberal arts college (SLAC) in a manner that seemed to suggest their status as a former student of a SLAC (or not) clearly explained why the individual took the particular action or made the particular decision being discussed. (Generally the tone of the discussions has been that "good"…
drorzel | June 28, 2011That's the title of my slightly insane talk at the DAMOP (Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics of the American Physical Society) conference a couple of weeks ago, summarizing current topics of interest in Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics. I'll re-embed the slides at the end of this post, for anyone who missed my earlier discussion.
I put a ton of work into that talk, and had a huge amount of material that I didn't have time to include. I'd hate for that to go to waste, so I'm going to repurpose it for blog content over the next week or so. It'll probably be about a half-…
oracknows | June 28, 2011It's grant crunch time, as the submission deadline for revised R01s is July 5. However, in a classic example of how electronic filing has actually made things more difficult, the grant has to be done and at the university grant office a week before the deadline if it is to be uploaded in time. So, my beloved Orac-philes, I'm afraid it's reruns again today, but, benevolent blogger that I am, I'll again post two about the same topic. Since I recently reran a really old post that started it all, I thought I'd follow up with the two additional posts about the same topic. This is the third one and…
pharyngula | June 27, 2011Harry Lonsdale is a godless Oregonian who has just offered a $50,000 prize plus $2,000,000 in funding for research into the origins of life.
A millionaire scientist who once ran as a Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate has just launched a $50,000 prize to promote research on the origin of life. Yes, he has an ulterior motive: He hopes that researchers working on the question will eventually prove that life's origins can be fully explained by physical and chemical processes, without invoking a creator.
Harry Lonsdale is a chemist in Bend, Oregon, who made a fortune when he sold his drug…
oracknows | June 26, 2011It's grant crunch time, as the submission deadline for revised R01s is July 5. However, in a classic example of how electronic filing has actually made things more difficult, the grant has to be done and at the university grant office a week before the deadline if it is to be uploaded in time. So, my beloved Orac-philes, I'm afraid it's reruns today, but, benevolent blogger that I am, I'll post two, one older, one more recent, but both about the same topic. This one's from 2007, which means that if you haven't been reading at least four years it's new to you.
A common refrain among…