Science
sciencepunk | May 3, 2011What better way for a bunch of science geeks to celebrate a birthday than by having a science party? We spent a lot of time making delicious science-themed snacks, and I have to say, they came out pretty good!
Bacterial jello plates. They looked a bit too relastic, the cell biologists wouldn't touch them.
More plates, this time made with rice pudding. Tastier than jello, but less popular due to looks.
DIY electrophoresis jello. The red dye didn't migrate, but the yellow colouring of the jello did!
Obligatory placebo gag.
The text reads sample:alcohol 1:2. It didn't lie.
Señor…
oracknows | May 3, 2011"Personalized medicine." You've probably heard the term. It's a bit of a buzzword these days and refers to a vision of future medicine in which therapies are much more tightly tailored to individual patients than they currently are. That's not to say that as physicians we haven't practiced personalized medicine before; certainly we have. However it has only been in the last decade or so that our understanding of genomics, systems biology, and cell signaling have evolved to the point where the vision of personalized medicine based on each patient's genome and biology might be achievable within…
drorzel | May 2, 2011Over in Scientopia, Janet notes an interesting mis-statement from NPR, where Dina Temple-Raston said of the now-dead terrorist:
[O]ne intelligence officials told us that nothing with an electron actually passed close to him, which in a way is one of the ways they actually caught him.
As Janet notes, this would be quite a feat, given that electrons are a key component of ordinary matter. But for the sake of silly physics blogging, let's take this seriously for a moment. Suppose that Osama bin Laden really could make himself utterly devoid of electrons: would that be a good way to hide?
To…
oracknows | May 2, 2011Here's a brief one for you all. Former UPI editor and now editor of the anti-vaccine crank blog Age of Autism has a talent for incredibly un-self-aware statements. This time around, in the wake of President Obama's having released his "long form" birth certificate, ol' Danny Boy posted a quickie statement (in amongst a bunch of other almost as amusing quickie statements) that reads:
Now that the "birther" myth has been debunked, maybe we can get rid of the ridiculous but widespread notion -- pushed by people who should know better -- that vaccines don't cause autism.
Uh, no, Dan. You have it…
pharyngula | May 2, 2011I'm a major fan of kidneys — they're fascinating organs for discussion of both development and evolution. Today I lectured about them in my human physiology course, but I could only briefly touch on their development, and instead had to talk on and on about countercurrent multipliers and juxtamedulary nephrons and transport membranes and all that functional physiology stuff. So I thought I'd get the evo-devo out of my system with a few words about them here.
Our kidneys go through an elaborate series of three major developmental stages — we essentially build three pairs of kidneys as embryos…
drorzel | May 2, 2011Last summer, there was a fair bit of hype about a paper from Mark Raizen's group at Texas which was mostly reported with an "Einstein proven wrong" slant, probably due to this press release. While it is technically true that they measured something Einstein said would be impossible to measure, that framing is a little unfair to Einstein. It does draw media attention, though...
The experiment in question involves Brownian motion, and since I had to read up on that anyway for something else, I thought I might as well look up this paper, and write it up for the blog.
OK, so what did they do that…
bioephemera | May 1, 2011Now this is just cruel: yesterday the Cambridge Science Festival kicked off - a week of science, sciart, sci-journalism and sci-education activities at MIT, Harvard, the Museum of Science, and surrounds. Am I going to be hanging out all day with my fellow-geeks in the sun (which finally came out a few days ago, right on cue)? No! Because I have to write two final papers. (At least they're about sci-law. . . )
Anyway, don't be like me. If you're in the Cambridge/Boston area, have a life and check out the Cambridge Science Festival schedule. There are talks, performances, screenings, panels,…
oracknows | April 30, 2011Dedicated to a certain commenter who thinks I'm an "eco-fascist" because I criticized Ann Coulter for abusing physics and biology for claiming that "radiation is good for you," I present a video that succinctly describes everything you need to know about the "Climategate" affair:
I posted it on my Facebook profile, too, and already a certain Libertarian comedian with a monumentally poor understanding of science and a chip on his shoulder when it comes to scientists has been drawn to it like a moth to a flame.
Actually, I had been planning on posting this video anyway sometime during the…
jrosenhouse | April 29, 2011Today is the last day of classes around here, meaning that I am just too darn happy to work up the righteous indignation needed for a proper blog post. So your homework is to go read this excellent essay from Russell Blackford. It is mostly directed at the recent chest-thumping of Michael Ruse, but also addresses some other issues as well. I especially appreciated this part:
For Ruse, the whole point seems to be that a bright line must be drawn between religion and science, but this is not merely simplistic, misleading and wrong - though it is all of those. It is impossible.
Whatever we…
pharyngula | April 27, 2011
I've been giving talks at scientific meetings on educational outreach — I've been telling the attendees that they ought to start blogs or in other ways make more of an effort to educate the public. I mentioned one successful result the other day, but we need more.
I give multiple reasons for scientists to do this. One is just general goodness: we need to educate a scientifically illiterate public. Of course, like all altruism, this isn't really recommended out of simple kindness, but because the public ultimately holds the pursestrings, and science needs their understanding and support.…
drorzel | April 26, 2011This paper made a big splash back in November, with lots of news stories talking about it; it even made the #6 spot on Physics World's list of breakthroughs of the year. I didn't write it up then because I was hellishly busy, and couldn't take time away from working on the book-in-progress to figure out exactly what they did and why it mattered. I've got a little space now between handing the manuscript in last week and starting to revise it (probably next week), so while it's a bit late, here's an attempt at an explanation of what all the excitement was about.
So, what's this about, anyway?…
pharyngula | April 26, 2011I read this story with mounting disbelief. Every paragraph had me increasingly aghast. It's another case of physicists explaining biology badly.
It started dubiously enough. Paul Davies, cosmologist and generally clever fellow, was recruited to help cure cancer, despite, by his own admission, having "no prior knowledge of cancer".
Two years ago, in a spectacularly enlightened move, the US National Cancer Institute (NCI) decided to enlist the help of physical scientists. The idea was to bring fresh insights from disciplines like physics to help tackle cancer in radical new ways.
Uh, OK…I can…
pharyngula | April 25, 2011In my talk at the Society for Developmental Biology, I encouraged more scientists to take advantage of the internet to share science with the public. Someone fell for it! Saori Haigo has started a blog, and she even explains why.
I've started this blog because I believe I have a social responsibility as a professional scientist to communicate science openly to the people. I will blog about what I think are important topics in the biological and biomedical sciences and explore the value, current issues, and realistic expectations of what we gain from doing research on that topic. In addition…
catdynamics | April 24, 2011curious flap over leaked internal memo from LHC's ATLAS collaboration over at "Not Even Wrong"
hints of Higgs at 115 GeV in γγ decay
intriguing but too vague and unconfirmed for the physics to be interesting at this point.
Sociology of the comments is interesting.
drorzel | April 22, 2011A few months ago-- just before the paperback release of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog-- Amazon started providing not only their Sales Rank data, but also sales data from Nielsen BookScan. Of course, the BookScan data is very limited, giving you only four weeks, and the Sales Rank data, while available over the full published life of any given book, are presented as a graph only with no way to extract them as a data table. You'd have to be some sort of obsessive nerd to make a quantitative comparison between them.
So, anyway, here's the data I got for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog:
This…
catdynamics | April 22, 2011 ...and now we know where we have been
iSpy@home
as you know, Bob, there has been some flap in the intertoobz and old media that the iPhone keep GPS logs, automatically, by default, unencrypted, that are downloaded during backups...
Cool.
Er, well, maybe they should be turned off as default and be selectively turned on only by user, and maybe some prudent default encryption would also be good.
Or, you could just have told us, rather than let someone figure it out intuitively given that there is a GPS locator coupled to Apps.
Anyway, here is a selected snapshot from my life over about 3…
drorzel | April 21, 2011Several people blogged about a new measurement of gravitational states of neutrons done by physicists using ultracold neutrons from the Institut Laue-Langevin in France. I had to resort to Twitter to get access to the paper (we don't get Nature Physics here, and it's way faster than Inter-Library Loan), but this is a nice topic for a ResearchBlogging post, in the now-standard Q&A form:
OK, why was this worth begging people on Twitter to send you a copy? The paper is a demonstration of a sort of spectroscopy of neutrons bouncing in a gravitational field. They showed they could drive…
drorzel | April 21, 2011After chasing a bunch of kids with cell phones off of his lawn, Kevin Drum has kicked off a discussion of "multitasking", specifically about whether it's merely a threat, or a positive menace. He points to an interview with Clifford Nass, a researcher who says his experiments show that nobody is any good at doing two things at once. John Holbo at Crooked Timber picks up the discussion and adds a few good points, and there are some others in the comments (CT's comment section being one of the most civilized and erudite in blogdom).
In particular, I think John's comment on satisficing is an…
pharyngula | April 20, 2011I am a gorgeous hunk of virile manhood. How do I know? I looked at my fingers.
Research has shown that men whose ring finger on their right hand is longer than their index finger are regarded as better looking by women, possibly because their faces are more symmetrical.
There is no link, however, between this finger length and how alluring women find a man's voice or his body odour, the study found.
Guys, you may be looking at my picture on the sidebar and thinking there must be something wrong here…but no, I assure you, my right ring finger is distinctly longer than my right index finger…
oracknows | April 19, 2011Hot on the heels of his excellent effort Immunize, ZDoggMD is back for a followup. Unfortunately, his partner in crime, Dr. Chase McCallister, billionnaire hemorrhoid surgeon, whose woo-fighting alter-ego is Doc Quixote, screwed up. Wandering into the University of Google, he came up with a rap that would do Mike Adams proud:
More reason than ever to get your vax on!