Science
bioephemera | January 12, 2011
A new biology game called EteRNA "crowdsourc[es] the scientific method" by inviting players to design their own self-folding RNAs. The best designs are synthesized and tested in the lab to see how well the predicted structure plays out in the physical world - an innovation the game's creators see as an improvement over other folding games like Foldit, where there is no experimental feedback.
"Putting a ball through a hoop or drawing a better poker hand is the way we're used to winning games, but in EteRNA you score when the molecule you've designed can assemble itself," said one of the PIs…
drorzel | January 11, 2011It occurs to me that I'm kind of dropping the ball on my shameless self-promotion because I haven't mentioned that one of my posts made the cut for this year's fifth edition of the best-of-science-blogging anthology The Open Laboratory. The post included is Science Is More Like Sumo Than Soccer, a discussion of the importance of avoiding jargon.
I was a little surprised at that one, but re-reading it to copyedit the text for publication, I guess it is pretty good. It wasn't one of the top posts of last year, traffic-wise, but I think it's useful, and am happy to have it included.
(It's…
drorzel | January 10, 2011I'm always a little hesitant to post reviews of books that I'm using as reference sources when I'm writing something, because it feels a little like recommending that you skip past my book and go to my sources instead. This is, of course, completely irrational, because however much I my use a given book as a resource, what I'm writing is going to cover a different set of topics, with a slightly different slant. And since the folks at Cambridge University Press were kind enough to send me a review copy of Tatsu Takeuchi's An Illustrated Guide to Relativity, I really kind of owe it to them to,…
drorzel | January 9, 2011A reader from the UK, James Cownie, was kind enough to send this picture of the "New and Bestselling" shelf at a WH Smiths " at one of the service stations on the M20." You might not recognize the cover immediately, but in the #11 spot on that list is occupied by How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog, the UK version of my book. Or, given how well it's doing there, perhaps I should start referring to the cover pictured in the left column of the blog as "the American edition..."
Anyway: Woo-hoo!
bioephemera | January 7, 2011Here are some essay links I've had open as tabs in my browser for over a week, waiting to be posted. Unfortunately, I don't have time to do the extensive commentary they deserve, so I'm admitting that, and just posting them already. Enjoy.
Graphical Abstracts & Biologists as Designers
Andrew Sun discusses "graphical abstracts" at nature network:
Although they are irrelevant to the quality of the research in my opinion, graphical abstracts (GAs) are in fact increasingly appreciated nowadays. No matter you like them or not, chances are that you have to draw one in order to publish your…
drorzel | January 6, 2011I've reached a point in the book-in-progress where I find myself needing to talk a little about particle physics. As this is very much not my field, this quickly led to a situation where the dog asked a question I can't answer. But, hey, that's why I have a blog with lots of smart readers...
The question is this:
What are all these extra particles for?
Or, to put it in slightly more physics-y terms: The Standard Model contains twelve material particles: six leptons (the electron, muon, and tau, plus associated neutrinos) and six quarks (up-down, strange-charm, top-bottom). The observable…
drorzel | January 6, 2011Not an exhaustive list, but since I'm noodling around with my calendar, I might as well note some of the stuff I'll be doing this year:
I'll be on a panel about international science testing at the AAAS Annual Meeting in February. This will be a different experience-- not only have I never been to a AAAS meeting before, the whole thing appears to be organized in a different manner than any meeting I have been to. I'm doing a bit of a drive-by for this-- coming in Friday afternoon, leaving Sunday evening-- but I have classes to teach.
I've been invited to give a Saturday Morning Science…
bioephemera | January 5, 2011What if Ke$ha joined Science Cheerleader? Yes, it would be awesome/disturbing/disorienting. No, it hasn't happened - yet. But this parody may induce a double-take:
Now, NASA should clearly have just used THAT at their press conference.
In case you're not into the auto-tuney-teeny-bop scene, the video is a parody of Ke$ha's "We r who we r" . And this is a parody of "Take it off" about meteors, asteroids, and comets.
From Jank.
drorzel | January 5, 2011Back in the fall, I got an email from my UK publisher asking me if I'd be willing to read and possibly blurb a forthcoming book, The Four Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality by Richard Panek. The book isn't exactly in my field, but there really wasn't any way I'd turn down a request like that. Coincidentally, I received an ARC of the book a few days later from the US publisher. They weren't asking for a blurb, but I'm always happy to get free books.
From the title, I expected this to be another book laying out the now-standard model (if not…
oracknows | January 4, 2011Back in December, I took issue with a highly irritating article by someone who normally should know better, Jonah Lehrer, entitled The Truth Wears Off: Is There Something Wrong With the Scientific Method?, so much so that I wrote one of my typical long-winded deconstructions of the article. One thing that irritated me was contained in the very title itself, namely the insinuation that the "decline effect," which is the tendency of effects observed in early scientific experiments demonstrating a phenomenon to "decline" or become less robust as more and more experiments are performed, is…
pharyngula | January 4, 2011Jonah Lehrer has posted a reply to criticisms of his article on the 'decline effect' in science. It doesn't work, and his arguments miss the mark. As I said, what the statistics show is that science is difficult, and sometimes answers are very hard to come by; that does not justify his attempt to couch the problem in language that suggests a systematic failure of science.
John Allen Paulos is saying the same thing. You can trust him, he's a professional mathematician.
drorzel | January 4, 2011There was a faintly awful essay by Melissa Nicolas at Inside Higher Ed yesterday, giving MLA job candidates advice on how to dress:
Let's start with your shoes. Anyone who has been to MLA knows that it is a big conference, and whether you are on a search committee, attending sessions, or interviewing, you are most likely going to be doing a lot of walking. In a city. Often in the cold (though not this year!). While it is certainly inappropriate to come in your Wellies, teetering into the room on heels that are as stable as a university's endowment sends the message that you might not be a…
bioephemera | January 4, 2011NYC scientist and filmmaker Alexis Gambis is building a body of science-themed short films. His documentary A Fruit Fly In New York juxtaposes lab equipment with the infrastructure of New York City; between grad students and postdocs relating the (somewhat deadpan) joys of fruit fly research, befuddled New Yorkers puzzle over a vial of Drosophila ("that's something I don't want on my body"). I was surprised and tickled to see that one of my friends, a former fly researcher, makes an appearance. The scientific community is so small!
The clip I enjoyed most, though, is the one I've embedded for…
drorzel | January 3, 2011It's the first day of the new term, and the projector bulb that was working on Friday decided to stop working by Sunday. After that bit of excitement this morning, plus my lecture, I'm beat. I always forget how much talking is involved in intro physics lectures.
My class for the term is the first term of introductory physics, which seems like a good idea for a poll:
What is your favorite part of Newtonian physics?online survey
Given the book we use, "The Momentum Principle," "The Energy Principle," and "The Angular Momentum Principle" would be better names for what I've got in mind, but it'…
catdynamics | January 2, 2011Icelandic media are reporting audible rumbles from Eyjafjallajökull sunday evening.
Earthquake activity is not up, though over the last few weeks there have been some small tremors under the glacier.
No sign of an actual eruption, and no sign of activity under her big sister, Katla.
Yet.
There is a spike in earthquake activity at the northern edge of Vatnajökull by Kistufell.
There are frequently surges of activity up there, it is right along the major line of the North Atlantic Ridge as it goes across the island, and there are at least three major active volcanoes right along there,…
drorzel | January 2, 2011Because I'm sure everybody is as fascinated by blog stats as I am, here's the traffic to this blog for 2010, in graphical form:
In case you can't numerically integrate that in your head, I'll tell you that the total number of pageviews represented there is a bit more than 908,000. We have yet to crack the million mark in any one year, but the total number of pageviews over the history of ScienceBlogs is just short of 3.9 million. Not too shabby.
Looking at the overall traffic states for the five years (five years!) that I've been blogging at ScienceBlogs, the thing I'm happiest about is this…
bioephemera | January 1, 2011
Michael Reedy's drawings are like 1980s Visual Man and Woman models plopped down in a half-excavated quarry of visual and literary allusions. He achieves a cut-paper, graphic feel by composing on superimposed planes, sort of like a stage set, with strategic uses of outlining and negative space. And he is a master of figure drawing (he teaches it, so he'd better be). When an artist really knows figural anatomy, he/she doesn't need to do anything flashy with it: you can just tell.
While it's not one of the overtly anatomical drawings (like malum E, above), I'm totally captivated by Blash, a…
bioephemera | January 1, 2011Hans Rosling's Joy of Stats is now available in its entirety (one hour) from YouTube! Thanks to flowingdata for the heads up.
drorzel | December 31, 2010Late last year, Matthew Beckler was nice enough to make a sales rank tracker for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. Changes in the Amazon page format made it stop working a while ago, though, and now Amazon reports roughly equivalent data via its AuthorCentral feature, with the added bonus of BookScan sales figures. So I've got a new source for my book sales related cat-vacuuming.
Still, there's this great big data file sitting there with thousands of hourly sales rank numbers, and I thought to myself "I ought to be able to do something else amusing with this..." And then Corky at the Virtuosi…
bioephemera | December 30, 2010
This series of sciart wallpapers by Dan Funderburgh were inspired by the Time-Life Science Library, a series of educational books published in the 1960s. For those of us old enough to remember them, Time-Life's series are objects of nostalgia in themselves. Coupling the vintage design and palettes of those books with vintage sci-art symbolism yields a sharply contemporary set of prints.
Funderburgh describes his work as "a repudiation of the fabricated schism between art and decoration;" you could also describe it as a repudiation of the fabricated gulf between science and design. (Fun…