Science
bioephemera | December 2, 2010Okay, you've probably heard the buzz about the "arsenic organism" supposedly discovered in Mono Lake, and how NASA's 2pm press conference today will reveal more. I'll be honest, I wasn't that excited about it - extremophile bacteria metabolize some freaky stuff, and it seemed pretty clear the announcement wasn't about extraterrestrial life. But Gizmodo is now claiming the critter has arsenic based DNA.
Did April Fools Day relocate to December? I'll believe this story when I hear it from the researcher herself, but that would be SO COOL. I'm getting my wide-eyed-awestruck-biologist hat out of…
oracknows | December 1, 2010No, no, no, no, no!
I hate it when a fellow ScienceBlogger goes astray!
Fortunately, it's been a long time indeed since I felt obligated to administer a dose of Insolence, Respectful or otherwise, to a fellow ScienceBlogger. It's been even longer (as in, I think, never) that I've ever seen one whose resource I use regularly screw up so amazingly. I'm talking about Coby of A Few Things Ill-Considered, whose How To Talk To A Climate Skeptic (also found here) is a resource I turn to again and again and again when faced with denialist arguments about anthropogenic global warming. Indeed, I've…
drorzel | December 1, 2010The JCC, where SteelyKid goes to day care, is having a book sale, so the lobby has been full of books for sale the last few days as we've headed out. Getting SteelyKid away from the books is pretty difficult, as you would expect from our daughter.
We've mostly avoided getting anything, but yesterday, I caved and bought the Curious George board book with pull-out flaps that she latched onto. Why? This page:
The book is a collection of pages showing various places George goes to be curious, and has pull-out tabs showing a person associated with the place, and a thing associated with the place…
krandall | December 1, 2010By Dr. Rosalba Bonaccorsi
Environmental Scientist at the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, SETI Institute, and Gail Jacobs
Rosalba, what first sparked your interest in science?
I've always had big dreams -- even as a young girl. As soon as I started to walk, I took an interest in conducting experiments with whatever was available around such as household plants and various chemical compounds. I'm lucky I didn't end up poisoned or otherwise hurt! I remember dismantling alarm clocks. I was so curious!
As a young girl, I was in poor health and as a result spent a lot of…
drorzel | December 1, 2010I hadn't heard anything about Dance of the Photons: From Einstein to Quantum Teleportation before it turned up in my mailbox, courtesy of some kind publicist at Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, otherwise I would've been eagerly anticipating it. Anton Zeilinger is a name to conjure with in quantum optics, having built an impressive career out of doing laboratory demonstrations of weird quantum phenomena. He shared the Wolf Prize earlier this year with John Clauser and Alain Aspect, and the three of them are in a small set of people who probably ought to get a Nobel at some point in the near future…
oracknows | December 1, 2010I don't recall if I ever mentioned this before, but back when I was in college I had quite the interest in a couple of sciences that you might not have expected or guessed at, namely anthropology and archaelogy. Indeed, an archeology class that I took as a senior was one of the most memorable and fascinating classes I took during my entire four years in college. If I have one regret about my college years, it was my laser-like focus on getting into medical school. It was that intense focus that kept me taking far more classes related to chemistry, biology, and other sciences that I thought…
bioephemera | November 30, 2010Dave Hone's blog, Archosaur Musings, is hosting a wonderful series of interviews with paleoartists - artists and illustrators who specialize in resurrecting lost species for scientific publications, popular media, and/or fine art. Check out Mark Witton and Todd Marshall for particularly interesting perspectives.
Not only are these pretty posts with lots of eye candy, they're also excellent windows into that varied career options for anyone considering freelance medical or biological illustration. Kudos to Dave Hone for this truly useful (and I'm sure very time-consuming) series of sciart…
drorzel | November 30, 2010At least, that's the obvious conclusion from the Royal Society's Science Sees Further page. The introduction touts it as "a series of articles on some of the most exciting areas of science today," but what's striking to me is that none of the twelve topic listed (Ageing Process, Biological Diversity, Cognition and Computation, Cultural Evolution, Extra-Terrestrial Life, Geoengineering, Global Sustainability, Greenhouse Gases, New Vaccines, Stem Cell Biology, Uncertainty in Science, and Web Science) includes any of the most obvious exciting developments in physics. Many of them have some…
pharyngula | November 30, 2010This is a fascinating way to present data about global and historical economies:
I'm also kind of blown away by the fact that the BBC has a documentary about statistics. How do they get an audience without blowing things up or the occasional sleazy sexual affair?
drorzel | November 30, 2010Somebody asked a question at the Physics Stack Exchange site about the speed of light and the definition of the meter that touches on an issue I think is interesting enough to expand on a little here.
The questioner notes that the speed of light is defined to be 299,792,458 m/s and the meter is defined to be the distance traveled by light in 1/299,792,458 seconds, and asks if that doesn't seem a little circular. There are actually three relevant quantities here, though, the third being the second, which is defined as 9,192,631,770 oscillations of the light associated with the transition…
bioephemera | November 28, 2010
I've been dithering about buying these for my scientist friends, but it looks like eavesmade's etsy shop may be running low, so I'm going to quit dithering and just post this for your pre-Cyber Monday enjoyment. They're wooden scientist holiday ornaments, featuring the likes of Carl Sagan, Rosalind Franklin, and Stephen Hawking. I think they're both great and hilariously awkward.
You get six for $30 plus shipping. Order fast. . . . !
PS Thanks to Joanna for the link!
bioephemera | November 28, 2010Yes, that's what I said - Gunther von Hagens has a gift shop, and he's selling earrings and necklaces made of slices of equine and bovine genitalia. Don't like ostentatious, plastinatious penis jewelry? There's always a bull penis vasculature walking stick.
I had to blog these, but honestly, I didn't really want to know they existed at all.
pharyngula | November 27, 2010Although citing the Bible seems to be a way to fast-track bad science papers to publication. In yet another example of a journal letting bad Bible interpretations pass for science, a paper titled "Newer insights to the neurological diseases among biblical characters of old testament has been published in the Annals of the Indian Academy of Neurology. It isn't new or newer, it doesn't offer any insights, and the title isn't even grammatical. Among its inventions is the idea that Sampson was autistic because he was violent and had odd dietary habits, that Isaac was diabetic, and that Ezekiel…
bioephemera | November 26, 2010
All shopped out? I can pretty much guarantee that difficult person on your gift list does not have a huge, one-of-a-kind mama Emperor scorpion carrying baby scorpions made of fleece, felt and pom-poms.
At $200, this plush scorpion sculpture may sting your pocketbook, but seller weirdbuglady also offers more affordable amoebas, tardigrades, fossils and insects. Check out her etsy shop and her blog.
drorzel | November 26, 2010Today is "Black Friday," the semi-ironic name given to the day after Thanksgiving when major retailers roll out Incredible! Deals! to draw shoppers in at an ungodly early hour. Personally, I don't plan to come within a mile of a mall today, but if that's what floats your boat...
Of course, if you're thinking of gifts for a person interested in science (and if you're reading this, you ought to be...), you could do a lot worse than to look at this list from GeekDad at Wired, which I'm sure you'll be shocked to notice includes How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. If your holiday shopping takes you…
drorzel | November 25, 2010It's Thanksgiving here in the US, so blogging will be light to nonexistent. For the sake of those looking for a quick escape from the chaos of a family gathering, or, you know, those poor benighted souls in other countries for whom this is just another Thursday, here's a thematically appropriate poll about science:
What are you most thankful for?online surveys
Have a great holiday/ Thursday.
oracknows | November 24, 2010If there's one characteristic of denialists of all stripes, it's that they have a strong tendency to personalize their dislike of their particular bete noir science. For instance, anti-vaccine activists tend to attack Paul Offit as though he were the Dark Lord of Vaccination. Creationists tend to attack Charles Darwin (who, being conveniently dead, can't defend himself) and Richard Dawkins (who, being one of the most vocal atheists in the world, makes a convenient target because creationists are almost invariably motivated by religious objections to evolution). Climate change denialists tend…
drorzel | November 24, 2010Given that I'm currently working on a book about relativity, I'm spending a lot of time idly thinking about various relativistic effects. Many of these won't end up in the final book, but they're fun to think about.
One thing that occurred to be earlier, while thinking about something else entirely, is the Doppler shift. In particular, I was thinking about the detection of planets around other stars, which is often done using the Doppler shift due to the orbiting planet's tug on its star. If the orbit is more or less aligned with our line of sight to the star, then the star wobbles back and…
oracknows | November 22, 2010You may have noticed that there wasn't the usual 3,000 word heapin' helpin' of Insolence this morning. That's because I happened to be away visiting family in Chicago over the weekend and I just didn't have time to come up with anything--and I enjoyed myself too thoroughly to worry overmuch about it. In case you're wondering, the posts that went up over the weekend were either written before I left or so short that they took me five or ten minutes to do.
Sort of like this post.
Unfortunately, this morning I did see something of interest that disappointed me enough that I took a bit of time…
bioephemera | November 21, 2010Today's Guardian has a very interesting (though long) article by Richard Holmes, author of The Age of Wonder, about the unsung women of science. In the Guardian piece, Holmes shares some of his research for his forthcoming book, The Lost Women of Victorian Science:
[M]y re-examination of the Royal Society archives during this 350th birthday year has thrown new and unexpected light on the lost women of science. I have tracked down a series of letters, documents and rare publications that begin to fit together to suggest a very different network of support and understanding between the sexes.…