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mixingmemory | March 25, 2008Just to show that there are no hard feelings between behaviorists and cognitive psychologists, we've created an R-W t-shirt:
Here's the back:
I don't know about you, but I think this t-shirt would be great for dates, parties, rock concerts, and weddings.
cortex | March 25, 2008I had no idea this many Americans were nocturnal:
Twenty percent of American workers are night-shift workers, and the number is growing by about 3% per year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. While the rest of society sleeps, police officers, security guards, truck drivers, office cleaning crews, hotel desk clerks, nurses, pilots and many others keep patients alive, streets safe and packages moving. But at a price.
These workers -- and people with more conventionally sleep-deprived lifestyles -- are known to be at higher risk for accidents, sleep disorders and psychological stress…
cmcclain | March 25, 2008
At Kevin's request this week I focus on the Turtle, the first American submarine. Its 1776, with the American Revolution in full swing and on September 7 the world's first submarine attack occurs.
The Turtle was the invention of David Bushnell, a Yale graduate who also invented the time bomb. The egg-shaped Turtle was a one-person submarine totally barely 7 feet in diameter operated under human power. Bushnell needed to solve several yet encountered engineering issues to design such a submersible (i.e. a watertight, pressure-proof hull; variable ballast; vertical and horizontal…
cmcclain | March 25, 2008
As part of the MNHN's current Abysses exhibitions, based largely on Clare Nouvian's elegant book, you can choose and pilot your own submersible over at the their website. I choose the Trieste which handled a little rough on corners around hydrothermal vents.
gregladen | March 25, 2008
Attention:
Berry Go Round Submissions are technically due today. But, I'm not going to assemble the carnival until quite late tonight, so you have several hours to get them to me.
Gene Genie is to be published on March 30th, so please get those submission in as well. Any time up to the 29th or 30th will be fine.
Thank you very much, you may now resume your activities.
petnoyer | March 24, 2008
American space and satellite technologies provide valuable services to our global society and important contributions to global environmental monitoring. In a way, the whole world depends upon the United States global observing system of geopositional and environmental satellites to monitor storm systems, FEDEX packages, vessel traffic, and ice cover. Few people appreciate these services, but they are enabled by our democracy, specifically by the Freedom of Information Act, which stipulates that any taxpayer funded enterprise must be made publicly available upon request. NOAA and NASA take…
esiegel | March 24, 2008This is some very basic biology: when resources are unlimited and there are no pressures on a species, its population grows exponentially. There's also no evolution other than random mutations; without selection pressures (regardless of whether it's natural or artificial), the genetic information content of a species doesn't change appreciably.
Biologists make use of this to perform tests on certain cells. If you simply put a population of cells in a petrie dish and left them there, they start out by doing this:
They divide. They take over the dish. But then, they run out of room. And when…
moleculeoftheday | March 24, 2008Happy Dyngus day.
Formaldehyde is both a toxic and useful compound. Unfortunately, it's a gas, so it's tough to move around. Typically, you get it as a solution in water - with some methanol to keep it from polymerizing into "paraformaldehyde," which is the other major way to get it. Both are a pain - one has water, which is poison for a lot of reactions, and one acts like brick dust - it won't dissolve in anything.
Trioxane is the third way - it's well-behaved and soluble. Hooray trioxane!
esiegel | March 24, 2008Cameras, CCDs, prisms, grisms, etc., are all some of the instruments that can go on top of telescopes to help us see things better. We haven't really increased the size of telescopes so much as we have the quality and ability of the apparatus that go atop them. Take a look at various pictures I've stolen off the web, all taken by (avid) amateur astronomers in different years. The pictures are of M81 and M82, two galaxies in a group that make up possibly the nearest cluster of galaxies outside of the local group. (The closest is either the M81 group, the Centaurus group, or the IC 342 group.)…
gregladen | March 24, 2008
Take a deer's body, attach a camel's head, add a tapir's snout, and you have a saiga--Central Asia's odd-ball antelope with the enormous schnoz. Unfortunately, these animals are as endangered as they are strange looking. The problem is over-hunting. Now, according to a Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) study, the saiga's migration routes are in jeopardy as well.
Conservationists tracked saiga with GPS collars in Mongolia and discovered a "migration bottleneck"--a narrow corridor of habitat that connects two populations. Local people herding livestock and increased traffic from trucks and…
gregladen | March 24, 2008The German Federal Ministry for Education and Research is opting for more female scientists. Two hundred women-only professorships are to be created, says Minister Annette Schavan, having observed that the current 11 percent of female professors is decidedly too low.
Details here if you read German, summary here if you don't.
grrlscientist | March 24, 2008
I thought I'd mention that I have been invited by SEED to an event in my beloved NYC; The MIND08 Symposium which is held all day on 4 April. This symposium is co-hosted by one of my favorite art museums in the world, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and is held at the Parsons New School for Design in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. I am really looking forward to this and plan to write about this event on my blog for you to enjoy.
pharyngula | March 24, 2008Matt Nisbet is currently running a photo of Dawkins and myself with this legend: Dawkins and Myers: It's Time to Let Others Be the Spokespeople for Science. Never mind the personal criticism, doesn't he even realize how wrong that statement is? No, it's worse than that; it's so bad it's not even wrong.
Who are the "spokespeople for science"? Is this a formal title conferred on specific individuals, is there a protocol for defining who gets the job, and most importantly, is there a salary? Nisbet doesn't seem to realize that there are no spokespeople for science — there are just people…
cortex | March 24, 2008If you're into art, science and the brain, or enjoyed the recent MoMA show on design, then be sure to check out this Seed/MoMA/Parsons event on April 4th. The guest list is pretty fantastic, and includes everyone from Benoit Mandelbrot to Henry Markram to Chandler Burr to Erik Demaine to Greg Lynn. The timing of the presentations is almost comically dense - by my calculations, the "What is Reality?" talk will get about 15 minutes - but that's how I prefer my academic talks: lofty and short.
cortex | March 24, 2008My bracket is a disaster: I seem to have an uncanny talent for picking all the wrong upsets. But perhaps I should find solace in the fact that the NCAA tournament is inherently unpredictable. That, at least, was the conclusion of a 2001 paper by the economists Edward Kaplan and Stanley Garstka. They mined every statistical tool they could think of in an attempt to crack the office pool. They searched for secret algorithms in past NCAA tournaments, and used Markov models to see if regular season performance affected post-season performance. They ran endless computer simulations, and plugged in…
esiegel | March 24, 2008Those of you who keep up with your news may have seen this headline on CNN last week: Star Explodes Halfway Across Universe. What they're talking about is a Gamma-Ray Burst, which was so bright that, despite being 7.5 billion light years (that's 2.3 Gpc) away, it was still visible on Earth with the naked eye. From the article:
The aging star, in a previously unknown galaxy, exploded in a gamma ray burst 7.5 billion light years away, its light finally reaching Earth early Wednesday.
This is the sort of thing that the SWIFT satellite was designed to detect, pinpoint, and then tell Earth-based…
jlynch | March 23, 2008Dawkins on Ben Stein:
The narrator is somebody called Ben Stein. I had not heard of him, but apparently he is well known to Americans, for it is hard to see why else he would have been chosen to front the film. He certainly can’t have been chosen for his knowledge of science, nor his powers of logical reasoning, nor his box office appeal (heavens, no), and his speaking voice is an irritating, nasal drawl, innocent of charm and of consonants. I suppose that makes it a good voice for conveying the whingeing paranoia that I referred to, so maybe that was qualification enough.
Read more of…
kevin z | March 23, 2008The Scripps Institute of Oceanography and the Rady Business School of University of California, San Diego, have joined forces to create a degree program the world has never been witness to before! Nature Career's reports the new joint Oceanography PhD/MBA (Master of Business Administration) promises "... to unearth novel economic solutions to ecological problems such as fisheries collapse" and quotes Scripps ecologist George Sugihara,
"Management and policy are bumping up against business concerns, and having credentials in both worlds will give an individual that much more gravity."…
cmcclain | March 23, 2008The recent Invertebrate Wars reminded me of spectacular, but often ignored, group of gastropods. The parasites! This is a group that I have totally geeked out on in the past. In my previous work I have focused on the Ptenoglossa likely a paraphyletic or polyphyletic group, established originally of unspecified rank by Gray (1853). It is generally agreed upon that the group is above the level of family and generally is defined as a suborder (Bouchet & Rocroi 2005). The group includes usually includes the families Cerithiopsidae, Triphoridae, Janthinidae, Epitoniidae, Aclidae, and the…
cmcclain | March 23, 2008I've discussed Nautilus Mineral here at DSN previously. In the past, I have been admittedly biased against the company and their operations to mine the deep. Here I will try to provide a less biased viewpoint. My goal is simply educate the public on Nautilus's current operations, what concerns have been raised about these operations, and what unanswered questions remain.
Nautilus Mineral The Company.
Nautilus is based in British Columbia with extension offices currently in Brisbane and PNG. The company was formerly known as Orca Petroleum Inc. According to Yahoo Finance, Orca "…