Social Sciences
clock | May 3, 2007NPR has started a year-long series on climate called Climate Connections. The other day, they broadcast the first in a series of their educational segments, starting at the very beginning: the carbon atom. You can read the intro here and watch the video here but just listening to the audio in the car was absolutely fascinating (the video is close, but much shorter and not identical to the first quarter of the audio segment for which the podcast is at the "listen" button).
The science was very basic yet completely correct and the entire segment was so fun to listen to. It was fast and…
cmcclain | May 2, 2007
I try to keep all posts here strictly on topic, after all this is Deep-Sea News. So if you are not interested in my personal life and only in the deep sea then stop reading now.
Last year on July 4, I faced the decision that no one with a dog should ever face. The vet looked at me and said, "We can take Moses into surgery and try to find and correct the problem or..." It is the next words that scared me the most, "or put him to sleep." I never hurt so much except for the day I left him behind at an interstate exit when I asked for directions, not realizing he was missing until 10 miles…
catdynamics | May 2, 2007Pay more to unknowingly feed congealed urine to your loved ones.
So large corporations can make fractionally more money.
It is one of these framing issues, see.
More problems with pet food.
Recall expanded and clear that contaminated "protein" made it into the human food chain.
To cut a long story short, since this is all over the media; chinese producers figured they could inflate the nitrogen assay of vegetable protein by adding cheap nitrogenous compounds.
A favourite seems to be Melamine - a polymer of cyanamide, very high nitrogen content by mass. For extra layman yuck factor, it is…
purepedantry | April 30, 2007If this works, this guy is going to make a bagillion dollars:
By giving ordinary adult mice a drug - a synthetic designed to mimic fat - Salk Institute scientist Dr. Ronald M. Evans is now able to chemically switch on PPAR-d, the master regulator that controls the ability of cells to burn fat. Even when the mice are not active, turning on the chemical switch activates the same fat-burning process that occurs during exercise. The resulting shift in energy balance (calories in, calories burned) makes the mice resistant to weight gain on a high fat diet.
The hope, Dr. Evans told scientists…
sb admin | April 28, 2007Uh, no.
Look, we're all human, and we all have eyes and brains and things, and as such one may as well admit that if you look at the pictures that Shelly has of herself on her blog, there's a bird. Also, it's a flattering image of the blogger. I suppose, while we're at it, we might as well take a look at the banner, and as long as the image of scissors near a brain doesn't make us squirm too much with discomfort, we can be amused by the humor. "You've come a long way, baby!"
But there's still some distance to cover, clearly.
While Shelly's pictures would seem to indicate that she may have…
cortex | April 25, 2007David Leonhardt has an excellent column on the squeezed middle class. He notes that while inequality is increasing, the other common complaint - that the income of middle class workers is now more volatile - is not supported by government statistics. There has been no great risk shift, at least when you look at income. As Leonhardt notes, accurately diagnosing the problem is a necessary part of coming up with a solution:
There is now a big push in both Washington and state capitals to come up with policies that can alleviate middle-class anxiety. That's all for the good. In fact, it is…
clock | April 24, 2007Earth's First Rainforest Unearthed:
A spectacular fossilised forest has transformed our understanding of the ecology of the Earth's first rainforests. It is 300 million years old.
Repressing Genes:
Researchers report that most genes are repressed through a mechanism by which methyl molecules are attached to DNA. The cells of a given tissue can express only certain genes while others are silenced. This process, called gene repression, allows cells to perform specialized tasks that are different among various organs. Previous studies have shown that genes are repressed when methyl molecules are…
razib | April 23, 2007A few weeks ago, Andrew Brown (author of The Darwin Wars) stated:
I'm not sure that Boyer, Atran and Wilson regard their explanations as complementary. I have talked to all three of them about it. My feeling is that while all three of them understand that the explanations might be complementary, they prefer to believe that all the work is done by their preferred model. It's not clear to me how one could decide this point in principle.
He refers to Scott Atran (In Gods We Trust), Pascal Boyer (Religion Explained) and David S. Wilson (Darwin's Cathedral). Atran & Boyer are of very similar…
clock | April 22, 2007I am sure that other science bloggers (on or off the Seed scienceblogs) will have to say more about all of these studies over the next few days:
To Understand The Big Picture, Give It Time - And Sleep:
Memorizing a series of facts is one thing, understanding the big picture is quite another. Now a new study demonstrates that relational memory -- the ability to make logical "big picture" inferences from disparate pieces of information -- is dependent on taking a break from studies and learning, and even more important, getting a good night's sleep.
The Origin Of The Brain Lies In A Worm:
The…
pharyngula | April 21, 2007Larry Moran raised an interesting comparison over at Laden's place. In response to this constant whining that loud-and-proud atheism 'hurts the cause', he brought up a historical parallel:
Here's just one example. Do you realize that women used to march in the streets with placards demanding that they be allowed to vote? At the time the suffragettes were criticized for hurting the cause. Their radical stance was driving off the men who might have been sympathetic to women's right to vote if only those women had stayed in their proper place.
This prompted the usual cry of the…
cmooney | April 20, 2007
Yesterday I gave a talk in Melbourne at the Bureau of Meteorology, sponsored by the Melbourne Centre of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society. Although in my previous conference talk here I had already raised the subject of framing (see coverage here and here), this time (for the first time) I devoted an entire talk to laying out the arguments that I've been putting forward with the help of Matt Nisbet.
The audience was a small but high caliber group of a few dozen scientists. My impression is that they were extremely receptive, in general, to the message. Some responses to…
scientificactivist | April 20, 2007On Wednesday, when the Supreme Court upheld a federal ban on "partial-birth abortions" in its 5-4 decision on Gonzalez v. Carhart, it dealt a potentially huge setback to US reproductive freedoms. Although intact dilation and extraction makes up only a small subset of all abortions, this ruling is significant in that it explicitly does not allow for exceptions when the mother's health is at risk. The decision is also notable in its lack of adherence to Court precedence, its lack of reliance on solid legal reasoning, and its ignorance of medical opinion. Much can and should be written about…
apalazzo | April 17, 2007This is for all you libertarians who think that laws and government are shackles. Just remember that society is a contract.
Now that those who practise justice do so involuntarily and because they have not the power to be unjust will best appear if we imagine something of this kind: having given both to the just and the unjust power to do what they will, let us watch and see whither desire will lead them; then we shall discover in the very act the just and unjust man to be proceeding along the same road, following their interest, which all natures deem to be their good, and are only diverted…
sb admin | April 16, 2007By Dick ClappÂ
Opponents in the debate over conflict of interest in cancer research are duking it out, and the current forum for their fight is the American Journal of Industrial Medicine. The article that touched off this particular scuffle was âSecret Ties to Industry and Conflicting Interests in Cancer Research,â by Hardell L, et al. (Am J Ind Med 2007;50:227-233), which details a number of examples of researchers working for industries and not disclosing their ties. The most widely publicized revelations (see this Guardian story) were about Sir Richard Doll, one of the icons of 20th…
oracknows | April 14, 2007Prometheus makes the case that our current age of unreason can be largely attributed to the Baby Boomers. As someone who can be viewed either as a very young Baby Boomer or a very old GenX-er, I nonetheless heartily agree with his clarion call near the end of his analysis:
Our society is growing more and more dependent on rationality, science and technology to keep it from collapsing. It's too late to turn back, now - giving up on reason and returning to magical thinking will cause a human (and probably environmental) catastrophe that would beggar the imagination. And, at the same time, the…
clock | April 13, 2007Tyrannosaurus Rex And Mastodon Protein Fragments Discovered, Sequenced:
Scientists have confirmed the existence of protein in soft tissue recovered from the fossil bones of a 68 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex (T. rex) and a half-million-year-old mastodon. Their results may change the way people think about fossil preservation and present a new method for studying diseases in which identification of proteins is important, such as cancer.
Here's a local angle to the same story.
Human-Chimp Differences Uncovered With Analysis Of Rhesus Monkey Genome:
An international consortium of…
clock | April 11, 2007As you know, the last several days saw quite a flurry of blog posts about framing science. I posted my thoughts here and I keep updating my post with links to all the new posts as they show up (except the expected drivel by William Dembski, some minor creaitonists and Lubos Motl). Some of the other bloggers ignored my post, many linked to it without comment, and many linked to it with positive commentary - with two exceptions.
One was Larry Moran (who probably skimmed it quickly, found what he did not like in it with his own frame of mind at the time, and used it as a starting point to…
revere | April 10, 2007Soon, maybe as soon as the end of the month, the Libyan Supreme Court will hear the appeal of the five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor, the "Tripoli 6" (here, here, here, here, here and here). As it approaches there is intense activity from the international scientific community. On March 23, ten major medical associations wrote to Colonel Qadhafi:
We the undersigned leading health professional associations in the United States are writing to urge you in the strongest terms to immediately release and exonerate the five Bulgarian nurses--Valya Cherveny, Snezhanka Dimitrova, Nasya…
retrospectacle | April 10, 2007
Wow, why is this so relaxing? I think this slow-moving up-close-and-personal whale thingamajig could supplant bubble baths and candles as most relaxing thing ever. If they had added whale-song in the background I think we'd have the cure for insomnia and hypertension.
And while you're feelin' so fine, why not read about blue whales here? A blue whale, while the largest animal, doesn't have the largest brain. That honor goes to the sperm whale, who's brain weighs in at 20 pounds. A blue whale's brain is 15 pounds, and a human's is about 6 pounds.
From the Whale and Dolphin Conservation…
hrynyshyn | April 7, 2007Fellow SciBloggers Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbet have a short essay in this week's Science that says scientists need to adopt the "framing" strategy that right-wing propagandists have been so successful with over the past couple of decades -- if science is ever to trump the neo-conservative claptrap that infects global warming and evolution debates, among other important public policy issues. It's generating a lot of attention in these parts of the blogosphere and throughout the scientific community, I expect. Subscribers can read the whole thing but the publicly accessible one-line summary is…