Social Sciences
chaoticutopia | April 6, 2007While here in Colorado, freezing rain and snow is drizzling from the skies, spring is sweeping across the northern hemisphere. In celebration, I designed this petal-like Julia set and laid it on top a wavy Mandelbrot set, creating this arousing union. (What can I say? It's spring!)
In creating the fractal, I used the colors from this native Colorado wildflower, which will be blooming here, very shortly:
Bell's Twinpod (Physaria bellii)
These pretty little blooms are only found in Colorado, and even then only in certain areas. Specifically, the plant grows in sandstone or shale formations (…
thusspakezuska | April 6, 2007Bora at A Blog Around the Clock alerted me to an article in Science Daily titled Power And Sexual Harassment -- Men And Women See Things Differently.
Issues of power, workplace culture and the interpretation of verbal and non-verbal communication associated with sexual harassment were the focus of a study by Debbie Dougherty, assistant professor of communication in the College of Arts and Science at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Working with a large healthcare organization in the Midwest, Dougherty examined the question: why does sexual harassment occur?
Dougherty's findings show…
oracknows | April 6, 2007In perusing my Folder of Woo, which is becoming every more crammed with potential targets begging for the tender mercies of Orac in their very own Your Friday Dose of Woo installments, I was wondering which one to pick. After all, it's an embarrassment of riches (if you can call it "riches") in there, with so much woo and so little time. I needed something different after last week's installment, which, sadly, appeared to have grossed some people out. I don't know why it might have grossed more people out than previous posts on colon cleanses and liver flushes, but for some reason it did. But…
bcohen | April 4, 2007So, like most of us, I'm reading over back issues of The Western Journal of Medicine and Surgery, and I stumble upon an article I'd dog-eared some time back. It's an "Analysis of Boston Waters," from their April 1846 issue. You know, page 362? The one that has Benjamin Silliman warning against lead poisoning. You know Silliman, leading light of the early years of American science, founded and editor of the American Journal of Science, incorporating member of the National Academy of Science? Yes, that Benjamin Silliman. Well, he's saying "it is the course of safety to avoid, as far as…
cevans | April 4, 2007James Gardner is part of a new breed of complexity theorists: an armchair philosopher that goes beyond the epistemological, who posits broad, celebratory theories about the nature of the future of the universe. His first book, Biocosm, proposed the "Selfish Biocosm" hypothesis, which suggests that intelligence doesn't emerge in a series of Darwinian accidents, but is hard-wired into the cycle of cosmic creation; it's a really beautiful idea, putting us right at the center of a living, breathing, intelligent universe, which, incidentally, is the title of his newest book.
Dude also rolled…
clock | April 4, 2007Sleep Quantity Affects Morning Testosterone Levels In Older Men
The testosterone levels of healthy men decline as they get older. As sleep quality and quantity typically decrease with age, objectively measured differences in the amount of sleep a healthy older man gets can affect his level of testosterone in the morning, according to a study published in the April 1st issue of the journal SLEEP.
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"The results of the study raise the possibility that older men who obtain less actual sleep during the night have lower blood testosterone levels in the morning," said Penev. "Although…
clock | April 3, 2007The Eyes Have It! How Box Jellyfish Avoid Banging Into Things:
Box jellyfish are much more active swimmers than other jellyfish -- they exhibit strong directional swimming, are able to perform rapid 180 degree turns, and can deftly move in between objects. So how do they manage to manoeuvre the obstacle course that is in the sea bed?
Bats Get The Munchies Too!:
Many of us will be familiar with cravings for sweet food, after having overindulged in alcohol the night before. It appears that Egyptian fruit bats also crave particular types of sugar to reduce the effects of ethanol toxicity.…
evolvingthoughts | April 3, 2007
Don Metcalf, who I have mentioned before here, has been awarded the American Association for Cancer Research Award for Lifetime Achievement in Cancer Research.
Donald Metcalf receives American Association for Cancer Research Lifetime Achievement Award
PHILADELPHIA – Donald Metcalf, M.D., the physiologist renowned as "the father of hematopoietic cytokines" for his pioneering work on the control of blood cell formation, will receive the American Association for Cancer Research Award for Lifetime Achievement in Cancer Research.
The award will be presented on Monday, April 16, 2007…
grrlscientist | April 2, 2007
A freshly-plumaged LeConte's Sparrow, Ammodramus leconteii, that Dave Rintoul banded in Kansas in the fall of 2005. (bigger version).
Image: Dave Rintoul, KSU.
Birds in Science
In the past few years, China has become famous for the number and quality of bird fossils from the Early Cretaceous that have been discovered there. This week, another such discovery has been reported by an international team of Chinese, American and Japanese scientists. Their discovery of 120-million-year-old fossilized footprints made by a roadrunner-like bird in Shandong Province, China (see map), was published…
pharyngula | March 31, 2007A gay rights group called Soulforce had a sit-in (it warms my heart to hear the traditions of the 1960s have not completely died) in the offices of Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and typical homophobe. One of our local bible scholars, Reuben David, an assistant professor of Communication Arts at North Central University, took it upon himself to criticize these militant gay rights activists; I'm really impressed with his perspective:
Osama Bin Laden's threat against the West is milder compared to the movements of [Soulforce founder] Mel White and others who…
oracknows | March 29, 2007I was going to try to be a good boy. Really, I was. I had been planning on answering a question about the early detection of tumors. It was an opportune time to do so, given the recent news of cancer recurrence in Elizabeth Edwards and Tony Snow, coupled with a couple of papers I saw just yesterday and the announcement of new screening guidelines for breast MRI. However, I was finding that writing the piece would be fairly complex (because it's a complex topic) and that it might even require a multi-post approach. There was no way to do it justice today; doing it over the weekend would make a…
jrosenhouse | March 28, 2007Read Part One and Part Two.
Stephen Meyer was next up. Strobel and Richards played their parts well, but, let's face it, the conference thus far had mostly been amateur hour. Strobel stepped in it every time he mentioned something vaguely scientific, but he's not exactly thrust forward as one of the major intellects of the ID movement. Richards presented his goofy argument with sufficient eloquence, but there was too little of substance in his presentation to make him worth too much emotional energy.
But with Meyer we hit the ID big time. Meyer, you will recall, is the one who managed to…
pharyngula | March 28, 2007He mangles science, now he defames history. Michael Egnor is like the Swiss army knife of creationist hackery.
Former Vice President Al Gore famously claimed to have invented the Internet because years ago he was in the Senate and sponsored a bill. The assertion that Charles Darwin's theory was indispensable to classical and molecular genetics is a claim of an even lower order. Darwin's theory impeded the recognition of Mendel's discovery for a third of a century, and Darwin's assertion that random variation was the raw material for biological complexity was of no help in decoding the genetic…
grrlscientist | March 26, 2007
A male Superb Bird of Paradise, Lophorina superba (seen from front)
performing a courtship display for a female (brown) in Papua New Guinea,
from "Jungles," in the "Planet Earth" series.
Image: Fred Olivier/Discovery Channel and BBC.
Birds in Science
Red-breasted nuthatches, Sitta canadensis, appear to have learned the language of black-capped chickadees, Poecile atricapillus. Nuthatches interpret the type of chickadee alarm and can identify what sort of predator poses a threat. Nuthatches have learned to tell if the chickadees are threatened by pygmy owls, which pose a serious threat to…
tfk | March 26, 2007Lawrence.com's Joel Mathis is blogging Tocqueville, and asks "Is equality still ‘a fundamental condition of America?,’" My argument would be that it is no less so than it was then, but that isn't saying much. Tocqueville has a tendency to use an idealized conception of America as a foil for his own philosophizing, as do most of the foreign writers who've ventured to our shores.
Certainly we have not achieved anything resembling true equality, but the aspiration is there. Income mobility has fallen and income inequality is at a level not seen since before Teddy Roosevelt's progressive…
mixingmemory | March 26, 2007
When I was an undergrad, my intro psych professor mentioned research in industrial/organizational psychology indicating that the color red causes people to be happier and more productive, while blue makes people sadder and less productive. Later I was taught that the relationship between color and performance was actually more complex. Specifically, I was taught that colors with higher wave lengths (like red) cause arousal, while colors with smaller wavelengths are soothing. Until a couple years ago, though, I'd never actually read any research on the topic. My knowledge was all hearsay.…
evolvingthoughts | March 24, 2007The IDiot Dembski has written this:
It’s a happy Darwinian world after all …
William Dembski
Every now and again when I want to feel good about our shared humanity, I curl up with Darwin’s DESCENT OF MAN and read passages like the following:
The reckless, degraded, and often vicious members of society, tend to increase at a quicker rate than the provident and generally virtuous members. Or as Mr. Greg puts the case: “The careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman multiplies like rabbits: the frugal, foreseeing, self-respecting, ambitious Scot, stern in his morality, spiritual in his faith,…
revere | March 23, 2007Pregnant Latina women in the Salinas Valley in CAlifornia have pesticides in their bodies. The surrounding farmland is loaded with pesticides. But how is it getting from the land to them? Or is it? Tom McKone and his colleagues at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs set out to find out. It turned out not to be that easy.
McKone and company concentrated on organophosphate pesticides (OPs). These are long acting nerve poisons for pests but can also affect humans and are of concern for neurodevelopmental effects on fetuses and children. When taken into the body they are metabolized to other…
voltagegate | March 23, 2007In Kaziranga National Park in India, four endangered one-horned rhinos (Rhinceros unicornis) have been found dead in the past few weeks, while our own legislators battle over measures to curb the spread of brucellosis from bison to cattle.
In Indian myth, the one- horned rhino is a divine beast, often depicted carrying the universe on its back in the form of the preserver god, Vishnu. Many historians believe that it was also responsible for the ancient fairy tales of the unicorn. So why were the rhinos shot? Mysticism, ironically, under the guise of "traditional medicine."
Their horns -- made…
jrosenhouse | March 21, 2007In yesterday's post I remarked that people seem to lose their minds upon deciding to become anti-evolution advocates. There is no better case in point than William Dembski. Ten years ago he was the star of the ID movement. A well-credentialed scholar with shiny new ideas holding down an actual academic position and publishing books with credible publishers.
Those days are long gone. Nowadays he only seems to find time to post brief missives at one of the most cartoonishly ignorant blogs on the Web: Uncommon Descent. I stopped paying attention to the blog a while back, figuring Dembski…