clock | October 5, 2006Study says no video games on school nights:
According to Dr. Iman Sharif, the results were clear-cut. "On weekdays, the more they watched, the worse they did," said Dr. Sharif. Weekends were another matter, with gaming and TV watching habits showing little or no effect on academic performance, as long as the kids spent no more than four hours per day in front of the console or TV. "They could watch a lot on weekends, and it didn't seem to correlate with doing worse in school," noted Dr. Sharif.
The study was using self-reporting by kids, which has its problems, but is OK in this case, I…
clock | October 5, 2006Brian Russell is organizing the 2007 Podcastercon. Let me show you how much fun the last year's Podacstercon was by reposting this January 16, 2006 post (also cross-posted on Science And Politics) about the exciting education session led by David Warlick of 2 Cents Worth blog:
Sorry for three days of absence from this blog. I needed some time to recuperate after the Podacstercon which I attended last Saturday. It was a marvelous experience. For more information check out the Podcastercon blog, the wiki, a nice article in News and Observer, the blog reports via Technorati tags, Technorati…
clock | October 5, 2006Seven women are to be stoned to death for "crimes against chastity". Amnesty International is asking for your help. Read about it here. Sign a petition (or submit your own letter) here. If we do not act fast, this is what will happen:
Under Shari'a law, a prisoner is buried up to her breast, her hands restrained. Rules also specify the size of the stones which can be thrown so that death is painful and not imminent. Both men and women can be sentenced to die by stoning. In practise, however, an overwhelming number of women receive that penalty.
Death penalty is always bad, but this method…
clock | October 5, 2006
Jean-Claude Bradley is the pioneer in the use of blogs in science in the way that too many of us are still too scared to do - posting on a daily basis the ideas, methods and data from the lab. He and his collaborators are using the blogs Useful Chemistry, Useful Chem Experiments 1 and Usefulchem-Molecules, as well as the UsefulChem Project wiki to exchange information, brainstorm and inform the public of their work. These sites serve as laboratory notebooks open for everyone to see.
So, I am delighted to tell you that Jean-Claude will be coming to the 2007 North Carolina Science Blogging…
clock | October 5, 2006Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science, will chat onliine on DefCon blog at 7pm EST tonight. You can post a question right now, if you register.
clock | October 5, 2006Have you seen Flock of Dodos yet? Don't you want to? Why not do something socially positive in the process - ask your local library to get a copy - it is only $345! Then ask them to host a public screening. Then get a bunch of friends and watch it. Get more information from Reed (especially for Triangle bloggers) and PZ Myers.
clock | October 5, 2006I missed answering AskTheScienceBlogger question for a few weeks now, so let me take a quick stab at the latest one:
What's an antioxidant, and why are they healthful? I thought oxygen was supposed to be good for you!
Not that I know too much about this but I should, as the molecule central to my area of research is melatonin which is one of the most powerful antioxidants normally produced in our bodies. I do mention antioxidants when I teach the Intro Bio lab, so I know the very basic, textbook stuff, as I wrote here:
Then I explained in quite a lot of detail what happens in the…
clock | October 4, 2006From John Dupuis via ACRLog, news of Academic Blog Portal wiki collecting (in a Chinese Classification of Animals kind of way) all the academic blogging goodness. It is currently heavy on humanities side, but you can add science blogs there if you want.
I wonder if something like this should be linked from somewhere there...
clock | October 4, 2006Archy has totally switched from mammoths (and Republicans) to mastodons. He explains the news on the tuberculosis in their bones and what that has to do with their extinction.
clock | October 4, 2006 Mark Foley and the unmasked Republican Party
Also, welcome to the readers from Leiter Reports (coming here to read this but also hopefully looking around).
clock | October 4, 2006From November 01, 2005, a review of a review...
Here is a nice article in Washington Post - Ecological Niche May Dictate Sleep Habits - about the adaptive function of sleep.
It addresses some of the themes I am interested in.
First, the unfortunate fact is that sleep was initially defined by researchers of humans, i.e., medical researchers. Inevitably, the (electrophysiological) definition of sleep was thus saddled with unneccessary anthropocentric elements that for decades hampered the study of evolution of sleep.
I was present at the meeting (here in Biotechnology Center in RTP) several…
clock | October 4, 2006Since every chemical induces a different response in the body dependent on the time of day when it is administered, I am not surprised that this also applies to caffeine:
A new study at the Université de Montréal has concluded that people drinking coffee to get through a night shift or a night of studying will strongly hurt their recovery sleep the next day. The study published in the current issue of Neuropsychopharmacology was conducted by Dr. Julie Carrier from the Department of Psychology at the Université de Montréal. Dr. Carrier runs the Chronobiology Laboratory at the Hôpital du…
clock | October 4, 2006In the light of this years' Nobel Prizes in Physiology and Chemistry (all RNA all the time), it would be interesting to think how would transcription, translation, gene regulation and replication work if DNA has evolved to be like this!?
clock | October 4, 2006For easy-to-understand quick look at the evolution of vision I have to refer you to these two posts by PZ Myers, this post of mine, and these two posts by Carl Zimmer.
Now, armed with all that knowledge, you will curely appreciate the importance of this new study:
Compound Eyes, Evolutionary Ties:
Biologists at the University of California, San Diego have discovered that the presence of a key protein in the compound eyes of the fruit fly (which glow at center due to a fluorescent protein) allows the formation of distinct light gathering units in each of its 800 unit eyes, an evolutionary…
clock | October 4, 2006In these days of global warming it is important to realize how important temperature is in regulation of a variety of biological processes. Here is today's sampler of examples:
Why Do Cold Animals Make Bigger Babies?:
Reproduction involves a critical decision: Should an organism invest energy in a few large offspring or many small ones? In a new study from the American Naturalist, biologists used a new statistical approach that can test multiple theories at the same time, an approach they hope will shed light on many evolutionary problems. They used data from many populations of Eastern…
clock | October 4, 2006...on the suspension of habeas corpus. A Must Read.
...and on a lighter note....
clock | October 4, 2006Roger D. Kornberg got a chemistry Nobel Prize this year for figuring out one of the most basic processes in all of biology, stuff we teach in intro classes - DNA transcription, i.e., how the cell "reads" the DNA code and synthesizes messenger RNA molecules that are used as templates for synthesis of proteins. Excellent choice from my perspective of a biologist. But what do the chemists think?
Also, is this the first instance of a parent and the child both getting a Nobel (his father got one four decades ago for DNA replication)?