biology
oracknows | July 12, 2009I've just returned from Las Vegas after having attended The Amazing Meeting.. Believe it or not, I was even on a panel! While I'm gone, However, my flight was scheduled to arrive very late Sunday night, and I'm still recovering. Consequently, for one more day I'll be reposting some Classic Insolence from the month of July in years past. (After all, if you haven't been following this blog at least a year, it'll be new to you. And if you have I hope you enjoy it again.) This particular post first appeared in July 2007.
I really shouldn't do it.
I really shouldn't go perusing the blog of the…
emjohnson | July 8, 2009
Offspring Abandonment in the Ancient and Natural World
In the Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex the great kingdom of Thebes is condemned following a case of mistaken identity (and a little patricide). The sordid tale begins when the infant prince is abandoned by his parents (see right) after learning of a prophecy that his son will one day murder his father, marry his mother and assume the throne. His ankles pierced with a spike, young Oedipus is sent to be abandoned atop mount Cithaeron. While this tale sets up a beautiful tragedy it also hints at a common reality in both the ancient and…
bioephemera | July 8, 2009Opened the July 09 issue of The Scientist to find an article by Steven Wiley on why, contrary to popular belief, you aren't necessarily a failure if it turns out you're not suited for academic research:
There is no disgrace in failing to achieve a career as a scientist. Truly. Some of my students achieved distinction in their graduate work only to walk away from a scientific career with no regrets and with much ensuing success. Life is full of opportunities. The more attuned we are to how we realistically match those opportunities, the more likely we are to find real satisfaction in our…
emjohnson | July 6, 2009Rejection of authority and working-class values inspired the scientific method.
As everyone knows, when food is digested it is processed into chyle and turned into blood by the liver. This blood then flows to the lungs where it releases any impurities into the air. Flowing from the lungs into the left ventricle of the heart the blood then mixes with air and is charged with animal spirit - where it changes from dark purple to bright red. This charged blood then passes through the arteries and throughout the body.At least, if you had lived anywhere in the Western world up until the early 1600s…
oracknows | July 6, 2009Two of the major themes on this blog since the very beginning has been the application of science- and evidence-based medicine to the care of patients and why so much of so-called "complementary and alternative" medicine, as well as fringe movements like the anti-vaccine movement, have little or--more commonly--virtually no science to support their claims and recommendations. One major shortcoming of the more commonly used evidence-based medicine paradigm (EBM) that has been in ascendance as the preferred method of evaluating clinical evidence. Specifically, as Dr. Kimball Atwood IV (1, 2, 3…
bioephemera | July 4, 2009Wow. . . coming off the Silence is the Enemy rape awareness initiative, it's more depressing than usual to see the Telegraph's latest bad science reporting. Their story implies that rape victims deserve blame for what happens to them:
Women who drink alcohol, wear short skirts and are outgoing are more likely to be raped, claim scientists at the University of Leicester (source).
Ben Goldacre of the excellent Bad Science blog didn't think so. So he tracked down the (student) author of the (unpublished) (MS) dissertation cited by the Telegraph. She said the article was completely wrong:
"We…
esiegel | July 2, 2009Earlier this week, the most obvious scientific news in recent memory was reported: there's Uranium on the Moon.
This has been, pretty much, a slam-dunk since Apollo 11. Why? Because we've brought moonrocks back to Earth, and we've analyzed them thoroughly. What did we find? That they're made of the same stuff that Earth-rocks are made of!
I mean, not that that isn't interesting. None of the other rocky bodies in our Solar System have the same composition as Earth, which helped lead us to the understanding that the Moon was made out of the same stuff that made Earth. In fact, one of the…
bioephemera | July 2, 2009
Forrest McCluer
A little more explicitly biological than most of the works at Artomatic, Forrest McCluer's six-foot viroid is part of "an ongoing project to deconstruct 30 discarded personal computers and then create sculptures from all their constituent parts."
I'm not even going to start "deconstructing" the layers of meaning in a giant model of a biological virus made out of discarded, outdated computers. . . total bioephemera!
bioephemera | July 1, 2009
mushroom paintings, oil on panel, 2008
Amy Ordoveza
This series of three paintings by Amy Ordoveza works as abstraction from a distance, but close up, they're luminous golden woodland fungi - the quintessence of bioephemera! See more at her website/blog.
bioephemera | June 30, 2009Last Friday, in my post on Nature's comprehensive coverage of science journalism, I mentioned the recent Nature Biotechnology conference paper on science communications co-authored by scibling Matt Nisbet. I also said I'd come back to one of the points in it that bothers me.
As I said yesterday, most of the material in this paper (the issues of media fragmentation, framing problems, incidental exposure, etc.) has been expressed elsewhere. I agree with the majority of it, and it's nice to see it all in one place. But I have to take exception to a small piece of the paper - an example that I've…
ejohnson | June 30, 2009This book review was originally posted by Greg Laden on Greg Laden's Blog.
previously reviewed
Birds: Nature's Magnificent Flying Machines is a book by Caroline Arnold and illustrated by Patricia Wynne for, I'd say, Pre-Elementary School kids and first/second grade. This is a good book to read to a pre-literate kid. Then put it away for later when the first grade academic report on birds is due ... it will be an excellent reference.
This is a well done and highly recommended book.
Birds... is highly specialized. It deals with only one topic: Bird flight. I like that. Who needs just…
oracknows | June 29, 2009This is just a brief followup to my post this morning about yesterday's NYT article on cancer research. An excellent discussion of the NYT article can be found here (and is well worth reading in its entirety). In it, Jim Hu did something I should have done, namely check the CRISP database in addition to PubMed. A couple of key points follow about the examples cited in the NYT article.
Regarding Dennis Slamon:
I hate to criticize Dennis Slamon, because the HER2 to Herceptin story is a great one. But the image one gets of his research program being saved by a friend from Revlon while the NCI…
aardvarchaeology | June 29, 2009An idle thought struck me. Let's say you're on the latitude of Northern Europe and you've become a locavore, someone who avoids foodstuffs that must be transported far from their production site. Let's also say that you don't like greenhouses. And finally, let's say you're hooked on coffee or tea. Is there a caffeine source that can be grown outdoors in Northern Europe?
Most psychoactive substances only occur in a small group of closely related plants. But caffeine pops up in widely divergent branches of the floral kingdom. Does anybody know of a caffeine-producing plant that, say, a Dane or…
oracknows | June 29, 2009A couple of weeks ago, NEWSWEEK science columnist Sharon Begley wrote an article entitled From Bench To Bedside: Academia slows the search for cures. It was a rather poorly argued bit of polemic, backed up only with anecdotes that came across as sour grapes by scientists whose grant proposals the NIH had decided not to fund, and based on many misconceptions she had regarding basic science versus translational research, journal impact factors, and how journals actually determine what they will publish. Not suprisingly, Begley's article caught flak from others, including Mike the Mad Biologist…
bioephemera | June 27, 2009If this story is to be believed, Body Worlds creator Gunther von Hagens is going to plastinate Michael Jackson.
I have no objection to plastination per se, but I think it would be uniquely tragic for Michael Jackson to remain an object of invasive voyeurism after death. That's exactly what he was from his earliest childhood, and it seems to have affected his mental health so profoundly. Andrew Sullivan may have put it best: "He died a while ago. He remained for so long a walking human shell."
bioephemera | June 26, 2009
. . . at least according to a Japanese researcher, who trained them to differentiate "bad" and "good" children's art.
According to New Scientist,
This isn't Watanabe's first efforts to teach art appreciation to pigeons. In 1995, he and two colleagues published a paper showing that pigeons could learn to discriminate Picasso paintings from Monets - work that earned him that year's Ig Nobel prize. New Scientist plays no role in selecting winners, but Watanabe's latest study make a strong case for another award.
Zing.
Of course, Watanabe first had to determine what was "good" or "bad" art.…
bioephemera | June 25, 2009This may be the best BBC story EVER. Seriously:
Australian wallabies are eating opium poppies and creating crop circles as they hop around "as high as a kite", a government official has said."We have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles," Lara Giddings told the hearing. "Then they crash," she added. "We see crop circles in the poppy industry from wallabies that are high."
I have nothing to add. At a complete loss here. I can't even come up with a bad pun.
PS - Oops, I forgot to say this was courtesy of reader Jake! Thanks Jake…
grrlscientist | June 25, 2009tags: Biosphere 2, environment, biophilia, green living, Jane Poynter, TEDTalks, streaming video
In this video, Jane Poynter tells her story of living two years and 20 minutes in Biosphere 2 -- an experience that provoked her to explore how we might sustain life in the harshest of environments. This is the first TED talk drawn from an independently organized TEDx event, held at the University of Southern California. [15:54]
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives…
bioephemera | June 24, 2009
The "gastronomical cocktail" called "sex on a drip" is just one reason to hop a plane to Singapore and visit The Clinic, a theme restaurant that's probably not for the squeamish.
Their website boasts, "Clinic's unique alfresco is easily identified by its hospital whites, colourful pills, syringes, drips, test-tubes, and paraphernalia in all manner of the clinical, all in tribute to the tongue in cheek pop art of Damien Hirst." I don't know about Hirst - rotting, half-preserved sharks don't make me hungry - but their website is definitely fun in a trippy, pharma-chic way, complete with…
ejohnson | June 24, 2009
In the course of anthropological history, several developments served to set humans apart from other mammals: Tools, language, and domestication all played an instrumental role in shaping our evolution. Now, Razib of Gene Expression reviews a recently published book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, that argues that the ability to extract maximum energy from food through cooking was the crucial factor in making Homo sapiens the planet's dominant species. In addition to releasing a greater number of calories per unit consumed, cooking also helped free up time and energy. "Instead of…