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grrlscientist | June 26, 2009Here's the latest blog carnival action in the blogosphere for you to read and enjoy;
Carnival of the Vanities. This blog carnival celebrates the best writing in the blogosphere, regardless of topic.
Carnival of Education, which has a zillion contributions from people involved with education.
Book Review carnival, #20. Are you looking for a few good books to read while you are on the beach? If so, this is the place to look for them.
Carnival of Satire, #115. This blog carnival is sure to give you a smile.
gregladen | June 26, 2009The new study identifies 27 loci that have rare copy number variations, where there are more or fewer repeated DNA segments than expected, common to the genomes of several children with autism spectrum disorder. These variations are not present in controls without autism spectrum disorder.
The peer reviewed paper is available in the Open Access journal PLoS Genetics.
The sample included 2,832 individuals distributed among 912 families that had multiple autistic children. The control group consisted of 1,070 samples of disease-free children who presumably are not clustered from a smaller…
mspringer | June 26, 2009Alas for Michael Jackson. Talented musician, deeply broken human being. Most of my knowledge of him was through cultural osmosis rather than his actual music, and I'm young enough so that I can't really remember the time before he was a punchline about changing skin color, disastrous plastic surgery, and child molestation. Well, de mortuis nil nisi bonum.
His death reminds me of my undergrad thermodynamics book, of all things. As you know, an object at a particular temperature will radiate light with a particular spectrum depending on the material. Heat something up enough, and it will…
grrlscientist | June 26, 2009
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is a blog carnival that celebrates the best science, nature and medical writing targeted specifically to the public that has been published in the blogosphere within the past 60 days. To send your submissions to Scientia Pro Publica, either use this automated submission form or use the cute little widget on the right (sometimes that widget doesn't upload when the mother site is sick). Be sure to include the URL or "…
cortex | June 26, 2009If anybody happens to be in New Haven this evening, I'll be speaking about Proust, art, science, wine and Descartes with the psychologist Paul Bloom. It will be fun and it's free. The event starts at 5:30 and is at the Yale Center for British Art.
grrlscientist | June 25, 2009Usually, I complain that I get less than what I've paid for, especially because I try to live frugally, which is difficult after the nearby 99-cent store burnt down recently. That unfortunate event means that all my expenses for food, cleaning supplies and other stupid items that I need -- like a bucket to catch the water leaking from underneath my sink because the landlord won't fix it and I lack the tools to fix it myself -- now cost significantly more than they did just a short time ago.
Significantly more.
But today, when I was eating my meagre dinner of Progresso Chicken and Wild Rice…
gregladen | June 25, 2009LA Times:
[Updated at 3:15 p.m.: Pop star Michael Jackson was pronounced dead by doctors this afternoon after arriving at a hospital in a deep coma, city and law enforcement sources told The Times.]
gregladen | June 25, 2009Not many details available, but it sounds like he was found 'not breathing' and rushed to hospital. UPDATE: The word is that Jackson may have been not breathing and unresponsive at the time the paramedics arrived.
He was taken to UCLA medical center. This happened 2.5 hours ago, and there are no other details available.
The best information for now is probably the LA times.
UPDATE : TMZ is reporting that Jackson has died.
gregladen | June 25, 2009The current I and the Bird blog carnival (it is about birds) goes into extra innings. This is a particularly good version of the carnival, which is always good anyway. Check it out here.
pharyngula | June 25, 2009I'm really not being mean and trying to banish a fellow science blogger to some barren, frigid desolation — hey, that's where I live! — but she's volunteering to leave New York for a month to live in Antarctica. All you have to do is vote for her essay, and presto, maybe they'll ship her off to somewhere near the south pole. Cool.
gregladen | June 25, 2009Eight to one? Any guesses as to which of the nine supreme court justices think it is OK to get a 13 year old girl to strip down and shake out her underwear so you can see if she has TWO ASPIRIN ON HER???
The Supreme Court said Thursday school officials acted illegally when they strip-searched an Arizona teenage girl looking for prescription-strength ibuprofen.
In an 8-1 ruling, the justices said that school officials violated the Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches when they ordered Savana Redding to remove her clothes and shake out her underwear.
Redding was 13 when Safford Middle…
gregladen | June 25, 2009... At age 62. Updated:
Of cancer, details here.
She was a pop/cultural icon who invented an entire hair do. Her image was so caught up in one of her main roles as an actress that her other work, including health care related work, has been somewhat ignored.
(That role was in Charlie's Angels, BTW.)
sb admin | June 25, 2009A few recent items highlight programs and innovations that are helping improve health in developing countries:
Journalist and Nieman Fellow Christine Gorman spent three months in Malawi to learn about a new program thatâs tackling the countryâs severe nursing shortage with higher pay and more support for nursing education and training. Sheâs been writing about her trip and the issues it raised for her on her blog, Global Health Report, and now reports that the American Journal of Nursing has published a photo essay on nurses in Malawi, featuring text from Gorman and photos by Eileen…
cortex | June 25, 2009It's a shame that we stop encouraging naps once the preschool years are over. After all, there's a growing body of scientific evidence that the afternoon siesta is an important mental tool, which enhances productivity, learning and memory. (It's really much more effective than a cup of coffee.) Here's the Times:
Have to solve a problem? Try taking a nap. But it has to be the right kind of nap -- one that includes rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep, the kind that includes dreams.
Researchers led by Sara C. Mednick, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego…
gregladen | June 24, 2009Surgeon and inventor Catherine Mohr tours the history of surgery (and its pre-painkiller, pre-antiseptic past), then demos some of the newest tools for surgery through tiny incisions, performed using nimble robot hands. Fascinating -- but not for the squeamish.
jwilbanks | June 24, 2009There's an interesting tweet about attribution in the data web. And it raises a tension I run into a lot but haven't seen a lot written about: the shifting nature of what the word "attribution" means.
We have a fairly common understanding of attribution in our daily lives: credit where credit is due is mine, and it tends to be what most people think. This is whether one is a musician, a scientist, a teacher, or anyone who does creative or innovative work. We like getting credit for our work. No problem there.
This idea of attribution encompasses the idea that we should get credit for our…
sb admin | June 24, 2009
by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure
For years those concerned about the consequences of an influenza pandemic from an exceptionally virulent flu virus, like A/H5N1 ("bird flu") have despaired about motivating business, government and neighbors to take it seriously enough to make serious preparations. It's understandable. There's are a lot of potential catastrophes competing for our attention and while each can be made plausible if we can get someone to listen long enough, it's rare we can do this. As I said, too much competition. Now that a real life influenza pandemic has arrived,…
mspringer | June 24, 2009Chad Orzel's got a great post up about the physics of Lord of the Rings. It's about Legolas the elf and his excellent eyesight. His eyes are so good that in fact they're probably operating well beyond the physical diffraction limits of any optical device with a human-sized pupil. Some speculation was discussed about how his eyes might plausibly be so good without magic: maybe he can see in the short-wavelength UV, maybe he can do interferometry(!), maybe elf pupils are bigger than we think, maybe the Middle Earth "league" is shorter than our identically-named unit of distance, along with a…
gregladen | June 24, 2009"So take this and fill it out," he suddenly said, thrusting a small square of paper in my general direction, a piece of paper that looked like a postcard on one side and a form to be filled in on the other. "As soon as you can. Do it right now."
So my boss had just forced me to join the Columbia House Record Club so he could get a free album by getting someone else to join. I had to pick five albums from this list of mostly totally stupid stuff....
Forced to Join the Columbia House Record Club at Quiche Moraine