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petnoyer | September 5, 2008
You can't say farewell to Summer 2008 without a loving look back at... the Italian Spiderman. This viral video came on the scene like a Jersey girl on the boardwalk, sweeping Philly boys off their feet. We're showing Episode 6, in which our hero seeks remnants of the the asteroid that formed the Chicxulub Crater off the coast of the Yucatan Penninsula.
Check out YouTube for the full series from Alrugo Entertainment if you haven't seen it. Special shout out to the 2-1-5. Miss you guys. Congrats Bill and Kika, welcome baby Alexa Capozzoli!
petnoyer | September 4, 2008
Image courtesy Dr. Erik Cordes, Expedition to the Deep Slope, NOAA/MMS
The deep-sea gorgonian genus Iridogorgia sp. is characterized by a partially calcareous axis with an open, upright spiral or helix arrangement (Verrill, 1883) used to strain food from the water column. Three new species were described last year (Watling 2007). According to Dr. Steve Cairns at Smithsonian NMNH, this is Iridogorgia pourtalesii Verrill, 1883. It's the type species for the genus. Picture from 1410 m depth in Green Canyon 854 on the 2007 Expedition to the Deep Slope in the Gulf of Mexico.
AE Verrill (1883)…
cortex | September 4, 2008Razib makes an excellent and obvious point:
I do not believe scientists are particularly rational people as compared to the normal human. Because the average scientist has a higher IQ than the average artist I am willing to grant marginally higher rationality to an average scientist. Their ability to decompose and abstract any given conceptual system is greater. That being said, the contrast between the disciplines of art and science are far greater than those of individual artists and scientists. Why?
Because at the end of the day science does not rely on the rationality of a scientist. It…
sb admin | September 4, 2008Ken Ward of the Charleston Gazette has been following closely and reporting on the deadly blast on Aug 28 at the multinational Bayer CropScience's plant in Institute, WV. His first story (here) indicated that witnesses saw a red fireball at about 10:25 pm, and that thousands of residents were told to shelter in place, and his next story reported on the plant's rocky safety record. Mr. Barry Withrow, 45, who was killed in the blast was buried on Sept 1. This small WV town is well known in public health circles because of its notorious connection to Bhopal, India and that city's…
grrlscientist | September 4, 2008Some of these reciprocal links are late, but it's better to be late than not at all, I suppose. Here's some blog carnivals for you to enjoy while I am seeking out more London adventures to tell you about on my blog;
Carnival of Horses for September. This blog carnival focuses on the best horse-related blog entries that have been published in the previous month in the blogosphere.
Gene Genie, #34. This blog carnival links to essays about genetics for you to enjoy.
Medicine 2.0, #31. This blog carnival is about medicine and it has a lot of interesting links for you to explore!
Carnival of…
cortex | September 4, 2008Is it football season already? It seems like I just got over the epic disappointment of the Superbowl. (Yes, I'm a Pats fan) So, in honor of football season, I think it's worth highlighting one of the major trends to affect the sport over the last few decades: the ascent of the passing game. Since 1960, quarterbacks have managed to increase their average gain per pass attempt by nearly 30 percent, from 4.6 yards to 6.5 yards. (Running backs only get about 4 yards per attempt, a number that hasn't changed in thirty years.) Furthermore, even as quarterbacks have gotten more yards per pass, they…
sb admin | September 4, 2008The Department of Labor's Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) confirmed yesterday that it has referred evidence related to the Crandall Canyon disaster to a federal district attorney for a possible criminal investigation. Murray Energy was assessed a $1.34 million civil penalty on July 24 for violations related to the massive ground failure which took the lives of nine men, but the Mine Act of 1977 also provides for criminal penalties which include up to one year in jail. (In contrast, the OSH Act's criminal provisions only allows up to 6 months in jail.) The referral was…
mspringer | September 4, 2008Teaching Physics 201 has me digging out some of my old favorite concept-y problems. Nothing dramatic in the mathematics, but at the 201 level you can't even assume knowledge of derivatives. But you can try to catch their minds with interesting examples. Here's a classic one:
You've got the earth and the moon. They have mass and so they attract each other with gravity. Both the earth and the moon are pretty large, and so the attraction is considerable. On the scale of earthbound undergraduate lab equipment however, gravity from anything but the earth is pretty hard to measure. Pretty…
petnoyer | September 3, 2008When a sailor misses a chance to go to sea, he tends to wander around his garden, paying special attention to the clouds and the weather, as if he were walking on the ship's deck in fresh sea air. He circles his home like it were a shipyard, looking for repairs. Today I noticed some rotting wood on the gable in a corner of the garden. A bee crawled out.
The adjacent firebush (Fig. 1) buzzes every morning with dozens of bees of a few different species. Two species are bumblebees, big, black, and loud; the other is small, like a honeybee, yellow and black. Hummingbirds also frequent the bush.…
cortex | September 3, 2008So there's been a lot of talk about how John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin for VP demonstrates the danger of trusting your instincts and making important decisions with your gut. But I think such a conclusion is unfair - not to McCain, but to our very own brain.
After all, one of the major findings of neuroscience in the last decade or so has been the tremendous power of the emotional mind. The unconscious, long derided as a Freudian underworld, is now seen as an adaptive supercomputer. Antonio Damasio, for instance, has demonstrated that when people lose the ability to experience emotion -…
cortex | September 3, 2008Panhandling is a surprisingly lucrative profession:
Anecdotal surveys by journalists and police, and even testimony by panhandlers themselves, suggest that begging can yield anywhere from $20 to $100 a day--though police in Coos Bay, Oregon, found that local panhandlers were taking in as much as $300 a day in a Wal-Mart parking lot. "A panhandler could make thirty to forty thousand dollars a year, tax-free money," Baker says. In Memphis, a local FOX News reporter, Jason Carter, donned old clothes and hit the streets earlier this year, earning about $10 an hour.
Why do people give money away…
mspringer | September 3, 2008Physics is a continuous thing, progressing steadily forward with only rare dramatic leaps. This is not the kind of style that makes for flashy news stories in the popular press. When there are interesting things being reported, they're usually wrong. "Faster than light" laser pulses, quantum teleportation, invisibility cloaks... if it's in the popular press it's probably not anything remotely resembling what they tell you it is. It's like asking me to report on avant-garde fashion.
But every once in a while some interesting things pop up. Today two things did. The first is the sun.
The…
kevin z | September 2, 2008Zach at When Pigs Fly Returns has the latest edition of the paleo-carnival, The Boneyard! Keep an eye out for preserved naughty bits...
kevin z | September 2, 2008
Well, we are mostly packed up and the family is ready for our big move to coastal North Carolina to start my new job at the Duke University Marine Lab! And it seems like we might be greeted with southern hospitality by Hannah. My first time living in the south and we are immediately confronted by Storm World. That's just Faaaaaaaaaantastic...
Since I will be temporarily living on one of the barrier islands, I may not even be able to get to our new home to unpack and hunker down. They shut the bridge down if winds exceed 60 mph. I even need to get a "hurricane pass" which allows me onto the…
razib | September 2, 2008Enter the new hegemon, ScienceBlogs welcomes another white male, Genetic Future.
cortex | September 2, 2008I love these experiments, if only because everyone assumes that the basic finding doesn't apply to them. It's only these other simpletons who can't tell the difference between red and white wine, or cheap plonk and fancy Bordeaux, or strawberry and chocolate yogurt:
In one recent test, psychologists asked 32 volunteers to sample strawberry yogurt. To make sure the testers made their judgments purely on the basis of taste, the researchers said, they needed to turn out the lights. Then they gave their subjects chocolate yogurt. Nineteen of the 32 praised the strawberry flavor. One said that…
cortex | September 2, 2008On the last day of every golf tournament, Tiger Woods insists on wearing a bright red polo shirt. Woods says the habit is merely superstition, but new research suggests that his fashion sense might actually come with athletic benefits. A paper published this month in Psychological Science reports that referees and umpires subconsciously favor competitors in red uniforms. The experiment was clever: the scientists showed 42 experienced tae kwon do referees video clips of five different male competitors. Each clip featured one athlete in red and another athlete in blue. At first, the referees…
mspringer | September 2, 2008In honor of Physics 201 which I'm teaching this semester, I present a very elementary statics problem.
Here we have a board of uniform composition and weight W. It has length l and the supports are separated by a distance s. What are the two forces (call them A and B) on the boards?
The board isn't moving. It's just sitting there, and so if there's no acceleration there's no net forces. That gives us
Hmm. That's two unknown quantities with one equation. Not enough. Fortunately there's another equation we can use involving the torque. Torque is the angular equivalent of force. Get a…
cortex | September 2, 2008You've got to feel very sorry for Bristol Palin. The poor teenager isn't running for political office and yet she's the subject of two front page stories in the NY Times today. All of a sudden, every talking head on the cable news is wondering how her pregnancy will influence the election. Is this what politics has become?
And yet, this teenage pregnancy is indicative of something: the pitiful failure of abstinence-only sex education. Governor Palin, of course, strongly supports abstinence-only education in the classroom. (She also believes in teaching creationism alongside evolutionary…