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kevin z | August 1, 2008ScienceBlogs has a new blogger in town! I'm excited about Built on Facts. Matt is a graduate student in physics at Texas A&M who blogs on all things physics-ey. He writes very well and is easy to follow. Go there, say hi, put his feed in your blog aggregator or bookmark him, and see a BFR! (Big Freaking Rocket)
kevin z | August 1, 2008OK, for the penguins out there reading Deep Sea News, don't get any ideas!
My favorite kid's channel Noggin has a moose that sings songs in between TV shows, instead of commercials. I'm glad we gave up our TV service, everything is on YouTube these days!
cmcclain | July 31, 2008
Peter Ward is the man. I became acquainted with his work through reading is papers on the rise (and fall) of mollusks through time. His research on mass extinctions is seminal. You also got to love his inordinate fondness of Nautilus!
kevin z | July 31, 2008(image credit: Birgitte Wilms, National Geographic)
(image credit: David Doubilet, National Geographic)
National Geographic says it best,
"Perpetually pouting with vermilion lips and probing with a hornlike proboscis, the shortnose batfish (Ogcocephalus nasutus) is not known for its grace. Most often it is seen half hopping, half lunging across the seafloor like an awkward amphibian. The "nose" acts as both shovel and fishing lure."
gregladen | July 31, 2008 You can't have it until December, but you can pre-order it now (in case they run out!). Click the picture. Maybe. Probably, this is more properly thought of as the Zeroth Harry Potter Book.
Do you know about the Tales of Beedle the Bard? According to Julia (I didn't know) it has to do with these three brothers who encounter a river previously uncrossed by mortal men. They fool death or build a bridge or something and survive and get wishes. One asks for a powerful wand, one wants to bring back the dead, and one asks that Death not be able to follow him.
This results in the existence…
cmcclain | July 31, 2008...it's a sea demon!
Actually its a pteropod, a shell-less gastropod, and even crazier it is a simultaneous hermaphrodite.
grrlscientist | July 31, 2008Hey everyone, the planners have set up a location for the public to meet the ScienceBloggers in NYC!
Location: Social bar and lounge -- look for us in the back room.
Date: Saturday, 9 August 2008
Time: 2-4pm
grrlscientist | July 31, 2008Here's a blog carnival for you to enjoy;
A Gardening Carnival, 30 July 2008 edition. This blog carnival focuses on all aspects of gardening and lawn care.
mikethemadbiologist | July 31, 2008I'm sure you were asking yourself that very question this morning. OK, maybe not. But one of the interesting questions about antibiotic resistance is why a certain antibiotic resistance gene or allele (gene variant) is common and others are rare.
Among the beta-lactamases, the TEM-1 allele is the most common. Beta-lactamases protect bacteria against beta-lactam antibiotics, which include penicillin and its derivatives. TEM-1 was the first beta-lactamase gene to be characterized and provides resistance only to penicillin and ampicillin, while other, newer TEM alleles confer resistance to…
cmcclain | July 31, 2008...the ocean is our final frontier. Besides if we need to explore it before it is overfished, mined, covered in trash, or a sink for all our excess carbon. Mars can wait.
Of course I say this in partly in jest. I mean I don't want to start another Volcano War. A country like the United States should worry less about being a military leader, outspending all other countries 20 to 1. If we outspent the rest of the world 18 to 1 that would be enough for both space and deep-sea exploration.
cortex | July 31, 2008A mule is a biological hybrid, an offspring of a male donkey and a female horse. According to a new paper, all of this cross-pollination has real benefits: mules are significantly smarter than either of their parents. No regression to the mean here:
Six of each animal were shown sets of two food buckets, each marked with a different symbol.In order to gain access to the food, the animals had to pick the correct bucket. The mules learned to discriminate between more pairs of symbols than the horses or donkeys, and did so more consistently.
The scientists argue that the intelligence of mules…
petnoyer | July 31, 2008If you have been following the story of Andrea Marshall and the manta rays off Mozambique you may notice she responded to questions in the comments section yesterday to tell us she's working with elasmobranch expert Leonard Compagno to sort through "10 generic and 25 species synonyms, mostly without type specimens" in order to figure out whether she has a new species (or two).
Ocean Revolution co-director Tim Dykstra contacted Deep Sea News, too, thanking us for highlighting the outreach and communication model the Whale Shark and Manta Research Centre has embarked upon. I called the science…
cortex | July 31, 2008One of the lessons of my article on insight (based largely on this research) is that mind wandering isn't necessarily a bad thing, at least if you want to tap into the obscure associations prevalent in the right hemisphere:
Schooler's research has also led him to reconsider the bad reputation of mind wandering. Although we often complain that the brain is too easy to distract, Schooler believes that mind-wandering is an essential mental tool. "Just look at the history of science," he says, "The big ideas seem to always come when people are sidetracked, when they're doing something that has…
kevin z | July 30, 2008
BBC News reports:
"Less than a month after it was put in orbit, the ocean-mapper Jason-2 has returned its first pictures to Earth.
From an altitude of more than 1,300km, the spacecraft is now feeding back data covering nearly the entire globe.
Jason-2 is set to become the primary means of measuring the shape of the world's oceans, taking readings with an accuracy of better than 4cm.
The information will be crucial to our understanding of both sea level rise and changing ocean currents.
(snip)
Its key instrument is the Poseidon 3 solid-state altimeter. It constantly bounces microwave pulses…
cortex | July 30, 2008The devious slogan for the New York State lottery is "All you need is a dollar and a dream." Such state lotteries are a regressive form of taxation, since the vast majority of lottery consumers are low-income. As David Brooks notes:
Twenty percent of Americans are frequent players, spending about $60 billion a year. The spending is starkly regressive. A household with income under $13,000 spends, on average, $645 a year on lottery tickets, about 9 percent of all income.
A new study by Emily Haisley, Romel Mostafa and George Loewenstein explored some of the reasons why low-income people spend…
grrlscientist | July 30, 2008Here's a few recently published blog carnivals for you to enjoy;
Carnival of Liberals, 30 July edition. This blog carnival focuses on politics and freethought.
Carnival of the Green, issue 138. This blog carnival focuses on living lightly on the earth.
cmcclain | July 30, 2008When I was a kid, I was infatuated with Legos. Who am I kidding? I am still infatuated with Legos! Imagine when I realized that my love of oceanography and my long ignored love of Legos could be combined. Below the fold are some wonderful examples of what $1000 worth of Legos and too much free time can yield. You can see more of these here, here, and here.
All this reminds me several years ago when I spotted a Lego Technics set that was of Alvin. As a poor graduate student I didn't purchase it, a decision I regret weekly. Does anybody remember this or know where to get one?
sb admin | July 30, 2008by revere, cross-posted at Effect Measure
The FDA is saying they still aren't sure how over 1200 Salmonella stpaul cases resulted from food chain contamination but they are saying its from jalapeno peppers grown in Mexico. This from a press release July 25:
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is advising consumers that jalapeño and Serrano peppers grown in the United States are not connected with the current Salmonella Saintpaul outbreak.However, the FDA continues to advise consumers to avoid raw jalapeño peppers--and the food that contains them--if they have been grown, harvested or…
pharyngula | July 30, 2008An organization of the Catholic leadership has now condemned my actions. This is sad news: it's clear that at least this tier of the Catholic hierarchy is as deranged as the wackaloons flooding my mailbox.
We find the actions of University of Minnesota (Morris) Professor Paul Myers reprehensible, inexcusable, and unconstitutional. His flagrant display of irreverence by profaning a consecrated Host from a Catholic church goes beyond the limit of academic freedom and free speech.
Hmmm. Who is the Confraternity of Catholic Clergy to decide the limits of freedom? Flagrant irreverence towards a…
cortex | July 30, 2008Ed Yong has an excellent summary of a new experiment simulating the natural evolution of an artificial language as it's passed from one person to another. Every time we use a language we are subtly bending the rules and words to fit the contours of the brain:
Together with Kenny Smith at Northumbria University, they have provided the first experimental evidence that as languages are passed on, they evolve structures that make them easier to transmit effectively.
The team tracked the progress of artificial languages as they passed down a chain of volunteers. They found that in just ten…