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kevin z | July 13, 2008
When global warming raises the sea levels and wipes out most of the large cities of the world. We can rest assured that our floating lilypad cities will protect us and form a utopic society where we will all wear togas and be peaceful prosperous people celebrating scientific achievements. Until the aliens come and destroy us that is.
Check out this concept floating city, from the Daily Mail:
"The 'Lilypad City' would float around the world as an independent and fully self-sustainable home. With a lake at its centre to collect and purify rainwater, it would be accessed by three separate…
kevin z | July 12, 2008It seems that Microsoft Excel* doesn't know how to average. Or am I missing something? I showed to the lab postdoc and we both we were wide-mouthed. How can I be confident that simple Excel commands are producing the correct results? This is pretty important since I am composing a table of mean abundances (per collection) for 55 species for nine factor levels for publication! The rest seemed OK, but I'll need to spot-check on Monday to remain confident. How did I figure out there was a mistake? One cell had a mean that was an order of magnitude higher than should have been possible with my a…
kevin z | July 12, 2008Chad Widmer, an aquarist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, just released a brand spanking new book on jellyfish aquarium maintenance. I volunteered under Chad (with their penguin exhibit) many years ago and shadowed him as took care of the Aquarium's jelly collection (doubtfully he remembers me with all the other volunteers). He literally had rows and rows of jellys, from the sea nettle, Chrysaora quinquecirrha to the flower hat jelly, Olindias formosa, and many others.
At $25.95 (212 pages), I'm sure this book is going to be worth every penny! Chad knows his stuff and has many years experience…
petnoyer | July 11, 2008
Photo by Dr. William Precht.
A recent study published in Science Express by Dr. Kent Carpenter of Old Dominion University and a consortium of nearly thirty coral reef ecologists has determined that one-third of coral face increased extinction threat due to climate change and local anthropogenic influences. Carpenter refers to the current problem as "the human meteor"; in reference to the meteor impacts that helped send the dinosaurs hurtling towards extinction at the end of the Cretaceous Era. At that time, one third of extant coral species went extinct along with dinosaurs.
Online…
cortex | July 11, 2008The latest Seed has a very interesting article on the complicated geometry underlying Western music, and the intuitive mathematical understanding demonstrated by composers:
The shapes of the space of chords we have described also reveal deep connections between a wide range of musical genres. It turns out that superficially different styles--Renaissance music, classical and Romantic music, jazz, rock, and other popular forms--all make remarkably similar use of the geometry of chord space. Traditional techniques for manipulating musical scales turn out to be closely analogous to those used to…
kevin z | July 10, 2008
Thanks to Jives, our New England correspondent, for bringing this to our attention! My favorite is below, a couple more under the fold. Click here for more.
pharyngula | July 10, 2008In a great big ugly oops, the A/V geeks at TAM6 were not true geeks in that they screwed up and lost all the audio of an entire day's worth of recordings at the meeting. This is bad, because it means all the clever slams and insults given to Phil Plait will not be passed down to posterity. If you've got recordings of the event, contact the skeptics and help them out.
(I suppose we could all just call in and make fresh new jokes at Phil's expense, but they wouldn't sync with our lip movements as well.)
gregladen | July 10, 2008 Sizzle
Randy Olson is a Harvard ('84) trained marine biologist with field experience on the Great Barrier Reef, in the Antarctic, the US Virgin Islands, and elsewhere. He even spent a little time with Jacques Cousteau.
But an extensive career in marine biology was not to be.
Randy started to change careers around 1990, with the production of a number of short films including "Barnacles Tell No LIes" (which I've placed at the bottom of this post for your enjoyment). In 1994 he literally jumped ship. walking away from a tenured professorship in New Hampshire, and went to USC to study…
cortex | July 10, 2008Nature has a really interesting article on the sheer difficulty (impossibility?) of finding the genetic underpinnings of mental illness:
Finding genes involved in psychiatric conditions is proving to be particularly intractable because it is still unclear whether the various diagnoses are actually separate diseases with distinct underlying genetics or whether, as the DISC1 [a gene implicated in shcizophrenia] story suggests, they will dissolve under the genetic spotlight into one biological continuum. Indeed, some researchers suggest that it would be better to abandon conventional clinical…
sb admin | July 10, 2008Pens, pads, and other trinkets bearing prescription-drug logos have come to symbolize the extensive presence of pharmaceutical marketing in healthcare settings, but they may be on their way out. Pharmaceutical-industry trade association The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) is announcing a new voluntary code of conduct that bans drug reps from distributing these logoed items to doctors and other healthcare professionals.
The ruleâs voluntary nature will limit its effectiveness, and, of course, it only addresses one of the many avenues through which drug companies…
cortex | July 10, 2008From the new experimental philosophy reader, edited by Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols:
It used to be commonplace that the discipline of philosophy was deeply concerned with questions about the human condition. Philosophers thought about human beings and how their minds worked. They took an interest in reason and passion, culture and innate ideas, the origins of people's moral and religious beliefs. On this traditional conception, it wasn't particularly important to keep philosophy clearly distinct from psychology, history, or political science. Philosophers were concerned, in a very general…
cortex | July 10, 2008Is it just me or are the mosquitoes extra bad this year? I have a feeling that people would care even more about climate change if, instead of talking about rising sea levels, environmentalists started talking about swarms of mosquitoes. A warmer earth will be an itchier place.
On a related note, a small experimental study conducted last night on a patio table confirmed my hypothesis: citronella candles actually attract the insects. The allure of the flickering light seems to far outweigh the benefits of the chemical repellent.
gregladen | July 9, 2008Welcome to the One Hundred and Ninth Edition of The Tangled Bank, the Weblog Carnival of Evolutionary Biology. This is the LOL edition of the Tangled Bank....
Carnival business ...
The main page for The Tangled Bank is here. The previous edition of The Tangled Bank was here, at Wheatdogg, and the next edition of the Tangled Bank will be here, at Blue Collar Scientist.
And now, on with the show. ...
In Small Things Considered...
Rational redesign of bacterial signaling proteins based on amino acid co-evolution at Chance and Necessity is a bit of Peer Reviewed Research Blogging, covering an…
kevin z | July 9, 2008In case you have been sleeping all day, flounders have been flopping all over the place! The maestro of science story-telling, Carl Zimmer, has produced in my opinion one of his finest posts ever at his new blog at Discover Magazine. Head over there now, don't delay!, to understand the evolution of one of the weirdest fish out there in Dawn of the Picasso Fish. Then go to Mystery of Mysteries where Adrian Thysse, FCD posted a really cool video of flounder development. You can actually see the eyes migrate to the top of the head! Fish are weird. Then round off your flatfish fun with Ed Yong's…
cortex | July 9, 2008I don't know how I feel about this new trend of giving household pets human anti-depressants. Here's James Vlahos in the Times Magazine:
The practice of prescribing medications designed for humans to animals has grown substantially over the past decade and a half, and pharmaceutical companies have recently begun experimenting with a more direct strategy: marketing behavior-modification and "lifestyle" drugs specifically for pets. America's animals, it seems, have very American health problems. More than 20 percent of our dogs are overweight; Pfizer's Slentrol was approved by the F.D.A. last…
cortex | July 9, 2008I've got a profile of ecologist Jianguo Liu in the latest Conservation Magazine:
When the Wolong Nature Reserve was established in Southwestern China in 1975, it was hailed as a landmark achievement of the environmental movement. The reserve, which covers more than 200,000 hectares, contains more than 10 percent of the wild giant panda population and has received extensive financial and logistical support from both the Chinese government and numerous environmental organizations, including the World Wildlife Fund. At first glance, the Wolong reserve would appear to be a model of a protected…
cortex | July 9, 2008One of the biggest misconceptions of natural selection is that it mandates nastiness, that the pressure to survive and multiply requires a ruthless sort of amorality. In other words, we are all Hobbesian brutes, driven to survive by selfish genes.
Fortunately, our psychological reality is much less bleak. We aren't fallen angels, but we also aren't depraved hominids. In fact, it's now becoming clear that evolution lavished lots of attention on what might be called the moral brain, which is really a series of neural circuits enabling social interaction. The end result is that we…
gregladen | July 9, 2008
Hourglass: A carnival of biogerontology
Carnival of the Blue is Here!
Welcome to the Green Travel Carnival.
Welcome to the Green Travel Carnival.
Linnaeus' Legacy #9 - Classifying the Classifiers
Grand Rounds, Vol 4, No 42 - The Seinfeld Edition
A virtual carnival of science: New and Exciting in PLoS One
Ill be accepting Tangled Bank submissions until about 1:00 Today Central US Time. Send 'em in.
kevin z | July 8, 2008
RIP Bob, RAM, delicious ahi
No Tuna, Yes Cry
No Tuna Yes Cry
No Tuna Yes Cry
Hey there fisherman, don't throw in your gear
No Tuna Yes Cry
Said I remember when Fishy used to swim
In every part of every ocean
Ransom Myers studied large fish
Showed us all declining populations
Good fish we had Good fish we lost
Now will they be going away?
In this bright future we can't forget our past
So stow your gear away and
Not Everything is going to be all right
Fish are smaller each and every night
Not Everything is going to be all right
Fish are smaller each and every night
Not Everything is going to…