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cortex | November 5, 2007If you want to learn about umami, glutamate, veal stock and Auguste Escoffier, check out this story about Chapter 3 of my book on Morning Edition. It was a special thrill getting to do this with Robert Krulwich, who has long been one of my favorite science reporters.
cmcclain | November 5, 2007
Ocean Nourishment Corporation of Sydney, Australia just got the green light to dump several hundred tons of industrially-produced urea in to the Sulu Sea between the Philippines and Borneo. Assuming you urinate about 1.5 liters a day (range is 800ml to 2000ml) that is about the same amount of 500 years of your collected urine...if you actually decided to collect your urine. Several international civil societies called upon the London Convention, the UN committee that regulates ocean dumping to prevent the experiment. Again the idea, is to promote phytoplankton growth and eventually sequester…
cmcclain | November 5, 2007I was just thinking the other day how I wish I had crab claws so I could crush academic opposition. Grab the children and run to the hills, it is attack of Crab Claw Craig!
sb admin | November 5, 2007At the opening general session of the American Public Health Associationâs 135th Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, speakers urged the public health professionals in attendance to address the glaring inequities in the U.S. and throughout the world.
Carlos Cano, interim director of the DC Department of Health, told the audience that in the District of Columbia, a few blocks from the Capitol building, exist âsome of the most glaring health disparities in the Western Hemisphere.â CDC Director Julie Gerberding stressed that as a nation, weâve failed to address disparities not only in healthcare,…
gregladen | November 5, 2007... Oh, wait. brought back to life "in stunning 3D by a scientist at The University of Manchester."
I hate those press release writers...
This is actually fairly cool despite the fact that no actual spiders were actually brought back to life. Very High Resolution X-Ray Computed Tomography (VHR-CT) was used to "digitally dissect" tiny fossils thus revealing very fine detail including internal organs. Here is an example:
View larger image
The same graphic in a different format can be seen here, and you can get a PDF of the paper here.
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Penny et al. 2007, 'First fossil…
cortex | November 5, 2007Here's W.H. Auden in The Dyer's Hand generalizing about our senses:
"The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition."
Is Auden right? I think he nailed our acoustic cortex. (For more on that, check out my Stravinsky chapter in the book.) But I'm not sure our sense of sight is quite as restless as he would have us believe.
Thanks for the tip Steve!
grrlscientist | November 4, 2007tags: Humanist Symposium, blog carnival
The 10th issue of the Humanist Symposium is now available for your reading pleasure. Unknown to me until just now, they included a piece that I wrote (I didn't submit my essay to this blog carnival, so someone else out there did it on my behalf, which is quite an honor, methinks), so be sure to go over there and show them some appreciation!
razib | November 3, 2007I've gotten tired of Firefox freezing when Newsweek.com (and other sites) loads. Recently Firefox started freezing in gmail when I tried to use the search. But the UI for Safari, Opera and IE are inferior in my opinion. Any recs for something similar to Firefox that doesn't freeze all the time?
petnoyer | November 3, 2007
Rick laments below that I ruined his Friday with the anchor scar story, so I'll try to spice up his weekend with a lighter note. The road from Saba's airport to Fort Bay Harbor is a thing of wonder. It climbs and descends the sleeping volcano through villages like Hell's Gate, Windwardside, and The Bottom.
People once believed "The Road" could not be built on Saba Island until civil engineer Josephus Lambert Hassell took a correspondence course in engineering and organized a crew of locals to start construction in 1938. Nine years later, the road was complete. The first car would arrive in…
grrlscientist | November 2, 2007
A slightly worn Julia Heliconian butterfly, Dryas julia Fabricius.
This image was taken summer 2004 at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park's Pollinarium exhibit. It was donated to Wikipedia under the GFDL by Steven G. Johnson, the photographer. [wallpaper size].
As promised, here are my Houston, Texas, bird and butterfly lists for last weekend, including life list additions denoted with an asterix (below the fold);
Bird List
* = New species on Life List
Common Loon
Horned Grebe
Eared Grebe
Great Egret
Mallard
Ruddy Duck
Turkey Vulture
Black Vulture*
Northern Harrier
Sharp-shinned Hawk…
pharyngula | November 2, 2007I really do have no sense of shame, and since Halloween has just gone by, I have even more opportunities to pander to the cute. How about a dog?
Or how about … adorable little kids?
Have no fear, the conference ends today, and I'll be turning off the saccharine drip.
cortex | November 2, 2007The rules of the wine tasting were simple. Twenty five of the best wines under twelve dollars were nominated by independent wine stores in the Boston area. The Globe then assembled a panel of wine professionals to select their top picks in the red and white category. All of the wines were tasted blind.
The result is a beguiling list of delicious plonk. But I was most interested in just how little overlap there was between the different critics. In fact, only one wine - the 2006 Willm Alsace Pinot Blanc from France - managed to make the list of every critic. Most of the wines were personal…
petnoyer | November 2, 2007Thank God it's Friday. Work moves to the back burner, social issues move to the front burner. This week we provide two underwater movies to help your work hours pass quickly. Both videos (below the fold) show the devastating impacts of anchor damage on the Caribbean Sea's Saba Bank, in the Dutch Antilles. The videos are short, each about 2.5 minutes long, but the memory should last years. The battle to limit these anchor scars has only just begun.
Special thanks to Shelley Lundvall of the Saba Conservation Foundation for shooting these and posting these at YouTube.
The first video shows…
petnoyer | November 2, 2007
If you wondered yesterday why we're collecting gorgonian samples (as well as fish, shrimp, crabs, algae, and sponges) for the Saba Conservation Foundation, this 6m anchor scar on the Saba Bank should help to explain. We're collecting biological samples in order to document the biodiversity of the Saba Bank, and by doing so, we're helping our partners to win protection from oil tanker's anchors.
The Saba Bank is on enormous shallow offshore platform (60km x 40km) west across the channel from Saba Island in the Netherlands Antilles. Saba bank has been called the world's third largest submerged…
razib | November 1, 2007Thank you to everyone who donated! To me the most gratifying thing is to know that so many students are being affected. Let's do this again next year!
grrlscientist | November 1, 2007tags: Ask a Science Blogger, vertebrate eye, molluscan eye
Image: Wikipedia. [larger view].
The newest "Ask a Science Blogger" question is; Which parts of the human body could you design better?
Since I have only 500 words or so to explain, I will discuss only one anatomical feature: I would choose to redesign the vertebrate eye so the microscopic structure of the retina more closely resembles that of the molluscan eye.
On causal observation, the vertebrate eye appears to be similar to the cephalopod eye (cephalopods are often thought of as the "classical" mollusc), however, a more…
petnoyer | November 1, 2007Hello again. Sorry to be absent from posting at DSN lately, but I was all wrapped up in a diving expedition to Saba Bank in the Netherlands Antilles. You'll hear more about it as we assemble the material and results, but first thing's first. Let's get to the good stuff!
This here 8' tiger shark below circled me and Dr. Juan Armando Sanchez twice as we collected gorgonians in 25m of water over a flat rubble landscape on the Saba Bank interior last week.
We didn't get really nervous until the animal turned to approach us. Juan was fearless enough to snap off 3 or 4 great shots with his Sony…
grrlscientist | November 1, 2007tags: women, all women blogging, blog carnival
Actually, the latest edition of the All Women Blogging blog carnival has been available for a few days, but I was in Texas this past weekend, so was unable to post anything about it. But as they say, better late than never, eh? This is really a huge international blog carnival, full of a variety of blog goodness, so be sure to go there and check out what they've linked to.
cortex | November 1, 2007The latest issue of Science has a special section devoted to decision-making. Alan Sanfey, best known for his influential study of the Ultimatum Game, has written a thorough review (available for free) about recent progress in the field. The takeaway lesson is that the experimental methods of neuroeconomics (Game Theory plus fMRI with a dash of electrophysiology) can help us better understand the neural source of our social decisions:
A common criticism of economic models is that observed decision behavior typically deviates, often quite substantially, from the models' predictions. Most…
grrlscientist | October 31, 2007tags: carnival of cities, blog carnival
Wow, they like me!
The latest edition, the Five Digital Snapshots edition, of the Carnival of Cities is now available for you to enjoy. There are several essays there that really make me miss .. other cities, other homes, that I've lived in. But they included a piece that I wrote, a piece that I had a lot of fun writing, as a matter of fact!