Science
While I don't entirely agree with biologist Ronald Pasterk in the following interview -- his quote smacks a little too much of a tradesman irked at upstarts who have it too easy -- I still think he makes a good...
There was a tough-minded closing paragraph in a thoughtful piece in the weekend Boston Globe about the continuing controversy over infant vaccines and thimerosal:Perhaps that is why it's better that our public health policies require childhood vaccination and discourage individuals...
This week’s issue of the journal Nature has an interesting series of articles on science on the web age, especially the role of blogs, wikis, open data, and other such stuff, including the OpenWetWare initiative. The overview is (I think)...
From today's New Scientist, some unsurprisingly harrowing news about avian influenza developments in China being suppressed:Expert says bird flu has killed 300 people in China 18:27 24 November 2005 NewScientist.com news service Debora MacKenzie A respected Japanese scientist, who works...
There is a must-read investigatory article in the current Bloomberg Markets magazine on ethical issues at the industry review boards (IRBs) used in drug testing for big pharma. Provocative stuff, especially the human testing mill that exists in support of...
Okay, I definitely have a not-so-suppressed geek streak. I laughed this morning in reading the following Perl one-liner regular expression joke (from use Perl): Obligatory Doug Adams reference by jbodoni (3320) <jbodoniNO@SPAMgmail.com> on 2005.11.04 10:10 (#44321) > Use ($foo, $bar,...
Popular Science has a piece in its current issue on the top ten worst jobs in science. While it plumps for “human lab rats” as worst, I would have gone for their number ten, “orangutan pee collector”. Mind you, I...
Next up in our geek-out in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, this fascinating paper on some advances in unsupervised learning of languages: Unsupervised learning of natural languages We address the problem, fundamental to...
The current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science is chock-full of fascinating stuff. First, there’s this: Asynchronous extinction of late Quaternary sloths on continents and islands Whatever the cause, it is extraordinary that dozens of genera...
From The Scientist magazine, an interesting video slideshow on stem cells: In June The Scientist sent senior editor Jeffrey Perkel to Madison, Wisconsin, to spend a day at the WiCell Research Institute, where he learned some of the tips and...
The following snippet is from a fascinating paper in the July issue of the Journal of Allergy & Clinical Immunology:The human gut contains about 1.2 kg of bacteria, and although the identity of many of these is unknown and uncharacterized,...
Nature has created a fascinating weblog from the future written as the blow-by-blow blogging of an avian influenza outbreak starting late this year. It is harrowing reading: 25 January 2006 Escaping from hellApologies for the long delay in posting. The...
There was a nice piece in the N.Y. Times earlier this week concerning a recent Science paper on obesity. The upshot: People tend to be sedentary because they are overweight, not vice-versa as many people had long thought/hoped. While that...
In statistical physics the hypotheses of ergodicity say, in essence, that everything that can happen will eventually happen. Given enough time and a system with different states, each of those states will eventually happen with equal overall frequency. So, is...
Maybe it's just me, but you'd think in these gambling-mad times that an academic publication called the "Journal of Gambling Studies" would actually study gambling, or at least contain some interesting papers on probability. But apparently not:Treating Problem Gamblers: Working...
There is a nifty paper out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences looking at scale-free networks. While such things -- networks where the majority of nodes have few connections, but some nodes have many connections -- are...
Thomson ISI does some dandy datamining, and it has just released its list of the hottest scientists over the last two years. What does hottest mean in this context? Well, research that is more widely cited than other papers of...
Fascinating research note in the journal Allergy. Called "Hypothesis: urbanization and the allergy epidemic -- a reverse case of immunotherapy?", it argues that migration from urban to rural areas increases the risk of allergy. As the author says, it is...
From the journal Nature today, evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr has died. Sad news:Ernst Mayr dies, aged 100Michael Hopkin German-born biologist formulated the modern concept of species. The evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr died on 3 February at the age of 100, after...
I love how it is so often the case that a biopharmaceutical compound created for one purpose turns out to be at least as useful (if not more) for something completely different. Case in point: Otsuka Pharmaceuticals' rebamipide. Novartis has...
I am tickled by the skewed approach to releasing snow conditions information by major ski resorts. Whistler-Blackcomb is among the more avid practitioners of what we can call asymmetric weather reporting: Precipitation during below-freezing periods is snow, but precipitation during above-freezing...
From Nucleic Acids Research recent database issue:Year# databases% growth 2003386-- 200454842% 200571931%...
Nicely done Sharon Begley piece in today's WSJ on the false scientism inherent in many claims of a genetic basis for various diseases. As she points out, there have been analyses of purported links between genetics and diseases and the...
The American Meteorological Society is having its 85th annual meeting in San Diego this week. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately, if you're a meteorologist) the area is having what is euphemistically called "active" weather. Ironically enough, such conditions have consequences, however,...
From an article in the New Scientist on how satellites happened to measure the open-ocean wave height (50 cm!) of the the recent Indian Ocean tsunamis:The satellites saw the first two wavefronts produced by the main quake, spaced 500 to...
From a paper in the current issue of Nature:The authors describe a patient (SM) who has bilateral brain lesions in the amygdala, a region of the medial temporal lobe known to be critical for the perception of fear. SM cannot...
Dawkins's Law of the Conservation of Difficulty: Oscurantism in an academic subject expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity....
Upon the death of Dolly the cloned sheep last year, Carl Feldbaum, the head of the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), received a lot of media calls. What happened? Did Dolly's death have to do with cloning? His response:"...Dolly was incredibly...
Whether you're doing market research or trying to figure out likely political winners, polls matter. An article in the journal Nature today has some interesting comments on the subject:By one estimate, only 35% of people reached by phone during the...
Somewhat off-topic, because I don't do much science here or much straight-up pointer stuff, but Nature now has an RSS feed. Indulge your inner scientist here....
According to the current Advertising Age, things were busy, if nervous, at this week's National Association of Television Program Executives (NATPE -- pronounced to (sort of) rhyme with "nasty") conference in Las Vegas. TV execs can't figure out where the...
My National Post column today was on bumpf and posturing at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos.Update: Ah, if only I had seen this story before I had written the above column. Apparently the WEF anticipated my criticisms...
Microsoft's quarterly financial results tonight seemingly have many investors in a tizzy. It has nothing to do with the higher-than-expected equity compensation costs, however. Those are shuffling of costs from one period to another, and it isn't all that important...
Am I the only one who thinks there is a connection between NASA's loss of contact yesterday with the Mars Rover, and the beginning of the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland? One of my pet theories is...
Quirky piece in the Independent about Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's recent marriage to romance novelist Melanie Craft. It is requisitely snide in that U.K. way, so you get bon mots like the following: "At 34, Ms Craft is 25 years...
