Poll stat coverage

An edifying post on "statistical tie" versus "margin of error" from the Washington Monthly blog. Bluefishcanoe, this sounds right, right?

A new kind of computer science

I don't pretend to understand this, but when someone announces they have found, "the fourth fundamental circuit element, along with the resistor, capacitor and inductor," I take notice (ref (see, it's so easy!)). It seems odd to me that this bit of electrical engineering, known as the memristor, was "found" and not created-- the researchers write, "Here we show, using a simple analytical example, that memristance arises naturally in nanoscale systems in which solid-state electronic and ionic transport are coupled under an external bias voltage." Uh, OK.

Anyway the NYT says, "Potentially even more tantalizing is the ability of the memristors to store and retrieve a vast array of intermediate values, not just the binary 1s and 0s conventional chips use. This allows them to function like biological synapses and makes them ideal for many artificial intelligence applications ranging from machine vision to understanding speech."

Katrina spills

In a recent op-ed for the Washington Post Charles Krauthammer argues for increased oil-drilling because, in part, "The United States has the highest technology to ensure the safest drilling." This may be true, but it does not follow that our technology is safe enough. Krauthammer continues, "Compare the Niger Delta to the Gulf of Mexico, where deep-sea U.S. oil rigs withstood Hurricanes Katrina and Rita without a single undersea well suffering a significant spill." This is a pretty strong statement to make without any references, and it turns out it is simply false. Katrina resulted in the largest oil-spill since the Exxon Valdez (ref). This is the age of the internet, why can't the Post make its opinion makers include references in their pieces? Just one hyperlink dudes? At best this practice would prevent blowhards like Krauthammer from just making shit up to support their cases, and at worst we could locate the sources of these insidious falsehoods.

protein folding supercomputer

I've always thought protein folding prediction software is the inevitable and someday dominant future. Also, it is my go-to topic for awkward late-night and often all-too-lubricated "socials" at conferences and the like. Anyway, some big boys announced a new super big boy on the scene, Anton.

Asking a Judge to Save the World, and Maybe a Whole Lot More

More fighting in Iraq. Somalia in chaos. People in this country can’t afford their mortgages and in some places now they can’t even afford rice.

None of this nor the rest of the grimness on the front page today will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth — and maybe the universe. Link

Open acccess fiat

Harvard has mandated that its faculty will publish only in open-access journals. This is kind of a big deal. Here's the NYT story and some more commentary at Open Access News. I gather that in most fields the open-access journals are also the most prestigious but this not at all the case in biology. People are fucking crazy about the journals. I know of faculty that won't support tenure offers to colleagues who haven't published in any of the big three, Nature, Cell, and Science. Most researchers obsess over getting their work into these publications. As a result, the big three are in a very different league- with citations figures usually 2-3 times higher than the lower orders. The thing is, if I were a post-doc with a hot story in a lab that made its name in the pages of Cell, and my fancy boss told me we couldn't publish there I'd be furious ('course now I'd give my pinky for any kind of fucking story- just a big bar and small bar man!!). But this is for the greater good. It will force more journals to open up and its likely other universities will follow. Journals shouldn't have high subscription fees anyway- their costs should be plummeting due to declines in printing, etc.

Big DNA molecule

I keep seeing this synthetic "genome" in the news and I really think its impact is being inflated by forces I don't care enough about to discuss (OK, Craig Venter's ego). It seems like a highly successful DNA polymerase reaction and no more. I must be missing something. From what I can tell, this is the story: this dude that is good at getting press made a giant DNA molecule that is probably enough to encompass a bacterial genome. Shit's been done for viruses already. They haven't even shown it's sufficient to direct bacterial replication or life or whatever. Again, I ask, what am I missing?

Judah Folkman dies

Dr. Folkman's research took on one of those classicly iconoclastic storylines that they make NOVA episodes about. R.I.P., man. Globe link and more info here and here.

read this guy's blog

Every couple of months a member of the unenlightened trots out this tired argument:

Evolution gives our kids an excuse to believe in natural selection and survival of the fittest, which leads to a belief that they are superior over the weak.

Furthermore, they often argue, that evolution was used to justify Nazism and shit like that. Not so different, I'd argue, are the people at cocktail parties who chastise scientists for in some way, being responsible for slavery or the vague teleology that allegedly underpins race-based oppression. If you haven't yet stocked your blog roll with Pharyngula, I suggest you do because PZ Myers is a solid science writer and an intelligent contributor in various political debates. Here he writes about the comments of a City Council member, but his basic idea is the good one,

Rather than reducing our kids' exposure to evolution, let's increase it. The problem with what Bill Foster believes, a belief he shares with the Columbine punks, is that it has nothing to do with evolutionary biology — in their ignorance, they've swallowed a whole pop-culture, religious line of bullshit about the theory. Biology does not advocate killing the stupid and weak; it does not preach some kind of objective superiority of one class of people over another; it merely describes what happens in the natural world.

That's right, the theory of evolution has as much to do with morality as the theory of gravity. If you want to blame scientists for something, I suppose you can blame them for insufficiently explaining to people that Social Darwinism is kind of an oxymoron, but don't tell me evolution is bad.

AAAS on the candidates

AAAS has a presidential campaign web site up. Link

The most accurate measurement ever made and a new theory of everything

The team, led by Geoff Pryde of Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, has managed to measure the interference between two light waves as they beat slightly out of step, with a precision that is limited only by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the most fundamental and unavoidable source of ‘fuzziness’ in the quantum world.
Nature News

----

An impoverished surfer has drawn up a new theory of the universe, seen by some as the Holy Grail of physics, which has received rave reviews from scientists...Even better, it does not require more than one dimension of time and three of space, when some rival theories need ten or even more spatial dimensions and other bizarre concepts. And it may even be possible to test his theory, which predicts a host of new particles, perhaps even using the new Large Hadron Collider atom smasher that will go into action near Geneva next year.

Telegraph

And it's testable?!? Gracias, Minty

Cheetah Booya

This really is what it's all about:
Cheetah poops through sun roof (youtube).

Bird(s) of paradise dances

Bird of Paradise video, Another one

Brazilian researcher gets 16 years

As Brazil Defends Its Bounty, Rules Ensnare Scientist - Whoa, from the article, it seems the punishment is insanely severe and that the trial was effed. Lawyers for Dr. van Roosmalen, a naturalized Brazilian citizen who was born in the Netherlands, say he is in large part a victim of the xenophobic sentiment attached to fears of biopiracy. They note that he was tried as a foreigner, initially denied habeas corpus and the right to appeal the verdict against him, given a near-maximum sentence despite being a first-time offender and sent to a notoriously harsh prison.

Checkers: solved

Science
NYT

hilarious curve fitting

all kinds of folks are rightly sweating this fitted.

Engineered Cre recombinase

People routinely use Cre recombinases to remove bits of DNA in a genome that are flanked by sequences specifically recognized by the enzyme. These homeboys in Germany re-engineered the enzyme to recognize repeat sequences in integrated HIV and holy smokes, they use it to specifically knock out the HIV proviral DNA!

simulated brains

The scientists ran a "cortical simulator" that was as big and as complex as half of a mouse brain on the BlueGene L supercomputer. BBC news link

I heard acerbic sceptic Richard Dawkins dropping the "universal ancestor" on Fresh Air the other day so I figured I should take a closer look at what people say about it. He seemed totally convinced, and so did his counterpoint Christian Francis Collins. Anyway, here's a free PNAS review from 1998.

The delayed rise of present-day mammals

The NYT summarizes the recent meta-study revealing the surprisingly deep roots of modern mammals, "The mass extinction that wiped out dinosaurs and other life 65 million years ago apparently did not, contrary to conventional wisdom, immediately clear the way for the rise of today’s mammals." Here's the Nature paper.

Neofelis diardi

A "new" kind of cat. Link

new Cell review issue

An entire issue of Cell on "Epigenetics and Chromatin Modification."

Frilled Shark

How come "living fossils" always look so old?

Youtube
NYT