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Come for the mountains, stay for the cougars

post from Bad Astronomy Blog on 16 May 2008 03:40:43 PM. © Bad Astronomy Blog

And not the good kind of cougars, either.A two-year-old 110 pound mountain lion was tranquilized and taken safely away from a house in WAITASECONDHOLYFRAKKINGHALEAKALA it was in Boulder!Wow. I was just driving down the road a little while ago where the cat was found! There’s an elementary school near there, too, and it was in [...]

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Biology needs to explain gravity

post from Pharyngula on 16 May 2008 03:16:58 PM. © Pharyngula

Is your lunch hour safely over? If not, wait a while before watching another interview with Ben Stein. I can't believe what an idiot this man is; it's not just that he's ignorant, but that he has these bizarrely inappropriate notions about biology. He complains about "Darwinism" because it doesn't explain why are there laws of gravity and thermodynamics, or where physics and gravity come from (Bonus lunacy! He claims Darwin said gravity was intelligently designed!). He keeps making these insane assertions in interview after interview, too; does he ever think, or notice that gravity is not a product of biological processes? Did someone tell him gravity was produced by sucking or something?

We all know, after all, that gravity is actually produced by the 4th dimension, which is not what you think it is. Just ask a smart rabbit, who even shares some other sentiments with Stein.

(Whatever you do, don't send that comic to Ben Stein — he might think it's a serious hypothesis.)

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_to_explain_gravi.php

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The Molly month of May

post from Pharyngula on 16 May 2008 02:39:53 PM. © Pharyngula

We're all caught up on the new Molly inductees: for March, it's Glen Davidson, and for April, brokenSoldier. Give them your attention when they comment!

Of course, now we have to gather nominations for May. Who are the commenters who make you perk up and think? Name them in the comments to this post.

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How Did That Chain Letter Get To My Inbox

post from Science Blog - Send lawyers, guns and money on 16 May 2008 02:33:28 PM. © Science Blog - Send lawyers, guns and money

Everyone who has an e-mail account has probably received a forwarded chain letter promising good luck if the message is forwarded on to others--or terrible misfortune if it isn't. The sheer volume of forwarded messages such as chain letters, online petitions, jokes and other materials leads to a simple question--how do these messages reach so many people so quickly?

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McCains bizarre beliefs

post from Bad Astronomy Blog on 16 May 2008 02:29:47 PM. © Bad Astronomy Blog

Regular readers know I am no fan of Presidential candidate John McCain. I used to be, back when he made sense, and he didn’t pander to religious extremists, didn’t constantly flip-flop, didn’t have weird ideas about the economy and the war, and actually appeared to be telling the truth about some things. Those days are [...]

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May 16, 1960: Researcher Shines a Laser Light

post from CR4 - Recent Blog Entries on 16 May 2008 01:56:40 PM. © CR4 - Recent Blog Entries

From WIRED: 1960: Physicist Theodore Maiman uses a synthetic-ruby crystal to create the first laser. Maiman began tinkering with electronic devices in his teens and even earned college money repairing appliances and radios. He was working at the Hughes Research Laboratories of t

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Avoiding risk

post from Science Blog - Send lawyers, guns and money on 16 May 2008 01:17:08 PM. © Science Blog - Send lawyers, guns and money

One of the most famous figures in psychology is the following:

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Friday Cephalopod: Like a pearl torpedo

Loligo forbesi

Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide ^{(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)}, by Mark Norman.

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Phoenix descent video

NASA’s Phoenix Mars lander will drop onto the Red Planet’s surface on May 25. JPL has put together a very cool video with animations and interviews with engineers about what this portable lab will go through on its way down. This is very well done (even if one guy talks about friction with the atmosphere, [...]

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Challenging the Science Status Quo

post from Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog on 16 May 2008 12:30:00 PM. © Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog

Challenging Science

When scientists question facets of existing theories or propose new ones, they present the best evidence available and make the strongest arguments they can to their colleagues. Colleagues in turn challenge that evidence and reasoning. The rigor of this process is what makes science such a powerful tool.
…
Lynn Margulis wrote a paper, ?The Origin of Mitosing Eukaryotic Cells,? which argued that eukaryotic cells ? those with a true nucleus ? arose when cells with no nucleus symbiotically incorporated other such cells to make new cells that could perform more functions. The paper was rejected by many journals, and when eventually published by The Journal of Theoretical Biology it was highly criticized. Margulis spent decades defending her work, but scientists now accept her suggested mechanism through which organelles such as mitochondria and chloroplasts evolved. Her suggestions about other organelles have not stood up to experimental tests, and are not as widely accepted.
…
In 1982, Stanley Prusiner published an article on his research into scrapie ? a disease in sheep related to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease ? which argued that the infectious agent was not a virus but a protein, which Prusiner called a “prion”. Because no one had heard of a protein replicating without a nucleic acid like DNA or RNA, many virologists and scrapie researchers reacted to the article with incredulity. When the media picked up the story, “the personal attacks of the naysayers at times became very vicious,” according to Prusiner. However, his critics failed to find the nucleic acid they were sure existed, and less than two years later, Prusiner?s lab had isolated the protein. Subsequent research provided even more support for prions, and in 1997 Prusiner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

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