New science blog in the mainstream media

While attending the 2008 Science Blogging conference in North Carolina, I met an energetic and charming medical journalist named Helen Chickering. She will be writing a brand new science blog for MS NBC news. Look for it under the name Six-pack Science. Tune in for the latest in practical science.

NC Museum of Life Sciences

Roy Campbell, the Director of Exhibits, took a group of science bloggers behind the scenes at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. and up front among the exhibits. This right whale is one of several whale skeletons mounted at the museum, suspended over another hall. The museum has a friendly and accessible air and gives off a sense of wonder.

Long necks

These fellows from the Toronto hydroelectric company are way up in a "cherrypicker" crane. They are attaching some cross-connections between power lines.

Below is a look at the new barosaurus at the Royal Ontario Museum.

Spreading the science around

In the Open Science session of the Science Blogging Conference, Bill Hooker pointed out that not everything needs to be online. In some countries, such as Thailand, people don't have Internet access but they do have DVD players. New contents of PLOS one could be burned onto DVDs and sent by mail.

Books: Now you can order Open Lab 2007

A great collection of blog articles about science has hit the virtual newsstands!

In a few weeks, look for it in a bookstores, Right now, you can order it through on-demand publisher Lulu, which gives the publishers (PLOS one) a greater share of the profits.

There was a wiral-bound pre-press version at the conference so that people could look over the assembled articles. It's quite substantial.

Definitely put ordering one on your to-do list. And sharpen your pencils to write one of the best science articles of 2008, for next year's edition.

Signing in

I'm signing in from the Science Blogging conference in North Carolina. One of the topics is providing open access to science via the Internet to the developing world.

Science Blogging Conference

After three years, I'm learning how to do it right!

Science Blogs have been such a success for Seed Magazine and others that they are changing the "news landscape" of the Web. Science bloggers are helping others to get started. For the next two days, I'm at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Sigma Xi facility in Research Triangle Park to learn new skills, topics, and approaches.

Driving to the science-blogging conference

I made it! After a late start and a long drive, LotStreetWiz and I arrived at Research Triangle Park at 02:45 this morning.

Saturday is a blogging skills session and a lab tour: for me, behind the scenes at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.

Creationist book slips up

Steve at Forbidden Music writes,

"The book [Atlas of Creation by Harun Yahya] is juxtapositions of bad pictures of fossils with bad pictures of conordinal living things (fossil fern, living fern; fossil bunny, living bunny; fossil fly, living fly) alongside the erroneous claim that there are no differences between the extinct and extant forms...

Here���s his example of a living caddisfly.

It���s a fishing lure."

Follow the link to read more and see more and larger pictures.

Scientific LOLcats

It's time for another cheezeburger.

Happy Newtonmas!

Yes, it's also Sir Isaac Newton's birthday. Newton was the famous scientist who proved that one could be a genius and also a right shit. "Newton's Tyranny," which tells how Newton did his best to torpedo, sidetrack, delay, and suppress the discoveries of Stephen Gray and John Flamsteed.

Hat tip to Theo Bromine at Thinking For Free for today's Newtonmas carol:

God rest ye merry, physicists
Let nothing ye dismay.
Remember Isaac Newton
Was born on Christmas day.
His gravity and calculus
And f=ma
Oh pillars of physics and math, physics and math,
Oh pillars of physics and math

And hat tip to John Wilkins at Evolving Thoughts for the concept of Newtonmas (or Newtonmass).

Science v. Religion? ID and the Problem of Evolution: Zero stars

Steve Fuller's book Science v. Religion? ID and the Problem of Evolution is thoroughly discredited in a review by Prof. Norman Levitt, a professor of mathematics at Rutgers University, New Brunswick:

Fuller... is a professor of sociology of science at the University of Warwick (UK), whose career has been built on a lofty and careless disdain for science itself. The book under review... is a truly miserable piece of work, crammed with errors scientific, historical, and even theological, a book that will find approving readers only amongst hard-core ID enthusiasts hungry for agreement but indifferent to the quality of evidence offered in support of their position....

I want to consider Fuller���s very extensive discussion of ���complexity��� and ���randomness.��� ... Fuller... shows no awareness of the actual mathematical literature (even though much of it is accessible, at the basic level, to anyone with minimal mathematical skill). Instead, he seems content to take ID-theorist William Dembski as his guide. He attributes to Dembski a maxim to the effect that it is ���impossible��� to design a true random-number generator because it is ultimately possible to ���infer��� the algorithm that lies behind it (p. 61). But this grossly misunderstands a basic principle of complexity theory, the insight that in general it is not possible to devise an effective method for distinguishing a random from a non-random stream of data.

Indeed, it is easily possible for virtually anyone to devise a simple way of generating such a data stream (making it highly ���compressible��� or non-random), which will, for all practical purposes, defeat any human attempt to say whether it is or isn���t random or how ���compressible��� it really is. ...in the context of I.D. ���theory,��� the effect is to refute the na��ve notion that design by an intelligent agent is always discernible....

Fuller has done little to come to terms with Dembski���s most trenchant critics, actual experts in complexity and information theory, such as Mark Perakh and Jeffrey Shallit, the latter of whom has justifiably damned Dembski���s work as ���pseudo-mathematics.��� (Read more.)

(Hat tip to Pharyngula)

New California Academy of Sciences building

The California Academy of Sciences is starting to install exhibits in its new science building. The science museum is in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, California, U.S. Follow the link for a photo gallery.

• Most of the pictures are of the new Rain Forest building, which will have a living roof.
• There will also be a planetarium.
• An aquarium will hold the deepest coral reef in the world.
• Architectural elements of the old building are being preserved in the new building.

To me, it looks like an interior designed by Raymond Moriyama.

A Kitzmas Karol

The Innoculated Mind has published an article on the anniversary of the Kitzmiller vs. Dover decision, making Dec. 20 Kitzmas Day. It's called "A Kitzmas Karol". (You can jump straight to the poem, here.)

Tangled Bank #95 at Ouroboros

Tangled Bank 95 is up at Ouroboros with a theme of "Here I Stand and Can Do No Other."

Texas ponders shooting itself in the foot

While the U.S. state of Texas considers whether to let a Creation Science school turn our graduate students, the Arab countries prepare a leap forward in science and technology research.

Seed magazine: Arab world builds its own science infrastructure.

... [Instead of doing their own R&D] Arab nations spent a staggering trillion dollars importing scientific and technological knowhow over the past three decades.

(Much of it from the U.S.)

Earlier this year, the 22 nations of the Arab League approved a 10-year plan to boost scientific research. It calls for member states to raise their allocation to science twelvefold to 2.5 percent of GDP���more than the average 2.3 percent spent by developed nations.

Also:

Arab political leaders are laying down the foundation for a strong scientific community.... "If there is a political will to regionalize and internationalize initiatives, it would be of great benefit to the Arab world...." ...a new pan-Arab foundation with a monumental endowment of $10 billion.... Arab nations increasingly are investing in international science collaborations to catch up with the West....

Qatar is also undergoing a science revolution. With a $1.5 billion annual allocation to science in a country with a population of less than a million, Qatar is intent on reform.... Education City is Qatar's new university system���a 2,500-acre campus that is home to branches of five of the world's top universities, including Cornell and Carnegie Mellon.... The country is bringing in foreign expertise to achieve a long-term vision���to make Qatar a knowledge-based society. "QSTP is a 20-year program"....


Omani political leaders have also set in place a 15-year plan for science development....


Saudi Arabia has also secured plans for a multibillion-dollar science and technology university.... Arab nations are making moves to translate their oil-driven economies into knowledge-based ones."

Haiku contest at The Science Creative Quarterly

The Science Creative Quarterly is holding a haiku contest. (Haiku are 3-line poems with lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables, usually with reference to nature.) The LOL Creashun contest had one entrant who was writing haiku for their contribution. Perhaps that person will submit a few.


But read the rules first! It's a haiku phylogeny contest.

AGU Fall Meeting

The 2007 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union is on now (December 10 - 14). My step-daughter presented a paper on Monday morning, which I gather is quite an honour since the organizers like to lead off with interesting papers. Now, there are many topic streams, so there are many papers in this time slot; but we are proud of her.


Her paper, the topic of her Ph.D. thesis, is the effect of CO₂ changes on the growth of black spruce and white spruce.

A glimpse into bisexuality

PZ Myers at Pharyngula has a long, detailed description of new research into the sexual behavior of fruit flies. It seems that a certain mutation called genderblind, related to the biochemistry of the nervous system, causes male fruit flies to pay equal attention to unresponsive males and females. It's possible that the mutation makes the nerves more sensitive to stimulation.


The diagram above shows the results of the mutation. A male fly (at the top) is given a choice between a male or female fly. The male is on your left, the female on your right.

• If the decider is an ordinary fly or wild type ("WT"), he chooses the female. His choices are shown as the black bar at the bottom.
• In the middle are the choices by a genderblind ("gb") fly. You can see that more than half the time he chooses the male fly.

For a glimpse into just what's going on here, follow the link.

Barosaurus in ROM's new dinosaur gallery

The Royal Ontario Museum* in Toronto has opened its new dinosaur gallery. On display is their skeleton from the attic, the giant diplodocoid Barosaurus.

The Barosaurus was restored by Peter May.

*The designation "Royal" indicates a significant resource in the British Commonwealth.