More viruses in pigs

by fPat
Concern over Ebola virus in pigs:
[Via BBC News | Science/Nature | World Edition]

A form of Ebola virus has been detected in pigs for the first time, raising concerns it could mutate and pose a new risk to humans.

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This is Ebola Reston,which does not cause illness in humans. Nonetheless, this is very disconcerting. Pigs as a reservoir for Ebola make it much likelier that an outbreak could occur in highly populated regions rather than in lightly populated regions of Africa. You can listen to a podcast or read the paper.
In swine, this virus also causes illness and it appears to actually have been circulating in pigs for some time. The original primates that carried the first identified Reston strain in 1989 were imported from the Phillipines, which is where these pigs were located.

Technorati Tags: Science

Young turtles help explain an ‘old’ fossil

by Clearly Ambiguous
An evolution insight as scientists discover how a turtle gets its shell:
[Via BBC News | Science/Nature | World Edition]

Scientists reveal a spectacular insight into turtle evolution – how the unique animals get their shells.

[More]

Evo-devo really helps inform us so much today. Here, the study of developing turtles provides evidence for the evolution of the turtle’s shell, a unique feature of this animal. And it also helps explain a 220 million year old fossil that only has half a shell. The developing embryo of a turtle has a pattern that looks similar to this fossil.

And this quote from the author is great:

“No matter how exquisite it may seem, as if it were some sort of magic, evolution is at most a good trick… and there is a way to make it work.”

The paper is behind a subscription wall but the abstract sure is interesting. The turtle embryo starts out with many similarities to mammal and bird development. hen it seems to go off on its own plan, resulting a new fold that puts the ribs on the outside of the body, permitting them to fuse and form a shell.

Possible a very slight change in the developmental plan results in the shell. Very nice.

Technorati Tags: Science

The public and scientists

The Gap Between the Public and Scientists:
[Via AAAS News - RSS Feed]

Pew/AAAS Study: While Public Praises Scientists, Scientists Fault Public, Media

Most people in the U.S. admire scientists, but regard for the nation’s science achievement is falling and many don’t believe in climate change or evolution, says a study by Pew and AAAS.

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Although it is sad to few people apparently understand that evolution is true, it is nice to see that almost 50% of the people understand the effects of human activity on climate change. Of course, 84% of the scientists know of our role in climate change.

It is probably not too surprising that many more scientists feel that the Bush administration censored researchers while most people had never heard about this. After all, this was something that directly affected their work while it would have little effect on the lives of most people.

Be sure to take the quiz so you can see what you know about these topics. I was 12 for 12, getting more right than 90% of the others who took the quiz.

Technorati Tags: Science

Response to disruptive technology

by kevindooley
Conference blogging: icons for presenters:
[Via Genetic Future]

A while back I pondered the possibility of creating icons for conference presenters to add to their first slide to alert bloggers/tweeters in the audience about whether the presented data was “blog-safe”. This was provoked by a recent episode illustrating general confusion among bloggers (in this case, me) and scientists about the use of social media at conferences.

Fellow Australian-turned-UK-resident-scientist Cameron Neylon has now put together a handy set of slides for presenters to label both “blog-safe” and “no-blogging” presentations. The slides have a ccZero license and so are freely available for download and modification; the original icons can be found on Cameron’s Flickr account and Christopher Ross’ website.

I think these slides are a great start, and I’d encourage anyone interested in the interface between science and social media to consider modifying them for their own presentations. I’d see the slides as being useful in a variety of situations:

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This illustrates some of the disruptive effects of new technologies. In the old days there were journalists and there were researchers at scientific conferences. The journalists knew when they could write about the talks and when the talks were were embargoed.

But with live blogging the line between the groups have disappeared and confusion has risen. Social groups always have a little trouble dealing with such disruptions but adaptive groups figure out ways around.

This looks like a nice approach. Let the presenters publicly declare what can be blogged and what can not. Now we just need to make this an active part of everyone’s presentation.

Technorati Tags: Science, Web 2.0

Not causation

by lrargerich
Forsyth scientists suggest linkages between obesity and oral bacterial infection:
[Via Eureka! Science News - Popular science news]

A scientific team from The Forsyth Institute has discovered new links between certain oral bacteria and obesity. In a recent study, the researchers demonstrated that the salivary bacterial composition of overweight women differs from non-overweight women. This preliminary work may provide clues to interactions between oral bacteria and the pathology of obesity. This research may help investigators learn new avenues for fighting the obesity epidemic.

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They could tell by looking at the bacterial fauna in a women’s mouth whether she was overweight or not. The presence of a single species, Selenomonas noxia, at high levels was correlated.

This study does not answer if the bacteria somehow cause obesity but that should would be a nice thing if true. Then perhaps finding a way to rid someone of the bacteria could reduce their weight.

But it also means that someone could be described as obese based purely on the bacteria found in their saliva. I expect this to be an important part of CSI or NCIS next season. “There was not enough human DNA in the spit to determine identity but the bacteria tell us that the perp was overweight, with a body mass index between 27 and 32.”

Technorati Tags: Health, Science

Changing with the times

by LiebeDich.
Science blogging versus journalism:
[Via Bad Astronomy]

I recently gave a talk at the National Academy of Sciences about science blogging, social networking, and communication in general. I had a lot of fun, and the NAS has posted a podcast about the meeting with some excerpts of what I said (they have a list of older ‘casts …

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This is a continuing discussion between those who see what the technology does (i.e. allow the rapid dissemination of unfiltered information) and those whose livelihood depends on doing the filtering of information (i.e. newsmedia, book and music publishers).

For the last few hundred years, information was hard to find, publish, disseminate and use, requiring the creation of experts to help filter it and properly present it. Filtering had to happen before publishing. Only the ‘best’ could be published.

Now, information is easy to find. It is cheap to publish and disseminate. Filtering happens after it is created or published. The best sites now have people who help provide better ‘post-publication’ filtering.

In the old style, the important aspects of filtering were analytical – the reporters, etc. had to take information and distill it into a simpler form, which could then be published. The costs of publishing forced this model.

Now, publishing is trivial and has little cost. The analytical approach, while still very valuable, is no longer the only mode. Synthetic approaches, where information from many different areas is brought together , where whole systems are examined at once, are now possible.

Blogs and aggregation sites are a part of this new approach. They are able to do things that no industrial age organization can do. They connect and filter the vast amount of information now available, allowing both analytical and synthetic approaches to be used in order to create knowledge.

The organizations that get this, that can see the benefit of not only analysis but synthesis of information, will be very successful. Those that do not, that do not really understand what is going on, will have to adapt or die.

Technorati Tags: Science, Social media, Web 2.0

Weird Internet today

The internet has not been it reliable self recently. I was without Internet service on Friday due to a fire in a datacenter in downtown Seattle. Of course, trying to find out what was going on WITHOUT internet service was quite a chore.

I mean first I had to check my system, since the Verison modem was all green, indicating that it was connected fine. Everything checked out fine on my end.

I tried accessing Verizon via my iPhone. That worked but there was nothing at the Verizon site to explain the service outage, not even at the page called System Service.

So, after digging out an old bill, I found a number for the DSL service. After a fun phone tree, I got a recorded message that service in my area code was out and was expected back online in a few hours.

Which it was, saving me the worry of a July 4th weekend without internet.

Then today, accessing pages using several different browsers was really slow. Some sites would load fine (such as Amazon). Others would load very slowly or timeout before they were loaded. But email worked just fine. And my newsreader (NewsNetWire) was able to get the news feeds from sites that I could not get to directly from my browser!

I figured that perhaps email, using a different protocol, might be able to access the 4 different mail servers I use for different accounts but doesn’t the newsreader was using the same HTTP protocol that the browsers do. Well I’m self-educated so I might be missing something. (I tried playing around with changing DNS servers in case Verizon’s had been hosed but this did not help).

I was able to get Goggle News and see that there were a lot of government servers under a DDOS attack so I made the leap that that might be having some effect. Call it Internet magic.

So, with no real explanation, things have returned to normal. But I hate not knowing why.

Technorati Tags: Technology

Misleading by deniers

by me’nthedogs
Christopher Booker’s misinformation about the Polar Bear Specialist Group:
[Via Deltoid]

Chris Mooney refutes claims that a skeptical report was suppressed by the EPA. (See also Deep Climate’s analysis of the origin of the report.

Another story about skeptics being suppressed has been concocted by Christopher Booker:

Dr Taylor had obtained funding to attend this week’s meeting of the [Polar Bear Study Group], but this was voted down by its members because of his views on global warming. The chairman, Dr Andy Derocher, a former university pupil of Dr Taylor’s, frankly explained in an email (which I was not sent by Dr Taylor) that his rejection had nothing to do with his undoubted expertise on polar bears: “it was the position you’ve taken on global warming that brought opposition”.

Dr Taylor was told that his views running “counter to human-induced climate change are extremely unhelpful”. His signing of the Manhattan Declaration — a statement by 500 scientists that the causes of climate change are not CO2 but natural, such as changes in the radiation of the sun and ocean currents — was “inconsistent with the position taken by the PBSG”.

It is hard to imagine more unreliable sourcing than a Christopher “white asbestos is harmless” Booker second-hand report of an email, but I thought I should check the story to be on the safe side, so I asked Derocher about Booker’s article:

[More]

When I first heard about this, I was skeptical. I’ve been to scientific meetings and served on panels. The rationale espoused in the Telegraph article did not smell right. Since it only represented on side of the issue, I waited for the other shoe to drop.

So, he as not invited because he no longer holds one of the 15 positions that is allowed to attend. He no longer represents Canada on any of the relevant panels. And if he is no longer involved in polar bear research and management, then there is good reason for him not be be invited.

His view on climate change may be in the minority but his lack of invitation to the meeting seems to follow the rules that he helped write. Yet the reports make it seem as though he is being snubbed, even when he was paying for it himself, purely for his climate change beliefs.

Misleading. It’s a large part of the denier’s bag of tricks. So just remember the name. Christopher Booker and realize that his goal appears not to be to reveal truth but to mislead the reader.

Technorati Tags: Environment, Politics

I am such a nerd

As I discussed a few weeks ago, I am such a nerd. But then, it helps me understand and laugh at cartoons like this, so I guess we are even.

Wikipedia is your friend.

But then, I played 4 years of college baseball, all of them as the starting catcher. And I played football until an injury ended my career. So I guess I was a physically coordinated nerd.

And I could be again if I would lose about 60 pounds.

Technorati Tags: Entertainment, Science

Sounds like a fun book

Newton, P.I.:
[Via Cosmic Variance]

When I was studying for my Ph.D., a fellow grad student and I asked our advisor if he could think of one single characteristic that was common to all of the best scientists he knew. Without too much hesitation, he answered: “Hard work.” That certainly wasn’t the answer we wanted to hear — you mean there isn’t some secret recipe to being brilliant? And of course hard work is not nearly enough to elevate you to the ranks of the world’s great scientists. But now that I have marinated for some time in the juices of experience myself, I see the truth of what he was getting at; there are a lot of smart people out there, so it makes sense that what elevates a few of them above their peers is an extraordinary focus on their work and a great amount of simple effort.

So it should come as no surprise that Isaac Newton, the greatest physicist of all time, was a relentless worker. In his days at Cambridge, when he focused on the workings of the natural world, he would spend as little time as possible on anything that drew him away from the researches in his rooms. Over the couple of years he was writing the Principia Mathematica, he took things to extremes, going for extended periods without food or sleep. (He also, apparently, died a virgin. Extremes come in many guises.)

Most contemporary physicists have heard that Newton eventually left Cambridge and more or less turned his back on scientific research, to take up activities in later life that we associate with varying degrees of disreputability: alchemy, religious studies, taking a bureaucratic position at the Royal Mint, using the Royal Society to attack his scientific rivals. Lots of us shrug and agree that many older scientists do all sorts of crazy things, and don’t wonder too much about the details.

Happily, Tom Levenson (of The Inverse Square, and one of our honored guest bloggers) has provided us with a fascinating peek into a telling episode in Newton’s later life — his career as a criminal investigator. Not really “P.I.”, as Newton was acting in his capacity as a government official, the Warden of the Mint. The story is closer to something from Law and Order or CSI — remarkably close, in fact. In Newton and the Counterfeiter, Levenson tells the tale of how Newton took up what should have been a cushy sinecure, and ended up devoting his extraordinary Newtonian powers to the pursuit and prosecution of one William Chaloner, the counterfeiter of the title. Poor Chaloner, suffice it to say, never knew what hit him.

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It has the makings of an interesting movie. Who’d play Newton, I wonder? And how could they have a love interest if he died a virgin? I guess Hollywood could not make it (not enough CGI or bombs blowing up) but perhaps a nice independent one would work.

My oddball casting would be Brad Pitt. He could do it.

Technorati Tags: Science

Very cool photograph

This picture of the plume of a volcano in the Kuril Islands was taken by an astronaut on the International Space Station. It happened to be at the right place at the right time. All sorts of interesting things can be seen and there is a nice description of them at the web page.

Interestingly, there appears to be some discussion on the reason for the circular hole in the cloud deck. It may just be a factor of the island itself but it certainly presens itself as something caused directly by the volcano.

The photographer on the ISS took a series of pictures over a minute period as it flew overhead. These have been put together for the following animation. Again, very cool.

Technorati Tags: Environment, Science

The winner is from around here

It is always kind of fun to have a winner so close to home. I think it says something about the state of Washington in general and the Puget Sound region in particular.

Technorati Tags: Entertainment

Ideologue writes crap – just answer with a smile

by cogdogblog
Old fossil “disproves” Darwin!:
[Via Pharyngula]

The old fossil is Pat Buchanan, who has published a freakishly antiquated diatribe against Darwin. It’s extremely old school — he uses arguments straight out of 1960s era “scientific creationism”, trying to tar Darwin with guilt by association with Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler. He is apparently inspired by a “splendid little book,” The End of Darwinism: And How a Flawed and Disastrous Theory Was Stolen and Sold, by a creationist crank named Eugene G. Windchy. You can get an idea of Windchy’s level of scholarship by this quote:

That Darwinism has proven “disastrous theory” is indisputable.

“Karl Marx loved Darwinism,” writes Windchy. “To him, survival of the fittest as the source of progress justified violence in bringing about social and political change, in other words, the revolution.”

“Darwin suits my purpose,” Marx wrote.

John Lynch has rebutted this claim; I rather doubt that Marx could love someone as bourgeois as Darwin, a prosperous landowner and investor, a fellow who thought his greatest success in life was his talent as a businessman, and I can be fairly confident that any affection would not have been returned. And please, don’t even mention the false claim that Marx wanted to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin.

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I get so tired of this. He brings up stuff that has been well debunked and he knows it. He is not a stupid nor ignorant man. He appears to be deliberately spreading lies for political and ideological purposes.

He is writing about matters that have been shown to be false. He is repeating things that are not true and have been known not to be true for a long time. He obfuscates the facts at almost every opportunity.

As a scientist, I have to deal with questions from crap like this. People act like it must be true because Buchanan would not knowingly write something that was false. Of course he would. It is a gambit utilizing a logical fallacy.

One side says A. The other says C. So the truth may really lie somewhere in between, at B. By taking an extreme position, he hopes to move many ignorant people away from A, even if A is objectively true. Moving them to be gets them much closer to his side.

Particularly if he starts at V and can move them to H. A may be objectively true but if he can move people to H he can have a huge effect on policy, which is his purpose.

He is not interested in actually describing what happens in the natural world. Like all deniers, he can not accept evolution for political and ideological reasons so he must denier it, using any and all tools. To a denier, outright lying is fine. The goal is to affect policy not to tell the truth.

So, I will have to answer the same questions that I have many times before. I have to do this almost every time a denier spews out something, even if every single thing in the missive has already been shown to be completely false many times before.

I have to try and move them to A because that is where truth lies. Making decisions on anything based on lies and fabrications will always result in failure. Yet that is the goal of deniers, often because failure for society means lots of success for them.

So, 6 months, a year, from now, he, or one of the innumerable ideologues will spew some more lies on evolution or some other science.The cycle starts all over again.

Buchanan and others of his ilk have no shame. And it is scientists like me that are simply supposed to be nice and courteous when dealing with ramifications of this crap being spread around yet one more time.

You know, one of the most mind-nubing abuses of a prisoner is to make him dig a hole, then fill it up, then dig it again, then fill it up, then dig it again…

Responding nicely to the questions of people responding to the ideological ramblings of people like Buchanan, after having done it many times before, becomes very, very hard. It becomes like filling in a hole that will never be allowed to stay filled in. Someone always digs another and we have to fill that one.

Yet, if we show any sort of displeasure or lack of grace from a legitimate questioner responding to Buchanan’s crap, we are chastised for treating them like idiots.

And, of course, that is another aspect that Buchanan hopes to achieve. Not only will people move to the middle but the people who actually are talking factually will drive them there, or even further towards his position.

Because Buchanan and other deniers would love to receive these people with open arms. They want people to believe falsehoods because it serves their ideological purposes.

So, while I may disagree with some of Chris Mooney’s new book, which lays blame on scientists for causing people to retreat from science, I can certainly understand this. It is very hard to maintain a nice attitude when the same question has been asked and answered a thousand times, and when the number of ignorant people never seems to end.

It makes it even harder when a substantial number of those asking questions actually do not care what the answer is. They have already made up their minds and simply want to attack.

The number of deniers of evolution, of those that really do not want to learn about Nature, that do not want to understand objective truth, greatly outnumber the genuine seekers of truth that are simply skeptical and can be reasoned with. In fact, I’m close to believing that without some other knowledge or insight about an individual, we might as well assume that close to 100% that ask questions of evolution are deniers.

Start from there and it makes things much easier. It gets trickier with other types of deniers, as I think the number of real questioners may be much larger. But, I think it is likely that the deniers are still in the majority.

In the long run, we fall into Buchanan’s trap if we get upset or treat people like idiots. He wants us to do that so we drive more people to his position. We must act against the very human tendencies we would have.

Because in some very important areas, we need to produce policies also, ones based on truth. Getting more people to see the truth will make it easier to create policies that work.

So hard as it is, I’ll do my best to remain nice and explain things patiently. But if I get a hint that my overtures are in vain, that I am in the presence of a denier who can never be moved towards the truth, then I will refuse to fill up that hole.

And I may not be nice about it.

Technorati Tags: Politics, Science

Evolution vs. Creation per the Family Guy

more about "Family Guy: Evolution vs. Creation | …", posted with vodpod

Kansas gets some deserved ribbing.

Dinosaur called Dakota

by hoyasmeg
Dinosaur mummy yields its secrets:
[Via BBC News | Science/Nature | World Edition]

A beautifully preserved dinosaur found in the US retains remarkable detail of skin cells.

[More]

Now this is really cool. The dinosaur’s soft tissue was so well preserved and then replaced by minerals that its underlying structure was still maintained. So they could actually see cellular structure.

They could determine that the skin had two layers, just as expected by study of modern relatives of the dinosaur. They found that in regions of the dinosaur that had shown bite marks in previous fossils, the skin was much thinner explaining why predators would go for that region first.

While the actual proteins had degraded, they could find chemical remnants of these molecules. It is a nice demonstration of what can be preserved under the right conditions. I wonder what other sorts of structures they will be able to tease out of the fossil?

Technorati Tags: Science