Science Blogs

Something new is afoot in the science blogosphere. Seed Magazine has been busy inviting science bloggers to its ScienceBlogs website to create one big, aggregated science blog. Some of the bigger names in the science blog category have abandoned, or presumably will soon abandon, their old blog servers to join ScienceBlogs, including Pharyngula, Cognitive Daily, and Living the Scientific Life. The ScienceBlogs homepage operates like an RSS feed to give you a place to quickly scan the latest posts from all of their science blogs. According to Tim Lambert of Deltoid, "The main reason for the move is the chance to be associated with the fine group of blogs here. The designers at ScienceBlogs are dreaming up ways to provide links to interesting posts at other blogs on this site in the sidebar, so my readers can get some more value out of my blog. I also now have advertising in the sidebar. I hadn't bothered with this before because it was extra work for not very much money, but I don't have to do anything except write the posts and cash the thin cheques." Ahh, so there's the hook: They're getting paid to blog for ScienceBlogs. Nothing new there actually, since this is the business model of Weblogs, Inc., which founder Jason Calacanis just recently sold to AOL for a cool $25M.

ScienceBlogs is the largest and most engaged global conversation about science. It features blogs spanning nearly every discipline of science and point of view. It is an authentic global, digital science salon. ScienceBlogs is powered by Seed Media Group -- publishers of Seed Magazine -- and is part of the Seed Digital Network, which also includes Seedmagazine.com and Phylotaxis.com. Seed provides technology, hosting and other enabling support for Scienceblogs.com as part of its Mission to broaden the growing global awareness of Science and the places where it intersects with Culture.

The American Museum of Natural History Bulletin has a great series of feature articles on the latest tsunami research that includes interactive multimedia files and essays on how tsunami reseachers are trying to get ahead of the next big wave. This video provides an overview of the feature, complete with interviews of scientists including Vasily Titov, who created the first animated model of the Sumatra tsunami that was shown by major news outlets all over the world. Watch how a subduction zone earthquake creates a tsunami like the Sumatra earthquake and tsunami that hit the Indian Ocean in 2004. The essays cover computer modeling approaches, high-tech buoy monitoring systems, and research in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S., which shows that a major tsunami hit the coast near the Cascadia subduction zone only 300 years ago.

An anonymous do-it-yourselfer who goes by the name of JavaMoose on Flickr built his own deep-towed underwater camera using PVC tubing, a color camera, and a black and white camera capable of seeing in the dark with infrared illumination. A 100-foot-long cable provides power to the cameras and connects them to an external video capture device and laptop, which allow real-time monitoring and recording of the underwater images. You can see a slideshow of the construction and sample videos of underwater critters recorded by the cameras: Initial Testing, Second Run, and The Feeding Frenzy! In The Feeding Frenzy, JavaMoose and his crew dropped bait into the water and managed to record a swarm of little fish around the color camera. The videos come complete with a clever selection of soundtracks to get you in the spirit. (PS: We'll gladly post his name if we ever find out his true identity.)

Literature.org, the free, online library, has dozens of complete, unabridged books from English literature as well as a few science texts available for you to read online. Three works by Charles Darwin are available on the site, including The Voyage of the Beagle, two editions of The Origin of Species. and The Descent of Man. The site can get away with posting the works online because the authors have been dead for at least 75 to 90 years.

Just as the U.S. is losing its lead in basic scientific research, "Congressional support for boosting U.S. academic research this year slammed head-on into other national needs and a growing demand to curb federal spending," reports Science in the Jan. 6 issue. "The resulting crackup has left the National Institutes of Health (NIH) with its first cut in spending since 1970 and the National Science Foundation (NSF) with an increase that only regains lost ground and mocks the recent rhetoric about the importance of a 7-year doubling of its budget.... Basic and applied research spending across all federal agencies will inch up by $1 billion in 2006, to $57 billion, according to an analysis by AAAS (which publishes Science). But the lion's share of the increase went to preparation for NASA's moon-Mars mission, a bump that helped NASA achieve an overall 1.5% increase, to $16.5 billion. Even a 2.1% increase in the Defense Department's $73 billion research and development budget masks a 2.9% drop in its $1.5 billion basic research account and a flat budget for the $3 billion Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).... NIH and NSF officials have been told to expect little or no increases, with another cut likely in NSF's education programs and no money for any major new scientific facilities. But last-minute agency appeals were still pending at press time, leaving some officials hopeful that White House budgeteers might be listening to the recent drumbeat of support to boost investment in research and training."

Yes, that is a bike with a rocket on its rear. No, you shouldn't try to build one of these yourself, unless of course you actually happen to be a rocket scientist. Tim Pickens, who not only is a rocket scientist, but is president of his own rocket design firm, built a 200-pound-thrust rocket engine that attaches to a bicycle for a mere $750 and lots and lots of work. The rocket blasted his bike from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 5 seconds - as fast as a Porsche. According to Popular Science, "the rocket bike employs the same hybrid rocket technology as the suborbital spaceplane SpaceShipOne, whose propulsion system Pickens helped design. In place of synthetic rubber fuel, however, the bike uses ordinary roofing tar. To ignite it, Pickens placed a model-rocket motor inside the engine. A button on the handlebar fires the model-rocket motor, which in turn sets off Pickens's larger motor by lighting the roofing-tar fuel. His next project is to build a company car: a pickup truck with a removable 2,000-pound-thrust rocket strapped into the bed." We all can see where this is headed, and let's just say it isn't pretty; no, not when your helmet has melted around your head.

The Panda's Thumb is the virtual pub of the University of Ediacara. The patrons gather to discuss evolutionary theory, critique the claims of the antievolution movement, defend the integrity of both science and science education, and share good conversation.

A website and weblog about topics and issues discussed in the book "Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution" by Howard Rheingold.

Continuous news, views, and abuse by the staff of Reason magazine.

There are lots of fun online videos covering science topics that we hardly ever take the time to review. So as the work week winds down, take a look at these when the boss isn't watching.

EPIC 2014: How will you get your news in the future? In the year 2014, The New York Times has gone offline. The Fourth Estate's fortunes have waned. What happened to the news? And what is EPIC?

NASA TV: NASA has replaced its analog TV program with digital TV online. Watch NASA TV live feeds about the International Space Station and other on-going science programs. It's like CNN for space science.

Richard Feynman Lectures: A series of four lectures, the Douglas Robb Memorial Lectures, were given by Feynman at the University of Auckland in 1979 and are now available on digital video. The lectures cover photons, quantum behavior, Feynman diagrams and particle interaction, and an overview of the state of the science in quantum physics (circa 1979). The video quality is excellent and the lectures can be understood by non-scientists. Hosted by the Vega Science Trust.

The award of the Los Alamos National Lab (LANL) management contract to the University of California on December 21 by the U.S. Department of Energy is being criticized by the editors of top science journal Nature in the January 5 issue. A consortium led by the University of California and industrial engineering partner Bechtel corporation beat out a challenge by a group led by the University of Texas and Lockheed Martin. In an editorial entitled "No new start at Los Alamos," Nature writes, "Once, this news would have led to celebrations among the 8,000 or so University of California staff at Los Alamos. But their mood is instead forlorn. Staff pensions and other benefits are not guaranteed under the new arrangement, and recent actions by the University of California have eroded goodwill. ... The process by which the Department of Energy awarded the contract has been murky, even by the usual standards of such exercises. Few believe that the department's grey-suited administrators really made an independent choice. Rather, the process was characterized by delays and heavyweight political lobbying from Senator Pete Domenici (Republican, New Mexico), among others. That's par for the course, as the 'management crisis' at Los Alamos has always been more about Washington politics than about actual administrative issues at the lab." This was the first time that the contract has come up for rebidding since Los Alamos National Laboratory was established in 1943 to develop the first atomic bomb and was triggered by recent security scandals and claims of espionage, which in fact aren't all that new at LANL. More on the reaction to the LANL contract decision can be found in LANL: The Real Story, an insider's blog by retired LANL computer scientist Doug Roberts.

An insider's blog about Los Alamos National Laboratory edited by retired LANL scientist, Doug Roberts.

Catching up on the latest science news is a pain if you have to click to a dozen different websites. Now iTunes has over 40 free science podcasts that you can download and listen to on your commute to work. Most of the major science news organizations have podcasts listed there, including Science, Nature, New Scientist, and Discovery. NASA produces its own podcasts such as one on the Spitzer Space Telescope, which presents newscasts on recent science discoveries, alien asteroid belts, star formation, and more. Smaller science groups you may have never heard of are there too like The Naked Scientists, a weekly live radio show by Dr. Chris Smith from Cambridge University, who just happens to be an expert on ... herpes! Just download the latest podcasts every morning, and you'll be the smartest kid in the room by the time you get to work. Don't have iTunes? Download it here.

The Cascades Volcano Observatory of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has released truly awesome videos created from photos taken daily by an automated digital camera on the Sugar Bowl Dome, located 2.3 km (1.4 miles) north-northeast of the vent. The camera, on loan from the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, was installed on October 10, 2004. The camera snaps one photo every 3 minutes and sends a picture to observatory scientists once every hour. The pictures shown in this movie were taken from June 16 to August 16, 2005 - only two months! The video shows the dome on the left rising then collapsing as the dome on the right diverts the flow of magma. The current status as of today (Jan. 3) of Mount St. Helens is at volcano advisory alert level 2, color code ORANGE. Small earthquakes are being recorded every 2-3 minutes with intermittent larger events. According to the USGS, "The eruption could intensify suddenly or with little warning and produce explosions that cause hazardous conditions within several miles of the crater and farther downwind."

Nature released in its December 22, 2005 issue a timeline of events in the scandal involving South Korean scientist Woo Suk Hwang, who not only exhibited questionable ethics by using eggs from a junior female lab member, but faked his headline-making cloning experiments. The harvesting of eggs from a junior lab member was supposedly uncoerced, but there is a high likelihood that there was pressure of one form or another in this high stakes game of big-money research. As they say, where there's smoke, there's fire. The South Korean media reported the source of the eggs on November 21, and less than a month later, on December 13, reports surfaced that Hwang and his team had faked data from their 2005 Science paper, in which Hwang's group claimed to have established 11 embryonic stem-cell lines from the skin cells of individuals. In a related article in the same issue of Nature (see Where now for stem-cell cloners? (subscription required)), scientists say that "complete loss of confidence in Hwang's work has set the field back by years. It has also taken away what seemed to be firm confirmation of the feasibility of using cloning to produce patient-matched stem cells."

Cell phone: check. Laptop: check. Digital camera, iPod, PDA: check, check, check. Chic, cozy place to store and charge all these gadgets: Huh? If you're like most people, you probably have a half-dozen cords dangling between your electonic gadgets and a powerstrip against the wall or else the gadgets themselves are scattered throughout the house and plugged into various outlets. Not only is it unsightly, but it takes up valuable space. Now the technology furniture company, Anthro (as in anthropology, get it?), has come to the rescue with eNook, a wall-mounted charging workstation. eNook allows you to charge all of your gadgets, including a laptop computer, in a sleek hideaway that's attached to the wall and opens up to create a handy little desktop. It's especially useful if you work at home and want to hide away your desk when you're done for the day. The inside panel is covered with your choice of fabric and doubles as a bulletin board. Anthro's asking price is $399 plus $29 for the interior metal shelves. If you're feeling short on change, the DIYer in me thinks you could make one of these yourself with some enginuity and a trip to the hardware store. [Ed.: Add a lock to the cabinet, and you'll have added security for your gadgets as well.]

The December issue of Wired magazine contained a short article and data report on where the U.S. stands relative to other nations in spending on research and development, number of researchers per 1,000 people, total number of Ph.D.s., and number of published scientific papers by origin. The U.S. consistently falls at or below average by these measures, particularly when it comes to research spending, where China is spending more than twice as much on science as a percentage of gross domestic product (6% of GDP) than the U.S. (2.5% of GDP). Of course, this comparison doesn't consider private sector spending in the U.S. Ironically, the Wired article by Greta Lorge cites the breakthrough research on cloning of human embryos by South Korean scientists as evidence that the U.S. has lost its lead in biotech. But as the world learned last month, the stem cell research has been found to be fraudulent, and the lead South Korean scientist, Dr. Woo Suk Hwang, admitted to fabricating evidence, casting doubt on his entire body of work. The scandal simply demonstrates how much pressure is on scientists and nations to be first in the science race. Perhaps the more important question isn't why is the U.S. falling behind, but why don't Americans seem to care? In science, it only matters who is first with a scientific breakthrough. Not only are there no awards for Number Two, but top scientific journals won't publish articles by also-rans unless they add something new to the story. Even then, there is little glory in merely adding another decimal point.