Science Blogs

We are a collection of individuals interested in exploring the cutting edge of genetics and its intersection with other disciplines and everyday life (or the inverse!). We are liberal, conservative, libertarian, white, brown, Asian, male, female, Jewish, gentile, religious, nonreligious, American, non-American and many other labels. We are united by a reverence for the exploration of the heterodox in an empirical and analytic fashion drained of excessive emotive enthusiasm or revulsion. We are part of the remnant!

Susanne Osthoff, a 43-year-old German archeologist, has been kidnapped in northern Iraq. Osthoff, who speaks fluent Arabic and has converted to Islam, disappeared on November 25, several months after first being warned by American authorities that she was a potential abduction target. Osthoff was working in Iraq to witness the looting of Iraqi historical sites and gather information about the destruction of ancient sites. It is thought that she was kidnapped to put pressure on the German government to cease cooperation with the Iraqi government and American forces. Osthoff is married to a Jordanian and has one daughter. (via Archaeology)

Genomics as a medical tool & lifestyle choice.

A bioinformatics weblog.

Education-technology news from around the Web, brought to you by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

A magnitude 6.8 earthquake stuck the Lake Tanganyika region along the East African Rift zone on December 5 at 2:19 PM local time. Moment tensor solutions for the earthquake show that it was a normal faulting earthquake along a roughly north to north-northwest striking faulting plane. The East African Rift zone lies along the failed rift arm of the Afar Triangle, or triple junction, along which the Arabian plate rifted from Africa. The US has a similar kind of failed rift arm that runs along the Mississippi river and the New Madrid fault zone, which is less seismically active, but which failed in a series of large earthquakes in 1811-1812 that rang church bells as far as Boston.

What do you do when you just have to get on the internet to find out if your tomography model is done, and you don't want your thesis advisor to know you've been shopping at Macy's where there's not a single cybercafe in sight? If Santa is good to you this year, you just might whip out your handy WiFi digital hotspotter to find an open wireless network. The Canary Wireless hotspotter from our geeky pals at ThinkGeek will tell you not only the presence of a wireless network and signal strength, but the network ID, encryption status, and channel. If you're lucky enough to find more than one open network, you can simply scroll down for the best one. It's small enough to fit in the palm of your hand and makes for a handy keychain.

The December 1 issue of Nature contains a special section Science in the Web Age that covers the new wave of online publishing and communication, which seems to be passing many scientists by. Open access publishing, weblogs, and wikis, which are huge, growing forces on the internet, have yet to gather strength within the scientific research community, which ironically lives and dies by peer-review, publishing, and citations. According to one article by Declan Butler, "Most younger biologists blog anonymously, says Roland Krause, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin and a bioinformatics blogger. 'Many fear that their superiors consider it a waste of time, or even dangerous,' he says. [RealClimate blogger and scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Gavin] Schmidt agrees: 'Until blogging is seen as normal, this will continue to be a problem.'" Perhaps it's a generation gap that distinguishes young researchers who grew up with the internet, video games, and online social networking sites like Friendster and MySpace, which are only a few years old. "Such fears are dated, argues Jason Kelly, an MIT graduate student involved in OpenWetWare. The upcoming generation, he says, believes that excessive competition can harm science; they see the benefits of brainstorming their research ideas on blogs as far outweighing the risks."

The Editors' blog of The American Journal of Bioethics.

On November 28 the Kilauea volcano east Lae`apuki lava delta collapsed into the sea producing a huge outpouring of lava and a cloud of steam and other gases. The USGS reports that the cliff edge retreated 50 meters during the collapse and that Kilauea's summit and Pu`u O`o cone on the east rift zone slightly deflated after the event but has been inflating since December 1. The USGS website has a regularly updated photolog with more cool pictures of the delta collapse and subsequent redevelopment. Some of the pictures make for great desktop wallpaper.

Academics tend to shun pop culture, but some have learned how to use a famous face to shed light on their obscure little corner of science. Carl Hepburn at the University of Essex attracted attention a few years ago for not only figuring out how to weave the words 'Britney Spears' and 'semiconductor physics' in the same sentence, but for designing an entire online course around the two in The Britney Spears' Guide to Semiconductor Physics. Earlier this year, Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, esteemed Columbia University economist and advisor to Kofi Annan, toured Kenya with actress Angelina Jolie for an MTV special The Diary of Angelina Jolie and Dr. Jeffrey Sachs in Africa: "Spending two long days in Sauri, Sachs exposes Jolie to every corner of village life to reveal his vision for ending extreme poverty by 2015." So, how do you keep students from falling asleep in science class? You can try flashing pictures of a famous actress or pop music icon in between slides, but be careful about whom you choose, because today's pop sensation is tomorrow's tabloid fodder.

Swarthmore College biology student Colin Purrington has come up with "Charles Darwin Has A Posse" stickers to promote Charles Darwin and his theory of natural selection in public spaces. The design is a takeoff of the "Andre the Giant Has A Posse" street art project that spread throughout the world in the 1990s. Purrington's website offers not only various T-shirts, mugs, etc. for sale with the Darwin image, but also graphics files of the image for free, which anyone can download and affix to their object of choice. "Take a photograph of a Darwin Has A Posse sticker in action," says Purrington, "and I'll gladly post it on the "Darwin Sightings" page (coming soon). My goal is to have photographic evidence of Darwin appreciation in all 50 states by his 200th birthday, in 2009."

This just in from the isn't-that-cool department. Elumens has created a low-cost 3D immersive viewing system for individual users called the VisionStation. Three-dimensional immersive environments are useful for various research, education, and scientific visualization applications, particularly in the military and oil and gas industry, but most are huge, expensive systems that cost many thousands of dollars. These small concave screens are about the size of the average office desk, provide a 180 field of view, and are designed to be easily portable. It's like having your own personal IMAX theatre. Definitely something to put on your Christmas wish list your next research proposal.

You can now have your DNA sequenced and framed to hang on your living room or office wall as unique, one-of-a-kind modern art. Founded this year by Adrian Salamunovic, a marketing, design, and technology veteran, and Nazim Ahmed, who has a degree in Molecular Genetics and a background in biotech, DNA11 creates framed art from DNA fingerprints. The DNA is gathered using a cheek swab that you collect yourself and deposit in a tube that is sent to a lab. The images are printed as digital high-resolution giclee fine art pieces and signed by the artists. The cost of the prints range from $390 for an 18" by 24" print to $790 for a 36" by 54" print. The Ottowa-based company gained popularity this year with the commission of prints by Absolut Vodka for their fruit-flavored vodka advertising campaign, which portrayed DNA fingerprints from the fruits used for each flavor of vodka.

Intelligent design advocates criticize biological evolution, which is based on at least 150 years of research and observation, but when the John Templeton Foundation offered financial support for scientific research into intelligent design, no one stepped up to the plate. As reported in today's New York Times, "The Templeton Foundation, a major supporter of projects seeking to reconcile science and religion, says that after providing a few grants for conferences and courses to debate intelligent design, they asked proponents to submit proposals for actual research. "They never came in," said Charles L. Harper Jr., senior vice president at the Templeton Foundation, who said that while he was skeptical from the beginning, other foundation officials were initially intrigued and later grew disillusioned. "From the point of view of rigor and intellectual seriousness, the intelligent design people don't come out very well in our world of scientific review," he said."

The Monterey Bay Aquarium in California has a number of live web cams featuring marine life in their exhibits and off their oceanfront decks. The cams run from 7 am to 7 pm Pacific Time, but you can view recorded video in the off hours. The online exhibits include a kelp cam, otter cam, shark cam, aviary cam, penguin cam, outer bay cam, and a Monterey Bay cam, that can catch anything that happens to sail by from fish to boats. The shark cam in the Australia Gallery shows pelagic stingrays and scalloped hammerhead sharks like the one shown at right. The penguin exhibit contains 19 new penguins that were rescued from the aquarium in New Orleans. You can watch them feed the penguins at 10:30 am and 3:00 pm.

Opentopia, the free online encyclopedia, has a cool online world sunlight map that shows the current sunlight and cloud cover in a rectangular projection as well as a spherical projection. The map app was created by Aaron Hopkins using NASA satellite images and the Linux app Xearth, which is freely available on the web.

For such a short video, Eric Schulman's History of the Universe in 60 Seconds or Less has a rather long history. Dr. Schulman, who sits on the Editorial Board of the Annals of Improbable Research (home of the Ig Nobel Prize), first performed a 200-word written article about the history of the universe at the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony in 1997. The article was later expanded ever so slightly into the book A Briefer History of Time. Now the National Science Foundation has posted a video of Dr. Schulman performing the short talk on their website. Catch it if you have a minute ... or less.

Scientific research on the December 26, 2004 Indonesian earthquake and tsunami began almost immediately after the first earthquake signals were detected. Now the National Science Foundation (NSF) has prepared a special multimedia report entitled "After the Tsunami" that covers current efforts to understand not only the powerful forces that were responsible for the event, but how to identify early warning signs, communicate critical information to authorities, and mitigate against future disasters. NSF, in addition to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is one of the major funding agencies behind tsunami research being conducted by scientists in the US today.