Posted by spooneybarger
Fri, 22 Aug 2008 08:25:00 GMT
Three hundred dollars’ worth of meals later, the young researchers had their data back from Guelph: 2 of the 4 restaurants and 6 of the 10 grocery stores had sold mislabeled fish.
The results of Ms. Strauss and Ms. Stoeckle’s research are being published in Pacific Fishing magazine, a publication for commercial fishermen. The sample size is too small to serve as an indictment of all New York fishmongers and restaurateurs, but the results are unlikely to be a mere statistical fluke.
Really? How exactly is that unlikely to be mere statistical fluke given a sample size of 4 restaurants and 10 grocery stores.
O wait, how about we also get into sampling methodology…
Nah,
really, if you are going to make a statistics statement or use statistics to back something up, you should have at least a basic understanding.
Other than that, its an interesting article…
Read the whole thing…
Posted in Science, NYC | no comments
Posted by spooneybarger
Fri, 22 Aug 2008 07:41:00 GMT
Sweet, go check out Intel’s demonstration of wirelessly powering a lightbulb.
Posted in Weird Science, Science | no comments
Posted by spooneybarger
Wed, 12 Mar 2008 12:57:00 GMT
Although we often think of evolution in grand terms — a lineage of fish turning into frogs, or monkeys becoming apes — the technical definition is more humdrum. It’s simply a change in the frequencies of different versions of a gene in a population over time.
Read more…
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Posted by spooneybarger
Mon, 10 Mar 2008 13:22:00 GMT
There is a particular narrative about science that science journalists love to write about, and Americans love to hear. I call it the ‘oppressed underdog’ narrative, and it would be great except for the fact that it’s usually wrong.
The narrative goes like this:
1. The famous, brilliant scientist So-and-so hypothesized that X was true.
2. X, forever after, became dogma among scientists, simply by virtue of the brilliance and fame of Dr. So-and-so.
3. This dogmatic assent continues unchallenged until an intrepid, underdog scientist comes forward with a dramatic new theory, completely overturning X, in spite of sustained, hostile opposition by the dogmatic scientific establishment.
We love stories like this; in our culture we love the underdog, who sticks to his or her guns, in spite of heavy opposition. In this narrative, we have heroes, villains, and a famous, brilliant scientist proven wrong.
I’m sure you could pick out instances in science history where this story is true, but more often it is not. You wouldn’t know this from the pages of our major news media though; in fact you’d probably get the impression that the underdog narrative is the way science works. And many journalists may think that too; after all, most of them read (or misread) Thomas Kuhn when they were in college, and Kuhn brought this kind of narrative to a new high. The impression this narrative leaves is that science only progresses by the efforts of brave individuals who are willing to weather the wrath of the scientific establishment.
Read more…
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Posted by spooneybarger
Fri, 07 Mar 2008 15:46:00 GMT
Thierry Heidmann’s office, adjacent to the laboratory he runs at the Institut Gustave Roussy, on the southern edge of Paris, could pass for a museum of genetic catastrophe. Files devoted to the world’s most horrifying infectious diseases fill the cabinets and line the shelves. There are thick folders for smallpox, Ebola virus, and various forms of influenza. SARS is accounted for, as are more obscure pathogens, such as feline leukemia virus, Mason-Pfizer monkey virus, and simian foamy virus, which is endemic in African apes. H.I.V., the best-known and most insidious of the viruses at work today, has its own shelf of files. The lab’s beakers, vials, and refrigerators, secured behind locked doors with double-paned windows, all teem with viruses. Heidmann, a meaty, middle-aged man with wild eyebrows and a beard heavily flecked with gray, has devoted his career to learning what viruses might tell us about AIDS and various forms of cancer. “This knowledge will help us treat terrible diseases,” he told me, nodding briefly toward his lab. “Viruses can provide answers to questions we have never even asked.”
Read more…
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Posted by spooneybarger
Sun, 24 Feb 2008 13:11:00 GMT
DRAGONS and virgin births are the stuff of myth and religion. Except, that is, in Kansas, where they have recently come together in a way that should alter the way many of us look at nature and demonstrate the risks in our habit of using it to help us make ethical decisions.
Keepers at Wichita’s zoo got a surprise last year when they found developing eggs inside the Komodo dragon compound. Komodos are large rapacious lizards naturally found in Indonesia, but increasingly populating zoos around the world. Finding fertile embryos of dragons is a joyous occasion — there are only a few thousand of the lizards in the wild and captive breeding may be the only way to keep the species around.
But these eggs — two of which hatched a few weeks ago — were unusual: they developed from a female that had had no male of the species in close proximity for more than a decade. Judging from similar occurrences over the past two years in Britain, it appears that these lizards sometimes use a form of virgin birth in which eggs hatch without conception. The embryos are genetic clones of the mother.
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Posted in Weird Science, Science | no comments
Posted by spooneybarger
Mon, 07 Jan 2008 11:08:00 GMT
about time…
Two Baylor College of Medicine researchers in Houston are working on a cocaine vaccine they hope will become the first-ever medication to treat people hooked on the drug. “For people who have a desire to stop using, the vaccine should be very useful,” said Dr. Tom Kosten, a psychiatry professor who is being assisted in the research by his wife, Therese, a psychologist and neuroscientist. “At some point, most users will give in to temptation and relapse, but those for whom the vaccine is effective won’t get high and will lose interest.”
Read more…
Posted in Science | no comments
Posted by spooneybarger
Sat, 22 Dec 2007 18:59:00 GMT
One of the potentially useful things that a living cell can do is pump ions across its membrane. Simon Levinson, a biophysicist at the University of Colorado Medical School in Denver, US, says this generates a potential difference and so could be exploited to make a biobattery.
Levinson believes that kidney cells, which are particularly good at transporting ions, could be well suited to making a miniature battery. This would be formed by stacking up large numbers of cell layers to boost the voltage and current they can produce.
He suggests that such biobatteries might be ideal for powering devices inserted in the body, such as insulin pumps or pacemakers.
Read more…
Posted in Science | no comments
Posted by spooneybarger
Wed, 28 Nov 2007 22:38:00 GMT
especially when it destroys the universe. take that al gore!
Forget about the threat that mankind poses to the Earth: our very ability to study the heavens may have shortened the inferred lifetime of the cosmos.
Read more…
Posted in Science | no comments
Posted by spooneybarger
Sat, 17 Nov 2007 09:32:00 GMT
Scientists say they may be on the brink of translating into words the thoughts of a man who can no longer speak, after a pioneering experiment.
Electrodes have been implanted in the brain of Eric Ramsay, who has been “locked in” – conscious but paralysed – since a car crash eight years ago.
These have been recording pulses in areas of the brain involved in speech.
Now, New Scientist magazine reports, they are to use the signals he generates to drive speech software.
Read more…
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Posted by spooneybarger
Thu, 01 Nov 2007 06:22:00 GMT
What do Islamofacism, methamphetamine production, tort lawyers, and homemade fireworks have in common? The answer is that they are all part of the seemingly inevitable process of destroying the childhood Chemistry Set. A.C. Gilbert, in 1918 was titled the “Man who Saved Christmas” with his innovative ideas of packaging a few glass tubes and some common chemicals into starter kits that enabled a generation to learn the joy of experimentation, and the basis for the scientific method of thought.
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Posted in Science, Civil Liberties | no comments
Posted by spooneybarger
Thu, 25 Oct 2007 09:27:00 GMT
Posted in Science | no comments
Posted by spooneybarger
Thu, 11 Oct 2007 10:56:00 GMT
its so good to have a purpose….
Some scientists think they have figured out the real job of the troublesome and seemingly useless appendix: It produces and protects good germs for your gut.
That’s the theory from surgeons and immunologists at Duke University Medical School, published online in a scientific journal this week.
Read more…
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Posted by spooneybarger
Wed, 05 Sep 2007 08:47:00 GMT
doomed we are….
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued a flier to combat myths about the flu vaccine. It recited various commonly held views and labeled them either “true” or “false.” Among those identified as false were statements such as “The side effects are worse than the flu” and “Only older people need flu vaccine.”
When University of Michigan social psychologist Norbert Schwarz had volunteers read the CDC flier, however, he found that within 30 minutes, older people misremembered 28 percent of the false statements as true. Three days later, they remembered 40 percent of the myths as factual.
Younger people did better at first, but three days later they made as many errors as older people did after 30 minutes. Most troubling was that people of all ages now felt that the source of their false beliefs was the respected CDC.
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