Archive for April, 2009
April 30, 2009 at 11:20 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Way back in the day when I was in library school in Ohio, there was a slowly dying tradition in rural libraries of hosting “library cats.” These were cats that lived full-time in libraries, most public. Well, Gary Roma of Iron Frog Productions has created a worldwide historical archive of library cats and organized them around an interactive map, giving the names, locations, and dates of residents for individual cats. It’s a work in progress, so if you know of a cat that isn’t mentioned, be sure to let him know.
Link
Image via flickr user TVLshac
Original post by John
April 30, 2009 at 10:22 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Tired of speeding cars, residents of the village of Crosby-on-Eden in Cumbria, England, decided to take matters into their own hands: by creating a scarecrow policeman, complete with a radar gun made from a water bottle!
David Sowden, another resident, added: "Certainly from a distance it looks like a genuine police officer.
"One visitor said it would be a good idea to keep that up for a week and then replace him with a proper physical police officer with a gun for another week and see what happens.
"It has made them nose dive and they said they couldn’t believe the reaction."
Link (Photo: North News)
Original post by Alex
April 30, 2009 at 10:21 pm · Filed under 5250
Can’t wait for the new X-Men movie? Neither could Ryan Higa - but instead of fretting about waiting, he did something about it: he "sweded" his own X-Men Origins: Wolverine trailer. The result? Hilarious! (BTW, Ryan is the creator of the YouTube channel Nigahiga, the second most subscribed channel of all time on the site)
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]
Original post by Alex
April 30, 2009 at 10:20 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
tags: Experimental Heart, cancer research thriller, Jennifer L. Rohn, book review
Reading fictional books about scientific research inevitably inspire me to claw my eyes out from sheer frustration with the many shocking inaccuracies before I reach page 100 — Michael Crichton’s truly stupid books scream immediately to mind. So I was skeptical about reading and possibly reviewing another such book. But this book pleasantly surprised me: I truly enjoyed Jennifer Rohn’s engaging page-turner, Experimental Heart (Cold Spring Harbor Press: Cold Spring Harbor, NY; 2009).
Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…
Original post by "GrrlScientist" none@example.com
April 30, 2009 at 10:19 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
If you’ve been watching all of the media hype, you’d be forgiven if you think that the swine flu pandemic will kill us all. But according to some scientists, it’s actually much milder than your average run-of-the-mill flu that hit every winter:
The swine virus does appear able to spread easily among humans, which persuaded the WHO to boost its influenza pandemic alert level to phase 5, indicating that a worldwide outbreak of infection is very likely. And the CDC reported on its website that "a pattern of more severe illness associated with the virus may be emerging in the United States." [...]
But certainly nothing that would dwarf a typical flu season. In the U.S., between 5% and 20% of the population becomes ill and 36,000 people die — a mortality rate of between 0.24% and 0.96%.
Dirk Brockmann, a professor of engineering and applied mathematics at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., [...]
Original post by Alex
April 30, 2009 at 10:10 pm · Filed under 5242
I’ve been seeing a lot of comments mocking the current outbreak of H1N1, and a lot of people (and journalists) who don’t understand what “big deal” about the “snoutbreak” of swine influenza is, or don’t get what the raising of the World Health Organization’s pandemic alert phase up to 5 means. I noted here what the alert level meant, but wanted to discuss it a bit more in a full post; after the jump.
Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…
Original post by Tara C. Smith none@example.com
April 30, 2009 at 10:00 pm · Filed under 5244
These cells look like fairly typical bone cells. They appear to be connected to each other by thin branch-like projections and are embedded in a white matrix of fibres. At their centres are dark red spots that are probably their nuclei. But it’s not their appearance that singles out these extraordinary cells - it’s their source. You’re looking at the bone cells of a dinosaur.
They come from an animal called Brachylophosaurus, a duck-billed dinosaur that lived over 80 million years ago. By looking at one of its thigh bones, Mary Schweitzer from North Carolina State University has managed to recover not just bone cells, but possible blood vessels and collagen protein too. Their presence in the modern day is incredible. Time usually isn’t kind to such tissues, which decay and degrade long before harder structures like bones, teeth and armour are fossilised.
This is the second time that Schweitzer’s team have [...]
Original post by Ed Yong none@example.com
April 30, 2009 at 8:00 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Snowball, the sulphur-crested cockatoo, is an internet superstar. He’s known for his penchant for grooving to music, notably Everybody by the Backstreet Boys. As the music plays, Snowball bobs his head and taps his feet in perfect time with it. If it speeds up or slows down, his rhythm does too. He is one of two parrots that are leading a dance dance revolution, by showing that the human behaviour of moving in time to music (even really, really bad music) is one that’s shared by other animals.
People who’ve attended parties at scientific events may question the ability of humans to move to a beat, but it’s a fairly universal skill and one that many people thought was unique to our species. After all, domesticated animals like dogs and cats don’t do it, and they spend their time with humans and have been exposed to our music for thousands of [...]
Original post by Ed Yong none@example.com
April 30, 2009 at 7:56 pm · Filed under 5222
A reader (hat tip, sandy) has pointed me to a very interesting interview with CDC’s chief virologist, Ruben Donis, in Science Magazine’s blog, ScienceInsider. In it he provides further information on the confusing reports about the species origin of the current swine flu, originally said to be of swine, human and bird origin but later claimed to be only swine. It may be that both are true, depending on how you look at it.
Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…
Original post by revere none@example.com
April 30, 2009 at 7:36 pm · Filed under 5224
Wanted to draw attention to this wonderful interview with CDC virologist Ruben Donis, chief of the molecular virology and vaccines branch at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, from ScienceInsider. It’s echoes nicely some of the themes I and others have been trying to hit in this swine flu coverage: the mystery about where this virus came from and where it is going; its weird novelty — and the temptations and difficulties in trying to explain that novelty; the huge advantage we have in spotting and studying it because of the "false alarms" from SARS and avian flu; and the need for an aggressive but parsimonious approach to solving the puzzle of this virus so we can think sensibly about how it might behave — and how we should behave.
Donis’s answers (to some wonderfully intelligent questions) recognize all this both implicitly and explicitly, and he seems sharp-eyed [...]
Original post by David Dobbs none@example.com
Next entries »
.jpg)