Don’t forget to visit the PBS web site where they have all kinds of cool stuff for everybody, including and especially teachers. So, now the defense gets their shot…. Continue reading Judging Judgment Day. Spontaneous Generation (Live Blogging) IV
Monthly Archives: November 2007
Judging Judgment Day. Spontaneous Generation (Live Blogging) III
Oooh, that lawyer for ID was played very smarmily … nice acting. And the guy they got to play Georg Bush was fantastic … looked exactly like him.Darwin’s great great great great grandson has a teleological view of evolution. Well, I guess understanding evolution is not genetic. Or at least, not selected for. Continue reading Judging Judgment Day. Spontaneous Generation (Live Blogging) III
What is this giraffe doing?
The one on the right:
Continue reading What is this giraffe doing?
Judging Judgment Day. Spontaneous Generation (Live Blogging) II
Hey, Samantha’s husband!Oh, no, John Scopes. Arrested…Oh, Colonel Potter! … Oh, no, never mind.Pay close attention to this textbook stuff Genie is talking about. The whole story is more insidious and horrific than they will ever cover in this show. Continue reading Judging Judgment Day. Spontaneous Generation (Live Blogging) II
Judging Judgment Day. Spontaneous Generation (Live Blogging)
Spontaneous Generation (Live Blogging)I did not like the verbiage … the wording … of the pre-show intro at all. Listening to it by itself, ID and “Darwin’s Theory” sound like they are of similar import. It really is not necessary in this day and age to pretend that there is actually a debate. Especially on PBS, for crying out loud.I resent and object to the idea that an issue is not real unless you can show the cover of time with that issue depicted on it.In the reconstruction, the actors looked better than the originals for the most part.I wonder if people outside the Northeast realize that in the Northeast we generally consider Pennsylvania to be “southern.” Well, now you know.This whole story, Dover, is Exhibit A for abolishing the School Board System of managing education.
Hey, turn on the TV…
It’s time for Judgment Day.
Overheard in Minneapolis
Question: In science, in reference to probability, how come what you predict is not always what you get?Answer from 12 year old:Because experimental and theoretical probability are not the same.Answer from Hight School student:Because everyone has their own opinions, views,concepts, and interests, and no one wants to believe they are wrong about what they are saying. Well, what these many people have to say forms into predictions. Then, someone who is a couple of steps higher in level and who actually studies the topic can tell you the actual answer….What is going on here is obvious. The middle school student is talking about probability. The high school student is talking about the blogosphere.
Six out of the world’s eight species of bears are threatened with extinction
It is pretty remarkable that there are only eight species of bears to begin with. But, if things go really badly, we could end up with only two.Here’s a press release from IUCN: Continue reading Six out of the world’s eight species of bears are threatened with extinction
Sunlight makes a vicious strain of bacteria even more dangerous
A team of researchers has figured out that that certain bacteria can tell the difference between light and dark, and become ten times more virulent when exposed to sunlight…
This not a really new story, but i think it might interest you.
This is the first time light has been shown to change the course of a bacterial disease. And these particular bacteria are probably not alone: As many as one-third of other bacterial species may react to light by producing physiological or chemical changes.Brucella, the bacteria that cause the infectious disease brucellosis, and more than 100 other kinds of bacteria contain proteins originally thought to be functional only in plants, according to Winslow Briggs, one of the researchers and director emeritus of the Carnegie Institution Department of Plant Biology. “Many of these bacteria have been pretty well studied, but nobody has ever showed light responses in them,” said Trevor Swartz, the study’s lead author and a former postdoctoral fellow in Briggs’ lab. “In Brucella, we showed that light actually is controlling infection.”…The researchers were originally stumped by the appearance of light-sensitive proteins in bacteria, organisms not previously thought to care about light or dark. “The question was, what the blazes is it doing in Brucella?” Briggs said. “That’s where we had to hook up with people who were handling Brucella, because it’s a very dangerous pathogen.”
The proteins that signal to the bacterium that it is in the presence of light appear to do so in order to indicate if the bacterium is inside or outside of the host. If outside the host, the bacteria should act one way (more virulently), if inside the host, they can be more laid back.This was published in Science, and you can read the press report here.
The molecule in question is a set of proteins with a “flavin-binding LOV domain.” These molecules are found widely in plant tissues, fungi, and bacteria (algal phototropins). The molecules react to light and produce a signal that outputs to a wide range of systems. This means that these molecules can react to light and then originate a cascade of reactions elsewhere in the cell.The reason that this research is interesting is this: It was already understood that flavin binding LOV domains were involved in reactions to light in plants as well as bacteria that used light, but not understood what they were doing in other bacteria.This left open two possibilities, predicted by evolutionary theory. One is that there is a light-related function that was as yet not understood, the other being an unknown function that had nothing to do with light. The first prediction is obviously the more interesting adaptationist perspective.From the Perspectives report in Science by Kennis and Crosson:
Swartz et al. show that light increases the enzymatic (autophosphorylation) activity of a Brucella LOV histidine kinase (see the figure). Strikingly, they demonstrate that visible light increases the virulence of B. abortus in a macrophage infection model: Wild-type Brucella is 10 times more virulent after exposure to visible light than bacteria that were never exposed to light. Deletion of the gene encoding LOV kinase from Brucella abolished this light-mediated virulence response, reducing bacterial proliferation in light-exposed macrophage cells to the level observed in the dark.
The next step? Well, light can be a two-edged sword. It seem based on this research to increase virulence, but it also can be deadly to bacteria. So there must be some interesting trade offs going on. What is the molecular evolutionary response to this conundrum?______________-KENNIS, J. T. M. & CROSSON, S. (2007): Microbiology. A bacterial pathogen sees the light.. Science, 317, 1041-2.SWARTZ, T. E., TSENG, T., FREDERICKSON, M. A., PARIS, G., COMERCI, D. J., RAJASHEKARA, G., KIM, J., MUDGETT, M. B., SPLITTER, G. A., UGALDE, R. A., GOLDBAUM, F. A., BRIGGS, W. R. & BOGOMOLNI, R.A. (2007): Blue-light-activated histidine kinases: two-component sensors in bacteria.. Science, 317, 1090-3.
A good way to cook a turkey
My daughter, Julia, is named after two people. One of them is Julia Child. I happen to think Julia Child has had more influence on American society than most other people, by helping to make varied and interesting cuisine part of American culture.One day when Julia was a very young child (my Julia, not Julia Child), I was out walking her in her carriage. I turned the corner around the Van Serg Building on the Harvard Campus and practically ran into Julia Child, who was walking in the other direction on her daily constitutional.”Oh, what a cute child,” she said. (And she was a cute child, I assure you.) “What’s her name.”Well, that was an interesting conversation…..Anyway, I want to suggest that you use a recipe invented by Julia Child for cooking your Thanksgiving Turkey this year. It is called “Laid Back Turkey.” It is, in my view, the best possible way to cook a turkey.But it is not for the feint of heart…. Continue reading A good way to cook a turkey
National Survey Explores Race and Gender in 21st -Century Politics
(Santa Barbara, Calif.) – A team of political scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the University of New Mexico, the University of Massachusetts, and the University of Notre Dame has completed a groundbreaking survey that explores how race and gender is changing the political landscape of the United States. The scholars presented their findings today at a press conference at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.The Gender and Multicultural Leadership Project is, to date, the most comprehensive multiracial, multi-office national survey of Black, Latino, Asian, and Native American elected officials holding position at state and local levels.Principal investigators include Pei-te Lien, a professor of political science at UC Santa Barbara; Christine Marie Sierra, a professor of political science at the University of New Mexico; Carol Hardy-Fanta, director of the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts, Boston; and Dianne M. Pinderhughes, a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame. They constructed a national database of over 10,000 public officials in federal and selected state and local office. Survey respondents were drawn from this database and included 1,354 officials, slightly more than half of whom are African American, over one-third are Latino/a, seven percent are Asian American, and two percent are Native American. Among other topics, respondents discussed their positions on issues such as the war in Iraq, the No Child Left Behind education policy, immigration, and the Voting Rights Act.
Continue reading National Survey Explores Race and Gender in 21st -Century Politics
Windows Makes Predictable Random Numbers
The Next Logical Step in Evolution of the Web
StupidFilter was conceived out of necessity. Too long have we suffered in silence under the tyranny of idiocy. In the beginning, the internet was a place where one could communicate intelligently with similarly erudite people. Then, Eternal September hit and we were lost in the noise. The advent of user-driven web content has compounded the matter yet further, straining our tolerance to the breaking point
If you don’t understand what we’re talking about, just move along, nothing to see here…For the rest of you.. Continue reading The Next Logical Step in Evolution of the Web
Roots Coming Home to Roost
Many years ago a couple of researchers (Hatley and Kappleman) suggested omnivory, including eating of roots, to be a common theme in the adaptations we see in bears, humans, and pigs. Some years later, Richard Wrangham and I independently and for different reasons came to the idea that roots are potentially important in human evolution, so we collaborated on a paper suggesting this. Subsequently, bits and pieces of data have been accumulating to support this hypothesis (the “root hypothesis”). And here, Jim Moore of San Diego, is reporting on living chimps eating roots in a relatively savanna like environment. As we predicted.
Chimps dig up clues to human past? from PhysOrg.com
One of the keys enabling the earliest human ancestors to trade a forest home for more open country may have been the ability to gather underground foods. Now a team of scientists reports for the first time that in Tanzania our closest living relatives, chimpanzees, are using sticks and pieces of bark to dig for edible roots, tubers and bulbs.[…]
Plants can help you. They can kill you. And they can get you stoned.
I find it absolutely fascinating that scientists often bother to estimate the effects of diet by feeding controlled quantities of food, especially plant food, to rats to see what happens.For example, there is a common substance in cooked food that, if fed in even modest quantity to rats, causes the rats to get cancer and die in no time. This raises concerns for humans because, well, the rats died. So the substance must be “bad for you.”But this approach to nutritional science, and the reasoning that goes with it, is deeply flawed. Continue reading Plants can help you. They can kill you. And they can get you stoned.