[This slideshow may not appear in Google Reader or on mobiles] Reference: McKellar, Chattertton, Wolfe & Currie. 2011. A Diverse Assemblage of Late Cretaceous Dinosaur and Bird Feathers from Canadian Amber. Science http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1203344 Images courtesy of Science/AAAS More on feathered dinosaurs: Earliest bird was not a bird? New fossil muddles the Archaeopteryx story Dramatic restructuring [...]
The Senate has “saved” JWST? Hang on a sec, folks… | Bad Astronomy
Yesterday, the Senate subcommittee for Commerce, Justice, and Science — the group that initially sets the budget for NASA, among other agencies — issued a press release stating that they had produced a draft bill for the fiscal year 2012 appropriations. In the section on NASA, this release stated simply: The bill provides funds to [...]
“Years, Not Decades” to Growing New, Improved Tissue From Your Own Stem Cells | 80beats
Biologist George Church, examining a molecular model. George Church, the geneticist behind the Personal Genome Project, is envisioning a package deal: get your genome sequenced, and he and his collaborators will develop a line of induced pluripotent stem cells (IPS) from your tissue, so in the future, you’ll be able upgrade your system with organs [...]
The Intersection Has Officially Moved to Science Progress | The Intersection
New blog URL is here.
I’ve written an introductory post, telling readers what to expect, here.
And I’ve done a first real post over there, entitled “Could Personality Differences Help Explain the Reality Gap on Climate Change?” I have never seen anyone take a crack at it from this angle before, so response should be interesting.
Those of you who have bookmarked will want to redirect to http://www.scienceprogress.org/intersection
Commenting over there is by Facebook, btw, so that will also be something to get used to.
See you!
Fermi at 2: still rocking the high-energy sky | Bad Astronomy
Astronomers working with Fermi — a mission that is mapping the sky in gamma rays — have just released a new catalog of objects detected by the spacecraft. They’ve re-analyzed two years worth of data and have found nearly 2000 objects blasting out this super-high-energy form of light. Here is the all-sky map they made [...]
Snails cross continents by flying inside birds | Not Exactly Rocket Science
Imagine you’re living off the coast of California, and you want to get to sunny Florida. That sounds easy enough, but there are three big problems in this imaginary scenario. First, you are a snail, so crossing even a small distance takes a lot of time. Second, there is a continent in the way. Third, [...]
Poll on personal genomics | Gene Expression
Genomes Unzipped points me to a Nature survey on personal genomics for scientific researchers. With price points down to $200 or so many scientists have been at least genotyped. Though it varies by domain. Many molecular biologists seem intrigued by the novelty of personal genotyping services. In contrast, in a room of a dozen or [...]
Rick Perry and his transcript | Gene Expression
This piece in The New York Times goes through the A’s, B’s, C’s, D’s, and F’s, of Rick Perry’s transcript. Two questions which come to mind: 1) If we know this about Perry, why shouldn’t we know this about all the candidates? I don’t know what getting a B in business law and a D [...]
When all probable things can not be right | Gene Expression
I’ve been chewing on the modern human range expansion into Neandertal territory paper for a few days now. But I haven’t been able to bring myself to say much. There are two reasons. First, it’s a simulation paper, and I don’t exactly know what I can say besides being skeptical of the plausibility of some [...]
Ötzi, first, but not last, farmer? | Gene Expression
Dienekes relays that Ötzi the Iceman carried the G2a4 male haplogroup. He goes on to observe: We now have G2a3 from Neolithic Linearbandkeramik in Derenburg and G2a in Treilles in addition to Ötzi from the Alps. G2a folk got around. He joins Stalin and Louis XVI as a famous G2a. It was already clear with [...]
US Doctors Infected Hundreds of Guatemalans with Syphilis–And Concealed the Evidence | 80beats
Last fall, it came to light that researchers had infected 700 Guatemalan soldiers, prisoners, and mental patients with syphilis in a US Public Health Service study between 1946 and 1948. The American government apologized for these “abhorrent” practices, and promised to investigate what had happened. A White House bioethics commission released its report on the study this [...]
Personal genomics & rare populations notes | Gene Expression
I’m going to address two points in this post. The next possible target for getting an undersampled population, and the Malagasy results. First, lots of great submissions in regards to populations which are undersampled. Some of them are actually already in the data sets. For example, the Burusho and Kalash are in the HGDP. There [...]
How Human Are You? A New Turing Test Relies on Spatial Relations | 80beats
Where is the cup? THERE IS NO CUP. What’s the News: Ever since Alan Turing, the father of modern computers, proposed that sufficiently advanced computers could pass as human in a conversation, the classic Turing test has involved what’s essentially instant messaging. Computers designed to imitate human conversational patterns are often entered by their [...]
Lonely sentinel of the galaxy | Bad Astronomy
I’ve posted lots of pictures of globular clusters in the past, but this new one is something special. And not just because it’s stunningly beautiful… which it is: [Click to spheroidenate, or grab the massively embiggened 3850x3850 pixel version.] This is Hubble’s view of NGC 7006, a relatively faint cluster of a hundred or so [...]
Percy, Percy, me | Bad Astronomy
So I went to a Greek festival last weekend, and ate a ton of really good food. It was outside, with lots of tents set up with different cuisine, and one of them made me smile. I took the picture here, and tweeted this: "At a Greek festival, where they’re serving spicy grilled astrophysicist," linking [...]
Beetles turn eggs into shields to protect their young from body-snatchers | Not Exactly Rocket Science
Some parents give their children a head start in life by lavishing them with money or opportunities. The mother seed beetle (Mimosestes amicus) does so by providing her children with shields to defend them from body-snatchers. A female seed beetle abandons her eggs after laying them. Until they hatch, they are vulnerable to body-snatching parasites, [...]
Happy first day of spring… Mars! | Bad Astronomy
Today, September 14, 2011, is the vernal equinox for the northern hemisphere of Mars! If you want to be technical, it’s the time when the axis of Martian rotation is perpendicular to the direction of the Sun, and the northern hemisphere is headed into summer (making it the autumnal equinox for the southern hemisphere). When [...]
Facts Don’t Persuade Climate Skeptics–So What Does? | The Intersection
The answer, according to a new study, is making them feel better about themselves. As I report:
…the contested issues under examination were whether the 2007 troop “Surge” decreased insurgent attacks in Iraq (it did), whether the U.S. economy added jobs during 2010 under President Obama (it did), and whether global average temperatures have risen since 1940 (they have). Those who opposed the Iraq war and supported troop withdrawals were disinclined to credit George W. Bush’s surge with having worked. Those who oppose President Obama are disinclined to credit him on the economy, or to generally believe in global warming—especially that it is human caused.
Nyhan and Reifler once again confronted partisans with information on these subjects that (presumably) contradicted their beliefs—but there was a twist. This time, the contradictory information was sometimes presented in the form of a convincing graph, showing a clear trend (in attacks, jobs, or temperatures). And second, sometimes the individuals went into the manipulation after having undergone a “self-affirmation” exercise, in which they were asked to describe a positive character attribute or value that they possessed, and a situation in which showing that attribute or trait made them feel good about themselves.
And in both cases, the manipulation worked—although by different means.
Presenting an unequivocal graph was powerful enough to change people’s views, even as presenting technical text (at least in the rising temperatures case) was not. Meanwhile, getting people to affirm their values and sense of self also decreased their resistance, presumably because they felt less threatened by challenging information after having had their egos reinforced and their identities bolstered.
Read on here. Huge implications for effective science communication.
Nile crocodile is actually two species (and the Egyptians knew it) | Not Exactly Rocket Science
The Nile crocodile is a truly iconic animal. Or, more accurately, two iconic animals. As I’ve just written over at Nature News: The iconic Nile crocodile actually comprises two different species — and they are only distantly related. The large east African Nile crocodile (Crocodylus niloticus) is in fact more closely related to four species [...]
Knowledgeable individuals protect the wisdom of crowds | Not Exactly Rocket Science
If you ask someone to guess the number of sweets in a jar, the odds that they’ll land upon the right number are low – fairground raffles rely on that inaccuracy. But if you ask many people to take guesses, something odd happens. Even though their individual answers can be wildly off, the average of [...]
