No, really, it’s hard to believe, but it’s true. See Richard Feynman interviewed, for example.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
No, really, it’s hard to believe, but it’s true. See Richard Feynman interviewed, for example.
Once again, I bravely plunge into the fascinating world of kinky sex research in humans. This time, we learn something incredibly useful. Gentleman, would you like to know how to improve the potency of your semen? Do you need a good excuse to give your significant other when she catches you browsing porn sites? Do you want another excuse to sneer at those pompous business types who flaunt their fancy cell phones? Here’s the study for you.
By way of Over My Med Body, I found this article that finds new virtues for seafood: it reduces anti-social behavior. This is great news! I plan to announce when I’m feeling cranky here at the Myers household, which will prompt an immediate serving of tasty salmon. I’m going to be eating fish every day!
Well, maybe not…I’m really not that cranky. But it is yet another piece touting the virtues of polyunsaturated fatty acids, especially the essential ω-3 fatty acids in which sea food is rich, so it reinforces my preferences, anyway.
Here’s an interactive timeline that has it all: animated critters go strolling across the screen, there is a graph of oxygen concentration, and you can watch the continents slip and slide around the globe as you drag an arrow around the timeline. You’ll want a big monitor to display this on—it gets cluttered at times.
Word is just in from a fellow doing some interesting work that the Royal Society lecture by Steve Jones, “Why Creationism is wrong and Evolution is right” is available for your viewing pleasure.
Science asks awkward questions, doesn’t it? I got a link to a recent paper in the BMJ (thanks, SEF!) that asks one of those questions—can fetuses feel pain?—and then takes it apart clinically, coming up with an answer that will make some adults feel pain: that answer is no.
Science fairs usually have a few pleasant surprises, a lot of ho-hum projects done by rote with little thought (sometimes clearly done the night before), and a few stinkers that reveal nothing but the student’s ignorance. The science teachers are supposed to screen the project proposals to prevent that from happening, though, so the really bad projects usually don’t get through. There’s also a hierarchy: local to county or regional to state, and only the best are supposed to progress. State science fairs usually have some very impressive work and some that might be naive, but at least the student has enthusiasm. This description of a state level science fair project is disturbing, not just because the student’s work was substandard, but because it somehow made it through what should have been multiple levels of screening.
Then I saw it. “Creator or Not? YOU DECIDE”
The title claimed we could decide, but the project left no room for vacillation. It started with a hypothesis that “The universe was created by an intelligent designer.” It went on to make the standard big number argument, and closed with the conclusion, “The universe was created by an intelligent designer.”
The big number argument: there are twenty amino acids. The average human protein has around 460 amino acids in it. Thus the number of possible combinations is a huge number. The age of the universe in seconds likewise is a huge number, but less huge than the number of possible amino acid combinations. Thus you would have to have been randomly generating these protien chains at the rate of bunches every second from the Big Bang to now before you got human protein chains. Clearly that didn’t happen; therefore, an intelligent designer did it. Quod erat demonstratum.
That’s extremely distressing. It’s sad that some kid has such a poor knowledge of logic and evidence, but it is even more troubling that the educational system has rotted out so much that shoddy work like that can actually advance that far. We should worry about individuals, of course, but this is a sign that the educational infrastructure that leads to good scientists isn’t working—there was a complete failure from parents to science teacher to fair judges, and all of those people ought to be ashamed of themselves. This is not how we get kids into the Siemens Westinghouse competition.
(via The Scientific Activist)
John Lynch beat me to this story about catfish feeding on land, so I’ll be brief. It shows how the eel catfish, Channallabes apus, can manage to take an aquatic feeding structure and use it to capture terrestrial meals. Many fish rely on suction feeding: gape the mouth widely and drop the pharyngeal floor, and the resulting increase in volume of the oral cavity just sucks in whatever is in front of the animal. That doesn’t work well at all in the air, of course—try putting your face a few inches in front of a hamburger, inhale abruptly, and see how close you come to sucking in your meal. So how does an aquatically adapted feeder make the transition to eating on land?
A very cool idea: portray the Evolutionary Timeline on a web page, drawing it so that one pixel equals 30,000 years.
Go to the page and just keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling…
Martin Brazeau is looking for volunteers to spend July in Atlantic Canada helping him split rocks, looking for Late Devonian to Early Carboniferous fossils. Let’s see…I wonder if the family would mind if I abandoned them for a month? I don’t have any important responsibilities, do I?
