A new explanation!
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Since we’re entering the holiday season, and I wouldn’t want to be accused of contributing to the War on Christmas (oh, horrors!), here are some fortuitously christmassy entertainments.
If you’re shopping for just the right gift for that devout Christian, look into the Twelve Days of Kitschmas. These are exactly the kind of garish ticky-tack most appropriate for your beloved followers of the prosperity gospel.
But perhaps you want to share with more spiritually minded loved ones. How about some Bible verses? In fact, how about the most badass verses in the entire Bible? 1 Samuel 18 suggests some great presents for your father-in-law, too.
Whoa. Giuliani is toast. The guy was using city funds to pay for his gambols with his mistress?
This would be good news if it weren’t for the fact that Huckabee, Romney, Thompson…heck, the whole revolting Republican lineup…make me ill.
Clenched fist salute to Pat Condell:
Exactly.
A pathologist in Ontario made some dreadful, stupid, sloppy mistakes, the kinds of errors that can destroy people’s lives.
The mistakes Smith made in conducting autopsies or giving second opinions on autopsies prompted the province to call the inquiry. His work contributed to some parents or caregivers coming under suspicion or being convicted for the deaths of their children.
It took years and many cases for this guy’s incompetence to be caught out. How could that be?
The lesson is that you should never, ever give a network executive control of your fate.
Those kinds of macabre twists would be Futurama’s undoing. Fox was expecting something familiar, The Simpsons in space. Executives certainly were not prepared for the bizarre contours of Groening and Cohen’s brave new world. “The network’s attitude quickly went from tremendous excitement to great fear,” Groening says. “They were very troubled by the suicide booth. They didn’t like the ‘All-Tentacle Massage’ parlor.”
How can you not like the ‘All-Tentacle Massage’ parlor? Obviously, Groening and Co. should have just sent the execs a two hour preview clip of HypnoToad, and gone ahead and done whatever they wanted.
At least the good news is that Futurama is coming back for one more year.
Last week, I reported on this new breakthrough in stem cell research, in which scientists have discovered how to trigger the stem cell state in adult somatic cells, like skin cells, producing an induced stem cell, a pluripotent cell that can then be lead down the path to any of a multitude of useful tissue types. I tried to get across the message that this is not the end of embryonic stem cell (ESC) research: the work required ESCs to be developed, the technique being used is unsuitable for therapeutic stem cell work, and there’s a long, long road to follow before we actually have stem cell “cures” in hand. A review on LiveScience emphasized similar reservations. Seizing on this one result as an excuse to end research on ESCs would be a great mistake.
So let’s consider what it takes to turn a stem cell into a medically useful tool. One “simple” (we’ll quickly see that it is anything but) example is finding a cure for type 1 diabetes. We understand that problem very well: people with this disease have lost one specific cell type, the β cells of the pancreas, which manufacture insulin. That’s all we have to do: grow up a dish full of just one cell type, the β cells, and plant them back in the patient’s gut, and presto, no more diabetes (setting aside the chronic difficulty of removing whatever destroyed the patient’s original set of β cells, that is). Sounds easy. It’s not.
The seed of this mornings discussion in neurobiology was “Time, Love, Memory” by Jonathan Wiener. As has been the norm in past weeks we met in the on campus cafe bringing along with us four insightful questions each to keep the discussion rolling along throughout the hour. Wiener describes later in his book (p192) the three necessary components of living clocks. Living clocks are the basis of circadian rhythms and must have an input pathway so that the clock can be reset by the sunrise and sunset. A good example of why this is important is that humans actually have a twenty-five hour clock that resets itself everyday to correlate to the actual day length of twenty-four hours (23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4.1 seconds for any physicists reading this). People who are blind or people who are not exposed to the sun at all will exhibit a twenty-five hour clock, out of synchronization with the earth’s rotation.
So my question was about animals that live near the poles. How do polar bears or lynxes reset their clocks in the arctic summer when the sun doesn’t set? Some thoughts were that perhaps the living clocks are reset by magnetism but quickly realized that there is no shift of magnetism that corresponds to the length of a day. Another thought was that if it’s always light out, does it matter when the polar bear sleeps? The polar bear could have a period of activity, followed by a period of decreasing activity, and then rest and sleep. Lynxes often hunt at night and rest during the day but if it’s always light out does their clock remain synchronized with the earth’s rotation? PZ mentioned there isn’t much research pertaining to this but If anyone knows of any interesting papers that would enlighten this topic post them up.
References: Jonathan Wiener. “Time, Love, Memory.” Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, Inc. New York. 1999.
Has everyone else heard of the Secret Science Club, though? It sounds a bit like Cafe Scientififique, but with a New York attitude — you lucky New Yorkers ought to go (it’s a bit far for this lucky Minnesotan to make the commute).
It’s got a good writeup in the Gothamist, too. And a nice logo.
Trent Lott may be bailing out of politics, but it looks like his successor may be Chip Pickering, Pentecostal kook who had a brief appearance on Borat. Is it an improvement to replace a mean stupid thug with a religious airhead with a nice haircut?
