Enjoy the nice criticism of medical woo.
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Sid Schwab takes on the credulity of believers in alternative medicine, like chiropractic.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Enjoy the nice criticism of medical woo.
Sid Schwab takes on the credulity of believers in alternative medicine, like chiropractic.
I used to live on this stuff in the good ol’ days.
Now you can get it on a t-shirt through the University of Texas at Austin School of Biological Sciences. Although, you know, “Texas flavor” does sound like it’s setting up the punchline for a joke.
It’s the week before Thanksgiving. Have you done your Christmas shopping yet?
Deep Sea News recommends a lovely poster. It’s one of those black light posters, so you can have the gaping jaws and needle-like teeth of abyssal predatory fish glowing at you.
Street Anatomy has a list of ten anatomy related gifts…and it’s not the traditional bucket of offal under the tree. Anatomically correct chocolates, brains for cuff links, and the body bags and plush body parts are nice…but the $100 million diamond encrusted skull is a bit over the top. Leave off the superfluous diamonds and just give the gift of bones.
More carnivals, including one that is new to me!
Accretionary Wedge #3 (a geology carnival!)
And we have a new Tangled Bank coming up at From Archaea to Zeaxanthol next Wednesday—send those links to your science articles to me or [email protected].
By the way, we’re going to run out of hosts in January, so if you’re interested in hosting, drop me a line to volunteer.
Now say something, anything here in the comments.
The Discovery Institute is spreading misinformation again. They have a document that implies that it would be OK for schools in at least some states to “teach the controversy”, by which they mean that it is alright for teachers to promote Intelligent Design creationism in their classes. I wonder if the DI would also consider themselves liable if any teacher followed their advice, and discovered that they were costing their district an awful lot of money, as in Dover? Somehow, I doubt it.
On the front page of their screed, they quote Charles Darwin: “A fair result can be obtained only by fully balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.” What they neglect to mention is the importance of that word “balancing”: we have been balancing the arguments, and the scientific side weighs tons while the creationist side is a puff of air. They also omit any mention of facts on their side, because they have none. Darwin’s quote is not advocacy for equal time for nonsense.
We had a seminar from Marco Restani of St Cloud State University yesterday — he’s a wildlife biologist who talked about Tasmanian Devils. Just a little tip: don’t ever invite wildlife biologists or conservation ecologists to give talks. They are the most depressing people in the world, and they really make it hard to hide away from the ugly realities. This talk was no exception: the Tasmanian Devil is in big trouble, and is facing at least two major threats, each of which may be sufficient to wipe them out. And just looke at that guy! He’s adorable! How can you let them go extinct?
This week I’ve been diving in a little more into doing some actual research myself. Nothing breakthrough mind you, just some simple experiment to sort of understand the world around and inside of me a little better. My partner and I are looking into how the optic nerve develops inside of zebra fish and how its development may be affected by developing the fish in total darkness. We are trying to stain 1-2 day old zebra fish with Dye-I by simply poking the dye into the retina with any sort of small sharp object we can find. We’ll then separate the groups of stained fish into those that develop in a small flask with normal exposure to light (about 10-15 hours a day of UV light) and those that develop in a tin-foil-wrapped flask with no UV exposure in which feeding will be done under red light.
Every few days, I hope to take some of the fish out and look at how their brains are developing using a fluorescent microscope that allows me to see how the dye is traveling. With any luck, I’ll see a decently clear pattern of paths of nerves from the retina to the lateral geniculate. I’m not sure where it leads from there as the zebra fish has mainly the midbrain rather than our large forebrain with a thalamus and cerebral cortex. More research on my fish is definitely needed before I can do any real analyzing of the staining technique, but my real problem right now is just getting some fish stained!
Using a pin head dipped in dye, I had been trying to poke the retinas of these fish. Once the retina ruptures, almost any amount of dye should stain the retina and lead to further staining of the optic nerve as development continues (from what I’ve read, usually the rods and cones develop about 4 days at the earliest). I ran into many problems with this of course and have been fishing (oh so hilarious, I know) for new solutions ever since.
The first problem I had is that the head of the pin is about the size of the fish’s eye itself, so trying to rupture the eye with it is like trying to shove a baseball bat through my own. Of course actually rupturing the retina with this gigantic tool will only happen if my mounted fish would stop moving every time I get close to it, which is the second problem. So far, I’ve created new tools by heating TLC spotters over a flame in the organic chemistry lab and then pulling it in half so that the glass is pulled into a tiny pipette with a head just smaller than the fish’s retina. This has been successful after coupling it with a technique for knocking out my fish to keep them still. I burst a small bubble of anesthetic (0.5 MESAB) over the water that I’m using to mount my fish before injecting the fish in augar onto the slide. This does a great job in keeping the fish still so I can do my dirty work of staining its eye, but sometimes the concentration of anesthetic is too strong and the fish will die. All in all, with much more research and some patience this may turn out to be a fun little project. If you have any ideas as to where I should be looking for research and anything else I could be doing with this experiment, let me know.
~Bright Lights
Salma, Salma, Salma…you heard about my thread to name the feeblest reason for believing in Christianity, and you couldn’t just leave a comment like everyone else? You had to go running to the press to submit your entry?
Mexican actress SALMA HAYEK was so upset by childhood jibes about her flat-chest, she would pray to God for larger breasts. The Ugly Betty star reveals she was bullied for having small breasts as a youngster – and decided to turn to her Catholic religion for help. She says, “My mom and I stopped at a church during a road trip we were making from our home in Mexico. “When we went inside, I prayed for the miracle I wanted to happen. I put my hands in holy water and said: ‘Please God, give me some breasts’. “And he gave me them! Within a few months, I developed a growing spurt, as teenagers do, and I was very pleased with the way I grew outwards.”
They are very nice, Salma, but you should really give credit where credit is due: genes, steroid hormone receptors, steroid hormones, diet, and a million years of chance and selection.
It’s awfully hard to get into the spirit of the War on Christmas when Christians are so danged tacky. I mean, really…the Jesus loves you sucker is only one comma away from perfect honesty, while the Jesus Tree Topper with the silk gown, gold crown, nail prints in the hands, and built-in light is pure cheese. He really needs a complement, though: Naked Tormented Jesus with Stigmata Squirting Action. Then the kids could battle it out between ascetism and the prosperity gospel right there on the Christmas tree.
