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Early Career Resources Center - Elsevier

Nov 15 2013 | comment(s)

Producing research that is accessible, highly-cited, globally visible and impactful is no easy task. Aside from being quality research, it requires multiple other skill sets and competition is fierce.

There are over 3 million research articles written each year and even with pay-to-publish and 'light review' open access journals, only half will show up in international journals.

Roboroach: Mobile Phone 'Cockroach Backpack' App Is Controversial

Nov 15 2013 | comment(s)

Know how many scientists got started wondering about nature by blasting ants with a magnifying glass?

Quite a few, actually. While most scientists and engineers don't necessarily like Sid in "Toy Story", they confess to being a lot like him, Frankenstein-ing together toys and hooking things up to firecrackers and such.

With that in mind, The Backyard Brains company has created an app intended to get children to be interested in neuroscience. And I bet it works. But it is controversial, at least among the demographic that makes everything controversial.

Human Organs Cloned And Grown In 2014

Nov 14 2013 | comment(s)

Growing custom-made, functioning organs will be regenerative medicine's defining moment and it will happen in 2014, predicts Real Clear Science's Alex Berezow.

But will it be adult stem cells (it needs some work still, as I noted in articles a few times here) or Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer (ummm, banned by the Obama administration)?

Alex has the answers in The Wired World In 2014, on newsstands everywhere, or Zinio or iTunes.

IPCC Revises Carbon Estimates From September Report

Nov 12 2013 | comment(s)

The United Nation's geographically chosen panel of climate experts, the the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC), is moving fast to correct errors in its first of four sections of its new report, heading off the public relations disaster of the last report, where it was only revealed by critics that the document contained 'grey literature', including an off-hand claim in a magazine, and was in part written by environmental activists.

Carnival of Math Number 1101000

Nov 12 2013 | comment(s)

The 104th Carnival of Math (1101000 in binary - see how clever they are??) is in full swing, with 40 entries.

The friendship paradox, a flaw in RSA encryption, how combinatronics and Pampers are related, it's all here.

If you, like me, like math and enjoy reading about math, even if you don't always 'get' what they are getting at in some of this, it's worth taking a look. Bonus: 104 is the sum of 8 consecutive even numbers: 6 + 8 + 10 + 12 + 14 + 16 + 18 + 20.

Come Frolic at The 104th Carnival of Math! - Math Frolic

5 Reasons Not To Buy Gluten-Free Labels

Nov 07 2013 | comment(s)

If you are not a celiac, there are numerous reasons not to jump on the gluten-free fad. Gluten-free products are nutrient poor, they're high in sugar, contain preservatives and are made with refined oils. That's not healthier and it's why Lady Gaga got fatter going gluten-free, even though she claimed it was a diet plan.

And if you are celiac, buying gluten-free labels in a store can be dangerous, because they can still have trace amounts of gluten. Like 'organic' food and its dozens of synthetic ingredients and processes allowed, 'gluten-free' does not mean "100%" gluten-free.

5 Reasons To Avoid The Gluten-Free Aisle by Dr. Amy Myers, Mind Body Green

Can Marketing Make You Thinner?

Nov 04 2013 | comment(s)

Ask a sociologist, an epidemiologist, an anthropologist, a psychologist or a health guru what causes weight gain and you are going to get answers varying from heteronormative oppression by men to the diet choices of your grandparents and resulting epigenetics to blaming your parents because you swallow a lot of aggression.

Oh. And marketing. That is always to blame. First Lady Michelle Obama did for obesity what Nancy Reagan did for drugs; she basically handed a government subsidy to a bunch of marketing and advertising agencies to solve a problem that she thinks is easily solved if we demonize one segment of culture. But, wait, isn't marketing the problem? Fight fire with fire, people.

Canada Ponders Return To Old-School Arithmetic Drills

Nov 03 2013 | comment(s)

In the United States, we have abandoned the experiment of returning to old, successful way of teaching math - No Child Left Behind led to parity for girls and boys for the first time in history but was unpopular with teachers and unions who said we shouldn't be 'teaching to the test'.

Canada thinks just the opposite; like America in the 1990s, they are watching test scores plummet, and are thinking about abandoning the "concept-based learning" from the early 1900s that America has returned to - but they want to see if there can be a science reason to do so.

$Rubik's Cubes And The Average Size Of Selmer Groups Of Elliptic Curves$

Rubik's Cubes And The Average Size Of Selmer Groups Of Elliptic Curves

Nov 02 2013 | comment(s)

Here's a fun number theory idea for you.

Say you have a 3x3x3 matrix filled with numbers, including in the very center. So you have 27 numbers in a special 3-dimension configuration. Since there are three axis for such a cube, there are three ways of dividing such a cube into three 3×3 matrices $A, B,$ and $C.$ Once you do that you can get a cubic form by computing

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data And Why Science Is In Trouble

Nov 01 2013 | comment(s)

Datasets are changing the way we approach the world around us.

10 years ago, you could get by doing terrible numerical models and make rookie statistical errors in understanding data and only 400 people would read it, while even fewer would understand it. Not any more, everyone can now parse data on the Internet so your clever analysis of fMRI images or convenient massaging of results to match your end-oriented beliefs are going to get tripped up pretty quickly.

The Beautiful Mathematics Of Sugar In Your Coffee

Oct 30 2013 | comment(s)

What do the motion of spinning of a top, computer architecture, and the sugar in your coffee all have in common?

They highlight the beauty of mathematics.

Yann Pineill and Nicolas Lefaucheux created a video where they put equations on the left, the technical diagram in the middle, and then real-life footage of the phenomenon is on the right.

Result: Math makes some incredibly complicated stuff look easy.

H/T Gizmodo

Science Meets Halloween: Make Scary Fog and Slippery Slime At Home

Oct 29 2013 | comment(s)

Halloween is just around the corner, but if you live in California, like me, they aren't doing anything fun. They can't even call it Halloween.

So though when you were a kid you might have learned things that excited you about science, like how to make 'slime' using cornstarch and water or, for a little more cost, fog using dry ice and water, that isn't going to happen in 2013.

When Are 5 Million Scientists Wrong And A Few Dozen Contrarians Right? Food Activism

Oct 23 2013 | comment(s)

93 scientists have declared GMO safety a misinformation campaign and deplore the lack of empirical and scientific evidence on which the false claims of “consensus” on safety are being made.

Bring your tinfoil hat.

They say that there is no consensus at all, there are no studies on the health effects of genetically modified food, the ones that exist are terrible, that government and scientific bodies don't really mean it when they endorse the safety of GM foods, that Europe is also lying to the world, and a bunch of other stuff with dozens of footnotes.

Priming Studies And A Lack Of Replication Isn't Just Psychology's Problem

Oct 22 2013 | comment(s)

'Priming' studies, which suggest that decisions can be influenced by apparently irrelevant actions or events that took place just before the cusp of choice, have been a boom area in psychology over the past decade, though what isn't? fMRI, surveys of college students, claims about epigenetics and just about everything have been used by psychologists fame-whoring mass media for publicity.

Sure, but that is psychology, easily marginalized as soft and wayward, right?

Not so. Irreproducibility is much more widespread, finds The Economist. It happens in all science and the usual ability of science to self-correct is losing ground.

Weather Warfare, Space Reflectors And Other Science Experiments To Enjoy Dooming The World With

Oct 21 2013 | comment(s)

Fake volcanoes, giant space mirrors, oceans of iron filings - one of these ideas might save our planet from the worst effects of global warming – or destroy it. Memphis Barker reports on the rise of geoengineering – and the rift it has opened in the scientific community.

Twisted History Of Science And Religion

Oct 21 2013 | comment(s)

Few people love evolutionary biology outreach as much as the University of Chicago's Professor Jerry Coyne. His book, "Why Evolution Is True", is one of three that gets a personal endorsement on my profile page and he posted a terrific article here, A Letter To Darwin - Here's What Has Happened In The Last 150 Years, for our 30 Days of Evolution Blogging event during the 150th anniversary of 'Origin of Species'. His Why Evolution Is True site has become a go-to venue for smart writing about science and society.

Fear Marketing 101

Oct 18 2013 | comment(s)

Do you rush to buy a particular brand of chicken because it is anti-biotic free? Are you more likely to buy beef that uses "ethical, sustainable" practices like no added steroids or hormones.

I don't blame you, that stuff sounds scary, I don't want antibiotics in my sandwich. There's just one problem: chicken has to be antibiotic-free by law. One brand is trying to look like they are somehow superior to another company even though the chicken is the same.

And 'added' hormones make someone less ethical? Well, that qualifier is necessary because, as you know, we have lots of natural hormones - so do cows and the plants they eat.

Experimental Trees Can Save Orange Crops: Anti-Science Hippies About To Go Nuts

Oct 15 2013 | comment(s)

Florida, second only to the entire country of Brazil in global orange juice production and which accounts for over 90 percent of orange juice consumed in the United States, has lost billions of dollars in revenues from a disease that is killing orange trees faster than they can be replaced.

Citrus greening has cost Florida's economy an estimated $4.5 billion in lost revenues since 2006, according to the University of Florida's Institute of Food and Agriculture Sciences. In an already terrible economy, having a state industry that employs 76,000 full- and part-time workers at further risk is a very bad thing.

UK Environment Secretary Labels Anti-GMO Activists 'Wicked'

Oct 14 2013 | comment(s)

UK environment secretary Owen Paterson believes that Golden Rice could prevent blindness and death among children in poor countries.

Anti-science progressives insist most science is dangerous and that biologists are just immoral tinkerers who don't think about safety.

Anatomy Of A Retraction

Oct 10 2013 | comment(s)

Pamela Ronald, researcher at the University of California, Davis (and blogger at Scientific American) has outlined why a paper she contributed to in Science was retracted.