No comments please, we’ve made it through peer review (?)
Recently Daniel MacArthur pointed to the vibrant discussion over at Genomes Unzipped on a moderately infamous paper from Science last year, Widespread RNA and DNA Sequence Differences in the Human Transcriptome, asserting that it is “exactly what open peer review should be like.” This made me wonder, it’s been over five years since Chris Surridge […]
Mike Snyder profile in Science
Examining His Own Body, Stanford Geneticist Stops Diabetes in Its Tracks: Over a 14-month period, the molecular geneticist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, analyzed his blood 20 different times to pluck out a wide variety of biochemical data depicting the status of his body’s immune system, metabolism, and gene activity. In today’s issue […]
What the World Is Made Of
I know you’re all following the Minute Physics videos (that we talked about here), but just in case my knowledge is somehow fallible you really should start following them. After taking care of why stones are round, and why there is no pink light, Henry Reich is now explaining the fundamental nature of our everyday […]
Everything is Connected
They do things differently over in Britain. For one thing, their idea of a fun and entertaining night out includes going to listen to a lecture/demonstration on quantum mechanics and the laws of physics. Of course, it helps when the lecture is given by someone as charismatic as Brian Cox, and the front row seats […]
Neutrinos and Cables
I’m a little torn about this: the Twitter machine and other social mediums have blown up about this story at Science Express, which claims that the faster-than-light neutrino result from the OPERA collaboration has been explained as a simple glitch: According to sources familiar with the experiment, the 60 nanoseconds discrepancy appears to come from […]
Non-overlapping magisteria for the social and biological?
Most of you know that Stephen Jay Gould proposed ‘non-overlapping magisteria’ for science and religion. I don’t care much for the framing myself, though neither am I on the same page as Sam Harris and company. But I thought of this model when reading this comment below: Kind of a tangent, but I think it […]
Darwinism of the Inanimate
Via Laura Hollis at the Twitter machine, here’s an interesting paper by chemist Addy Pross. The author tries to extend the idea of Darwinian natural selection to the realm of inanimate objects. Toward a general theory of evolution: Extending Darwinian theory to inanimate matter Addy Pross Though Darwinian theory dramatically revolutionized biological understanding, its strictly […]
How To Think About Quantum Field Theory
I continue to believe that “quantum field theory” is a concept that we physicists don’t do nearly enough to explain to a wider audience. And I’m not going to do it here! But I will link to other people thinking about how to think about quantum field theory. Over on the Google+, I linked to […]
A 3.8-Sigma Anomaly
Every professional football game begins with the flip of a coin, to determine who gets the ball first. In the case of the Super Bowl, the teams represent the National Football Conference (NFC) or American Football Conference (AFC). Interestingly, the last 14 coin flips have been won by the NFC. Working out the numbers, the […]
Your Favorite Deep, Elegant, or Beautiful Explanation
The annual Edge Question Center has now gone live. This year’s question: “What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?” Find the answers here. I was invited to contribute, but wasn’t feeling very imaginative, so I moved quickly and picked one of the most obvious elegant explanations of all time: Einstein’s explanation for the […]
Do I Not Live?
Can we define “life” in just three words? Carl Zimmer of Loom fame has written a piece for Txchnologist in which he reports on an interesting attempt: biologist Edward Trifonov looked at other people’s definitions, rather than thinking about life itself. Sifting through over a hundred suggested definitions, Trifonov looked for what they had in […]
Happy Birthday, Stephen Hawking
Sorry for the light blogging of late. Actual work intervenes, and it might remain that way for a while. But I’ll try to pop in whenever I can. Stephen Hawking is celebrating his 70th birthday today. That in itself is an amazing fact, just as it was amazing when he celebrated his 40th, and 50th, […]
“Doctors don’t cure nothing”
NSFW As I observed before, modern medicine is subject to some of the same statistical issues as social science in its tendency to put unwarranted spotlight on preferred false positive results. Trials and Errors – Why Science Is Failing Us: This doesn’t mean that nothing can be known or that every causal story is equally […]
The power of false positives in behavior genetics
Genomes Unzipped, Size matters, and other lessons from medical genetics: …Smaller studies, which had no power to detect these small effects, were essentially random p-value generators. Sometimes the p-values were “significant” and sometimes not, without any correlation to whether a variant was truly associated. Additionally, since investigators were often looking at only a few variants […]
The downsides of grassroots science funding
Grassroot funding for science: A good idea? Summary: Crowdfunding science is a good idea to add additional support to underfunded missions or to enable small projects. It is not a good idea to draw upon the public opinion to fund research projects from scratch. It might appear as if public money is put to good use, […]
Think right, not deep
Over the past few weeks I’ve been observing the response to Rick Scott’s suggestion that Florida public universities focus on STEM, rather than disciplines such as anthropology. You can start with John Hawks, and follow his links. More recently I notice a piece in Slate, America Needs Broadly Educated Citizens, Even Anthropologists. There several separate […]
A story behind the story
David Dobbs points me to a story in Popular Science which tracks the controversy around the “arsenic life” hypothesis, and its effects on Felisa Wolfe-Simon. Back in the days before the internet you’d read the story as an outsider and get a particular take. A long narrative by its nature primes us in a certain […]
Where is the ArXiv for X?
Derek Lowe asks “Why Isn’t There an ArXiv For Chemistry?” Where indeed. A few years ago I went to a talk given by Michael Eisen and asked him about why the biological sciences didn’t have an ArXiv, and one of his explanations wa…
They’re called “peer reviewers”
George Monbiot’s piece, Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist, is making the rounds. This paragraph jumped out at me:
Murdoch pays his journalists and editors, and his companies generate much of the content they use. But the acad…
Ingenuity’s flight toward rents
Andrew Oh-Willeke, Esq., observes:
One example of cyclicality that continues to today is the practice of law. The basic principles of Roman private law and the complaints that people made about lawyers and litigation were remarkably similar in the 300s…