madame scientist's not-so-mad musings

Great idea!

Originally shared by Stuart Duncan (AutismFather)

Thanks to the brilliant ideas of Sarkis Dallakian, you can now find clinical trials in your area that pertain to you… and that you can get involved in if you want!

I had the pleasure of talking to Sarkis Dallakian yesterday and used his project, ClisMap, and now you can check it out as well as our discussion on my site.

Originally shared by David Weigel

http://www.slate.com/content/slate/blogs/weigel/2011/08/24/the_krugman_google_saga_or_why_fact_checking_is_important.html

Paul Krugman’s G+ account was a hoax.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/24/identity-theft/

More rampant misinformation. All this, when funding rates for research are at ~10%! Imagine, only 10 of 100 grant applications get through tough peer review. Only one resubmission is allowed at the NIH. Anyone remember Sarah Palin complaining about “fruit fly research” without understanding how important Drosophila is as a genetic model to study human disease and development?

Still distracted by joke opportunities 😦

West coast-East coast rivalry over today’s quake:

@Larry_Morgan

As if New Yorkers aren’t arrogant enough; now they’ve “survived an earthquake.” So what?! We had a bigger disaster – the Kardashian wedding.

Originally shared by Frank Paynter

Originally shared by Sarah Donivan

there are no words for this!

I would never have guessed that “The research estimates that animals rule with 7.8 million species, followed by fungi with 611,000 and plants with just shy of 300,000 species.” Animals are SO much more successful in speciation than plants and fungi. Why?

Originally shared by Alan Simon

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=139891231

Microfossils of sulphur-metabolizing cells in 3.4-billion-year-old rocks of Western Australia; Nature Geoscience Aug 21.

“Sulphur isotope data from early Archaean rocks suggest that microbes with metabolisms based on sulphur existed almost 3.5 billion years ago, leading to suggestions that the earliest microbial ecosystems were sulphur-based. However, morphological evidence for these sulphur-metabolizing bacteria has been elusive. Here we report the presence of microstructures from the 3.4-billion-year-old Strelley Pool Formation in Western Australia that are associated with micrometre-sized pyrite crystals. The microstructures we identify exhibit indicators of biological affinity, including hollow cell lumens, carbonaceous cell walls enriched in nitrogen….”

(…meant that the text got too technical for me at this point!). For a quick layperson’s view, see the blog by the nice folk at ZME Science.

Note to creationists on G+, I’ll see your 6000 yrs and raise you 3.5 billion!