To follow up on Betsy McCall post on the new Gallup poll on American’s Belief in evolution (http://goo.gl/fkxfd). Whenever science vs. faith comes up, I remind people that science only cares about what we know and not what you believe. They are two very different things. If you don’t like the flowchart, you can move to #Amercia for a better Amercia. This is mainly because I’m pro-science not atheist. I do support my atheist friends.
#Anti_anti_intellectualism
I downloaded this a long time ago and don’t know the source. Gnotic Pasta found a larger version http://goo.gl/INtVP Thanks.
OK so I work with a different type of magnet (MRI for those who don’t know me). I shared this a while ago; the old fashioned way (email). I think it’s cool enough to reshare with my G+ friends.
This is an excellent video some 10th graders made for extra credit in their chemistry class. It also follows the bondage, err chemical bond video I posted yesterday (http://goo.gl/yvgLB).
So I’m at work catching up on scanning some slides of human squamous cell carcinoma tumors, SCC61. Actually they are xeongrafts in mice legs. The hematoxylin and eosin stains (http://goo.gl/Sq9Eq) make it easy to identify cancer (the purple part, the pink part is muscle). While I’m scanning each slide, I was also catching up on G+. I click on a post from Buddhini Samarasinghe that she warns is long but worth the read (http://goo.gl/tiZtc). It’s an interview with Dr. Otis Brawley about his book, “How We Do Harm: A Doctor Breaks Ranks About Being Sick in America”.
He works at Grady hospital in Atlanta, is currently chief medical officer at the American Cancer Society, and graduated from the University of Chicago. Grady sounds like Cook County hospital in Chicago (think ER TV show, now called Stroger), you wouldn’t want to go there but a lot of cops do because they are very experienced in GSW-trauma. Chicago is still the #1 segregated city (http://goo.gl/Vyio8). …the abstract, scholarly term “health disparities” acquires a very real smell of a rotting breast.
Here is the problem: Poor Americans consume too little healthcare, especially preventive healthcare. Other Americans-often rich Americans-consume too much healthcare, often unwisely, and sometimes to their detriment. The American healthcare system combines famine with gluttony.
I don’t want to quote the whole article but I ♥ the Wayne Gretzky quote, “You miss every shot you don’t take”.
There’s so much of the article that resonated with me. I do cancer research. I work in an urban hospital where I see firsthand, the disparities he speaks of. I know breast cancer survivors and our group does breast cancer research. Previous post on breast MRI. http://goo.gl/VSrU4 He’s taken heat about PSA testing but it is something we talk about at work quite often and agree with him.
Anyway, enough babbling. Read the post from Buddhini Samarasinghe
By examining the skulls of primates and connecting the structure and function of bones Dr. Ross et al hopes to better understand the evolutionary forces that drive variations in the skulls of primates. Dr. Ross brought primate skulls on loan from the Field Museum of Natural History to the lab and I imaged them with our microCT (x-ray computed tomography) which I’ve discussed in previous #ScienceSunday posts. The theme for today’s ScienceSunday is collaborative research. So I collaborated with Erin Kane to present my collaboration with Dr. Ross. Just as in real life, working together, we can get more done and complement each other. Thanks to Erin for the beautiful write up below.
Primate Eyes
One of the defining features of all primates is our binocular vision. As primates’ ancestors took to the trees, being able to accurately judge distances gave individuals a selective advantage – you survived jumps and were able to have more offspring than individuals without depth perception who broke bones or fell out of trees. The development of binocular vision may also have helped early primates hunt insects better.
The evolution of binocular vision involved moving eyes from the side of the head (like a horse) to the front of our face, where they are today. When primates’ eyes moved to the front of their faces, this changed the distribution of forces exerted on the skull, especially when chewing. Over time, primate ancestors developed a bony ridge, called a post-orbital bar, behind their eye that kept the forces of chewing from deforming the skull and squishing the eyeball.
Tupaia is a tree shrew, one of primates’ closest relatives. Their eyes are on the sides of their faces, so their post-orbital bar isn’t complete. Cheirogaleus, the fat-tailed dwarf lemur, is a prosimian, a relatively primitive modern primate (http://goo.gl/ti65p). It’s skull is very similarly shaped to Tupaia, but it has a complete post-orbital bar, and it’s eyes are closer to the front of its face. Tuapaia is a lot like the proto-primates, organisms called plesiadapids who are likely primates’ ancestors. Cheirogaleus is a pretty good analogy for some of the early primates – nocturnal, probably eating insects, and living solitarily.
About the same time monkeys evolved, primates’ eyes shifted to the front of their faces. In response to the shift in forces from the eyes moving further to the front of their faces, monkeys and apes developed a solid plate of bone at the back of their eyes. Saguinus and Aotus are both South American monkeys with that solid plate of bone at the back of their eyes. Sagiunus is a diurnal monkey, active during the day. Its eyes are much smaller than Aotus, the only nocturnal monkey. Nocturnal primates have really large eyes (compare Aotus and Cheirogaleus) in order to get as much light as possible into their eyes.
Enjoy your collaborations, Memorial Day in the US, and The Monkees.
Dr. M. Bhatia et al at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada (where ScienceSunday curator Allison Sekuler is) developed a new cancer drug screening method using pluripotent stem cells. They found that thioridazine, an anti-psychotic drug, is effective against cancer stem cells without harming normal cells. The screening method specifically looks for drugs that cause cancer stem cells to differentiate.
Interdisciplinary work and collaborations are the norm for my area of research. So it only makes sense to collaborate with my science friends on G+. Thanks Rajini Rao for giving me the chance to collaborate on a ScienceSunday post. I’m looking forward to everyone’s collaborative posts next Sunday. Unless you have a thick skull (hint) don’t miss my collaborative post with Erin Kane next #ScienceSunday
Originally shared by Rajini Rao
Double your Science Sunday Pleasure:As a theme for next week’s ScienceSunday , Chad Haney proposes Google+ Collaborations. Combine your expertise to create synergy and more awesome #sciencesunday posts. As an example, this beautiful sectioning of a flower, set to the haunting lilts of a waltz, has the hallmark of a post from Rajini Rao . Chad Haney provides expert insight on the imaging. So, what are you waiting for science enthusiasts?
• The Beauty Within: Beauty, as they say, lies in the eye of the beholder. Arabidopsis is an insignificant flowering plant of the mustard family (Brassicaceae) that holds special beauty to plant geneticists and molecular biologists. It has only 5 chromosomes, completely sequenced, and a short life span of 6 weeks from germination to seed maturation. A large collection of mutant lines are freely available as a scientific resource, and genes can be readily introduced by infecting with Agrobacterium tumifaciens. A model organism worthy of modeling in this imaging video.
• Deconstructing a Flower: 248 sections of an Arabidopsis flower that was paraffin-embedded and sectioned at 20 microns. Sections were stained with Safranin and Fast Green and photographed with a consumer-grade camera mounted on a Nikon Eclipse 50i at 20X.
• Chemical clearing vs. digital clearing. The method for plants requires a controlled substance and many samples are too thick for it to work. So they used Adobe After Effects to digitally remove the background making it easier to visualize the sample. They imported JPEGs of each histological slide into AE to create a 3D “stack”. It took 1 hour to align 60 slides after they gained some practice. Images that were lost due to processing issues were excluded. Because they did not use software designed for this, I doubt they were able to get the spacing correct, i.e., have blank slices. There are tons of segmentation algorithms in medial imaging that could have been used. Unfortunately, it would like require some code writing or very expensive medical imaging software. So hats off to them for a cost effective, brute force method. However, as we posted a while ago, the Visible Human Project was funded to develop software that can be used for this project (http://goo.gl/cv2xU).
In 1976 Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” as a combination of memory and gene.
E. Moro and JL Iribarren of IBM used models of infection to examine how digital information (email) spreads. This was in 2009 before all of the social media exploded. Nevertheless, one important outcome is that people vary in their “infectiousness”. Sometimes it’s not content it’s who gets “infected”.
Phys Rev Lett. 2009 Jul 17;103(3):038702. Epub 2009 Jul 14.
Impact of human activity patterns on the dynamics of information diffusion.
Wired: What about things that get rooted in popular culture despite an aversion to them and a desire for them to go away? For example, how is it possible that the Paris Hilton meme hasn’t reached the end of its shelf life yet?
Blackmore: Presumably because it presses enough human buttons — you know, sex, greed, celebrity. Some memes will succeed because they make you talk about them even though you think they’re bad. For example, a horrible story about murder or torture upsets you. And one of the ways you try to cope with the upset is to tell somebody else, to share the burden, and that way it spreads and upsets more people, even though you wish it wouldn’t.
Which reminds me of the #ReptileThursday meme where some guy used the hashtag to complain about #ReptileThursday . Since #ReptileThursday was trending, his comment showed up there and people piled on more, in response to his comment.
BTW, if you have me circled then you know I ♥ memes. What’s your R0 number (basic reproduction number in epidemiology studies, memes in this case)?
#ScienceSunday ScienceSunday curated by Allison Sekuler Robby Bowles and Rajini Rao
From the Wiki: The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes.
It came up in Filippo Salustri post here: http://goo.gl/Pw2C6 and then in the share below by praveen kulkarni
The video explains it well and it’s true we come across it (unfortunately) quite often in online discussions. The video touches on another issue, which is confusing opinion and fact. The Dunning-Kruger effect seems to explain how one could confuse opinion and fact in an argument. It might even partially explain the anti-science movement.
Nevertheless, it’s an interesting video that was very timely. Thanks for the share praveen kulkarni
Maybe people that follow ScienceSunday would care to start a discussion about the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Originally shared by Praveen Kulkarni
The skills involved in being competent in some area are often the same skills needed to evaluate that competence.
Example : say, in a debate, the skills needed to put forward a logical argument are the same as those to recognize a logical argument
So the skills for doing and assessing go together.
