« Calorie-Counting Whoas
The Mathematics of Cooperation »
h1

Science Etcetra Mercuryday, 20080409

April 9th, 2008
  • MRI scans show that parental exposure to cocaine, alcohol, marijuana or tobacco alters infant brain growth.

    • Thinner cortical gray matter in pregnancies exposed to cocaine, alcohol, marijuana and tobacco

    Thinner cortical gray matter in pregnancies exposed
    to cocaine, alcohol, marijuana and tobacco
    Courtesy Christopher Watson and Michael Rivkin, MD,
    Children’s Hospital Boston
  • The list of things that make humans unique in the animal world are increasingly becoming just a matter of degree; horses can count.
  • Bloggers are sweatshop journalists.
  • Data from the European Venus Express is shedding light on the history of why our sister planet failed to produce an environment to sustain life.
  • Feeding the birds has good and bad effects on their health.
  • People use the term Cloud Computing to describe a wide variety of different applications.
  • Having a male twin in the womb, puts the female twin at health risk.
  • Music inspired by an article on the Big Bang.
  • Science 2.0 milestone as the Protein Data Bank (PDB) at Rutgers archives its 50,000th molecule

    • Backbone structure of the infectious epsilon15 virus (PDB ID 3c5b)

    Backbone structure of the infectious epsilon15 virus (PDB ID 3c5b)
  • Is research based on MRI scans the modern phrenology?
  • Cool slide show, the colors of alien plants.
  • AVPR1a is the gene behind ruthless behavior.
  • NYT has the best explanation of the Monty Hall Problem ever. I’ve heard the statistics behind why you should always switch doors, but never understood it until this demo walked me through the steps.

    • NYT Monty Hall Game with My Results

    NYT Monty Hall Game with My Results

    5 comments to “Science Etcetra Mercuryday, 20080409”

    1. I didn’t watch it, but jeez Ryan, if you were having trouble with it, could have just asked. Every time I have explained that to someone, I usually just proved with with like, a hypothetical 9,000 trials or something. :o
      (Yay College!)

           by Nick Hamden April 9th, 2008 at 8:25 am

    2. Heheheh, I remember rolling dice to prove the Monty Hall thing to my middle-school classmates who wouldn’t believe me. They still didn’t really want to believe me, but they couldn’t argue with the numbers once I got up to 20 trials using each algorithm (switch, don’t switch) or so.

           by ClintJCL April 9th, 2008 at 11:30 am

    3. RE:Smoking
      Interesting. After just reading this article about how smoking is mostly negligible during the first 5 months of pregnancy, I kind of wish they used a larger test set (150 vs 6860 in the smoking-is-negligible study) and examined issues like “First 5 months” vs “Last 4 months”. Might provide some more granular insight into the whole thing.

           by ClintJCL April 9th, 2008 at 11:34 am

    4. If you want a wonderful example of sexism in the higher maths and sciences, I’ll loan you Marilyn vos Savant’s collection of letters in response to the (correct) answer to the problem she posted in her weekly column. Whoever knew that under the lab coats, so many male professors had their panties in a great Gordian knot?

           by flyingsirkus April 9th, 2008 at 11:58 am

    5. @Clint: I linked to that article also recently. I agree with you about the need to use larger data sets. It was a small data set that led to the “abortions cause breast cancer” nonsense a few years back.

      @flyingsirkus: Sounds interesting. I just wikied the story. I didn’t realize there was sexism involved, but can see how that could happen. Many scientists believe sexism is behind the hostile rejection of the Aquatic Ape hypothesis also.

           by ideonexus April 9th, 2008 at 11:15 pm

    Leave a Comment