Missing Bees Mystery Solved? Asian Parasite Is Killing Western Bees

Look who's here again!!!Our disappearing honey bees. A parasite common in Asian bees has spread to Europe and the Americas and is behind the mass disappearance of honeybees in many countries, says a Spanish scientist who has been studying the phenomenon for years.

read more | digg story

New Media

The Economist interviews eminent voices on the emergence of new media such as blogs, wikis, and youtube.

• The Long Tail - Chris Anderson	April 20th 2006
  “When the tools are spread ubiquitously, talent will rise out, luck will rise out, and being in the right place at the right time will rise out, and suddenly you will see the content just emerging whether it meant to or not.”
  David Sifry, Technorati	April 20th 2006
  “The people formerly known as your audience, or the people formerly known as consumers, are now participants in the process of building your brand.”
  Jerry Michalcki on Wikis	April 20th 2006
  “Companies are tantalized by the prospects of blogs and wikis, terrified by the risks and potential negative outcomes of doing it wrong.”
  Paul Saffo on Blogs	April 20th 2006
  “This is an age of electronic incunabula... It's a capital 'R' revolution.This is an age of electronic incunabula... It's a capital 'R' revolution.”
  Andreas Kluth, Intro	April 20th 2006
  “In the participatory era, media will no longer be delivered one way from a media company to an audience...but by audience members to other audience members. The distinction between content creators and consuming audiences first gets blurry and then disappears completely...Instead of media being delivered as a sermon or lecture, it becomes a conversation among the people in the audience”

N-joy.

Again on bees.

I've already written about disappearing honeybees, and possible causes for the Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), prompted by articles in the NYTimes.



Now, there's a new one, where expert entomologists suggest that the whole thing may have been a little bit over-hyped.

• What some scientists say is missing from the debate is historical context. “Every time there are these disappearances, the ills of the moment tend to be held accountable,” said May Berenbaum, who heads the entomology department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and led a National Academy of Sciences review of the status of North American bees and other pollinators that was published last year.

  “In the ’60s it was synthetic organic insecticides,” Dr. Berenbaum said. “In the ’70s it was Africanized bee genes. In the 19th century, there is a wonderful report about this resulting from a lack of moral fiber. Weak character was why they weren’t returning to the hives.”

The last bit is hilarious, yet it explain very well how scientist are normal people, and tend to involuntarily project their own prejudices upon the subject of study. Although I am still amused at the idea that someone may attribute moral fibre (or lack thereof) to bees or caterpillars.

Newsrotics?

here's a nice neologism, coined to define people who obsess about celebrities in the media.

I am not quite sure whether it's the merge of news and erotica, or neurotics (does this last one even exists in English? the spell checker doesn't seem to mind it).

Oh yes, credit where it's due, I came across it while Looming (that is, browsing The Loom). I will get back on the Oxford University Press blog again (and again and again and again), to discover some more about how words are selected to enter the dictionaries. I wonder if the process is different depending on the languages, with more structured languages taking more time to "accept" neologisms. And what about ideographic languages? If I am not mistaken there's many ways a gliph can be read aloud. so may be neologisms are easier to invent and harder to detect there, as long as you look only in written media.

intriguing... and googling for pictures of ideograms, I found something new by chance (from PubMed/Medline):

Jpn J Psychiatry Neurol. 1989 Jun;43(2):137-42.

Related Articles, Links

Schizophrenic neologism versus aphasic neologism: characteristics in writings of Japanese schizophrenic patients.

Moriyama N, Nakao H.

Yahata Kosei Hospital, Kitakyushu, Japan.

Three cases of schizophrenia with ideographic neologisms in Japanese are presented and compared with aphasic neologisms reported in Japanese literature. Schizophrenic neologisms are different from aphasic neologisms in nature. The contrast becomes obvious when both are compared in Japanese writing based on the dual writing system of kanji (Chinese characters, ideogram) and kana (phonetic characters, syllabogram).

Publication Types:

• Case Reports
• Comparative Study

PMID: 2477575 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

Ten thousands!!!

Expected number of hits in some minutes (I'm right now at 9999).

Surprisingly, it's taken much less than I expected.

Virtue of cross-linking with some of the bloggers in my roll, I believe, not certainly because of what I write.

Anyway, thanks to all of you for coming around.

this statement wouldn't be funny, if it weren't for irony

thanks to XKCD

and one more comic to laugh your brain out (if you have no brain, you won't catch it)

How do Creationists see hominid fossils?

It's what laelaps wonders about. I thought they just discarded them as more or less deformed humans - or apes, in the one we (erroneously) believe more 'primitives'.

Ugly animals have their place too.

So, go and have a look at many of them.

http://uglyoverload.blogspot.com/

I am inserting this blog in my roll.

Aliens?

They're here already...

This cicada is even more impressive.



with my regards to those who took the pictures.

I apologize

for not posting more.

I'm back from conferencing round Europe, but work is heavy, and free-time at home is spent mostly setting up pieces of furniture and stuff. The little left is for my lady. And sometimes to sleep before the next day.

I'm reading a nice book (The Swarm) during commute time, when I am not trying to catch up with my PK studies and such. It's about the sea inhabitants (whales, jellyfishes, even worms and bacteria) rioting and getting rid of humans. It reads heavy and documentary, at times, and characters are a tad stereotypical, but what the hell, it's a good read. Although after three hunded pages still we have no clue on what is going on and the plot is getting stuck. We know some alien intelligence lurks in the darkness at the bottom of the oceans, but we are not even hinted about their nature or the scope of their actions. It gets kind of boring after a while. Science Fiction fans want to understand the alien, most of all. Not to watch it while it smashes to pieces human civilisation.

Interesting stuff though, especially in the technical bits. I didn't know there was so much methane in the oceans, or that there were plans to extract it (how naive am I?). Nor about the complex ecosystems living off it.

Clever Frog Uses Leaf as an Umbrella

probably fake, but very funny!!!

read more | digg story

Best Car Ad Ever?

Saw it when I was still in the UK.

Captn Slow!!!

Captain Slow has its own show

First!!!

Lots of things have happened during this week.

I went to Lille, France, giving my first ever scientific presentation in front of a hiuge audience of three hundred plus medicinal chemists, slightly puzzled at my presence there.

I feel it may have gone better, not many questions were asked so may be I didn't get my message through. Hopefully, next time will do better. The important thing is that the ice is broken, and I've shown to myself that I can stand up there.

Plus, most of the people met while there were quite interesting.

Second great thing, I finally have a date for my PhD Viva: the 6 or 7 of August I will be once again crossing the channel to reach Southampton, and defend my thesis in front of an internal examiner (not yet chosen) plus an industrial external (can't disclose his name yet).

In the meanwhile, I am supposed to set straight my work record, by properly finishing the pKa prediction evaluation, and write up my Guinea-Pig CardioVascular paper.

lots of things to handle in so few weeks. we'll see how I fare.

see you soon. Gotta go and mow the lawn, right now.

Fast Followers aren't only in Pharma.

I'm back from my UK parenthesis, and almost ready for my french one.

In the meanwhile I've realised that I haven't posted for roughly 10 days.

And lots of things have happened. For the moment, though, I will only link you to this piece from the NY Times.

Asian phone makers are planning their answer to the iPhone, and the most common one seems to be: let's copy it!

tjhis is quite a common phenomenon in the pharma industry, known as fast follower - as soon as a company (say Pfizer) comes up with an innovative product (often known as first-in-class), a competitor (say Eli Lilly) change the molecule just enough to get around the patent, and markets it. Now things are getting more difficult, since these 'me too' drugs, as they're commonly known in the industry, have to demonstrate definite advantages over the first-in-class, to receive marketing authorisation.

Not so in consumer electronics, though, where a very similar implementation can still get you a viable product - however, even here the key is do more than the first-in-class, iPhone, without getting too complex. After all, the success of iPod was largely due to the human-friendly interface it presented to users, other than the appeal of being able to purchase music online and synchronise your mp3 collection between iPod and PC. And after all, iPhone is being marketed by Apple as a full screen, GSM capable iPod, not the other way around.

Good luck to Samsung and Nokia and whomever else may want to join the battle field. The more they fight, the more and better features we'll get, and the lower the prices we'll have to pay for them.

PacMan's Skull

Somebody scalped Pacman!!!

Remember your youth

listen to L'isola del tesoro, interpreted by Lino Toffolo.

Italian theme song of the japanese animated series "The Treasure Island" - L'Isola del Tesoro.

Calda e' / fredda e' / differenza c'e'.

Remember Ranma 1/2? During my university year it was one of my favorite comic books. here's the italian version of the anime opening theme.



So, why is this post tagged as science? Well, cause I was listening to Nature Podcast from 07/06/07 and heard that some scientist elucidated the reason why menthol tastes 'cold'. Long story short, it (presumably binds and) activates a Na/Ca ion channel, present in our tongue but also in other sensory terminations (see menthol shower-gels), which is normally active only at temperatures below 28 degrees. Hence, the 'cold' sensation. Cool, ain't it?

Why Ranma as title holder? well, cause for this character those termination were pretty important, since a bucket of cold water would transform him into a her (just like the song says). Now imagine if he had known this. May be now we would be able to cure his/her curse?

PS: the title says: Is it warm? Is it cold? It makes a difference! (from the italian theme song)

PPS: Incidentally, I've also worked on ion channels, during my previous year (expressed in the heart, though, not in the tongue) and will present my in silico models at Lille, France, this first week of july. See you there may be ;-)

What makes a GOOD mentor?

Nature has an interesting five-minutes in their latest podcast, on what makes a good mentor for young student, either at the PhD level or below (ehr, that would be me).

If I were to score my own mentor, I'd probably conclude that, with the exception of the last one, all of my official mentors did fail in one field or another. Still, I am not going to blame my own lack of success on them. It is, definitely, almost completely my fault. After all, they've worked hard to get where they are and it's up to me now to show my muscles. Outside of the gym, though.

Still, the single most important thing I need from a mentor is bouncing ideas back and forth, and a safe weekly (or fortnighly, or monthly) meeting to make myself accountable for what I have done in the intervening time. I know it's like admitting that I do not know how to prioritise my time and don't put the right importance to the various parts of my life but ehy, isn't this the reason while I am writing a blog post which will most likely be read by no-one?

So, in conclusion, I think I better press the goddamn button and start reading the paper. And not come back after five minutes to check how many hits I got. It's not that I am lazy, more that I am easily distracted. Gawrsh!

Space Carrier Blue Noah Vs Space Battleship Yamato

One of the step stones of my childhood.

I just happened to listen to its theme song on my shiny new MP3 Player - courtesy of the company, for winning the internal safety contest - in fact I did not deserve it, since during the drill I did ignore the fire alarm thinking that it was just a test of bells and whistles...

Well never mind.

Anyway, I did like this series, although I felt as if it was a rip off of Space Battleship Yamato, certainly more iconic - Matsumoto's style is unmissable.