April Fool's Day

Lots of good pranks, hoaxes, and jokes around the net this morning in honour of April Fool's Day but I think this one from ThinkGeek takes the cake, poking fun at the recent claims about arsenic-based life:

Artemia monica is the fancypants name for Sea Monkeys (specifically, those found in Mono Lake, California). And what's even cooler, by eating the GFAJ-1, the Sea Monkeys have also gained the ability to substitute arsenic for phosphorus. Promptly removing this new breed of Sea Monkey's eggs from the water instantly puts them into cryptobiosis (another fancypants word meaning, "suspended animation.") Because of this cryptobiosis and the fact that Sea Monkeys breed at an alarming rate, we have tons of eggs which we can now offer to all of you. That's right, you can get your very own Arsenic-Based Sea Monkeys today!

Awesome.

"In the real world, that would be considered a mental disorder!"

CollegeHumor looks at grad school...

Colbert to Congress: More Human-Fruit Hybrids!

The Grades Your Grades Could Be Like

Look at this video, now back to me...



If you haven't seen the original, you can watch it here.

[h/t: The Thoughtful Animal]

Futurama on Homeopathy

It's back, baby! Futurama returns to the television airwaves tonight after almost 7 years off the air, with all its jokes about stem cells, global warming and quantum physics. Like their take on homeopathy:



One thousand years in the future, and still no evidence...

The Worst Jobs in Science

Popular Science has a list of the "10 worst jobs in science", reprinted in USA Today.

Feces piper: Some hospitals perform controversial "fecal transplants," which involve feeding fecal matter through a tube from a healthy person into a person infected with the C. difficile bacteria to fight the bacteria.

Somehow I think these aren't official job titles. Most don't actually sound half bad ("bad dance observer"? "doomsday fact checker"?) And no, grad student doesn't make the list.

NASA Announces New Mission

One Benefit of Global Warming

Canadian Tourism Federation Welcome Video from Canadian Tourism Federation on Vimeo.

Homeopathy in the Hospital

10 Reasons to Grow a Beard

I've written about beards before, and I have an obvious bias, but this made me laugh. Put down your razor and check out The Bureau for Bigger, Better Beards.

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

Do you like superhero fantasy? Do you like musicals? Then check out Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. It's a 3-part musical superhero spoof (each part is about 13 minutes long) starring Neil Patrick Harris and written/directed by Joss Whedon (the man behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly, co-writer of Toy Story, as well as several comic book stints).

It's free to watch, but will only be online until midnight, Sunday July 20th.

Sciencewear

Wear your love of science on your sleeve, or illustrate 'teach the controversy' silliness. The above pictures are clothing designs from wearscience.com. For more of their graphics, go here.

On not seeing the forest for the trees

N: which is correct, seven and five IS thirteen, or seven and five ARE thirteen?
Joker: Neither.
Joker: Because it's twelve.

[From bash.org]

These are the people at your seminar...

Our departmental student seminar day just passed and what a perfect opportunity to play seminar bingo. How many of those caricatures have you identified at a talk? Which one are you?

Unfortunately I came across this *after* the talks. Maybe next year.

"Alternative" Approaches

We chirp from time to time about alternative medicine and other quackery. Have you ever wondered what would happen if we applied the alternative approach to other fields? Behold alternative cleaning and alternative engineering.

Found via Respectful Insolence

Scientists, Arm Yourselves Against DNA Denialism!

These days it seems that anyone who questions a widely held scientific belief is a delusional "denialist". Are you considering suggesting the hypothesis that global climate change is driven primarily by cosmic radiation rather than human activity? Don't bother. Everyone knows global-warming deniers are in cahoots with big oil. Pondering whether public health and education measures might be more effective than anti-retroviral drugs in combating AIDS in South Africa, or asking exactly how HIV infection eliminates CD4 T cells? Shut the !@#$% and get back on the band-wagon already you HIV-AIDS denialist! You've obviously been brainwashed by the LSD you got from some burnt-out, pot-smoking scientist from California, like Peter Duesberg or Kary Mullis. Have you ever dared to question the prevailing deterministic model of stem cell division? Stem cell denialist! Every day you spread doubt is another day a person with ageing cells will have to go without replacements. Or worst of all, has it occurred to you that all available molecular phylogenetics data does not fit into the "universal tree of life"? Ha! Did God tell you that on a mountaintop, you evolution-denying, modern-day Moses? I hope you burn in hell!

With all the rampant denialism going on out there, we smarty-pants scientists need to prepare for the next outbreak. The question is, which form of denialism will be the next to hit? I think it only makes sense that those conniving little bastards will go after the very foundations of modern genetics and molecular biology - the "theory" that the genes encoding our biological traits are contained in cellular deoxyribonucleic acid (aka "DNA").

So how to prepare? I propose a new tactic. No more bloody and violent exchanges of capital letters and exclamation marks on the battle fields of the blogosphere. Enough with the "YOU ARE A DENIALIST BECAUSE YOU ARE DUMB AND IRRATIONAL AND WILL NEVER ACCEPT REALITY!". No more "it's in a peer-reviewed journal and has been regurgitated by a lot of other peer-reviewed journals so it must be true". No more "this is not even really a debate amongst REAL scientists, so I don't have to bother to explain it to you". No more "I did a PubMed search on your hypothesis, no hits came up, so you're wrong!!!". No more "I hold a BSc, an MSc and a PhD from Oxford, Cambridge and Hogwarts, whilst you barely satisfied the conditions of your community college, ergo I am clearly in the right and you, sadly, are mistaken".

Yes, I would like to propose a radical new approach in the war on denialism. I call it "explaining science". This means doing nothing except explaining experiments and their results. (aka "the evidence"). When people are unconvinced or do not immediately understand, we rephrase and try again. And again. And again. They still don't get it? Maybe we draw a picture. A cartoon. Maybe an animation. Maybe a bulleted list. Maybe use statistics, a pie-chart or a bar graph. Make a video, a hologram or a video-game. Do an interpretative dance. Whatever it takes. Just don't call them denialists, or you'll remind them they're supposed to be denying something (shhhhhhh). And maybe, in the end, we will convert the denial-lovers to science-lovers. Or perhaps some will resist and forever remain beyond our reach. Maybe the disease of denialism is incurable or even genetically encoded in an unlucky few defectives. But I'll be damned if we don't die trying!

So, to prepare for the eminent strike against DNA, all we have to do is remember how we know that DNA is the genetic material. Keeping the experimental evidence at our fingertips, we will be well-armed to defend science from the denialists. What? Can't remember why? Don't worry, me neither. Hey I'm just a graduate student in biochemistry after all. Luckily, Larry Moran, a real scientist who's old enough to still remember the evidence and knows how to blog, points to the experiment in question (that's why they call him 'Professor'). It was Canadian Oswald Avery's 1944 paper which showed that DNA, but not RNA, carbohydrate or protein could transfer the genetically transmitted trait of virulence from bacterium to another. You can read commentary in science blogger John Dennehy's "Citation Classic of the Week". Even better, check out this awesome Cold Spring Harbor animation describing the experiment. No denialist can withstand the power of animations!

So, fellow scientists, be vigilant for the emergence of the DNA denialists when they strike. Know the enemy, but more importantly, know the evidence!

(PS- This was a humor piece, whether you find it funny or not. Except the part about the Avery paper. So don't be sending me any hate-mail.)