A science nerd thread.

[martinpb]

The evolution of envenomation: Lets step away from the concept of irreducible complexity, quietly and slowly...

hehehe - always loved the argument from incredulity ones!

The guy to see/read about this is Bryan Fry from The Univeristy of Melbourne. He's working his way though the world's reptiles, collecting their venoms, working out how they evolved one from another. He gives a pretty good talk if you get to see him.

 

[3viltoast3r]

Which do you rather: Light as a particle or light as a wave? And obviously reasons as to why. No fence sitters would be preferable yet still acceptable as a definitive answer, as far as I know, is yet to be found.

The answer you dont want to hear: It's both - But it's a Particle on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and it's a wave on Tuesday, Thursday, and the weekend.

I have to say I think I prefer it as a particle - Mainly because im doing 2 Quantum courses at uni..

Why? - Mostly for me it's the UV catastrophe....

I reckon the Stern-Galach experiment is pretty cool: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern–Gerlach_experiment

 

[Toff]

Though you may be able to inherit some intelligence, I would assume that intelligence is mainly influenced by your environment.

I would say that it's a bit of both, ie. you're born with a certain genetic potential for intelligence, but it takes the right enriched environment to realise that potential to it's full extent.

Still, it's a bit hard to try and measure/ discuss something that hasn't been properly defined yet..

 

[DJninja]

I've only read some of the first page but in answer to the initial question could it be that the lower level humans (pretty crude I know) produce more offspring because of there lower chance of survival. Just look to nature and any number of eco-systems, you will find an organism that will over produce naturally because only a small number of offspring will survive. Just like in rougher areas of communities, having more children may increase the chance of successfully passing on your genes from one generation to the next.

We may see wealth/intelligent/etc. as the highest level humans but when it comes to natural selection survival of the fittest is all that matters. Fitness could just come down to ability to procreate better.

 

[scblack]

Arete, don't forget about the statistical concept of Reversion to the Mean. Actually that may not even be a concept by definition, but generally when two really really intelligent people breed, the child is statistically likely to be dumber than them. Or if two professional athletes breed the child is statistically unlikely to be able to break into a run.

Of course my hyper-intelligent children are the exception to this rule... By being even brainier than me.

 

[bear the bear]

I have been using various flavours of HP calculator my whole uni/ professional life....because of the RPN they use I can't go back to a normal one with out lots of swearing!!!

 

[FR Drew]

Obscure research work?

Okay so who amongst us nerds has the weirdest research that they've carried out?

I've written a research paper for work on "the deterioration of cellulose nitrate and cellulose butyrate doped fabric aircraft", and my final uni research was on the development of a solar heated oven for baking insects to death.

Surely there has got to be something more obscure than that amongst us Rotorburners?

 

[Arete]

Mine was a project on rusa deer demographics - which involved working out the approximate age of ~400 deer that had been shot in the RNP. In order to do this, you use tooth wear as an indication of age. This meant decapitating each deer with a circular saw and putting the head in a slow cooker to remove the flesh from the jaws so I could compare the teeth to a reference set of jaws of farmed deer that were killed at 1-15 years of age.

The end result was I had refrigerated shipping container of dead deer in various stages of headlessness/ a pile of numbered deer heads and a shed full of slow cookers with heads stewing away in them for a couple of months. My supervisor delighted in getting me undergrad volunteers on the premise they'd be working with cute little Bambi, which resulted in a number of spews/faints once they entered my factory of deer mutilation and were handed a circular saw or a deer head with a bullet hole in it.

 

[for those about to rock]

Mine was a project on rusa deer demographics - which involved working out the approximate age of ~400 deer that had been shot in the RNP. In order to do this, you use tooth wear as an indication of age. This meant decapitating each deer with a circular saw and putting the head in a slow cooker to remove the flesh from the jaws so I could compare the teeth to a reference set of jaws of farmed deer that were killed at 1-15 years of age.

The end result was I had refrigerated shipping container of dead deer in various stages of headlessness/ a pile of numbered deer heads and a shed full of slow cookers with heads stewing away in them for a couple of months. My supervisor delighted in getting me undergrad volunteers on the premise they'd be working with cute little Bambi, which resulted in a number of spews/faints once they entered my factory of deer mutilation and were handed a circular saw or a deer head with a bullet hole in it.

Only one word could sum that up - cool.

How does one get into this line of work, whatever that may be?

 

[Arete]

Academic science. Basically, never leave university.

 

[martinpb]

Will run experiments for bike parts (and food)

Title of PhD thesis:
"An evaluation of solid-state NMR methods for drug discovery"
that was pretty obscure work.

I've also worked on studying the antibacterial effects of the peptides that frogs produce when they are stressed and currently work on a disease that causes about 1/1,000,000 deaths.

 

[martinpb]

My supervisor delighted in getting me undergrad volunteers on the premise they'd be working with cute little Bambi, which resulted in a number of spews/faints once they entered my factory of deer mutilation and were handed a circular saw or a deer head with a bullet hole in it.

You win!!

My supervisor thought it was fun that i had to get up at 6 am to drive to an abattoir in order to get pigs stomachs for the SSNMR experiments - but sounds like it was nothing compared with decapitating deer for a living! (not that doing a PhD is living, more like purgatory without the view of clouds and pearly gates). The other members of my lab were bribed with malt loaf and doughnuts to spend up to four hours in the cold room helping me to purify H+/K+-ATPase from the stomach walls. In return i had to help out getting the related protein SERCA from rabbit legs (we once came in to find a picture of a pet rabbit in the new blender we'd got for that prep - the boss could be a bit weird some days).

 

[FR Drew]

Yup, I'm thinking Arete for the win thus far...

 

[Arete]

So applications for the UWS Hawesbury Institute closed yesterday. 11 new scientific research positions, one of 3 454 next-gen sequencing platforms in the country and $40 million in research funding injected into a traditionally applied teaching university... it will be interesting to see if it works out for them.

 

[wombat]

So applications for the UWS Hawesbury Institute closed yesterday. 11 new scientific research positions, one of 3 454 next-gen sequencing platforms in the country and $40 million in research funding injected into a traditionally applied teaching university... it will be interesting to see if it works out for them.

Heh, as someone who has been on both sides of the desk there (albeit in a different school) I have every faith that they will be able to fuck it up.

 

[3viltoast3r]

In a 1st year physics lecture:

Lecturer: "Ok guys, who's doing a science degree?"
30 people put up their hand
Lecturer: "Ummmm. Oh. Ok. And what are you guys doing, Electrical Eng or something?"
Remaining 200 people put hands up.
Lecturer: "Shit."

 

[cameron_15]

As a budding science nerd, I look forward to posting in this thread in the months (and years) to come

I've just finished year 12 and Will either be studying Medicine (At James Cook University) or Biomedicine (At Melbourne Uni) next year. Can not wait to return to Biology/physiology/anatomy etc, I missed out a lot on that this year.

With regards to Light, I sit firmly on the fence. There's solid evidence to support both models. That was what I gather from VCE Physics, which is very boiled down to say the least.

 

[dog boy]

just ordered my christmas present

 

[Arete]

Anybody know how robust C&RT trees are? I usually would use ANCOVA and quadratic DFA to assess how much influence a variable has on an assignment, but that won't work with categorical variables.
The fact the only measure of robustness is mis-assignment rate is making my p-value OCD go haywire.

 

[Bjorn]

i read somewhere - and please don't quote me or ask me for hard facts - that a woman chooses her potential mate according to his pheremones. deodorant, aftershave, perfume, and - this i find extremely interesting - the Pill mask a woman's ability to "smell" the right man for her, breeding-wise.

Women choose mates partially based on pheromones, as you said. When they are ovulating/preparing to ovulate, hormones predispose women to be attracted to the alpha male, warrior type with potentially the strongest genetic stock. After they become pregnant they are predisposed to being attracted to the type who will stick around and provide for their young. The pill mimics pregnancy by the use of hormones so women on the pill are predisposed to being attracted to the nurturing type rather than selecting for the strongest genetic stock.

Of course this is only a predisposition and not a driving force.

As for severed deer heads Arete; wouldn't farmed deer have different tooth wear from wild deer, introducing a consistant error into your results? I don't know much about severed heads, although Willsy did imply I was a potential serial killer.