This sounds interesting. I hope to get to to his inaugural lecture as found Richard’s Auckland Skeptics in the Pub cosmology talk (October 2011) and the discussion after really interesting.
Although my Physics education ended at High School, so probably won’t understand much, i still enjoy learning what I can.
The importance of being wrong: the Big Bang and precision cosmology
Inaugural lecture by Professor Richard Easther Department of Physics
A generation ago, “precision cosmology” was an oxymoron. Since then, advances in observational astrophysics let us measure global properties of the universe -- age, expansion rate, composition, temperature, smoothness -- to within a few percent, or even better.
This newfound clarity allows us to test competing cosmological models and rule out those which do not match what we see in the sky. I will describe recent advances in observational astrophysics, and explain how I use this data to explore the properties of the universe a trillion, trillion, trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.
All are welcome to this public lecture.
5.30pm, Tuesday 14 May Large Chemistry Lecture Theatre Building 301, 23 Symonds Street The University of Auckland
I don’t expect he remembers but I did briefly meet Richard there and pass on my thanks for the work he does for the Zone and Skeptic related events like TAM. I’m looking forward to many more Zone episodes!
Siouxsie Wiles is a microbiologist and bioluminescence enthusiast who heads up the Bioluminescent Superbugs Group at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. I know her through the Auckland Skeptics in the Pub Meetup Group. BSG make bacteria that glow in the dark to better understand how to prevent and fight microbial infection.
She is currently fundraising for her RocketHub SciFund Challenge Project. The aim of this crowd funded project is to study bacterial evolution. RocketHub is not an investment or charity. It is an exchange; funds from you in exchange for rewards. The more you donate, the better the reward!
Any level of contribution is welcome but for us$50 you get your name ‘drawn’ in glowing bacteria. Invest more and the rewards increase.
Thanks for checking out my SciFund Challenge, Evolution in Action!
Bacteria are masters at adapting to their environment, rearranging their genetic material or gaining new genes from their surroundings. This has allowed them to colonise pretty much every conceivable environment. From boiling hot geysers to that pink scum in your shower. Even us.
Did you know that the number of cells that make up our body are outnumbered 10 to 1 by the bacteria that live on and in us? The majority of bacteria are either harmless or pretty beneficial, but some of them have evolved to cause us serious harm. Around the world, one out of every four people that die are killed by a microorganism of some sort. That’s a staggering 14 million people every year.
And you know what? They just keep on evolving! That’s how we get antibiotic resistance and new diseases emerging. So what I want to know is, how do bacteria evolve to cause disease? And that is where you come in! Your contributions to my SciFund Challenge will help unravel how these amazing microbes keep outsmarting us.
Just how are we going to do it?
Bacteria have a number of really useful characteristics that make them ideal for studying evolution:
They multiply really rapidly so we can measure change in a short space of time They can be stored frozen in a sort of suspended animation. This means we can freeze bacteria from every step of our experiments, building up a living ‘fossil’ record which can be regrown and analysed at any time. Modern sequencing techniques have made it relatively cheap and easy to sequence whole bacterial genomes so we can unravel any genetic changes that occur during our experiments.
So as not to create some superhuman killing machine able to rampage around the world Contagion-style, we are studying the evolution of a bacterium that doesn’t infect humans and isn’t spread by the air. Instead, we are using Citrobacter rodentium which infects mice using the same ‘modus operandi’ as food poisoning strains of E. coli do in humans. They go in one end… and come out the other! And because mice like to eat poop (more technically known as coprophagia) they easily spread C. rodentium to each other. We allow C. rodentiumto spread from mouse to mouse to mouse to mouse to… you get the picture, each time freezing bacteria that are shed in the poop.
We use a glowing strain of C. rodentium so that we can track exactly where the bacteria are within the mice without having to kill the animals. We then carry out competition experiments between the original C. rodentium strain and the ‘evolved’ poop isolates to see which strains have gained a competitive edge. We do this by growing the strains in the lab as well as getting them to infect caterpillars. This gives a first clue as to whether the poop isolates are starting to change the way they outsmart the primitive part of our immune system.
Why is this important?
This work will give us a better understanding of how infectious bacteria adapt, and how they might evolve in people in the future. This is very important - in the fight against an ever-changing foe, forewarned is forearmed!
How can you help?
To unravel the genetic secrets of how Citrobacter evolves while it spreads from mouse to mouse, we will need to sequence the genomes of lots of our poop isolates. Your contributions will be used to pay for this sequencing, which costs roughly $100 per isolate. The more money we raise, the more isolates we can sequence, and we have hundreds to choose from.
Interested? Check out the rewards section [image below] to see what’s on offer in return for a contribution to this exciting project. Thanks for your help!
For those new to SciFund and RocketHub
RocketHub is not an investment or charity. It is an exchange; funds from you in exchange for rewards from me. The more you donate, the better the reward! Rockethub is an ‘all and more’ funding mechanism. If I don’t reach my financial goal I get to keep what I raise. If I do reach my goal, I get access to exciting opportunities. And if I raise more than my goal I get to sequence even more evolved bacteria.
It was great to find Odd Todd on Twitter last night. Had been a while since I visited his site and I did not realise he was tweeting. Little did I know it would also help cure Alfie’s recent annoying behaviour of barking, seemingly at nothing, from about 19:00 till bedtime.
As I read Odd Todd’s recent tweets Alfie started barking, again. Then I saw this:
When I ask my dog 'What's 1+1?' He looks at me like I can go f myself for mocking his dog brain...
What is bizarre, ok maybe just Odd, was I said to him (in a normal tone of voice) “What’s 1 + 1”? and he was silent, with a puzzled look, for quite a long time.
I realise there could be other explanations but tried again tonight. 1 + 1 only worked for a few seconds but it has been over an hour since I followed up with: “What is the square root of 96”? Not even a whimper since…
Now it seems I will have to come up with increasingly complex math problems to silence the pooch. A bit concerning if it gets as far as algebra and calculus as he will likely leave me for dead.
A logical fallacy is usually what has happened when someone is wrong about something. It's a flaw in reasoning. They're like tricks or illusions of thought, and they're often very sneakily used by politicians and the media to fool people.
Don't be fooled! This website and poster have been designed to help you identify and call out dodgy logic wherever it may raise its ugly, incoherent head.
If you see someone committing a logical fallacy, link them to the relevant fallacy to school them in thinky awesomeness and win the intellectual affections of those who happen across your comment by appearing clever and interesting.
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This started as a comment on a blog post but got a bit long and involved. I’m not much of an expert on dieting as have only managed my own weight without formal dieting. I’m also far from perfect but perhaps lucky in finding lots of potentially fattening food unappealing.
If I have a flaw it’s probably eating too little, or at odd times, and a bit much fried stuff. I like most veg, love fruit and rare meat. Maybe that’s why the Paleo thing is of interest. A theory shot down by also loving pasta, rice, bread and grains!
Anyway, the comment went…*
I cant comment on the effectiveness, or not, of Paleo diet but am suspicious of magic bullet solutions. Especially if described with language like “Mother Nature has provided us humans with Natural Foods for human consumption”. Nothing was ever “provided” and humanity survived by fighting for every calorie.
Barbara J. King, a biological anthropologist at the College of William and Mary, writes;
“You might think that, as an anthropologist, I'd greet this embrace of the human prehistoric past with unalloyed delight, especially in a country where a high percentage of our population is evolution-averse. Like most anthropologists, though, I don't think there's good science behind these claims”
I am aware, through an acquaintance, of a study on Paleo being done at Auckland Uni. Have no idea to what extent but can probably find out as know someone who was involved.
With regard to calorie counting, this post by Dr Karl has some interesting info on that and why losing, even maintaining weight is not easy;
“it seems that we have overestimated, by the amazing factor of up to three times, just how much weight you will lose if all you do is eat less.”
Sometime over the holiday break, one of those frequent rubbish days of a summer not to remember, I stumbled upon the documentary film ‘Being Elmo’ on a Sky channel. It was a fascinating look at Kevin Clash's life and career to as the man behind Elmo.
Although released a few weeks back I just heard an interview with ‘Being Elmo’ Editor Writer Justin Weinstein about his next project: 'An Honest Liar’ - The Story of the Amazing James Randi:
A first for the Token Skeptic podcast: an interview with Justin Weinstein and Tyler Measom, who are the directors/producers of the forthcoming documentary on James Randi, called An Honest Liar.
and more at
'An Honest Liar - Movies.com You need to have a lot of gall or a lot of merit to call yourself "amazing." James Randi has both. In the late 1940s he began performing magic under the name of The Amazing Randi…
What is bizarre, ok maybe just Odd, was I said to him (in a normal tone of voice) “What’s 1 + 1”? and he was silent, with a puzzled look, for quite a long time.
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