"Developmental biology: The hole picture"What's the best way to make a tube? Roll up a sheet? Hollow out a solid rod? Some innovative movies show how the problem is tackled during the development of blood vessels in embryos. Check out this incredibly cool movie from the journal Nature's web site that actually shows the formation of blood vessel structures from the merging of bubbles.Keith Mostov and Fernando Martin-Belmonte are the authors of the article from the July 27th 2006 Issue of Nature on page 363.

Whenever assaulted by that annoying high-pitch whine of a mosquito fly-by, I've recently taken to gesturing vaguely towards my wife and whispering to the orbiting insect, "..pst...hey buddy, she's tastier." I meant it as a joke, but as it happens, my wife might really be tastier to a mosquito. According to this article on WebMD, one in 10 people are "highly attractive to mosquitoes." The chemical attractants include high concentrations of either steroids or cholesterol or uric or lactic acid on the skin. (and that is after being drawn from over 50 meters away by carbon dioxide and motion.I think I'll make sure to take my wife along on my next backpacking or canoeing trip!

President Bush announced earlier this week that he is now preparing a "swift veto" of the new Stem Cell bill currently under debate in the senate. This decision flies rather boldly in the face of the President's recent statements including those made in his last State of the Union speech. Double-speak surrounding difficult policy issues has become troublingly commonplace when they touch on scientific results that call political and religious positions into question. None of my friends were able to correctly attribute the following quotation:"Science, like any field of endeavor, relies on freedom of inquiry; and one of the hallmarks of that freedom is objectivity. Now more than ever, on issues ranging from climate change to AIDS research to genetic engineering to food additives, government relies on the impartial perspective of science for guidance."These words actually came out of the mouth of President George H.W. Bush in 1990 and are sadly about as for from the actual science policy of the current administration as anyone could possibly imagine. Despite recent initiatives to expand science and technology education, a more genuine quote representative of the current administration's actual position was heard recently from the Whitehouse Spokesman, ...

One of the real challenges of approaching the "hobby" of astronomy, is that in today's increasingly urban and light-polluted environment, the cost of equipment necessary to generate even a passable image of the type that you might find in say, Astronomy or Sky and Telescope Magazines, is typically beyond the financial reach of even a committed student.A good precision optical instrument, a stable mount with precise tracking of the celestial sphere, and a decent CCD imaging setup plus the computer to drive it can run as much as a few thousand dollars. And of course we are all teased in the process by the glorious Hubble Telescope images afforded by a NASA-sized budget.Well, I am here to report that there is hope for the intrepid who set their sights on the starts. Ahem. As with so many other things these days, the Internet is here to save us. There are now several VERY nice connected observatories, each of which has several high-end telescopes and imaging systems accessible and controllable via a simple web browser.My favorite is the "Astronomy Bed and Breakfast" called New Mexico Skies. They combine friendly service with some of the darkest and ...

Or, how to confuse correlation with causality, part 34,289,767.Some friends and I went to see Al Gores recent movie "An Inconvenient Truth" a few weeks ago. It was really quite a good show, in marked contrast to his political voice through the failed campaigns.Let me start my review, lest my yelping liberal wife slay me out of hand, by saying that I DO believe that there should be serious and growing concern regarding global warming. I also believe that there should be more movement in federal policy circles to address these issues sooner rather than later. I also think that Gore put together a very approachable and emotionally effective presentation on why we should all take the global stakes of failing to act on such an awesome threat to our ecosystem much more seriously.I even saw a news article briefly appear on Yahoo entitled something to the effect of "Gore gets science right in global warming movie." Unfortunately though, the blogosphere dug in over the next few days to discover that the reporter who wrote the article only contacted 35 scientists, only 5 of whom had actually seen the movie, none of whom were climatologists.To Gore's and the movie producers' ...