Life changes

Well, it's official. I have become a paid shill of the biotech industry. This week I accepted a job at a biotech company in California, and will be leaving my post-doctoral position at a medical school. For the next few weeks posting will likely be lighter than normal, as I have to move my family across the country and get settled. I'm going to try to keep the Friday beautiful sciences coming, at the very least, but I've missed several of those in the last few weeks.

As an aside, I intend to continue writing about biotech issues of societal relevance, but in this case, I won't write at all about the industry I am working with. This is for two reasons (one more important than the other) --- One, as it will look like I am biased (but I try to write about data, and not about conclusions, so this shouldn't be all that important). Two, I don't want to anger my new biotech overlords, should they ever learn of my blog.

As I've always intended to maintain anonymity, that shouldn't be hard.

Science: You're doing it wrong

Hat tip to Orac.

How big is big?

This cool video shows size scales. It's a useful and entertaining description of powers of 10.

As it turns out, we're very small...

87th Skeptics' Circle

The 87th Skeptics' Circle is up at Action Skeptics. Go have a gander.

American Association for the Advancement of Science on Expelled

Folks may have already seen this statement about the Expelled movie, but here it is to reiterate the position of the American Association for the Advancement of Science:

AAAS further decries the profound dishonesty and lack of civility demonstrated by this effort. The movie includes interviews with scientists who report that they were deceived into appearing as part of such a production, and advance segments [of the film] broadly depict those who accept evolution as racist and sympathetic to Nazis. Such generalized insults are untrue and grossly unfair to millions of scientists in the United States and worldwide who are working to cure disease, solve hunger, improve national security, and otherwise advance science to improve the quality of human life.

Friday beautiful science

Sorry I've been quiet for a while. Various personal issues have kept me fairly occupied (including flying out to California for a job interview at a biotech company).

Today's Friday beautiful science is something I've lusted after ever since I first saw it. It's a 3-dimensional map of our best data about the Milky Way galaxy, mapped out in painstaking detail inside of a cube of glass. It's simply beautiful.

Behold: a galaxy suspended in a glass cube.

A laser was used to etch around 80,000 of the stars in the Milky Way, using three-dimensional data from the Japan’s National Astronomical Observatory.

Production of the cube was motivated by the urge to see a galaxy in three dimensions. In encyclopedias and such, galaxies can only be viewed in two: we wanted to do so from all directions. Even the Magellan Cloud, comparatively close to us, is outside this cube. Space can be sparsely filled, one could say…or rather, there are great extremes in density.

I've made prints of many of my other Friday beautiful science photos. Perhaps some day I'll save enough Japanese yen to be able to purchase this little beauty...

Colbert in space.