Clipmarks | balthazarus's clips

Best wildlife images

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 12:25:23 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus

Snow leopard wins top photo prize

A picture of an elusive snow leopard on a night-time prowl has won the prestigious Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2008 award.

"I knew the animal would come; it was just waiting for the actor to walk on stage and break the beam."

This photo showing a young male lion harassing a thirsty giraffe at a waterhole in Namibia has won this year's Young Photographer of the Year prize.

"Stage, action, story and onlookers combine to make an unforgettable scene."

Italian Stefano Unterthiner's photo of a mischievous Sulawesi black-crested macaque won the competition's Animal Potraits category.

"He would leap at me and kick off my back like a trampoline," he recalled. "It was part play, part confrontation, part attention-seeking, part curiosity."

David Maitland's "deadlock" is this year's winner of the competition's Behaviour: Other Animals category.

The photo of a fight between two white-tailed eagles

the top prize in the Behaviour: Birds category

opens

London

Friday, 31

Tags: pictures, wildlife, prize

Beauty Bias affects political judgment

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 12:14:59 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: we, humans, are biased through and through. without facing it, we will never be able to have a say regarding it.

Clip Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

The Beauty Bounce: How a pretty face wins votes

Scientists have discovered the "Beauty Bounce" does exist and that for female candidates having a pretty face really does win votes from both men and women.

The study by Northwestern University in Chicago found that while the perception of competence was the biggest vote winner, for women at least beauty could give them an extra boost - especially among men.

Even female voters seemed to tap into the cultural expectation that women who are attractive as well as competent are more worthy of high status roles

Overall, voters perceived the faces of male politicians as more competent and dominant relative to female politicians; female politicians were perceived as more attractive and approachable relative to males.

Candidates who were perceived as more attractive by men were more likely to win votes in the actual Congressional election

image really matters

attractiveness was not a factor for male candidates

it was all about competence

Tags: politics, science, society, beauty, bias

Palin and the fruit fly or just plain ignorance

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 11:59:59 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: One might have thought that Sarah Palin would take a more active interest in one aspect of scientific research. Palin's youngest son has Down's syndrome, a genetic disorder caused by the presence of an extra chromosome 21. Although a geneticist by training, I am certainly no expert on the pathogenesis of this condition, nor the significance of Drosophila research into Down's syndrome. So, I typed "drosophila trisomy 21" into PubMed, the scholarly biomedical equivalent of Google. There were 109 results, the most recent published just the day before Palin's gaffe. The concluding sentence of that study — about the genetic cues that steer nerve fibres around during the growth of the fruit fly — suggests that the paper will "have implications for the pathogenesis of Down's syndrome".

These two are drops in the ocean of fruit fly research that have clinical relevance. Down's syndrome, Alzheimer's disease, autism, diabetes, ageing research, cancers of all types

Clip Source: www.guardian.co.uk

Palin and the fruit fly

Sarah Palin may have alienated herself from the entire basic research community

"You've heard about some of these pet projects, they really don't make a whole lot of sense and sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not."

"I'm going to be as restrained and measured as I possibly can about this. But this is the most mindless, ignorant, uninformed comment that we have seen from Governor Palin so far, and there's been a lot of competition for that prize."

the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster is arguably on a par with the mouse as the founding model organism for the field of genetics.

Palin said in the same speech that "early identification of a cognitive or other disorder, especially autism, can make a life-changing difference".

The discovery, made in Drosophila fruit flies, may lead to advances in understanding autism spectrum disorders

Tags: election, science, genetics