Walkabout Wednesday: angiogenisis is interesting, and more politics in the environment (surprise ...)

Angiogenisis is the formation of blood vessels, are your professors lazy, and politics taking over sage grouse management in Montana.

Bad science journalism 101: ignoring confidence limits

You might have seen the news articles -- JOGGING CAN KILL! Well, I agree, but this article provides only sketchy evidence at best.

Science has a credibility issue

Scott Adams, creator of the cartoon Dilbert, says that "...everything about science and nutrition." is Science's biggest fail. But I think it's deeper than that.

Walkabout Wednesday: missed a week!

Insulin can be a weapon, who's the richest college grads again? and babies. Baby pallid sturgeon ...

Walkabout wednesday: I'm really messed up, gender equality in hiring, and pretty pictures!

My Health

Cristi Vlad has a nice post this week looking at a carefully controlled, but short, dietary intervention on a bunch of physiological metrics. My typical "low carb" gets into the range of the low carb diet there in terms of total grams, but not in terms of percentage calories. These folks were eating way more than me! Of course, the subjects were all obese, with average BMI of 34 (mine is currently 24). Other than weight I'm much more messed up than these subjects, with more inflammation (hs-CRP), higher triglycerides, lower hdl, etc etc.

Your Education

My field (or at least my academic unit) is far, far behind on gender diversity among the faculty. But at least some departments at UNL have fixed that problem, and as a result it improves the recruitment of women into their graduate programs, which makes it easier to recruit women faculty etc etc. I don't know how well our graduate program does at recruiting and graduating women. Hmm, might be worth a look for the 2015 Academic Program Review.

Our Environment

This is a really nice visualization of increasing global temperature. I like visualizations that use the ability of an animation to move time off the x-axis in a meaningful way. Although, I don't think that visualizations like this increase the likelihood that we (as in, members of the species Homo sapiens sapiens) are likely to "...act hard and fast." 

Walkabout Wednesday: vampire aphids

Does red meat trigger immune reactions, what is the value of a postdoc, and vampire aphids. No kidding.

How do perennial plants avoid senescence?

If you know, please tell me! The following is part of a pre-proposal that Brigitte and I are submitting to NSF. This is our justification for continuing to spend a week each summer counting fruits on a small shrubby, not particularly attractive plant. I mean, other than the fantastic hiking and fishing in the area.