SCI-EDGE Blog A Go Go

Annual Clearance and Yard Sale Now at VWR Labshop.com

01:29pm 05/07/2008

If you are looking for lab supplies at great prices, shop LabShop's annual yard sale where you can find awesome clearance and web specials and realize fantastic savings. The more you buy, the more you save! But hurry, shop early for best selection! Check out the bargains here: Annual Clearance and Yard Sale

Boreal Biology: Save 10% 'til Friday

08:38am 04/29/2008

Boreal Biology �
The Highest Quality Biological Specimens For All Your Life Science Studies
Save 10% 'til Friday

At Boreal/Northwest, we have awesome intuitive products that will help you introduce, educate, and excite students about the amazing world of science! All Boreal Biology specimens are provided in excellent condition and in generous quantities for classroom and laboratory study. And, we offer delivery schedules you can count on to ensure your specimens arrive healthy and ready for student use.

Place your online order by Friday and receive 10% discount! Apply promo code BN29 during checkout � excludes tax and shipping amounts.

� Live Animals & Specimens
� Clearance Products

Butterfly Larvae Kit
Reg. $69.00

Transform your students from observers of nature to active participants!

Elodea
Reg. $9.75

An exygenating plant that grows well in any well-let freshwater aquarium.

Live Grass Frog Tadpoles
Reg. $27.70

Students can watch in amazement as these frogs metamorphose from a fish-like animal into a complete land animal!

*Offer Details: To activate 10% discount offer, apply promo code BN29 during checkout process. Discount applies to merchandise only, excludes tax and shipping amounts. Some product line are excluded from discount offer � preserved, telescopes, Vernier Probeware, Kodak cameras, Pasco items and previously placed orders. Offer expires 05/02/08. These specials may not be combined with any other offers.

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800-387-9393
info@boreal.com

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Save 10% on Exciting New DNA Models and Materials

10:09am 04/24/2008

Save 10% on Exciting New DNA Models and Materials
�DNA Day is April 25th

As an exclusive newsletter customer of Ward's Natural Science, we invite you to check out some of the awesome DNA models we offer. These models are extremely helpful to demonstrate and reinforce the important information you present to your students. Purchase before Monday and save 10% on your online order! (To activate offer, click any link in email. Offer expries 04/28/08).

� See more DNA Models

National DNA Day is a unique day where students, teachers and the public can learn more about genetics and genomics! It was created to commemorate the completion of the Human Genome Project in April 2003 and the discovery of DNA's double helix. Click here for more information: www.genome.gov/10506367

Francis H.C. Crick Bobblehead
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The world's smartest bobblehead!

James Watson Bobblehead
Price $20.75

There's no crick in his neck!

Nucleotides Super
Model Kit
Price $41.95

Piece together DNA from its four nucleotide components.

*Offer Details: Offer is only applicable to online orders between April 24 and April 28, 2008. To activate the offer, click on link in this email. Email promotions are offered to our newsletter subscribers only. At the current time, wardsci.com promotions are only available to domestic U.S. customers. Promotions can be applied to one online order only and are not applicable with any other Ward's offer.

Ward's Natural Science Establishment, LLC
5100 West Henrietta Rd.
Rochester, NY 14586
(800) 962-2660

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10:04am 04/24/2008

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Springtime Lab Clean-Up Sale at LabShop right now!

01:54pm 04/23/2008

VWR's Labshop website is currently running this promotional offer:

An exclusive offer to our newsletter subscribers! Start your spring cleaning on the right foot � get organized and clean up the lab! To get you started, we have put together a special selection of products all on sale when you place your order online! But hurry, discount offer expires on Monday, April 28th!

Apply Promo Code LS23A during check-out process to activate 10% discount offer.

Be prepared to find great prices, fast delivery, and the best value at VWR LabShop. We help our lab customers succeed every day and we do whatever it takes to make selection and ordering easier and faster! Click here to check it out: VWRLS

Free Butterfly Net

08:28am 04/17/2008

Prepare for Butterfly Season Today � The Weather is perfect! Place butterfly order by April 18th for delivery the week of May 5th. Free Net with Online Order!

We have a great selection of intuitive products that will help you introduce, educate, and excite students about the world of butterflies! Order $25.00 or more online today and receive absolutely free a Student Butterfly Net. Don't be disappointed � place your order today! (Free net offer expires Tuesday, April 22, 2008).

� Butterfly Information (Painted Lady Order Form, Shipping Schedule, and Instructions)

� Butterfly Products

Butterfly/Insect Net with Bamboo Handle
Free with $25 or more!
Additional quantities avaliable for $6.83

*Offer Details: The above specials are for our valued email customers only. These specials may not be combined with any other offers. Free butterfly net with online orders of $25.00 or more. Click on any link in email to activate offer � expires Tuesday, April 22, 2008.

Manage Your Subscriptions: This newsletter is sent to customers who have requested to receive it by entering their email address in the newsletter subscription form or during online registration at boreal.com. Boreal values your privacy. If you wish to be removed from future emails, please click-here. Please allow 10 days to complete your request.

Boreal Laboratories, Ltd.
399 Vansickle Road
St. Catharines, Ontario L2S 3T4
800-387-9393 � (fax) 800-668-9106

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Strange Science: Living in a World of Unfamiliar Voices

09:19am 04/15/2008

By Greg Miller, ScienceNOW Daily News, 14 April 2008

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA--Imagine not being able to tell your son's voice from that of a complete stranger. Welcome to the life of a 60-year-old British woman known as KH. Although a handful of people have reportedly lost the ability to recognize voices after a stroke or other brain damage, researchers believe KH is the first documented case of someone who never developed this ability in the first place.

The case came to light a few years ago when KH read an article in New Scientist magazine about people who can't recognize individuals by face. The article struck a chord, and she contacted the magazine, explaining that she had an analogous voice-recognition problem. For as long as she could remember, the voices of even her closest relatives were indistinguishable. New Scientist contacted Bradley Duchaine, a cognitive neuroscientist featured in the article, and Duchaine invited KH to visit his lab at University College London.

A successful management consultant, KH scored average or above on a variety of memory and reasoning tests. Her hearing was normal and a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan of her brain revealed no obvious defects. She told the researchers her problem was limited to recognizing people's voices, explaining that she sometimes introduced herself to business clients by different names so that when they called she could identify them according to who they asked for.

Additional tests supported KH's account, says Duchaine's collaborator L�cia Garrido, who presented the findings here 13 April at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. In one experiment, the researchers played 96 sentences, half of them spoken by famous actors, politicians, or other celebrities, the other half spoken by unfamiliar voices. KH did little better than chance when asked whether each voice belonged to someone famous. Even when she did correctly categorize a voice as famous, she identified the correct celebrity less than 5% of the time, a dismal performance compared with that of six control subjects who took the same test. KH was similarly hopeless at a second experiment in which she attempted to learn six new voices and then distinguish them from voices she'd never heard before.

"I think it's entirely novel," says Jamie Ward, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Sussex in the U.K. He points out that KH performed normally when asked the gender or emotional state of a speaker, supporting the researchers' conclusion that her deficit is specific to voice recognition. The underlying neurological mechanism in KH's case remains a mystery, but Garrido says the team hopes to use functional MRI scans to investigate how KH's brain responds to voices.

Dino-Era Feathers Trapped in Ancient Amber

11:09am 04/11/2008

This is one of those "how cool is that" moments that I occasionally stumble upon while making my way through my iGoogle newsfeeds. I often wonder why this stuff doesn't get covered in the mainstream media. I'm sure I'm not the only dino-nerd out there who'd be interested.

by Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News

April 11, 2008 -- Seven feathers that either belonged to a non-avian dinosaur or an early bird have been discovered encased in amber in a remarkably vivid state of preservation, according to a recent Proceedings of the Royal Society B study.

The 100-million-year-old amber, excavated from a Charente-Maritime quarry in western France, was found near the fossilized teeth of a troodontid dinosaur. Troodontidae is a family of bird-like, two-legged dinos that, other fossils suggest, had feathers and laid eggs in nests, just as birds do today.

The teeth of dromaeosaurids -- another bird-like group including the famed Velociraptor -- were also found near the amber.

"These two non-avian dinosaur [groups] are currently known to be feathered and are thus possibly related to the fossil feathers from France," concluded the archaeological team, led by Vincent Perrichot, a researcher at Humboldt University's Museum of Natural History in Berlin.

In a separate but related finding, Malvina Lak of the University of Rennes in France recently found 356 prehistoric creepy crawlies -- including wasps, flies, ants and spiders -- trapped in 100-million-year-old amber excavated from a different site in southwestern France.

Both teams used a sophisticated X-ray technique called synchronotron holotomography to "see" inside the hunks of ancient amber.

"Amber fossils are characterized by an exceptional quality of preservation that allows a detailed observation of all tiny structures," Perrichot and his colleagues wrote.

When X-rayed, the amber chunk with the seven feathers, now housed at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, revealed the feathers were lying side by side and "very probably originate from a single individual."

The feathers show what the scientists describe as an "intermediate and critical stage in the incremental evolution of feathers, which has been predicted by developmental theories but hitherto undocumented by evidence from both the recent and the fossil records."

The first feathers, it is thought, consisted of a base shaft securing many loose barbs, sort of like strands of hair tied together at one end. Those feathers may have been followed evolutionarily by an intermediate stage, represented by the feathers found in the ancient amber.

The seven feathers "have a structure unknown in bird feathers," but they also have a flattened shaft, which the researchers say is a "prerequisite for using them to fly."

Feather impressions found in other fossils of the dromaeosaur Sinornithosaurus and a still unnamed Chinese theropod had a similar structure.

Kevin Padian, a professor in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of California at Berkeley and a curator at the university's Museum of Paleontology, doesn't rule out that the feathers could have belonged to a dinosaur, but he told Discovery News "their structure does not allow us to conclusively determine the source."

While ancient amber provides a window into ancient life, it's an incomplete one, said Lak. Fossils of dinosaurs, birds and other large creatures will probably never be found in such a way, she noted, simply because they can "escape from the resin before becoming trapped."

Crescent Moon Alert

10:25am 04/08/2008

On Tuesday evening, April 8th, a 12% crescent Moon moves into conjunction with the Pleiades. "Into conjunction" is astronomy jargon for "side-by-side." The Moon will be so close to the Pleiades that, to the naked eye, they seem to touch, but that is impossible because the Pleiades are 400 light years away.

Also known as the Seven Sisters, the Pleiades are a cluster of young stars. The brightest seven of these blue-white beauties form a little dipper shape as wide about as the Moon (0.5 ^o). In spite of their great distance, the Pleiades are faintly visible to the naked eye even from urban areas.

Right: A deep-sky exposure of the Pleiades star cluster by amateur astronomer Robert Gendler. [More]

On April 8th, the Moon will lead you directly to the Pleiades. Binoculars are recommended: scan around the Moon and you will find not just seven but dozens of sparkling stars, some of them winking in and out behind the mountainous lunar limb. The Moon itself may take your breath away as you sweep your optics across the cratered Earthlit landscape.

As on previous evenings, the best time to look is shortly after sundown, facing west: sky map. The crescent Moon, Earthshine and a star cluster in the same field of view--it doesn't get much better than that.