environment
esiegel | June 27, 2011"Doubt, indulged and cherished, is in danger of becoming denial; but if honest, and bent on thorough investigation, it may soon lead to full establishment of the truth." -Ambrose Bierce
About a week and a half ago, I wrote an article called The Power of Theory In Science, where I mentioned the Big Bang, Evolution, and Global Warming as some of the leading scientific theories describing a variety of natural phenomena.
Image credit: Rhys Taylor, Cardiff University.
And while no one took issue with my assertion that the Big Bang and Evolution were the best scientific theories describing (…
sciencepunk | June 23, 2011Artist Mike Bodge has unveiled a nifty project to chart the colour of the sky above New York City in real time. A camera installed in his office snaps a picture of the skyline every five minutes, and analyses the image to calculate its average colour. The varying shades of blue, grey, orange and black are posted online in a never-ending mosaic.
Mike says:
Many of my projects tend to be about New York City, as it's a place i'm constantly inspired by. I have a great view at my office overlooking the East Village neighborhood and I've done time lapses and other things but none really…
sciencepunk | June 23, 2011From the Journal of Things Kurt Vonnegut Warned Us About, Japanese scientists have discovered a way to make water freeze at room temperature.
Image CC Nicholas Bufford
The team of scientists were investigating the properties of water molecules wrapped in single-atom thick carbon nanotubes. The nanoconfined water displayed several unusual properties. Most striking was that as the width of the carbon nanotube decreased, the melting point of the water trapped inside rose. These "tubule ices" are unlike any seen in bulk water, and can even occur at room temperatures.
Thankfully, there's no…
pharyngula | June 21, 2011I was sent this cartoon by Mia. Mom really doesn't love us any more than anything else.
Environmentalism is actually an act of self-defense.
(via Humon)
jtoney | June 20, 2011Source: Sheep purple Flickr Photostream.
Big Ag and antibiotics are becoming a lightning rod for a culture war of facts. Does agricultural use of antibiotics contribute to their diminishing effectiveness in people?
Liz Wagstrom, Chief Veterinarian of the National Pork Producers Council says no. In in a Letter to the Editor in The New York Times, she writes:
In fact, numerous peer-reviewed risk assessments show virtually no risk to humans from antibiotic use in animals.
...
The risk to public health from overuse or misuse of antibiotics comes overwhelmingly from human medicine, not…
pharyngula | June 18, 2011The Minnesota Senate's loudest voice against climate change, it's chief denialist, is a Republican (of course) named Michael Jungbauer.
Sen. Jungbauer is fond of making pronouncements from on high regarding the scientific weakness of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He takes positions in direct opposition to 98 percent of published and peer-reviewed climate, atmospheric scientists and glaciologists. But the water and sewer treatment specialist by day is, apparently, quite knowledgeable on all manner of science. It certainly appears to be. He uses big words…
pharyngula | June 16, 2011It's a new blog from the region I've always felt was home, so I have to mention it.
Also, the top entry there is about water, something always on the minds of Pacific Northwesterners, so I have to tie it into a weird story from Portland: a man was seen peeing in one of their reservoirs, so they're draining it completely at a cost of $35,000. Seriously? That's just silly squeamishness. Fish and amphibians and passing birds and insects and mammals are busy peeing in our water supply all the time; insects are dying and falling into the reservoirs and rotting in them. And let's not forget the…
esiegel | June 16, 2011"He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast." -Leonardo Da Vinci
It's often lonely, these days, as a theorist. As soon as most people hear the word theory, in fact, they start thinking about something like this:
Image credit: F. Steiger.
But if you're scientifically minded, you know just how powerful your theory is. Because your theory - if it's any good - allows you to not only explain what you've already seen, but allows you to predict something new, which you can then go look for.
By the early…
jtoney | June 15, 2011Scientists have evidence that global warming may have occurred more than 65 million years ago. How does this warming compare to modern data?
In this fascinating report, they state: {my emphasis in bold.}
The early part of the Cenozoic era, which started around 65.5 million years ago witnessed a series of transient global warming events called hyperthermals. The most severe of these was the PETM at the Paleocene-Eocene boundary, around 56 million years ago. Over a period of around 20,000 years, a mere blink of the eye in geological terms, ocean temperatures rose globally by approximately 5°…
pharyngula | June 14, 2011Once again, politicians are going on little, petty crusades to help the government economize, and as usual, they go for cheap shots that do nothing, other than to reveal their screwed up priorities. Here's Joe Biden, letting us know where the real problems lie.
Did you know that the government spends millions to maintain buildings that have sat vacant for years? Or that your tax dollars pay to needlessly ship copies of the Federal Register to thousands of government offices across the country even though the same information is available online?
And I bet you didn't know that your tax…
jtoney | June 10, 2011Yes, I know that thousands of bloggers have been mining through the more than 24,000 emails released today from Sarah Palin's time as Governor of Alaska. I could not resist some data mining myself.
Here's my pick, for now:
If you would like to explore the direct source - not through major news media - here it is, from Crivella West, a firm that funded the enormous efforts of digitizing all of these documents from hard copies. Click here.
Note that you will find a number of her emails that include major portions blanked out, marked as "redacted."
I have highlighted issues of environmental…
jtoney | June 6, 2011Source.
Sperm counts declining due to environment and chemical hazards is, seemingly, commonplace knowledge. But a startling study just published in the journal Epidemiology debunks the concept.
Highlighted in The Science Times of The New York Times {June 7 edition}:
But now 15 years of data from 18-year-old Danish men taking their military physicals show no decline in sperm counts, after all. The idea that sperm counts were plummeting began with an alarming paper published in 1992 by a group of Danish researchers. Sperm counts, they reported, declined by 50 percent worldwide from 1938 to…
mikethemadbiologist | June 6, 2011It would be nice if educational 'reformers' took a break from busting teachers unions to deal with the infiltration of pseudo-scientific falsehoods into the science curriculum:
...the most brazen example is buried in the middle of the story: a coal-industry produced propaganda film for kids selling the lie that the atmosphere needs more greenhouse gas:
...the Coal Education Development and Resources foundation, known as CEDAR, offers small grants to teachers whose lessons dovetail with its industry-driven mission...
...CEDAR also offers a video to teachers called "The Greening of Planet Earth…
mikethemadbiologist | June 5, 2011Last week, James Q. Wilson, writing in The Wall Street Journal, described several of the factors that have led to a sustained decrease in crime. One reason is increased incarceration:
One obvious answer is that many more people are in prison than in the past. Experts differ on the size of the effect, but I think that William Spelman and Steven Levitt have it about right in believing that greater incarceration can explain about one-quarter or more of the crime decline. Yes, many thoughtful observers think that we put too many offenders in prison for too long. For some criminals, such as low-…
jtoney | June 4, 2011"An explosive power the size of a Hiroshima bomb - once a week."
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Like most Americans, I would love to be able to drive without having to fill up with increasingly expensive gas - costly not only to our wallets, but to the environment and to geopolitics. Why not switch to a hybrid vehicle or even better, an electrical vehicle? Wouldn't an electrical vehicle offer a better, cleaner approach?
I imagine parking my new electrical vehicle in the garage, plugging it in overnight to recharge for a new day, unfettered by gas and oil, sleeping soundly. If only it could be so…
milhayser | May 26, 2011
Time goes on and turns our attention, but radioactive isotopes take a long time to decay. On Greg Laden's Blog, Analiese Miller and Greg update us on the nuclear crisis in Japan. Although the dangers faced at the Fukushima power plant have diminished, the long term consequences have just begun. Greg writes "it has been a while since extensive fission has occurred in the leaking reactor" and "there is real progress in hooking up the plants to outside power sources." Meanwhile, Ana's extensive news feed documents irradiated produce, neglected and euthanized livestock, and a widened evacuation…
esiegel | May 24, 2011"If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens... Where Is Everybody?" -Stephen Webb
As egocentric as we are, we know that not only are we but one planet of many orbiting our Sun, but that when we look up in the heavens, every point of light we see is another chance -- another opportunity -- for planets, for life, and even for intelligence.
Image credit: Ned Wright, COBE / DIRBE, and NASA.
With hundreds of billions of stars (visible here in infrared wavelengths) in our galaxy alone, we have many, many chances for life to have evolved similarly to how it did here on Earth. With hundreds of billions…
jtoney | May 19, 2011
Figure 1. Miniaturized radio transmitters attached to bumblebees.
(a) Transmitter attachment on a Bombus terrestris individual kept in a glass tube with opened gauze where the transmitter is fixed with superglue. (b) Nectar collecting individual of Bombus terrestris on Phacelia flower having a transmitter attached. (c) Bombus terrestris individual with attached transmitter, foraging on red clover (Trifoliumpratense).
Can you imagine being able to track a single bumblebee over the course of a day? German and Danish scientists accomplished this impressive feat. So what do those bees do all…
jtoney | May 15, 2011
Hilary Clinton famously said in 1992:
I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession which I entered before my husband was in public life.
Ironically, daily domestic necessities such as baking and cooking have taken on a different twist in a recent partnership between Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and Academy Award winning actor Julia Roberts.
The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves' mission, led by the United Nations Foundation, is:
...is a new public-private partnership to save lives, improve livelihoods,…
mikethemadbiologist | May 6, 2011There's a recent study that examines the effect of pollution on educational performance in Michigan. Basically, the authors found that test scores were significantly lower for the two 'most polluted' quintiles of schools (i.e., the worst forty percent), even after controlling for income, school absence, school location, and other factors.
But there's something else obvious that jumps out at you. In the appendix, tables 2 and 3 examine the effects of a bunch of different variables on math and English NAEP scores (the NAEP is widely considered to be the gold standard for testing student…