June 30, 2008
Category: Earth Science
This summer may see first ice-free North Pole from PhysOrg.com (AP) -- There's a 50-50 chance that the North Pole will be ice-free this summer, which would be a first in recorded history, a leading ice scientist says. [...] Climate change causing significant shift...
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Posted by Greg Laden at 11:33 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Blogging
HEADLINE: ZIMMER DENIES DISCOVERY OF NEW ELEMENT The world must wait until Tuesday to find out details.......
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Posted by Greg Laden at 11:22 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Health
I am not entirely sure that the FDA has actually identified a tomato with Salmonella on it. The tomato hypothesis was based on recall data, which is notoriously iffy. Not totally useless, but iffy. The FDA, gutted by years of uncaring neglect by evil Republicans,...
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Posted by Greg Laden at 10:49 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A study just out in PLoS Medicine suggests that an increasing trend of delaying childbirth is associated wiht a rising rate of the use of cesarean delivery. The explanation appears to be impared uterine function. From the editor's summary: Though it was not studied here,...
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Posted by Greg Laden at 8:01 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A study released today in PLoS Medicine compares alcohol, tobacco, and illegal drug use across seventeen different countries participating in the World Health Organization World Mental Health Survey Initiative. Alcohol seems to be widely used in the studied countries, tobacco less so but fairly evenly...
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Posted by Greg Laden at 8:00 PM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
This is cute.... A number of right-wing website, such as that of the AFA(American Family Association) have been using auto-correction filters to automatically change words of various articles they post from various news organizations, such as the AP. For example, "the Democratic Party" becomes "the...
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Posted by Greg Laden at 6:41 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Environment
I find it hard to believe that the government has ignored the need for solar energy to the extent that it seems surprised that anyone wants to build new solar plants. From the New York Times: Faced with a surge in the number of proposed...
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Posted by Greg Laden at 6:39 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Blogging
Seed media group has just issued the following press relese: SCIENCEBLOGS ACHIEVES RECORD GROWTH NEW YORK (July 1) - ScienceBlogs (www.scienceblogs.com), the web's largest science community, announced today that traffic for the first six months of 2008 increased by more than 60% over the same...
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Posted by Greg Laden at 4:48 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Health
Do you drink bottled water or tap water? Water from a cooler (which is a big giant bottle) or from a filter built into a refrigerator or sink? Or do you Britta? (Yes, let me be the first to verb that noun .... ) Increasingly...
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Posted by Greg Laden at 4:25 PM • 28 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Blogospherics
Both have gone dark. Both are making announcements today at 5:00 EST. This could be big. A BloggoBlockbuster of some kind in the making. Maybe they have been having a secret affair all along and are moving to CA to get married!?!?!? Maybe they are...
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Posted by Greg Laden at 12:44 PM • 37 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Microsoft to stop selling Windows XP on Monday from PhysOrg.com (AP) -- Microsoft Corp. is scheduled to stop selling its Windows XP operating system to retailers and major computer makers Monday, despite protests from a slice of PC users who don't want to be...
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Posted by Greg Laden at 11:09 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Blogging
First of all, he has posted this enigmatic item on his blog: Some News ... ... at 5 today While you're waiting for 5:00 PM (eastern time? I'm guessing?) you can watch this several time: Carl Zimmer interviewing Paul Ehrlich....
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Posted by Greg Laden at 9:18 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Blogging
Archaeoporn archy Armchair Dissident Astrocreep's Science Astrocreeps Science A Very Remote Period Indeed A world gone mad Bad Astronomy Behavioral Ecology Blog Bench Marks Beyond Reasonable Doubt Biocurious Biological Ramblings Biology in Science Fiction Biosingularity Bitch, PhD. Blog Around the Clock blogfish blogSci...
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Posted by Greg Laden at 1:31 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 29, 2008
Category: Other
Benjamin Zander has two infectious passions: classical music, and helping us all realize our untapped love for it -- and by extension, our untapped love for all new possibilities, new experiences, new connections....
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Posted by Greg Laden at 10:29 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Natural Selection
Proto Stephen Jay Gould OMFSM you are not going to believe this. Over at the University of Chicago, someone is making a terrible fool of themselves. It is hard to say if this is Shankar Vedantam, the Washing Post Staff Writer, or Patterson Clark...
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Posted by Greg Laden at 4:58 PM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I find myself using a basic text editor more and more often. Even the relatively well behaved openoffice.or Writer had a tendency to do stuff I don't necessarily want to do with a simple text file, and certainly, something like Word is the work of...
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Posted by Greg Laden at 4:01 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Other
On this day in 1895, T. H. Huxley died at the age of 70. Huxley was known as "Darwin's Bulldog" because of his defense of Darwin's important work in evolution. He debated Samuel Wilberforce in 1860, and people have been debating creationists since. Huxley...
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Posted by Greg Laden at 12:16 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
10,000 Birds Aardvarchaeology A Blog Around The Clock A Blog from Hell Abnormal Interests About Darwin A Cat Nap A Constrained Vision Aetiology Afarensis A Few Things Ill Considered All-Too-Common Dissent Almost Diamonds A Load of Bright Analyze Everything Ancora Imparo Angry Toxicologist An Inconvenient...
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Posted by Greg Laden at 1:31 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 28, 2008
Our local paper, the Star Tribune is re-printing a New York Times story on the Philidelphia "Year of Evolution" .... Which is just fine. But the story has a comment section and it would sure be nice to have a few more pro-evolution comments on...
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Posted by Greg Laden at 11:59 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Technology
Nicholas Negroponte talks about how One Laptop per Child is doing, two years in. Speaking at the EG conference while the first XO laptops roll off the production line, he recaps the controversies and recommits to the goals of this far-reaching project....
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Posted by Greg Laden at 10:28 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Religion
according to this wackaloon: hat tip: atheist media...
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Posted by Greg Laden at 7:48 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Blogging
Living the Scientific Life Lounge of the Lab Lemming lunartalks Mechanically Separated Meat Mendel's Garden Migrations Mike the Mad Biologist Minnesota Atheists Missives from the frontal lobe Mixing Memory Mobile Science Education Molecule of the Day Muse In Vivo Mystery of Mysteries Mystery Rays from...
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Posted by Greg Laden at 7:34 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Science News
NEWLY IDENTIFIED ROLE FOR 'POWER PLANTS' IN HUMAN CELLS COULD LEAD TO TARGETED THERAPIES COLUMBUS, Ohio - Scientists have determined that human cells are able to shift important gene products into their own mitochondria, considered the power plants of cells. The finding could eventually lead...
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Posted by Greg Laden at 1:53 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
There is new information from an older idea (from about 2000) by Paul Sherman and colleagues. The idea underlying this research is simple: Symptoms of illnesses may be adaptive. Indeed, this may be true to the extent that we should not call certain things illnesses....
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Posted by Greg Laden at 12:25 PM • 26 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Events
Happy Second Blogoversary Janie!...
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Posted by Greg Laden at 10:41 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: iPod Touch
For your iPod Touch: The Phoenix Mars Mission thingie. Gives you two RSS feeds (one for news one for blog) and the weather report on mars. A widget displays the elapsed mission time on mars. I'd like to see this application give us more. Like...
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Posted by Greg Laden at 9:25 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 27, 2008
Category: Other
Singer-songwriter Nellie McKay performs the semi-serious song "Clonie" -- about creating the ultimate companion....
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Posted by Greg Laden at 10:28 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: primates
Perhaps judging a man by his cologne isn't as superficial as it seems. Duke University researchers, using sophisticated machinery to analyze hundreds of chemical components in a ringtailed lemur's distinctive scent, have found that individual males are not only advertising their fitness for fatherhood,...
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Posted by Greg Laden at 7:51 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Science News
How the Snake Got Its Vertebrae Snakes, fish, chickens, and humans all begin life in much the same way. Early in their transformation from an amorphous blob of cells into a fully developed animal, growing cells pinch off into a string of identical segments destined...
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Posted by Greg Laden at 6:26 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Carnivals
Four Stone Hearth, the Lard Edition is here, at Paddy K Swedish Extravaganza. Four Stone Hearth is a blog carnival covering all of anthropology. The home page for Four Stone Hearth is here.. I want to get you excited about this blog carnival, because I...
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Posted by Greg Laden at 5:24 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Health
According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) dog bites and respiratory illness are among the top concerns for travellers to china....
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Posted by Greg Laden at 4:03 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: iPod Touch
An x-ray I took of Julia's hand. Sorry, it's a little blurry. The main two functions of an iPod touch are: being an iPod (music, podcasts, movies, etc.) and giving you a pocket size web browser. There are several other functions as well, like...
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Posted by Greg Laden at 1:48 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Technology
Is this some kind of sick joke? Do you remember when Bill Gates retired from Microsoft? There was even a YouTube video about it: That was, like, six months ago. So why do we see this reported on the BBC web site:...
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Posted by Greg Laden at 12:46 PM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
to get is phone. He even brought some muscle. Some tough looking guy. He tried to claim the fish was his, of course. He was like "Yea, I had that in my pocket. I was gonna eat it later" and shit. But I didn't...
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Posted by Greg Laden at 12:20 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 26, 2008
... is certainly still in the future. But we have seen a step in that direction in a new paper, coming out this week in Science. This research applies intensive and extensive genomic analysis to the avian phylogenetic tree. The results are interesting. This paper...
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Posted by Greg Laden at 10:59 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Minnesota Atheists' "Atheists Talk" radio show Sunday, June 29, 2008, 9-10 a.m. Central Time In honor of Minneapolis Gay Pride, Wayne Besen of Truth Wins Out discusses "Exposing 'Ex-gay' Ministries" and Jane Bowman of Project 515 discusses "515 Minnesota Laws that Discriminate Against Gays." "Atheists...
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Posted by Greg Laden at 9:51 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Join Zuska and her commenters in a pile on regarding the Smithsonian Magazine's recent article on the archaeology of southern Africa. It's racist, it's sexist, and it's even anti-Neanderthal. (The article, not Zuska's post) Regarding the writing about the use of stone tool technology in...
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Posted by Greg Laden at 8:52 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Science News
Harvard has a new podcast called Harvard Medical Labcast, Science that's Changing your World. It's pretty good, and you can find it here. If you want the latest Linux podcast managing client, check this out....
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Posted by Greg Laden at 8:30 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Please have a look at the latest I and the Bird (Number 78) blog carnival, located HERE at It's Just Me. Also, PLoS has published a number of avian biology papers lately, all of which I want to read and eventually will (at least some...
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Posted by Greg Laden at 2:41 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
This is not a time to be profound. This is a time to rehydrate and make some more coffee. And search around for stuff that fell out of pockets....
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Posted by Greg Laden at 9:55 AM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Carnivals
The Tangled Bank # 108 is HERE at Wheat-Dogg's World....
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Posted by Greg Laden at 4:10 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 25, 2008
Category: Science News
NASA warming scientist: 'This is the last chance' from PhysOrg.com (AP) -- Exactly 20 years after warning America about global warming, a top NASA scientist said the situation has gotten so bad that the world's only hope is drastic action. [...] Some searchers still...
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Posted by Greg Laden at 5:21 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks