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Wesley Dodson
Attention to old Combined feed users
Posted by Wesley Dodson on February 14, 2013 If you use the old Combined or Select feeds, you might notice they’re broken. Please use our new sitewide feed url: http://scienceblogs.com/feed/. You can also subscribe to channel feeds such as http://scienceblogs.com/channel/brain-and-behavior/feed/. But really you should just hang out at Last 24 hrs and keep clicking on things. http://scienceblogs.com/last-24-hours/.
Messing With No. 2
Posted by Wesley Dodson on February 8, 2013 It’s not often that medical science seems nuttier than its alternative. On Respectful Insolence, Orac dismisses the enema as a cure for all ills, writing that the “liver, colon, and kidneys” are specialized to remove toxins, and you won’t “become chronically ill if you don’t shoot water up your butt periodically to wash the poop…
Outmaneuvering Influenza
Posted by Wesley Dodson on January 18, 2013 Flu season is gearing up in the northern hemisphere, and this year’s strains appear more virulent than usual. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control declared an epidemic on January 11; the CDC estimates that between 3,000 and 49,000 people die from influenza or its complications every year. By comparison, the infamous flu…
Double Negative Kelvin
Posted by Wesley Dodson on January 14, 2013 Reports that researchers elicited a temperature “lower than absolute zero” might make one question the meaning of the word absolute. On Built on Facts, Matt Springer writes “temperature is a relationship between energy and entropy, and you can do some weird things to entropy and energy and get the formal definition of temperature to come…
No Mistaking Astronomical Objects
Posted by Wesley Dodson on January 9, 2013 On Starts With a Bang, Ethan Siegel makes headway on his tour of “110 spectacular deep-sky objects” first cataloged by Charles Messier in 1758. Before powerful telescopes were developed, the heavens consisted of the sun, moon, stars, a few bright planets, and the rare passing comet. Comets were actively sought by men like Messier, who…
Looking Out for Life
Posted by Wesley Dodson on December 7, 2012 Although Curiosity has not found evidence of life on Mars, NASA announced yesterday that its suite of dirt analyzers works perfectly. Meanwhile new discoveries on Earth and the planet Mercury continue to imply the possibility of extraterrestrial life. On ERV, Abbie Smith marvels at the extremophile bacteria that have been locked under an Antarctic ice…
The Melting Snowball Effect
Posted by Wesley Dodson on December 4, 2012 A new look at twenty years worth of research shows that polar ice is in fact melting, and raising sea levels, faster than anticipated. Greg Laden writes “Greenland is losing ice about 500% faster now than it was in the early 1990s, while Antarctica is losing ice at about the same rate.” Altogether, ice melt…
Implausible Cause
Posted by Wesley Dodson on November 30, 2012 On Pharyngula, PZ Myers deconstructs the hypothesis of two physicists who show an undue enthusiasm for biology. They claim cancer is caused by cells regressing from their modern, multicellular functionality to a “proto-metazoan” lifestyle of largely uncoordinated growth. Myers says their is no plausible avenue for such atavism, writing “you can’t take one of your…
Drifted Apart, Crammed Together
Posted by Wesley Dodson on November 26, 2012 As organisms spread into new habitats, they diverge and differentiate to best adapt to their surroundings. But when separated species exploit similar niches, their body plans begin to converge, and they end up looking a lot like each other. Such is the case with Beaked Sea Snakes, uber-venomous consumers of spiny catfish and blowfish, long…
Time to Act on Climate Change
Posted by Wesley Dodson on November 19, 2012 Although the science is getting cold, the conversation about climate change was warmed over by President Obama on Thursday. On Thoughts from Kansas, Josh Rosenau says “This is a welcome change from the complete silence of the last few years, but falls well short of what the American people and the world deserve.” Rosenau argues…
