environment
aardvarchaeology | March 10, 2012Above-ground atomic explosions and reactor leaks during the past century have produced a pretty funny atmosphere full of exotic heavy isotopes. In radiocarbon calibration this error source is called "bomb radiocarbon". A few years ago it was suggested that a person's age might be determined through looking at the amount of various isotopes in some bodily tissue (was it the eye's lens?) and cross-referencing it with the historic data on spikes and troughs in the abundance of various isotopes.
Now the always readworthy Chris Catling tells the readers of Current Archaeology #265 (April) of…
esiegel | March 7, 2012"Be careful. People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things. New things...well, new things aren't what they expect. They like to know that, say, a dog will bite a man. That is what dogs do. They don't want to know that man bites a dog, because the world is not supposed to happen like that. In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds...Not news but olds, telling people that what they think they already know is true." -Terry Pratchett
We all like to think that our opinions are the result of…
jtoney | March 3, 2012
This undersea video looks like science fiction showing an icy finger of death killing everything in its path, but is a stunning portrayal of freezing point depression - with narrative by the inimitable Alec Baldwin of "30 Rock" fame on NBC.
A brinicle, or brine icicle, plunges toward the Antarctic seabed from the ice shelf above, killing everything in its path. This had never been filmed before Frozen Planet, premiering March 18 on Discovery Channel.
Here's a brief description of what's going on:
As the seawater freezes and salt is forced out of the pure ice crystal lattice, the…
jtoney | February 23, 2012
Can global warming (weirding) lead to smaller mammals?
This, hot off the press in tomorrow's issue of Science:
Body size plays a critical role in mammalian ecology and physiology. Previous research has shown that many mammals became smaller during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), but the timing and magnitude of that change relative to climate change have been unclear. A high-resolution record of continental climate and equid body size change shows a directional size decrease of ~30% over the first ~130,000 years of the PETM, followed by a ~76% increase in the recovery phase of…
pharyngula | February 21, 2012Last week, I gave a talk at UNLV titled "A counter-revolutionary history of evo devo", and I'm afraid I was a little bit heretical. I criticized my favorite discipline. I felt guilty the whole time, but I think it's a good idea to occasionally step back and think about where we're going and where we should be going. It's also part of some rethinking I've been doing lately about a more appropriate kind of research I could be doing at my institution, and what I want to be doing in the next ten years. And yes, I want to be doing evo devo, so even though I'm bringing up what I see as shortcomings…
pharyngula | February 21, 2012I don't get it. First there was Climategate, in which hackers illegally broke into a server at the University of East Anglia and stole a pile of emails from climate researchers. The denialists seemed to be fine with that, and quote-mined the heck out of the documents to find damning statements, lying and claiming that they showed that the scientists faked their data (they did no such thing, of course). All the sturm and drang at that time was over the contents of the emails, not the illegal method of their acquisition.
Now the shoe is on the other foot. The Heartland Institute, a right-wing…
pharyngula | January 26, 2012We're having a visit today from Shawn Lawrence Otto, a fellow who has been fighting against the un-American war on science on the web and in a book, Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America. He's speaking on campus tonight at 7:30 Central, in the HFA Recital Hall — I urge local community members to show up, he has important things to say about education and climate change — and that talk is going to be streamed live, so all you distant strangers can also watch the show.
It was a little strange, though, to get messages from the university administration telling me I'm expected…
pharyngula | January 23, 2012Every time I mention the fact of global climate change, the denialists start sending me furious emails. (By the way, I know that AGW is "anthropogenic global warming"; what is CAGW?)
I think we can safely say that AGW believers are clinically psychotic
The psychosis of the CAGW cult is total. Rational thought is not possible. It's like watching a freak show from the asylum.
Not ONLY must you never be near the reins of government, you should never come out of your padded room.
Right. So all the scientists who are citing the evidence and presenting the logic of greenhouse gases are the…
sastyk | January 23, 2012This is a revised version of a post that appeared three years ago, towards the start of the recession. It seems just as relevant, maybe more relevant, now.
A while back there was a study that suggested that it is more expensive to be poor in the US in some ways, than it is to be rich. And to anyone who has actually been poor, this probably made perfect sense. Among the ways that being poor cost you money:
1. Your infrastructure is limited, so you are limited to what fits in your infrastructure - for example, you don't have a car, so you can only shop at the convenience stores or those on…
pharyngula | January 22, 2012The requirements to be a TV weather presenter are fairly slack: an undergraduate degree with some training in meteorology is preferred, but not required, and the main skills seem to be looking presentable with nice hair, being able to dance with a green screen, and being glib and cheerful. So I guess it's not surprising that the "scientists" leading the charge against global warming are climate-denier TV weathermen. That link takes you to a long list of quotes from various television weather personalities — including a couple from Minneapolis — who all deny reality and use their position as…
jtoney | January 19, 2012
A dung beetle performing a dance on top of its dung ball. The little jig apparently helps the pea-brained beetles navigate.
CREDIT: Emily Baird; Baird E, Byrne MJ, Smolka J, Warrant EJ, Dacke M / PLoS ONE
Do you have a favorite animal? Chemist Sir Harold Kroto does. It is the dung beetle. Why?
Because it is:
an insect that has evolved to eat animal excrement. "If there were no dung beetles, we'd be 80 feet deep in elephant crap!"
The dung beetle plays an essential role in recycling organic matter for a "greener" sustainable environment. Dung beetles, it turns out, also do some dirty…
jtoney | January 18, 2012
Can a plant send tweets for water? It is possible, using a "do your own biology" approach.
From Mashable:
From SparkFun:
Botanicalls Kits let plants reach out for human help! They offer a connection to your leafy pal via online Twitter status updates to your mobile phone. When your plant needs water, it will post to let you know, and send its thanks when you show it love. It comes as a kit so that you can hone your soldering skills (or teach someone else) while you build a line of communication between you and your houseplant!
This kit comes with everything you need to get your plant…
pharyngula | January 11, 2012I don't know about where you are, but this has been a strange winter here in Minnesota. We've had two snow "storms" so far, that did little more than dust the place with snow that melted away in these bizarrely odd warm days we've had. It's cold, windy, and snowing lightly today, but otherwise, this was the first Christmas of Color I've experienced since moving to Minnesota.
There's a meteorological explanation, though, and it's not global warming. It's a La Nina year, and the Arctic Oscillation and the North Atlantic Oscillation have been coincidentally conspiring to allow air to flow across…
jtoney | January 10, 2012
Mac Users Guide Flickr Photostream
As a technophile, I do love my iPhone and iPod as portable portals to new media, the web and entertainment. But everything comes at a price. I was reminded of this, starkly, by a brilliant commentary by Mike Daisy, featured recently on NPR's This American Life. That sausage may be delicious, but few of us want to be reminded of how it came to be. So it goes for iPhones, even for something as mundane as to how their screens are cleaned in the factory.
From This American Life broadcast, "Mr. Daisy and The Apple Factory:"
Mike Daisey performs an excerpt…
jdupuis | January 6, 2012Another list for your reading, gift-giving and collection development pleasure.
Every year for the last bunch of years I've been linking to and posting about all the "year's best sciencey books" lists that appear in various media outlets and shining a bit of light on the best of the year.
All the previous 2011 lists are here.
This post includes the following: Mother Nature Network: Best green and environmental books of 2011.
The Best Science and Nature Writing of 2011 edited by Mary Roach
Once and Future Giants: What Ice Age Extinctions Tell Us About the Fate of Earth's Largest Mammals by…
pharyngula | December 12, 2011He's not a very exciting speaker, but he does present the compelling evidence well.
(Also on FtB)
pharyngula | December 10, 2011I have really been looking forward to seeing David Attenborough's latest, Frozen Planet, here in the US. I've seen brief snippets of the show on youtube, and like all of these big BBC nature productions, I'm sure it's stunning. And then I hear that the Discovery Channel has bought the rights! Hooray!
But wait, experience cautions us. Remember when American television replaced Attenborough's narration with Sigourney Weaver? And <shudder> Oprah Winfrey? ANd when the Oprah version dropped the references to evolution? What kind of insane butchery would they perpetrate this time around?
Well…
esiegel | December 9, 2011"Life is not a miracle. It is a natural phenomenon, and can be expected to appear whenever there is a planet whose conditions duplicate those of the Earth."
-Harold Urey
One of the most exciting investigations going on right now in space is NASA's Kepler Mission, which is on the hunt for planets beyond our Solar System!
Image credit: Dana Berry / NASA / Kepler Mission.
From high above the Earth's atmosphere in outer space, Kepler points at a small region of our sky, sensitive to a remarkable 150,000 stars within our galaxy!
Image credit: NASA / Kepler, retrieved from the Astronomical…
esiegel | December 5, 2011"Every time you look up at the sky, every one of those points of light is a reminder that fusion power is extractable from hydrogen and other light elements, and it is an everyday reality throughout the Milky Way Galaxy." -Carl Sagan
(This post is coauthored by Dr. Peter Thieberger, Senior Physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory.)
A cheap, clean, efficient and virtually limitless source of energy would be just what our world needs right about now. The cheap sources -- coal, oil, and gas -- are dirty, destructive, and limited, while the clean sources -- wind and solar -- are expensive and…
esiegel | November 25, 2011"Between cold fusion and respectable science there is virtually no communication at all. ...because the Cold-Fusioners see themselves as a community under siege, there is little internal criticism. Experiments and theories tend to be accepted at face value, for fear of providing even more fuel for external critics, if anyone outside the group was bothering to listen. In these circumstances, crackpots flourish, making matters worse for those who believe that there is serious science going on here." -David Goodstein
I'm going to tell you a story that starts back in 1770, before not only the…