February 19, 2012
I just got this email. I have no way of telling if it is authentic:
February 18, 2012
By e-mail to: greg@gregladen.com
By Federal Express to:
Mr. Greg T. Laden
Greg Laden's Blog
44788 265th Lane
Aitkin, MN 56431-4807
Re: Stolen and Faked Heartland Documents
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen…
February 19, 2012
Kentucky's Creation Museum is in contention for listing as one of the "top ten" places to bring your child under 15 years of age on this travel and tourism site.
Feel free to go and vote your preference! Also, I
I think you can't vote something down, but you can vote something up. You know what…
February 17, 2012
If you know only a little bit about Charles Darwin, you know that he figured out Evolution via his study of the finches (and other birds) of the Galapagos. If you know a bit more than that about Darwin, you know that he totally messed up his collection of birds from the Galapagos Islands, and didn'…
February 17, 2012
We're taking a break from live recording this week. On the podcast, we're talking science and storytelling. Guest host Marie-Claire Shanahan speaks to science journalist and author Deborah Blum about her national bestseller The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz…
February 15, 2012
Mice with a certain laboratory variant of Alzheimer's disease have been shown to get much better with the use of an existing pharmaceutical. This is only in mice, only with a certain model of the disease, and is only one study, so we must be very cautious, but the results are on the face rather…
February 15, 2012
Anti-science and creationist rhetoric, coming from organizations like the Discovery Institute, often paints Darwin as handmaiden to the Nazis and founder of racist biology. The eugenics movement of the early twentieth century is uncritically melded with Darwin's writings that touched on race, and…
February 15, 2012
Years ago, my friend Rick Bribiescas and I got into a friendly debate about the cause of muscle atrophy and bone loss during space flight. We both felt that a homeostatic mechanism was thrown out of whack by the circumstances of weightlessness. One of us suggested that zero gravity caused to lose…
February 15, 2012
You could read hundreds of pages of Darwin's work and easily come to the conclusion that he was a geologist. But a different selection of readings would convince you he was a biologist. In truth, he was neither and both. I'm giving a talk this weekend for the Humanists of Minnesota that will…
February 15, 2012
It will take some time before the meaning of HeartlandGate is realized. The released confidential documents are not extensive, but they are current, mainly related to a meeting that happened less than a month before their release. They don't tell us anything that we didn't suspect, but they give…
February 14, 2012
The following is a subset of the LinuxQuestionsDotOrg's Members' Choice Awards:
Desktop Distribution of the Year - Ubuntu (21.83%)
Server Distribution of the Year - Debian (31.15%)
Mobile Distribution of the Year - Android (69.43%)
Database of the Year - MySQL (49.54%)
NoSQL Database of the Year -…
February 14, 2012
This seems to be fairly big news. The Heartland Institute is a conservative and libertarian "think" tank that cut its teeth on denying the dangers of cigarette smoking back in the 1990s. These days the Heartland Institute seems to be focused on Anthropogenic Climate Change Denialism and Science…
February 14, 2012
We know that Darwin was a biologist, and in many ways he was the first prominent modern biologist. But many people do not realize that he was also a geologist. Really, he was mainly a geologist on the day he stepped foot on The Beagle for his famous five year tour. This is especially true if we…
February 12, 2012
All of my Bird Book Reviews are Here, and some of the reviews include broader discussions that go beyond the book, so do browse through them.
Feeding Birds:
Should you even be feeding the birds to begin with?
Birders get annoyed at squirrels for obvious reasons. But you can be happier about the…
February 12, 2012
This is interesting:
February 12, 2012
Charles Darwin's research and writing on Evolution and related topics is still very much alive today, modified and expanded on but only in a few details replaced. Here is a selection of writing about Darwin and his work to be found on this blog:
Darwin and his Formative Fieldwork
2008-02-13 Charles…
February 11, 2012
Shockingly, age 48. Reports are vague.
Here's some info.
February 11, 2012
This is a lion:
Click the picture for a larger version of the photograph. Photo by Greg Laden.
And here are selected blog posts about lions and related beasts:
Amboseli Lions May Go Extinct
The Evolution of Cats: Sabertooth vs. Regular
Tarangire Lions
The Lion That Ate the Earthwatcher
Biker and…
February 10, 2012
It's alive!!!!! And, it's wallboard.
February 10, 2012
From Kristin Montalbano:
Mark Twain once said, the Mississippi River is a "wonderful book with a new story to tell every day." Well, Nat Geo WILD spent an entire year exploring the length of North America's longest and greatest waterway in Wild Mississippi and we can tell you the man was NOT…
February 10, 2012
According to Rick Santorum, it is.
Strange.
Brad Johnson has context and analysis here.
I think Rick Santorum is trying to destroy America.
February 10, 2012
A team of researchers based in Namibia, South Africa, Australia and the United Kingdom now report fossils from a Namibian deposit that seem to be animals and apparently date to about 760 million years ago. This extends the known time span of animals on the planet by about 17 percent....
Read more
February 9, 2012
A new multi-part special, Wild Mississippi will be first aired on February 12 at 6 Central on National Geographic Wild. I can't watch this when it is on because I don't get the channel on my TV, but I copped a review copy and have enjoyed it quite a bit.
Here's the description of the first…
February 9, 2012
When I was a kid, I saw a photograph in an old Life magazine of a man standing on the ice somewhere in the Arctic, and a killer whale breaking trough the ice, much of the whale's body out of the water, a very short distance from the man. The whale was so close to the man that it was hard to say if…
February 9, 2012
There is a learning technique pioneered in language studies by Pimsleur which makes sense: You learn a word (or some other thing) and over time forget it, and the "forgetting curve" is steep. But, if you re-encounter that same information while the curve is descending you learn it again and the…
February 9, 2012
My State is better than your state! (Or Province or District.)
The No Child Left Behind Law, for better or worse, is a Federal program to make states to a better job in education. It is a fairly specific plan. But many states came up with their own plans which are different, yet in some cases,…
February 8, 2012
The Russian probe destine for the Mars system never made it out of Earth Orbit and recently crashed back into Planet Earth. Why did the rocket ship fail? There has apparently been a lot of obfuscation of what caused this disaster, but now there is some better information. It may have been caused…
February 8, 2012
... well, not really, but ...
No matter how interesting the big expensive science NASA does is, or how important the work is to understanding our planet and solar system or figuring out important problems, nothing is as cool as seeing your own house on a satellite photograph, as it were:
The High…
February 8, 2012
The following is a short version of the litany of global warming denialists' current rhetoric:
"Current pause in global warming"
"lack of global warming for well over 10 years now."
"There is no credible (statistically significant) data that says global warming is occurring"
"fifteen years of…
February 8, 2012
Rumors have been in the air for days, but we now think it confirmed that Russian Scientsts have penetrated the liquid part of Antarctica's Lake Vostok. The lake has been frozen over for something like 20 million years. Certainly there was life in it at the time. Is any of it still there? Has…
