August 19, 2011
I have written before of insects in the Ituri Forest. (Oh, and here too.) When it comes up that I've spent time there, certain questions often come up, and one of them is: "Did you eat bugs."
Every one has seen those National Geographic specials where some natives somewhere are eating insects,…
August 19, 2011
Until I was sent this paper, I had no idea that Kangaroo DNA had not been sequenced before. How did we even know they had DNA?!?!
This is the fourth Marsupial genome, after the Tasmanian Devil and and some other non-Australian marsupial, to be sequenced. According to Professor Marilyn Renfree of…
August 18, 2011
that has wandered into their camp if they don't know anything about it a priori is ... according to what they told me when that happened once ... is ...
Many, though certainly not all, insects are linked to important things in life. This is true of many things that are not insects as well. For…
August 18, 2011
I knew a couple who had spent a lot of time in the Congo in the 1950s. He was doing primatology, and she was the wife of a primatologist. And when she spoke of the Congo or Uganda, where they spent most of the time, she always said two things that always put me off a little. First, she would…
August 18, 2011
See Case Study: How a notorious spammer was brought down via Twitter for a rundown on the recent events related to Dennis Markuze a.k.a. Dave Mabus.
I still don't agree that it was Twitter that brought Mabus down. Yes, it was the medium, and a very powerful one at that, but it was carrying a…
August 18, 2011
Recently, a paper came out with research indicating that Archaeopteryx, the famous feathered fossil, may not be on the bird lineage after all. This paper was discussed briefly in the blogosphere, but I was fairly unsatisfied with the level of treatment it received. The research is a little…
August 18, 2011
Plymouth, Minnesota plays a fairly important role in my life. It is a big suburb to the west of Minneapolis, a mainly liberal or progressive middle class bedroom community linked to first ring extra-urban commercial development based mainly on corn. Kellogs, Cargill, Mosaic, other companies that…
August 17, 2011
"Train up a child in the way that he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it."
-Proverbs 22:6
This is a report of a Fundamentalist Christian couple who beat thier 7 year old child to death as part of the practice of corporal punishment to which they subscribed as per instructions…
August 15, 2011
I've known very few real Iowans. I know people who live there now but are from the Twin Cities, but I've only met a handful of native Iowans. One of them is a dear friend, most are only vague acquaintances. Six of them were landlubbing pirates of no value to humanity whatsoever.1 But I'm sure…
August 14, 2011
Several strange creatures including a psychedelic octopus have been found in frigid waters off Antarctica in one of the world's most pristine marine environments.
Others resembled corals and shrimps. At least 30 appear to be new to science, said Julian Gutt, chief scientist of an expedition that…
August 14, 2011
Dennis Markuze aka David Mabus on a Television News Story ... the story is inaccurate in a number of minor ways that obscures an interesting truth, but it is a moment in time worth savoring:
The story is inaccurate in the following ways:
There has not been a "recent escalation" of threats. The…
August 12, 2011
Things at Fukushima are about as interesting as they've ever been. We want to talk about specific problems at the reactor site, with radioactive material, cooling systems, etc. but first a few words about things happening more broadly, beginning with the largest and work towards the smallest scale…
August 11, 2011
After a journey of almost three years, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has reached the Red Planet's Endeavour crater to study rocks never seen before.
On Aug. 9, the golf cart-sized rover relayed its arrival at a location named Spirit Point on the crater's rim. Opportunity drove…
August 11, 2011
3D Image of Vesta's Equatorial Region
This anaglyph image of Vesta's equator was put together from two clear filter images, taken on July 24, 2011 by the framing camera instrument aboard NASA's Dawn spacecraft. The anaglyph image shows hills, troughs, ridges and steep craters. The framing camera…
August 11, 2011
People who watch birds identify them, and that process is integral to what makes birding interesting. But the best practices for identifying birds appear on the face of it to conflict with evolutionary concepts of birds, and this can lead to both sloppy thinking and missed opportunities
People who…
August 11, 2011
Can a person be scientifically literate without accepting the concepts of evolution and the big bang? To many scientists and educators, the answer to that question is an unqualified "no." But the National Science Board--the governing body of the National Science Foundation (NSF)--isn't sure that…
August 11, 2011
Did we miss an opportunity over the last few months? For several months, since Last April, SETI has been in hibernation, not taking calls from aliens living in other worlds with radio sets. Phil Plait reports that SETI is back on line after a revival of funding. The question is, did we miss any…
August 10, 2011
The Honshu tsunami of March 11th (the one that caused the Fukushima disaster) caused the otherwise stable Sulzberger Ice Shelf to calve giant hunks of ice. Climate scientists call this "teleconnection." I call it a big whopping bunch of whack knocking off a gigunda chunka stuff. Either way, this…
August 7, 2011
This looks interesting: ATOMIC COVER-UP: Two U.S. Soldiers, Hiroshima & Nagasaki, and The Greatest Movie Never Made. From the author:
On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb over the center of Hiroshima, killing at least 70,000 civilians instantly and perhaps 50,000 more in…
August 7, 2011
I have lived among Cannibals, according to a lot of people who claim to know. The number of times that the "tribal" people of the Congo have been called cannibals is too great to be counted, most notably in great literature like The Heart of Darkness but most commonly, I suspect, from the pulpit or…
August 6, 2011
We dropped the atomic bomb on japan today (in 1945) and that caused a lot of changes in the world. The idea of a bomb like this was so outrageous that it was actually possible to keep the project secret even though thousands of people worked for months on it, at many different locations. In one…
August 6, 2011
That was Wauconda, Illinois, Tea Party Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL).
August 5, 2011
Not wearing a life vest when you are on a recreational boat is about the same as not wearing your seat belt when driving on the highway: Perhaps 8 out of 10 water-recreation related deaths in the US in recent years would not have happened were the person wearing a life vest (as in wearing, not…
August 4, 2011
Observations from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have revealed possible flowing water during the warmest months on Mars.
"NASA's Mars Exploration Program keeps bringing us closer to determining whether the Red Planet could harbor life in some form," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said, "and…
August 3, 2011
I have a childhood memory of a troop of baboons, waiting among nearby rocks on a sun baked kopje, taking notice of nearby humans and watching and waiting until they saw a weakness and finally moving in for the kill, barking, grabbing, ripping livid flesh with long sharp canines, howling like wolves…
