Environment
clock | January 29, 2008There is lots of cool new stuff in PLoS Biology this week. Take a look:
Conspicuous Chameleons is a synopsis/summary of this article:
Selection for Social Signalling Drives the Evolution of Chameleon Colour Change:
The ability to change colour has evolved in numerous vertebrate and invertebrate groups, the most well-known of which are chameleons and cephalopods (octopuses and their relatives). There is great variation among species, however, in the apparent capacity for colour change, ranging from limited changes in brightness to dramatic changes in hue. What drives the evolution of this…
clock | January 29, 2008James Hrynyshyn is one of my SciBlings and part of the Scienceblogs.com large North Carolina contingent. He lives in a small town of Saluda in the Western part of the state and blogs mainly about climate science and related policy on Island of Doubt. He is also one of those "repeat offenders" - he came not to one but to BOTH Science Blogging Conferences!
Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your background? What is your Real Life job?
I am a freelance science journalist whose current real job is father to a 14-month-old. My 20-year-…
illconsidered | January 28, 2008 Sipping from the internet firehose...
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H.E.Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
(skip to bottom) Top Stories:EU 20 by 2020, AGU Statement, Davos, Anthropocene, Holoconferences? Melting Arctic, WAIS, AMS Annual, Yale Report, Hawaii Conference, Bali Hurricanes, GHGs, Temperatures, Paleoclimate, Tuvalu, The Inquisition Impacts, Tropical Rainforests, Corals, Desertification, Wacky Weather Wildfires, Floods & Droughts, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Supply & Farming Mitigation, Transportation, Buildings…
laelaps | January 25, 2008I may or may not be able to get to all this stuff in detail today, but here's a smattering of some paleo news to start your day with;
Paleontologists have known for a number of years that the Chicxulub crater in the Yucatan peninsula is likely the "smoking gun" for the end-Cretaceous meteor impact, but new research suggests that the bolide struck the earth in water deeper than originally thought. This would modify ecological effects in the wake of the impact, and it was good to read that a variety of short-term and long-term effects of the event were considered in the new research;
[Sean]…
clock | January 24, 2008Seismic Images Show Dinosaur-killing Meteor Made Bigger Splash:
The most detailed three-dimensional seismic images yet of the Chicxulub crater, a mostly submerged and buried impact crater on the Mexico coast, may modify a theory explaining the extinction of 70 percent of life on Earth 65 million years ago.
Jacky Dragons Are Born When The Temperature Is Right For Their Sex:
An Iowa State University researcher spent four years in Australia studying reptiles. Dan Warner, a researcher in the ecology, evolution and organismal biology department, has been working with the jacky dragon, a lizard…
worldsfair | January 23, 2008
Well, maybe not. It's just that... is it me, or is this Oscar (will it happen will it not?) thing everywhere in the news these days? There's such media saturation that it brought to mind the following thought I had the other day.
Say I was an alien coming down to Earth, and I wanted to help, you know, fix things. I want to do this because it's a "highly advanced being with super powers and super technology" sort of thing. Depending on where I land and who I would have contact with first, I can imagine that one scenario is for an informed Earthling to say:
"Well, if you want to help,…
loom | January 21, 2008A few days ago, my family was wandering the ruins of the Roman Forum. I explained to my daughters that the fragments of pillars around us were very old. Veronica, who is four, wanted to know how old.
They were made before she was born, I explained. Before her sister Charlotte was born.
Before Charlotte was born? she asked.
Actually, before I was born, I said. They were built before I was born, and fell down before I was born.
That last part was a bit too much for her.
Trying to comprehend deep time was actually the reason we were in Rome in the first place. I was invited to give a lecture…
illconsidered | January 21, 2008 Sipping from the internet firehose...
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H.E.Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
(skip to bottom) Top Stories:West Antarctic Melt, AMS, GM Melting Arctic, Beaufort, Greenland, Robin White, Climate Grief, Bali Temperature Record, GHGs, Sea Levels, ENSO, Satellites - NEO & Solar Impacts, Forests, Corals, Wacky Weather, Floods & Droughts, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Mitigation, Transportation, Sequestration, Geoengineering, Adaptation Journals, Misc. Science, THC - Rapid Watch Kyoto-2,…
hrynyshyn | January 18, 2008So, there's this town in Montana, see. Name of Choteau. And seems that science ain't so popular in those parts...
School authorities' cancellation of a talk that a Nobel laureate climate researcher was to have given to high school students has deeply divided this small farming and ranching town at the base of the east side of the Rocky Mountains.
The scholar, Steven W. Running, a professor of ecology at the University of Montana, was scheduled to speak to about 130 students here last Thursday about his career and the global changes occurring because of the earth's warming. Dr. Running was a…
sb admin | January 16, 2008A quick look at âChernobyl: Relationship between Number of Missing Newborn Boys and the Level of Radiation in the Czech Regionsâ by Miroslav Peterka, Renata Peterková, and ZbyneËk Likovsky´ in Environmental Health Perspectives.
As a rule, more boys than girls are born. But in November 1986 in the eastern regions of the Czech Republic, the reverse was true â more girls than boys. It appears that radiation exposure released by the Chernobyl nuclear accident in April 1986, brought to earth by rain over the area, increased radiation exposure. Fetuses that were approximately three months old at…
illconsidered | January 14, 2008 Sipping from the internet firehose...
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H.E.Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
(skip to bottom) Top Stories:UK Nukes, Canadian NRTEE Report Melting Arctic, Antarctica, Methane Hydrates, Carbon Forum America, Bali Hurricanes, Carbon Cycle, Temperatures, Paleoclimate ENSO, Glaciers, Sea Levels, Solar Cycle, NASA/JPL Spat Impacts, Forests, Corals, Wacky Weather, Floods & Droughts, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Mitigation, Transportation, Buildings, Geoengineering, Iron Hypothesis, Adaptation…
razib | January 14, 2008A few weeks ago I watched a Bloggingheads diavlog between Carl Zimmer and Peter Ward, the latter a paleontologist at the University of Washington. I had been developing a deeper interest in the broader patterns of evolution across Deep Time, so I really enjoyed the discussion and learned quite a bit. When I saw Ward's book Out of Thin Air: Dinosaurs, Birds, and Earth's Ancient Atmosphere at the library, I had to pick it up! Overall it's a quick and breezy read; but nevertheless he manages to pack a pretty big scientific punch from what I can tell, the occasional interruptions of the…
chaoticutopia | January 13, 2008Something about climate change makes people want to argue. Take Greenland, for instance. A few weeks ago, I posted a photo essay about the recent acceleration of melting in the Greenland Ice Sheet. Not only is the entry is still getting comments, but it also spurred a discussion on a political message forum that went on for six pages. Watching all these opinions fly, there were a number of times that I wanted to dive in and start defending science... but I’m a hermit, and it is more fun to lurk and watch. Besides, every point that I wanted to bring up can be found in a paper I’ve been waiting…
petnoyer | January 10, 2008Here's another elegant headline from the Telegraph UK publication I mentioned below. You gotta love the Brits.
Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything
The comments section is pretty fascinating... "Interesting. Similar to my onion-model of the universe. Remove the time dimension...and you get a perfectly rational view of life." This is a compelling story about a mathematical form with 248 points called the E8 which can be described by the same equations that accounts for more of the substance of the universe than the prevailing "string theory".
If you're looking for more surf…
hrynyshyn | January 10, 2008We may never live it down. The sight of George W. Bush traipsing about his ranch in Texas, extolling the virtues of switchgrass-derived ethanol as a replacement for gasoline generated more than a few chuckles among scientifically literate environmentalists. Yet another example of the commander in chief's fanciful world view, right? Probably. But a new study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that maybe, just maybe, he was on to something real.
"Net energy of cellulosic ethanol from switchgrass" by M.R. Schmer, et al. at the University of Nebraska…
sb admin | January 7, 2008It's been three weeks since the deadly explosion at the Jacksonville, Florida T2 laboratory which claimed the lives of four workers and injured others on and off the site. The US Chemical Safety Board (CSB), along with OSHA and other agencies, is investigating the disaster and lead CSB official, Robert Hall, offered the following information on Jan 3 about the event:
"The blast at T2 was among the most powerful ever examined by the CSB."
"...There are several steps in the process [of producing the gasoline additive MMT]; the first step involved heating and reacting organic materials with…
cmooney | January 7, 2008In my latest "Daily Green" column, I find myself slightly praising John Tierney of the New York Times, who is right for the wrong reasons about something he calls "availability entrepreneurs":
Today's interpreters of the weather are what social scientists call availability entrepreneurs: the activists, journalists and publicity-savvy scientists who selectively monitor the globe looking for newsworthy evidence of a new form of sinfulness, burning fossil fuels.
I agree that there's an unfortunate tendency to opportunistically blame individual weather events on global warming. I've said this…
illconsidered | January 7, 2008 Sipping from the internet firehose...
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H.E.Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
(skip to bottom) Top Stories, $100 Oil, Northern Carbon, Old/New Year Arctic Warming, North Atlantic Warming, USCCSP, Earth Hour, Hansen, Bali Hurricanes, GHGs, Carbon Cycle, Temperatures, Glaciers, Sea Levels, Moon, Solar Cycle Impacts, Forests, Corals, Wacky Weather, Wildfires, Floods & Droughts, Australian Drought, Food vs. Biofuel Mitigation, Transportation, Electra, Buildings, Sequestration Journals, Misc.…
oracknows | January 4, 2008
Vibrations.
After a year and a half of doing Your Friday Dose of Woo every week with only a couple of breaks, it's all I can feel or hear sometimes.
Vibrations.
What is it about woo and "vibrations," "harmonics," or "waves," anyway? It doesn't matter if it's sound waves or electromagnetic waves. Somehow the denizens of Woo World seem to think that vibrations have special powers beyond what physicists tell us that they have, such as the ability to transmit energy. Hardly a week goes by, it seems, when I don't encounter claims by woo-meisters such as being able to "raise cellular vibration"…
gregladen | January 4, 2008Indeed, in science. The current issue of Science reviews the positions of each of the major presidential candidates in the area of science.
Writing the overview to this collection of views, Jeffrey Mervis states:
Many factors can make or break a U.S. presidential candidate in the 2008 race for his or her party's nomination. The ability to raise millions of dollars is key, as are positions on megaissues such as the Iraq war, immigration, and taxes. Voters also want to know if a candidate can be trusted to do the right thing in a crunch. Science and scientific issues? So far, with the…