Environment
ddobbs | August 17, 2006It's good to see NASA hasn't completely abandoned its mandate to look after the home planet. As its Earth Observatory notes:
Among the casualties of the conflict between Lebanon and Israel in the summer of 2006 was the Mediterranean. Israeli raids in mid-July on the Jiyyeh Power Station released thousands of tons of oil along the Lebanese coast, perhaps rivaling the Exxon Valdex accident in 1989. By August 8, the spill covered approximately 120 kilometers (75 miles). The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) flying onboard NASA’s Terra satellite took this picture on August 15…
tlambert | August 16, 2006Don Boudreaux says that we shouldn't try to prevent global warming because
Capitalism produces so much food that we are never malnourished; it produces ample clothing and sturdy homes to protect us from the elements; it produces the soaps, shampoos, toothpastes and detergents that we use every day to cleanse our bodies and living spaces of bacteria and other dirt. And by continually substituting machines for human labor, capitalism progressively makes our work less backbreaking and less perilous.
Those of us who recognize these important benefits of capitalism -- those of us who understand…
clock | August 16, 2006This is the second in a series of posts on the analysis of entrainment, originally written on April 10, 2005.
The natural, endogenous period of circadian rhythms, as measured in constant conditions, is almost never exactly 24 hours. In the real world, however, the light-dark cycle provided by the Earth's rotation around its axis is exactly 24 hours long. Utility of biological clocks is in retaining a constant phase between environmental cycles and activities of the organism (so the organism always "does" stuff at the same, most appropriate time of day).
Thus, a mechanism must exist to…
clock | August 16, 2006This post from February 03, 2005 covers the basic concepts and terms on entrainment.
Let's now continue our series of Clock Tutorials with an introduction to some phenomena (and related terms and concepts) observed in the laboratory in the course of doing standard circadian experiments. Such experiments usually involve either the study of properties of freerunning rhythms (check the old tutorials, especially CT2 and CT 4 for clarification of basic terms and concepts), or the analysis of entrainment of rhythms to environmental periodicities.
Entrainment is a process by which a biological…
scientificactivist | August 15, 2006Since I've been on the road so much lately, I haven't really had a chance to follow up on some of the more interesting links forwarded to me lately. Each probably deserves its own post... but I'm going to dump them all into this post anyway. Besides, there seems to be a common thread running through all of them.
First up is an interview with climate scientist Ben Santer in Environmental Science & Technology. Santer was a lead author on the president's recent Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) and has been a target of anti-environmental groups since he was a lead author on a 1995…
clock | August 4, 2006We have recently covered interesting reproductive adaptations in mammals, birds, insects, flatworms, plants and protists. For the time being (until I lose inspiration) I'll try to leave cephalopod sex to the experts and the pretty flower sex to the chimp crew.
In the meantime, I want to cover another Kingdom - the mysterious world of Fungi. And what follows is not just a cute example of a wonderfully evolved reproductive strategy, and not just a way to couple together my two passions - clocks and sex - but also (at the very end), an opportunity to post some of my own hypotheses online.…
oracknows | August 4, 2006After the last couple of weeks of Your Friday Dose of Woo, I was in a bind. You see, people were telling me that they really enjoyed the last couple of weeks, particularly last week. For some reason, they were amused by my discussion of various liver cleansing regimens, hot on the heals of having discussed colon cleansing regimens. (Must be the bathroom humor; it gets 'em every time.) Some of you were surprised at the real obsession that alties have with "purifying" their insides from various "poisons" or "toxins." As I discussed, some of these folks seem to believe that their insides are…
cortex | August 3, 2006In the search for renewable energy, environmentalists are sometimes the bad guys. And no, I'm not talking about nuclear energy (although I'm in favor of building new nuclear plants). I'm talking about the new attempt to squeeze electricity from the perpetual swells of the ocean. In a rational world, environmentalists would champion such an energy source, since no greenhouse gases are produced and the earth provides it for free. Alas, that hasn't been the case:
While such generators do not emit smoky pollutants or leave behind radioactive waste, the [wave] machines are not small or delicate,…
clock | July 28, 2006
This post from September 09, 2004, was my first education about Rapturists:
Read these articles carefully (some are long, but please persist) and freeze. You'll get goosebumps...at least.
Apocalypse Bush!
Why Care for the Planet When the End Times are Almost Here? Vote Bush and Hop On the Salvation Train!
The Covert Kingdom
Thy Will be Done, On Earth as It is in Texas
"Thank you Gawd for giving us strawng leaders like President Bush during this crieeesis. Praise you Lord and guide him in this battle with Satan's Muslim armies."
The Church of Bush
What liberal infidels will never understand…
hrynyshyn | July 27, 2006It's like every rationalist's worst media nightmare. Pat Robertson interviews Sen. Jim Inhofe on the 700 Club. I know I shouldn't be surprised by what transpired. After all, Inhofe is the guy who keeps calling global warming the greatest hoax of all time. But I have to admit I wasn't prepared for the depths of his mendacity.
Consider this exchange:
ROBERTSON: Tell me, what do the environmentalists believe? Do they worship the God of the Bible or something else?
INHOFE: Well, let's talk about the environmentalists. I call the far-Left environmental extremists the ones like the NRDC (National…
terrasig | July 26, 2006This week's 'Ask A ScienceBlogger' focuses on reports such as those in National Geographic and DailyKos that global warming is having, and will progressively have great influence, on wine grape-growing. The idea is that grapes grown for premium wine production are much more sensitive to climate than table grapes or many other agricultural products, making them an excellent living laboratory 'canary in a coalmine." A very appropriate question this week as we launched our feature, The Friday Fermentable, last week.
This issue has been bandied the wine industry over the last several years but…
clock | July 25, 2006 I wrote this on the Edwards campaign blog on December 15, 2003 and copied it on www.jregrassroots.org a few months later, then posted it again on Science And Politics on August 23, 2004:
An individual can be a President of USA for 4-8 years.
Human civilization is, depending on your definition of civilization, about 5,000-20,000 years old.
Human species (or something like it) has been around for about 1.000,000 years.
There has been Life on Earth for about 3,600.000,000 years.
Do you have the power of imagination to imagine a 100 years? How about a thousand? Ten thousand? A million years? A…
bcohen | July 24, 2006A: Probably.
* * *
DN: So Ben, what's up with those mountain tops?
BRC: They're fewer than there used to be, that's what I know.
DN: Less places to ski and stuff?
BRC: But many more places to golf, apparently.
DN: Ben, is that for real? Mountain top removal for coal, for golf, for kicks, apparently? When I first asked, I was actually referring to a scene in the new Superman movie, but this I'm guessing is non-fiction. Why on earth are they doing this? It seems like an awful lot of effort.
BRC: It is, my Canadian co-blogger, for real. But it's less work than hiring a bunch of West…
worldsfair | July 24, 2006The question posed this time:
Are there any children's books that are dear to you, either as a child or a parent, and especially ones that perhaps strike a chord with those from a science sensibility? Just curious really. And it doesn't have to be a picture book, doesn't even have to be a children's book - just a book that, for whatever reason, worked for you.
- SCIENCEBLOGGER ANSWERS -
Dave, World's Fair
So, today is the last day of the Children's book workshop, and it's been a nice change of pace for sure. The instructor, Susan Juby, was excellent and the content generally helpful and did…
pharyngula | July 21, 2006The story of the Australian lungfish has made this week's issue of Nature. Remember, it's not too late to keep the pressure on.
Dam project threatens living fossil
Lungfish face extinction, say environmentalists.
We are about to lose a key piece of our evolutionary history, warn biologists. They are campaigning to save the Australian lungfish, which they fear could be sent extinct by an enormous dam planned for southeastern Queensland.
The hefty, muddy-brown fish (Neoceratodus forsteri) is thought to have survived virtually unchanged for at least 100 million years, making it one of the…
hrynyshyn | July 19, 2006Could it be a coincidence that this column summarizing the political right's infatuation with bad science in England appeared only a couple of days after Chris "Republican War on Science" Mooney arrived in London?
Polly Toynbee of the Guardian writes about the right-wing's shift from climate-change denialism to nuke-power advocacy. She suggests it's all part of a pathetic trend:
The old right has been on an arduous journey, with most finally converted to the truth universally acknowledged, except by flat-earthers: the world is warming at life-on-earth threatening speed. When the climate-…
tlambert | July 18, 2006We all know that the scientific consensus on global warming is that humans are causing most of it. The Creationist consensus is that humans aren't causing it. But just as their are divisions in the Creationist camp between Old Earth and Young Earth Creationists, they are divided on why people believe that humans are warming the planet.
Creationist Julia Gorin thinks it's to avoid thinking about the threat from fascist Islamonazi Hitlers
Freud called it displacement. People fixate on the environment when they can't deal with real threats. Combating the climate gives nonhawks a chance to look…
oracknows | July 18, 2006Over the weekend, between bouts of rounding on patients and seeing consults (I was on call), I perused the Last 24 Hours channel on the ScienceBlogs homepage, when I came across a fellow SB'er discussing a recent paper in Science about evolution. It was a study of the finches of the Galapagos Islands by Princeton evolutionary biologists Peter and Rosemary Grant. Being a physician and not a hardcore evolutionary biologist, I must confess that I don't always get into the nitty-gritty of how biologists study evolution, but this was a compelling story that was fairly easy for me to understand. I…
clock | July 17, 2006This post about the origin, evolution and adaptive fucntion of biological clocks originated as a paper for a class, in 1999 I believe. I reprinted it here in December 2004, as a third part of a four-part post. Later, I reposted it here.
III. Whence Clocks?
Origin, Evolution, and Adaptive Function of Biological ClocksThe old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed. (Heinlein 1973)Now darkness falls.
Quail chirps.
What use Hawk eyes?
(Basho)
Local/temporary and global/universal environments. In the study of adaptive functions, usually the question is…
cortex | July 17, 2006Well, not really. But there has definitely been a shift in public perception since last summer. As I was watching my local news this morning, the anchor alluded to global warming as a way of "explaining" the record setting heat wave currently stifling most of the country. Of course, the science linking greenhouse gases to a hot week of weather is tenuous at best. Nevertheless, people are now using the scientific consensus on climate change as a means of understanding their local forecast.
This is both good and bad news. On the one hand, it demonstrates that global warming has hit the big time…