Technology
pgleick | December 9, 2015On December 9th, National Public Radio broadcast an interview between NPR’s Steve Inskeep and Senator Ted Cruz on the subject of climate change. Below is an annotated transcript of that interview with my [bracketed] responses to the consistently false scientific claims made by Senator Cruz. Effectively, every single scientific point he made was wrong – a classic “Gish Gallop” of long-debunked talking points of those who dispute the unambiguous scientific evidence of climate change. In these bracketed annotations I have provided a few hyperlinks to each of the myths he repeats. I have tried…
kkrisberg | November 13, 2015According to a new, first-of-its-kind survey of the nation’s public health workforce, 38 percent of workers are planning to leave their current positions before the next decade. On its face, that’s a deeply worrisome number. But Brian Castrucci is an optimist — “where there is change, there is opportunity,” he says.
Castrucci serves as chief program and strategy officer at the de Beaumont Foundation, which along with the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, recently released the findings of the Public Health Workforce Interests and Needs Survey. The survey, referred to as PH…
esiegel | October 10, 2015“In the world of the very small, where particle and wave aspects of reality are equally significant, things do not behave in any way that we can understand from our experience of the everyday world...all pictures are false, and there is no physical analogy we can make to understand what goes on inside atoms. Atoms behave like atoms, nothing else.” -John Gribbin
No matter how much you've experienced in this world, there are some properties of the Universe that will still never be intuitive. Here at Starts With A Bang, we don't shy away from any of it; we embrace it all! This past week, here's…
oracknows | October 2, 2015I've written many times about how the relationship between the early detection of cancer and decreased mortality from cancer is not nearly as straightforward as the average person—even the average doctor—thinks, the first time being in the very first year of this blog's existence. Since then, the complexities and overpromising of various screening modalities designed to detect disease at an early, asymptomatic phase have become a relatively frequent topic on this blog. Even more than ten years ago, I noted that screening MRI for breast cancer and whole body CT scans intended to detect other…
gregladen | September 23, 2015Hillary Clinton just came out with her climate change plan. Here it is.
Hillary Clinton’s Vision for Modernizing North American Energy Infrastructure
Flipping a light switch, adjusting the thermostat, or turning a car key in the ignition brings predictable results—the light goes on, the temperature changes, the car starts. But where the energy for those everyday tasks comes from has changed dramatically in recent years, due to massive gains in renewable energy and a boom in domestic oil and gas production. And the amount of energy required to perform those tasks has fallen thanks to historic…
gregladen | September 16, 2015Liquid fuel powering internal combustion engines is inherently inefficient. This is because innumerable explosions causing kinetic work to be done also makes piles of heat, and for other reasons. The same amount of energy put into an electric motor and an internal combustion motor produce more usable work for the former than the latter. Also, electric motors can operate at similar efficiencies across a range of speeds, while internal combustion motors require more messing around to change speeds. And then there is torque. Torque is apparently at the center of coolness for many vehicle…
drorzel | September 1, 2015Today, I officially stopped being department chair, and started my sabbatical leave. I also acquired a new toy:
My new camera, taken with the old camera.
My old DSLR camera, a Canon Rebel XSi that I got mumble years ago, has been very good for over 20,000 pictures, but a few things about it were getting kind of flaky-- it's been bad at reading light levels for a while now, meaning I'm constantly having to monkey with the ISO setting manually, then forgetting to change it back when I move to a brighter location and taking a bunch of pictures where everything is all blown out. It also…
esiegel | August 31, 2015“It is marvelous indeed to watch on television the rings of Saturn close; and to speculate on what we may yet find at galaxy’s edge. But in the process, we have lost the human element; not to mention the high hope of those quaint days when flight would create ‘one world.’ Instead of one world, we have ‘star wars,’ and a future in which dumb dented human toys will drift mindlessly about the cosmos long after our small planet’s dead.” -Gore Vidal
And yet, it isn't just the rings of Saturn that fascinate us, nor can we simply "watch them on television," as Gore Vidal sadly declared. Every twenty…
pharyngula | August 30, 2015NASA has put out a call for novel ideas in space exploration, which I think is an excellent way to do science. More creativity!
But this feels like they're just pandering to me (I know, they're not): building robotic squid to explore the oceans of Europa? What's not to love about that idea?
esiegel | August 19, 2015“‘Star Trek’ says that it has not all happened, it has not all been discovered, that tomorrow can be as challenging and adventurous as any time man has ever lived.” -Gene Roddenberry
Today would have been the 95th birthday of Gene Roddenberry, the mind that brought us the Universe of Star Trek. In addition to a utopia where maladies like hunger, disease and poverty were eradicated, Star Trek promised a future where technology was widely available and sufficiently advanced to the benefit of all of humanity.
Image credit: ©2015 KGO-TV, of the “Scanadu” medical tricorder.
While many of these…
oracknows | August 10, 2015Alright, alright already! I get the message.
Over the course of the day yesterday I was bombarded by e-mails with a link to a New York Times article that shows a rather shocking lack of understanding of the science—more specifically, the lack of science—behind alternative medicine. Whenever something like this happens and I get so many requests to address a specific article, I'm always torn between my natural contrariness, which tempted me not to touch this article with the proverbial ten foot cattle prod (although something about this needs a cattle prod applied to it) and my desire to give…
gregladen | August 7, 2015Trump went into the GOP debate last night with a roughly 20% poll standing. Everyone will tell you to ignore polls early in this race, they never predict the outcome of a primary or a general election. That, however, is a non sequitur. We do not look at early polls to predict the distant future. We look at them to help understand the present, and to get a handle on what might happen over the next few weeks. The meaning of the polls shifts quite a bit before the first primaries, then they meaning of the polls has to be re-evaluated after every primary. At some point the re-evaluations…
oracknows | August 7, 2015Listicles. I hate Listicles. I don't do them. Yet, as much as I hate them, I can't deny that in this brave new world of click bait, listicles bring the clicks, which is why so many blogs and websites post them. Indeed, there's a website, Thrillist, that is dedicated to pretty much nothing but listicles. Not surprisingly, quacks and cranks love listicles as well, because they can go viral, getting passed around through the fevered swamp of antivaccine and quack Facebook pages and Twitter feeds like measles through a Waldorf School.
So it was that I came across yet another one of these annoying…
esiegel | August 2, 2015“Your problem is to bridge the gap which exists between where you are now and the goal you intend to reach.” -Earl Nightingale
When you think about the obstacles facing us in the world today, it's easy to look to advances in technology as the panacea. If there are waterways that need crossing, you'll build what architects have been telling us to build for generations -- as Lucy Wainwright Roche would sing -- a
Bridge.
But not all bridges are built the same.
Image credit: Flickr User Pratham Books.
In the state of Meghalaya, India, one of the wettest, rainiest places on Earth, the rivers…
esiegel | August 1, 2015“It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.” -Neil Armstrong
This past week saw a whole lot of interesting things happen, including tonight's second full moon of the month: a rare blue moon. In my life, I saw the International Space Station for the first time, but here at Starts With A Bang, there was so much to learn about and share, including:
When will the stars go dark? (for Ask Ethan),
Advertising vs. art (for our Weekend…
drorzel | July 17, 2015Another week, another set of posts at Forbes to link here:
-- Why Do Solids Have Energy Bands? A conceptual explanation of why putting together lots of atoms with electrons in well-defined energy levels leads to a solid with electrons filling broad energy bands.
-- This Is The Key Distinction Between Magic And Advanced Technology: Following up a fun panel at Readercon, and how the "magical thinking" involved in my grad school lab is distinct from real magic.
-- What Submarine Navigation Can Teach Us About Building Luxury Prison Tunnels: The editor at Forbes sent email asking if anybody could…
esiegel | June 20, 2015“We are a singularity that makes music out of noise because we must hurry. We make a harvest of loneliness and desiring in the blank wasteland of the cosmos.” -Jack Gilbert
Although you had lots to say, it came almost exclusively on two of our posts, so let's jump right in and see if we can expand what we've been talking about on your Comments of the Week!
Image credit: Ethan Shipulski, via http://mindblowingphysics.pbworks.com/w/page/52081285/Graviton%202012.
From Denier on temperature limits and singularities: "If at “some high temperature, you will restore the potential that caused our…
oracknows | June 14, 2015Over the years, I've written a lot about the intersection between the law and science in medicine. Sometimes, I support a particular bill, such as SB 277. Sometimes I oppose a bill, such as right-to-try or laws licensing naturopaths. The case I will discuss here is unusual in that it is a case of the law getting ahead of what the science says in a manner that will likely do little, if any, good for patients, cause a lot of confusion until the science is worked out better, and end up costing patients money for little or no benefit. I am referring to laws mandating the reporting of high-breast-…
pgleick | May 28, 2015[As part of the Pacific Institute’s ongoing efforts to evaluate the impacts of the California drought and offer strategies, technologies, and policies to reduce those impacts, we are presenting a series of short assessments on “Understanding the Numbers.” This piece is the part of that series.]
California is a wonderful place to grow food. The climate is highly favorable; soils are some of the best in the world, it is located well to serve global distribution markets with major ports and other transportation infrastructure; and normally, some regions are relatively well-watered.
Normally.
In…
sa smith | May 27, 2015WHOOOOOOOO!!!!
April 7, 2010:
Using HSV-1 to cure metastatic melanoma
May 26, 2015:
Talimogene Laherparepvec Improves Durable Response Rate in Patients With Advanced Melanoma
WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!
They just published the results of Phase III clinical trials of a herpes simplex-1 genetically modified to kill cancers, specifically, advanced melanoma.
The GMO virus has a name now: T-VEC.
And instead of looking at 50 patients who all got the virus, this study was a group of 436 patients , randomly assigned 2:1 to a treatment (T-VEC) group, or GM-CSF only group (the immunostimulatory molecule…