gregladen | March 6, 2013John Platt has a nice summary of recent activity in the are of de-extinction. This is where you use modern genetic techniques to bring species that are extinct back into existence.
I find it interesting that casual talk about this sort of thing almost always starts out with things like de-extinction very large and very long extinct, and I'm sure, very expensive to take care of creatures like dinosaurs or wooly mammoths. People in the de-extinction business (and there are some, and there have even been some efforts carried out) are more realistic, of course.
I've always said we should…
gregladen | March 6, 2013Pretty soon, I'm going to be giving away two pounds of free coffee on my blog. Just thought you'd like to know. It is special coffee. You'll have to do something to get it, though.
gregladen | March 6, 2013You should check out "The Beauty Issue," the latest issue of MPLSzine, a Twin Cities based on line magazine, in which I have a contribution.
gregladen | March 5, 2013I love it when scientists say that! And, so said scientist Daniel Baker, speaking of a newly observed feature of the famous and well known, or at least, we thought well known, Van Allen Belts.
First discovered in 1958, the Van Allen belts have been thought to comprise two reservoirs of high-speed, electrically charged particles, corralled into separate doughnut-shaped rings by Earth’s magnetic field. The outer ring orbits at a distance of some 10,000–60,000 kilometres above Earth, and encircles an inner band of even more energetic particles, roughly 100–10,000 kilometres above Earth. ...…
gregladen | March 5, 2013The "clanger cicada" can physically kill bacteria by poking and shredding them with tiny pointy structures that seem to look a little like an old fashioned cheese grater. Keep in mind that this happens at a very small spacial scale, so the relationship between objects is different than in normal human experience. Essentially, the membrane of a bacterium spreads itself over the pointy nano-spikes of the insect wing. This is a little like a failed "laying on the bed of nails" attempt, but where the force involved with the bed of nails is gravity, gravity has nothing to do with the bacterium…
gregladen | March 5, 2013That title is ambiguous but only if one admits to vernacular usage. Which is legit.
Huxley is consonantly making grammatical errors that primarily serve to prove how stupid adults are. English has a typical way of marking past tense, for instance, and he uses it all the time, correctly. So he might have hided himself behind the couch. Or, so he sayed. I see-ed him in the bedroom so maybe he hided himself there.
The thing is, we have language rules that are based on nothing more than historical quirkiness and BS, and language rules that are based on the particular system a language morphology…
gregladen | March 2, 2013For the last 25 years or so there has been a decrease in the amount of ice that remains on the surface of the Arctic Ocean every summer. This is a trend that can be attributed to global warming, which in turn, can be attributed to the steady release of previously fossilized Carbon to the atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas. But over the last few years, this decrease in ice has been much more dramatic. The trend has steepened. The formation and melting of ice has to do with air and water temperatures. This in turn can be affected by how much ice there is, because ice…
gregladen | March 1, 2013... is not what you thought it was, no matter what you were thinking. According to this interesting moving infographic movie thingie:
gregladen | March 1, 2013At the beginning of the 20th century, a traveler in Central Africa made mention of some strange people that he had come across. He was traveling among regular, run-of-the-mill natives…probably Bantu-speaking people living in scattered villages and farming for their food. But along the way, strange people came out of the forest. These strange people had sloping foreheads; they were short of stature, bow-legged and otherwise misshapen. They also clearly were, in the eyes of the traveler, of subhuman intelligence. The traveler described these people as a separate, subhuman race that lived in the…
gregladen | February 28, 2013From Peter Sinclair:
One of the most feared of climate change "feedbacks" is the potential release of greenhouse gases by melting arctic permafrost soils. New research indicates a critical threshold of that feedback effect could be closer than we once thought.
gregladen | February 28, 2013We were talking about River Blindness.
Trigger Warning: The video below is not for general consumption. Having said that you may want to watch it. The first part depicts the reactions of a handful of celebrities watching a series of shots depicting seven different related tropical diseases, and I must say, having seen all of these diseases in person (and having treated some of them, and had mild versions of a couple myself) that these particular videos show the worst side of it. But still, a very large number of people (according to the source of the video, about a billion) have some form…
gregladen | February 28, 2013I first became aware of, and read, King Leopold's Soliloquy, which is not his soliloquy but a parody of what he might say according to Samuel Clemens, while doing fieldwork in the ex-Belgian Congo. That is where the real story that inspired the essay took place. I lived in an area that at one time had a few a plantations, but the plantations only existed briefly and are now long gone. The "road" through this area was passable only with a very tenacious four wheel drive vehicle (we had a Land Rover) and grew worse every year. But the road at one time was excellent.
I knew a guy, an older…
gregladen | February 27, 2013You all know that the Arctic Ice melts more each summer than ever before. In a few years, the Arctic will be ice free during the summer. The rate of annual melting is greater than expected even just a few years ago. Please note that the increasing melt of Arctic sea ice does not bode well for the associated Greenland Ice Sheet which is also showing signs of melting at a higher rate than expected. The melting of Arctic sea ice has a number of important environmental implications, but the melting of the Greenland Glacier has that plus more; it will contribute significantly to sea level rise…
gregladen | February 27, 2013Humans appear to have a great deal of variation in sexual orientation, in what is often referred to as "gender" and in adult behavior generally. When convenient, people will point to "genes" as the "cause" of any particular subset of this diversity (or all of it). When convenient, people will point to "culture" as the "cause" of ... whatever. The "real" story is more complicated, less clear, and very interesting. And, starting now, I promise to stop using so many "scare" quotes.
Fixed up and reposted.
Prior to birth there are a number of factors than can influence things like gender or…
gregladen | February 26, 2013Last February 17th, there was a big rally at the Los Angeles City Hall where people demanded action on climate change and an end to our reliance on fossil fuel. The city of Los Angeles gets 39% of its electricity from coal fired plants, so that would be hard.
But today, we've learned that "...Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa will be "signing papers" in the coming weeks that will wean L.A. from coal-fired power within 12 years."
Apparently, the mayor made this announcement at a UCLA event discussing related issues, and it was a real jaw dropper, truly unexpected. This will require…
gregladen | February 26, 2013There will be a discussion on Climate Desk Live about this topic tomorrow, Feb 27th. Details and access to the event are HERE.
Increasingly, the US Navy is leading the charge towards clean energy, which can in turn impact national security an even climate change. Through investments in biofuels, construction of a more energy-efficient fleet, forward thinking about issues like rising sea levels and a melting Arctic, and commitments to reduce consumption and reliance on foreign oil, the Navy is leading the charge of a vast energy reform effort to "change the way the US military sails, flies,…
gregladen | February 26, 2013[View the story "Why does the science community shun the Bloggies?" on Storify]
Why does the science community shun the Bloggies?
I was shocked to discover that @bloggies is unaware of the reason that science blogs no longer participate in the contest. @bloggies noted: Prominent climate skeptic blogs tend to campaign for nominations, while other science blogs don't seem to mention the Bloggies.
Storified by Greg Laden· Tue, Feb 26 2013 10:47:37
@gregladen I don't know what the reason is myself.The Weblog Awards
.@Bloggies Maybe I'll write a blog post about it and send you the link if you…
gregladen | February 26, 2013A big step in improving the efficiency of photovoltaic cells in on the horizon. A paper published over the weekend in Nature Physics describes the ability of a substance called Graphene to convert a high percentage of the energy from sunlight into electricity. Graphene uses more of each photon's energy, and a wider range of photons of different energy levels (using a broad spectrum of the Sun's energy), compared to existing solar cells. From the abstract of the paper:
The conversion of light into free electron–hole pairs constitutes the key process in the fields of photodetection and…
gregladen | February 26, 2013
See Peter's original post here, which also covers the recent alarming finding by NASA regarding Eastern US forests. EG, " The warming climate this century has caused new stresses on trees, such as insect pest outbreaks and the introduction of new pathogens. Scientists consider both climate change and disease to be dominant driving forces in the health of forests in this region."
gregladen | February 25, 2013From the NCSE:
Senate Bill 758 (document), the so-called Oklahoma Science Education Act, which would have undermined the integrity of science education in the Sooner State, is dead. February 25, 2013, was the deadline for Senate bills to pass their committees, but the Senate Education Committee adjourned its February 25, 2013, meeting without considering it. Still active in the Oklahoma legislature is House Bill 1674 (document), styled the Scientific Education and Academic Freedom Act, which differs from SB 758 primarily in mentioning "biological evolution, the chemical origins of life,…