gregladen | June 22, 2016Some sort of Hops Flowers Substance is a common dietary supplement used by post-menopausal women. A recent study looks at one molecule extracted from hops to see if it could help reduce the chance of getting breast cancer.
The paper is in the journal Chemical Research in Toxicology, and is called Hop (Humulus lupulus L.) Extract and 6-Prenylnaringenin Induce P450 1A1 Catalyzed Estrogen 2-Hydroxylation, by Shuai Wang, Tareisha L. Dunlap, Caitlin E. Howell, Obinna C. Mbachu, Emily A. Rue, Rasika Phansalkar, Shao-Nong Chen, Guido F. Pauli, Birgit M. Dietz, and Judy L. Bolton.
One factor that…
gregladen | June 22, 2016Certain things that come across one’s desktop, on the internet, are hard to turn away from. Train wrecks, for example. For me, this list includes commentary about grammatical errors and proper language use.
I find this sort of discussion interesting because I’m an anthropologist, and probably also because I’ve spend a lot of time 100% immersed in a language or two other than my native English. This training and this experience each make me think about how we make meaning linguistically. Also, as a parent, I have observed how a child goes through the process of first, and quickly, learning how…
gregladen | June 21, 2016This is bad news and good news, but mostly good news. No matter what you think of nuclear energy (and I'm one of those people who give it a stern look and remain suspicious), it does tend to produce electricity with the addition of much less fossil carbon into the atmosphere than, say, burning coal. So, we probably don't want to see a wholesale reduction in the use of nuclear energy too quickly, and we may even want to see some new plants built.
The Diablo Canyon nuclear plant is the only working nuke plant in California, and it is famously located in an earthquake-rich locality. The plant…
gregladen | June 21, 2016My local grocery store just came up with some Vidalia onions. They are the best onions, and I'm cooking with them every day so I can eat them all before any go bad.
When you cook onions to the point where they brown, they become sweet tasting and great smelling. That is the Maillard reaction. Cooking meat enough gets you a similar effect. Toast. All kinds of foods.
"All sorts of things happen in this reaction. But eventually, you get to flavor town."
Here's a short video that gives you the science of the Maillard reaction:
How do you pronounce it? Mai yard. More or less. Skip past the…
gregladen | June 20, 2016Which Android Tablet Is Best?
You will have to decide which tablet is best for you based on your specific needs, and no general review is going to give you that information in a useful way. But, among the many tablets there is a handful that rise to the top and should be looked at either to consider purchasing or to use as a benchmark against which to measure others.
Here is some guidance to help you decide which Android tablet are in that category, and that you should consider. Note that I look briefly at a very inexpensive option here (not included in the list below).
Nexus 9
Most of…
gregladen | June 20, 2016The Birdman of Lauderdale is a collection of essays by birdman Clay Christensen.
Clay writes the popular "Birdman of Lauderdale" column for the Saint Paul Park Bugle, and leads birdwatching field trips in the Twin Cities area.
This is a collection of updated and edited essays from that publication, most about bird watching, or the birds themselves. Is it OK to hate cowbirds? What is it like to witness the takeoff of a mob of cranes? How do birdwatchers find birds anyway? What is bird banding all about? These and other burning questions are addressed in engagingly written snippets.
I…
gregladen | June 18, 2016Roughly speaking, we are toast if the Earth's surface temperatures reach something like 3 degrees C above pre-industrial levels.
We have already reached about 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial, and we will go higher even if we stop adding more greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere, because it takes time for the Earth's system (the oceans, atmosphere, and ice, mainly) to catch up.
It is generally thought that if we don't keep about 80% of the known fossil fuel, including coal, oil and other oily substances, and gas, in the ground, then we will go past that 3 degree level.
As noted in a recent…
gregladen | June 18, 2016The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy is a great new book by climate scientist Michael Mann and cartoonist Tom Toles.
This book serves many purposes. It includes an overview of the basic science of climate change and human caused global warming. It has a compendium of many of the key science deniers, and a description of the well known taxonomy of science denial ("It's Not Happening!", "OK, It's Happening but It's Natural", "It Will Take Care Of Itself", "It Will Be Good For Us", etc.). The authors discuss the…
gregladen | June 17, 2016This is great news if you are a mouse!
Here's the summary of the paper:
NAD+ repletion improves mitochondrial and stem cell function and enhances life span in mice, by
Hongbo Zhang, Dongryeol Ryu, Yibo Wu, Karim Gariani, Xu Wang, Peiling Luan, Davide D’Amico, Eduardo R. Ropelle, Matthias P. Lutolf, Ruedi Aebersold, Kristina Schoonjans, Keir J. Menzies, Johan Auwerx, (here, if you subscribe to Science.)
The oxidized form of cellular nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) is critical for mitochondrial function, and its supplementation can lead to increased longevity. Zhang et al. found that…
gregladen | June 16, 2016Weather is climate here and now, and climate is weather over the long term. Climate is the large scale process of movement of air and water, and changes in the properties of air and water, on and near the surface of the Earth, the atmosphere, oceans, and ice fields respond to the imbalance of heat -- with more of it near the equator and less of it at the poles -- as the world literally turns. Weather is the local, temporal, and personally observable sign of that climate system. Climate is meaning and weather is the semiotic process by which we understand that meaning.
OK, perhaps I've gone…
gregladen | June 13, 2016Thinker, writer, and independent scholar Shawn Otto has written an important book called “The War on Science: Who’s Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It” (Milkweed Editions, publisher)
Read this book now, and act on what you learn from it, for the sake of your own future and the future of our children and their children.
The rise of modern civilization, from the Enlightenment onward for hundreds of years, was the same thing as the rise of modern science. The rise of science was a cultural novelty with only vague foreshadowing. It was a revolution in the way humans think.…
gregladen | June 11, 2016Since 1968, about 17 candidates ran in Democratic primary races and earned enough votes (above about 20% all told) to count as having been contenders.
Of those, one was murdered, one was shot but lived, one was eliminated from competition by GOP dirty tricks, and one left the race because of insufficient support but would probably have been exposed as having two families (that would have been a scandal) had he stayed in the race.
Putting this another way, there is about a 24% chance that a Democrat running in a primary will be taken out of the race for extrinsic reasons.
Given the stakes…
gregladen | June 10, 2016Shawn Otto's The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It is a very important and excellent book, just released.
I have a review of it, but after going to the book launch the other day, decided to rewrite some bits. But I'm currently more nomadic than usual and this is not a good time to so such important work, so I'll not likely post the review until Monday.
But I wanted to let you know about the book.
gregladen | June 8, 2016And, how did my model do?
There was a lot of talk about California, and a lot of back and forth, but in the end I stuck with my original model to predict the outcome of that race. See the table above for the results, but the bottom line is that I predicted that Clinton would get 57 percent of the votes and Sanders 43 percent. It turns out that Clinton got 57 percent and Sanders got 43 percent.
Excuse me for a moment while I bask in the bright light of being-right-ness.
Thank you. Now, on to the details.
First, a quick, note on the numbers and methods. All my percents (for prediction and…
gregladen | June 7, 2016Based on the best available estimates, which could be better but the satellite broke, the Arctic Sea Ice is melting this year at an unprecedented rate.
It is almost like the Earth is warming up or something.
gregladen | June 7, 2016Check out our detailed interview with the famous and amazing Ethan Siegel.
We talk about the history of understanding the universe, why you should believe in Dark Matter even though it is obviously fake, why exploring uranus can lead to the discovery of amazing things, and more.
gregladen | June 7, 2016The human release of greenhouse gasses has ultimately caused changes in weather patterns so that major storm systems in the Northern Hemisphere get wetter and move along more slowly, causing significant rainfall events to occur at a much higher rate than previously. This has become a nearly ongoing phenomenon, with major floods in Canada, Colorado, Texas, Western Europe, Texas again, various places in Azia, more in Europe, Texas again, and so on.
The short version of the story: The jet stream is often fairly linear, traveling around the planet at a high speed, but it can also get all wavy…
gregladen | June 7, 2016This is an excellent moment to revel in the complexity of life, and argument, and to appreciate the value of the honest conversation.
A candidate is the presumed nominee when she or he obtains the required number of pledged delegates to be at 50% plus a fraction in the total pledged delegate count. This is because a candidate must have a true majority to win the nomination when the delegates are all counted up at the convention, and the pledged delegates are required to cast their lot with the candidate they are pledged to, assuming that candidate exists at the time of the convention.…
gregladen | June 6, 2016Monday, June 6, 9:00 PM CT
Nope. For the second time in a row, what might have been a named Eastern Pacific tropical storm will probably never amount to more than a depression and a big wet spot in Mexico.
Monday, June 6, 2:00 PM CT
The first named tropical storm in the Eastern Pacific would be called "Agatha." Rather suddenly, a disturbance in the region near Mexico has gotten itself organized, and the National Weather Service is saying that there is a 100% chance of this blob of weather turning into a named storm by the end of the day Wednesday.
We were all a bit shell shocked by…