gregladen | April 15, 2008QUEST visits the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, where scientists will soon aim the world's largest laser at a target the size of a pencil eraser. The goal? Nuclear fusion -- and, they say, the answer to the world's clean energy needs.
gregladen | April 15, 2008I've already announced to you, twice, the emergence of a new web site called "Expelled Exposed" developed by the National Center for Science Education. Chances are you already went and looked at the site.
But, as of a few minutes ago, the site has been totally refined and updated. The site that is now up at www.expelledexposed.com is presumably the intended product, and it is quite different from, more extensive, more informative, fancier, than the earlier site. So if you looked at the one-page site I had sent you to before, please go back and have a second look. There is much more to be…
gregladen | April 15, 2008John Wheeler may have been one of the few living individuals who actually worked with Einstein, until his death at the age of 96 two days ago. He is famous for his work on the Unified Field Theory (which did not come to fruition), the Harrison-Wheeler equation which has to do with high-density nuclear matter inside of very dense (neutron) stars, and for coining the term "black hole."
Well, he did not really coin the term. It is said that he was giving a talk on the phenomenon, and during the talk a student called out "black hole" as a suggested name for the phenomenon, and it stuck.
The…
gregladen | April 15, 2008That elephants have an aquatic ancestry has been suspected for some time now. Moreover, the idea of elephant aquatic origins and elephant origins in general is part of a growing realization that many of the world's aquatic mammals originated in a couple of regions of Africa that were for a very long time enormous inland seas (but that is another story I won't cover here).
The earlier evidence came from observation of the ontogeny of the kidneys in elephants, during which the kidneys take on the characteristics that are found in aquatic mammals generally. That research was published in 1999…
gregladen | April 15, 2008"Academic Freedom" bills seem to come in two flavors: Those that protect students from the possibility of learning certain things, and those that protect subversive teachers from getting in trouble for being bad teachers. In both cases, they are bills typically introduced into state legislatures by conservative republicans expressing concern with the Liberal Bias. There is a vague institutional connection between the concept of Academic Freedom Bills and the organization founded by conservative David Horowitz, "Students for Academic Freedom." The motto of this organization is "You can't…
gregladen | April 14, 2008I don't think this is too new, but I certainly missed it.
For the busy viewer, watch the first 15 seconds or so to get the idea, then skip ahead to 3 minutes 1 second to get to the meat of it.
(Hat tip: Frischer Wind)
It seems to me that all you need, with these devices, is a kind of "smoke detector" that detects anything wrong ... terrorists, disgruntlement among the passengers, running out of the preferred dinner option ... whatever. On activation, the "smoke detector" (let's call it a "Potential National Security Situation Detection Device") .. simply activates all of the EMD…
gregladen | April 14, 2008Pangea Day is May 10th. Everybody is going to get together and hold hands to bring the world together. We'll call it "Hands Across the Mid Ocean Ridges..."
Well, OK, that may not work, but there will be events of interest. Today we have a little pre-Pangea Day warm up, with a selection of national anthems sung by one country for another country.
Kenya sings for India
France sings for USA
Japan sings for Turkey
gregladen | April 14, 2008
On April 9, 2008, numerous dust plumes blew off the Libyan coast and over the Mediterranean Sea. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite captured this image the same day. Although contrasting strongly with the underlying ocean water, the tan plumes are thin enough to allow a view of the land and water surfaces underneath the dust. The plumes blow toward the east-northeast, turning more northward as they move farther off the coast.
This dust storm continued a pattern of intermittent storms blowing off the African coast and over the Mediterranean in…
gregladen | April 14, 2008This is a press release pertaining to an article coming out next month in the American Journal of Public Health:
The widespread assumption that pandemic influenza is an exceptionally deadly form of seasonal, or nonpandemic, flu is hard to support, according to a new study in the May issue of the American Journal of Public Health.
The study challenges common beliefs about the flu--in particular the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) claim that "the hallmark of pandemic influenza is excess mortality."
Peter Doshi, a graduate student in the History, Anthropology, and Science,…
gregladen | April 14, 2008Check out this film. My friend Marta plays "Holy Mary, Mother of God" a part especially well suited for her.
Details:
In this video:
Adri Mehra (videos), Kristen Swenson, Louie McCoy, Lydia Schwartz (videos), Marta Haftek, Nicole LeDuc (videos), Peter Kenyon (videos), Taylor Park (videos)
We entered a 24 hour film contest the weekend of April 4th. Friday the 4th at 10:00pm we received an e-mail stating the theme of the movie (Saving) and the action that had to be included in the movie (Knocking on a door). By 10:00pm the following day we had to hand in our movie to a nearby bowling alley…
gregladen | April 14, 2008When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time is a book by Michael Benton on the Permian Extinction now out in paperback. From the press release:
Today it is common knowledge that the dinosaurs were wiped out by a meteorite impact sixty-five million years ago, which killed half of all species then living.
Far less well-known is a much bigger catastrophe - the greatest mass extinction of all time - which occurred 251 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period. In this cataclysm, at least ninety per cent of life was destroyed, both on land, including sabre-toothed…
gregladen | April 14, 2008Rokia Traore sings the moving "M'Bifo," accompanied on guitar and on the n'goni, a lute-like Malian stringed instrument with a soulful tone. A quietly mesmerizing performance.
gregladen | April 14, 2008I'm home sick, so I'm not going to be able to hug very many atheists... But you'all go hug each other now, ya hear?
Here is the facebook link to the event.
gregladen | April 13, 2008On April 14, 1912, the RMS Titanic hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic. In less than three hours, the unsinkable ship sank to the bottom of the sea. A total of more than 1,500 lives were lost.
The events surrounding the sinking of the Titanic may be more of a reflection of human social ineptitude (to put it kindly) than technological hubris.
Of a total of 2,223 people, only 706 survived; 1,517 perished.[8] The majority of deaths were caused by victims succumbing to hypothermia in the 28 °F (â2 °C) water. Only two of the 18 launched lifeboats rescued people out of the water after the…