gregladen | March 7, 2008If you thought robotic snakes were creepy, you should check out this (very serious) proposal for how to make a "manned" Mars trip a reality.
Will humans ever really go to Mars? Let's face it, the obstacles are quite daunting. Not only are there numerous, difficult, technical issues to overcome, but the political will and perseverance of any one nation to undertake such an arduous task just can't be counted on. However, one former NASA engineer believes a human mission to Mars is quite doable, and such an event would unify the world as never before. But Jim McLane's proposal includes a…
gregladen | March 7, 2008From Slashdot:
"After major improvements in SMP support in FreeBSD 7.0, benchmarks show it performing 15% better than the latest Linux kernels (PDF, see slides 17 to 19) on 8 CPUs under PostgreSQL and MySQL. While a couple of benchmarks are not conclusive evidence, it can be assumed that FreeBSD will once again be a serious performance contender. Some posters on LWN have noted that the level of Linux performance could be related to the Completely Fair Scheduler, which was merged into the 2.6.23 Linux kernel."
gregladen | March 7, 2008Scott Rowed published an Op Ed piece in the Calgary Herald last October that has just come to my attention. It is about evolution in schools in Canada, and provides an interesting perspective.
Should we reward them with taxpayers' money to pass on these wonderful insights to the next generation? Should our future leaders learn to smother their critical thinking and make decisions based on faith rather than evidence and reason? From Canada, we don't have to look too far south to see how tragic these faith-based decisions can be.
Read the whole thing here.
Scott has another Op Ed piece…
gregladen | March 7, 2008.... Have you ever had this happen: You are minding your own business, teaching your life science course, it's early in the term. A student, on the way out after class (never at the beginning of class, rarely during class) mentions something about "carbon dating." This usually happens around the time of year you are doing an overview of the main points of the course, but before you've gotten to the "evolution module" (more on the "evolution module" another time ... or come to the Bell on Friday to hear me rant about that in person).
Jeanne d'Arc was a very influential 10th grader. I…
gregladen | March 7, 2008Internet Explorer 8 passes the Acid2 test. Huzzah!
But waitaminnit... What's this stuff about forward compatibility by adding some new X-UA-Compatible header to my pages or my server? Am I reading this right? Are you telling me that in order for IE8 to use its fully compliant rendering, we have to add something new to our pages? And that if we don't, it will fall back to rendering pages just like IE7? Is that what this means?
That's just dumb.
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Hat Tip TUIB Guy
gregladen | March 7, 2008... Because they are concerned about that "who's going to answer the phone at 3:00 AM" thing.
while the consensus is that the 3 a.m. ad helped Clinton, it has also drawn criticism as a tactic that ultimately benefits John McCain, particularly if he is to face Obama in the general election. In essence, Clinton has now turned the debate about commander-in-chief readiness into a contest of résumés. And the conventional wisdom is that John McCain -- ex-fighter pilot, former POW and war hero -- wins.
But that's not necessarily the case, say senior military officials and political analysts. In…
gregladen | March 7, 2008Scientists have long projected that areas north and south of the tropics will grow drier in a warming world -- from the Middle East through the European Riviera to the American Southwest, from sub-Saharan Africa to parts of Australia.
These regions are too far from the equator to benefit from the moist columns of heated air that result in steamy afternoon downpours. And the additional precipitation foreseen as more water evaporates from the seas is mostly expected to fall at higher latitudes. Essentially, a lot of climate scientists say, these regions may start to feel more like deserts under…
gregladen | March 7, 2008Midges, baseball fans recall, are the gnat-like insects that rose from Lake Erie last October and descended upon Chamberlain in the bottom of the eighth inning of a playoff game against the Cleveland Indians, distracting him into throwing two wild pitches. Cleveland scored the tying run without a hit. The Yankees eventually lost the game and eventually the series.
During mating season, the air at Lake Myvatn can also be thick with male midges, each hovering, waiting for a female to join him. "It's a like a fog, a brown dense fog that just rises around the lake," said Anthony R. Ives, a…
gregladen | March 6, 2008I want to refer you two two items, one older piece by me and another very new, fresh out of the box piece by Carl Zimmer. Not that I'm trying to compare Zimmer and me. But the two posts are somewhat complementary, yet very much on the same page.
How to Date the Grand Canyon: Go With the Flow
Abducted by Aliens ... and dropped off at the Grand Canyon
Well, you've got to admit they are both pretty attractive titles....
gregladen | March 6, 2008A team of scientists including Linda B. Buck, who shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, has retracted a scientific paper after the scientists could not reproduce their original findings.
...
In the paper, the researchers described how they produced genetically engineered mice that produced a plant protein in certain smell-related neurons. The researchers had claimed that as the plant protein traveled between neurons, they could map out which neurons in the cortex of the brain received information from which smell receptors in the nose.
In the retraction, published by Nature…
gregladen | March 6, 2008As wolves wander into Massachusetts, we now have a report of the elusive Wolverine being spotted on a research camera in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
Camera Spots Wolverine in Sierra Nevada from PhysOrg.com
(AP) -- A research project aimed at weasels has turned up a bigger prize: a picture of a wolverine, an elusive animal scientists feared may have been driven out of the Sierra Nevada long ago by human activity.
[...]
gregladen | March 6, 2008May any parent legally homeschool children in California? Last week, a state appellate court said no. A unanimous three-judge panel ruled that California law lays down specific circumstances under which homeschooling is permitted, and not all parents meet the requirements.
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gregladen | March 6, 2008Late last month, I put up a quick post, New-generation antidepressants do not produce clinically significant improvements in depression, that addressed a PLoS published metastudy of interest.
I was careful to use the phrasing from the paper as the title of my post, and to provide only the author's summary, because I knew this was a tricky issue. I could have read the paper carefully and reported my opinion on it along side the information from the paper (a practice known as "blogging on peer reviewed research), but I did not have the time or interest to do so, yet I knew many of you would…
gregladen | March 6, 2008A public service announcement for those of you living in or passing through Nevada:
Vegas Clinic May Have Sickened Thousands from PhysOrg.com
(AP) -- Nearly 40,000 people learned this week that a trip to the doctor may have made them sick. In a type of scandal more often associated with Third World countries, a Las Vegas clinic was found to be reusing syringes and vials of medication for nearly four years. The shoddy practices may have led to an outbreak of the potentially fatal hepatitis C virus and exposed patients to HIV, too.
[...]
gregladen | March 6, 2008There is a fairly new paper in PLoS on the colonization of the New World. It is the latest in a series of attempts to synthesize biogeography, climate change related paleoenvironmental reconstruction, genetics, and archaeology.
The authors draw these conclusions:
These results support a model for the peopling of the New World in which Amerind ancestors diverged from the Asian gene pool prior to 40,000 years ago and experienced a gradual population expansion as they moved into Beringia. After a long period of little change in population size in greater Beringia, Amerinds rapidly expanded into…
gregladen | March 6, 2008This just in via my Newsmax.com newsletter:
WASHINGTON -- Officials in Michigan and Florida are showing renewed interest in holding repeat presidential nominating contests so that their votes will count.
The governors of both states are now saying they would consider holding a sort of do-over contest by June. So are top officials in Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign.
That's a change from their previous insistence that the primaries their states held in January should determine how the state's delegates are allocated.
Clinton won both contests, but the results were meaningless since the…
gregladen | March 6, 2008There is a new paper out suggesting that the Flores hominids, known as Hobbits, were "human endemic cretins."
From the abstract of this paper:
... We hypothesize that these individuals are myxoedematous endemic (ME) cretins, part of an inland population of (mostly unaffected) Homo sapiens. ME cretins are born without a functioning thyroid; their congenital hypothyroidism leads to severe dwarfism and reduced brain size, but less severe mental retardation and motor disability than neurological endemic cretins. We show that the fossils display many signs of congenital hypothyroidism, including…