gregladen | January 8, 2008If you are in New Hampshire, you must read this latest important political news before going to the polls...
Poll: Bullshit Is Most Important Issue For 2008 Voters
Ron Paul's Old Newsletters Filled With Bigotry And Conspiracy Theories
Obama's anthropology connection
gregladen | January 8, 2008Eco-friendly cotton from Africa is making its way onto the backs of U2 fans across the world, thanks to a new partnership between Hard Rock International and the ethical T-shirt company edun LIVE. Founded by U2 frontman Bono and his wife Ali Hewson, edun contributes proceeds from the sale of its 100% African cotton tees to the Conservation Cotton Initiative (CCI), a program run by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). CCI helps lift African farmers out of poverty by providing education on proper land management, organic cotton growing techniques, and wildlife conservation.
Read the rest…
gregladen | January 8, 2008Accepting his 2005 TED Prize, photographer Edward Burtynsky makes a wish: that his images -- stunning landscapes that document humanity's impact on the world -- help persuade millions to join a global conversation on sustainability. Burtynsky presents a riveting slideshow of his photographs, which show vividly how industrial development is altering the Earth's natural landscape. From mountains of tires to rivers of bright orange waste from a nickel mine, his images are simultaneously beautiful and horrifying
gregladen | January 8, 2008
From a University of Bristol Press Release: "Rather than being gentle giants, new research reveals that Pleistocene cave bears, a species which became extinct 20,000 years ago, ate both plants and animals and competed for food with the other contemporary large carnivores of the time such as hyaenas, lions, wolves, and our own human ancestors."
Joao Zilhao, Professor in Palaeolithic Archaeology at the University of Bristol, Professor Erik Trinkaus of Washington University and colleagues in Europe made the discovery while dating the remains from Europe's earliest modern humans. Cave bears (…
gregladen | January 8, 2008Jimmy Wales assembled "a ragtag band of volunteers," gave them tools for collaborating, and created Wikipedia, the self-organizing, self-correcting, never-finished encyclopedia of the future. Here, he explains how the collaborative approach works, and why it succeeds. Along the way, he debunks some controversies, explains the "neutral point-of-view policy" and why it is non-debatable; and details the Wikipedia governance model: a democracy with a bit of aristocracy and some monarchy thrown in.
gregladen | January 8, 2008 What if Napster stocked textbooks? Engineering professor Richard Baraniuk talks about his vision for Connexions, an open-source system that lets teachers share digital texts and course materials, modify them and give them to their students -- all free, thanks to Creative Commons licensing.
gregladen | January 8, 2008Pumice is rock that is ejected from a volcano, and has so much gas trapped in it that it can float. So when a pumice-ejecting volcano (not all volcanoes produce pumice) goes off near a body of water, you can get a raft of rock floating around for quite some time. By and by, water replaces the gas within the rock and it sinks. Like a rock. So, you can get layers of pumice on the bed of lakes, seas and oceans. A forthcoming paper in Deep Sea Research I describes two such pumice deposits of "Drift Pumice" in the Indian Ocean.
The fact that the two deposits are more or less on the surface of…
gregladen | January 7, 2008Texas is the winter home of the only self-sustaining wild population of Whooping Cranes Grus americana in the world and this winter record numbers have completed their migration and returned to the southern state.
Whooping Cranes have been on the endangered species list since 1970, when only 56 birds survived in the wild in the world. These birds nested in Canada and migrated south to spend the winter in Texas.
Since then, habitat conservation and protection of the birds has enabled the wild population to increase and in 2007 there were a total of 73 pairs which produced 80 chicks, of which…
gregladen | January 7, 2008A Stanford scientist has spelled out for the first time the direct links between increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and increases in human mortality, using a state-of-the-art computer model of the atmosphere that incorporates scores of physical and chemical environmental processes....
The new findings, to be published in Geophysical Research Letters, come to light just after the Environmental Protection Agency's recent ruling against states setting specific emission standards for this greenhouse gas based in part on the lack of data showing the link between carbon dioxide…
gregladen | January 7, 2008A group of scientists ... has uncovered a new biological mechanism that could provide a clearer window into a cell's inner workings.....What's more, this mechanism could represent an "epigenetic" pathway -- a route that bypasses an organism's normal DNA genetic program -- for so-called Lamarckian evolution, enabling an organism to pass on to its offspring characteristics acquired during its lifetime to improve their chances for survival.
Giardia surfaces are known to adapt to a host's immune response, and pass this on to daughter cells during cell division. That would be a system of…
gregladen | January 7, 2008Carbon is cycled from gas (C02) to solid (plant tissue) and and back (through fire, digestion, fermentation, etc.) again and again.
Some of that carbon is trapped over long periods in the form of "fossil fuels."
The earth has, in a sense, grown accustom to having a huge chunk of the available carbon stored away in coal and oil, so the recent (last century or so) release of large quantities of this carbon is a problem. This is why fuels made of plants (ethanol, diesel) are of interest. But those fuels require two steps: The carbon is captured by plants, then the plant matter is converted…
gregladen | January 7, 2008Accepting the 2007 TED Prize, Bill Clinton says he's trying to build a better world to hand his daughter. Unequal, unstable, and unsustainable, our world must correct its course, and private citizens ("like me") can be powerful forces for change. His Clinton Global Initiative, fresh from success negotiating down pharmaceutical prices in the developing world, is now running a pilot health care system in Rwanda, based on the work of Dr. Paul Farmer in Haiti. In 18 months, its shown potential as a model for the entire developing world. Clinton's TED wish: Help him build this system in Rwanda, to…
gregladen | January 7, 2008At the Bell Museum of Natural History
Cafe Scientifique: Looking at Lichens
Tuesday, January 8, 2008; 6 p.m.
Kitty Cat Klub, Dinkytown
We've all seen lichens growing on rocks, trees, or buildings. Yet their unusual and complex structure often goes unnoticed. Though they appear to be a single entity, lichens are actually complex and versatile organisms. Bell Museum Curator of Lichens, Imke Schmitte, will discuss the evolution of lichens, which species provide food, medicines and clothing dyes, and which help out nature by cleaning the air and adding color to the landscape.
Cafe…
gregladen | January 7, 2008The com units are broken, the transporter can't penetrate the ion clouds, and the Klingon have you surrounded. You turn to Scotty and say, "Scotty, if you were any kind of engineer, you'd whip us up a Klingon Repellent device using this tricorder and these useless communicators."
"I cannae mind what I was thinkin', Captain! I can give it a try. Geese a dod of that Tricorder, Mr. Spock and I'll sort you up a real sloater of a Klingon Killer .. oh wait, no, sorry. It says here: 'No user serviceable parts'."
Then the Klingons kill them all.
But that wouldn't happen in real science…
gregladen | January 7, 2008High school robotics competition kicks off
Some 35,000 high school students from over 1500 high schools in eight countries today began competing in the annual US FIRST student robotics contest.
This year's competition, dubbed "FIRST Overdrive," challenges the student teams to build semi-autonomous robots that will move 40-inch diameter inflatable balls around a playing field and score the most points.
The Evolution of Altruism in Robots
Despite the fact that many fundamentalists believe morals come directly from god, scientists have long known that it's not just humans who are capable of…
gregladen | January 7, 2008I'm currently working on a project to assemble species names for various uses, and came across this interesting post by Podblack Cat on Podblack Blog. The author explores the interesting variants of species names of interesting species...
What about a spider called Draculoides bramstokeri? Or the sand-crab Albunea groeningi, named after Matt 'The Simpsons' Groening? A big winner in terms of nomenclature nods would have to be Frank Zappa, who has at least five different species named after him... one because the orb-weaver spider, Pachygnatha zappa, features abdominal marking that resembles…
gregladen | January 6, 2008I don't like the definition of macro vs. micro evolution. But I do enjoy the way this video makes fun of creation science proponents.