gregladen | May 24, 2013Recent reconfiguration of federal funding for STEM education has resulted in important programs at the NIH losing their funding. Below is information on Health and Biomedical Science Education Programs Aimed at
Grades K–12 at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
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In the proposed FY 2014 budget, President Obama has set a policy that all STEM education funding be consolidated into three institutions, the NSF for graduate and undergraduate training, the Dept. of Education for K-12 STEM and the Smithsonian for informal education. Justification for this…
gregladen | May 23, 2013The Boy Scouts have ended their ban on openly gay members. Gay scout leader still have to pretend they are not gay.
gregladen | May 23, 2013Don't make a move until you've CLICKED HERE.
Then you can continue on to this post. Thanks.
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I think the accusation that I've "stalked" fellow blogger Abbie Smith have been made one too many times. But I'm not sure. Is this the point where I lay out the exact sequence of events of what happened between us? What do you think?
OK, here's the story.
Abbie Smith had created an informal group of people who were to eventually become known as the Slyme Pit, mostly Mens Rights Activists, who had come together to object to feminist writings by various bloggers and others,…
gregladen | May 22, 2013From Wikipedia:
"Illuminati" refers to various organizations ... links to the original Bavarian Illuminati or similar secret societies, and often ... conspire to control world affairs by masterminding events and planting agents in government and corporations to establish a New World Order and gain further political power and influence. ... the Illuminati ... lurk... in the shadows and pull... the strings and levers of power in dozens of ...
They are well documented in this book.
And now, there is incontrovertible evidence of involvement of Hollywood and music industry stars in the…
gregladen | May 22, 2013You can't!
There's a fungus among us—a hundred different species in fact—and nearly all take up residence on our feet, according to a study that appears in the journal Nature this week.
Only a few fungi species were found on other body parts known to house fungi—such as behind the ears and on palms—according to the most thorough analysis to date of our fungal "landscape."
Ha. You're probably better off leaving most of them alone. Click through for the details.
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Other posts of interest:
How to get rid of spiders in your house
Why is your poop green?
How many cells are there in the…
gregladen | May 22, 2013This is the question everyone eventually asks themselves. The answer is no. They live all over your body in the follicles of your hair.
But, the situation is much more complicated than that, and in fact there is a lot we don't know about these mites. But, there is a scientist who may be willing to scrape some of the mites off your face in order to advance our knowledge ... of something many people would probably not really want to know about.
We’re interested in studying the evolution and diversification of Demodex mites ...we want to use the information encoded in Demodex DNA to map the…
gregladen | May 21, 2013A quaint New England rocky creek
Imagine standing next to Parable Creek, an imaginary rocky brook in New England. The water is rushing past you from left to right, around the rocks that emerge tall above the surface of the stream, mounding over the top of those that are lower down. The deepest parts of the steam are relatively flat but show ripples that belie the presence of other rocks and sunken branches that are well below the water line.
While you are observing a young boy of about 11 years old comes along, carrying his fishing pole. “Hey mister, how’s it going?” he says, as he steps…
gregladen | May 21, 2013There are good reasons to believe that global warming leads to more storminess, but the exact nature of that transition is unclear and hard to measure. Part of the reason for this difficulty is that a given type of storm may become more likely under certain conditions caused by climate change, while a different kind of storm may become less likely, with the "storminess" overall increasing but doing so indifferent ways across time. Also, the most severe, and thus possibly the most important, weather events are infrequent so it is difficult to see changes over time with any statistical…
gregladen | May 21, 2013In behavioral biology there is a fair amount of attention to individual quality, which may be determined by genes or parasite load or energy balance, or some interaction among these (and other) factors. Individual quality is honestly indicated by some trait or behavior; a large bright thing hanging of your head, a long bout of complex and energetic dancing, or a very loud complicated song, may be impossible to achieve in an individual with insufficient energy or some sort of disease. Therefore, other individuals looking to choose a mate can observe the traits or behaviors and do what the…
gregladen | May 20, 2013The story of climate change has always been more of worst-case, or at least, worser-case scenarios developing and less about good news showing up out of nowhere and making us unexpectedly happy.
A few decades ago, it became clear that the release of fossil Carbon into the atmosphere primarily as CO2 was going to cause a greenhouse effect (yes, dear reader, we've known this for looooong time ... the idea that this is a recent and still untested idea is a lie you've been fed so many times some of you may have begun to believe it). At that time climate scientists thought, reasonably, that…
gregladen | May 20, 2013There is a book called "The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania" produced by the Heartland Institute. The Heartland Institute is famous for doing all that work to prove that smoking is not bad for you, and more recently, that climate change is not real or is not important or is not human-caused etc. etc. Heartland is a libertarian "think" tank that receives money form big corporate interests like Tobacco and Petroleum and then uses that money to advance the interests of those corporate entities, regardless of the actual truth of the situation. They also use…
gregladen | May 18, 2013Again and again. Do you have to take a stupid pill every day to be a reporter? Or are reporters like this one speaking down to their audience. Either way, it's shocking.
gregladen | May 18, 2013Several environmental advocacy groups are asking the US State Department to launch an investigation over the State Department's handling of the Keystone XL review.
This is a bit nuanced but important, and I want to make clear what is going on here.
Normally, environmental impact assessments are done by private contractors ultimately hired by the entity that is building the project that could have the impacts. I often hear people complain that Trans Canada, the group that wants to build the Keystone XL pipeline across the United States to allow the export of it's bitumen (a kind of soft coal…
gregladen | May 17, 2013Hahaha
Ha.
This is about solar energy being repressed by energy interests in Arizona.
gregladen | May 17, 2013You might be interested in the latest Skeptically Speaking podcast:
This week, Skeptically Speaking looks to the stars that light up the night sky, and fuse hydrogen and helium into the elements that make life possible. Science writer Jennifer Ouellette examines the possible evidence of ancient supernovae in bacterial fossils. Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel explains the controversy surrounding the so-called black hole firewall paradox. And astronomer Pamela Gay of CosmoQuest discusses the impact of U.S. sequester budget cuts on her research and outreach.
gregladen | May 17, 2013Apparently that is a thing:
NEW YORK and COLORADO SPRINGS, May 16, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Over half of sustainable, responsible, impact (SRI) investment industry professionals say that retail investors (65 percent) and institutional investors (53 percent) are currently expressing interest in fossil fuel-free portfolios in the face of growing signs of climate change, according to First Affirmative Financial Network's Fossil Fuels Divestment Survey.
Read the rest here.
See also this:
Securities of fossil fuels firms, as an economic sector, may soon be on the decline.
Predictions as to when oil…
gregladen | May 17, 2013Genie Scott of the NCSE gives a talk on Creationism.
Executive director Genie Scott talks about the history of creationist legislation, including bills that allow teachers to "critically analyze" evolution or present the "full range of scientific views of origins". Strategies, tactics, and more. When: 12/1/2012. Where: Eschaton 2012, Ottawa. Video courtesy of www.youtube.com/user/AtheismTV
(Don't be put off by the audio problems in the beginning it gets fixed.)
gregladen | May 16, 2013It is being debated in the US Senate! (Unofficially.) Here's Senator Sheldon Whitehouse on the issue:
See also: Sen. Whitehouse destroys colleague who said God won’t allow climate change
And this:
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
gregladen | May 16, 2013
Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous. Read more: OFA.BO/gJsdFp
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) May 16, 2013
gregladen | May 16, 2013An important study has just been published1 examining the level of consensus among scientists about climate change.
The issue at hand is this: What is the level of agreement in the scientific community about the reality of climate change and about the human role in climate change? The new paper, Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature, address this question and the answer is very clear. The number of climate scientists who question the reality of global warming or the human role in global warming is vanishingly small.
This is not the first…