sheril | December 21, 2007
We already know everyone's favorite echinoderm is a far-eastern delicacy, has purported aphrodisiac qualities, and is a real life shape shifter even J. K. Rowling couldn't dream up... but according to an international team of scientists, the under appreciated sea cucumber may just be a veritable miracle worker to boot!
Not only are these critters up to regenerating our organs and bringing eyesight to the blind, now they're potentially stopping the spread of malaria which might one day save millions of lives.
It's like the second coming... errr, for holothurians.
From PLoS Pathogens:
Malaria…
cmooney | December 20, 2007
[Tracks of storms in the Northwest Pacific basin, 2007.]
Okay--I realize the year isn't over yet. But I figured it was close enough to start compiling some data on global hurricane activity. Using a cutoff of 35 knot maximum sustained wind speed to identify a storm, here's what I get if you use the Unisys database to look at activity up through yesterday (and there is nothing new today):
Atlantic: 15 Storms, 2 Cat 4-5 (Dean, Felix)
Northeast Pacific: 11 Storms, 1 Cat 4-5 (Flossie)
Northwest Pacific: 25 Storms, 7 Cat 4-5 (Yutu, Man-Yi, Usagi, Sepat, Nari, Wipha, Krosa)
South Pacific: 10…
cmooney | December 20, 2007I'm pleased to say we brought in the following new endorsers yesterday:
Congressman Vern Ehlers, R-MI, 3rd District, Michigan, Ranking Republican, House Subcommittee on Research & Science Education
Mark Emmert, President, University Of Washington
Harold M. Evans, Author of They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine, Two Hundred Years of Innovators and of The American Century; BBC Columnist, editor at large, The Week
Ehlers is our third Republican congressman to endorse the statement supporting the science debate. And Emmert is the third major university president--…
cmooney | December 20, 2007Winter travel sucks. And I'm doing it anyway.
After spending more or less all of December getting myself as settled as possible here in LA, I now must venture out again next month--and the one after that. Specifically, I'll be in North Carolina, Louisiana, Missouri, and Florida. More details:
Saturday, January 19, 3:45 PM-4:45 PM
"Changing Minds through Science Communication: a Panel on Framing Science"
NC Science Blogging Conference
Sigma Xi Center
Research Triangle Park, NC
Wednesday, January 23, 8:30 AM-12:00 PM
"Seventh Communications Workshop: The Science of Communications--What We Know…
cmooney | December 19, 2007Move over, all you monkey trials from primordial American history (and from, like, 2005). Here comes a high stakes whale trial that has been lost to our memories, but that we really should learn about and remember.
I'm talking about the 1818 court case Maurice v. Judd, chronicled in Princeton historian (and former Chris Mooney professor) D. Graham Burnett's new book Trying Leviathan. Back in those days, Linneaus's taxonomic system already classified the whale as a mammal, but folk wisdom (rooted, of course, in the Bible) said otherwise. Or as Ishmael puts it in Melville's Moby Dick: "Be it…
sheril | December 19, 2007Long ago, before I wandered through tidepools and discovered the majestic sea cucumber, I wanted to be an astrobiologist.
To this day, little captures my imagination and attention so intently as the study of space. And I know I'm not alone... From Carl Sagan to George Lucas, most everyone seems just as completely fascinated about understanding the great, infinite beyond... collectively wondering about our place in the galaxy on this pale blue dot.
I came across this image in yesterday's Science Times and you can bet I was excited... What you see is a jet of energy shooting out of a…
cmooney | December 19, 2007ScienceDebate2008 added the following names yesterday:
Sheldon Glashow. The Metcalf Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Boston University, Nobel Prize in Physics, 1979
Geoffrey West, President, Santa Fe Institute, Time 100 list of the 100 most influential people of 2006
Meanwhile, our blogger coalition, I'm pleased to say, added some top hurricane folk:
Eric Berger, SciGuy
Jeff Masters, Dr. Jeff Masters' WunderBlog
In short, they just keep on coming in...
Which brings me to the current outlook on this project and where it stands (I know a lot of you want to know). Right now, the…
cmooney | December 18, 2007We've already heard from Publisher's Weekly and Science Friday...but now the blogs are weighing in.
I'm psyched that the Weather Underground's Jeff Masters, the Houston Chronicle's Eric Berger, and MSNBC's Alan Boyle are all naming Storm World as a top science read from 2007--and recommending it as an Xmas gift.
Thanks, guys!
cmooney | December 18, 2007While Sheril is riling up the geeks, I thought I'd provide the first of what I'm sure will be many updates this week on the ScienceDebate2008 endeavor.
There's immensely heartening news, anywhere you look. The op-ed by myself and Lawrence Krauss announcing this project has now appeared in major papers across the country: The Los Angeles Times, San Jose Mercury News, St. Paul Pioneer Press, Charlotte Observer, and Newsday. Our ever-growing Facebook group is nearing 2,000 members. And though I cannot give a precise number at the moment, I do know for certain that many, many more people than…
sheril | December 18, 2007
I need a new computer.
So readers, Mac or PC?
The thing is Mac users sometimes scare me just a little... Really. It's as if they've been converted to the Church of Macintosh. Has anyone else noticed this phenomenon? Now admittedly, my dad is a Mac user and mom's set on her PC, so it's possible that's why I'm now at this crossroads questioning my faith over at Correlations...
Mac users generally strike me akin to missionaries. I've recently dubbed them the 'Cult of Apple'. Why? Well, it's not enough that they love the camera, the screen, the bubbly icons at the bottom of their desktop…
sheril | December 17, 2007Just one month ago, Cyclone Sidr - one of the fiercest cyclones to hit Bangladesh in the last 131 years - slammed the country's southern and southwestern regions. At least 3,300 people lost there lives and millions were left homeless. The United Nations estimates that 8.7 million people were affected by the storm and many remain dependent on food handouts and aid. While total pledges have reached 545 million dollars, the government has appealed for at least 2.2 billion.
According to World Bank Vice President for South Asia Praful C. Patel:
More is needed, more is deserved by Bangladesh…
cmooney | December 17, 2007I'm preparing for a KPFA radio interview this morning, and so have had to brush up on precisely what went down in Bali over the past week. In essence: Everything, and nothing.
Global delegates agreed to a plan that (we hope) will eventually lead to a successor to the weak tea and expiring Kyoto Protocol. That successor treaty will be negotiated in late 2009 in Copenhagen--two years from now.
In Bali the U.S. was essentially browbeaten by the rest of the world--global moral suasion proved powerful enough to get State Department negotiator Paula Dobriansky to stop blocking the development of…
sheril | December 14, 2007There's wonderful reason I've been quieter here than usual... ScienceDebate2008 has hit the ground running to so much enthusiasm and excitement, Chris and I are incredibly busy keeping up with all the hullabaloo! And we're also having a lot of fun working to make this incredible idea into a reality...
We've been following the blogosphere and media reports, and here's the latest from WIRED:
A Who's Who of America's top scientists are launching a quixotic last-minute effort this week to force presidential candidates to detail the role science would play in their administrations -- a question…
cmooney | December 13, 2007As many of you know already, this week Rep. Henry Waxman's House Oversight Committee came out with a major report on the Bush administration's interference with climate science. Not exactly a new subject, but the Waxman report (PDF) is definitive in the way journalistic accounts often cannot be, simply because congressional investigators have many more tools at their disposal.
I wrote my latest DeSmogBlog item about the new Waxman report. "The end of an era," I called it--by which I mean, the end of the Bush vs. science era. And what an era it has been. I end the piece this way:
All in all,…
cmooney | December 13, 2007Well it has been a wild ride so far...I wish this was my day job.
ScienceDebate2008 now has, by my count, more than 80 bloggers in our coalition. And honestly, I'm very much afraid that some bloggers seeking to join up may have slipped through the cracks or not been added yet.
And that's just one indication that we have generated a seismic online discussion of the need for a presidential debate on science in the current campaign cycle. Bora, who invaluably tracks such things, tallies well over 100 posts on the subject since Monday. This is, like, bigger than the famous framing debate. No…
cmooney | December 13, 2007In my latest "Science Progress" online column, I've tried for something a little bit off my beaten path. The piece takes, as its starting point, a recent Urban Institute study suggesting (among other things) that contrary to many lamentations from the science community, the real issue is not the failure to produce enough scientists and engineers to keep competitive, but rather, the fact that we don't even have enough jobs for the scientists and engineers we're currently producing.
Of course, I do not therefore argue that we need less scientists--but rather, that the scientists we're producing…
cmooney | December 12, 2007Okay: In the further further interest of promoting a presidential debate on science, Sheril and our ScienceDebate2008 ringleader, Matthew Chapman, have now published a great piece on HuffingtonPost announcing and elaborating on the idea.
Larry Krauss and I, in the LA Times, pretty much made the case (not very hard to make) for why the candidates ought to debate science and technology policy. But Chapman-Kirshenbaum go further, seeking to clear up some misconceptions about precisely what we are proposing:
Our idea, which is already flourishing in the blogosphere, has generated great enthusiasm…
sheril | December 12, 2007I love being a scientist. That said, science is far too vast to be limited to me and my test tube holding, statistics-savvy, lab-coat-wearing, and/or globe-trotting colleagues who traverse the spectrum of 'ologies'... You see, science reaches out infinitely beyond the realm of those who 'do' it as a profession.
Science is life.
It's intimately connected to everything we do and never independent of how we spend our days wandering about our great green and blue home. The thing is, we often lose our way as most of us plod through high school wondering how science is actually relevant to our…
cmooney | December 12, 2007
Well well well. 15 named storms this year after all. The last (um, we think) is in the Caribbean right now, spinning way past the season's official endpoint. Its name is Olga. It started out subtropical, but has since become a fully tropical storm with maximum sustained winds of 50 knots at its apparent peak (although the storm has since weakened).
But any way you slice it, it's an anomaly to have a storm like Olga so late in the year. As I put it in my latest "Storm Pundit" item: "It was the most average of hurricane seasons, and the most unpredictable of hurricane seasons."
Indeed,…
cmooney | December 12, 2007Folks: In the further interest of promoting a presidential debate on science, there's a joint op-ed in the LA Times today by Lawrence Krauss (one of our top ringleaders) and myself. [It felt really cool, incidentally, to wake up this morning and find my op-ed in my own hometown paper; I haven't had that feeling since, like, 2003 when I was writing with some regularity for the Washington Post.]
I think the argument that I'm making with Krauss will not be a surprising one, but let me quote a few choice paragraphs:
And, in fact, it's not going too far to say that science in its broadest sense…