purepedantry | August 10, 2007Scientists have thawed samples of bacteria that were frozen in ice for up to 8,000,000 years in order to figure out whether these bacteria would still be viable and whether their DNA is intact. It turns out they are viable, but the longer they were in ice the more their DNA was fragmented. This has implications as to whether life traveled to Earth from a comet or was evolved on site:
However, while some bacteria taken from 100,000-year-old ice reproduced quite readily, cells from the oldest ice multiplied only very slowly and their DNA was badly damaged. Studies of isolated DNA from the…
purepedantry | August 8, 2007This dude got arrested because he tried to smuggle a monkey on an airplane in his ponytail:
A passenger who originally departed from Lima, Peru, and connected in Fort Lauderdale had been hiding the small monkey in his ponytail, under his hat, according to Spirit Airlines spokeswoman Alison Russell.
During the flight, the monkey crawled out of its hiding spot, forcing the owner to hold it in his hands, where the unexpected visitor was soon spotted by fellow passengers and crew members, Russell said.
Awesome. I mean every time I think the human species cannot become more ridiculous, they just…
purepedantry | August 8, 2007Vindication at last. I catch a lot of hell because I tend to talk with my hands.
However, Susan Wagner Cook for the University of Chicago has shown that when teaching math problems kids who repeat the hand gestures of the teacher are more likely to get the problem right. In other words, practicing gestures aids in retention:
Kids asked to physically gesture at math problems are nearly three times more likely than non-gesturers to remember what they've learned. In today's issue of the journal Cognition, a University of Rochester scientist suggests it's possible to help children learn…
purepedantry | August 7, 2007In response to my earlier post on the limits of utilitarianism Ezra Klein, blogger and journalist at The American Prospect, had this to say:
Reading this perfectly serious attempt to lay out Ayn Rand's objections to utilitarianism, I'm reminded of how utterly astonishing I find it that anyone takes her seriously. Listen to this stuff: "The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice - which means: self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction - which means: the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as a standard of the good."
Do people really…
purepedantry | August 7, 2007A woman who fell when she was four and got a pencil in lodged in her head has one of the craziest MRIs ever (on the right, click to enlarge):
Margret Wegner fell over carrying the pencil when she was four. It punctured her cheek and part of it went into her brain, above the right eye.
The 59-year-old has suffered headaches and nosebleeds for most of her life.
Surgeons in Berlin were able to remove most of the pencil in a two-hour operation, but a 2cm section was so embedded it was impossible to remove.
...
The pencil measured 8cm (3.1 inches) long, and had narrowly missed damaging an optical…
purepedantry | August 7, 2007The SciAm blog has a great discussion on current research into the neuroscience of morals. Two cool observations. First, while people tend to agree with the calculus of utilitarian moral judgments, they tend to reject them. Would you kill one person to save twenty? Even if you can morally justify that exchange, you are decidedly reluctant to do it. Second, this reluctance to make utilitarian moral judgments is neurologically based in the sense that if you lose a certain part of your brain (the ventromedial prefrontal cortex) you are more likely to accept this calculus.
Go check it out.
I…
purepedantry | August 6, 2007Now that's thinking outside the box:
Two graduate students at MIT's School of Architecture and Planning want to harvest the energy of human movement in urban settings, like commuters in a train station or fans at a concert.
The so-called "Crowd Farm," as envisioned by James Graham and Thaddeus Jusczyk, both M.Arch candidates, would turn the mechanical energy of people walking or jumping into a source of electricity. Their proposal took first place in the Japan-based Holcim Foundation's Sustainable Construction competition this year.
A Crowd Farm in Boston's South Station railway terminal…
purepedantry | August 6, 2007It's mad, I tell you, madddd! Mad scientists these days. Always going around saying, "Hey, you know how that animal could be better? If it had another head. Muahahaha!"
Anyway, the (possibly mad) scientists Wolfgang Jakob and Bernd Schierwater wanted to know more about the genes that determine the body plan of multicellular organisms. In mammals, these genes are called Hox genes, and in organisms that have circular symmetry like jellyfish they are called Cnox genes. We know that these genes broadly pattern the body plan of multicellular organisms because in a variety of settings if you…
purepedantry | July 30, 2007I saw the Simpsons Movie, twice in fact, which should indicate to you how good I found it to be. Two favorite lines. This one from the trailer:
The other one was where Tom Hanks is trying to sell the US on a new Grand Canyon in a commercial. He says: "If you are going to trust a government, why not this one?"
Priceless.
purepedantry | July 30, 2007Are you shocked? I'm not:
Drinking malt liquor -- the cheap, high-alcohol beverage often marketed to teens -- may put young adults at increased risk for alcohol problems and use of illicit drugs, particularly marijuana, according to a new study of malt liquor drinkers and marijuana use by scientists at the University at Buffalo's Research Institute on Addictions (RIA).
"In our study of young adults who regularly drink malt liquor," reports lead researcher R. Lorraine Collins, senior research scientist at RIA, "we found that malt liquor use is significantly related to reports of alcohol…
purepedantry | July 30, 2007I am clearing out links, so here are two quotes on a libertarian persuasion.
From Jane Galt (about media coverage of the Hillary/Obama foreign policy debate:
It's not really my business, since I don't think anyone will ever describe me as progressive or (outside of Britain), liberal, but I don't find this surprising, or even necessarily bad. Progressives/Liberals are possibly on the cusp of a political resurgence. It seems perfectly natural that they should spend more time worrying about how to cement their political coalition, then what to do when they have power. This has massive drawbacks…
purepedantry | July 30, 2007From Edgar Allen Poe's essay The Imp of the Perverse:
We have a task before us which must be speedily performed. We know that it will be ruinous to make delay. The most important crisis of our life calls, trumpet-tongued, for immediate energy and action. We glow, we are consumed with eagerness to commence the work, with the anticipation of whose glorious result our whole souls are on fire. It must, it shall be undertaken to-day, and yet we put it off until to-morrow; and why? There is no answer, except that we feel perverse, using the word with no comprehension of the principle. To-…
purepedantry | July 30, 2007A healthy debate rages as to whether Restless Legs Syndrome is actually a disease, or whether it was something contrived by drug companies in order to sell drugs.
Nicholas Wade reports in the NY Times that two separate studies have found a gene that is linked with the disease:
Kari Stefansson, chief executive of Decode Genetics, said his company had linked variations in the gene known as BTBD9 with periodic leg movements during sleep and with low iron levels in the blood, two clinical features already associated with the syndrome. He said Decode had missed, but subsequently confirmed, the…
purepedantry | July 30, 2007Aside from believing that cell phones give you cancer, many individuals report that feelings of illness around cell phones and other electromagnetic fields. This being in spite of the fact that human beings possess no sensory apparatus to detect electromagnetic waves -- unless of course you believe that an X-men-esque revolution is impending. Researchers in Britain have shown that these feelings of sickness are all in their heads:
Roughly 4% of Britons claim to be affected by radio waves from sources such as telephone transmitters and other electrical equipment.
Fox and her colleagues…
purepedantry | July 23, 2007Despite numerous statements by the airline industry and government to the contrary, it is in fact slightly safer to sit at the back of the plane in a plane crash. The first class cabin had the lowest survival rate for the crashes they examined.
Hat-tip: Slashdot.
purepedantry | July 20, 2007I am as excited for the new Harry Potter book as everyone else. I mean, come on, you want to see the end of even a bad movie, right?
But Jane Galt echoes something that I have been thinking for a long time about the series: Harry can be such a tool and his buddies aren't the sharpest tools in the shed either. I sympathize with Snape half the time. I understand. Being surrounded by well-meaning incompetence is enough make anyone turn to the dark side. At least Voldemort knows how to run an adequate organization, though being constantly confounded by school children draws even his…
purepedantry | July 18, 2007Giancola and Corman wanted to know why drunks are more aggressive.
The prevailing model to explain this effect is what is called the attentional allocation model wherein the alcohol inhibits an individual's ability to focus on a broad range of stimuli -- they become attentionally myopic. This means that when they focus on something that is provocative, they will become super-provoked. When they are focusing on something less provocative, they will become less provoked because they can more successfully ignore the provocative stimuli. It is in essence the horse-blinder theory of…
kcontreary | July 18, 2007As an American living in Europe, I am at times accutely aware of the differing levels of religiosity between my country of origin and my current residence. But an article from this past weekend's edition of the Wall Street Journal suggests that the disparity may be starting to decrease. Surveys show that, particularly among young people, reported belief in religious concepts (heaven, hell, the soul) is rising, as is church attendance.
All the usual suspects are trotted out as possible explanations for this spiritual upswing: immigration from more devout countries, anxiety over erosion of…
purepedantry | July 17, 2007Ronald Bailey at Reason has an article about the costs of the FDA black box warning on antidepressants:
Excessive caution is risky, too. Back in 1992, Congress, worried about the slow rate of approvals, passed legislation imposing FDA user fees on pharmaceutical companies. Flush with these new funds the agency hired 1000 additional drug reviewers and slashed new drug review time from 30 months to 15 months. Now critics claim that the FDA is in the thrall of drug companies and is endangering the public's health by rushing dangerous new drugs onto the market. As evidence they cite the dangerous…
kcontreary | July 14, 2007Anyone who has traveled in Europe before and after the introduction of the euro can appreciate how easy tourism is made by the common currency (haggling with the guys in money change booths was never my idea of vacation). But a recent paper by Benn Steil in Foreign Affairs goes even further, arguing that the adoption of regional or multi-state currencies is better for economic development than the cornucopia of national currencies used in the world today.
Time was, Steil recalls, it was said that three things were necessary in order to be a "real country": an airline, a stock exchange, and…