retrospectacle | April 19, 2007 Ok, no nobody really *likes* to work. Even if you like your job, there are some days that you'd rather just sleep in or not have to jump through hoops or deal with your boss' same old TPS-report complaints. A recent survey (2006 General Social Survey) of 27,000 random Americans noted that less than 1/2 of Americans are satisfied with their jobs, with the trend being greatest for the under-25 crowd and weakest for the 55+ group. Seems about right, as most of the jobs you have when you're young are awful, and at 55 years old you've got retirement on the horizon.
Twenty years ago, the first…
retrospectacle | April 17, 2007Anti-cancer vaccines seem to be a burgeoning field in immunology (for example, the HPV vaccine) and what's more, they seem to hold much promise. A recent clinical trial at UCSF Brain Tumor Research Center has tested a vaccine (vitespan, trademark Oncophage) to glioma, a tumor of glia cells in the nervous system which is always fatal. The vaccine is individually tailored to the patient: its made out of their own tumor.
All 12 patients had recurrent high-grade glioma, and all 12 showed an immune response, attacking the tumor, following administration of the vaccine. Patients who received the…
retrospectacle | April 16, 2007In response to the horrific school shooting in Virginia Tech, a commenter in this post left a link to a fascinating story from the latter part of 2006. Its a Boing Boing article, which quotes Loren Coleman, entitled School shootings: malignant, contagious social meme? and its really worth a read in light of today's scary events. It explores the incidence of school shootings 'in a row' or how the Columbine shooting is "a dark cloud" hanging over such incidences and inspiriing copy-cat crimes.
Most contemporary school shootings tend to occur primarily during two periods of the school year - at…
retrospectacle | April 16, 2007I was pretty shocked to see the headline on CNN.com right now: Gunman kills 21 on Virginia Tech campus. As someone who spends the majority of my day on a college campus, this really rattled me. Should I start worrying that this could happen at Univ. of Michigan, too?
The shootings mark the deadliest school shooting incident in U.S. history, topping attacks at Columbine High School in 1999 and at the University of Texas in 1966.
The Associated Press quoted officials saying more than 20 people were wounded. A hospital spokeswoman told AP that 17 Virginia Tech students were being treated for…
retrospectacle | April 16, 2007I got an email from the head of this study, David F. Colvard, MD, of Raleigh, North Carolina. His team has shown that nasal irrigation can help solve a common problem for scuba divers: middle ear squeeze. This refers to the phenomenon divers experience during ascent and descent in the sea, when external pressure differences cause compression in the middle ear. This can cause damage and hearing impairment, if serious. To combat this, usually divers take a decongestant in either pill or spray form. However, Dr. Colvard's study has shown that nasal irrigation helped divers achieve middle ear…
retrospectacle | April 13, 2007
Good news! Florida is opening a public comment period from May 1-June 14, and the decision about whether to downgrade their status from endangered will be postponed until after that period.
The final plan will be presented to commissioners in September. If approved, the state will upgrade the manatee's status from endangered to threatened. That would mean scientists believe the species has rebounded from the brink of extinction.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service had recommended changing the manatee's federal status from endangered to threatened in Florida and Puerto Rico after deeming it no…
retrospectacle | April 13, 2007Don't have any groundbreaking parrot research to report on today, so content your self with fun parrot news this Friday. Just take this adorable cockatoo which has spent the last two weeks trying to hatch a bunch of chocolate Easter eggs!
The cockatoo has been protecting the chocolates since she was taken outside, and saw them on a table.
Geoff Grewcock, who owns the bird at a sanctuary in Nuneaton, said Pippa had become very protective of the eggs and acted like a mum to them.
He said: "She went straight over, climbed on the creme eggs and that was it. She thinks they're her eggs."
Pippa…
retrospectacle | April 13, 2007Just came across this interesting blog, CityParrots, which catalogs and reports on feral parrot populations in cities. Quite a lot of breadth, from parrot conservation, to stories on illegal trade, to Kakapos, to wild parakeets in Connecticut! Check it out!
retrospectacle | April 12, 2007What happens after a person receives a traumatic brain injury? Tissue damage and swelling often results in neural tissue being unable to receiving adequate levels of glucose which are required to "feed" the brain. This deprivation of energy can cause further injury to tissue, so often times an artifical supply of glucose is given to the brain to stave off those bad effects within the first few hours of injury.
Now this traditional food source may take a back-seat to lactate: the chemical that makes your tired muscles "feel the burn" and gives sour milk its, well, sourness. Researchers at UCLA…
retrospectacle | April 12, 2007Kurt Vonnegut, long-time smoker author of "Slaughterhouse Five" and "Cats Cradle," died last night of brain injuries he suffered weeks ago during a fall. He was 84.
"I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations," Vonnegut, whose watery, heavy-lidded eyes and unruly hair made him seem to be in existential pain, once told a gathering of psychiatrists.
A self-described religious skeptic and freethinking humanist, Vonnegut used protagonists such as Billy Pilgrim and Eliot Rosewater as transparent vehicles for his points of view. He also filled his novels with satirical…
retrospectacle | April 11, 2007Well ear plugs seem to be the answer to all our hearing-loss woes, according to this short new piece I came across on CNN. The author suggests wearing earplugs during incredibly noisy tasks as well as everyday ones, which is ok, but rather unrealistic. Who's really going to drop hundreds on custom ear-plugs, or wear plugs during aerobics (yeah, they fall out), or during a rock concert where you want to *enjoy* the music, not muffle it. And the author also brings out the tired song and dance about earbuds/iPods being bad for your hearing (they aren't any worse than previous technology, and…
retrospectacle | April 11, 2007I grew up in Florida, in central Florida to be exact. As a kid we went to Blue Springs and other manatee havens on field trips, to observe these gentle and curious animals. They are huge, and as they tend to inhabit shallow areas of the Florida coastal waterways its easy to see them in the clear springs of Florida, and even swim with them in some cases (not recommended, as you may inadvertently injure them). In the 1980s and 1990s, when i lived there (before I went back for undergrad) manatee conservation was forefront. They were nearly gone; hunted to the brink of extinction in the earlier…
retrospectacle | April 10, 2007I was just chuckling at PZ's lament about the sub-par potential of octopi to open a beer for you:
I was thinking it would be so cool to have an octopus on your shoulder, and you hold up your beer bottle, and he reaches out an arm and twists the top off for you. And then you read a little further and discover that the little smart-aleck will only do it if you open it first and put some octopus food inside for it. I wouldn't mind a bit of shrimp or crab bobbing about in my beer, but having to open the bottle first to put it in there defeats the whole purpose of carrying a bottle-opening octopus…
retrospectacle | April 10, 2007Not a huge deal, but hey, its exciting to me to get a facade of legitimacy. ;)
retrospectacle | April 10, 2007Wanna know the deep dark history of creationism, the intelligent design movement, and the Dover trial? Well Ed Brayton who blogs at Dispatches From the Culture Wars gave a talk a few weeks back at the Freethought Association in Grand Rapids, MI. Check it out here.
retrospectacle | April 10, 2007
Wow, why is this so relaxing? I think this slow-moving up-close-and-personal whale thingamajig could supplant bubble baths and candles as most relaxing thing ever. If they had added whale-song in the background I think we'd have the cure for insomnia and hypertension.
And while you're feelin' so fine, why not read about blue whales here? A blue whale, while the largest animal, doesn't have the largest brain. That honor goes to the sperm whale, who's brain weighs in at 20 pounds. A blue whale's brain is 15 pounds, and a human's is about 6 pounds.
From the Whale and Dolphin Conservation…
retrospectacle | April 9, 2007This is really upsetting, especially to someone who used to study manatees: Florida has been toying with the idea of down-grading manatees' "endangered" status and relaxing the amount of protection they receive. Protective laws include (and consist mostly of) laws which force boaters to slow down in areas where manatees live and breed. Given that the number one killer of manatees (perhaps really the *only* one) is collisions with boat propellers, these laws have been largely responsible for the up-swing in their numbers over the past 20 years. However, now that the laws have proven successful…
retrospectacle | April 9, 2007 The Matrix movies have a lot of religious undertones, from 'Neo' as a Christ-figure, the Nebuchadnezzar as their ship, Trinity as his side-kick, the name of the rebel city (Zion), and much more.
Then, I suppose it was only a matter of time until a "real religion" emerged based on the tenets of the Matrix story: Matrixism. What are the tenets of Matrixism, you might ask?
1. Belief in the prophecy of the One.
2. Acceptance of the use of psychedelics as sacrament.
3. Recognition of the semi-subjective multi-layered nature of reality.
4. Adherence to the principles of one or more of the world's…
retrospectacle | April 9, 2007
Some guy was arrested this past Wednesday for trying to smuggle pot in an Easter Bunny. The stuffed bunny wabbit was stuffed with more than plush, it was also packing 16.6 grams of weed. The owner of said bunny was pulled over after running a red light, then searched the car
because an "overwhelming" scent of marijuana was coming from the vehicle, the report says.
Dupont found the bunny on the passenger floor. Inside the bunny's front pouch were 16 small bags of marijuana. Dupont said the marijuana appeared to be packaged for sale, the report says.
Lawrence, who is wearing a DARE T-shirt in…
retrospectacle | April 7, 2007I've become a bit more interested in cooking lately, I suppose because of its similarity to performing an experiment. You have reagents (ingredients), follow a protocol (recipe), and have have both positive and negative outcomes (hopefully delicious!). The recent discovery of Cooking for Engineers has also peaked my interest since it often frames cooking in chemical or mechanistic terms, replete with how-to and pictures for the visually-inclined.
This week I've gone out on a limb and made a couple of my favorite, yet kinda weird, dishes. These include Tom Yum soup (Thai coconut lemongrass…