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Sharp pics from blurry ones

Forty years ago I was the only doc in a bioengineering lab in a famous technical university. We had our own computer -- it took up a giant room -- and had attached to it a rare device in those days, a scanner for converting transparencies to computer readable form. It was really a cathode ray tube with a sensor on the other side of the transparency. The CRT scanned and the sensor sensed and an analog to digital converter converted. About that time I got interested, along with an engineering colleague, in taking two-dimensional x-ray images, which were really projections or shadows of the…

Storm Update

So we made it through. Let me just note, however, that anyone who says that Irene was a wimpy storm that didn't do much damage shoulda been here. We're safe, but it was a near thing. We had close to 9 inches of rain and wind gusts that I'd estimate above 60mph - they took down two big locust trees and several willows. One of the locusts came down 10 feet from the buck barn where the buck goats and the calves were, another 10 feet from the rear of the house, while my kids were sitting in the room reading. Our enormous beech tree was entirely surrounded by the rushing creek (it is normally…

Swine flu: what did you expect?

by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure Usually "What did you expect?" is a rhetorical question, but we have a more serious point to make. Let's start with the familiar and move on to the less familiar. Many of you are coming here to find the latest news about swine flu. It's an imprecise term that covers two different things: what has happened that is new, in the sense of surprising and we didn't already know it would happen; and what is the current situation. Overnight (in the US) Europe (Spain) registered its first confirmed case. That's additional data but not surprising. We know this…

Dinosaur soft tissue--just bacterial biofilm?

An interesting new paper is just out today in PLoS ONE. You recall the announcement a few years back that soft tissue that resembled organic tissue had been isolated from a Tyrannosaurus femur. This started off a huge controversy in the field (and beyond)--researchers disagreeing with each other whether the structures seen were indeed blood cells and vessels; creationists crowing about how this finding represented "proof" that the earth was indeed young and dinosaurs had existed just a few thousand years ago; and of course, talk of cloning and DNA analysis. On the side of "soft tissue =…

Emerging Disease and Zoonoses #18: spread of H5N1 in Nigeria

Those of you who have followed creationism/intelligent design literature over the years have probably felt as if you're living in an alternate universe sometimes. In that literature, many times it seems as if "up" means "down" and "highly supported by the evidence" means "a theory in crisis." You may not have been following the comments to this thread on AIDS (and lord, I can't blame you), but if you have been, you've seen a similar phenomenon, where it's suggested that mutations found in RNA viruses are just due to sloppy lab work, essentially blowing off an entire field of research.…

It had wool, and armour plates, a massive beak, horns, and it smelled veeeeery bad: whatever happened to the Tecolutla monster?

Yay for day.... (counts) ... four of sea monster week. This time another familiar carcass image... well, familiar to me anyway. This remarkable object/shapeless hunk is the Tecolutla monster, collected from Palmar de Susana between Tecolutla and Nautla, Veracruz, Mexico, in 1969. Initially encountered by a group of farmers who chanced upon it in the dead of night* (apparently when it was still alive), they kept it secret for a week but eventually informed the Tecolutla mayor, Professor César Guerrero. Believing it to be a crashed plane (this story gets better and better), he organised a…

Free Will and Fruit Fly Behavior

I've been seeing articles popping up all over the place about a recent PLOS article called Order in Spontaneous Behavior. The majority of the articles seem to have been following the lead of the Discovery Institute, which claims that the article demonstrates the existence of free will, which they argue is inconsistent with naturalism and darwinism. The thing is, the paper says nothing of the sort. The paper did a very interesting study on the behavior of fruit-flies. They basically tethered fruit flies inside of a small cylindrical apparatus, which basically amounts to a little tiny…

Great Asian cattle

Cattle are another of those groups of animals that, while they're familiar and while we take them for granted, are really pretty incredible. The size, power and awesome appearance of many wild cattle never fails to amaze me. Markus Bühler (of Bestiarium) has been good enough to share these photos he took of Banteng Bos javanicus and Gaur B. gaurus at Berlin Zoo. These are Banteng, also known as Tsaine or Tembadau, a wild cattle of southeast Asia, Borneo and Java: the sexual dimorphism is obvious, as is the distinctive white rump patch and 'stockings'. Three subspecies are recognised, of…

Catholic geezers deny biology in Louisiana

Legislators in Louisiana are considering a bill to prohibit human-animal hybrids. We've been all over this subject before — it's ridiculous and founded on complete incomprehension of what the research is all about. How ridiculous is it? SB 115 bans the "mixing of human and animal cells in a petri dish"! Guess who is pushing this ban? The Louisiana Conference of Catholic Bishops, a collection of professional ignoramuses, like this guy, Archbishop Alfred Hughes: old, white celibates with clerical collars and heads stuffed full of decaying dogma. Look, Hughes, let's face up to reality. You aren…

I Don't Fear For The Swedish Language

Year after year, the Swedish language is spoken by a smaller percentage of the world's population. And year after year, the geographical area where Swedish is spoken shrinks a little. But year after year, Swedish is spoken by an increasing number of people. How does this work? Although Swedish speakers in Sweden and SW Finland have low nativity figures, and thus lose relative ground locally to Finnish speakers, and globally to the fecund masses of e.g. India, Sweden also receives immigrants who cause the country's population to grow slowly but steadily. And they all learn Swedish. In my area…

Gay Marriage Gaining Support

The Pew Research Center has released the results of a national survey with some very good news for advocates of gay marriage. The good thing is that it's a tracking survey that has been done since 2003, so you can measure how attitudes have changed. The findings are very positive: Public acceptance of homosexuality has increased in a number of ways in recent years, though it remains a deeply divisive issue. Half of Americans (51%) continue to oppose legalizing gay marriage, but this number has declined significantly from 63% in February 2004, when opposition spiked following the Massachusetts…

Readercon: Social Class and Speculative Fiction

Having spent the weekend at Readercon, I feel like I should talk about it a little. For those who have never been to a SF convention, it's not all people dressing up like space aliens and fairy princesses-- in fact, the cons Kate and I go to tend not to have all that much of the dress-up thing going on. Instead, they're run more like an academic conference, with lots of panel discussions on different topics relating to stuff in the genre. Why this happens is somewhat mystifying, when I stop to think about it, but it's entertaining enough in its way. Anyway, I went to a handful of panels that…

Go Tell It On The Grocery Store

The press helped elect Donald Trump. The mainstream press loved itself that false balance, giving absurdly pseudo-even coverage to whatever tripe might be spewed by willfully ignorant conservatives. So, screw them, and we await their apology. Meanwhile, the tabloid press has made its own contribution to the problem. Part of that is impressing on so many minds such crazy crap that a large percentage of Americans (apparently about one half of the actual voters) will believe anything. Or, perhaps, simply don't care about what is real and what is not. People are looking for things to do to…

My baby was designed by god just like a banana

When my baby nurses from his mom, he can see her face and bond with her because he was designed to do so by god. Like how a banana is designed by god to fit comfortably in the hand for eating, or maybe just carrying around. What am I talking about? (A timely repost) Imagine the following two alternative scenarios. Alternative Universe One The Scene: Visiting Nurses Inc. VNI contracts with health care providers to send trained visiting nurses around to check in on newly minted babies and their parents. This is standard procedure in many health care plans, and of course, VNI wants to…

The Advent Calendar of Physics: Faraday

Moving along through our countdown to Newton's birthday, we have an equation that combines two other titans of British science: This is the third of Maxwell's equations (named after the great Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell), but it originates with Michael Faraday, one of the greatest experimentalists of the day. Faraday was a fascinating guy, who came from humble origins-- he was an apprentice bookbinder who managed to get a job as Humphrey Davey's assistant-- to become hugely influential in both chemistry and physics. He also played an important role in science communication and…

Andrén and Baudou on Malmer

Mats P. Malmer in 1989, holding a miniature replica of a Bronze Age sword. Photograph by Dr Rune Edberg, published with kind permission. Yesterday, 18 October, was Swedish archaeology professor Mats P. Malmer's 86th birthday. Sadly he passed away on 3 October. I wrote a brief appreciation when I heard the news. Here's a longer one by Anders Andrén and Evert Baudou, both professors of archaeology and members (like Malmer himself) of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters. Andrén is the current holder of Malmer's chair in Stockholm, having succeeded the man's successor Åke Hyenstrand. I've…

Publius on Clarence Thomas and Harry Reid

Publius, of Legal Fiction, has written an entry about the uproar over Sen. Reid's statement that Clarence Thomas has been an "embarrassment to the court". It's worth reading. While he's harsher on Thomas than I would be, he does hit on an important distinction in how one can judge a judicial opinion: As I said, Reid's error was in using the word "embarrassing," as it implies that Thomas's opinions are somehow unprincipled or intellectually lightweight. That's not true at all. Thomas's jurisprudence is the most coherent and principled of all the Justices. But that's not to say it's good. One…

Scalia and Legislative History

In perusing Heidi Bond's reports on the speech and Q & A session that Scalia held last week at the University of Michigan, one thing jumped out at me. I'll post this just as she wrote it, but keep in mind that these are live blogged notes, not a written out report or a transcript: Says he'll say a few words about something other than originalism. Says that he thinks he'll lose it; "it's a hard sell to tell people that the Constitution doesn't mean whatever it ought to mean." "My other great cause is. . .the elimination of the last legal fiction in. . .our law: the use of legislative…

Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union [Library of Babel]

There are lots of other books in the booklog queue, but this one is due back at the library today, so it gets bumped to the front of the list. Of course, it doesn't hurt that it's probably the most widely discussed of the books waiting to be logged... In case you've been hiding out in a cave that no book reviews can penetrate, The Yiddish Policemen's Union is Michael Chabon's new novel about a Jewish homeland in Alaska. In this alternate history, the founding of Israel went catastrophically wrong, and the Zionists were driven into the sea by Arab armies. Lacking a home in the Holy Land, a…

Vacuum Technology is Black Magic

We've continued plugging away at the optical excitation experiment discussed in the Week in the Lab series last year, and have finally managed to get a decent metastable signal out of the thing. The signals are at pressures that are considerably higher than I would like (and quite a bit higher than the turbopump is happy with), but recent results from a colleague at Argonne National Lab suggest that this may well be due to the fact that one of our lasers is operating at much lower power than would be ideal. Still, it's data, and data are always good. As always with experimental work, getting…

Links for 2010-04-10

Neil Fraser: Hardware: Lava Lamp Centrifuge "Would a Lava Lamp work in a high-gravity environment such as Jupiter? Would the wax still rise to the surface? Would the blobs be smaller and faster? With broad disagreement on the answers, I built a large centrifuge to find out." (tags: physics gravity experiment science video planets astronomy silly) LaserFest | SpectraSound Music Transmission Device "All too often a great dance party is ruined because the stereo is far off over yonder. Well never let that happen to you again. We at LaserFest present you with SpectraSound -the device that…

Testing the Multiverse

Here's an interesting article from Quanta. It's about efforts by physicists to test the idea of the multiverse: If modern physics is to be believed, we shouldn’t be here. The meager dose of energy infusing empty space, which at higher levels would rip the cosmos apart, is a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times tinier than theory predicts. And the minuscule mass of the Higgs boson, whose relative smallness allows big structures such as galaxies and humans to form, falls roughly 100 quadrillion times short of expectations. Dialing up…

ERVs and Hodgkins lymphoma

Hey, you guys remember a while back, when Casey 'Tits' Luskin about peed his pants because 'ERVS AR BE FUNKSHUNAL!!' Except, this is really another case of Creationists not knowing the difference between an ERV, solo LTRs, and random wayward ERV genes. And those solo LTRs that could theoretically still act as a promoter, really dont all that often. Well, like I have said a million times on this blog, these solo LTRs, like all endogenous retroviral bits are not usually good things, CAUSE THEY CAUSE CANCER. Furthermore, Creationists (and wooists as a whole) are madly in love with epigenetics.…

Biology's Next Revolution?

The current issue of Nature features this interesting essay by Nigel Goldenfeld and Carl Woese. The essay's point is that recent discoveries about genomic interactions among microbes, particularly the phenomenon of horizontal gene transfer (HGT), is forcing us to reevaluate certain basic concepts in biology. They write: One of the most fundamental patterns of scientific discovery is the revolution in thought that accompanies a new body of data. Satellite-based astronomy has, during the past decade, overthrown our most cherished ideas of cosmology, especially those relating to the size,…

Uncomfortable Question: Creationist Theology

In the uncomfortable questions thread, David White asks: Ever entertained the notion that attacks on true science from the muscular political creationism/ID lobby might be vitiated by exposure of their great and inexplicable theological flaw (gasp!) dating all the way back to William Paley? Not really, no. Because, you know, there are only so many hours in the day. I don't mean to be rudely dismissive of David's thesis, which is laid out at length on his own blog, and is detailed and well argued. The thing is, though, the political problem of creationism has relatively little to do with…

Vaccinia virus tricks its way into hosts by mimicking dead cells

If it looks like a dead cell and it feels like a dead cell, be careful - it could be a virus. Viruses are experts at infiltrating and exploiting cells but some are so big that they need to use special tricks. The Vaccinia virus is one of these. It belongs to the same family as the more infamous variola virus that causes smallpox. This group are among the largest of viruses, dwarfing many other types by a factor of ten. But despite its size, Vaccinia relies on stealth rather than brute force. It's a mimic and it disguises itself as cellular flotsam. Vaccinia carries a molecular tag on its…

Got any more "bright" ideas?

Going on four years back, a couple of Californians decided the secular/atheist/agnostic/skeptic community needed a catchy name in the same way the homosexual community purloined the term "gay" as part of its evolution toward mainstream acceptance. They came up with "bright," as in "I'm a bright" and quickly won qualified endorsements from the likes of atheist/agnostic/skeptic luminaries Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins. A website was thrown together, and a brief flurry of media attention from the few journalists who pay attention to such things followed. But after that, a whole not of…

Virus and bacteria team up to save aphid from parasitic wasp

Viruses and bacteria often act as parasites, infecting a host, reproducing at its expense and causing disease and death. But not always - sometimes, their infections are positively beneficial and on rare occasions, they can actually defend their hosts from parasitism rather than playing the role themselves. In the body of one species of aphid, a bacterium and a virus have formed a unlikely partnership to defend their host from a lethal wasp called Aphidius ervi. The wasp turns aphids into living larders for its larvae, laying eggs inside unfortunate animals that are eventually eaten from…

Selective aphasia in a brain damaged bilingual patient

IN the 1860s, the French physician Paul Broca treated two patients who had lost the ability to speak after suffering strokes. When they died, he examined their brains, and noticed that both had damage to the same region of the left frontal lobe. About a decade later, neuropsychiatrist Carl Wernicke described a stroke patient who was unable to understand written words or what was said to him, and later found in this patient's brain a lesion towards the back of the left temporal lobe.  Thus was established the classical neurological model, in which language is localized to two specific areas…

A Handy Graphic/Timeline of Gonzalez's Publication Drop

Intelligent Design is a career-killer. There's just no two ways about it. And not because of how peers treat the ID supporter; they throw their own productivity under the bus, to use Casey Luskin's overworked cliche. We saw the same thing with Behe and Dembski. Behe has published ONE peer-reviewed paper in the last decade-ish. And Dembski... well, does anybody even know where he works these days? All hyperbole aside, let's look at Gonzalez's publication track record while we keep in mind that tenure committees consider work that comes in after one joins the university to be of prime…

Footprints on the Moon

Yesterday we lost Neil Armstrong, an accidental hero, thrust by fate onto a rock in the sky. Many dreamt of walking on the moon before he did, and a few men did after him. He happened to be the first. Hopefully many more men, and women too, will echo his iconic footsteps in the future. Perhaps even future space tourists will huddle around Tranquility base, laying nostalgic 60s filters over their high-resolution snapshots of an upended American flag from a long-ago mission. We can only hope. A lot of my favorite humans have died this year: Armstrong, Sally Ride, Ray Bradbury, all people who…

False claims in Kates' TN law review paper

[Writing to Don Kates] You asserted that handguns are involved in less than 50% of criminal firearm injuries. You dismissed my calculation that the data in your paper implied that the percentage was 90-97% as some sort of trick. Could you please tell me what you consider the correct value of this percentage to be? Don B Kates, Jr. writes: I answer: The correct value is determinable only from actual statistics. So far as I know, no statistics are available on the percentage of injuries involving handgun versus long gun crime. (Conceivably, the NCVS have such data, but I am not aware of it.…

Bluegrass in Gettysburg

Mr. Zuska and I spent a few days in Gettysburg at the Bluegrass Festival. I am a conflicted fan of bluegrass music. That is, I do love me some banjo. And hearing a good banjo, fiddle, bass, mandolin, and guitar together is, to me, a true aural delight. The problem lies with some of the lyrics. As the Steep Canyon Rangers pointed out Thursday night, there are a lot of "mean woman songs" in bluegrass. Thursday I must have heard at least three whose story went along the lines of "you done me wrong and broke my heart; that's why I had to shoot you and him with my daddy's gun; you're layin…

More on evolutionary "speed limits"

Yesterday's post on evolutionary speed limits and Haldane's Dilemma has sparked some interesting discussion, and some of the comments have already started to move beyond the very simple scenario that I outlined. Next week, I'll post a couple of more complex examples, and look at the effect of things like a lower frequency of mutants in the starting population, what can happen with two mutations being selected at the same time, and whether mutations need to be fixed to be evolutionarily meaningful. I'll also go over a couple of basic concepts that might help in understanding those scenarios.…

Casual Fridays: Inside EVERYONE's studio of curse words

For last week's Casual Fridays study we asked respondents to answer James Lipton's famous ten questions from Inside the Actor's Studio. In case you've never seen the show, here are the questions: What is your favorite word? What is your least favorite word? What turns you on? What turns you off? What sound or noise do you love? What sound or noise do you hate? What is your favorite curse word? What profession other than your own would you like to attempt? What profession would you not like to do? If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? What…

Language and time: More on whether the future is literally in front of us

Last week's article on the Aymara language and metaphorical depictions of time generated a lot of discussion. I think part of the confusion there had to do less with the specific example and more with basic questions about metaphorical representations of time, so today I'm going to cover some of the research that led up to the Aymara research. In the article, we conducted a poll where we asked participants a simple question: If your Wednesday meeting is "moved forward two days," what day is it on now? About half the respondents said "Friday," and the other half said "Monday." How is that…

O.C. Marsh's Mammal-Like Amphibians

The skeleton of Inostrancevia, a Permian synapsid from modern-day Russia. From the American Museum Journal. The science of paleontology has long been concerned with searching out the origins of modern groups of animals, but at the turn of the 20th century there were frustratingly few transitional fossils. That evolution had occurred was generally agreed upon, but where the transitional forms might be found, what they would look like, and what mechanisms drove their evolution remained disputed. Among the murkiest of these subjects was the origin of mammals. In an 1898 letter published in…

An early, rabbit-sized elephant relative from Morocco

Parts of the skull, including the upper jaws (maxillae), of Eritherium azzouzorum as seen from the front (top) and below (bottom). From Gheerbrant (2009). Yesterday I blogged about the ~27 million year old elephantimorph Eritreum, a creature that stood only about four feet high at the shoulder, but there were once even smaller proboscideans. About sixty million years ago in what is now Morocco there lived a rabbit-sized (~5 kg) hoofed mammal that is one of the earliest known relatives of the modern behemoths of Africa and Asia. Called Eritherium azzouzorum, it was a small mammal that…

Liveblogging the 2009 State of Innovation Summit

I'm here in DC at the Newseum for the State of Innovation Summit, a collaboration between SEED and the Council on Competitiveness. The crowd is pretty awesome - right now Adam Bly, SEED's CEO, is sitting a few rows from me with E.O. Wilson. Earlier, Wayne Clough, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, talked about a conversation he'd had recently with Steven Chu about using the Smithsonian's resources to enhance public understanding of climate change. As he spoke, the intense sunshine of a summer day in DC played across the Smithsonian castle turrets directly behind him (the seventh floor…

Ada Lovelace Day: Katherine Jones-Smith and the Pollock Fractals

It's Ada Lovelace Day! Ada Lovelace (1815 - 1852) is often referred to as the world's first computer programmer. The daughter of the famous poet Lord Byron, and the admired intellect, Annabella Milbanke, Ada Lovelace represented the meeting of two alternative worlds: the romanticism and art of her father versus the rationality and science of her mother. In her attempt to draw together these polar opposites and create a 'poetical science' during the Victorian age, Ada collaborated with the renowned mathematician and inventor, Charles Babbage. (source) I'm betting famous names like Marie Curie…

Cool Visual Illusions: The Winking Effect and Other Luminance-Contrast Illusions

In honor of the announcement of the Best Visual Illusion of the Year (via Steve), I thought I'd revive the old cool visual illusion series. I may post about this year's winner, the leaning tower illusion, in the future, but I just now read the paper, so I have some work to do first. Instead, I'm going to talk about an illusion discovered by one of the members of the team that came in third place this year, the winking effect. To see the effect, you'll have to head on over to the Journal of Vision website, which I'll link you to in a minute, 'cause I don't know how to put flash animation into…

Krauthammer: Sloppy, or Liar?

There are other, more interesting things to write about.  But someone is WRONG on the Internet, so it must be corrected.  Moreover, we must speculate about the rationale for this blatant misstatement.  And wonder why it was printed in a prominent newspaper. href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/31/AR2008073102824.html">Pelosi: Save the Planet, Let Someone Else Drill Friday, August 1, 2008 House Speaker Nancy Pelosi opposes lifting the moratorium on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and on the Outer Continental Shelf. She won't even allow it…

ESOF2008: Looking inside your brain: Keynote speech

The keynote Speaker for the Human Mind and Behaviour theme is Pierre Magistretti of the Brain-Mind Institute at Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne in Switzerland. Title: Looking Inside Your Brain Abstract: Prof. Magistretti will outline current brain-imaging technology and explore the ethical and societal implications of how, in addition to conventional medical diagnostic applications, it might be sed. He is professor of Neuroenergetics and Cellular Dynamics at the Brain Mind Institute. Magistretti began his talk by emphaising that despite major developments of neuroimaging techniques…

Friday Sprog Blogging: just add water.

One afternoon, the Free-Ride offspring were in the mood for some spur of the moment experimentation. So, we cleared the kitchen table, rummaged through the cupboards, and came up with a plan. The question we decided to investigate: What happens to different dry ingredients when you add water to them? We put each of the dry ingredients in its own little bowl. (If they got mixed up, that would make it harder to figure out what was going on.) Also, to help us remember what was in each bowl, we labeled the wooden sticks that we used to stir once the water was added. The dry…

Friday Sprog Blogging: kitchen table conversations concerning water

The participants in the conversation recounted here were not under oath during the conversation, and there exists no official transcript of the conversation. Dr. Free-Ride's better half: When we were filling water bottles for soccer practice today, your child had an interesting theory about what was going on with the ice cubes. Dr. Free-Ride: You put ice cubes in the water bottles? Pretty fancy! So, what was the theory? Elder offspring: Well, the ice cubes floated to the top of the bottle, near where the drinking spout is. I think that's 'cause the ice cubes want to get warm and melt so…

A Very Cool Ancient Crocodile

I have never actually seen a snake eat a crocodile or a crocodile eat a snake, but I am pretty sure I've seen a snake planning to eat a Nile Croc. And that was in the geological present. In the geological past, about 60 million years ago (during the "Eocene" a.k.a. "dawn age") there was a rain forest that is sort of the ancestor to modern rain forests, which is now a coal deposit (and thus, eventually, will be part of our air) in Columbia. It has yielded interesting materials, and the latest report, just published, is of a fossil dyrosaurid crocodyliform (ancient croc ancestor). It is…

Primitive Cultures are Simple, while Civilization is Complex: Part 2

In the first part of this discussion, I reminded you that we are talking about "falsehoods." "Falsehood" is a term I and others have co-opted and have used for well over a decade in anthropology and biology courses across the land. The idea is to identify a statement that, when uttered in some particular demographic or sociocultural context, invokes a relatively consistent set of meanings in the minds of those present, such that those meanings are at least iffy, probably wrong, and often (but certainly not always) offensive and destructive in some way. Such a construct ... this falsehood…

The Australian's War on Science 68: getting your science from a chain email

Jane Fraser, columnist in The Australian , writes a column based on "facts" she got from a chain email: Back to Plimer. He says he knows how disheartening it is to realise all your savings on carbon emissions have been eaten up by natural disasters. You've suffered the inconvenience and expense of driving Prius hybrids, buying fabric grocery bags, sitting up 'til midnight to finish your kids' "The Green Revolution" science project, using only two squares of toilet paper, putting a brick in your toilet, selling your speedboat, holidaying at home instead of abroad, replacing all those light…

Happy Birthday, Lusi (the Drilling Totally Did It)

It's been two years* since the ground opened near Sidoarjo, Indonesia, spewing mud over the homes, farms, and businesses of tens of thousands of people. The disaster quickly acquired the rather endearing name of "Lusi", which is short for "lumpur" (Indonesian for mud) and "Sidoarjo". The two-year anniversary media bonanza has focused on the continuing plight of the refugees and the publication of a new paper analyzing GPS data around the mud volcano to determine that there is, indeed, going to be a big hole in the ground where the mud used to be. Chris Rowan has already blogged about that…

The Rift in the Biological Sciences

I can't speak for each and every one of the other biologist types in the house here at ScienceBlogs, but one comment on Chad's post on highfalutin particle physicists struck a chord with me. It all starts with this quote getting back at people who think their research is the be all and end all of all science: One thing that bugs the heck out of me, is when I hear particle physicists talk about their field as if it is all of physics. I have a great love of particle physics, so I'm not dissing the field at all, nor arguing that it isn't more fundamental, but it rubs me the wrong way to…