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Different magicians, same old tricks

With the election of Barack Obama as the next president of the United States, many science-savvy folks have breathed a (tentative) sigh of relief. Perhaps we can finally put all this creationism in the classroom nonsense to rest now that a progressive Democrat is next up for the presidency. I'm not so sure, and there was a time when the loudest defense of Creation came from progressive Democrats. The brand of young-earth creationism we are familiar with today is not so much rooted in Victorian responses to Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, but the fundamentalist fervor prevalent in…

When Do Children Think Wishes Can Come True?

It's now clear that by age 3, children have a pretty sophisticated theory of mind, which includes an understanding of the limits of the causal powers of thought. They know that thoughts cause behaviors and other thoughts, but they're also aware that simply thinking about something can't affect it. Except, according to a recent paper by Woolley, Browne, and Boerger(1), when it comes to wishing. They cite results from a study by Vikan and Clausen(2) in which 96% of 4 to 6-year old children believed that their wishes could affect others. Which raises an interesting question: when do children…

Secret Evils of EMR

A minor controversy has erupted over the health care provisions that were slipped in to the economic stimulus bill without discussion.  It has provisions such that.. Your medical treatments will be tracked electronically by a federal system...One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and "guide" your doctor's decisions. This verbiage is found in a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039…

Antidepressant Warnings in Perspective

Since it seems to be a big deal to the New York Times (two articles in two days), I thought I'd comment on this.  An FDA advisory panel recently voted to expand the warnings in the product labeling for antidepressants.   Just to put this in perspective, the FDA makes many such changes.  The most recent href="http://www.fda.gov/medwatch/safety/2006/oct06_quickview.htm">summary page is from October of this year, and it lists changes to the labeling for Avastin, Chloraprep, Coumadin, Remicade, Seroquel, Allegra, Opana, Sodium Chloride Irrigation solution, Vicoprofen, DepaKote, Heparin,…

Everybody's favorite homeopath is back, and I'm not...

It figures. I don't know if it's confirmation bias or not, but it seems that every time I go away on a trip, some juicy bit of blog fodder pops up. So, right here, right now, while I'm at the AACR meeting soaking up the latest and greatest in cancer science, inevitably someone posts something that normally would provoke--nay, demand--an Orac-ian deconstruction full of the usual Insolence. So what is it this time? Dana Ullman. Yes, everybody's favorite homeopath for whom no science is too settled to twist and homeopathy and homeopathic "thinking" are in fact responsible for much of medical…

When not to treat?

The Cheerful Oncologist posts a nice piece about When Is No Treatment the Right Treatment? It's a difficult question that surgical oncologists have to face as well. His example is a man with lung cancer who has recently rapidly deteriorated with little hope for long-term survival. Should he get chemotherapy? Are the risks (immunosuppression, etc.) worth the rather meager benefit? It's a really, really tough question. We surgeons face this question as well, although probably much less frequently than medical oncologists do (another reason I don't think I could do medical oncology). One of the…

The skin of ichthyosaurs

No time for anything new, unfortunately. But I have a lot of old stuff kicking around: here, I've recycled text from my undergrad thesis on ichthyosaurs. I hope you get something out of it. Ichthyosaurs are famous for preserving impressions of soft tissue; these are preserved as black, carbonaceous films, and are known for specimens that come from Solnhofen and Holzmaden in Germany, from Barrow-upon-Soar in England, and from the Wapiti Lake area of British Columbia. Martill (1993) reviewed occurrences of ichthyosaur soft tissue preservation, citing records from the Hettangian, Sinemurian,…

Coulter's Science: Let the Criticism Commence

As I mentioned the other day, about 1/3 of Ann Coulter's new book is devoted to "Darwinism". Since she has no background on the subject at all, she had to get some tutoring on the subject and she got it from none other than the Discovery Institute folks. She says in the book, ""I couldn't have written about evolution without the generous tutoring of Michael Behe, David Berlinski, and William Dembski...", while Dembski himself goes so far as to say, "I'm happy to report that I was in constant correspondence with Ann regarding her chapters on Darwinism - indeed, I take all responsibility for…

Arguments for morality are not arguments for religion

(This article is also available on Edge, along with some other rebuttals to and affirmations of Haidt's piece.) Jonathan Haidt has a complicated article on moral psychology and the misunderstanding of religion on Edge. I'm going to give it a mixed review here. The first part, on moral psychology, is fascinating and a good read that I think clarifies a few ideas about morality. The second part, though, where he tries to apply his insights about morality to the New Atheists*, fails badly. I can see where he has thought deeply about morality, but unfortunately, he hasn't thought clearly about…

Mark Steyn's Latest Trick

UPSATE. The motion has been denied. Rather hilariously, bt the way. Professor Michael Mann vs. Shock Jock Mark Steyn You all know about the libel suit filed by Professor Michael Mann against Canadian right wing radio shock jock Mark Steyn. Steyn made apparently libelous comments linking Mann, who is widely regarded as the worlds top non-retired climate scientist, to the Jerry Sandusky scandal. (I don’t know what Steyn was implying but the only link is that both work(ed) at Penn State University!) There are other aspects of the libel suit as well, beyond the scope of this post. The suit was…

Neurological bias = a liberal media? I don't think so

Over at Economics of Contempt, there is an argument that liberal media bias has to exist because there is evidence that partisanship changes the way that our brains process information. (This is not his only evidence, but it is part of it.) Now, I don't want to get into a discussion about the existence or nonexistence of a liberal (or conservative) media bias. What I take issue with is the particular study that Economics of Contempt cites as evidence of this bias. I think that he is misapplying the results of that study. Economics of Contempt cites the results of Westen et al. 2006.…

Maiacetus, the good mother whale

The extinct whale Dorudon, from the new PLoS One paper. When the English anatomist William H. Flower proposed that whales had evolved from terrestrial ungulates in 1883 he cast doubt upon the notion that the direct ancestors of early whales chiefly used their limbs for swimming. If they did, Flower reasoned, whales would not have evolved their distinctive method of aquatic locomotion, typified by vertical oscillations of their fluked tails. Instead Flower suggested that the stock that gave rise to whales would have had broad, flat tails that paved the way for cetacean locomotion as we know…

NCCAM: I say we take off and nuke the entire center from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

Over the years that this blog has been in existence, beginning very early on, there has been one overarching theme. That theme is that the best medicine is science-based medicine. Sure, we could quibble about how that was originally defined, and I used to be more of a booster of evidence-based medicine until its blind spot with respect to "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) and "integrative medicine" (IM). That blind spot, as I've explained time and time again, both here and elsewhere at my not-so-super-secret other blogging location under my real name, that blind spot is prior…

Age of Autism's Anne Dachel takes on Bill Moyers over vaccines. Hilarity ensues.

Thanks to the partying and backslapping going on in the antivaccine movement over the reversal of the decision of the British General Medical Council to strike Professor John Walker-Smith off of the medical record, after a brief absence vaccines are back on the agenda of this blog. Antivaccine cranks view the decision as a vindication and exoneration of antivaccine guru Andrew Wakefield even though it is nothing of the sort and is in fact a decision based on questionable (at best) scientific reasoning. Actually, as some of my commenters have pointed out, Justice Mitting applied legal…

The vilest antivaccine lie that won't die: Shaken baby syndrome as "vaccine injury"

Way back in the day, when I first encountered antivaccine views in that wretched Usenet swamp of pseudoscience, antiscience, and quackery known as misc.health.alternative, there was one particular antivaccine lie that disturbed me more than just about any other. No, it wasn't the claim that vaccines cause autism, the central dogma of the antivaccine movement. Even ten years ago, that wasn't a particularly difficult myth to refute, and, with the continuing torrent of negative studies failing to find even a whiff of a hint of a whisper of a correlation between vaccination and autism, refuting…

The Trouble with Deepak Chopra, Part 3: More Choprawoo

As I mentioned on Friday, I'm in Chicago right now attending the American College of Surgeons annual meeting, where I'll be until Wednesday afternoon, and may not be able to post anything new before Thursday afternoon or Friday. If there are any of my readers who happen to be surgeons attending the meeting, drop me a line and maybe we can get together. In the meantime, here's a blast from the past from the past. This post first reared its ugly head almost exactly three years ago; so if you haven't been reading at least three years, it's new to you. It seems like only yesterday that I was…

Correspondence on "Agricultural production and malaria resurgence"

Correspondence on the paper "Agricultural production and malaria resurgence in Central America and India" Nature Vol 294 26 November 1981 pages 302,388 Malaria debated SIR --- I have read the paper by Chapin and Wasserstrom (Nature 17 September, p.181) with interest. I am disappointed with the presentation and discussion of the important subject of malaria resurgence and its relationship to agricultural production. The authors give a garbled account of the very concept of malaria eradication and especially of the causes of the relative failure of this great endeavour. They imply, that the…

The Trouble with Deepak Chopra, Part 3: More Choprawoo

It seems like only yesterday that I was fisking yet another piece of seriously irritating woo from that expert purveyor of woo, Deepak Chopra. In fact, it was only yesterday that I was fisking part two of Chopra's woo-filled The Trouble With Genes series. As I mentioned in my previous fisking, I had thought that Dr. Chopra might lay low for a while, and was surprised that he popped up again so soon. So color me even more surprised that Chopra wasted no time in wading back in again with yet more of his tradmark brand of woo (which I like to call Choprawoo) in a post entitled The Trouble With…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: When two woos go to war

There's a new woo in town. Unfortunately, it's the same as the old woo. I first noticed it around Christmas. Inexplicably, I started getting a greatly increased amount of traffic to an old Your Friday Dose of Woo post of mine. The post to which I'm referring is one that I did a year and a half ago about some fabulously silly woo that claimed to remove toxins through the soles of your feet through a special foot pad, which inspired me to entitle the post These boots were made for detoxifyin'. This product in question was called "Miracle Patches" and, it was claimed, can remove all manner of…

I Told You This Would Happen: the Evil Librul Blogger Edition

Never doubt the prognostication of the Mad Biology. A couple of days ago, I wondered if the Mighty Conservative Wurlitzer would unleash its awesome fury against the Edwards campaign bloggers. Turned out I was right. First, there was some hardhitting investigative reporting from the National Review bloggysphere that yielded...nothing. But then Michele Malkin got in on the act. For those of you who don't who Michele Malkin is, one of her claims to fame is authoring a book that defends the racially-motivated interment of Japanese-Americans during World War II (because if it's ok when FDR did…

The nature of religion and Breaking the Spell

A few science bloggers have referred to Daniel Dennett's new book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, and the controversy that is erupting around it. I haven't read the book, but this piece in The Boston Globe gives a very quick sketch of the ideas Dennett covers. It seems that Dennett wants to examine religion as just another natural phenomenon, a suite of behaviors and cognitive states characteristic of our species. In short, Dennett seems to be covering three primary modern hypotheses in regards to why religion seems a ubquitous aspect of our cross-cultural phenotypes…

Smart people got no babies.... (?)

RPM comments on some issues relating to human genetics. First, he points to the article about how conservatives are going to outbreed liberals, etc. etc. etc. The problem with this article is that the Left & the Right have been around since the late 18th century and history marches Leftward even though one assumes the Right has been breeding at a higher clip for the past 8+ generations. What gives? First, there is a heritable component to political orientation. That is, a proportion (around 0.5) of the variation in of conservatism or liberalism within the population is attributable…

Genetical Theory, chapter 2

It's been nearly a month since I last posted on The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. I've been holding off because I didn't know how to approach chapter 2, in many ways it is the most important and ambitious chapter (though not technically the most taxing). I think I will likely post twice on this chapter, and in this entry I'll avoid talking about the difference between "average effect" and "average excess" and what not. Rather, I'll focus on two issues: 1) The Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection. 2) Fisher's view on the nature of adaptation Both of these are rather simple…

Tetrapods are older than we thought!

Some stunning fossil trackways have been discovered in Poland. The remarkable thing about them is that they're very old, about 395 million years old, and they are clearly the tracks of tetrapods. Just to put that in perspective, Tiktaalik, probably the most famous specimen illustrating an early stage of the transition to land, is younger at 375 million years, but is more primitive in having less developed, more fin-like limbs. So what we've got is a set of footprints that tell us the actual age of the transition by vertebrates from water to land had to be much, much earlier than was expected…

Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend

tags: Evil Genes, borderline personality disorder, machiavellian behavior, successfully sinister, Barbara Oakley, book review I have lived and worked with people whom I have decided, in retrospect, were more than merely hateful and mean-spirited, they were just plain evil. So when Barbara Oakley asked me to read and review her book, Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend (Prometheus Books; 2008), I readily agreed. This well-written and very readable book is an exploration of evil people who exhibit an extreme form of Borderline…

Flu in dogs again, but not H5N1

The index case was a 5 year old Miniature Schnauzer with 5 days of nasal discharge and sneezing. The dog recovered but the next case, a 3 year old Cocker Spaniel wasn't so lucky, nor were the 2 Korean hunting dogs (Jindos) or a 3 year old Yorkshire terrier. Then 13 dogs in a shelter started to show signs of nasal discharge, cough and high fever. Antibody studies showed that they had all been suffering from influenza infection, subtype H3N2. These cases happened in the spring and summer of 2007 (NB: this is not flu season). H3N2 is the most common subtype involved in human seasonal influenza.…

Sleep Schedules in Adolescents

Earlier this year, during the National Sleep Awareness Week, I wrote a series of posts about the changes in sleep schedules in adolescents. Over the next 3-4 hours, I will repost them all, starting with this one from March 26, 2006. Also check my more recent posts on the subject here and here... I am glad to see that there is more and more interest in and awareness of sleep research. Just watch Sanjay Gupta on CNN or listen to the recent segment on Weekend America on NPR. At the same time, I am often alarmed at the levels of ignorance still rampant in the general population, and even more…

Tribute to Kathryn R. Mahaffey, PhD

It is with deep sadness we inform you of the sudden passing of Kathyrn R Mahaffey, PhD.   Kate had an exceptional and diverse career, with appointments at FDA, NIOSH, NIEHS and EPA.   Most recently, Kate served as a Professorial Lecturer at the George Washington University School of Public Health. Her husband, David Jacobs offers the following remembrance and tribute to her significant contributions to the public's health.   Information about a memorial service appears at the end of this post. Kathryn R. Mahaffey passed away peacefully in her sleep June 2, 2009 after decades of…

Don't Let Mercenaries Advise EPA on Asbestos Science

By David Michaels Product Defense is a lucrative business. The scientists who own and operate these firms make sizable profits helping polluters and manufacturers of dangerous products stymie public health and environmental regulators. The companies, and the scientists, sell not just their scientific expertise, but their knowledge of and access to regulatory agencies. Hire me, they say, because I can get the results you want. I used to work at EPA, or OSHA, or FDA -- I know how they operate, and besides, the folks at the agency will always answer my phone calls. This is mercenary science.…

The Frasercot: an enigmatic new carnivoran known only from its pelt

In another desperate effort to bump up the number of hits, I thought I'd go with a provocative title. There is, sorry, no such thing as a Frasercot: but it is, however, the answer to the question... to what animal, exactly, does that mysterious skin actually belong? No, it was not feathers, nor scales on a moth's wing (!), nor the skin of an octopus (!!), but most definitely the pelt of some sort of carnivoran (I enlarged and rotated a section of the adjacent image). But the problem is: that's about as far as we can go, as no-one really seems to know what it is... The skin is now owned by…

Australian Aboriginal Rock Art May Depict Giant Bird Extinct for 40,000 Years

tags: Paleontology, birds, Genyornis newtoni, rock art, aboriginal peoples, Archaeology, Australia, Niwarla Gabarnmung, Arnhem Land, Flinders University Australia's oldest painting? A red ochre rock art depiction of two emu-like birds (Genyornis newtoni?) with their necks outstretched. Image: Ben Gunn [larger view] An Australian Aboriginal rock art may depict a giant bird that is thought to have become extinct some 40,000 years ago, thereby making it the oldest rock painting on the island continent. The red ochre drawing was first discovered two years ago, but archaeologists were only…

Sleep Schedules in Adolescents

Earlier this year, during the National Sleep Awareness Week, I wrote a series of posts about the changes in sleep schedules in adolescents. Over the next 3-4 hours, I will repost them all, starting with this one from March 26, 2006. Also check my more recent posts on the subject here and here... I am glad to see that there is more and more interest in and awareness of sleep research. Just watch Sanjay Gupta on CNN or listen to the recent segment on Weekend America on NPR. At the same time, I am often alarmed at the levels of ignorance still rampant in the general population, and even…

all at sea

the US navy is all out this week when listening to heated rhetoric from DC, it is interesting to keep half an eye on what is actually happening on the ground. US doctrine calls for an ability to strike any where on the globe within 24 hours, a time they'd like to shorten to one hour (for non-nuclear strikes), but realistically for any sustained effort against a national power, the US need to move assets into place weeks or days before anything can happen. It is also effectively US doctrine to attack first at night, and near or just after the new moon, because that maximises the advantages of…

KITP: γ-rays from globulars

Fermi Gamma-ray Telescope has results. We hear about them. why, yes, that really was 47 Tuc "Discovery of γ-ray sources from the globular cluster 47 Tuc" or something similar, in preparation, at a glossy journal near you soon in the mean time, browse the LAT bright source catalog (for high galactic latitude - none has dared descend into the plane yet...) this will really screw up starry eyed particle (astro)physicists who were desperately hoping to find cold dark matter annihilation radiation from substructure in the halo hah! we temporarily ignore gamma-ray bursts... we will return to your…

TGGWS again: oh lordy

Prefix: you may have read the leaks about this in the Grauniad: "Channel 4 to be censured over controversial climate film" seems a fair comment on the fairness ruling. But are they right about the accuracy aspect? That will need another post. Meanwhile, thanks to Dave Rado for pushing all this, and have a look at http://www.ofcomswindlecomplaint.net/. Ofcom officially available from http://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv/obb/prog_cb/obb114/issue114.pdf. If you have any sense, you've probably forgotten the late and unlamented The Great Global Warming Swindle (and many other points in the blogosphere). But…

344-352/366: Wetland Walk

Another in the sadly delayed wrapping-up of my photo-a-day project. These are all pictures from a hike in the Vischer Ferry Nature Preserve over in Clifton Park. We took the kids over there one time, but a thunderstorm started coming in before we got very far. While the kids were at my parents', I decided to go over one afternoon and take a more thorough walk around the place. This ended up going quite a bit longer than I had expected, as I misremembered part of the trail map, but I got some good photos out of it. 344/366: Fake Jungle Part of the old Lock 19 from the Erie Canal, cosplaying…

Federal Marriage Amendment Snafus

The Washington Post is reporting on the framing of the Federal Marriage Amendment, which has been proposed in Congress to ban gay marriages nationwide, that it is so poorly written that even its proponents don't know what it would prevent and what it would allow. The article begins: In the spring and summer of 2001, a group of conservative legal scholars including former Supreme Court nominee Robert H. Bork hammered out the proposed text of a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. Participants say it was an informal, somewhat "messy" process conducted by e-mail and telephone so…

The Doctrine of Incorporation

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case involving a display of the Ten Commandments on government property. The case is McCreary County v. ACLU of Kentucky. This morning I received a PDF of a brief filed in that case on behalf of several religious right organizations. I do not know if the brief is publicly available, so I won't post a link to it at this time. What makes this brief interesting is that it doesn't just argue that posting the Ten Commandments on public property doesn't violate the first amendment, it argues that the first amendment does not apply to the states at all, leaving…

Baghdad Update: Too Much TV

Another update from my friend Paul, working as a journalist in Baghdad, this time on an unfortunate collision between the Sci-Fi Channel and reality: ----------------- Today two suicide bombers walked into a police commando recruitment center and blew themselves up, killing 35 recruiting hopefuls. The night before I watched a TV show where a young cadet blew himself up at the police graduation ceremony - killing, as I recall, 35 people. That was a bit of a shock. The moments after I leave the desk at night, after a long shift, are very special to me. I read, listen to music, decompress and…

The Magpie in the Mirror

A typical adult human recognizes that the image one sees in a mirror is oneself. We do not know how much training a mirror-naive adult requires to do this, but we think very little. When a typical adult macaque (a species of monkey) looks in the mirror, it sees another monkey. Typical adult male macaques stuck in a cage with a mirror will treat the image as a fellow adult male macaque until you take the mirror out of the cage. (Experiments that attempt to determine if an individual can recognize themselves in the mirror ultimately derive from what is known as the Gallup Test, after Gordon…

Hysterical chiro-woo at White Coat Underground

ERV does not have a monopoly on teh crazy. Pal really reels them in with his chronic lyme disease posts, and now, evidently, chiro-woo. I could not have made up this post from 'Dr. Howard Boos' if I had tried. You tell me this asshole doesnt sound EXACTLY like a Creationist or HIV Denier! 1. Hates science 2. Uses title of 'Dr' in an attempt to gain unearned credibility 3. Personal expertise/experience trumps scientific community 4. Little/No interest in modern scientific findings, eg journal articles 5. Scientific community wants to hurt people 6. Science itself hurts people 7. Woo…

"Singular Oddities of Character": Cavendish and Dirac

One of the oddities of writing the book-in-progress is that it involves a lot more history-of-science than I'm used to. which means I'm doing things like checking out 800-page scientific biographies from the college library so I can use them to inform 500 word sections of 4000 word chapters. One of these is Cavendish: The Experimental Life by Christa Jungnickel and Russell McCormmach, a biography of Henry Cavendish (and his father), whose most famous experiment is one of the things I plan to describe in the book. Henry himself turns out to be quite a character, though, thus the 800-page…

Great glowing spiders

I've known that scorpions have fluorescent cuticles — if you go out into the desert with a black light and shine it on the ground, the scorpions will often glow green and blue and be easy to spot. I had no idea that many spiders exhibit the same phenomenon, but there they are, glowing away. I may have to visit my local head shop (in Morris? Hah!) and get some black light bulbs to see what the fauna in my living room is up to. Fluorescence is actually a fairly common property: all it requires is a molecule called a fluorophore that can absorb and capture transiently photons of a particular…

The Status of Simulations

Most of what would ordinarily be blogging time this morning got used up writing a response to a question at the Physics Stack Exchange. But having put all that effort in over there, I might as well put it to use here, too... The question comes from a person who did a poster on terminology at the recently concluded American Geophysical Union meeting, offering the following definition of "data": Values collected as part of a scientific investigation; may be qualified as 'science data'. This includes uncalibrated values (raw data), derived values (calibrated data), and other transformations of…

After the Warming: a view from 2050 (via 1989)

Eighteen years ago British journalist/historian James Burke wrote and starred in a TV documentary on climate change. After the Warming (downloadable version available at Google Video) was presented in the guise of a future historian's review of the events leading up to a time, in 2050, when the world had come to grips with the consequences of global warming. I gave my copy to a friend in 1994, and have been trying to find another since. This week I finally did. And watching it now is positively eerie. And depressing. Eerie because it begins by describing things like the "full-scale…

He's back. And Bjorn Lomborg still doesn't get it

PZ Myers suggested I might have something to say in response to Bjorn "The Skeptical Environmentalist" Lomborg's resurfacing. Indeed I do. The Danish boy wonder is back with a new book, Cool It, in which he makes his case, yet again, that climate change isn't all that bad. He was wrong with his first book, which was savaged by everyone who actually knew the subject matter, and he's even more wrong now. Salon has an aggressive interview and an excellent book review, and it is on the former that I will base my analysis of Lomborg's major cognitive failure, in lieu of wasting precious time and…

The guardians of fear - molecules that provide safety nets for scary memories

As sufferers of post-traumatic stress syndrome know all too well, frightening experiences can be strong, long-lasting and notoriously difficult to erase. Now, we're starting to understand why. Far from trying to purge these memories, the brain actively protects them by hiring a group of molecular bodyguards called CSPGs (or chondroitin sulphate proteoglycans in full). By studying the brains of rats, Nadine Gogolla from Harvard University found that CSPGs - large chains of sugars and proteins - accumulate in the space around nerve cells and form defensive nets around a select few. Dissolve…

Wind Blows; Mountains Lose; Mountains Win; It's a Mess

With alternative energy proposals, the environmental lines are certainly not clear-cut. I've already noted why I think this is the case (short answer: they foster consumption possibilities, not reductions in consumption). But now there is a precise example of the complexity of such issues in many states proposing what are called Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS). How could one resolve these tensions, when we don't know which alternative is an improvement? The go-to answer there is generally, ask science. Get the evidence to demonstrate trade-offs. But we can't assume science will…

Icebergs are hotspots for life

Say the word iceberg, and most people are likely to free-associate it with 'Titanic'. Thanks to James Cameron (and, well, history too), the iceberg now has a reputation as an cold murderous force of nature, sinking both ships and Leonardo DiCaprio. But a new study shows that icebergs are not harbingers of death but hotspots of life. In the late 1980s, about 200,000 icebergs roamed across the Southern Ocean. They range in size from puny 'growlers', less than a metre long, to massive blocks of ice, larger than some small countries. They may be inert frozen lumps, but icebergs are secretly…

Relativity from a Flashlight

Here's an experiment to try. It's a thought experiment - it would be almost impossible to carry out in reality, though more delicate experiments roughly along these lines have been done. You're in one of the space shuttles, or the Discovery One, or your favorite fictional but realistic spacecraft. It has a hallway extending the length of the spacecraft from bow to stern. You stand at one end of the hallway with a laser pointer, and shine a brief pulse of light down the other end. Make that a very brief pulse. You want the physical length of the pulse as it flies down the hall to be short…