Search Content

Displaying results 56701 - 56750 of 112148

We're So Lucky

The first thing you need to know is that no one ever complains. I've seen a few people cry, mostly about lost pets, but what they say is "we're so lucky." They say "We're so lucky" as elders in their 80s and 90s put all the possessions of a lifetime out on the street to be hauled away as trash. One couple told me "We're so lucky - we saved our wedding album and one picture of all the grandchildren together." There wasn't time for more before they evacuated. "We're so lucky - the kids lost all their toys, but we're staying with friends who have girls the same size as mine, so they have…

E. coli O157 outbreak at daycare

So, today apparently is "blog about diarrhea" day. Hope no one's eating lunch. (One of the upsides of being a microbiologist is that we can talk about blood and gore and bodily fluids while we eat and no one gets grossed out. Or, perhaps, that's a downside. Anyway, I digress...) Two still hospitalized, four treated after E. coli outbreak at daycare Six confirmed cases of a serious E. coli infection and four additional "suspected" cases are being looked into by the [Tennessee] Department of Health, according to Debbie Hoy of the agency's Cookeville office this Tuesday. All of the infected…

Programming with Shapes: Clunk

Today's bit of pathology is a really silly, and really fun language called Clunk, with a downloadable package containing a perl implementation here. I'm not sure that it's Turing compete, but my best guess is that it is. It's another two dimensional language, but it's very different from any of the other 2d languages that we've look at, because it doesn't rely on an instruction pointer moving around the playfield; instead, it computes by creating an image by fitting together pieces according to some pre-determined rules. A Clunk program consists of a file containing a set of shapes. A shape…

False Journalistic Balance

When Klaus-Martin Schulte attacked Naomi Orestes and she responded, there was quite a lot of blosopheric response to it. If you look no further than scienceblogs.com, there were no less than eight direct responses (and some lively comments as well): one, two, three, four, five, six, seven and eight. What I was unaware of until today is an earlier article in Guardian by Jonathan Wolff about an outsider's look at the "controversy" around her 2004 Science paper. I saw it first on this post by Kaitlin Thaney (who also writes on the Science Commons blog), which links back to a post by Maxine…

Of Dinosaurs and Duck Feet ..

When Pittsburgh paleontologist Matt Lamanna jokingly promised his fellow scientists that he would eat a duck foot if they unearthed a rare bird fossil, he never expected that they would discover a large group of them in northwest China. This discovery, the most significant in the past 25 years, was made in the Changma Basin, a desert located more than 1,000 miles away from the famed Liaoning fossil quarries. "The dinosaur-bird transition is the hottest topic in dinosaur paleontology," says Lamanna. Some evolutionary biologists think that birds and dinosaurs are too different to be directly…

Behold, My Passion: Wild Lories

tags: birds, Moluccan Red Lories, Eos bornea rothschildi, Green-naped Rainbow Lorikeets, Trichoglossus haematodus haematodus, Seram, Indonesia, Image of the Day A pair of Moluccan Red Lories, Eos bornea rothschildi (upper, center and right), and a pair of Rainbow Lorikeet, Trichoglossus haematodus haematodus (lower, center (that bird is hanging upside down) and left), near the north coast of Seram, Indonesia. Image: Kevin Sharp [wallpaper size]. More about this image below the fold. As you know, dear readers, I am passionately in love with the birds of the South Pacific Ocean, especially…

Ask A Biologist - prettier and better than ever

Ask A Biologist, a wonderful site where experts answer all your questions about biology: This is a site aimed mostly at school kids and is devoted to providing the best scientific information available to anyone who is interested in any aspect of biology (the study of life) including palaeontology (the study of the history of life). But don't be put off; we accept questions from anyone who asks - whatever their age! We want to take you beyond the classroom - if you want to know more on any subject that interests you, then ask us and we will help you to find the answer. Everything you see here…

Music Mondays: David Gilmour on Chopping up Albums

Yes, that David Gilmour. Anyways, there was a post on Gilmour's blog a few months ago that provoked quite a little storm: Chopping up albums. Basically, the point Gilmour makes is that many albums are really meant to be listened to as a whole and shouldn't be split into individual tracks at record companies' whims. Read the whole thing to get the full sense of his argument, but I think the excerpt below gives a good sense: I'll go first: Blood on the Tracks' frenetic 'Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts' by Bob Dylan. There, I said it. (Forgive me, Bob.) More often than not, it gives me an…

Humble Sea Squirt Offers Hope to People With Rare Cancer

tags: cancer, liposarcoma, trabectedin, Ecteinascidia turbinata, sea squirt A toxin derived from a humble sea squirt, Ecteinascidia turbinata (pictured, right), shows great promise as an anti-cancer drug. This toxin, known as trabectedin (ecteinascidinin-743), shrinks and even completely removes cancerous tumors in more than half of the patients treated with it, according to a new study. The patients treated with this drug suffered from a specific type of liposarcoma cancer, which is associated with chromosomal mutations. Liposarcomas are a rare but malignant tumor that grow in the fat cells…

When it Rains, it Pours .. Mud, Lath, Plaster and Tiles

Today's view out the windows of my new neighborhood coffee shop. It's cold outside today, and, as you can see, it snowed. GrrlScientist 2008 [larger view]. This past week has been a real challenge because my bathroom is apparently disintegrating, which has caused the building "super" and his assistant to bang loudly on my apartment door bright and early every morning this past week, even last Monday, which was supposed to be a holiday. Worse, they hang around most of the day, so that I cannot leave my apartment during business hours so I can, you know, do things. Normally, I wake up…

Sanity Claws

I seem to be on a poetry roll here, kids. When I was 14, Citadel Miniatures put out a small run of a novelty pewter miniature named Sanity Claws: a tentacled menacing monstrosity for the festive season. And now Norm Sherman of the Drabblecast, whom I do not hesitate to call a genius and an Elder God, has written a Lovecraftian poem on the same theme (in all likelihood quite independently of that 1986 pewter giggle-shudder item). Hear Norm perform the poem on the Drabblecast's Christmas Special! 'Twas the Night By Norm Sherman 'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the edifice…

Comedy Central Censors South Park

Last night's South Park episode, as usual, contained a premise that was brilliant satire on multiple levels at the same time. First of all, they actually helped promote a show on another network, by having Kyle convince the head of the FOX network that he should show an episode of the Family Guy that includes a scene with Muhammed in it. Not an insulting scene, not a mocking scene, a totally innocuous scene where Muhammed hands something to the Family Guy. Kyle tells the FOX executive, ""You can't do what he wants just because he's the one threatening you with violence...Yes, people can get…

The year in stoats

A post a month, chosen not quite at random, and I couldn't always restrict myself to one post. Somehow, I feel that not a great deal happened scientifically during the year. But I still enjoy writing this stuff, and people still read it, so on I go. * Himalayan glaciers to disappear by... when? an obligatory reference to the CRU nonsense, but its a spin-off, so that's OK. * Death at UAH (and Wolf Hall) * Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi - its not all chance folks (and Hobbes again, and 400 ppm CO2) * Currygate, part 3: the key papers exposed - no round-up of the year could be complete without at…

Airbourne fraction, again

This was an ask stoat question, and probably a fairly easy one, so I'll have a go. First of all, what is it? AF (ie, Airbo(u)rne Fraction, is the proportion of human emitted CO2 that stays in the atmosphere, the rest being sunk in land or ocean. Now it is important not to confuse the "proportion that stays in the atmosphere" with "the concentration in the atmosphere" otherwise you get silly little skeptics running around thinking that "airbourne fraction is constant" means that CO2 has stopped increasing. Sigh. However, I see that last time I looked at this I was having to slap down the…

Romney's paean to piety

Well, Mitt Romney just lost the secular vote. Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone. Oh, wait. He never had it. That speech was an appalling piece of dreck. He claimed the mantle of John F. Kennedy, but no, he's no idealistic Democrat, and he sure mangled the Kennedy sentiment that we should elect our presidents as secular leaders, with no allegiance to any church, into an obscene insistence that our…

Seeing Red in the Sky

Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid. -Jules Feiffer Last semester, I was teaching my introduction to astronomy class, and part of the coursework was that each student had to choose a unique research topic and write a research paper based on that topic. Topics varied from cosmology to relativity to the space program to individual planets, but one choice captivated me so much that I bring my version of it to you now. Astronomy was, arguably, the very first science…

Crohn's Disease: Which came first, dysbiosis or inflamation?

Sounds like kind of a technical question. In Irritable Bowl Disease, including Crohn's Disease, it may be the case that bad bacteria cause intestinal wall inflammation. Or, inflammation could allow bad bacteria to do better than good bacteria. And, that might be an oversimplification because there could be other factors as well, including genetic predispositions. Many younger people who present with various abdominal symptoms are treated with antibiotics. These antibiotics could disproportionately favor bad bacteria. Whether from inflammation, genes, or use of antibiotics, it does…

Monkey poop! ... and the evolutionary power of HIV

The story of 'How we know where HIV-1 came from' is really cool-- A group of researchers went into the jungles of Africa, collected lots of monkey poop, and figured out pretty much the exact colony of chimpanzees that transmitted their SIV into humans, which lead to the HIV epidemic we know today. Those researchers have struck brown gold again! Eastern Chimpanzees, but not Bonobos, Represent a  Simian Immunodeficiency Virus Reservoir There are lots of different kinds of 'HIV'. Apparently, all of the  HIV-1 (Group M is causing the HIV epidemic in humans, and then Group N and O) we know today…

Bad maps

People had some peculiar ideas in 1932. Try reading this wonderfully detailed diagram of evolution (if you've got the bandwidth, download the 3212x8748 pixel version). The vertical axis makes sense: it's a logarithmic scale of geologic time. It's not quite right, since it has life arising about 1.6 billion years ago, when we now have good evidence that that occurred more than twice that long ago. I'm not going to complain about that — science does march onwards, and it probably represents the best estimates of that time. The horizontal scale is a real problem, and is revealing something about…

Kuhnian Huns

Back in August I blogged about a manuscript where a scholar appealed to Thomas Kuhn's old theory of paradigm shifts in order to evade criticism of their work. At the time I couldn't give the real details as I had received the manuscript in my capacity as journal editor. I've said before that I consider it an editor's duty to correct muddle in debates, both in the interests of scientific advancement and to help contributors avoid looking silly. So I wrote to the scholar in question and asked her to work some more on her contribution, specifically to address more of her opponent's substantive…

Mays

Arrr, the ol' spinnin' post, its seen a thing or two over the years. You could probably reconstruct the headship changes from its various colours. Last painted by Downing, when they went head in Lents in 2014; Caius were too cool to repaint it when they stayed head in Mays of that year, or re-took the Lents headship this year. Sakata Eio, in "The Middle Game of Go" (volume 1, game 3) writes "we are going to examine the lost chances and the potential that existed for better and more interesting moves". Which rather summarises these bumps; while exciting, they could have been even more…

Bork, Islamic Radicals and American Culture

Sandefur points to this article in Reason, responding to this article in the Washington Times about American popular culture's dominance over the rest of the world. Sandefur is quite right to point out that Bork has far more in common with the Taliban than he or his followers would like to admit. Witness this comment: Robert H. Bork remembers his ambivalence in 1989 as the Berlin Wall came down and dungarees and rock music poured into the former East Germany. "You almost began to want to put the wall back up," says the former Supreme Court nominee, a tart critic of American popular culture…

These Are a Few of my Favorite Blogs

I've been rather lax lately about reading other blogs and linking to articles that my readers might enjoy. To my delight, lots of other people have continued to write thoughtful stuff even while I wasn't there to read it (perhaps this suggests an answer to that "if a tree falls in the forest" question). So here is a roundup of some of the more interestin posts on some of my favorite blogs recently. I urge you all to follow the links and see what we've both been missing. Steve Sanders at Reason and Liberty has this post about the now often heard claim that gay rights advocates have pushed too…

Abrupt Climate Change, Past, Present, and Future

Dr. Lonnie Thompson of THE Ohio State University spoke at Union Wednesday night as part of the Environmental Studies Seminar Series on Abrupt Climate Change. Dr Thompson is an eminent climate scientist, and has spent thirty-ish years doing research on glaciers around the world, and what I learned from his talk is that I'll never make it as a single-issue blogger. His talk was basically an overview of what we can learn from ice cores, taken from a variety of palces all around the world, and what we learn is that the 20th century was a pretty unique time, climate-wise. There were lots and lots…

Bunnies Made of Cheese

The dog is standing at the window, wagging her tail excitedly. I look outside, and the back yard is empty. "What are you looking at?" I ask. "Bunnies made of cheese!," she says. I look again, and the yard is still empty. "There are no bunnies out there," I say, "and there are certainly not any bunnies made of cheese. The back yard is empty." "But particles are created out of empty space all the time, right?" "Have you been reading my quantum physics books again?" "It's boring here when you're not home. Anyway, answer the question." "Well, yes, in a sense. They're called 'virtual particles,'…

Some Light Reading for Saturday

Over at HuffPo, Jeff Schweitzer serves up a cri de couer against religion. He writes: Many factors have brought us to this sad state of affairs, but we can no longer ignore the 600 pound gorilla and trumpeting elephants in the room: religion is killing us. While our kids are being taught that god created gravity, children in Zaire are learning about Newton and Einstein. As children in Lichtenstein are being taught about the warping of space-time, American kids are learning that "people who do not believe in god" are incapable of understanding gravity. Preach it! American religiosity has…

Nef: Savior and Satan

Vpu has kinda been my accessory protein of choice here at ERV, but its not the only one with a super cool evolutionary history and super cool evolutionary implications. Another particularly fun one is Nef. This eeeeeeeety bitty HIV-1 protein (27 kDa) has a lot on its plate. Contrary to the 'expert' opinion of Michel Behe, who thinks viral proteins just 'gum up the works', Nef has several exceedingly specific functions-- Down-regulating CD4 from the host cell plasma membrane-- This is basically 'pissing on the fire hydrant'. HIV-1 requires CD4 on the surface of susceptible cells to…

!!Ong Bak 2!!

OMG! A new Tony Jaa movie: Back in 2003, a little Thai movie called Ong Bak introduced the world to an elephant-herder-turned-martial-artist named Tony Jaa. Directed by Prachya Pinkaew, the movie became a global sensation and rocketed Pinkaew and Jaa into the international celeb-o-sphere. They quickly collaborated on a follow-up called Tom Yum Goong (aka The Protector) that became the most successful Thai film ever released in America. Two times lucky, the Thai studio Sahamongkol Films eagerly green-lighted Jaa's dream project: Ong Bak 2 (Magnet Releasing), to be written, directed, produced…

Links for 2009-12-15

slacktivist: "Yes we can" "Evidence is of no consequence to Medina and Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck and the rest of the terrified angry mob calling itself a Tea Party because they're not acting based on evidence, or reason, or reality, or honesty. They're acting based on fear -- blind, howling, maddening, confusing fear." (tags: politics slacktivist race culture society US) Physics Buzz: Dark matters "[W]hen rumors circulated last week that CDMS had a paper coming out in the December 18th issue of the journal Nature, the physics blogosphere went mad in a way that reminded me endearingly of…

Yicaris dianensis

Early Cambrian shrimp! I just had to share this pretty little fellow, a newly described eucrustacean from the lower Cambrian, about 525 million years ago. It's small — the larva here is about 1.8mm long, and the adults are thought to have been 3mm long — but it was probably numerous, and I like to imagine clouds of these small arthropods swarming in ancient seas. The head limbs are drawn in median view and the trunk limbs in lateral view. There are a couple of notable things about this animal. One is that they're preserved in full 3-dimensional detail in an Orsten-type lagerstätte, which…

Pain in the eye of the beholder

It goes without saying that we are capable of noticing changes to our bodies, but it's perhaps less obvious that the way we perceive our bodies can affect them physically. The two-way nature of this link, between physicality and perception, has been dramatically demonstrated by a new study of people with chronic hand pain. Lorimer Moseley at the University of Oxford found that he could control the severity of pain and swelling in an aching hand by making it seem larger or smaller. Moseley recruited 10 patients with chronic pain in one of their arms and asked them to perform a series of ten…

The Physics of Rapunzel

Our excellent physics blogger Chad Orzel has a post up about the thermodynamics of Goldilocks. Seems it's a little questionable to have the porridge configured as it was in the old tale. A few wags in the comments complain that in a story with talking bears physics is the least of the concerns, but I think that misses the point. Suspension of disbelief requires that we grant the story the ability to say wild things so long as it does so in an internally consistent way. Don't, for instance, make time-travel commonplace enough so that a 13-year-old girl can use it to rearrange her school…

Is Name Calling an Effective Communication Strategy?

A few bloggers have registered their reaction to last week's PRI radio segment that questions the wisdom of calling climate change and evolution opponents "deniers." Most notably Orac, Mike the Mad Biologist, and Mark Hofnagle argue that their preferred brand of name calling remains the best communication strategy. But Orac, Mad Mike, and Mark overlook that the key audience in these rhetorical fisticuffs is not the small group of so-called "denialists" but rather the wider spectator public who may otherwise be ambivalent about a complex, seemingly remote issue such as climate change. As I…

Elsewhere on the Interweb (12/19/07)

Encephalon 38 is up at Not Exactly Rocket Science. Highly Allochthonous discusses an issue I had never heard of before: geovandalism or the destruction of geological samples that could be used in research. There are clearly trade-offs involved here: you don't want to completely shut off valuable avenues of research by preventing any sampling of geologically interesting localities, but you also don't want to cheat current and future geologists out of seeing these things in their original context, which is still the heart and soul of learning and doing good geology. Many times, these conflicts…

The Golden Compass was not a very good movie

I guess I suspected that Golden Compass might not be good, but I went to see it last night if for no other reason than to see why thousands of people would attempt to boycott it on Facebook. The Catholic League is also organizing a boycott. I haven't read the books that this movie was based on, but apparently the primary objection to the film was from Christian groups to the atheist imagery in the books. The author of the books, Philip Pullman, has also enunciated his desire to create a sort of anti-C.S. Lewis, secular trilogy. Listen, maybe the books are substantially better, but if this…

No, But Seriously

I am interested in the way scientific language changes with the passing of time. A sincere science* text, which is by nature written towards objectivity, has no more purpose when its objective ideals are proven to be incorrect. In its way, it becomes a kind of language poetry. Its uselessness becomes like the "uselessness" of literature. You know what I mean: crazy 17th century biology books earnestly featuring seven-headed hydra, or charmingly innacurate old maps with dragon faces at their edges. Those are almost art pieces, or cultural monuments. âPopular Scienceâ books from the 1950âs and…

Big Bang, a variation

Folks, this an experimental post (for me, that is). It is slightly incoherent. Written in five minutes. No corrections made. My typing hands decide not to pause. Enjoy if you can get through the muddle. Big Bang, a variation I watched Brian Cox present an excellent BBC TV programme on the LHC (on iPlayer, UK only). He covered a great deal and did it engagingly. As I watched the Big Bang being presented as garguntum explosion, I wondered if this is a true picture of the beginning of the Universe. The explosions seemed to pander to the shockjocks in us. Explosions: good. Explanations,…

Sexy women make everyone feel bad

Everyone knows that the way women are portrayed in our culture - sexy, skinny, tall - makes the average woman feel a bit like the gum I had to peel off my shoe this morning. When we look at magazine ads or watch TV shows, we women feel inadequate - and it's no wonder, when the average woman model weighs up to 25% less than the typical woman and maintains a weight at about 15 to 20% below what is considered healthy for her age and height. But the 40,000 or so ads the average American is exposed to a year aren't just affecting the girls. A new study coming out of the University of Missouri…

Freud is dead (Well... except in english departments)

Whenever I meet someone new and I tell them I'm studying psychology I inevitably get asked the ever annoying question "Are you analyzing me right now?" which of course always leads to the same response from me, "I'm as qualified to analyze or give therapy as an engineering student." Which is not at all. I'm thinking of changing that response to "English majors are more qualified to do that than any psychology student." After all, the humanities and other social sciences seem to be paying much more attention to the classic analysis of old, namely psychoanalysis than any self-respecting…

Science, "Faith", and the New York Times.

Verse one of Chapter 11 of the Letter of Paul to the Hebrews reads (in the King James translation of the Bible): "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." I mention this not because it is Sunday, or because I intend to offer a sermon, but because when I hear the word "faith," the definition that comes into my mind first is "the evidence of things not seen." By that definition, I have a very hard time thinking of science as requiring faith. If anything, "science" is the exact opposite of "faith". The body of knowledge that we call "science" consists of…

Prokaryotes and defining a negative

evolgen reports on debates in Nature about whether the term "prokaryote" is meaningful. Norman Pace argued that the term is a negative one ("privative" in Aristotle's sense), defined by what they do not have (which is to say, a nuclear membrane surrounding the genetic material). Now Bill Martin and Eugene Koonin have weighed in with a letter in which they say Prokaryotes are cells with co-transcriptional translation on their main chromosomes; they translate nascent messenger RNAs into protein. The presence of this character distinguishes them from cells that possess a nucleus and do not…

Cool visual illusions (with animations!), and an effort to explain why they occur

The cafe wall illusion has the dramatic effect of making a straight line appear slanted: That's right, the line is precisely horizontal. It was created by Akiyoshi Kitaoka, one of the world's foremost authorities on visual illusion, who is also a wonderful artist. In addition to the hundreds of other illusions he's created, he's posted an entire page of illusions all based on the cafe wall effect. But why does the line appear to be slanted? It must have something to do with the juxtaposition of light and dark patches, but what exactly? Take a look at this more elaborate illusion which…

How, exactly, do sad faces affect our ability to count?

Remember this video? A few weeks ago we used it to demonstrate that facial expressions can disrupt the perceptual system in fundamental ways. Actually, because we could only show a few short clips, we weren't able to duplicate the research results found by John Eastwood, Daniel Smilek, and Philip Merikle. But in their, more comprehensive study, although viewers were instructed only to count "upturned arcs" or "downturned arcs," when those arcs formed "faces" with negative expressions, people counted the arcs slower and less accurately. But how exactly do facial expressions disrupt the…

Jennifer Fulwiler: vacant-eyed, mindless cluelessness personified

I'm getting a clearer picture of Jennifer Fulwiler. She's very much a Catholic, she thinks she's an expert on atheists, and she likes things in fives. First it was five misconceptions atheists have about Catholics, and now she's written five Catholic teachings that make sense to atheists. As if she'd know. She claims to have been an atheist once, but her list of stuff that makes sense indicates that she was an awfully Catholic atheist. Purgatory. Why? "it made sense to me because it explained how heaven can be a place of perfect love, and God can still be merciful to people who had some…

Taking Sax and Brooks to Task

Mark Liberman has two great posts over at Language Log debunking first a claim made by David Brooks in this article on the gender gap in education, and then Leonard Sax's poor use of science that inspired Brooks' claim. This is what Brooks wrote: There are a couple of reasons why the two lists might diverge so starkly. It could be men are insensitive dolts who don't appreciate subtle human connections and good literature. Or, it could be that the part of the brain where men experience negative emotion, the amygdala, is not well connected to the part of the brain where verbal processing…

Friday Sprog Blogging: extra-terrestrial life.

Elder offspring: Since soccer season is over, you should take us someplace fun on Saturday. Dr. Free-Ride: Well, Saturday morning I'll be at commencement, and I think I'll need to spend at least part of Saturday afternoon grading. Younger offspring: Aww, do you have to go to commencement? Dr. Free-Ride: Yes, I have to. This year I'm a commencement marshal. Younger offspring: A commencement Martian?! Oh no! Elder offspring: Do you get to carry a ray-gun? Younger offspring: Why does that Martian in the Looney Tunes cartoons wear a skirt? Elder offspring: And why is his helmet so big? Dr.…

Friday Sprog Blogging: random bullets edition.

Dr. Free-Ride: So, what kind of science are you learning in school these days? Younger offspring: I don't know. Dr. Free-Ride: You don't know?! You have been going to school, right? Younger offspring: Of course. Dr. Free-Ride: When [Dr. Free-Ride's better half] was in the classroom helping with the lesson this week, what did you learn about? Younger offspring: About Fall, and pumpkins, and pumpkin seeds. Dr. Free-Ride: There's science in that, isn't there? Younger offspring: I guess. * * * * * Let the bullets commence! With the younger Free-Ride offspring's kindergarten science curriculum…

Friday Sprog Blogging: life science from two points of view.

It being spring and all, the Free-Ride offspring sometimes get that wistful why-aren't-we-4H-kids? look in their eyes. Not that there aren't critters aplenty in the back yard. The younger Free-Ride offspring sizes up the ladybugs and looks for a jar with holes in the lid that would be appropriate as a ladybug barn. (Then, I point out that the ladybugs are needed in the garden, right where they are, to keep the aphid population under control.) Most mornings, we have a delightful selection of colorful birds hopping around and eating (bugs, one assumes) right out our window. There are…

Berry Go Round #3

Welcome to Berry Go Round #3, the blog carnival deicated to all things botanical. The previous installment, Berry Go Round #2, is located here, at Further Thoughts. If you would like to submit an item to the next Berry Go Round, you may use this handy submission form. The Berry Go Round Home Page is here. Let us begin right away with the Artichokes. Seeds Aside has a piece on the relationship between the artichoke and the cardoon, both known in ADL (ancient dead language) as Cynara cardunculus. The phyloge relatinship between the two, and the story of domestication for each, is very…

The Australian's War on Science IV

I only wrote my last post on the Australian's War on Science a couple of days ago and already there's more attacks on science from them. First we have this news article: Professor Henderson said yesterday the report by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, handed down on February 2, was "alarmist". He said it had mislead Western governments over rising temperatures, and warned the cost of mitigation measures would be felt severely in Australia, unless it adopted a "balanced" view. ... Professor Henderson said IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri was "alarmist" and his report "a heavily…