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New Study On How Global Warming Changes The Weather

Human caused greenhouse gas pollution has warmed the planet. Global warming means more extreme weather. Many meteorologist who watch the weather every day see this. More and more research shows that greenhouse gas pollution changes the weather in a way that causes even more change in the weather. Changing weather systems means more lightning, increased high precipitation events in certain regions like the US Northeast, including more frequent large snow storms. Global warming has had uneven effects. The Arctic has warmed relatively more than most of the rest of the planet. The major movements…

Ten Thousand Birds

There are over 10,000 species of bird on the Earth today. There is one blog called "10,000 Birds" for which I write a monthly article, in case you did not know. But this post is about Ten Thousand Birds: Ornithology Since Darwin, a book by Tim Birkhead, Jo Wimpenny and Bob Monegomerie. Birds and various studies of birds are central to evolutionary theory and the development of all of the surrounding biology and science. Here's a short list of key roles birds have played in evolutionary biology: Darwin's study of pigeon breeding was central to On the Origin of Species and later works. The…

Bangladesh and Sea Level Rise

You've all heard about the horrible tragedy in Bangladesh, still unfolding. Not to distract from that event, or diminish its importance, I thought it would be interesting to have a look at that low lying country in relation to long term sea level rise caused by climate change. I am making no claim here about the maximum rate of sea level rise or about the timing of sea level rise. But the truth is, there have been times in the past when there was virtually no year round ice (glaciers) anywhere on this planet, and sea levels were much higher than they are now. During a time period not too…

The new bird flu: Is it serious?

There is a new outbreak of a bird flu in eastern China, referred to as H7N9. The first thing you need to know is that human populations have not been previously exposed (to any degree) to H7 or N9 type virus, so if this virus were to mutate in such as way as to spread human to human, the result could be very serious. Moreover, the "H" component of the virus is thought to have a genetic sequence that is known to readily mutate into form that would be target (bind to) human rather than bird cells. The virus has been found in chickens, pigeons, and ducks in markets where live birds are sold…

It was so unexpected that we thought there was something wrong with the instrument

I love it when scientists say that! And, so said scientist Daniel Baker, speaking of a newly observed feature of the famous and well known, or at least, we thought well known, Van Allen Belts. First discovered in 1958, the Van Allen belts have been thought to comprise two reservoirs of high-speed, electrically charged particles, corralled into separate doughnut-shaped rings by Earth’s magnetic field. The outer ring orbits at a distance of some 10,000–60,000 kilometres above Earth, and encircles an inner band of even more energetic particles, roughly 100–10,000 kilometres above Earth. ...…

New Paper: On Forced Temperature Changes, Internal Variability and the AMO

Michael Mann, Byron Steinman, and Sonya Miller have just put out a new paper on climate change which addresses a number of key concerns. The paper is called “On Forced Temperature Changes, Internal Variability and the AMO.” Here’s the abstract: We estimate the low-frequency internal variability of Northern Hemisphere (NH) mean temperature using observed temperature variations, which include both forced and internal variability components, and several alternative model simulations of the (natural + anthropogenic) forced component alone. We then generate an ensemble of alternative historical…

Castle Owners

My excavations this summer will target the ruins of two Medieval castles near Norrköping. Christian Lovén and I have selected these two because unusually, both have curtain walls (Sw. ringmur) but do not seem to have belonged to the Crown. The High Middle Ages in Sweden are poorly documented in surviving written sources, but in one of these cases we actually have a pretty good idea who built the castle and when. Landsjö in Kimstad parish enters the record in about 1280 when an old woman writes her will. She's Kristina, daughter of a certain Faste who had borne a plant device on his coat of…

In Defence of Archaeology

Somebody once said to me, "You archaeologists don't really know anything, do you? I mean, it's just guesses, right?". Well, sometimes I do despair about archaeology as a science. Can we actually know anything about what life was like for people in the deep past? Are we doing science at all or just deluding ourselves? But I always pick myself up pretty quickly. First, I remind myself that all science is a muddled process where we grope laboriously toward solid knowledge and often have to make detours. If archaeology isn't always very good science, then at least it's not alone in this. Then…

Climate models have proven extremely skillful in predicting the warming that has already been observed...

It am Michael Mann, saying Climate models have proven extremely skillful in predicting the warming that has already been observed and, by many measures (e.g. Arctic sea ice loss, melting of the major ice sheets) it is proceeding faster than climate models predicted... Notice any problems with that quote? Well yes: model inaccuracy is taken as proof of model skill. You cannot assert simultaneously that models are extremely skillful, and that change is occurring faster than they predicted. You can, of course, plausibly say If anything, uncertainty is breaking against us, not with us but that's…

Dennett on ID

Daniel Dennett, a man I consider one of the half dozen or so most brilliant thinkers on the planet, has an op-ed piece in today's New York Times about "intelligent design" called Show Me The Science. He makes essentially the same argument I have been making on this blog for nearly 2 years now: The focus on intelligent design has, paradoxically, obscured something else: genuine scientific controversies about evolution that abound. In just about every field there are challenges to one established theory or another. The legitimate way to stir up such a storm is to come up with an alternative…

Weekend Debate Report

The debate tournament went well, though I definitely realized that I am too old to do that anymore. It ended Saturday night and I'm still recovering from the lack of sleep. Still, it was a nice nostalgia trip. I was disappointed in the quality of the debate that I saw. The best team there was from Ohio and I can't imagine they would last long at a major tournament. I was told they went 3-3 at Wake Forest a few weeks ago, which is a major national tournament, and that sounds about right. I don't know if the quality of debate overall has gone down in the 13 or 14 years since I was actively…

Quantum Measurement Lotto

Thoreau at Unqualified Offerings gets credit for inspiring two posts today with his proposed Murphy's Law experiment and this one, about an unrelated issue in quantum measurement. This is an analogy suggested by a colleague a couple of years ago, comparing the projection of a quantum wavefunction in the measurement process to the lottery. The classic example of this problem is something like the double slit experiment with single particles. You have some position-sensitive detector that we can imagine as being made up of a large number of pixels, each having some probability of detecting a…

Regional climate response to solar-radiation management

Geoengineering is getting more and more attention in political discussions as well as research. I am by no means a proponent of any geoengineering scheme I have heard of and the majority of them try to address surface temperature only and therefore do nothing about "the other CO2 problem", aka ocean acidification. I must confess that H. E. Taylor's article a while back went some way in convincing me that like it or not we need to be considering these perilous pathways. He basically makes the compelling argument that we are in fact now, unwittingly or not, geoengineering our global climate…

Lazowska on the politicization of science and our uninspiring educational system

This is an excellent brief overview of the crucial problems in American education by Ed Lazowska, a computer scientist and engineer at the University of Washington who also served on an advisory committee under GW Bush. From his first hand view, he does not seem kindly disposed towards Republican policies in science. Presidential scientific advisory committees have been politicized. I have seen this firsthand. The general denigration of science emanating from the White House, and the near completee failure of the President's Science Advisor, Jack Marburger, to speak out, is poisonous. Right…

Green Computing

I'll be curious to see if there turns out to be a parallel between what is happening now in the auto industry, and what happens in the future in the computing industry.   We recently passed the 25th anniversary of the original IBM PC ( href="http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/pc25/pc25_intro.html">model 5150).  Ever since then, computer marketing has been oriented toward progressively faster, more capable machines.   Original IBM PC photo from IBM archive But now, we hear that rel="tag">Intel is href="http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/09/11/37NNintellayoffs_1.html"…

Bergman: Still crazy

Jerry Bergman is a fairly typical creationist: he's a loon, and he's dishonest. I debated him once to an utterly ineffectual conclusion, and it was like having an argument with a rabid squirrel — he makes no sense, he splutters out nutty fragments of angry rhetoric, and he's ultimately of no consequence whatsoever. But he still has an audience, and he's still out giving invited talks at churches all over the country. Next week, Bergman will be speaking in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and we've got a preview of what he's going to say on the — duh duh DUHHH — Dark Side of Charles Darwin. Part 1: •…

Thoughts on Osama

Some initial thoughts, on a beautiful day in a palpably better world without Osama: 1. I'm astonished he was still alive. I was certain he died from an anonymous bomb or health problems sometime between '01 and '04. He hadn't released any tapes or videos with unambiguous confirmation of when they were recorded, and the general consensus was that al-Qaida was now a fully decentralized organization that had adjusted to operating without him. The fact that he wasn't dead meant that, unlike his suicide bombers and guerrillas, he had basically abandoned his own cause to live in (very) quiet luxury…

Cult Fiction

The Telegraph has a list up of the top fifty "best cult books," a category they describe as: the sort of book that people wear like a leather jacket or carry around like a totem. The book that rewires your head: that turns you on to psychedelics; makes you want to move to Greece; makes you a pacifist; gives you a way of thinking about yourself as a woman, or a voice in your head that makes it feel okay to be a teenager; conjures into being a character who becomes a permanent inhabitant of your mental flophouse. Below the fold are the top 50. I’ve indicated those (19) I’ve read with italics.…

Happy Bloomsday

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead on this day back in 1904. I'm many hours late noting it. One favorite passage among many quoted below. Try to commit it to memory. What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the range, admire? Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its umplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8,000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all…

The Egnorance - It Returns. And Still Burns

Everybody's favorite creationist neurosurgeon is back. Today, Michael Egnor brought forth yet another remarkably inept attempt to find a way to justify egnoring the relationship between natural selection and antibiotic resistance. This time, he's apparently decided that there's no hope in finding a substantive argument, so he's resorting to nothing more than a childish rhetorical game. One of the authors of a recently published scientific paper that examined antibiotic resistance left a comment at The Panda's Thumb noting that his research did in fact rely on Darwinian evolution. In a…

Framing framing wrong?

John Hawks links to Greg Laden's blog in which he points out that Nisbet and Mooney misused the notion of framing. It seems (I am not that familiar with it, except via secondhand stuff about Lakoff's views, which Laden notes is derivative of the work of Goffman) that framing doesn't mean what they think it means, as Inigo Montoya might have said if they were Sicilian. Or does it? Words do not always mean the same thing as their theoretical contexts imply or define. Take "paradigm". Kuhn used it in a context (later deconstructed by Margaret Masterman into 21 distinct senses, some subtly…

Do "racing" video games really cause reckless driving?

Several news outlets are reporting on a study, in some cases claiming that racing video games "cause" accidents or reckless driving. But causality is difficult to demonstrate in psychology research. Do the games really cause accidents? Many of the irate commenters on the news articles claim that the study doesn't really show causality, or that it's not well-designed. I took a quick look at the actual study, and came away impressed: the study does show some causal links between racing games and poor driving behavior in simulations, but it also has some limitations. One thing I like about the…

Visual illusion may explain the allure of pointillist paintings

What is so mesmerizing about pointillist paintings like Seurat's Sunday Afternoon at La Grande Jatte? At first, we're impressed by the technical virtuosity of the work. It's an immense painting that Greta and I visited many times when we were in college in Chicago (and now, whenever we return for a visit): As you can see even in this reduced image, the painting is composed of tiny dots. But what you may not notice is that the dots in a given region of the painting aren't all the same color. Take a look at this detail: The leaves in the trees range from red to yellow to green to blue, and…

Hearing speech impaired voices

There's an interesting case study in The Lancet, about a woman who began hearing voices with speech impairments following a bicycle accident. The 63-year-old woman was treated at the University Hospital of Psychiatry in Bern, Switzerland, after falling from her bicycle and hitting her head. Following the accident, she suffered a brain hemorrhage and lost consciousness. Upon her arrival at the hospital, it was found that the woman had an aneurysm (a blood-filled dilation of a blood vessel in the brain). This was treated, and a craniotomy was performed to after tests showed damage in the…

Intelligent Design strikes out at the Vatican

There's no official declaration of the Pope's recent consult on evolution, but news is leaking out…and the good news is that Intelligent Design is not going to have a place at the table, and didn't figure in the discussions at all. Catholic News has one source: A participant at the Pope's closed door symposium on creation and evolution, Jesuit Fr Joseph Fessio, has denied speculation about a change in the Church's teaching on evolution, saying nothing presented at the meeting broke new ground and that American debates on Intelligent Design did not feature in discussions. Declan Butler, in…

Preventing Chemotherapy Errors: A Primer

I've been thinking a lot about Ms. Melanson, the woman from Alberta who died after receiving the correct dose of infusional fluorouracil chemotherapy in an fatally incorrect short time. Cancer care professionals take their responsibilities seriously and are not known to be infiltrated with ignoramuses or reprobates. This doesn't guarantee that a mistake will never be made; in fact this Canadian tragedy is all the more painful because according to the reports the nurses involved were well-trained. Writing chemotherapy orders is a task that requires the highest degree of concentration. It…

What logic we can get

The other night, we had three trauma cases come into the pediatric emergency department, almost at the same time. The first to arrive was a boy who'd collapsed and stopped breathing after being hit in the head with a ball during his prep school's baseball practice. Then, in quick succession, came two 14-year old boys who had been shot while visiting a great-aunt. One had been hit in the arm, and one in the neck. I was in charge of the airway of the kid who'd been shot in the arm. Trembling in his neck collar, blood oozing slowly out of the bullet wound, he eyed the IV catheter a nurse was…

NASA Loses Moon Landing Tapes

Yes, that's right. The moon landing may have been one of the most significant events of the Twentieth Century, but our original records of it seem to have been misplaced, as The Sydney Morning Herald reported on the 5th of August: The heart-stopping moments when Neil Armstrong took his first tentative steps onto another world are defining images of the 20th century: grainy, fuzzy, unforgettable. But just 37 years after Apollo 11, it is feared the magnetic tapes that recorded the first moon walk - beamed to the world via three tracking stations, including Parkes's famous "Dish" - have gone…

New Gene Makes Flies Less Gay

We all know that Drosophila are the gayest bunch of gays that ever gayed up genetics. This is especially true when you create mutations in fruitless (nee fruity), "the gay gene". Male flies with mutations in fruitless will try to get it on with other males (e.g., doi:10.1016/S0092-8674(00)81802-4). That's gay! But fruitless is an old school gene that needs to be fucked up to turn the flies gay (doi:10.1093/molbev/msj070; the first author on that paper is, I shit you not, named Gailey). Drosophila really aren't as gay as they are made to appear in the articles describing fruitless mutants.…

Sex in the Fourth Dimension

Most of us are so used to the male+female=baby system of reproduction that we practice that it doesn't even occur to us that there are other options. Sure, there's the occasional instance of parthenogenesis in some megafaunal species, but that seems like the exception rather than the norm. And we do recognize that a lot of the microbes that make up the majority of life on Earth reproduce asexual. But, when it comes to sex, we're stuck on male+female=baby. Kurt Vonnegut thought otherwise. In his classic novel Slaughterhouse Five, he introduced the Tralfamadorians and their understanding of…

Haiti Cholera Toll: Stricken - 11,000, Dead - 750+

Over eleven thousand Haitians have been infected with cholera, and over 700 have died. The epidemic is worsening very quickly. Over 80 of the dead have died within the last 24 hours as of this writing. The resources needed to deal with this are not available, apparently because cholera in Haiti is not as interesting or sympathy garnering as an earthquake in Haiti. From Medecines Sans Frontiers: Over the past three days, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) medical teams supporting Haitian Ministry of Public Health facilities and working in their own independent medical structures in Haiti's…

Medical Matters: H1N1, Science Ignorance and Cancer Screening

I have a few non-authoritative comments regarding recent and current medical developments. This concerns the flu (esp. the H1N1 Swine Pandemic Flu), and the two recent changes in screening recommendations, for breast and cervical cancer and related issues. Regarding the flu, we are seeing more evidence that a peak has passed in the H1N1 outbreak. What you need to know if you are in the US is that as of today, the CDC has NOT declared that a peak has passed here. The number of states with "outbreak" level occurrences has dropped and the number of children who die per week has gone down a…

Psst. Plants can kill you. Or at least try.

When I was eight years old, my sister and I discovered that a small tree in our Louisiana backyard was dropping some thickly shelled nuts into the grass. We loved  eating fallen nuts; an enormous pecan tree carpeted the front yard with them every summer. But these were different - rounder and fatter. Curious, we smashed a few on a brick, opening up some fleshy pale kernels inside. "Almonds!" I proposed hopefully. We sat down under the tree and prepared a feast. I don't fully remember what they tasted like. Slightly bitter, a little like a fresh leaf, a blade of grass. We were always tasting…

More erroneous claims about Kellermann

Kellermann's studies on guns frequently get criticized by people who do not seem to have read them. The latest to do so is Michael Krauss, who writes Notwithstanding all this data, the press gave extraordinary publicity to a 1993 article by one Arthur Kellerman in the New England Journal of Medicine. Kellerman's "study" concluded that the presence of a gun in one's home dramatically increased one's chances of being killed by gunfire. As has since been widely noted, though, the study had stupendous methodological flaws that would surely have…

Snot, sequencing & submersibles by Christina Kellogg

What do they all have in common? Deep-sea coral microbial ecology. Coral microbial ecology is the study of the relationship of coral-associated microorganisms to each other, the coral host, and to their environment. Just as we humans have beneficial bacteria living on our skin and in our intestines, corals also have co-habitating, non-pathogenic microbes (and yes, I AM shooting for the most hyphens ever used in a DSN post*). These microbes include bacteria, archaea, and fungi--representing all three of the major domains of life (eubacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes). What can we learn from…

Late to the Top 50 SF & Fantasy Meme (did I just say that word?)

After all my previous squawking about women reading science fiction and fantasy, OK, I mean hottus scientificas chicas who do or do not read the genre, I can't believe I missed this. Well, maybe I can. I am a near geriatric, after all. Here are the various responses from my SciBlings: Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the Last Fifty Years. The list is below the fold, and the books which I have read are in bold text: 36 of 50, if I counted right. My brother, 10 years my senior, is an avid science fiction and fantasy fan, and not only had many of these books in paperback form, but…

Christmas Goose: Snow or Canada?

Living in central New York, and only a few miles from the Utica Marsh, the honking and flying V's (not this) of the Canada goose are a common sight in the Fall, and perhaps it's only a mild exaggeration to say they're more common than red or yellow maple leaves. Early on Saturday mornings I can be found with a few friends doing our weekly long run along a canal trail that borders the marsh. It is nothing for us to see several hundred or a thousand of these honkers, not to mention numerous ducks and the random great blue heron. Once, two years ago, we came across a group of perhaps two hundred…

Point-counterpoint, or Why does Dick Cheney hate Republican voters?

Democracy Corps just released a major study of 49 House districts currently held by Republicans. The Ryun-Boyda race is not yet in the top 49 races, but pollster Stan Greenberg and strategist James Carville are thinking that Democrats need to challenge more than just those 49. Stan Greenberg says that "there've got to be seats beyond these 49," most of which are in a band from Connecticut to Indiana. The Democratic challenger has a 2 point advantage over the incumbent in the bottom tier of races, the ones that the pollsters considered a stretch originally. Especially interesting is the…

Ken Miller: Expelled from Expelled for his religious views

The more that the producers of Expelled talk, the more they demonstrate their abject idiocy. Chris Heard transcribes part of producer Mark Mathis's discussion with Scientific American: [SciAm editor] Mirsky: Why not also include comments from somebody like Ken Miller— Mathis: Uh— Mirsky: who is famously religious— Mathis: well— [Laughs.] Mirsky: and an evolutionary biologist. Mathis: I would tell you this. And this is keeping in mind who you’re talking to is an associate producer. I don’t make decisions about who gets interviewed, and, and I don’t make decisions about if they’re interviewed…

Self-Control is a Muscle

Experiments like this demonstrate why Puritanism is so psychologically unrealistic: A paper in The Journal of Consumer Research looks at the effects of self-restraint on subsequent impulse purchases. In one experiment, college students spent a few minutes free-associating and writing down their thoughts, under instructions not to think of a white bear. Given $10 afterward to save or spend on a small assortment of products, they spent much more money than students who had free-associated without having to avoid thoughts of bears. This isn't the first time people have explored the impact of…

Friday Random Ten, 2/19/2010

Transatlantic, "The Whirlwind (Part 4) - A Man Can Feel": a track from the new Transatlantic album. Transatlantic is a supergroup: it's made of members of Marillion (Pete Trevawas on bass), the Flower Kings (Roine Stolte, guitar), Spock's Beard (Neil Morse, vocals and keyboards), and Dream Theater (Mike Portnoy, drums). In general, I don't like supergroups; they're usually more of a commercial stunt than anything else. But I love Transatlantic; and this album is fantastic - it's a bit less smooth than some of Transatlantic's earlier work, but the writing is fantastic.…

Almost Friday Recipe: Carmelized Onions, Mushroom, and Sausage Stuffing

Because of the holiday, I'm posting my recipe early this week. It's actually too late, but I don't let little things like reality worry me. This is my thanksgiving turkey stuffing. The origins of this stuffing date back to my discovery of the "black turkey" recipe. I tried it one year, and the stuffing was really good, but the whole thing was just insanely overdone - everything about it was overcomplicated, and there were so many spices muddled up in the stuffing that I just didn't believe that there was any way that you could taste all of them. So over the next few years, I experimented,…

'Blue-eyed Humans' do not 'Have A Single, Common Ancestor;

ScienceDaily has a most-retarded title up for a report on some new research, Blue-eyed Humans Have A Single, Common Ancestor. I already blogged the paper at my other blog. The paper roughly confirms the previous finding that I blogged that an SNP on the gene HERC2 might regulate expression of OCA2 so that there is depigmentation; in particular in the iris. I have another post coming up tomorrow morning on another study on HERC2 (it's in schedule). Anyway, the title is stupid, because yes, the HERC2-OCA2 region probably has increased in frequency from a single gene copy, but blue-eyed…

Can Biologists Admit We Are Wrong? Dunno. But We Will Say Other Biologists Are Wrong

Because we are human after all. Jason Collins at Evolving Economics, in response to my post about one economist's misunderstanding of biology, asks a very good question: On the flip side, did Dawkins or Gould (or their respective supporters) ever concede to the other side that they were wrong and substantially change their world view? I agree with Razib about what happened: My own attitude is that both Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould retreated from maximalist positions when it came to the gradualism vs. punctuated equilibrium arguments of the 1970s substantively. But rhetorically they…

A fine example of apologizing oneself right into a defense of the indefensible

Wow. Bill Donohue is going to love Andrew Brown. Brown has written a defense of the Catholic church titled "Catholic child abuse in proportion"; you can tell right away exactly where it is going to be going. 'Only' 4% of American priests have been accused of sexual abuse of a minor, and as much as 27% of American women report a history of childhood sexual abuse (to quote just a pair of statistics he uses), therefore, Catholic priests aren't that bad. Which means… Certainly the safeguards against paedophilia in the priesthood are now among the tightest in the world. That won't stop a steady…

Nonoptimal Virulence and Avian Influenza

Several people have argued that if an influenza pandemic were to occur, it will rapidly evolve to become less virulent--that is less deadly. A recent paper explains why this might be wrong. Basically, the flaw with the 'optimistic' argument is that it is assumes that the virus will be optimally fit given its environment (lots of fat, juicy hosts to kill). As it starts to kill off its hosts, its virulence (ability to make dead people or 'deadliness') and transmission rate (ability to infect new hosts) will decrease to another optimal point where the virus will be able to maximize its…

Awaiting the verdict in the Tripoli 6 case: signs not hopeful

The verdict in the Tripoli 6 case is scheduled to be handed down on December 19. There has been worldwide recognition the science now shows the six defendants arrived in the country after the viral strains were circulating in the hospital and its environs, making the 400+ cases of HIV infection in children in the Benghazi Hospital in Libya most likely the result of poor hospital hygiene. Not that you'd know it from the Libyan news media: Bulgarian nurses are guilty, evidence show 2006-12-14 It's a big crime. More than Libyan 400 children were deliberately infected with HIV at Benghazi…

Astronaut John Grunsfeld Tells What Lifting Off in the Space Shuttle is Really Like!

The Space Shuttle lifting off and headed for the nether regions of space, although a majestic sight, is one of the most grueling and critical parts of the space mission because of all the raw power and energy expended by the craft. NASA astronaut John Mace Grunsfeld knows the experience well. He's flown on five Shuttle missions between 1995 and 2009, including a 16-day mission of ultraviolet observations with the Astro observatory, in addition to the fifth mission to the Russian Mir space station, and three servicing missions to the Hubble Space Telescope (including the final Hubble…

When children die from flu

We know that the burden of mortality of seasonal influenza falls mainly on the older population but also can kill children and infants. In 2004 CDC started the Influenza-Associated Pediatric Mortality Surveillance System, itself part of a larger notifiable disease system. Its aim was to find out more about the pattern of influenza deaths in children. It is now bearing fruit. A recent surprise was the subject of a CDC Health Advisory, its middle level of broadcast health alerts: From October 1, 2006 through May 7, 2007, 55 deaths from influenza in children have been reported to CDC from 23…

Neuroscience breakthrough technique is patent nonsense

Excitement, then irritation. That was my reaction to a news article in Nature about a technique using a protein to switch off nerve firing when activated by light: There were audible gasps and spontaneous applause at a neuroscience meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah, in February, when Ed Boyden described a protein that switches off nerve firing when activated by light. And when Karl Deisseroth told the fuller story of the protein, called NpHR and published in this week's Nature, at Cold Spring Harbor in New York late last month, there was talk of a revolution in neuroscience. It is perhaps no…