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My Picks from ScienceDaily

Huge New Dinosaur Had A Serious Bite: The newest dinosaur species to emerge from Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument had some serious bite, according to researchers from the Utah Museum of Natural History at the University of Utah. New Species Of Frog Discovered: Smallest Indian Land Vertebrate: The India's smallest land vertebrate, a 10-millimeter frog, has been discovered from the Western Ghats of Kerala by Delhi University Systematics Biologist, S D Biju and his colleagues. No Faking It, Crocodile Tears Are Real: When someone feigns sadness they "cry crocodile tears," a phrase…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Crested Auklet Birds Rub Tick-repelling Perfume On Their Mates During Courtship: Hitting it off with members of the opposite sex takes chemistry. University of Alaska Fairbanks researcher Hector Douglas has found that, for crested auklets, chemistry has both amorous and practical applications. The birds rub a citrus-like scent, secreted in wick-like feathers on their backs, on each other during courtship, a behavior called alloanointing. It is well known among some mammals, such as peccaries, but until now was not documented among birds. His research also indicates that the behavior could…

Sea Change

Ecosystems along the continental shelf waters of the Northwest Atlantic Ocean, from the Labrador Sea south of Greenland all the way to North Carolina, are experiencing large, rapid changes. While some scientists have pointed to the decline of cod from overfishing as the main reason for the shifting ecosystems, a recent paper emphasizes that climate changes are also playing a big role. "It is becoming increasingly clear that Northwest Atlantic shelf ecosystems are being tested by climate forcing from the bottom up and overfishing from the top down," said Charles Greene, director of the Ocean…

Are Mad Cow Disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Identical?

tags: Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, BSE, mad cow disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, CJD, pathogenic mutation, prion protein gene Image: Orphaned. Mad Cow Disease, technically known as Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), is one of a group of transmissible diseases that destroy brain tissue, collectively known as Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies (TSEs). TSEs are an unknown agent(s) that act by damaging the structure of brain proteins known as "prions" (PREE ons). In turn, these damaged prion proteins damage other normal prions and together, they build up to collectively…

Jerry Falwell: In His Own Words

tags: Jerry Falwell, quotes, religion, bigotry As you probably know, Reverend Jerry Falwell died suddenly today after eating breakfast. It sounds like he died from a heart attack, although no one is quite sure yet. But isn't it interesting that Falwell was once described as having "heart challenges"? Speaking of having heart challenges, he was a true fire-and-brimstone preacher who founded a college, Liberty University, that presumably is trying to carry on with his proud tradition of judging others unnecessarily harshly. Here are a few quotes from Jerry Falwell, lest any of us forget what…

Thrown to the Wolves

Last night was the third annual faculty-student basketball game, held as a fund-raiser for charity by a local sorority. This year the threw us a team that included five players from the varsity, including the only 2,000-point scorer in school history. Needless to say, we didn't win... It was sorta-kinda close for a while, until a stretch of about 4-5 minutes in the third quarter when the guys from the team played really hard. They eased up on us later, but the official final margin of five points owes a lot to the scoreboard operator "missing" a few of their baskets... My personal stats…

Ely to Littleport

Sarah (whose blog is rather emptier than James' so-called EB) is walking from Cambridge to the Sea to celebreate her age; and she invited company; so I joined her for stretch today from Ely to Littleport. It was a glorious day for it, sunny with just a light wind. It is a funny bit of the river though - I had envisaged striding out of Ely with the shadow of the cathedral on my back (ignore the geography, you know what I mean), but instead you start from riverside, go round some bits and under a bridge, leave the river around the back of an Env Ag deport and get briefly confused, round the…

Artificial evolution looks an awful lot like the natural kind

What properties should we expect from an evolved system rather than a designed one? Complexity is one, another is surprises. We should see features that baffle us and that don't make sense from a simply functional and logical standpoint. That's also exactly what we see in systems designed by processes of artificial evolution. Adrian Thompson used randomized binary data on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays, followed by selection for FPGAs that could recognize tones input into them. After several thousand generations, he had FPGAs that would discriminate between two tones, or respond to the words…

Humans can't tell legitimate science from junk science (Synopsis)

“I'm old enough to remember when the polio vaccine was still new. Also, it hadn't been that long since most people who caught pneumonia died from it. These medical breakthroughs were practically miracles.” -Pat Cadigan When it comes to health, safety, and how we interact with the world around us, pretty much everyone recognizes the importance of making our decisions based on sound science. Yet even when presented with the same evidence, many people will draw different conclusions. Why? Because once we’ve made up our minds that something is either good or bad for us, we cherry-pick the…

How uncertain are LIGO's first gravitational wave detections? (Synopsis)

"We hope that interested people will repeat our calculations and will make up their own minds regarding the significance of the results. It is obvious that "belief" is never an alternative to "understanding" in physics." -J. Creswell et al. Three times now, the LIGO collaboration has produced very strong evidence that black hole pairs, from across the Universe, inspiraled and merged, producing gravitational waves. The twin LIGO detectors in Hanford, WA and Livingston, LA each detected these signals, and the signals were correlated between both detectors. For the first time ever (and the…

Ask Ethan: How Bright Is The Earth As Seen From The Moon? (Synopsis)

"I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small." -Neil Armstrong The full Moon is undoubtedly bright. As viewed from the Earth’s surface, it’s the second brightest object of all, after the Sun, and is more than 1,500 times brighter than Venus. In fact, the full Moon is over 40 times brighter than the entire rest of the night sky combined, and can outshine even a big city when seen right next to one. The rising full Moon and the city of Chicago, as viewed over Lake Michigan from Northwestern University's…

Jim Graves Suspends Campaign for MN 6th (formerly against Bachmann)

Jim Graves, the candidate who almost beat Michele Bachmann in her bid for re-election to Congress last year, has suspended his campaign. I do hope he re-enters the race when Bachmann changes her mind and decides to run again! Here's the letter from Graves: This is the most difficult message I’ve ever had to write. A year ago, we set out on a mission: To restore civility, functionality and honesty to Washington by removing Michele Bachmann from office. Her hateful rhetoric and dangerous policies fueled an extremist movement unlike anything we’d seen in a long time. The tone it created was a…

Metal Detectorist Tattoo #2 - Hansen

Two strap ends from the eponymous Borre ship grave. Image from Oluf Rygh's 1885 Norske Oldsager. Metal detectorist Steffen Hansen has kindly given me permission to show you his tattoo sleeve. He found the strap-end at Øvre Eiker in Buskerud fylke, Norway, and had it tattooed along with other Norwegian examples of the Borre style. I haven't got a picture of his find, but you can see what they look like in the accompanying picture of a piece from the eponymous find at Borre in nearby Vestfold fylke. The tattoo was done by Mikael "Kula" Jensen of Radich Tattoo in Mjøndalen. The Borre style is…

With the Varnishing Ahead, I'm at My Shavings a Lot

The poet, philologist and bishop Esaias Tegnér (1782-1846) once wrote, All bildning står på ofri grund till slutet Blott barbariet var en gång fosterländskt "All our learning must always stand on a slavish foundation Barbarism is our single true heritage" This was in the context of how nice Tegnér felt that the late-18th century reign of Gustaf III had been. This was somewhat controversial in the time of national romanticism, as the Gustavian era had been inescapably saturated by French cultural imperialism. And Tegnér was right. As European countries go, Sweden was very late with all the…

Link from Alterman?

Jon Rowe pointed out that Eric Alterman linked to both his page and mine in a recent article. While I appreciate the link from such a prominent figure in the media, I'm at a loss to understand why he linked to me. It's a strange snippet from Alterman. First he takes a shot at Andrew Sullivan for being bothered that British Muslims were refusing to attend a ceremony in Europe noting the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Then he links to Jon's post about Daniel Lapin, a Rabbinic neo-conservative, appearing to endorse Christian anti-semitism. And then at the end he links to my post on…

No, Earth is not overdue for a massive asteroid strike (Synopsis)

"Bringing an asteroid back to Earth? What's that have to do with space exploration? If we were moving outward from there, and an asteroid is a good stopping point, then fine. But now it's turned into a whole planetary defense exercise at the cost of our outward exploration." -Buzz Aldrin Between recent statements from NASA, the American Geophysical Union and Los Alamos National Laboratory, you might think that humanity is overdue for a catastrophic impact from outer space. Indeed, it’s been a long time since we’ve had one that was very destructive, and other than the 1908 Tunguska blast, we…

Random Tracks

Despite turning in early last night, I'm sleep-deprived and I have an early morning lab, so here are some random songs from iTunes to hold you until I feel more like blogging. Ten tracks from the four-and-five-star playlist, with bonus commentary on a few: "Little Razorblade," The Pink Spiders. A new purchase, that I'm really enjoying a lot. "You Scare The **** Out Of Me," The Frantics. The guy I shared a lab with when I was working on my undergrad thesis had a copy of this, and I spent years trying to locate one. Thanks, Lara Beaton. "Can't Let It Go," Goo Goo Dolls "Shame On You," Hot Hot…

Three Quarks for Science Writing

I already mentioned this in a Links Dump, but there's enough buzz that it's probably worth a full post: the people at Three Quarks Daily have decided to offer prizes for blog writing: Starting next month, the prizes will be awarded every year on the two solstices and the two equinoxes. So, we will announce the winner of the science prize on June 21, the arts and literature prize on September 22, the politics prize on December 21, and the philosophy prize on March 20, 2010. About a month before the prize is to be announced we will solicit nominations of blog entries from our readers. The…

Sheet Rock Makes It a Room

Behold, an ordinary garage: Now, watch as it is transformed: Obviously, there's a good deal of work yet to do, but it's really remarkable how much difference sheet rock makes-- between Day 8 and Day 9, it goes from looking like a construction site to looking like a room that just needs a little finishing. I have pictures from other corners, but this is the only complete set (it's taken from the door from the kitchen into the garage), as there were a few days when there was so much stuff piled in one of the corners that I couldn't get there to take a picture. The background here…

Nunatak rocked!

Destined for the annals of music history are the sole representatives of Antarctica during today's Live Earth concerts - Nunatak. Engineers and scientists who comprise the 22 members of the British Antarctic Survey rocked it today with one of their original compositions. Nunatak is the British Antarctic Survey's Rothera Research Station's house band. The five person indie rock band is part of a science team investigating climate change and evolutional biology on the Antarctic Peninsula - a region where temperatures have risen by nearly 3°C during the last 50 years. From April to October -…

Intelligent musical design

My first post after moving the Island to ScienceBlogs was a list of science-themed popular songs. Not too surprisingly, there really wasn't much from which to choose. But it now gives me great pleasure to introduce to you a new tune that belongs at the top of any such list. I give you Chris Smither's "Origin of the Species," a track from the folk singer-songwriter's new CD "Leave the Light On." I can't think of another song that takes on intelligent design and pays tribute to Charles Darwin. Plus, it's a great piece of music in its own right, quite worthy of heavy rotation on the airwaves. "…

Correlation between gun ownership and homicide rates

Rick Bressler said: The Netherlands have a homicide rate about double that of the English one, and only half as many guns.... So here we have The Netherlands at about the lowest rate of gun ownership in Europe, and the Swiss with one of the highest and the homicide rates are about equal. We really need to look at more data points.... I found ownership percentages for handguns in "Experiences of Crime across the World" van Dijk, Mayhew and Killias (1991). These are from an international victimization survey. (The survey asked about long guns too, but the book does not report the answer.)…

Whipworm parasite reduces symptoms of autism

Image from www.Nematode.net.Credit: http://www.latech.edu/ans/faculty-staff/liberatos-james-d/parasite-pict… Believe it or not, scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in collaboration with Coronado Biosciences are intentionally infecting people who have autism with whipworms from pigs (Trichuris suis), although generally considered non-pathogenic to humans. For some individuals, an elevated inflammatory state contributes to repetitive and irritable behaviors associated with autism. Researchers have observed that allergic responses (measured by skin prick tests) are higher in…

FDA is looking for your help to determine source of illnesses and deaths related to dog jerky treats

Image from Vin News Service (http://news.vin.com/VINNews.aspx?articleId=22697) The FDA is calling for help to determine the source of roughly 580 deaths and over 3600 illnesses (gastrointestinal and kidney) related to jerky treats that were made in China. The  mystery dates back to 2007 when illnesses were first being reported by pet owners.  Most of the victims have been dogs, although 10 cats have become sick from eating these treats as well.The FDA has tested treats for contaminants including chemical, microbiological/bacterial, antibiotics, metals, and pesticides in addition to DNA and…

$1 million Gates Award for Aravind Eye Care

Announcement at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: SEATTLE -- In recognition of its groundbreaking work to prevent debilitating blindness and provide affordable, world-class eye care to the poor, the Aravind Eye Care System, based in Tamil Nadu, India, has won the 2008 Gates Award for Global Health. The $1 million Gates Award--the world's largest prize for international health--honors extraordinary efforts to improve health in developing countries. Founded by Dr. G. Venkataswamy in 1976, Aravind has saved millions of people in India from debilitating blindness. Cataracts account for…

Friday timesink

You really didn't want to work today, especially in the States where we're heading into the 4th of July holiday weekend. So, thanks to Julie Meloni at No Fancy Name, I'm blowing off stuff today to re-live memories of grad school through 1980s music videos. I still remember the mad rush to finish experiments to get home by 11 pm on Sunday nights to catch MTV's 120 Minutes. Here are a few of my favorites: 1. For old rocker farts like me and Rob Helpy-Chalk who struggle to find kiddie music that we can listen to a hundred times and have been rescued by Dan Zanes, here's The Del Fuegos, Dan's…

North Carolina Science Blogging Conference

Greta and I will be at the North Carolina Science Blogging Conference two weeks from now at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. An impressive list of bloggers and journalists will be attending, but there are still a few slots left, so if your weekend is still open, you might want to consider joining us. It's a great chance to meet up with dozens of talented scientists and educators from around the world, including ScienceBlogs' own Janet Stemwedel, "Abel Pharmboy", James Hrynyshyn, and Suzanne Franks, as well as journalists from The Lancet, Nature, and American Scientist. You…

Romanov Mystery Solved: Remains Of Anastasia And Alexei Identified

I've been fascinated by the Romanovs for decades hoping that perhaps, just perhaps... Anastasia had somehow escaped. Unfortunately, new research published in PLoS ONE finally provides grim evidence of what happened to the family's youngest children in 1918: One of the greatest mysteries for most of the twentieth century was the fate of the Romanov family, the last Russian monarchy. Following the abdication of Tsar NicholasII, he and his wife, Alexandra, and their five children were eventually exiled to the city of Yekaterinburg. The family, along with four loyal members of their staff, was…

The Synapse: Special Neuroscience Edition

This Synapse features a special Society for Neuroscience line-up with Shelley, Evil Monkey, Nick the Neurocontrarian, and myself attending. I arrived and faced a moral quandry of whether to drag my ass out of bed to see stuff. Having decided to have a look, I attended a Workshop on Teaching, a Workshop on Open Access publishing, nearly lost my mind, and a neurogenesis/gliogenesis slide session. Shelley summarizes some interesting work on oxytocin and vassopresin and critiques the lecture by Frank Gehry. Nick and Evil Monkey (here and here) have their sparse summaries here. As you may have…

ESOF2008, Barcelona, July 18-22

This coming Friday is my 34th birthday, and the lovely people from ScienceBlogs/ Seed Media Group have given me a fantastic present: they're sending me on an all expenses paid long weekend to Barcelona to cover ESOF2008. The mission of the Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF) is to provide both the European and the international science and business communities with an open platform for debate and communication. It presents and profiles Europe's leading research trends in the sciences, humanities and social sciences. It is an opportunity to discuss and influence the future of research and…

Dispatch from an airport terminal.

Holy smokes, an airport where the WiFi is actually free! (If only San Jose International were more mass-transit friendly...) I'm going to be offline for much of the day since I'll be in transit on my way to PSA 2008. I'm hoping Pittsburgh's weather will not destroy me. (The temperature ranges predicted as of yesterday don't seem too frightening, but California can do things to a person.) My symposium session is in the first time slot on Thursday. Between now and then, I need to condense my talk to 15 minutes (eep!) and construct a correspondingly concise Powerpoint presentation, since…

Is Bill Maher really that ignorant? (Part III): "Oh, come on, Superman!"

You can read parts I and II first, if you like. Yet another reason Bill Maher is an idiot can be found in the video below, taken from Real Time With Bill Maher from the February 8 episode. I happened to catch it in reruns and was looking for a transcript or YouTube version. It's truly appalling. This guy claims to be a rationalist and mocks religion for its irrationality, and here he is spouting off the more of his usual ignorant, idiotic, stupid ideas about medicine and, yes, downright woo, to the point where even his guests start to wonder what the heck is going on. They seem to back away…

Changes in gun ownership and firearm deaths in Australia

Mark Addinall writes: Tim Lambert writes: I looked in the reference you cite: "How Firearm Crime is Declining" It claims that the number of firearms owned in Australia has increased from about 2.5 million to about 4 million (Graph 1). I do not believe that "quadrupled" is the appropriate way to describe this increase. I have graph 1. 18" from my hose and I'm sure that bar 1. is less than 1.5 million. The thing's right in front of you and you STILL can't read it correctly. Sad. Graph 1 shows the firearms homicide rate AND an estimate of the numbers of firearms owned. It has two scales,…

Causation and Kellermann

circe wrote: In homes with guns the homicide of a household member is three times more likely to occur than in homes without guns. New England Journal 1993;329.1084-1091. David Friedman writes: You may also have noticed that the death rate in hospitals is much higher than in hotels. So if only we abolished the hospitals ... . But the study controlled for a variety of factors such as age, sex, neighbourhood, criminal record, drug use etc etc. If take your hospitals/hotels analogy and control for severity of disease/trauma we would find that hospitals are safer. For example, if you just…

I Got Your Distribution Right Here

In the comments of my dinosaur genome size post, Shelley asked: So do ALL birds have equally small genomes or is there variation among species? I don't think she was looking for a trite response along the lines of: "Of course there's variation among species." What she was asking, I presume, is how much variation in genome size do we see in birds? As you can see in this phylogeny, all birds (and nearly all theropods) have small genomes. But that tree only presents data from a few species. To get a better idea of genome size variation within birds, I downloaded C-values (amount of DNA in a…

Stoopid News

This is the inaugural post in a new category I call "Stoopid News." One of our local affiliates, WCCO News (Twin Cities Channel 4), ran a an interminable trailer claiming that a new study indicated that "teacher burnout" was not caused by low pay, not caused by working conditions, not caused by students, and not caused by workload. It was caused by something else. Details later on during the news broadcast. And so on. When the story was finally aired, it turned out that the study was done in Germany of German teachers. Fine. Now, this is an international blog, and I don't want you to…

Jupiter's Scar Caused by Asteroid?

A huge scar formed on Jupiter in July of 2009. It's shown here near the "bottom" of the planet: It could have been formed by a comet like body, or by an asteroid (a rocky body). Data from three infrared telescopes enabled scientists to observe the warm atmospheric temperatures and unique chemical conditions associated with the impact debris. By piecing together signatures of the gases and dark debris produced by the impact shockwaves, an international team of scientists was able to deduce that the object was more likely a rocky asteroid than an icy comet. Among the teams were those led by…

Tony Martin, again

60 Minutes (the Australian version) has done a story on the use of deadly force in self-defence. Unfortunately it sufers from the same problem that many of these stories do. Tony Martin (who was convicted of murdering a burglar) gets to present his account of what happened which makes it look like he acted in self-defence. TARA BROWN: What led to you firing the gun? TONY MARTIN: Fear. TARA BROWN: Were you under attack at that point? TONY MARTIN: I thought I was, yes, or was about to be attacked. Because the people downstairs, as I went down the stairs…

Systems Biology DNA Prep???

(from the archives) Once upon a time, we made the necessary chemicals from scratch to purify DNA from bacterial cultures. These days, for a couple of dollars, you can get all the reagents you need all packaged in a nice box - these things are called commercial "kits". You may ask, why do you use these kits - Is it laziness? or consistent results? A combination of these answers I guess. In the end those that never made the reagents from scratch are less likely to understand how the procedure worked, and how to trouble-shoot when the procedure fails. The latest kit (from Qiagen) had this flyer…

Morrison, Sebelius ahead, Boyda moves up in national rankings

SurveyUSA finds the governor favored 55% to 42%, and Paul Morrison is up 56% to 43%. That's among likely voters. Incumbents are ahead in other statewide races. The governor's numbers have held relatively steady, but this represents a major shift for Morrison. Republican support for the incumbent Republican slipped 12 points, while Independent and Democratic support for Morrison held steady at 61 and 87% respectively. Conservative support for their man Kline is unchanged, but moderates went from backing Morrison by 35% to 49% support for him. SUSA used to split pro-life and pro-choice…

Oy

Our President: President George Bush signed off with a defiant farewell over his refusal to accept global climate change targets at his last G8 summit. As he prepared to fly out from Japan, he told his fellow leaders: "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter." President Bush made the private joke in the summit's closing session, senior sources said yesterday. His remarks were taken as a [one]-fingered salute from the President from Texas who is wedded to the oil industry. He had given some ground at the summit by saying he would "seriously consider" a 50 per cent cut in carbon emissions…

Sex differences in ancestry in the New World

A new paper in PLoS ONE, Evaluation of Group Genetic Ancestry of Populations from Philadelphia and Dakar in the Context of Sex-Biased Admixture in the Americas, doesn't add much to what we know. They looked at a several hundred individuals who are self-identified as African American and European American, as well as 49 Senegalese from Dakar. Additionally, they reanalyzed data from Latin America from whites and blacks in Brazil, as well as a group of mixed Cubans. They found what you might expect to find, African and Native ancestry shows a female bias, European ancestry shows a male bias. But…

Way to enable an academic's coffee habit, researchers!

Two of the common props of the archetypal philosopher are alcohol and coffee. (Existentialism throws in berets and cigarettes.) New research from Kaiser Permanente Oakland suggests that the coffee might offset some of the alcohol's potential harm. From the Oakland Tribune: It seems that people who consumed large quantities of alcohol reduced their risk of being hospitalized or dying from cirrhosis because they were also heavy coffee drinkers, researchers at Kaiser Permanente Oakland suggest in a study published Monday. ``For heavy drinkers, the more coffee they drank, they less likely they…

Why Jade scares me.

OK, if you clicked through the links in my answers to the ABC meme, you know an embarrassing personal detail about me: I rather enjoy watching America's Next Top Model. (Truth be told, I wouldn't enjoy it nearly so much were it not enhanced by the reading of snarky episode recaps by Potes. And, as it turns out, regular commenter Uncle Fishy knows Potes from when he lived in Providence -- so I had to read the recaps.) If you don't like wallowing in the depravity of others (which is to say, my depravity), feel free to go read a classic post from the vault. Otherwise, read on. So, Top Model…

Alternative Energy Isn't Always Expensive

There are so many depressing studies on energy policy that I thought it was worth highlighting an optimistic one. The Rand Corp. just produced an analysis which predicts that alternative energy sources (like wind, solar and ethanol) could furnish as much as 25% of the U.S.'s conventional energy by 2025 at little or no additional expense. From the WSJ: The Rand study concludes that because prices for gasoline, natural gas and coal are likely to remain high, their cost advantage over renewables will erode, furthered by the hope that ethanol from farm wastes will be available by 2020. Renewable…

Friday Flotsam: Caribou versus the volcano, watching Marianas volcanoes and the plume at Kilauea

Catching up with some news: Anatahan erupting in the northern Mariana Islands in 2003. I ran across this article right before I got sick, but its been popping up around the interwebs (and is pretty interesting). It details a study in Molecular Ecology that suggests that populations of caribou in Canada's Yukon Territory were strongly effected by the White River Tephra. The White River Tephra is supposedly the largest Holocene plinian tephra (from a ash cloud fallout), with two components dating from ~1900 years ago and ~1250 years ago. The vent for the WRT is likely from a vent beneath the…

Sarychev Peak eruption update for 6/16/2009

Matua Islands (also known as Matsuwa Island), home of Sarychev Peak. The eruption of Sarychev Peak in the Kuril Islands has been wreaking havoc on flights to and from Asia for the past few days (as many Eruptions readers can attest). You can see the latest VAAC (Volcano Ash Advisory Center) statement here that shows ash to at least FL380 (38,000 feet / 11 km). Predicted ash movement (see below) for the next couple of days has ash moving to the southeast of the volcano and the U.S. Air Force has detected ash as far as 1500 miles / 2400 km southeast and 575 miles / 900 km northwest of the…

Economic barriers in the elite University (and in science)

This week at #scio14, Danielle Lee is leading a discussion on privilege in science. I'd started this post and abandoned it a few weeks back, but I think it speaks to a similar phenomenon as she describes in her post. Low-income students are being lost not only to science, but often to the college experience in general. This is amplified at elite institutions, but even at the public institutions I've worked at, lower income students are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to preparing for any kind of graduate or professional post-bac training.  My first introduction to one of my…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 74 new articles in PLoS ONE today. Browse for your own choices - these are mine: A 28,000 Years Old Cro-Magnon mtDNA Sequence Differs from All Potentially Contaminating Modern Sequences: DNA sequences from ancient speciments may in fact result from undetected contamination of the ancient specimens by modern DNA, and the problem is particularly challenging in studies of human fossils. Doubts on the authenticity of the available sequences have so far hampered genetic comparisons between anatomically archaic (Neandertal) and early modern (Cro-Magnoid) Europeans. We typed the…

Counting work-related injuries, disease and death among U.S. workers: Part 3

If you want to keep all your digits and limbs, you probably want to avoid working at Anheuser-Busch's Metal Container Corp., in Arnold, Missouri. That worksite was recently cited by OSHA for hazards related to incidents last fall in which one worker lost fingers in machinery, and another worker had a foot amputated because of a forklift incident. The 13 serious and one willful violation come with a proposed $107,200 penalty. Those two work-related amputations are just two of the estimated 3.9 million cases of injuries and illness that occur each year in U.S. workplaces. About a third of…