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The Australian's War on Science 63: Quote mining

In a news story in The Australian Christian Kerr claims: Former US vice-president turned climate crusader Al Gore has used footage of the Queensland floods from earlier this year as proof of climate change, contradicting the findings of the Gillard government's Climate Commission. A new video posted on YouTube, narrated by Mr Gore to promote his Climate Reality Program, opens with footage of the wall of water that swept through Toowoomba in January. In the video, Mr Gore says "big oil and big coal are spending big money" to distort debate on climate change. Yet he has ignored the findings of…

Laptop Love

I've been in a creative mood this week, and I decided to take it out on my notebook pc: Many people like to personalize their laptops with a unique bumper sticker or something similar. I couldn't find the right sticker, so I ended up doing my own thing. I took a bit of inspiration from the week of spirals I posted this last November, especially the pop art mosaic spiral. First, I painted a black background, then used some decoupage medium (gooey stuff that dries hard and clear) to seal in the tiles. The "tiles" are bits of scrapbook and origami paper, mixed with a few photos and a few of my…

Taking Published Results out of Context

If anyone thinks I have sold out to the Seed Gods, let this be my exhibit A against such opinions. Seed has published a review of Funk et al's ecological divergence and speciation PNAS paper. The scientific content is not all that bad, but it blows the implications of the study way out of proportion. My thoughts are below the fold. The Seed article uses to the Funk paper to look at the role natural selection plays in speciation. The focus is put on whether allopatric speciation is a neutral process or if it depends on divergent selection in the two different environments. The article…

What is the impact of discovery tools on researcher self-archiving behavior?

This is the question I was asking myself while reading this fairly straightforward paper on open access in high-energy physics (hat tip to Garret McMahon). It's impossible to be in my particular professional specialty and not know about the trajectory of self-archiving in high-energy physics, but I learned a smallish detail from that paper that intrigues me rather: the existence of SPIRES, a disciplinary search tool that covers both the published literature and gray literature such as preprints on arXiv. This strikes me as a rare thing. We have disciplinary gray-lit search tools such as RePEc…

Talkin' 'bout my institution: A clarification

A comment Chris Rusbridge left on a previous post leads me to clarify the extent to which the subject matter of this blog draws on my own position in the institution where I work, and that institution's take on matters data-curational. In brief: It doesn't. I don't talk about my place of work here, and I have no plans to start doing so. I have no data-curation or other cyberinfrastructure responsibilities at my workplace save those that happen to touch on my position as institutional-repository manager. The day I acquire such responsibilities, which is not wholly impossible but by no means a…

Eldredge on Darwin

Niles Eldredge has a fine essay online on what it means to be a Darwinist (not the term as caricatured by creationists, but merely as someone who respects the work of Darwin while acknowledging the vast increase in understanding evolution since his time). It's also useful for explaining how creationists distort the concept of punctuated equilibrium. The creationists of the day got into the act as well. In a clear demonstration of how thoroughly political the creationist movement has always been in the United States, Ronald Reagan told reporters, after addressing a throng of Christian…

Just Science #1: What Is The World's Largest Invertebrate?

Just Science Entry #1 Kim didn't miss much. She went into Final Jeopardy with $15,000 and won the match by a scant $1 by correctly identifying the world's largest invertebrate (answer: "What is a giant squid?"). But was she right? There seems to be considerable debate about this. Steve O'Shea (giant invertebrate expert extraordinaire) says this (with his permission)... Architeuthis is frequently reported to attain a total length of 60 ft. The largest specimen known washed ashore on a New Zealand beach, Lyall Bay (Wellington) in the winter of 1887. It was a female and "in all ways smaller…

Challenger Expedition on Google Earth

People seem fascinated by the prospect of purchasing virtual real estate at Second Life, but if you ask me, Google Earth is a better place to stake your claim. For instance, I am studying deep sea-fans, or gorgonians, in the West Atlantic twilight zone between 50-150 m. Many of these have their first description in the reports by Wright and Studer (1889) of the HMS Challenger expedition 1873-1876. This expedition is a piece of history that could come alive again in a "Google Ocean" environment. The main difference between then and now is that 19th century biologists studied dead and broken…

Brain & Behavior and Technology Weekly Channel Highlights

In this post: the large version of the Brain & Behavior and Technology channel photos, comments from readers, and the best posts of the week. Technology. Radio telescope on the Plains of San Agustin, New Mexico. From Flickr, by Fort Photo Brain & Behavior. Academician Andrei Sakharov. From Flickr, by dbking Reader comments of the week: On the Brain & Behavior channel, Jonah of The Frontal Cortex discusses the importance of Daydreams. In the age of television, he explains in an excerpt from his latest column in the Boston Globe, kids don't have "empty time" to let their…

New and Exciting in PLoS this week

Monday - time to check out PLoS Biology, PLoS Medicine and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, as well as, of course, PLoS ONE. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Equity for Open-Access Journal Publishing by Stuart M. Shieber: Scholars write articles to be read--the more access to their…

Indulging Idiots: TOO MANY TOO SOON!!!!!

Step 1-- Wooer makes some ridiculous claim about vaccines. This claim has no science supporting it, but it gets *worse*. There is actually not even a theoretical scientific framework where the claim could work.  Claim is antiscience right out the gates. Step 2-- Repeat wooer claim ad nauseum online. Step 3-- Scientists actually go to the trouble of officially debunking the claim in peer reviewed literature (even though there is not even a theoretical scientific framework where the claim could work!) because so many Average Joes/Janes think it might be true. Step 4-- Wooer et ass ignore the…

Surface Melting an Increasing Factor in East Antarctica?

Or so says Climate Denial Crock of the Week. There's no real text behind the headline, just a link to a WSJ video. This seems to be about Meltwater produced by wind–albedo interaction stored in an East Antarctic ice shelf, J. T. M. Lenaerts et al., Nature Climate Change (2016) doi:10.1038/nclimate3180, published online 12 December 2016. Here's the abstract: Surface melt and subsequent firn air depletion can ultimately lead to disintegration of Antarctic ice shelves1, 2 causing grounded glaciers to accelerate3 and sea level to rise. In the Antarctic Peninsula, foehn winds enhance melting near…

Mad Skillz

Things I can do that I no longer need to do (from here by way of here). Examining this list will no doubt tell you a lot about what I spent the past nearly forty years doing with technology. Adjusting rabbit ears on top of a TV Adjusting a television’s horizontal and vertical holds Adjusting a television’s color and hue adjustments Adjusting the tracking on a VCR Adjusting the head azimuth of a Commodore’s Datassette Archie AT commands for dial-up modems Autoexec.bat editing Backing up a PC using QIC-40 or QIC-80 tapes BASIC Booting off a floppy disk Burnishing a cartridge connector with a…

Pensacola hilarity

If you've been following the news from Florida, you must know that Kent Hovind's trial has begun. We've learned how profitable it is to be creation science evangelist… Heldmeyer said from 1999 to March 2004, the Hovinds took in more than $5 million. Their income came from amusement-park profits and merchandise -- books, audiotapes and videotapes -- they sold on site and through phone and online orders, she said. About half the money went to employees. …and that the IRS doesn't like him very much. Hovind attempted to manipulate funds from the start of his ministry, she said. In 1996, he filed…

Proper Procedure For Shutting Down A Blog

I wish more bloggers would read and bookmark this post (I don't know when I first wrote it, but I moved it up top on April 20, 2006): This is an old post but I wanted to bring it up to top as I recently saw some blogs shut down improperly, i.e., deleting the complete content. Every now and then a blog shuts down. There are as many reasons as there are bloggers, ranging from getting bored, through getting Dooced, to dying. Every blogger goes about shutting down the blog in different ways. I tried here to put down, in more or less systematic way, the dos and donts of shutting down a blog. If…

No alternative medicine ever disappears when shown to be ineffective: The case of laetrile

Everything old is new again, or so it always seems with alternative medicine. Before I explain what I'm talking about a bit more, let me just preface my remarks with an explanation for why there was no post tomorrow. I realize that most people probably don't care that much if I miss a day or two, but I care. Basically, I was in Chicago from Thursday through Sunday taking a rather grueling review course in general surgery offered by the American College of Surgeons. The reason is that I have to take my board recertification examination in general surgery in December. It was an amazing course,…

Choice, Value, and the Internet: The Sandefur Debate Continues.

In his opening remarks for the latest entry in our ongoing debate about public financing for science, Timothy Sandefur suggests that after this post, we move on to concluding remarks. That strikes me as a reasonably good idea (and not just because he's generously offered me the last word). We may not have yet reached a point where we're talking past each other, but we're definitely getting dangerously close to that point. After reading through Tim's latest post, I'm going to respond to his points out of order. I'm going to start out by looking at the more concrete examples that we've been…

And Who Elected These Guys Anyway?

One of the interesting things about blogging is that it has undermined the importance of the punditocracy. In the pre-interenet, and certainly pre-blog era, you had a very different relationship to politics, even if you were aware and relatively active: you were a consumer. By consumer, I mean that you used to have to wait around and hope that some columnist or editorial board would speak for you. There were some alternatives, such as writing letters to the editor, or in the early days of the internet, posting at electronic bulletin boards (remember those?). But now with blogging, it is…

When Hippies Punch Back

I'm a little late to this, but Susie Madrak asked Obama advisor David Axelrod a very important question: Madrak asked, "I'm a blogger, and I don't know if you know this term, but are you familiar with the term hippie-punching?" There was about a 15-second pause. "Go ahead," said Axelrod. She continued. "Liberals and bloggers feel like we're the girl you take under the bleachers but won't be seen with in the light of day." She mentioned a series of incidents where the White House distances themselves from their base, and wondered how that helps Democrats regain enthusiasm from those same…

No Need for Decryption

Is it possible to perform operations on encrypted data, while keeping it secure from all prying eyes (or circuits), even if that data is stored remotely, in the "cloud?" Will our end result still be encrypted, and when we decode it with our private decryption key, will our result be correct? To put it another way, could we allow sensitive data - say private medical information - to be monitored on-line and feel completely secure in the knowledge that no one can access it without our express permission? Can we use a cloud service to store our encrypted data and perform a search on that data…

My picks from ScienceDaily

New Orleans Termites Dodge Katrina Bullet: Tales of survival have been trickling out of New Orleans ever since Hurricane Katrina struck in August 2005. But few have focused on what might be considered the city's most tenacious residents--its subterranean termites. Agricultural Research Service (ARS) entomologists recently confirmed what many termite researchers and city officials were hoping against. Despite the high waters, winds and other havoc unleashed by Katrina over a year ago, the invasive Formosan subterranean termite is persisting in New Orleans. Wetlands Curb Hog Hormones In Waste…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Shoulder Ligament A Linchpin In The Evolution Of Flight: Brown and Harvard scientists have learned that a single ligament at the shoulder joint stabilizes the wings of birds during flight. In an advanced online publication of Nature, they explain how this tough bit of tissue evolved to become a linchpin for today's fliers. Internal Compass Of Immune Cell Discovered: Researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine have discovered how neutrophils -- specialized white blood cells that play key roles in inflammation and in the body's immune defense against…

Flawed Study - Why the Congressional Hearing?

Updated Below I had thought that with the Democrats takeover of Congress, weâd be done with Congressional hearings convened so anti-regulatory groups like the US Chamber of Commerce would have a platform to present unscientific studies that purport to show the enormous damage done by federal regulatory policy. Sadly, I was wrong. Last week, the Chamber released the results of a "survey" of the costs to small business of compliance with the Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act of 2002, known widely as Sarbanes-Oxley or SOX. The Chamber tried to find small businesses…

Occupational Health News Roundup

If you only read one article on the issue of occupational health and safety this week, make it Ray Ring's "Disposable Workers of the Oil and Gas Fields," published last week in High Country News. "The core of the story can be classified as straightforward investigative coup," editor John Mecklin explains in an accompanying piece . "In six months of amassing documents, scouring lawsuits and prodding databases, Ring was able to map out the general scope of a little-noticed reality: Since the start of the second Bush presidency, as skyrocketing energy prices drove a wild increase in oil and…

Graham Lawton Was Wrong

There. How's the taste of your own medicine? Yup, there was an editorial meeting. Coturnix, coturnix, @coturnix, BoraZ, Bora Zivkovic and @borazivkovic were there. I was there, too, and I could have said something, but I decided to remain silent as the traffic of this blog, which - cha-chink - means more money, is more important than accuracy. Very few readers will read your article. But everyone will see the cover. Very few people will read this post to the end, especially the links on the bottom that really contain the meat of the argument. But everyone will see this post title in their…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Frogs Are Being Eaten To Extinction, Experts Say: The global trade in frog legs for human consumption is threatening their extinction, according to a new study by an international team including University of Adelaide researchers. 'Hobbit' Skull Study Finds Hobbit Is Not Human: In a an analysis of the size, shape and asymmetry of the cranium of Homo floresiensis, Karen Baab, Ph.D., a researcher in the Department of Anatomical Scienes at Stony Brook University, and colleagues conclude that the fossil, found in Indonesia in 2003 and known as the "Hobbit," is not human. New Imaging Method Lets…

Iran swiftly sentences two HIV scientists - perhaps we can exert pressure.

Like we did with the Tripoli Six.... From Declan Butler, reproduced here in its entirety, as it is important: Iran has summarily tried two of the nation's HIV researchers with communicating with an "enemy government," in a half-day trial that started and ended on 31 December in Tehran's Revolutionary Court. There will be no further court hearings, and a verdict is expected within days. The brothers, Arash and Kamiar Alaei, who have achieved international acclaim for their progressive HIV-prevention programme, have been held in Tehran's notorious Evin prison since their arrest last June (see…

Friday Fun: Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence

I love Wikipedia. I probably use it every day. It's become an indispensable part of the modern information landscape. But. A few months ago, I was doing a session in our lab with a bunch of high school students. When I do these sessions I try and illuminate how the modern information landscape is a bit more complicated than they think -- I try and instill a little doubt and humbleness into their mostly quite confident attitudes. I talk about Facebook and privacy and Wikipedia and a whole bunch of things. Anyways, I'm talking about Wikipedia and demoing how easy it is to randomly change…

National Academies Press celebrates first year of free PDFs

Yesterday, that National Academies Press celebrated its first year of offering free PDFs of many of its reports. NAP reported in an anniversary email that website visitors have downloaded over 1.3 million PDF versions of books -- and that over the next year NAP will be adding more books (new and old alike) to the list of free downloads. Among the most downloaded so far are: The Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health Relieving Pain America: A Blueprint for Transforming Prevention, Care, Education, and Research To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System The reports on…

I’ve not found much of interest to write about tonight, and story submissions have been a dry hole lately

Not me you silly - that's a quote from WUWT. And as if in answer to his desperation, along comes The effectiveness of CO2 as a greenhouse gas becomes ever more marginal with greater concentration, a deeply stupid post. It starts with a nod towards pretending to have a clue: According to well understood physical parameters, the effectiveness of CO2 as a greenhouse gas diminishes logarithmically with increasing concentration... This inconvenient [sic] fact is well understood in the climate science community... ...because not even WUWT readers are going to fall for the idea that it's a surprise…

ID Picks up An Endorsement!

The last six months have been hard ones for ID folks. First, there was the big Dover decision. Then came several new transitional forms (see here and here, for example). The evolution of complex biochemical systems gets less mysterious every day. Likewise for the evolution of of cooperative behavior. Nick Matzke's brilliant annotated bibliography on the evolution of the immune system was posted, showing once more that the Michael Behe's of the world are just making it up when they say that scientists can't explain the evolution of “irreducibly complex” systems. Meanwhile, there is…

Skeptics' Circle 57: The Zebra Spilled its Plastinia on Bemis

Dear skeptical Reader, welcome to Aardvarchaeology and the 57nd Skeptics' Circle blog carnival! I used to blog at Salto sobrius, and now Aard offers the same salad of archaeology, skepticism, books, music and general psychedelic whimsy. We've got some really good stuff on the carnival this time. CLEAR THINKING Steve at NeuroLogica leads the reader through a number of insights into how our minds work, all important to "cognitive hygiene" and skeptical thinking. Factician at Conspiracy Factory asks himself, why do smart people say such stupid things? RELIGION Angry Professor at A Gentlemen's…

Books for the Spring 2008 semester

The Fall semester is winding down — this is the last week of classes — so it's time to start thinking about the Spring term. Ugh. I don't want to. This term has been driving me sufficiently insane as it is. But anyway, if you're a student thinking about all the money you'll have to be spending on textbooks, here's a list of what you'll need to get if you're taking my courses. Feel free to order them from some other source than the university bookstore. I don't get a penny from the U bookstore, but I have to confess, the links below do tie into affiliate programs that give me a few pennies in…

Technology Query: Making Animation?

The book-in-production will be released eight months from tomorrow, which means that I'm thinking of ways to promote it on-line. One obvious possibility would be some sort of YouTube video type thing, showing a conversation with the dog about physics. This runs into problems, though, given that the dog is, well, a dog, and thus doesn't take direction very well. It'd be really difficult to get the right sort of video of her. One solution to this would be to get some really basic video of me talking to her as a frame for the conversation, and do some sort of animation to fill in the rest. So,…

Invasive Species vs. Disturbance Specialists

Solenopsis invicta - invasive or just disturbed? Prevailing wisdom holds that imported fire ants marched across the southern United States on the virtue of their fierce nature and superior competitive ability.  The fire ant conquest of the south reads like a tale of bravery and intrigue, but according to Walt Tschinkel and Josh King it is also not true.   They have a must-read study in PNAS this week detailing a tight set of field experiments that turns the conventional wisdom upside-down. King and Tschinkel disturbed various patches of native Florida pine forest by mowing or plowing,…

Horribly Cold Lasers

Well, my Thanksgiving posting break lasted longer than I thought. Real life is a more fun place than the internet though, and I hope you were having lots of fun and food and were not on the internet to notice my absence. Among the things I did this Thanksgiving was watch Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog for the first time. It is, as you know, a thing of surpassing brilliance. It warrants a few posts about its unique self-financed studio-conglomerate-free creation, because that model would probably work well in other arenas of creativity, not the least of which is science. That I'll save for…

Backyard Nuclear Reactors

There's been an article in the Guardian that's been circulating around various science blogs recently. There's a proposal to make what small autonomous nuclear reactors, install them underground, and let them power local areas. Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years, say scientists at Los Alamos, the US government laboratory which developed the first atomic bomb. The miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts and will be nearly impossible to steal because they…

Nuclear Conversation, Coming Up Friday, Webcast

From an Eco Politics listserv I see mention of an upcoming debate about Nuclear Energy: "Cradle to Grave: New Nukes and Old Radioactive Waste" It is a Live Webcast Debate being held on the 27th. The link is here, but you can't see anything until the webcast. More details below the fold... MEDIA ADVISORY FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: CAN NUCLEAR POWER BE THE SOLUTION TO CLIMATE CHANGE AND FUTURE ENERGY DEMAND? ***Live Webcast Debate*** FORMER GREENPEACE ACTIVIST TURNED NUCLEAR INDUSTRY SPOKESMAN TO DEBATE LEADING "VOICES OF REASON" AGAINST A PROPOSED NUCLEAR RENAISSANCE Burlington, VT - After…

Happenings in the Quantum World: Nov 13, 2007

Grad school opportunities, postdoc opportunities, interference experiments, more D-wave, and sabbatical at the Blackberry hole Pawel Wocjan writes that he has positions open for graduate students in quantum computing: Ph.D. Position in Quantum Computing & Quantum Information with Dr. Pawel Wocjan, School of EECS, University of Central Florida (UCF), Orlando, in sunny Florida I am accepting applications for a Ph.D. position in Quantum Computing and Quantum Information starting in Fall 2008. You can learn more about my research and the research in quantum information science at UCF by…

The Future is Non-Profit Science and Enviro Journalism

On last week's announcement that CNN is shifting the focus and form of its science coverage, I am going to be posting what is a very different interpretation than the predictable laments from various bloggers. But, for now, the CNN announcement also directs attention towards what I believe is the future of science and environmental journalism. As I wrote last February and have discussed at various venues: The future will be online, in film, and/or multi-media, merging reporting with synthesis, analysis, personal narrative, and opinion. The goals will be to inform but also to persuade and to…

Mmmm...chocolate! (Flavinol, actually)

They media is often full of hype about "health foods". True "health food", to quote Michael Pollan, probably means, "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.'' That being said, chemical compounds isolated from natural substances (foods included) are an important line of medical research and can lead to insights on the health effects of food, and on drug development. The latest issue of Circulation, the journal of the American Heart Association, has a lovely little article about the cardiac effects of chocolate---and who doesn't care about chocolate? Reading a scientific article is often a…

Is publishing really doomed by oversupply of writing?

Until the digital age, content was scarce. It wasn't scarce because people didn't create it; it was scarce because it required an investment to distribute it. That's no longer true. Anybody with an Internet connection can make anything they write (or snap or video or sing) available to anybody else with an Internet connection. For just about free. That's just one reason -- among many -- why the amount of content choices available to everybody has mushroomed in the past 15 years. When the supply of something goes up faster than demand, the price of the something drops. Or, put another way,…

One more chance to vote for real science

Regular CogDaily readers know that I don't usually harp relentlessly on a single issue. Believe me, I'd much rather be talking about things like this, but it's not very often that I get a chance to make an impact in the blogosphere. Thanks to a link from Fark (via BoingBoing) it looks like today might just be that chance. If you voted in the Weblog Awards Best Science Blog Contest yesterday when I first posted about it, you can now vote again. If you didn't get a chance to vote because the site was down, it looks like it's up again. I'll post the poll below as well for your convenience. This…

The shape of HIV denial

What motivates someone to deny that a disease -- one which kills millions of people -- exists? Why would someone claim that the scientifically-established cause of that disease is actually the product of a vast conspiracy? Why would anyone believe them? This is a question for psychologists, but also for epidemiologists and public health professionals who must deal with the implications of those beliefs. Tara Smith and Steven Novella have written an excellent, exceptionally readable article in PLOS Medicine which describes the shape and scale of the problem of HIV denial. They point to a…

Scientists and Journalists, Redux

Well, this has become quite a hot topic, hasn't it? Carl Zimmer thinks I'm too sanguine about this sometimes troubled (although other times quite healthy) relationship between the media and scientists. As he puts it: "I think, first off, that Chris is a bit off-base. He's not feeling the genuine pain being expressed in the comments to Tara's post. These are people who have had lousy experiences with reporters. You don't have to be a prima donna to come out of the journalistic process feeling queasy." Sure, that's true. And I want to emphasize: Misquotation is bad bad bad, and that's why I…

Our cause is good, so our tactics don't need to be?

Earlier this week, I related a situation I found alarming in which a scientist and his children were targeted for harassment because he dared to express the view that research with animals plays an important role in answering scientific questions that matter to scientists and to the public. I was not alone in decrying these tactics. At least one animal rights group also condemned them. Given that the post was pretty clearly directed at the question of tactics, I am frankly puzzled by this comment from Douglas Watts: When I see mainstream "science" commit itself to a program which phases…

Burnham answers questions about Lancet study

The Washington Post has hosted a on-line discussion with Gilbert Burnham. Some snippets: "One last point that is hard for many people to understand. The number of people or households interviewed and the number of clusters used does NOT depend on the population of the country. At a certain point, taking more samples from more clusters does not increase the validity of the answer--and we calculated those levels before the survey." "Keeping bias out of sampling is a huge challenge, and we spend much of our time before a survey thinking about this. People living close together are more likely…

APS Day 3

I am exhausted. Today was a very long conference filled day followed by a very long baseball game at Fenway Park. My labmate, who is a bit of a baseball freak, in a moment of sheer brilliance, bought us STANDING ROOM ONLY tickets for the game. And so we stood. For >3 hours. My feet hurt. At least the Red Sox won. Plus it was pretty cool to see Fenway Park. Figure 1: The view from our standing-room only area. So here's the tweet rundown from today. I think everything is pretty self-explanatory, so I'll go easy on the commentary. Also, have I mentioned I'm tired? We'll start with the end…

The E-Word

Pursuant to a discussion here regarding the use of the word "evolution" in various scholarly contexts, consider the article in PLoS: Evolution by Any Other Name: Antibiotic Resistance and Avoidance of the E-Word The increase in resistance of human pathogens to antimicrobial agents is one of the best-documented examples of evolution in action at the present time, and because it has direct life-and-death consequences, it provides the strongest rationale for teaching evolutionary biology as a rigorous science in high school biology curricula, universities, and medical schools. In spite of the…

AGU Day 4: Jim Hansen and Goreticipation

No need for coffee this morning, as the energy in the 8 a.m. session on communicating science (particularly global warming science) has a palpable stimulating effect all its own. The star of the loaded panel was certainly Dr. Jim Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the Columbia University Earth Institute. After all, he's the national poster boy (or punching bag, depending where you stand) on the subject of federal interference in climate science. "I speak today as myself and not as a spokesman for NASA," Hansen opened to clapping and a few chuckles. The implication, not…