Search Content

Displaying results 7301 - 7350 of 87950

Drug abuse on campus

No, not the hard stuff. Cassie Gentry uses the campus paper to get all worked up about abuse of Plan B. Plan B is basically a high dose of birth control pills. Taken shortly after intercourse, it prevents an egg from implanting in the uterine wall being released from the ovaries, preventing pregnancy. Gentry is worried about how easy it is to get it: A few days ago I heard of a friend who knowingly had unprotected sex. Afterward, she panicked about becoming pregnant and rushed out to get Plan B, or the morning-after pill. Thanks to a Federal Drug Administration decision made on August 24…

Nudges and Decision-Making

David Leonhardt has an interesting column on the importance of using subtle environmental cues - Leonhardt calls them "nudges" - to encourage good decision-making. He begins with a fascinating anecdote about patients in hospital beds: For more than a decade, it turns out, medical researchers have known that people on ventilators should generally have their heads elevated. When the patients are lying down, bacteria can easily travel from the stomach, up to the mouth and breathing tube, and ultimately into the lungs, causing pneumonia. When people are propped up, gravity becomes their ally.…

Rick Perry defends his climate change denial

In his book Fed Up, Rick Perry came out solidly in the climate denial camp, repeating long-discredited claims of that the underlying science is fraudulent. ThinkProgress quotes him writing: For example, they have seen the headlines in the past year about doctored data related to global warming. They know we have been experiencing a cooling trend, that the complexities of the global atmosphere have often eluded the most sophisticated scientists, and that draconian policies with dire economic effects based on so-called science may not stand the test of time. Quite frankly, when science gets…

Celebrating African American History Month with Role Models in Science & Engineering Achievement: Barrington Irving

USA Science & Engineering Festival X-STEM Speaker renowned aviator Barrington Irving sums up his current mission as a role model this way: "Kids want to be challenged, but today too many are bored and uninspired. I want to use aviation to excite and empower a new generation to become scientists, engineers, and explorers." He has a lot to inspire kids about. Born in Jamaica and raised in Miami Florida's inner city, surrounded by crime, poverty, and failing schools, he beat the odds in 2007 when, at the age of 23, he became the youngest person ever (and only African American) to pilot a…

This is My Farm: From the City to the Country and Back Again

What I stand for is what I stand on. - Wendell Berry Note: You've got to give the Dervaes' some credit - their asshattery has inspired a wholel lot of focus on urban sustainable agriculture, homesteading and making a good life in the city! Today is "Urban Homesteading Day" and in its honor, here are some meditations on the relationships we need between city homesteaders and farmers, country homesteaders and farmers and everyone in between. Urbanization is the biggest trend in history. For the first time, more human beings live in cities than in the country. More than 50,000 farmers worldwide…

Is Google's Supposed Weakness an Engineering Mindset? Or Just Bad Luck?

When I read about Google, I often encounter a claim that Google's emphasis on engineering and mathy stuff has hobbled its ability to keep up in the social media world, and is in danger from Twitter and Facebook--although maybe Google+ will change that. It's usually something like this from the NY Times (italics mine): But Google has been criticized for failing to understand the importance of social information on the Web until competitors like Facebook and Twitter had already leapt ahead. Larry Page, Google's co-founder, regrets Google's failure to lead in this market and has spent time…

Chinese checkers

The irony is too delicious. Boingboing reports that Yahoo China will be sued by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industries for enabling the pirating of music by disclosing to its users where to get it on the internet. In effect they are being held responsible for the copyright status of everything they point to: "Yahoo China has been blatantly infringing our members' rights. We have started the process and as far as we're concerned we're on the track to litigation," said John Kennedy, chairman and chief executive of the music industry trade group the International Federation…

ACM responds to the blogosphere

Scott Delman, Group Publisher of the ACM, has responded to my post earlier this month on society publishers and open access. That post generated some very good discussion in the post comments that are well worth checking out. Delman's article is in the most recent Communications of the ACM (v52i8): Responding to the Blogosphere. Here are some excerpts, although Delman's article is so interesting that I wish I could quote the whole thing. The fact that ACM charges both for access to the published information in its Digital Library and also extends the courtesy of "Green OA" to its authors is…

My Picks From ScienceDaily

Duetting Birds With Rhythm Present A Greater Threat: Birds that sing duets with incredible rhythmic precision present a greater threat to other members of their species than those that whistle a sloppier tune, according to a study of Australian magpie-larks reported in the June 5th issue of Current Biology, published by Cell Press. Going Fishing? Only Some Catch And Release Methods Let The Fish Live: NSW Department of Primary Industries (DPI) fisheries scientists are investigating ways to boost the survival rates of several more species of fish caught and then released by anglers. Some…

Snowden

Yeah yeah, yet more opinion. So, Snowden has asylum in Russia. Naturally, he's delighted to be out of his tedious airport, saying in the end the law is winning. But is it? Because the interesting thing is who is making the decisions: Putin. As the Graun says the decision was "almost certainly taken personally by President Vladimir Putin". In Russia, that would be entirely natural: Russia is his persona fiefdom, and there is no rule of law - the law is whatever Putin happens to want it to be that day (Snowden also said I thank the Russian Federation for granting me asylum in accordance with…

October Pieces Of My Mind #1

Satanic Men At Work in Umeå. (Actually, there's condensation on the other side of the sign, and the sun is boiling it off.) Me: "subject". Autocorrect: "Sibbertoft". Hey everyone who names your daughters "Chatarina"! I just want you to know that you're stamping your kid with this big label that says "From A Home With No Language Skills". It's like naming her brother "Piliph". Huh? There's an online service named Plurk. I have no idea what it does but it sounds extremely funny in Swedish. Plurk plurk! Whenever I see a schnauzer dog I wish I could give its face a buzz cut. Android. The…

Links for 2010-11-09

Moving Toward Quantum Computing - Science in 2011 - NYTimes.com "In 1981 the physicist Richard Feynman speculated about the possibility of "tiny computers obeying quantum mechanical laws." He suggested that such a quantum computer might be the best way to simulate real-world quantum systems, a challenge that today is largely beyond the calculating power of even the fastest supercomputers. Since then there has been sporadic progress in building this kind of computer. The experiments to date, however, have largely yielded only systems that seek to demonstrate that the principle is sound. They…

Manual Links Dump

You may or may not have noticed the absence of the "Links for [Date]" posts the last couple of days. There's been some sort of glitch at del.icio.us, and they didn't auto-post the way they usually do. You may or may not have missed them, but I do, so below the fold you'll find the big long list of stuff that would've posted, had things worked as usual (many thanks to Kate for cleaning up the HTML from the del.icio.us source)): Physics and Physicists: Accelerator in a Bowl A nifty tabletop demonstration of a particle accelerator, using a ping-pong ball and a salad bowl. (tags: href="http://…

Fire ants move brood using temperature cues

  Does ant activity cycle by an internal clock, or is their activity cycle a response to changing environmental cues? A study in Insectes Sociaux weighs in on the side of environment. Penick & Tschinkel experimented with applying light and heat from different directions and at different times of day to fire ant mounds.  It turns out that the ants' daily rhythm of moving their brood around the nest is a result of temperature tracking.  I've pasted a link to the article and the abstract below. Penick & Tschinkel. 2008. Thermoregulatory brood transport in the fire ant, Solenopsis…

The Ultimate Charles Darwin Coffee-Table Book

The Darwin Experience: The Story of the Man and his Theory of Evolution by John van Wyhe National Geographic Books It almost seems like a throwback to another age, a time when people actually read books and stuff. And National Geographic Books' The Darwin Experience: The Story of the Man and his Theory of Evolution may be one of the last such volumes ever produced, given the rate at which e-books are gobbling up market share. After all, if you want to browse through Darwin's life or read On the Origin of Species, you can do that online. But for those of us born before the advent of the…

McCain's nuclear fetish

Two things stand out in my mind about Wednesday's presidential debate, both of them the product of John McCain's imagination. First is his insult to every science educator in the country. Once again, he deliberately mischaracterized a grant request to update an aging projector for Chicago's Adler Planetarium as an earmark for an "overhead projector." Second, he insisted America "can eliminate our dependence on foreign oil by building 45 new nuclear plants, power plants, right away." How many times do we have to point out the flaws in his logic before it sinks in? I have nothing new to say…

Neurologists Say Enhancement Is Ethically Proper

The topic of neural enhancement has created controversy.  This came to wide attention in late 2007, upon the publication of various articles in Nature, as noted by  href="http://scienceblogs.com/retrospectacle/2007/12/cognitive_enhancers_in_academi.php">Shelley Batts, href="http://scienceblogs.com/ethicsandscience/2007/12/the_ethics_of_performance_enha.php">Janet Stemwedel, href="http://scienceblogs.com/neuronculture/2008/04/steroids_for_the_brain_nature.php">David href="http://scienceblogs.com/neuronculture/2008/12/survey_the_slippery_slope_of_c.php">Dobbs, href="http://…

Telling the Patient When You are Not the Best Doctor for the Job

There is a very good article in the NYTimes about whether doctors should inform patients about disparities in care between hospitals: An article published online in October in the journal PLoS Medicine really hit home with me. Noting that the quality of cancer care is uneven, its authors argued that as part of the informed-consent process, doctors have an ethical obligation to tell patients if they are more likely to survive, be cured, live longer or avoid complications by going to Hospital A instead of Hospital B. And that obligation holds even if the doctor happens to work at Hospital B,…

WSJ reviews "brain fitness" products

"Brain fitness" is all the rage lately -- the idea that by "exercising" your brain, you can keep your mental ability at high levels even as you age. The good news is that there's more science to back up this fad than in other recent gimmicks such as the Mozart Effect. The bad news is that "training your brain" takes a bit more work than popping a CD in the car stereo -- and the science to back it up is far from conclusive. Undaunted, the Wall Street Journal had a panel of reviewers test six "brain fitness" products. Some of them even sound like they might be rather fun. The article,…

Casual Fridays: TK-421, why can't you spin that woman in reverse?

Last week we asked our readers about an illusion (created by Nobuyuki Kayahara) that's been circulated very widely recently: While the illusion can't actually determine whether you're "right-brained" or "left-brained," we were curious about what actually affects people's perception of the illusion. Over 1,600 readers took our online survey about the illusion. What's interesting about the illusion is that it's ambiguous -- it can appear to be spinning both clockwise and counter-clockwise. Here's how our readers saw it: So roughly two-thirds of viewers initially saw it spinning clockwise…

The Center for Science and Democracy

Last week, I had the privilege of attending the launch of a new initiative from the Union of Concerned Scientists - The Center for Science and Democracy. The UCS itself was founded in the late 1960's in response to the Cold War nuclear arms race. Graduate students and faculty at MIT decided that someone needed to advocate for "greater emphasis on applying scientific research to pressing environmental and social problems rather than military programs." That goal seems even more important in today's political climate, though the issue today is not between environment/society vs military, but…

Bad Science: Genetic Signatures of Centenarians

Source. A newsworthy study about a genetic signature of centenarians published in Science has not stood up to scrutiny by the blogosphere and peer scientists and has now been formally retracted by the authors. Until recently, such retractions - whether by Editors or by the authors themselves - have been quite rare. With the blogosphere and 24/7 news media becoming more and more prominent, I suspect that we may begin to see more examples. Ultimately, it is a healthy process and good for science. Below is an excerpt, with my emphasis, from their Letter to Editor in Science: ...we discovered…

Geek the Vote

Popular Mechanics (one of those magazines that genteel people refuse to admit they read, but that is actually a blast) has published a thing called "Geek the Vote." According to an email from PM, this is: ...an online guide to all the candidates' stances on issues related to science and technology including energy policy and climate change, gun control, science education and infrastructure investment. The full chart, which can be navigated by candidate or issue, is [provided] The site is here. This is apparently in response to (maybe not, but there is evidence to suggest this) the Science…

Crowd-sourcing your medical care

The work up of "fever of unknown origin" (FUO) is a classic exercise in internal medicine. Originally defined as a temperature greater than 38.3°C (101°F) on several occasions for more than three weeks with no diagnosis after one week of inpatient study, the definition has shifted. This reflects the dramatic increase in the sophistication of outpatient work ups in the fifty or so years since the term was formally defined. About a third of cases turn out to be infection, another third cancer, a smaller percentage so-called collagen vascular diseases such as lupus. A significant percentage…

Is the Ocean a Mirror? or Why is the Ocean Blue?

Did you actually make it through that?? Did you catch the strange reason why the sea is blue? Apparently the ocean is a mirror (not entirely false) that reflects the blue sky, hence it is blue (not entirely true). Some hypothesize that the ocean is blue because it reflects the blue sky, but this would only be visible at relatively low angles of observation and on flat water. So why is the ocean blue? Water itself isn't blue, right? The most widely-held hypothesis is that blue wavelengths of light penetrates deeper while red wavelengths are rapidly absorbed by the water molecules and…

Bush in Kansas

A month ago, Democracy Corps released a survey showing that Democrats were showing remarkable strength in the most competetive 49 House races. On a conference call announcing the results, James Carville quipped that Dick Cheney must be coming out to stump for Jim Ryun in Kansas because that's the only place he could go. Now the President is on his way (perhaps already on the ground. I won't be attending the event (it didn't seem worth trying to get the Ryun people to give me press credentials), so I'm glad to see that Joel Mathis is live-blogging events inside the Expocenter, and WIBW will…

Ironic Thoughts

I know, I know, you're probably sick of me prattling on about metacognition. If so, then feel free to skip this post. I've got a new article in the latest Seed (it's a particularly good issue, I think, although it's not yet online) on the virtues and vices of thinking about thinking: The game only has one rule, and it's a simple one: Don't think about white bears. You can think about anything else, but you can't think about that. Ready? Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and banish the animals from your head. You just lost the game. Everyone loses the game. As Dostoevsky first observed, in…

Ask Dr. Boris Behncke your Etna & Italian volcanoes questions!

The first Q&A with Dr. Jonathan Castro was such a success, I'm going to try to make this a regular feature. On that note, Eruptions reader Dr. Boris Behncke has volunteered to be the second geologist to take the plunge. Here is a little about Boris and his work: I've studied geology first in Bochum, Germany, then finished my Master's in Kiel, Germany (in 1996), before hopping south to Catania, where I did my Ph.D. in 2001. I live in Sicily since early 1997, but first visited the Italian volcanoes in 1989, and happen to be at Etna when it produced a spectacular eruption just on schedule.…

Is the Local Food Movement Elitist?

Local food is elitist! This trumpets from one paper or another, revealing that despite the growing preoccupation with good food, ultimately, it is just another white soccer Mom phenomenon. Working class people (who strangely, the paper and the author rarely seem to care about otherwise) can't afford an organic chicken or a gallon of organic milk! Ordinary people don't have time to make soup. Regular folk don't care about that stuff - that's for brie-sniffing folks, just the next rich people's food fad. I can think of a few hundred refutations of this claim, of course. There are all of my…

Oh, goody. NCCAM has a blog.

Oh, goody. I don't know how I've missed this, given that it's been in existence now for over a month now, but I have. Regular readers (and even fairly recent readers, given that I write about this topic relatively frequently) know that I'm not a big fan of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). Just search this blog for "NCCAM" if you don't believe me. I've explained the reasons many times, but the CliffsNotes version is that NCCAM is an enormous waste of taxpayer money, dedicated as it is to the study of modalities that are at best highly implausible and at…

"Darwinism": A "marketing problem"?

Longtime readers of this blog may recall Pat Sullivan, Jr. He first popped up as a commenter here two years ago, when I first dove into applying skepticism and critical thinking to the pseudoscientific contention that vaccines in general or the thimerosal preservatives in vaccines cause autism. He's a true believer in the mercury militia and, even to this day, posts on his blog about the unsupported belief that vaccines cause autism somehow. Eventually, he "outed me"--and no doubt will do so again when he notices traffic coming in from this post (yawn). In any case, I haven't really thought…

PNAS: Darren Anderson, Start-Up Chief Technology Officer

(This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of Darren Anderson, the Chief Technology Officer for Vive Nano. The goal is to provide some additional information for science students thinking about their future careers, describing options beyond the assumed default Ph.D.--post-doc--academic-job track.) 1) What is your non-academic job? I was the founding president of a start-up / spin-off company out of the University of Toronto. The company was originally called Northern Nanotechnologies, and is now called Vive Nano. My current job is…

ChatRoulette

Sam Anderson, in New York Magazine, takes on ChatRoulette, that strange new site that connects you, via webcam, with a stream of strangers: The site was only a few months old, but its population was beginning to explode in a way that suggested serious viral potential: 300 users in December had grown to 10,000 by the beginning of February. Although big media outlets had yet to cover it, smallish blogs were full of huzzahs. The blog Asylum called ChatRoulette its favorite site since YouTube; another, The Frisky, called it "the Holy Grail of all Internet fun." Everyone seemed to agree that it…

My picks from ScienceDaily

How A Brain Chemical Changes Locusts From Harmless Grasshoppers To Swarming Pests: Scientists have uncovered the underlying biological reason why locusts form migrating swarms. Their findings, reported in today's edition of Science, could be used in the future to prevent the plagues which devastate crops (notably in developing countries), affecting the livelihood of one in ten people across the globe. Many New Species Discovered In Hidden Mozambique Oasis With Help Of Google Earth: Space may be the final frontier, but scientists who recently discovered a hidden forest in Mozambique show the…

A morning of email

I realized this morning that I had no meetings scheduled for today. HOORAY!!! In addition, my department (recently renamed a School) is all in an uproar because our academic advisory council is arriving tomorrow, and our open house to the university is Friday. So I decided that I could take the day at home to catch up on all the email I've been ignoring avoiding unable to get to recently. Here's a sampling of my inbox (currently at 400 messages): umpteen million tables-of-contents for journals I want to read but don't have time to. I try and scroll through the email TOCs when they arrive…

"Post Modern" biology?

I wonder, do readers know much about "Post Modern" biology? Radio Open Source contacted me about this topic...the thing is that I don't usually pay much attention to the "overthrow" of the "orthodox" doctrine because I don't think these "doctrines" are really adhered to in the same way that Marxism or Christianity are. Science is about change, falsification is a feature and not a bug! Myself, contravention of standard orthodoxy is cool, that means the low hanging fruit might still be around. Epigenetics and phenotypic plasticity seem to be well acknowledged phenomena which might be…

Making the most of Molecule of the Month with Molecule World

We've been fans of the Molecule of the Month series by David Goodsell, for many years. Not only is Dr. Goodsell a talented artist but he writes very clear descriptions of the ways molecules like proteins, RNA, and DNA work together and function inside a cell. To learn about proteins and their activities, I like to go directly to the Molecule of the Month page, where I can find a list of articles organized by molecule type and name.  Many of these articles can also be downloaded in a PDF format. A really nice of his articles is that he includes PDB IDs for all the structures he discusses.  The…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Bacteria Use Radioactive Uranium To Convert Water Molecules To Useable Energy: Researchers report in this week's Science a self-sustaining community of bacteria that live in rocks 2.8 kilometers below Earth's surface. Think that's weird? The bacteria rely on radioactive uranium to convert water molecules to useable energy. The Neurobiology Behind Why Eating Feels So Good: The need to eat is triggered by the hormone ghrelin. Ghrelin is produced in the gut and triggers the brain to promote eating, but it remains to be determined precisely how ghrelin affects different parts of the brain. A new…

ICD: the most important classification you've never heard of

Some of the most boring sounding parts of epidemiology are also the most important. Take the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), now in its tenth revision (ICD-10). This is a standard way to code disease diagnoses that has its origins as far back as the 1850s. It was taken over as an official function of the World Health Organization (WHO) on its founding in 1948. By then it was already in its sixth revision. Versions of ICD9 and ICD10 are used for epidemiology, national health planning and health care management, where your insurance reimbursements are governed by ICD codes. It's…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Flies Don't Buzz About Aimlessly: Have you ever stopped to wonder how a fruit fly is able to locate and blissfully drown in your wine glass on a warm summer evening, especially since its flight path seems to be so erratic? Mark Frye at the University of California and Andy Reynolds at Rothamsted Research in the United Kingdom have been pondering this very question. Fruit flies explore their environment using a series of straight flight paths punctuated by rapid 90° body-saccades. Some of these manoeuvres avoid obstacles in their path. But many others seem to appear spontaneously. Are the…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Sex Ends As Seasons Shift And Kisspeptin Levels Plummet: A hormone implicated in the onset of human puberty also appears to control reproductive activity in seasonally breeding rodents, report Indiana University Bloomington and University of California at Berkeley scientists in the March 2007 issue of Endocrinology. The paper is now accessible online via the journal's rapid electronic publication service. The researchers present evidence that kisspeptin, a recently discovered neuropeptide encoded by the KiSS-1 gene, mediates the decline of male Siberian hamsters' libido and reproduction as…

High dose nutritional supplements and cancer risk

Regular readers know I don't have strong feelings about nutritional supplements and herbal medicine, unlike some of my medical blogger colleagues. I don't recommend or use them but for the most part it's not a subject that really gets me going, probably because I don't know enough about abuses. A lot of regular medical practice is not that soundly based, either, and some of it is pretty harmful. That's also not a subject that gets me going. The one prejudice I do have I got from my physician and surgeon father. His diet advice was "everything in moderation." That goes for nutritional…

Season Extension and Fall Gardening Class

Just to let you know, I'm going to be starting another class this coming week, beginning on Tuesday - this one helping people get started with fall gardening and season extension. If you are like most folks, you probably start out enthusiastic about your garden, but around the middle of the summer, you get focused on harvesting, or overwhelmed and let the cool season garden peter out. And that's a mistake, because with very simple and cheap methods of season extension and a little attention right about now (for those as northerly as me, a bit later for folks south of me in this hemisphere…

Friday Blog Roundup

Promoting public health depends on having good information. Much of the information we rely on comes from studies published in journals, but we often learn of these studies from news outlets that present distorted pictures of the findings. Going straight to the source limits that distortion but can be difficult for a number of reasons. Several blog posts this week offer helpful guides to accessing, understanding, and contextualizing academic research for public health. Iâm going to devote this weekâs blog roundup to these posts (and to a few timely posts linking science and pop culture).…

Giant owls vs solenodons

Here's something you don't see very often... This illustration (by Peter Trusler) shows the large Pleistocene Cuban owl Ornimegalonyx oteroi battling with a solenodon. Ornimegalonyx has been mentioned here a few times before (use the search bar), but nothing substantive, sorry. Most sources mention O. oteroi as if it's the only named species of Ornimegalonyx. Actually, Arredondo (1982) named three additional ones: O. minor, O. gigas and O. acevedoi. And, by the way, the Ornimegalonyx owls weren't the only big owls on Pleistocene Cuba - there was also a particularly big eagle owl (Bubo…

My picks from ScienceDaily

HIV/AIDS Pandemic Began Around 1900, Earlier Than Previously Thought; Urbanization In Africa Marked Outbreak: New research indicates that the most pervasive global strain of HIV began spreading among humans between 1884 and 1924, suggesting that growing urbanization in colonial Africa set the stage for the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Specific Gene Found In Adolescent Men With Delinquent Peers: Birds of a feather flock together, according to the old adage, and adolescent males who possess a certain type of variation in a specific gene are more likely to flock to delinquent peers, according to a…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Humanity May Hold Key For Next Earth Evolution: Human degradation of the environment has the potential to stall an ongoing process of planetary evolution, and even rewind the evolutionary clock to leave the planet habitable only by the bacteria that dominated billions of years of Earth's history, Harvard geochemist Charles Langmuir said Thursday (Nov. 13). Want Sustainable Fishing? Keep Only Small Fish, And Let The Big Ones Go: Scientists at the University of Toronto analysed Canadian fisheries data to determine the effect of the "keep the large ones" policy that is typical of fisheries.…

My Picks From ScienceDaily

First Successful Reverse Vasectomy On Endangered Species Performed At The National Zoo: Veterinarians at the Smithsonian's National Zoo performed the first successful reverse vasectomy on a Przewalski's horse (E. ferus przewalskii; E. caballus przewalskii--classification debated), pronounced zshah-VAL-skeez. Przewalksi's horses are a horse species native to China and Mongolia that was declared extinct in the wild in 1970. Lizards Pull A Wheelie: Why bother running on hind legs when the four you've been given work perfectly well? This is the question that puzzles Christofer Clemente. For birds…

Winter is coming

Winter will be here soon, I hear rumours it has already come to parts of the south and west, and it definitely arrived in Iceland. Iceland in winter requires some effort, but we have come up with some useful things to get through the winter, and I don't mean just the pickled whale blubber, rotten shark and broiled seal flippers. The traditional winter clothing is "lopi", which is coarse water resistant wool from the Icelandic sheep, renowned for its ability to survive bad weather, and for being stupid enough to be out in such weather in the first place. handknit lopi - expensive, but…

Puget Sound scientists: be a Biotech Expo mentor and help students

Every year students in the Puget Sound area gather together at the Biotech Expo to celebrate the life sciences and compete for prizes. Although their projects are diverse in nature, they compete in categories like research, art, journalism, drama, music, and others, all the students learn about science as part of their work. You can help a high school student learn about science by being a mentor for the Biotech Expo. It is especially helpful to students if they can bounce questions off of a real-live person who works in a scientific field. The Northwest Association for Biomedical…