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ADF and Gay Marriage Amendments

Man, the ADF is really on a roll lately with false claims. In this blog post, the admin of their blog claims that the various state amendments banning gay marriage do not interfere with governments or private companies offering benefits to domestic partners: Preying on these and similar fears, advocates of same-sex "marriage" argue that proposed state marriage amendments will undermine the ability of government and even private entities to grant benefits to unmarried people. This false argument is being used to confuse many people... Same-sex "marriage" advocates argue that eliminating…

Christian Libertarianism

Jon Rowe has a post about the WorldNutDaily called Antistatism Makes for Strange Bedfellows. He says: I think the strangest case of antistatist politicsin fact, libertarian politicsmaking for strange bedfellows is how the Christian Reconstructionists have managed to infiltrate libertarian circles, indeed calling themselves Christian libertarians. Like real libertarians, they too want to eliminate todays big-government. And he goes on to note that the "christian libertarians" want to replace this big government with, of course, a biblical theocracy. I thought I'd add a little information to…

Analogies Are Like a Thing That Can't be Stretched Too Far

Inside Higher Ed today offers a column by Daniel Chambliss of Hamilton College, taking issue with the Spellings commission report on higher education, and its analogies comparinf education to manufacturing: By the conclusion of Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings' recently-convened Test of Leadership Summit on Higher Education, I finally understood why her proposals are so ... well, so ill-conceived. They rest on a faulty metaphor: the belief that education is essentially like manufacturing. High school students are "your raw material," as Rhode Island Gov. Donald Carcieri told us. We…

Labs and Learning

Steve Gimbel at Philosopher's Playground is calling for the abolition of lab classes:>p> As an undergrad I majored in both philosophy and physics and I have a confession my former physics profs will surely not like -- everything I know about physics, I learned from my theory classes. You see, science classes come in two flavors. There are theory classes where a prof stands in front of the room and lectures and then there are lab classes where for many hours, students walk in ill-prepared and tried to figure out which one of these things we've never seen before is a potentiometer, fumble…

Boskone: Visiting Japan

The first panel I was on was travel advice for the Japanese Worldcon: Visiting Japan, If we attend the Worldcon in Yokohama this August, what knowledge should we bring along? What ten phrases are essential? What societal differences should we be prepared to accommodate? What are Japanese SF fans like? What will we eat? How much will this cost? Vince Docherty, Chad Orzel, Peggy Rae Sapienza The other two people on the panel turn out to be the official agents for the Nippon 2007 Worldcon for North America (PRS) and Europe (VD), making me the token guy-with-a-website. They've also been to Japan…

Classic Edition: Grad School Chicken Creole

A couple of times a year, our department secretary will organize potluck luncheons, and badger the faculty into cooking things and bringing them in for a big gathering in the conference room. We invite all the students, and everybody eats way too much, talks too much, and generally has a good time. We had another luncheon today, in honor of Valentine's Day, so the stated theme was red food. This did not produce what you might call a heartburn-friendly menu, but that's why I've got a sixpack of Red Seal Ale in the fridge... Hooray, beer! My contribution was what I think of as Grad School…

Regrettable Physics Update

In the last week, The IoP's Physics Web has posted two news updates that fall into the category of "regrettable physics," here defined as "the sort of work that makes Daniel Davies say mean things about physicists." I'm talking here about the application of physics concepts to fields where they're neither immediately relevant nor particularly wanted. The first gets bonus black marks for the title "Physicists Make Religion Crystal Clear" (which, I realize, isn't the fault of the authors, but really...). This reports on forthcoming work applying solid-state models to the growth of world…

What's the Matter with Making Universes?

In a comment on a post from last week, Neil B. Asks a good question about my snarky response to the "make-your-own-universe" kit: [Y]ou never explained why this "universe creator" could be considered based on a misapprehension. Considering the way multi-worlds QM theory is usually presented, IIUC; why would you (anyone?) say it doesn't work as advertised? The short and unhelpful answer to this is "See Chapter 4 of my book when it comes out." I spent a lot of time wrestling with the best way to understand this stuff, and I think it came out all right. The longer answer is, well, complicated.…

Links for 2010-07-29

Meet the real victims of Bush-era lawlessness: his lawyers. - By Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine "Those who distorted and upended the legal rules during the Bush era have hermetically sealed themselves inside a legal tautology that provides that lawyers cannot be held accountable for merely offering legal advice, and nonlawyers cannot be held accountable because they believed that what they did was legal. But now we are poised to drown in an even more dangerous tautology--first offered up by former Attorney General Michael Mukasey--which holds that the Bush administration lawyers made…

Lead Poisoning and Loons: A skeptical look

This is the continuation of a discussion of loons, skeptically viewed. I am not skeptical about loons themselves. I know they exist. In fact, I just spent the last half hour watching Mom and Dad loon (whom I cannot tell apart, by the way) feeding Junior I and Junior II (whom I also cannot tell apart) what I have determined to be mostly crayfish, but also the occasional minnow. In this installment of How the Loon Terns we will look at breeding success. In this installment of How the Loon Terns we will look at breeding success. Common Knowledge: When a pair of loons fails to breed, it…

Primitive beings walking on the moon

This week we celebrate the anniversary of the first time human beings walked around on the moon, and as part of that celebration we find NASA releasing improved versions of the original scratchy black and white low resolution images of the first steps taken on the moon by Neil Armstrong. I'm worried that the youngsters out there do not understand the momentous nature of this event. So stand still for a minute while I force some wisdom on you. Back in those days I was hanging around a lot with Bob Miller, a classmate who wanted to grow up and be an oceanographer. Bob had a pool in his…

Dirty poor people living in slime: Missionaries and American Idol

Actual missionaries As you may have noticed, I have written a series of posts about missionaries in eastern Zaire in the 1980s and early 1990s, focusing on my own personal experiences. These seven posts represent only a small number of these experiences, but they are more or less representative. They are meant to underscore the down side of missionary activities in Central Africa. To some extent, the negatives you may see in these essays are part of the reason for missionary activity being illegal in many countries (although the reasons for those laws varies considerably). It is my…

Notes from Up North

The first time I ever caught a bowfin (Amia calva)I was shocked and amazed at this fish. It was green .... really green like beyond fresh water fish green .... with a fancy spot on the upper part of the back of its dorsal fin. And it had one impressive dorsal fin. It was whopping big and took a while to land. When I caught that fish, I had a plastic worm lure with which I was trying to catch the mocking bass. The mocking bass is a specific individual large mouth bass or, as Julia called them back in those days, "big mouth bass." The mocking bass hangs on a sandy spot that looked like a…

The curious case of penile vaginal intercourse and depression in women

I'm starting to worry that the last few Friday Weird Science write-ups by Scicurious (who seems, these days, to be the primary blogger at Neurotopia) have been of papers that I happen to have read. Just so you know: Thousands of papers are published per week across the diverse sciences, and although Scicurious tends to deal with life science and I tend to read life science, the chances of this particular harmonic convergence across bloggers regarding papers published over the last decade is statistically almost zero. More likely, Scicurious and I just have similar taste ... or lack thereof…

Why didn't Darwin discover Mendel's laws?

Perhaps we are all subject to falling into the trap of what I call the Hydraulic Theory of Everything. If you eat more you will be bigger, if you eat less you will be smaller. Emotional states are the continuously varying outcome of different levels of a set of hormones, forming "happy" or "stressy" or "angry" cocktails. Your brain is a vessel into which life pours various elixirs. Too much of one thing, and there will not be enough room for something else. Even political arguments are hydraulic. The 'balanced' middle view between two arguments is like the mixture of contrasting primary…

Marta's (good) questions, ... continued

Why did the evolution of a large brain happen only once (among mammals, and in particular, primates?) Larger brains have evolved a number of times. It seems that there has been a trend over several tens of millions of years of evolution of larger brains in various clades, such as carnivores and primates. There is probably a kind of arms race going on among various species in which a larger brain is an asset. However, as you imply, a really large brain (like the extraordinarily large human brain) seems to be very rare. One of the reasons for this is that there are at least two major kinds…

Facebook Movie "Get a Life" Meme

I've got a meme below the fold. This is lifted from Facebook, where it was posted by Miles Kurland. SUPPOSEDLY if you've seen over 85 movies, you have no life. Mark the ones you've seen. There are 219 movies on this list. Copy this list, then paste it on facebook or on your blog. Then, put x's next to the movies you've seen, add them up, change the header adding your number, and click publish at the side. Having known miles for many decades, I would have thought HE'd be the one with the life, but apparently not ... My total is a measly 60. ( ) Rocky Horror Picture Show (x) Grease (x)…

Will Scott Adams never learn?

We went round and round on this well over a year ago. Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, wrote a shallow and ignorant argument that sort of shilly-shallied over a pro-creationist argument; I pointed out how stupid his reasoning was. The response was insane; criticize Adams, and his horde of Dilbert fans will descend on you like a cloud of pea-brained locusts. Adams took a stab at the subject again, proposing that at least we ought to teach it as an alternative to evolution, an old and tiresome argument that I thoroughly despise. Basically, Adams just outed himself as a feeble hack making tepid…

Yemen

A car bomb and rocket attack on the US embassy in Yemen has killed at least 16 people, including civilians and Yemeni security guards, Yemen officials said. -bbc Why Yemen? You might not know this, because the Bush Administration prefers you not, but Yemen is one of those places that is a major training ground and stopping off point for al-Qaeda linked (= can be hired by al-Qaeda at discount rates) groups. Yemen is more of a threat to US 'interests' in the middle east than Afghanistan, if we measure in numbers of crazy anti-US terrorists per cave or in absolute numbers. The entire time…

Hating on Nate Silver

I recently heard a pollster remark, “When you give conservatives bad polling data, they want to kill you. When you give liberals bad polling data, they want to kill themselves.” That attitude has been well on display recently in the right-wing freak out over Nate Silver's website. Silver currently gives Obama a 72.9 percent chance of winning the electoral college on election day. There is nothing mysterious in how he arrives at that conclusion. He's simply noticed that Obama has a lead in enough states to put him over 270. It's not complicated. But that's too complicated for right-…

Game Change

I watched HBO's film Game Change tonight, about the rise and fall of Sarah Palin in the 2008 presidential race. It was pretty good! Which is to say that it makes Palin look pretty bad. As presented in the film, Palin is not merely uninterested in filling the gaps in her understanding of domestic and foreign policy, but is actually incapable of learning anything even when she tries. Her decent performance in the debate with Joe Biden is presented, quite correctly, as the result of pure cynicism. When her prep team realizes that it is simply impossible to bring her up to speed on the…

Green our vaccines! Part II

While poop jokes are all in good fun here in the US (and in other developed parts of the world), diarrhea really isnt all that funny for most of the planet. Dehydration due to diarrhea is the second leading cause of death for babies, worldwide (it was #1 until we started aggressive education/re-hydration efforts). Hundreds of thousands of people die from cholera and enterotoxigenic E. coli (ETEC) infection every year. Thats not funny :( So scientists have been working really hard to create vaccines to cholera and ETEC, and a group of folks have figured out a really cool strategy--…

Hysterical chiro-woo at White Coat Underground

ERV does not have a monopoly on teh crazy. Pal really reels them in with his chronic lyme disease posts, and now, evidently, chiro-woo. I could not have made up this post from 'Dr. Howard Boos' if I had tried. You tell me this asshole doesnt sound EXACTLY like a Creationist or HIV Denier! 1. Hates science 2. Uses title of 'Dr' in an attempt to gain unearned credibility 3. Personal expertise/experience trumps scientific community 4. Little/No interest in modern scientific findings, eg journal articles 5. Scientific community wants to hurt people 6. Science itself hurts people 7. Woo…

Luskin Being Silly

Here's Discovery Institute flak Casey Luskin commenting on an article about evolution posted at MSNBC's website. The MSNBC article is available here.: Question: What do you do when a theory logically predicts both (a) and not (a)? Answer: Apparently you heavily promote it. MSNBC recently published two articles promoting Darwinian just-so stories to the public. The first article about the evolution of Waterfowl genitalia contends, “Scientists had speculated that male waterfowl evolved longer phalluses to give them a competitive edge over those not as well-endowed when it came to successfully…

The Times on the Creation Museum

The New York Times gives us sneak peek at the big Creation Museum opening in Kentucky this weekend: The entrance gates here are topped with metallic Stegosauruses. The grounds include a giant tyrannosaur standing amid the trees, and a stone-lined lobby sports varied sauropods. It could be like any other natural history museum, luring families with the promise of immense fossils and dinosaur adventures. But step a little farther into the entrance hall, and you come upon a pastoral scene undreamt of by any natural history museum. Two prehistoric children play near a burbling waterfall,…

Evolution on Hardball

On yesterday's edition of the MSNBC chat show Hardball, host Chris Matthews had the following surreal discussion with Richard Land, President of the Southern Baptist Convention: MATTHEWS: Let's get to it. On Broadway right now, "Inherit the Wind" is playing. I hear Christopher Plummer is fabulous. I've always been a Brian Dennehy fan. Brian Dennehy is playing the William Jennings Bryant character. Are you surprised that three of the Republican candidates for president in our debate last week openly expressed opposition to a belief in evolution? LAND: No. I'm not surprised at all.…

The Relevance of Evolution to Medicine

Writing in PLoS Biology, Catriona MacCallum offers these wise words on the subject of evolution and medicine. The article describes a conference MacCallum attended on the subject. MacCallum writes: One reason that evolution doesn't figure prominently in the medical community is that although it makes sense to have evolution taught as part of medicine, that doesn't make it essential. As explained at a meeting on evolution and medicine I recently attended in York, United Kingdom (the Society for the Study of Human Biology and the Biosocial Society's 2006 symposium, “Medicine and Evolution…

Chess in the Schools

Writing at Slate, Ann Hulbert offers some thoughts on the use of chess as an educational tool in elementary schools: In January of 1958, three months after Sputnik triggered an educational panic in America much like today's angst about the global talent race, a 14-year-old boy from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn made headlines: Bobby Fischer became the youngest U.S. champion in a cerebral sport long associated with genius--and long dominated by the Russians. The game, of course, was chess, and 15 years later--during his antic showdown with Boris Spassky in Reykjavik in 1972--Fischer…

Against "Gen Eds"

Matt Reed, who will forever be "Dean Dad" to me, has a post on "new" topics that might be considered for "gen ed" requirements, that is, the core courses that all students are required to take. This spins off a question Rebecca Townsend asked (no link in original), "Should public speaking be a general education requirement?" the idea being that public speaking is such an essential skill that everyone ought to learn it at some point. Reed adds "entrepreneurship," "[computer] coding" and "personal finance" as other things that might fall into the same essential category. Now, it's important to…

Individualists, Working Together

An article titled "Individualism: The legacy of great physicists," by Ricardo Heras. crossed my various social media feeds a half-dozen times on Tuesday, so I finally broke down and read it, and I'm puzzled. The argument is very straightforward-- single-author publications used to be common, now they're not, this might indicate a lack of truly independent work, that would be bad-- but a lot of it is at odds with my reading of the relevant history. The most jarring thing about the article is the "Individualistic Team" graphic above, including a bunch of pictures of famous physicists who are…

On Corrective Incentives

SteelyKid's kindergarten teacher is big on incentives and prizes-- there are a number of reward bags that get sent home with kids who excel in some particular area. I'm not entirely sure what's in these, because SteelyKid hasn't gotten any yet. This isn't because she misbehaves-- from all reports, she's very good-- but she's in a class with 21 other kids, and they've only been in school for a couple of weeks. Still, she regards this as a grave injustice, and I occasionally get aggrieved reports about the distribution of reward bags when I pick her up from after-school day care. I try to…

Time Is What You Measure With a Clock

Last year, Alan Alda posed a challenge to science communicators, to explain a flame in terms that an 11-year old could understand. this drew a lot of responses, and some very good winners. This year's contest, though still called the "Flame Challenge," asked for an answer to the question "What Is Time?" This is a little closer to my corner of science, so I considered entering, but as previously noted, I'm crushingly busy at present. And either scripting/ shooting/ editing a video, or doing the necessary work to hack a written response down to the prescribed 300 characters was more time than I…

Monday Math: Taylor Series

It is time to continue our quest to prove that the sum of the reciprocals of the primes diverges. We have one more ingredient to put into place. I am referring to the notion of a Taylor series. The idea is this: Some functions, like those from trigonometry, are difficult to evaluate precisely. It would be nice to be able to approximate them via some other, more manageable, function. And since polynomials are the most manageable functions there are, why not try one of them? So, let f(x) be a smooth function we wish to approximate. For simplicity, let us assume that we seek a polynomial…

The Big Math Conference

Now that the big ScienceBlogs software upgrade is complete, I can tell you about the big conference in Washington D.C. Lucky you! According to careercast.com, mathematicians have the most wonderful job there is. I am inclined to agree, of course. I don't understand why everyone doesn't get a PhD in the subject and join the fun. This is the annual Joint Mathematics Meetings, so called because it is organized jointly by the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America (no Monty Python jokes, please.) It is basically a big math party. Feeling glum about the…

Great glowing spiders

I've known that scorpions have fluorescent cuticles — if you go out into the desert with a black light and shine it on the ground, the scorpions will often glow green and blue and be easy to spot. I had no idea that many spiders exhibit the same phenomenon, but there they are, glowing away. I may have to visit my local head shop (in Morris? Hah!) and get some black light bulbs to see what the fauna in my living room is up to. Fluorescence is actually a fairly common property: all it requires is a molecule called a fluorophore that can absorb and capture transiently photons of a particular…

Robert Charles Wilson, Julian Comstock [Library of Babel]

Over at the Science and Entertainment Exchange, they have a nice post about the Darwin movie, which also appears in today's Links Dump, with John Scalzi addressing the putative controversy about the movie's distribution. John's suggestion for how to attract major US distribution-- Will Smith, explosions, and Jennifer Connelly's breasts-- reminded me of The Life and Adventures of the Great Naturalist Charles Darwin, a movie that figures prominently in Robert Charles Wilson's latest: Act One was called Homology and it dealt with Darwin's youth. In this Act young Darwin meets the girl with…

Hugo Voting

Just a reminder, if you're someone who's eligible to vote for this year's Hugo Awards, the deadline to do so is tomorrow. Of course, you probably already know that-- they sent out reminder emails last night. They want me to vote so badly, in fact, that I got four reminder emails last night, two with my own member number and voting PIN, and two with somebody else's... I sent my vote in this morning. Once again, this was a year in which there was a huge gap between the category winners and the next-best nominees. It was awkwardly large, in fact-- not quite big enough to put "No Award" second,…

A Day at the Races

I'm watching Pardon the Interruption after work, and they're talking about the Belmont Stakes. They show a clip of horses running, and Emmy pipes up: "I like horses!" She does this when she feels I'm not paying her enough attention. "Horses are okay," I say. "Okay? Horses are really neat!" She thumps her tail on the floor, to emphasize the point. "I guess." A really bad idea comes to me. "Say, did you know that all horses have an infinite number of legs?" "What?" "Yeah," I say, pausing the DVR. "All horses have an infinite number of legs, and I can prove it with logic." "How?" "Well, we know…

Definitions and Standards

Somebody asked a question at the Physics Stack Exchange site about the speed of light and the definition of the meter that touches on an issue I think is interesting enough to expand on a little here. The questioner notes that the speed of light is defined to be 299,792,458 m/s and the meter is defined to be the distance traveled by light in 1/299,792,458 seconds, and asks if that doesn't seem a little circular. There are actually three relevant quantities here, though, the third being the second, which is defined as 9,192,631,770 oscillations of the light associated with the transition…

Physics Is Not a Mad Lib

Via Tom, a site giving problem-solving advice for physics. While the general advice is good, and the friendly, Don't-Panic tone is great, I do have a problem with one of their steps, Step 7: Consider Your Formulas: Some professors will require that you memorize relevant formulas, while others will give you a "cheat sheet." Either way, you have what you need. Memorization might sound horrible, but most physics subjects don't have that many equations to memorize. I remember taking an advanced electromagnetism course where I had to memorize about 20 different formulas. At first it seemed…

Weather Explains Politics

In the wake of recent political developments, there has been a lot of hand-wringing about why Democrats in Congress are so spineless, and have been unable to pass meaningful legislation despite huge majorities. After thinking about my travel plans last night, I think I have the key to the Grand Unified Theory of American politics. The problem is not that Democratic politicians are uniquely craven, or venal, or anything like that. The problem is Washington, DC. No, this is not a prelude to some right-wing rant about how the Real America can be found only in states with more livestock than…

Course Report: Modern Physics

Back in the "Uncomfortable Questions" thread, Thony C suggested that I should do running updates on the course I'm teaching now. I meant to get to this sooner, but last weekend's bout with norovirus kind of got in the way... I like the idea, though, so below the fold are a bunch of comments on the classes I've had thus far this term: Class 1: Introduction to Relativity. I do a quick recap of the two classical physics classes that are pre-requisites for my class, showing the various conservation laws, and Maxwell's equations. I then set up a version of the problem that led to relativity,…

Uncomfortable Questions: Church Wedding

Adrienne asks: Why, when you apparently are an agnostic or atheist, did you get married in a church? And are you going to baptize your baby? Raise him/her in a religious framework? Now, here's a nice volatile question... Why did we get married in a church? Because religion is more than just superstition and mythology. I've written about this before, and will no doubt write about it again. My family is Catholic, and I was raised Catholic. I got out of school for an hour or so on Wednesday afternoon for religious education classes in middle school, and in junior high, I went to confirmation…

A small way to honor the memory of Elizabeth Sulzman

This afternoon, as I was busy working with graduate students and my daughter was napping at daycare, an email from AGU reminded me to renew my membership for next year. AGU is one of my two main societies and early renewal gives you a discount on electronic access to their articles, so I dutifully headed over to their site to pay up. Like all good organizations, before they'd let me pay their dues, AGU wanted to know if I would give a gift to one fund or another. Maybe I was feeling in a generous mood because I'd just come off good meetings with my grads, but I decided to browse the list of…

Adding content to the new course (Course design 1.4)

To recap, I'm prepping a new graduate level course on experimental design and data analysis (EDDA) that will serve MS and PhD students from geosciences and civil and environmental engineering. I've been working through the SERC course design tutorial, and so far I've figured out context and constraints, over-arching goals, and ancillary skills goals. It's finally time to add content to my course. (Note that the material that follows is a bit outliny, because I'm thinking out loud (on blog paper) here and looking for feedback) First, according to the good folks at SERC, I need to bring it back…

JAM redux: What do you write in your NSF annual reports?

At JAM last week, a really useful session was conducted by Nakeina Douglas, an assistant professor in the L Douglass Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs at Virginia Commonwealth. She also is involved in the Grace E Harris Leadership Institute, and teaches public policy and research methods. "What was so useful about her talk?" I hear you ask. Well. Let me tell you. She talked to us about how to write those darn annual reports for NSF. Let me share... Shockingly, the two main objectives of reporting for NSF are accountability and decision usefulness. I know; who would have…

Creationism evolves by jerks

I think one thing Razib says is exactly right: One of the most interesting things to me is the nature of Creationism as an idea which evolves in a rather protean fashion in reaction to the broader cultural selection pressures. Creationism has evolved significantly, but it's not exactly protean: it's punctuated equilibrium. If we had a time machine and could bring a typical creationist who came to age after Whitcomb and Morris's The Genesis Flood face-to-face with a pre-Scopes trial creationist, there would be a fabulously ferocious fight, because their theology and their basic beliefs would…

Is artemisinin really behind this case of hepatic toxicity?

Artemisinin is a natural product isolated from the leaves of the annual wormwood, Artemisia annua. Used originally in Chinese herbal medicine, the pure compound is employed in Africa as an inexpensive antimalarial drug. In April, 2009, the multinational pharmaceutical company Novartis received FDA approval for a combination drug called Coartem®, comprised of the semi-synthetic artemisinin analog, artemether, and another novel antimalarial, lumefantrine. An herbal preparation of artemesinin has recently been associated with a single case of hepatic injury as reported in this week's issue of…

Time to Talk About CAM?

Here's one of those Friday afternoon press releases, hoping no one will notice. I'm having a little trouble parsing out whether this effort promotes CAM or is truly meant to inform physicians in a manner so as to protect their patients from unscupulous providers: National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) For Immediate Release: Friday, June 6, 2008 CONTACT: NCCAM Press Office, 301-496-7790, TIME TO TALK ABOUT CAM: Health Care Providers and Patients Need To Ask and Tell The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), part of the National…

The fiery taste of chillies is a defence against a fungus

Food from countries all over the world owes a lot of its flavour to a fungus. The species in question isn't one of the many edible mushrooms used for cooking, the baker's yeast that gives rise to bread, or the moulds that spread through blue cheese. It's a little known species called Fusarium semitectum and its role has only just been discovered - it's the driving force behind the fiery heat of chillies. Chillies were one of the first plants from the New World to be domesticated and they have spread all over the world since. Just today, a quarter of the world's population has eaten…