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Rob Schneider: Auditioning for Jenny McCarthy's job as world's most famous celebrity antivaccinationist?

I suppose it's possible that there might be doubt that Rob Schneider has become a complete and total antivaccine wingnut. Possible, but not reasonable. After all, he's shown his cards and risen to prominence with his attacks on vaccine science made as part of his effort to oppose the passage of California Bill AB 2109, which was finally passed and signed by Governor Jerry Brown, but not without an attempt to water it down by adding a pointless (and probably unconstitutional) set of instructions for implementation in a signing statement. Leading up to this, Schneider had "made a name for…

White-Nose Syndrome

I hate to get all serious, but this is a topic near-and-dear to me, and one that needs more publicity. And while Zooillogix readers are intelligent and well-informed (and smoking hot, I might add), I want to be sure everyone is aware of the progress and potential of this epidemic. Plus, I know I'm not the only batfan here. In February of 2006, a caver in eastern New York photographed a group of hibernating bats with an unusual white substance on their muzzles. The following winter, bats were noted flying outside of caves months before they typically come out of hibernation. Then there…

The CephSeq Consortium has a strategy

I approve this plan. A number of researchers have gotten together and worked out a grand strategy for sequencing the genomes of a collection of cephalopods. This involves surveying the phylogeny of cephalopods and trying to pick species to sample that adequately cover the diversity of the group, while also selecting model species that have found utility in a number of research areas — two criteria that are often in conflict with one another. Fortunately, the authors seemed to have found a set that satisfies both (although it would have been nice to see the Spirulida and Vampyromorpha make…

Just Out of Sight

[Note from Craig: The following is by a close friend and colleague, Jeff Nekola. I invited Jeff along for a day out at sea. I thought it would be interesting, and a new perspective, for Jeff to tell you about field work for deep-sea biologist.] My field time is mostly spent looking at snails living in soil in a wide range of terrestrial habitats. Over the last decade I have conducted field work at over 1100 sites across North America, ranging from the subtropical bay thickets of the Gulf Coast to the taiga of central Quebec across the Midwest to the shores of Hudson's Bay at Churchill…

A hopeless muddle

James May, one of the presenters on Top Gear, is trying his hand at providing a little science education. I want to say…please stop. Here he is trying to answer the question, "Are humans still evolving?" In the end he says the right answer — yes they are! — but the path he takes to get there is terrible. It's little things that make me wonder if anyone is actually editing his copy. For instance, he helpfully explains that you, the viewer, were produced by your parents having sex. Then he says: That's how evolution is driven: by reproduction. But is that still true? Uh, yes? We haven't…

Look, I'm just a biochemist. Part 1

"Most of the time, I work in a little glass jar and lead a very uneventful life. I drive a Volvo, a beige one. But what I'm dealing with here is one of the most deadly substances the earth has ever known, so what say you cut me some FRIGGIN' SLACK?" Dr. Stanley Goodspeed's outburst to John Mason sent my friend, a medicinal chemist, and I into noisy guffaws which attracted the attention of the surrounding Cantabrigians on that rainy summer night. After a martini each, we weren't too discriminating and simply wanted entertainment so we chose to see The Rock at the Fresh Pond Cinemas. The…

Good grief, but I despise the Discovery Institute

There's nothing I detest more than intellectual dishonesty, and the Discovery Institute is a world leader in that. They have a ghastly little article up on their website, "Is origin of life in hot water?", which cites a recent paper in PNAS to argue that life couldn't have evolved without the enzymes that catalyze chemical reactions. Here's what they say about it: So it seems according to a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The authors address the conundrum of origin of life chemists between the rate of (un-catalyzed) organic reactions and the lack of time…

Whatever Happened To "I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar"?????

I was catching up on reading at Female Science Professor's place and came across her post: Women Girls. FSP, as far as I can tell, seems to be saying that the young ones these days are all hip with the term "girl" for women even into their 30's because...I don't know why, it's a peer thing, and we old biddies wouldn't understand. We must accept that the times they are a-changing. Girls just wanna have fun? Perusing the comments, I gather that "woman" is stodgy, or P.C. (!), and too mature and "girls" these days are putting off adulthood, and can't think of themselves as women. To this…

Things You Just Shouldn't Say Even If You Mean Well

I'm speaking from experience, people, having had most of these lobbed at me one time or another. Please feel free to add to the list in the comments section. 1. "When is the baby due?" I'm not pregnant, you douchebag. I'm fat. If I were pregnant, I'd probably be prancing around telling everyone and her goddamn sister about it because that's what we do in our society. Or, if I were pregnant, and afraid I might lose the baby, maybe I wouldn't want to talk about it. In any case, if I were pregnant, and you haven't heard about it yet, wait for me to talk to you about it. Otherwise, STFU…

The long march of bigotry continues

Lawrence has made an important step towards true equality by taking up the possibility of a local registry of domestic partnerships. This would allow a centralized place where companies that choose to provide partnership benefits to check the status of their employees, and would allow hospitals and other institutions to verify the relationships between people. The city is limited in what it can do with this registry, since state law forbids granting anyone but one man and one woman the right to marry or even "the rights or incidents of marriage." No one seems quite sure how far that…

Only technology will save us

The New York Times has a scary but numerically rich piece on the impending pension crisis in Europe. As in the days of yore Greece looks to be a pioneer. Here's an interesting pair of numbers: According to research by Jagadeesh Gokhale, an economist at the Cato Institute in Washington, bringing Greece's pension obligations onto its balance sheet would show that the government's debt is in reality equal to 875 percent of its gross domestic product, which is the broadest measure of a nation's economic output. That would be the highest debt level among the 16 nations that use the euro, and far…

Who is more important: Me or Michael Bolton?

Michael Bolton and I share the same birth date, February 26th (he being considerably older than I, of course). Who is better? It's an absurd question (I opted out of comparing myself to Johnny Cash and Victor Hugo; I know when I'm beat), especially since it's like comparing apples and lawnmowers. The ever-respectable, serious journalists over at Newsweek have decided to do just that, though, setting Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln (who were born on the same day, February 12, 1809) up for a no-holds-barred deathmatch to see who would come out on top. Ok, maybe it's not that over-hyped but…

Did Huxley really mop the floor with Wilberforce?

Sometimes textbook cardboard refuses to disintegrate. According to scientific lore, T.H. Huxley singlehandedly slew Samuel "Soapy Sam" Wilberforce during a debate at Oxford in the sweltering heat of an 1860 summer, causing a woman to faint and sending Robert Fitzroy, (former captain of the HMS Beagle when it took Charles Darwin around the world) into a frenzy, stalking the aisles and shouting "The book! The book!" while holding a bible aloft. It's a nice story, but like many such tales, it's probably not true. Although the legend of Huxley's great victory over Wilberforce continues to this…

“Implicit consent”—women can be stripped if they're dancing at a bar

This is an appalling story. Those "Girls Gone Wild" videos are already about the sleaziest things you'll find advertised on mainstream TV: they are basically made by getting young women drunk to reduce their inhibitions and than urging them to expose themselves for 'fame' and titillation, and convincing them to do something stupid in front of a camera. Usually it's a case of consensual stupidity (which should never be arousing, except for the fact that even sober guys can be awfully mindless about that sort of thing), but sometimes it crosses the line into assault. STLToday reports that the…

For a given value of "God"

I would assume that most people who go out to the movie theater now and then have at least one experience similar to my own. You're sitting there, already halfway through your bag of popcorn, and the lights dim for the trailers. Some of the upcoming movies look good, others are just eye-candy (but you know you're going to see it no matter how vapid the premise), and some make you wonder who the hell put up millions of dollars to film such absolute dreck. The last reaction most closely approximates my thoughts when I found out that Oxford is going to get $4,000,000 from the Templeton…

Book Review: Grave Secrets of Dinosaurs

While the most popular dinosaurs have names like Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops few people know one of paleontology's great secrets; the most numerous remains of a large vertebrates found in rocks of Mesozoic age carry the title "Chunkosaurus." Scraps of bone that may be difficult to ascribe to a particular species are far more common than articulated skeletons, and nearly any find where the bones of an individual animal are found together in association is significant, indeed. Given the natural history of bone during fossilization it's a wonder we have any remains of extinct creatures at all…

Sunday Sacrilege: Unorthodoxy

We're happier out of a straitjacket than in one. I saw something wonderful at a science fiction convention a few weeks ago. At these events, people often put on odd and extravagant costumes, and I saw one rather obese young man who'd made a minimalist choice: he'd come as one of the Spartans from the movie 300, which meant he was standing in the crowd wearing a red speedo and a bright red cape…and nothing else. Now imagine this same young fellow at an event at your high school. It would have been brutal. I know; when I was in high school, I was a little poindexter, ostracized, laughed at, and…

More basketball analysis

Reader Jorge has also looked at these amazing basketball shots. (here is my last basketball analysis) Jorge claims that at least one shot seems fake. He is referring to the following video (at around the 2:20 mark). ARRGH Ok, new plan. For some dumb reason, youtube won't let me embed this video. Well, here is a link - Amazing Basketball Shots: The Legendary Shots 4 (at least I can link to the right time). It is even dumber that you can't embed it, but youtube gives you the download option. Oh well. Let me tell you the part that Jorge has an issue with. This guy on a ladder throws a…

Pendulum - a third way

Looking back at part I of this idea, I don't think I did a very good job. Let me summarize the key things I wanted to say: Normally, there are two ways of modeling the motion of an object: Calculating the forces on the object and using the momentum principle or Newton's second law (which are the same thing). I called this the Newtonian way. The problem with this method is forces that constrain the motion (like the normal force). These forces have a variable magnitude to make the object stay on a particular surface. Defining some variables that describe the system as it is constrained.…

The Advantages of Tourette's

I was a stuttering child. Whenever I got the slightest bit nervous, I had an annoying tendency to run out of air on vowel sounds, so that beginning a phrase with "A" or "eee" or "I" was all but impossible. I would choke and sputter, my eyes blinking in mad frustration. This minor affliction led me to become extremely self-aware of my speech. Before I said anything out loud, I would consider the breathy weight of the words, and mentally rehearse all those linguistic speed bumps and stop signs. If the phonetics seemed too dangerous, the sentence would be rewritten in my head, edited down to the…

Funding Innovation

Via Tyler Cowen, comes this graph of demographic shifts in NIH grants, which show a clear trend: older scientists are getting more money. Cowen also cites the eminent economist Paul Romer, who worries about the effect of this shift on innovation: Instead of young scientists getting grant funding to go off and do whatever they want in their twenties, they're working in a lab where somebody in his forties or fifties is the principal investigator in charge of the grant.  They're working as apprentices, almost, under the senior person.  If we're not careful, we could let our institutions,…

Dopaminergic Aesthetics

Natalie Angiers profiles dopamine, which isn't just about rewards: In the communal imagination, dopamine is about rewards, and feeling good, and wanting to feel good again, and if you don't watch out, you'll be hooked, a slave to the pleasure lines cruising through your brain. Hey, why do you think they call it dopamine? Yet as new research on dopamine-deficient mice and other studies reveal, the image of dopamine as our little Bacchus in the brain is misleading, just as was the previous caricature of serotonin as a neural happy face. In the emerging view, discussed in part at the Society for…

Naps, Learning and REM

It's a shame that we stop encouraging naps once the preschool years are over. After all, there's a growing body of scientific evidence that the afternoon siesta is an important mental tool, which enhances productivity, learning and memory. (It's really much more effective than a cup of coffee.) Here's the Times: Have to solve a problem? Try taking a nap. But it has to be the right kind of nap -- one that includes rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep, the kind that includes dreams. Researchers led by Sara C. Mednick, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego…

Choice

Americans love alternatives. One of the benefits of modern capitalism, after all, is that we're free to consume products that perfectly match our preferences - if you want to wear skinny jeans with a Black Sabbath t-shirt, flip flops and a fedora (I saw such a person yesterday - he looked very satisfied with himself) then go right ahead. Gail Collins, while bemoaning the difficulty of reforming the college loan system, summarizes the American obsession with choice: This is why my corner drugstore offers, by my last count, 103 different kinds of body moisturizers. These are not, of course, to…

MRI and Back Pain

One of the case studies I use in How We Decide when discussing the dangers of information overload concerns the diagnosis of back pain. Before the introduction of MRI's in the late 1980s, doctors were forced to rely on X-rays when diagnosing back pain. X-rays provide doctors with a limited amount of information, since they only reveal the bones and spinal column. As a result, back pain remained a mostly mysterious phenomenon, and most patients were prescribed bed rest. Nevertheless, this simple treatment plan was still extremely effective. Even when nothing was done to the lower back, about…

Telling what people think

Michael Egnor is confused. No, wait, that's like saying that the Titanic is made of metal. Let's try again. Michael Egnor's confusion is drowning him in his own turgid prose: I can't tell what live people (or live rats) are thinking by looking at their brains, and I can't even tell using two-photon confocal microscopy (the latest in capillary imaging). Of course, I can't tell what dead people used to think by studying their brains, and I certainly can't tell what dead people used to think if I don't have a speck of tissue from their brains. And I certainly can't tell what 3.2 million year…

Cothran defends the Confederacy

Having defended Holocaust deniers and crusaded against gay parents, I shouldn't be surprised that Martin Cothran, lobbyist for the Kentucky affiliate of Focus on the Family and occasional shill for the Disco. 'Tute, would defend treason. In defending the secessionist States, Cothran mostly just whales away at a straw man, offering but one real person's views to which he objects: the comments of Bob Sutton, chief historian for the National Park Service, who reminds us that "Slavery was the principal cause of the Civil War, period." That's it. Yes, there's much sanctimonious talk about…

On corporate content

The ScienceBloggers have been whooping it up on Twitter, pissed as can be that PepsiCo has bought a blog on Scienceblogs to talk about nutrition and public health issues. This is very silly, and the tweeters have been working hard to come up with hypothetical examples that might match the absurdity of this situation. Bear in mind that PepsiCo doesn't just produce Pepsi and other tooth-destroying, obesity-producing fizzy waters seasoned with high fructose corn syrup. It produces a wide array of fast foods and snack products that have been credibly cited as instrumental in causing the obesity…

On offense

Ruchira Paul has a post up, "Religious, superstitious, nonsense" and other harsh words. The point at issue is the fact that a teacher who expressed anti-Creationist views in harsh tones was sued. Ruchira asks somewhat rhetorically as to the sort of things parochial schools say about other religions and atheists. The bigger issue is one of public decorum, and decorum is very contextual. When my 7th grade teacher had us read Medea she explained a bit about the context of Greek society, including the nature of their religion. She spoke of "their gods" and "our God." Her reference to "our God"…

Reader Survey Results

There are nearly 500 complete responses to the survey from last week. Here's a CSV file of the results. Below the fold are the frequencies as well as N's. I might report some trends in the data, but a lot of it is predictable. People who only read ScienceBlogs GNXP are way more liberal than those who do not. Reads.... Only GNXP ScienceBlogs Only GNXP Classic Both No Answer 1.83 2.08 2.87 Far Left 13.76 4.17 2.87 Left 28.44 5.56 11.48 Center Left 16.51 10.42 15.31 Center 8.26 6.94 11.00 Center Right 2.75 10.42 11.00 Right 1.83 13.19 10.05 Far Right 0.92 9.03 5.74…

The Hallmarks of Crackpottery, Part 1: Two Comments

Another chaos theory post is in progress. But while I was working on it, a couple of comments arrived on some old posts. In general, I'd reply on those posts if I thought it was worth it. But the two comments are interesting not because they actually lend anything to the discussion to which they are attached, but because they are perfect demonstrations of two of the most common forms of crackpottery - what I call the "Education? I don't need no stinkin' education" school, and the "I'm so smart that I don't even need to read your arguments" school. Let's start with the willful ignorance.…

The Genius of Donald Knuth: Typesetting with Boxes and Glue

Today is the 70th birthday of Donald Knuth. If you don't know who Knuth is, then you're not a programmer. If you're a programmer and you don't know who Knuth is, well... I have no idea what rock you've been hiding under, but you should probably be fired. Knuth is one of the most famous and accomplished people in the computer science community. He's done all sorts of great research, published a set of definitive textbooks on computer algorithms, and of particular interest to me, implemented a brilliant, hideous, beautiful, godawful piece of software called TeX. When I went to grad school,…

The Perspex Machine: Super-Turing Computation from the Nullity Guy

If you remember, a while back, I wrote about a British computer scientist named James Anderson, who claimed to have solved the "problem" of "0/0" by creating a new number that he called nullity. The creation of nullity was actually part of a larger project of his - he claims to have designed a computing machine called the Perspex machine which is strictly more powerful that the Turing machine. If this was true, it would mean that the Church-Turing thesis is false, overturning a huge part of the theory of computer science. Of course, just overturning the theory of computer science isn't…

Michael Fumento: Still a Disingenuous Ideologue

So Michael Fumento has issued a challenge to put 'odds' on avian influenza, thinking that somehow I've stated that an avian influenza pandemic is likely (he's also accused me, a scientist, of being "anti-scientist" and "alarmist"). Well, I'm not putting odds down because I've never said that a pandemic is likely. Then again, one should hardly be surprised when a professional conservative completely distorts what one says. In fact, in the post, I wrote: We can argue about public health priorities (avian flu isn't my top priority personally). One would think that was clear, but I made the…

Colored folk in science

Small kerfuffle about the fact that ScienceBlogsTM is so white. Some amusement that I am one of the white science bloggers. In any case, this comment caught my attention: Second, it is no secret that minorities of most stripes are seriously underrepresented in science. Bloggers are even more pointedly underrepresented in the pool of scientists. (Hard to categorize the "pool" from which the non-working-scientist SBers are drawn, so let's not even go there). It takes no genius to see that even if minority scientists were more likely to blog that this pool would be pretty dang small. This is…

Baby Bear's lament: James Wood in the New Yorker

I must admit that I quite like the subtitle for this new anti-atheist lament in the New Yorker by James Wood: "A don defends the Supreme Being from the new atheists." I just picture a gigantic graying gentleman in academic robes, his sleeves flapping as he swats aside the helicopter gunships piloted by Dawkins and Dennett and Harris and Hitchens as they swoop in to take out a cowering, defenseless, and semi-transparent Bronze Age patriarch behind him. It's a peculiar arrogance of the true believers that at the same time they fervently follow this imaginary being that they claim is omnipotent…

Will health care workers show up in a pandemic?

Reuters Health has a short note on a survey of 169 nurses, doctors and other health care workers (HCWs in the jargon) about whether they would report for duty during a pandemic. It was done by Dr. Charlene Irvin of St. John Hospital and Medical Center in Detroit, Michigan. I don't know where it was published or what its methods were, so it is hard to say how representative of all HCWs the results are. But it probably isn't very far off. Remember, though, I'm an epidemiologist. We are infamous for blithely acting as if numbers like 84 and 86 are the same. Some of you may remember a sign along…

Swine flu vaccines, adjuvants, equity, safety

When it comes to US swine flu vaccine policy, I'm not calling the shots, but if I were I'd do it differently than the current plan, which calls for a vaccine containing only viral antigen and no immunity boosting adjuvant. I opt for a vaccine with an adjuvant, probably the one that has been used for years in Europe, MF59. If I were to make a decision like that, I could well be making a mistake, because no one really can know at this point what is going to happen or not happen. We can only go on the best data we have coupled with some principles of what's right. On that basis and using my own…

Pandemic flu "lockdown" nonsense

I'm an advocate of using computer models to help us think about what might or could happen during various pandemic flu scenarios, but it is a technique with drawbacks. For one, it can suggest that some things might be possible that are either very difficult to do or aren't feasible. This happened in 2005 when some models were published in Science and Nature that suggested a pandemic could be nipped in the bud before it started. Most people thought that what was required was unrealistic but it put WHO in a bind. They had to marshal their resources to show they were willing to try or go down…

ClockNews - Adolescent Sleep

Here is the second post on the topic, from March 28, 2006. A couple of links are broken due to medieval understanding of permalinks by newspapers, but you will not miss too much, I hope.... Health Journal: Doctors probe why it's hard for many kids to get up (also Night Owls: Disorder may cause teens to sleep less): "The parents get stigmatized as not having control over their kids when they can't get them to school in time," says James Wyatt, co-director of the sleep-disorders center at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago who is conducting research looking for ways to better diagnose…

Randomized trial versus observational study challenge, II: meta-comments

Just a day into the New Year I was feeling feisty and issued a challenge to readers and the Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) blogosphere in general. I asked for a critique of a fictitious uncontrolled, non-randomized non-blinded small scale clinical study. It was truly a fictitious study. I made it up. But I had a template in mind and I intended to go somewhere with the example and I still do. But it will take longer to get there than I anticipated because it has raised a lot of things worth thinking and talking about in the meantime. I was going to wait a week to give people a chance to read…

Thanksgiving turkey gets Presidential pardon – Turkey workers, however, can’t get a break

As Americans prepare for the Thanksgiving holiday and the White House gets ready for President Obama to pardon the National Thanksgiving Turkey in a Rose Garden ceremony on Wednesday November 27 that will “reflect upon the time-honored traditions of Thanksgiving,” let us take a moment to reflect upon the welfare of the men and women who process the millions of turkeys on their way to Thanksgiving dinners. First, according to the US Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), about 220,000 people currently work in the poultry processing industry in the US, at an annual median wage…

Carcinogen use and release declines dramatically in Massachusetts: An important step in cancer prevention

In 1989, Massachusetts enacted a remarkable and landmark law known as the Toxics Use Reduction Act (TURA). Supported by both environmentalists and industry, and passed unanimously by the state legislature, TURA established toxics use reduction as Massachusetts’ preferred strategy for pollution prevention, and for reducing public, occupational and environmental exposure to hazardous chemicals. The law requires in-state businesses to report on their use of toxic chemicals. It also established programs to support state industries’ toxics use reduction efforts. In the two decades since the bill’s…

Choosing Trees and Shrubs for the Home Orchard

The first "seed" catalogs of the year are always the tree catalogs, and now is a good time to begin siting and planning for next year's tree stock. We try to add trees to our home orchard every single year, sometimes just a couple, sometimes more. Now with 27 acres, it may seem that our choices are very different than yours, but in fact, with a large herd of goats, the areas that we can ensure are 100% goat-proof are no larger than many people's good-sized yards. Moreover, because of our cold climate, we have to site many of our most sensitive trees and shrubs in an area the smaller than…

Low-Input Seed Starting

The first thing you need to remember is to think ahead, and bring in the compost before three feet of snow and ice lands on top of it. That was my big discovery two years ago, and like so many big discoveries was a. unpleasant and b. completely obvious - in retrospect. Living in a linear society, it can be difficult to get cyclical. You see, I knew you could start seeds in lightly sifted compost - in fact, I'd seen Rodale Institute tests that showed that some varieties seeds did best in finished compost. So, the year before, I'd gone out in February, dug up some compost, let it defrost, and…

My Dream Job, Opening Up?

About a year ago I was sitting around with a couple friends and they asked me where I thought my career was going. They were genuinely curious - what does blogging actually lead to? What kind of career advancement might a blogger get eventually? Can you transfer from blogging to journalism? Get a job at a better blog? Where does all this take you? My comments was that in many ways, I don't know the answer to that. I think in the longer term, journalists and bloggers are going to reconnect, but how that connection may happen, or what the future of that connection might be is extremely…

Regulating the Disaster

We still don't have the faintest idea how much oil is spewing out of the well in the Gulf. Nor do we have the faintest idea what the full environmental consequence of what may well be the biggest single-event human-caused. ecological disaster of all time (the very fact that I have to add the word "single-event" to that statement should tell you something). We know that it is almost certainly more than all the low estimates to date, and we know that the ecological consequences will be huge, lasting and we do not understand them. That is, we know some of the potential effects, we know they…

Zombietopia: Best Case Scenario for the Apocalypse

A while back I ran a post-apocalyptic novel book club on ye olde blogge, which was a lot of fun. It allowed us to get our doom on at low stakes. Now I'm not, strictly speaking, a hard doomer. I suspect most of the likely scenarios involve gradual declines in resource availability and increasing poverty. In some ways this is more depressing than the grand and more dramatic scenarios that writers love to create - you can win against the zombies, but it is tough to win against the enemy "crushing national debt and gradually increasing world temperatures." I think most apocalyptic novels are…

OSHA defines a "severe violator," but would your bad actor make the cut??

Late last month, OSHA chief David Michaels announced the Severe Violator Enforcement Program, (SVEP) a new iniative targeted at "recalcitrant employers who endanger workers by demonstrating indifference to their responsibilities under the law." OSHA says once these bad actor employers are identified, it will conduct inspections at other worksites controlled by the same employer where similar hazards may be present. A good idea, right? It depends on whether you agree with OSHA's narrow definition of a "severe violator." I don't, because OSHA doesn't go far enough. For example, would you…

Nanotube SNURs: Nano step forward, nano step back

by Richard Denison, PhD  cross-posted from blogs.edf In June, EPA published a Federal Register notice that included Significant New Use Rules (SNURs) for two carbon nanotubes (as well as 21 other chemicals).  That notice certainly got the attention of lawyers in town (see here, here and here).  The nanotube SNURs would require anyone planning to produce or process either of the two substances to notify EPA if the person intended not to comply with the (rather limited) risk management conditions specified by EPA.  Well, as reported yesterday by Sara Goodman of E&E News, EPA is now…