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Amtrak: The 2008 election linchpin

I have exaggerated and generalized to grab your attention. But it's not that much of a stretch to put reviving the North American continent's moribund passenger rail network at the heart of what really matters in this election year. By this, I mean how the American presidential and congressional candidates, and their analogs in Canada, approach the subject of mass transportation will tell you a lot about whether or not they understand the most important challenges facing society. OK. I'm still exaggerating. But not much. Passenger rail and other forms of efficient ways of moving people…

So it begins...

"It" is the great geoengineering debate. And the stakes have never been higher. The basics are ably described by Chris Mooney and his blog partner Sheril Kirshenbaum has already supplied a less-than-appreciative response. Even though there are still a good number of misinformed folks out there who can't accept the reality of climate change, some sectors of the scientific community have already given up on the hope of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and moved on to thinking about ways to counteract the resulting warming. What we're talking about is fiddling with the atmospheric and oceanic…

The Scarlet Letter

Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers have endorsed the "OUT" campaign that encourages atheists (or agnostics, if that's your semantic druthers) to publicly declare their lack of believe in gods and the supernatural. To help make the point, the campaign comes equipped with a red letter "A" that can be worn as a T-shirt logo or displayed on a blog. While there can be no doubt that society needs more people to declare their unfaith, is this new campaign a universally good idea? I fear not. It all depends on the context, or more specifically, the social environment. For Dawkins and Myers, academics who…

Forget Hitler, the fault lies in our stars

Astrology is not usually at the top of my worry list. Sure, there are far too many gullible readers of daily horoscopes, and it did bother me a bit to learn Ronald Reagan was consulting an astrologer while sitting in the White House. The space those astrology columns waste in the newspapers could be put to better use, but most the time, it seems like harmless silliness. At best, one could argue that astrology represents a misguided, primitive form of scientific inquiry into the forces that govern the universe, and it is true that the first modern astronomers were also the last sincere…

Things that are maybe useful? (a.k.a. molecular biology reagents that can survive difficult transit conditions)

So, previously, I pointed out some of the difficulties involved in getting reagents and other scientific things to a place like Nigeria. Anyway, I thought a post like this might therefore be useful for the odd reader out there who also does this sort of thing. Because the norm is traveling by bringing stuff along as "carry on," here's a run down of what I know. Please add more in the comments section if you have a trick or two yourself. 1. DNA constructs: Basically, the easiest thing to transport. Should easily survive any trip you plan to make with it. Of course, spiking with EDTA will…

Sunday Function

This is the graph of the line y = x: If you put your finger down on any point on that line, and then put another finger on another point on that line, you find that the total change in the y-coordinate divided by the total change in the x-coordinate between those two positions is 1. Move two units to the right, and the line rises by two units, etc. This is the same no matter which two points you pick. Every line has this sort of property, which is called slope. Steep lines that rise greatly for each unit of x displacement have a large slope, flat horizontal lines have zero slope, and…

Singularity Summit

ScienceBlogs' Razib is back from the Singularity Summit, with summaries of a good portion of the proceedings and some interesting links. Relatively recently I've written about why the Singularity very well may not happen (at least not the wilder version) - roughly, the growth curve of technology may be logistic rather than exponential thanks to the limiting effect of physical laws. Probably the most passionate proponent of the Singularity is Ray Kurtzweil, and according to a piece Razib links, he disagrees. (The piece itself is somewhat old, but apparently he presented an updated version at…

A Simple Winning Strategy for the Card Game War

War is a classic kids card game. I spent many an hour wiling away the time playing war growing up. Enough so that I actually developed a strategy for the game. A strategy for the game of war? That's crazy talk. For those who've never encounter the game of war here are the rules. A standard deck of 52 cards is shuffled and split between two equal stacks which are then given to the two players. The players then turn over the top card of their stacks and the player with the higher rank card "wins" and gets to take the two cards and place them at the bottom of their stack. If the cards…

Big Charity

It must be tough running a charity. You've got a cause you care deeply about, and you're constantly juggling the game of having to spend money (in administration, advertising, staff) to raise money (for the cause!), and worse, of sometimes having to compromise to achieve your goals — you sometimes have to work with your enemies to get where you're going. And if you're really, really good at it, and raise lots and lots of money, it becomes easy to lose sight of the cause while becoming corporate. So it goes with Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the $400 million/year giant pink gorilla of cancer…

Babies with Grown-up Brains

The soft spot on a baby's head may be able to tell us when our ancestors first began to speak. We have tremendously huge brains--six times bigger than the typical brain of a mammal our size. Obviously, that big size brings some fabulous benefits--consciousness, reasoning, and so on. But it has forced a drastic reorganization of the way we grow up. Most primates are born with a brain fairly close to its adult size. A macaque brain, for example, is 70% of adult size at birth. Apes, on the other hand, have bigger brains, and more of their brain growth takes place after birth. A chimpanzee is…

An Echoing Press: Saturation Coverage of Pope's Visit

Pew has released an in depth analysis of news coverage of the Pope's U.S. visit. As I have posted previously, some media critics have claimed that the press gave the Pontiff a pass on hard-hitting questions while polls show that the Pope's visit was a major public relations success. As the Pew news analysis finds, the Pope's visit dominated headlines, accounting for 16% of the total news hole for the week, eclipsing for example the 5% of coverage devoted to the war in Iraq and second in attention only to the 31% of coverage devoted to the election. According to Pew, the saturation coverage…

List of CFI Darwin Day Events Across the US

The Center for Inquiry has posted a list of its many Darwin Day events scheduled for locations across the country. For science enthusiasts, these events serve as an important ritual for building community and social identity. Darwin Day events also provide a news peg for generating local media attention. In this case, a positive message would be framed around the value of Darwin's original idea as the building block for medical and social progress. For example, without evolutionary science we would be hard pressed to understand problems such as bird flu. This message should be paired with a…

Mo Willems and Richard Dawkins: The tale of two talks...

Part of the reason for this post is just to say that I've finally been able to put up the Richard Dawkins' talk at the terry.ubc.ca site. This is essentially his "God Delusion" speech, and it happens to be available at a relatively high resolution (two files totalling about 350Mb) - if you have an hour to spare, it's definitely worth checking out. Anyway, I quite enjoyed his talk (which was held on the 29th of April), although I suppose I would be giving this opinion as someone who more or less agrees wholeheartedly with him. If you watch the video, you'll find that he is quite funny, and…

Ray Comfort is gonna die

As are we all. But Ray Comfort imagines what his last words will be, and they're quite a doozy—twelve paragraphs of god babble, more mindless regurgitating of his usual evangelical spiel, culminating in this: So, please, repent today. Confess your sins to God, and then forsake them. Then trust alone in Jesus for your eternal salvation and God will forgive you and give you everlasting life. So, as he lays dying of terminal logorrhea and metastasizing melodrama, Ray Comfort's last thoughts will involve hectoring everyone else around him. He's not a very nice person. I don't think he's even…

Something in the Air - Kissing, Lapdancing, and a Response called Flehmen

A post on kissing by fellow SciBling Sheril caught my eye, and I figured, why not pick a friendly argument as my inaugural post at Pure Pedantry (sorry, Jake). She pointed out a recent SciAm writeup summarizing work by a team of kiss-intrigued researchers, including psychologist Gordon Gallup, PhD, of SUNY, and quips: "You see, kissing undoubtedly allows us to find out all sorts of information about our partner. We're exchanging pheromones. In fact, when we're engaged, our bodies release a cocktail of chemicals related to social bonding, stress level, motivation, and sexual stimulation. We…

How do you mistake windshield wiper fluid for Kool-Aid? -or- What do we do in cases of methanol poisoning?

This is just unbelievable. At a day care center in Arkansas, 10 kids were accidentally given windshield wiper fluid instead of Kool-Aid: Child welfare investigators plan to talk to the owner of an Arkansas daycare center where 10 children were sickened after they were given windshield wiper fluid to drink. "They'll go out, they'll get an explanation and they'll try to sort (it) out preliminarily," said Julie Munsell, spokeswoman for the state Department of Human Services. Hospital officials say a staffer mistakenly put the blue liquid in the refrigerator after shopping and later served it…

Nanomagnetic remote control of animal behaviour

MAGNETIC nanoparticles targeted to nerve cell membranes can be used to remotely control cellular activity and even the simple reflex behaviours of nematode worms, according to research by a team of biophysicists at the University of Buffalo. The new method, which is described in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, could be very useful for investigating how cells interact in neuronal networks, and may eventually lead to new therapies for cancer and diabetes. Heng Huang and her colleagues synthesized manganese-iron nanoparticles, each just 6 millionths of a millimeter in diameter, and coated…

The social thermometer: Temperature affects how we perceive relationships

LANGUAGE contains many sayings which link our feelings and behaviour towards others to temperature. We might, for example, hold "warm feelings" for somebody, and extend them a "warm welcome", while giving somebody else "the cold shoulder" or "an icy stare". Why is that we have so many metaphors which relate temperature to social distance? According to George Lakoff, a professor of cognitive science and linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, we judge others on the basis of warmth because abstract concepts, such as affection, are firmly grounded in bodily sensations. There is…

How we feel affects what we see

People who place an emphasis on positive things and are generally optimistic are sometimes said to "see the world through rose-tinted glasses". According to a new study by Canadian researchers, this is more than just an idiom. The study, which has just been published in the Journal of Neuroscience, provides the first direct evidence that the mood we are in affects the way we see things by modulating the activity of the visual cortex. Their findings show that putting on the proverbial rose-tinted glasses of a good mood is not so much about colour, but about the broadness of the view. A number…

When Pigs Fly But Hell Hasn't Frozen Over: Semantic Anomalies, Context, and the Inferior Frontal Gyri

When reading the title of this post, your knowledge of the world was sufficient to let you interpret the phrase "when pigs fly," but also alerted you to the fact that it is inconsistent with much of that world knowledge: clearly, pigs don't fly. A new study by Menenti, Petersson, Scheeringa & Hagoort localizes the neural basis of this "anomaly processing" to a particular region of the prefrontal cortex - the inferior frontal gyri - and finds that the local context surrounding such anomalies (say, that you're told hell has frozen over) has much stronger effects in one hemisphere than the…

Enhancement of Intelligence By Training Controlled Attention: Far Transfer from Dual N-Back at the Group and Individual Levels

Kevin at IQ's Corner has blogged about a new paper in PNAS showing that "working memory" training can improve measures of fluid intelligence - a capacity long thought to be relatively insensitive to experience, and intricately tied to the most complex human cognitions like reasoning, planning, and abstraction in novel contexts. Jaeggi et al., posit that no empirical evidence shows "computer games enhance anything beyond task-specific performance and selective visuospatial attention" (which must bother our friends at Lumosity & SharpBrains - sigh), and highlight the concern that by "…

Kellermann's case-control study on gun ownership and homicide

Edgar Suter writes: In Kellermann's most recent study of homicide (Kellermann et al. "Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home." NEJM Oct 7, 1993; 329(15):1084-1091.) notes "Two hundred nine victims (49.8 percent) died from gunshot wounds." Prof. Schaffer offers a robust [and successful] effort to show that the "gun in the home" cannot be the actual homicide instrument in every case. According to Table 1, mentioned by Mr. Lambert, this figure includes 1% "unknown firearm" as "method of homicide." Let's charitably imagine that these "unknown firearms" actually were the "gun…

PTSD: Two new programs; two big ignored questions

After a rather intense two months of long-form work, I'm so far behind on blogging I don't know where to start. Forget the last two months and move on? Probably the best move. But beforehand, I want to note a few developments along major lines of interest. I'll start with PTSD. Amid the stagnation on combat PTSD, the summer brought news of new programs from the UK and US militaries aimed to answer the call for more effective treatment for rising rates reported in vets of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mind Hacks was one of several blogs to report and comment on a new Royal Marine program…

...and then, when they came for Jane Harman...

Unless you've been asleep for the last couple of days, you've probably heard that our government apparently wiretapped a member of Congress a few years back. According to the reports, the National Security Agency captured Representative Jane Harman (D-CA) engaging in a quid-pro-quo agreement with a pro-Israeli lobbyist where Harman would try to get the government to go easy on some accused Israeli spies, while the lobbyist would work to get Harman appointed to chair the Intelligence Committee. Harman has vigorously denied the reports, and there's been a great deal of speculation about the…

Community Organizing and the Scientific Community: A Challenge.

Last week, right around the time that Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin were mocking community organizers at the Republican Convention, I found myself talking about how community organizing can help us become more effective when it comes to dealing with issues where science and politics intersect. I think this is something that we really need to do. The political groups that are opposed to science are typically very well organized. This is true for the anti-evolutionists, it's true for the global warming denialists, it's true for the anti-vaccinationists, and it's true for the anti-…

"Give Me A Head With Hair; Long, Beautiful Hair"

Mr. Z and I went to see "Quantum of Solace" last Friday night. The cineplex was packed and teeming with Twi-hards. I went into the bathroom and found three of them before the mirror, primping and fixing their carefully coiffed hairdos. And what hair they had! Long hair, thick hair, shiny hair, healthy hair. It was almost painful for me to watch them, knowing full well how they must take for granted their luxurious heads of hair. Because it never occurred to me in the past that my hair would change in any substantive manner - at least not until I got really old and gray. When I was…

How to deal with the crazies

You all know them: those awful loud little men who travel from campus to campus to preach apocalyptic hateful nonsense on the sidewalks, who rant and howl and condemn everyone who passes by as a sinner, damned to hell, and reserving a special hatred for women and gays. One of the virtues of being on a small campus in a remote rural part of my state is that we don't get many of those jerkwads here, but they infest the main campus and any other college that is more conveniently located. What do we do about them? Tarring and feathering is illegal, and you can't just silence them because you don'…

Is nature democratic?

And the state of nature, nasty, poor, brutish, and short, or so said Thomas Hobbes. But it seems Hobbes was wrong. Humans have always lived in society. That doesn't mean they lived in cities or nations, of course, but they've always been social animals, just like our sister species the chimps and the gorilla. But what sort of society did they live in? Thom Hartmann thinks we were democrats in a state of nature. In an op-ed arguing (rightly, I think) that the decline of the middle class is leading to oligarchy, a "feudal aristocracy" (backed up by a recent survey of American mean incomes,…

Sociobiology 3: Kin selection and pluralist explanations

[The third in a series on a recent paper by David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson. Post 1; Post 2] In presenting a group selectionist account of sociobiology, Wilson and Wilson argue that alternatives such as kin selection are not really alternatives. Kin selection and multiplayer games Attacking the third leg of the tripod, W&W argue that even genic or individual selectionist accounts implicit include the existence of groups as a factor in evolution. This resolves, as far as I can see, to the view that equivalence classes in genetic selection form a group: if a population is…

Are species theoretical objects?

A lot of people have said something like "species are the units of evolution". What does this even mean? So far as I can tell, nobody has really fleshed this out. What, to begin, are the units of evolution? It depends a lot on what theory is being employed. If you are talking about population genetics, then the basic unit is, of course, the allele and the locus. That is, alternative genes (a concept that is itself rather problematic) at a given point or position on the genome. If you are talking about development, then the unit is the organism, as it also is when you are talking about…

Gosse's "Omphalos" online

Its is here. It's a largish PDF, about 81Mb, and this is only a temporary site until I get the proper files to Archive.Org for assembly and OCR. Philip Henry Gosse was a well-known naturalist in the early 19th century. Huxley referred to him as "that honest hodman of science", and he was responsible (I am told) more than anyone else, for the new fashion of keeping aquariums. Gosse's son, Edmund, wrote a rather unhappy memoir about growing up with a devout and strict father, called Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments, in which he mentions this book: My Father had never admired…

What is this "settled science" of which you speak?

In the past couple of days a pernicious little meme has appeared in two leading North American newspapers. I refer to the notion that there is such a thing as "settled science." First, on a column about climatology Monday the Globe and Mail's Margaret Wente asked not-so-rhetorically "So much for the science being settled. Now what?" The following day the Wall Street Journal's editorial page weighed in with a review of "what used to be called the 'settled science' of global warming." Both offerings betrayed a solid lack of understanding, not only of recent events involving recent allegations…

It wouldn't be fair to call James Randi a pseudoskeptic, but...

James Randi has few peers when it comes to applying scientific rigor to claims of paranormal or supernatural activity. He's been doing it for what seems like eons, all without any formal scientific training. So when he even hints that climate change denialists might have a point, it's time to see what's up. After all, he's made a honorable career of attacking pseudoscience, not science itself. The most recent post at his blog, named after Johnathan Swift is a bit on the rambling side, and little inconsistent. The most surprising paragraph is: I strongly suspect that The Petition Project may…

Lavender and tea tree oils may cause inappropriate breast growth in boys

Between the news offices for New England Journal of Medicine and NIH's National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), you have no doubt already heard the report that topical application of lavender and tea tree oil-containing products has been linked with gynecomastia in three boys. Yes, imagine being a private practice pediatrician whose 10-year-old male patient presents with "firm, tender breast buds measuring 3.5 cm by 4.0 cm in length and width and 3.5 cm in depth, with stretching of the areolae." In fact, imagine being the parent...or the boy himself. In all three cases,…

"Just smile, you'll feel better!" Will you? Really?

Do people ever tell you to "just smile, you'll feel better"? If you're like our daughter Nora, you hear it a lot, and you get annoyed every time you hear it. Telling a teenager to smile is probably one of the best ways to ensure she won't smile for the next several hours. But the notion that "smiling will make you feel better" has actually been confirmed by research. There are several studies demonstrating that people are happier when they smile, at least in certain circumstances. It's not as easy as you might think to study the effect. For one thing, it's possible that it's not the physical…

How badly does the curse word study suck? (More uncensored Casual Friday results)

Context. It can make all the difference in the world. The word "suck" can describe the action of a vacuum cleaner or a sex act that was illegal in the state of North Carolina until 2003. Following our analysis of last Friday's curse word study, several of the commenters pointed out that without the context for a particular curse word, it's difficult to say whether or not the word is offensive. Heck, calling someone a "cow" can be awfully offensive in the right (or, should I say wrong) context. There's no question these people are right. Yet on the other hand, the U.S. government has often…

One Study, Two Radically Different Interpretations

As I noted yesterday, a very important paper (PDF) has just come out on hurricanes and global warming, by Jim Kossin of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies and his colleagues. The paper was published in Geophysical Research Letters. Here's how the University of Wisconsin-Madison's press release describes Kossin's results: HEADLINE: New evidence that global warming fuels stronger Atlantic hurricanes MADISON -- Atmospheric scientists have uncovered fresh evidence to support the hotly debated theory that global warming has contributed…

Blaming the Scientists for Anti-Science Sentiments

The latest attempt to create sparks over science and religion came on Sunday in the New York Times book review. There, Judith Shulevitz wrote a subtle but ultimately very troubling piece that largely points the finger at scientists themselves for spurring on the evolution conflict. John Rennie goes to town on the article here, and he does a more extensive job than I plan on doing. Still, I was bothered by certain aspects of Shulevitz's article, and I'd like to explain further why. If I had to guess, I'd say that Shulevitz is writing in what I like to call "counterintuitive mode." This is…

Book Review: Terminal Freeze

One of the unwritten rules of creating a good horror yarn is that the location your story takes place in has to be as frightening as your monster. The setting almost has to act an an extension of the bloodthirsty antagonist; a place that can more easily be seen as its lair than a place of human habitation. In Lincoln Child's latest novel Terminal Freeze that place is Fear Base, a rotting military facility shivering the the shadow of Fear Glacier, and it is stalked by something utterly horrifying. Readers of The Relic, another horror novel penned by Child and his sometimes partner Douglas…

What about creationism?

I get a lot of questions about my forthcoming book, Written in Stone, but the most popular by far is "What are you going to say about creationism?" Presently there is a glut of books that confront creationism in one way or another. There are books that counter creationist claims with scientific evidence (Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters, Why Evolution is True, The Greatest Show on Earth, &c.) and others that, while they present many of the same scientific arguments, are also concerned with making the idea of evolution less threatening to religious audiences (Only A…

"Just smile, you'll feel better!" Will you? Really?

[Originally posted in November, 2007] Do people ever tell you to "just smile, you'll feel better"? If you're like our daughter Nora, you hear it a lot, and you get annoyed every time you hear it. Telling a teenager to smile is probably one of the best ways to ensure she won't smile for the next several hours. But the notion that "smiling will make you feel better" has actually been confirmed by research. There are several studies demonstrating that people are happier when they smile, at least in certain circumstances. It's not as easy as you might think to study the effect. For one thing, it'…

Not what I'd planned, but what I was meant to do....the impossible?

When I started my PhD, professors and fellow students would ask me what I was planning to do with my degree. I had a ready answer: "I'll either focus on teaching or on research, but I don't want a job where I have to be good at both." I felt confident in my answer, I'd done my research. I knew I wanted to be a mom, and having spent enough time in academia, I just seemed impossible to be a good mother, a productive researcher, and a committed teacher. I didn't want to do the impossible, so I was going to use the time during my PhD to figure out whether I wanted to go into teaching or whether I…

Science Fiction Prototyping

Last Friday I went to at talk by Brian David Johnson from Intel. That sentence sounds like any other that an academic could write--always with the going to seminars we acahacks are. That is until you hear that Brian David Johnson is a "consumer experience architect" in the Digital Home - User Experience Group at Intel. Okay that is a bit odd for a typical seminar speaker, but still lies in the "reasonable" range. And then you find out the title of his talks is "Brain Machines: Robots, Free Will and Fictional Prototyping as a Tool for AI Design" and you say, whah? Which is exactly what a…

Fart Spray (And Disgust) Makes Moral Judgments More Severe

I've been meaning to post about this set of studies for a while, but because it's relevant to Chapter 4 of Lakoff's The Political Mind, I figured I'd better get around to it before I write the review of that chapter. It's been a while, but in the past, I've talked a lot about new theories of moral judgment, and Jonathan Haidt's social intuitionist model in particular. Under Haidt's view, moral judgments are largely intuitive (that is, unconscious, automatic, and non-deliberative), and instead of being based on ethical principles, which we use mostly for post-hoc rationalization, they're…

How's Your Life? I Dunno, Is It Raining?

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you probably know that I'm fascinated by findings that show just how little we know about ourselves. Most of what's going on in our heads occurs below the level of awareness, and behind the often impenetrable barrier of the unconscious. Often when we're asked to make judgments, explain our actions, or assess our current motivational or emotional states, we're pretty much just guessing, and using what, from a third-person perspective, often seems like the least relevant information to do so. One great illustration of this came in a classic…

Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Update

Jonah posted an href="http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2008/05/tms.php">interesting video of  href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulation" rel="tag">Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) on The Frontal Cortex.  That got me to wondering if there was anything new.   In January 2007, the US FDA href="http://www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/ac/07/briefing/2007-4273b1_00-index.htm">concluded that rTMS was safe, but they were unconvinced of its effectiveness.  Their conclusion href="http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/jan07/comments/1697">was arguable, but the…

Planet of the Hats

I know you will not believe me, but I swear it's true: I'm not of this earth. I fled here years ago because my home planet was driving me crazy. Let me explain. My home world is very much like this one. It's populated by billions of bipedal primates, who are just like people here: sometimes foolish, sometimes wise, sometimes hateful, sometimes generous. They are grouped into cities and nations, and sometimes they have wars, and sometimes they cooperate. You really would have a hard time telling our two planets apart, except for one thing. The hats. My people are obsessed with hats. Almost…

Friday Sprog Blogging: experimental results (milk + lemon juice).

This Friday we're reporting on one of the experiments we were looking forward to last Friday, the one in which milk is curdled. (We'll report on our experimental attempts to dissolve an avocado next Friday.) We started with a little over a cup and a half of whole milk, on the cold side (since it was in the fridge until we were ready to start experimenting). Since we don't have glass stirring rods at home, we decided to use a plastic chopstick to do the stirring. As a control, before we started adding lemon juice, we put the chopstick in the cup of milk. The presence of the chopstick had…

Super Bowl parties, double dipping, and strategies for emerging alive.

Via Greg Laden, I see that there is now some research to support our primal revulsion toward double-dippers: Last year the food microbiologist's [Clemson University professor Paul L. Dawson] undergraduate students examined the effects of double dipping using volunteers, wheat crackers and several sample dips. They found that three to six double dips transferred about 10,000 bacteria from an eater's mouth to the remaining dip sample. "I was very surprised by the results," Dawson said in a telephone interview Thursday. "I thought there would be very minimal transfer. I didn't think we would…

Friday Sprog Blogging: science flutters by

Younger offspring: (brandishing a decorated and labeled paper plate) You're going to blog about this on Friday. Dr. Free-Ride: I am? Younger offspring: Yes! It has to do with science, and I made it. Dr. Free-Ride: (pretending to think it over) Well, I don't know ... Younger offspring: And this way, you don't have to get us to draw you pictures on Friday morning when we're supposed to be getting ready for school. Dr. Free-Ride: Ah, so you're saving me time? OK, I'm convinced. The younger Free-Ride offspring's kindergarten class has been studying insect lifecycles. It's one of those Spring-…