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Rebecca Otto: by far the strongest and most progressive candidate for Minnesota Governor in 2018

Here’s why: All the available data strongly indicates that Otto will beat all the other contenders across state in the upcoming Governor's race. Democrats have two major problems to face in 2018 and beyond. First, how do we win elections? Second, how do we remain true to our progressive and liberal roots? For Democrats, 2018 is a must-win election, and Minnesotans have a lot at stake. Will the state remain the shining star of the North, or will it go the way of Wisconsin, and sink into a Republican dark age of union busting, environment polluting, professor bashing, service slashing, and…

Why We Travel

The latest McSweeney's production is a marvel. It's in the form of a daily newspaper - The San Francisco Panorama - and is yet another reminder that the newspaper remains an essential literary form, a potent mixture of breaking news and obscure stories. (If your local indie bookstore stocks the Panorama, be sure to buy a copy.) I was fortunate enough to write for the Panorama Magazine on the cognitive benefits of travel, which I've pasted in below. It's 4:15 in the morning, and my alarm clock has just stolen away a lovely dream. My eyes are open but my pupils are still closed, so all I see…

Lurdusaurus: stupidest looking iguanodontian, and... a pneumatic ornithischian at last?

One of the strangest Mesozoic dinosaurs ever described has to be the African iguanodontian Lurdusaurus arenatus, named in 1999 for remains from the Lower Cretaceous Elrhaz Formation of Gadoufaoua, Niger (Taquet & Russell 1999). The Elrhaz Formation has also yielded the sail-backed iguanodontian Ouranosaurus, the rebbachisaurid sauropod Nigersaurus, the theropods Kryptops, Suchomimus and Eocarcharia, and the crocodilians Anatosuchus and Sarcosuchus. [Adjacent Lurdusaurus image by Luis Rey, used with permission.] As is well known among dinosaur researchers, Lurdusaurus was first…

2007: a good year for terror birds and mega-ducks

Actually, given that they've been extinct for quite some time now, 2007 wasn't really a particularly good year for either terror birds, aka phorusrhacids, or for mega-ducks (on which read on), but it was a pretty good year in terms of the new material that was published on them. Phorusrhacids were covered a few times back on Tet Zoo ver 1 in 2006 (go here and here): we looked at their phylogeny, taxonomy, anatomy and palaeobiology, and at the then-new discovery of BAR 3877-11, a gigantic Patagonian skull, 716 mm long, and most similar to the skull of Devincenzia pozzi (Chiappe & Bertelli…

Scientists are Excellent Communicators ('Sizzle' follow-up)

Titles of blog posts have to be short, but I could expand it to something like this: "Depending on the medium and the context, many scientists can be and often are excellent communicators" That is what I understood to be the main take-home message of "Sizzle". If you check out all the other blog reviews, even those that are the harshest do not state the opposite, i.e., that the movie pushes the stereotype of scientists as dull, stuffy communicators. Though, some of the commenters on those blog posts - people who could not have seen the movie themselves yet - imply that this was the case. So…

Birds in the News 68 (v2n19)

Wood Duck drake, Aix sponsa. Image appears here with the kind permission of the photographer, Arthur Morris, Birds as Art. Birds in Science The ancestors of modern birds are thought to have been small, feathered, dinosaurs, the theropods. One of these small feathered dinosaurs is Microraptor gui, a feathered dromaosaur that lived 125 million years ago in what is now China. According to the evidence, Microraptor gui was one of the earliest gliders. But unlike modern birds, it appears to have utilized four wings, like a biplane, because it had long and asymmetric flight feathers on both its…

Guarding the Coral Reefs like a Moray Eel: Interview with Rick MacPherson

I had great fun meeting Rick MacPherson last summer in San Francisco, so I was very happy that he could come to the second Science Blogging Conference in January where he co-moderated a panel on Real-time blogging in the marine sciences. Do not miss out on reading his blog Malaria, Bedbugs, Sea Lice, and Sunsets. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your scientific background? What is your Real World job? Aloha, Bora, and thanks for the opportunity to chat. I'm on the Big Island of Hawaii as I write…

Birds in the News 129

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Male mountain bluebird, Sialia currucoides. This bird surprised birders in Washington state by visiting Bainbridge Island this past April. Image: Eva Gerdts, April 2008 [larger view]. Birds in Science A team of scientists believe they can provide the key to an enduring wildlife mystery: how do birds navigate? Two main theories joust to explain the seemingly miraculous avian compass. One, supported by research among homing pigeons four years ago, is that birds have tiny particles, called magnetite, in their upper…

COVID-19: The Downside To More Testing Could Be Overflowing Hospitals

"You can’t fight a virus if you don’t know where it is." These were the words of Director General of the World Health Organisation (WHO), Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, at his briefing on the COVID-19 pandemic in mid-March. He made the statement in a bid to underscore the need to test many more people as key to containing the spread of the disease. Ordinarily, that makes sense and I would agree with it. It is the right thing to do in the face of a disease which would show mild to no symptoms in the majority of those that are infected but does not inhibit their ability to infect others.…

And yet another political roundup...

Under the fold: Ex-Cheney aide: Bush won't hit Iran: US President George W. Bush will not attack Iran to halt its nuclear weapons program before his term ends in January, David Wurmser, a key national security adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney up until last year, has told The Jerusalem Post. Election 2008 | Papers Examine Comparisons of McCain, Obama Health Care Proposals, Positions on Science : Three reports examine the health care plans of Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) and Republican nominee Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the Wall Street Journal reports (Meckler,…

Nicholas Gonzalez' response to the failed trial of the Gonzalez protocol: Disingenuous nonsense

Pity poor Nick Gonzalez. Sorry, I couldn't resist. After having used the same line when discussing the hugely enjoyable humiliation of the Godfather of HIV/AIDS denialism, Peter Duesberg, I couldn't resist using the same line to introduce my response to Dr. Gonzalez's woo-ful whine in response to the publication of the disastrous (for him and any patient unfortunate enough to be in the arm receiving his protocol) clinical trial that demonstrated about as unequivocally as it is possible to demonstrate that his "protocol" to treat pancreatic cancer is nothing more than as steaming and stinking…

Of southern African wing-gland bats, woolly bats, and the ones with tubular nostrils (vesper bats part IV)

Time to continue our trek across the vesper bat cladogram. In the previous article we looked at the bent-winged bats (or miniopterids, or miniopterines): a highly distinctive, morphologically novel group that seem to have diverged from vesper bats proper something like 45 million years ago. Their distinctive nature and long history of isolation relative to other lineages conventionally included within Vespertilionidae mean that bent-winged bats are now argued by many to be worthy of 'family' status. As we'll see here, they're no longer unique - bat workers now argue that another lineage of…

Blindsnake mimics, scaly-foots and javelin lizards (gekkotans part XI)

I really want to get these pygopodid articles finished. Actually, I really want to get the whole gekkotan series finished: the end is in sight and I know I'll get there eventually. In the previous articles on pygopodids (part of the long-running series on gekkotan lizards: see links below), we looked at pygopodid diversity and biology in general, and also at the phylogeny and evolutionary history of these fascinating, snake-like gekkotans. This time round, we look in more detail at the various different pygopodid taxa - not on a species-by-species basis (alas), but according to the units we…

Darwin, God and chance

One of the enduring objections to evolution of the Darwinian variety is that it is based on chance, and so for theists who believe God is interventionist, it suggests that God is subjected to chance, and hence not onmi-something (present, potent or scient). Darwin and his friend Asa Gray debated this issue in correspondence, and it ended up as the final pages of his 1868 Variation (below the fold). Effectively, Darwin argued that we cannot "reasonably maintain" that God intended for chance events that are useful to humans or to the species concerned. It is this that I want to discuss,…

Religious fundamentalists try to prove fetal DNA in vaccines causes autism and fail

There are some myths, bits of misinformation, or lies about medicine that I like to refer to zombie quackery. The reasons are obvious. Like at the end of a horror movie, just when you think the myth is finally dead, its rotting hand rises out of the dirt to grab your leg and drag you down to be consumed. Of course, the big difference between zombies and these bits of zombie quackery is that in most stories a single shot to the brain will kill the zombie. The same is not true of zombie quackery. You can empty clip after clip of reason, science, and logic into the “head” of the zombie…

Relying on prayer instead of medicine, part II

About a month ago, I wrote about an unbelievably sad story of a 12-year-old girl in Wisconsin who died of untreated diabetic ketoacidosis because she had been unfortunate enough to have been born into a family in which the parents believed in prayer rather than medicine. I say "unbelievably" because I find it truly difficult to believe that anyone in this day and age would willingly eschew effective medicine for their suffering child in favor of wishful thinking. Tragically and not surprisingly, prayer didn't work, and their child died. One of the unresolved issues at the time of the incident…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - the submissions so far

Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 240 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes and the bookmarklet, are under the fold. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays): A Blog Around The Clock: On Being a Nurse- a guest post A Blog Around The Clock: Yes, Archaea also have circadian clocks! A Blog Around The Clock: Why social insects do not suffer from…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - the submissions so far

Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 230 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes and the bookmarklet, are under the fold. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays): A Blog Around The Clock: On Being a Nurse- a guest post A Blog Around The Clock: Yes, Archaea also have circadian clocks! A Blog Around The Clock: Why social insects do not suffer from…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - the submissions so far

Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 230 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes and the bookmarklet, are under the fold. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays): A Blog Around The Clock: On Being a Nurse- a guest post A Blog Around The Clock: Yes, Archaea also have circadian clocks! A Blog Around The Clock: Why social insects do not suffer from…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - the submissions so far

Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 220 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes and the bookmarklet, are under the fold. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays): A Blog Around The Clock: On Being a Nurse- a guest post A Blog Around The Clock: Yes, Archaea also have circadian clocks! A Blog Around The Clock: Why social insects do not suffer from…

Obama's school agenda - Merit pay v 'performance-based pay'

Obama gave a major education speech at the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce yesterday. The money quote: For decades, Washington has been trapped in the same stale debates that have paralyzed progress and perpetuated our educational decline. ... It's more money versus more reform, vouchers versus the status quo. There has been partisanship and petty bickering, but little recognition that we need to move beyond the worn fights of the 20th century if we are going to succeed in the 21st Century. Well, the time for finger-pointing is over. Been much buzz about this talk -- the main points of…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Harry Potter called and wants his broom back

It's Friday, which means that it's time once again to delve deeply into the world of woo, all for your edification and (I hope) education. Even though I started out with less motivation than usual for tending to the blog, it actually turned out to be yet another rather eventful and surprisingly productive week on the old blog, with topics ranging from plumbing the depths of antivaccination lunacy, to doing some nice straight science blogging about the anticancer drug dichloroacetate (which actually gave me some ideas for my research), to discussing the "individualization" of treatments in…

Stomping free speech flat in Europe

Regular readers of this blog know that I have a particular dislike for Holocaust denial and that, indeed, I've tried to do my small part to counter the lies spread by Holocaust deniers, beginning on Usenet eight years ago. Regular readers will also know my opinion regarding laws in certain European countries such as Germany and Austria banning Holocaust denial upon pain of prison and other penalties. Although I can understand why such laws may have been necessary in the early postwar period, when the resurgence of Nazi-ism was a real danger, now, nearly 62 years after the end of the war, I…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Where's the Enzyte guy when you need him?

As I approach the second anniversary of Your Friday Dose of Woo (now only a mere two months away), it occurs to me: What sort(s) of woo, if any, have I neglected? Is there a kind of woo that is commonplace but has somehow slipped under Orac's radar? Hard as it may be to believe, there have now been over 100 installments of my weekly bit of vanity. Looking back over it, I see all manner of woo. Quantum homeopathy? Check? Sound healing? Of course! DNA Activation? That was definitely a fun one! Detoxification footpads? Not once, but twice! 9/11 Truther conspiracy theories? Yes, I've even…

Theology is a deceitful strategy

Karl Giberson is interviewed about the subject of his new book, Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). It looks interesting, in an aggravating sort of way, and it's on my long list of books to read and use to put dents in my wall. The interview reminds me why I detest the rarefied apologetics of sympathetic theologians as much as I do the bleatings of the purblind literalists — neither one even notices the fundamental flaws in their core of belief. Let me be nice first. Giberson does say a number of eminently sensible things — he's a physicist by…

Why are we having such bad weather?

I think most people will agree that in North America (and other places) we've been having some bad weather. Some of the weather is not necessarily intrinsically bad ... so what if it is a little cooler or a little warmer than you expect. Aridity? Deserts are nice! Extra rainfall? Great for the plants. But actually that sort of thing has its down side since important systems like agriculture, the water supply, and Spring Break work reasonably well because of expectations that might not be met if the weather is different. Other weather is intrinsically bad. I'd mention tornadoes but at the…

Universal Coverage and Innovation

(I am going to try not to go on a big rant here; we'll see how well that goes.) Jonathan Cohn wrote an article in The New Republic looking at one of the critiques of universal health care: that it might stifle innovation. He presents his case as a balanced one where the relative trade off between costs and benefits need to be considered: But one argument against universal health insurance isn't so easy to dismiss: the argument about innovation and the cutting edge of medical care. It goes more or less along the lines of my conversation with Mike Kinsley: In a universal coverage system, the…

Science Funding and Society: Final Thoughts

What Government - at least as we know it - Is. Timothy Sandefur and I have been debating the proper role of government in funding scientific research for a couple of weeks now. Over the course of the debate, it's become clear to me that he and I do not have a common understanding about what our government actually is, or what the right relationship between the government and the citizens actually is. Over the years, we humans have tried out more forms of government than you can shake a stick at. In the context of this particular debate, though, whenever we've used the term "government",…

Oh, the shame again: Another doctor embarrassing himself over "intelligent design" creationism

Geez, I might as well just put a paper bag over my head right now around my fellow ScienceBloggers. You've heard me lament before about the woeful ignorance about biology and evolution common among all too many doctors. (You haven't? Well check here, here, here, and here.) Heck, you've even heard me lament about it just a few days ago, my irritation being piqued by a physician by the name of Dr. Geoffrey Simmons. Now, as if to rub my face in it, Dembski's crew over at Uncommon Design have made me aware of an orthopedic surgeon named David A. Cook, M.D., who's adding to my embarrassment. As…

Do You Have To Believe In Climate Change?

Let us begin with the clear statement that asking whether you have to believe in climate change in no way alters the fundamental scientific consensus, or the tens of thousands of peer reviewed papers.   I personally think the evidence for anthropogenic climate change is very clear.  But that doesn't change the fact that global warming at this point is viewed as an ideological issue, rather than scientific one, and that many people do not believe that it exists, or that humans cause it.  In fact, while recent extreme weather has shifted the culture somewhat, it seems safe to say that a solid…

ScienceOnline'09: Interview with Bjoern Brembs

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January. Today, I asked Bjoern Brembs to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you?What is your (scientific) background? As a boy, I was always out and about chasing and catching animals. I've been fascinated by watching animals behave and at the time…

The Web: how we use it

Best time to appreciate Open Access? When you're really sick and want to learn more about what you have.: * Complete OA still a long way off. One thing I re-learned during this was that it is incredibly frustrating to see how much of the biomedical literature is still not freely available online. Shame on Elsevier and all the others who are still hoarding this important information. * Thanks to those providing OA. Related to the above issue, I came to appreciate was the societies and publishers have decided to go the OA route. I spent a lot of time reading material from ASM, BMC, PLoS…

On Comments: Grammar Nazis and Eccentrics? Honestly!

Ten Words You Need to Stop Misspelling (detail) view the whole thing at The Oatmeal - it's great. While blogging late at night, I've sometimes wondered whether an extensive study of blog comments would yield a set of emergent categories, which could then be organized into a sort of phylogeny representing different species of blog commenter. I'm not referring to politics, academic discipline, or favorite ideological hobby horses: I'm talking about comment writing style and what you can infer from it, independent of a comment's content. For example, you have no doubt encountered Grammar Nazis…

Combatting Holocaust denial: Ur doing it wrong when u smash free speech

I detest Holocaust denial. Relative newbies who haven't been reading this blog that long may be wondering why I, a physician, booster of science-based medicine, and scourge of the anti-vaccine movement (well, at least in my mind, anyway) would blog about Holocaust denial, but in actuality my interest in combatting Holocaust denial predates my interest in combatting quackery by at least two years. Indeed, one of my earliest long-form posts for this blog, written more than a year before I joined ScienceBlogs and reposted after I joined relates how I discovered Holocaust denial, my confusion and…

Thomas Cowles twisting in the wind defending the "cancer boy" urban legend

I'm rather amused. No, I'm very amused. Yesterday, as you may recall, I discussed a seemingly alarming e-mail that's going around about a 17-year-old boy with melanoma whom the State of California had allegedly removed from the custody of his mother because she and he had wanted to use "advanced natural medicine" to treat his melanoma, rather than surgery and chemotherapy. I pointed out a number of questionable elements in the story that made me very suspicious of its accuracy, not the least of which is the fact that the mainstay of melanoma treatment is surgery plus biological therapy, not…

Comments of the Week #145: from identical snowflakes to science and God

“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're doing something.” -Neil Gaiman Here we are, at the end of a momentous week here at Starts With A Bang! The world is changing; the president of the world's most powerful nation has changed; but the quest to learn ever more about the Universe still continues unabated. There's so much coming down the pipeline…

Our Real (Adult) Educational Crisis: The Ongoing Failure of Our Political Press Corps(e)

A study showing that many people who receive assistance from government programs don't believe they have done so has been making the rounds once again (you heard it here first! Months ago!). My favorite idiocy is how 43% of Pell Grant recipients--federal aid for college--don't realize it's a government program (one does wonder how that 43% successfully graduated from grade school). I argued that this delusion was willful: This seems a case of willful ignorance by definition. Government aid is for lazy slackers, for 'welfare queens', and, in some people's minds, for those people. Decent,…

Birds in the News 145

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter ABSTRACT: Rainbow Lory, Trichoglossus haematodus. Image: John Del Rio. [larger view]. Birds in Science UK Scientists have found bird fossils dating back around 55 million years that could help shed light on a period of time before humans and most mammals had evolved. The fossils, including two complete bird skulls, a pelvis and several bones, appear to be the remains of parrot-like birds and were found by a local archaeologist on marshland Seasalter Levels near Whitstable, Kent. "Birds' skeletons are so fragile, the…

"Ayurgenomics": The return of woo-omics

Every so often, I come across something in the world of woo that leaves my jaw dangling from its joint in utter astonishment that anyone could think such a thing was a good idea. Sometimes these things are investigations into various paranormal phenomena. Sometimes, it's the latest anti-science denialist screed from a creationist. Other times, it's a contortion of science so egregious that I can't believe anyone would actually do it--or that anyone would actually mistake that woo for good science. This time around, it's genomics that's being abused. This is a topic that, although I don't…

Books: "The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition" by Michael Tomasello, part II

The review of the second chapter was written on September 06, 2005: I have commented on Tomasello's Chapter 1 earlier. Second chapter is much longer and somewhat disjointed, but I would like to write some of my own first impressions now (also long and disjointed), before I read what other members of the reading group have written. As usual, I will make the post contrarian and critical, in the good tradition of blog-writing, but that does not mean I dismiss Tomasello's hypothesis altogether or do not look forward to reading the rest of the book. Read reviews by other group members for other…

Science Online Advice: Writing Books

Last Friday, when I didn't have any time to blog, Zen Faulkes wrote an interesting wrap-up post on Science Online 2013 in which he declared he won't be back. Not because it was a bad time, but because other people would benefit from it more, and his not going frees up a spot for somebody else. I recognize a lot of his reaction, though there were a couple of things that I got out of it that I think made it worthwhile, beyond just the socialization. On the whole, though, it wasn't really a transformative experience for me. I like to think, though, that I was able to provide a few things that…

Meet the pygopodids (gekkotans part IX)

One of my shortish-term goals at Tet Zoo has been to complete the series on gekkotan lizards I started in April 2010 (see below for links to previous parts). We continue with that series here, and this time round we're going to look at what should definitely be regarded as the weirdest of gekkotans: the near-limbless pygopodids, pygopods or flap-footed lizards, all of which inhabit Australia and New Guinea (and at least some of the surrounding islands). Because there's a lot to say about them, the article you're reading is the first of three. [Excellent paintings below by Alan Male, from…

The Hobbit's Brain

At 1 p.m. today I listened by phone to a press conference in Washington where scientists presented the first good look inside a Hobbit's head. The view is fascinating. While it may help clear up some mysteries, it seems to throw others wide open. Last October, a team of Australian scientists declared that they had found a new species of hominid that lived as recently as 12,000 years ago. It was short--maybe three and a half feet tall--and had a brain they estimated to be about the size of a chimp's. Its bones were found along with stone tools, suggesting that it made good use of its scant…

Another Week of Anthropocene Antics, April 28, 2013

Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Sipping from the Internet Firehose... April 28, 2013 Chuckles, COP19+, PAGES2k, Ocean Heat, Earth Day, Unburnable Subsidies, Pricing Nature, Thermodynamics, Cook, Shrinkology Fukushima: Note, News Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Fisheries, GMOs, GMO Labelling, Food Production Monsoon, Notable Weather, New Weather, GHGs, Temperatures, Aerosols…

Comments of the Week #136: From entropic gravity to parallel Universes

“The universe is asymmetric and I am persuaded that life, as it is known to us, is a direct result of the asymmetry of the universe or of its indirect consequences. The universe is asymmetric.” -Louis Pasteur Time keeps barreling forward for all of us, but I'm so pleased that Starts With A Bang! still keeps on taking on some of the biggest and smallest questions about physics, astronomy and the Universe as it related to humanity. There were a number of grandiose, challenging topics we took on this week, including: What if gravity isn't really fundamental? (for Ask Ethan), Top five features…

Online civility: between 10,000 cliques and 2 cultures, where's the neutral ground?

As I mentioned last week, I spent yesterday on a panel/in a workshop at Harvard's Kennedy School, "Unruly Democracy: Science Blogs and the Public Sphere." It was an excellent day - I met many interesting people and had some great conversations. Plus, I got to meet Dr. Isis in the flesh! Woohoo! Thanks to the Intersection's Chris Mooney and everyone at the Kennedy School's Science and Technology Studies program for putting on such a great event. Obviously, I can't speak for all science bloggers, and I didn't even try. But what I did endeavor to convey in my brief talk was the difficulty of…

Mrs. Hitler and her doctor

Unfortunately, as we have been dreading for the last four months or so since her relapse was diagnosed, my mother-in-law passed away from breast cancer in hospice. She died peacefully, with my wife and the rest of her family at her side. As you might expect, I do not much feel like blogging, and even if I did my wife needs me more. Because I foresaw this coming, however, I do have a series of "Best of" reposts lined up. If you've been reading less than a year or two, they're new to you. If not, I hope you enjoy them again. I don't know when I'll be back, other than maybe a brief update or two…

Gluten-free skin and beauty products? More like thought-free...

A couple of Sundays ago (Easter, to be precise), my wife and I were sitting around yesterday reading the Sunday papers and perusing the Internet (as is frequently our wont on Sunday mornings), when I heard a contemptuous harrumph coming from her direction. She then pointed me to an article in our local newspaper entitled Gluten-free beauty products in demand among some customers. Now, I must admit that I haven't been keeping up with the gluten-free trend, other than how easily it fits within the niche of "autism biomed" quackery, where, apparently, nearly every "biomed" protocol for…

Criticizing the Trial to Asess Chelation Therapy (TACT) is defending science-based medicine

When I wrote about the Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy (TACT) trial last week, little did I suspect that I would be revisiting the topic again so soon. For those of you not familiar with TACT, it was a trial designed to test a favorite quack treatment for cardiovascular disease, chelation therapy. It is, as I have described many times in the past, an incredibly implausible therapy based on a hugely simplistic concept that because calcium accumulates in atherosclerotic lesions, then using chelation therapy could remove the calcium and reduce the lesions. Chelation therapy is a favorite…

Comments of the Week #133: from a simulated Universe to dark matter black holes

“Weightlessness was unbelievable. It's physical euphoria: Nothing about you has any weight. You don't realize that you are weighed down all the time by yourself, and your organs, and your head. Your arms weigh down your shoulders. In space simulation, you get to fly like Superman! You're hanging in the air! It's the coolest thing.” -Mary Roach As October comes to an end, the nights grow longer (at least in the northern hemisphere) and Halloween approaches. There are wonders all around us, and the need to separate good science from bad. There's plenty in the rear-view mirror, like this month’s…