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The New England Journal of Medicine blows an opportunity

I happen to be in Phoenix today, attending the Academic Surgical Congress, where I actually have to present one of my abstracts. That means, between flying to Phoenix last night and preparing for my talk, I didn't have time to serve up a heapin' helping of that Respectful Insolence⢠you know and (hopefully) love. Fortunately, there's still a lot of stuff in the vaults of the old blog begging to be moved over to the new blog; so that's what I'll do today. I'll probably be back tomorrow, given that the conference will likely produce blog fodder. (Conferences usually do.) And, don't worry.…

The new Secretary of Health and Human Services is a member of a fringe medical organization. Here's what that means.

I’m always hesitant to write about matters that are more political than scientific or medical, although sometimes the sorts of topics that I blog about inevitably require it (e.g., the 21st Century Cures Act, an act that buys into the myth that to bring "cures" to patients faster we have to neuter the FDA and a retooled version of which is still being considered). This is one of those times. Yesterday, I woke up to the news that President-Elect Donald Trump had chosen Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) as his new Secretary of Health and Human Services. The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS),…

Doctors are "pushing vaccines"? Gee, you say that as though that were a bad thing!

I frequently point out how antivaccine activists really, really don’t want to admit that they are, in fact, antivaccine, so frequently, in fact, that I have a series that I call The annals of “I’m not antivaccine.” It’s already up to part 21. It could easily be up to part 51, or 101, or even 1,001. The only reason it isn’t is because I don’t want to devote this blog to nothing other than how antivaccine activists who deny they’re antivaccine routinely inadvertently reveal the truth. If there’s one area in which antivaccinationists reveal themselves to be antivaccine, it’s in their reaction to…

Another week of GW News, June 26, 2011

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 Another week of Climate Disruption News Sipping from the Internet Firehose...June 26, 2011 Chuckles, Bonn, COP17+, G20, IPSO, The Conversation, Threats Bottom Line, Subsidies, Psyche, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy, Fukushima Talk Melting Arctic, Fauna, Geopolitics Food Crisis, Agro-Corps, Prices, Riots, Food vs. Biofuel, Land Grabs, GMOs, Production…

Darwin and Design in Knoxville, Part Two

Read Part One of this series here. At this point Strobel and Meyer left the stage. The room grew dark, and a video came on the large screen to my left. It was an excerpt from the The Privileged Planet, based on the book of the same title. The book was written by astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez and theologian Jay Richards, and represented yet another gloss on the fine-tuning argument. Richards was the next speaker. I had not read The Privileged Planet when it was published, and therefore was only vaguely familiar with its arguments. After hearing Richards speak, I'm not inclined to buy…

The FTC vs. homeopathy: Substantive change in the regulation of magic or window dressing for the status quo?

Homeopathy is a frequent topic on this blog, for reasons that regular readers no doubt understand all too well by now. Homeopathy is, as I like to call it, again borrowing from Tolkien, The One Quackery To Rule Them All. When it comes to quackery, few can even come close to homeopathy for the sheer ridiculousness of its precepts. Whether it is the Law of Similars, which claims that to cure a disease you need to use a substance that cause's that diseases symptoms in healthy people, a "law" that has no basis in science, or the Law of Infinitesimals, which postulates that serially diluting a…

Misrepresenting science: Time to look in the mirror

If there's one thing I've been railing about for the last few years, it's how scientific and medical studies are reported in the lay press. It seems that hardly a week passes without my having to apply a little Insolence, be it Respectful or not-so-Respectful, to some story or another, usually as a result of the story having caught my interest, leading me to look up the actual study in the peer-reviewed literature. This is something I've learned the hard way that I have to do, having been burned a couple of times in my early blogging career. Sometimes, even now, I forget. For example,…

Another week of GW News, November 29, 2009

Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I ho8pe you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Another Week of Global Warming News Information overload is pattern recognition November 29, 2009 Chuckle, Copenhagen, CHOGM, G77, Save-the-Jungle, Copenhagen Diagnosis, CS Statement, CSIRO, Health & CC Bottom Line, Patents, Broken Promises, Garrett, Solar, CRU Hack Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica, EAIS Losing Mass Food Crisis, Land Grabs, Food Production Hurricanes,…

Guest Post: Astrochemistry and how the Universe comes together

“We are not simply in the universe, we are part of it. We are born from it.” -Neil deGrasse Tyson The story of the Universe is the story of us all; we all share the same cosmic history, coming from a hot, dense state some 13.8 billion years ago known as the Big Bang and emerging after billions of years of cosmic evolution to the Universe we know and love today. Image credit: ESA and the Planck collaboration. It's a beautiful story -- and one I've told before -- but it might seem, at least from our perspective, that something is missing from the astrophysicist's version of events. Yes, we…

From the ridiculous to the sublime: A journalist takes down Suzanne Somers over "bio-identicals"

Suzanne Somers annoys me. She annoys me because, despite the fact that her statements and activities over the last 25 years reveal her to be probably no more intelligent than the character that she played on Three's Company, she still feels the need to spread misinformation about diet and medicine in several books that she has written. Indeed, my annoyance at her was manifested very early in the history of this blog, when I mentioned her in the context of testimonials for alternative medicine treatments for breast cancer. The reason? In 2001, Somers was diagnosed with breast cancer. She…

The making of a Wiki-Lie: Chilling story of one twisted oddball and... so on

It am de Fail, they be at it again. With the world's longest and least coherent headline1: The making of a Wiki-Lie: Chilling story of one twisted oddball and a handful of anonymous activists who appointed themselves as censors to promote their own warped agenda on a website that's a byword for inaccuracy. The key here is their first bullet point, Wikipedia’s editors decided that the Mail’s journalism cannot be trusted. This is of course old news; the Graun reported it in early February which was when the vote itself was closed. But it seems like the Fail can't stop picking at the scab.…

Less Than Absolute Zero

I'm sitting in a hotel in Utah at the PQE 2013 conference.  As I write this, the temperature is a rather brisk 19F. (For everyone else in the world, -7.2C) That's not cold at all to some of you, but some of you didn't grow up in south Louisiana. Once a year they let us grad students out of the basement! Either way, on the Kelvin scale the weather here is still a balmy 267 degrees above absolute zero. Which is as cold as it gets, right? Right. As a result, I've seen a lot of hubbub online about a new result published in the journal Science: Negative Absolute Temperature for Motional Degrees…

Trial By Fire: The Holocaust History Project Won't Be Silenced

Today's regularly scheduled post has been delayed due to an important and tragic development. Something bad happened a couple of days ago, something that cuts rather close to home. Arsonists targeted the offices used as a mailing address for the Holocaust History Project (THHP). (Video here, but only if you have IE and Active X installed, unfortunately.) The fire caused considerable damage to a warehouse complex and caused smoke damage to nearby businesses. Although the perpetrators have not been identified, there is good reason to suspect that it was not the business that was targeted, but…

Another week of GW News, June 19, 2011

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 Another week of Climate Disruption News Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsJune 19, 2011 Chuckles, Bonn, The Conversation, Forest Europe, Solar Cycle, SRREN, Threats Bottom Line, Subsidies, C40, Psyche, Cook, Equinox Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy, Fukushima Talk Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Agro-Corps, Food Prices, Food vs. Biofuel,…

Another week of GW News, March 7, 2010

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... March 7, 2010 Chuckle, Copenhagen, Yvo de Boer, COP-16, UN-CFG, Anthony's Question, Precautionary Principle, Greenhouse Effect Bottom Line, Carbon Tariffs, World Bank, AAAS, IPCC Review, Interpreting Polls, Pushback, CRU Inquiry Melting Arctic, Polar Bears, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Land Grabs, Food…

The Triumph of New Age Medicine, part deux, courtesy of The Atlantic

There can be no doubt that, when it comes to medicine, The Atlantic has an enormous blind spot. Under the guise of being seemingly "skeptical," the magazine has, over the last few years, published some truly atrocious articles about medicine. I first noticed this during the H1N1 pandemic, when The Atlantic published an article lionizing flu vaccine "skeptic" Tom Jefferson, who, unfortunately, happens to be head of the Vaccines Field at the Cochrane Collaboration, entitled "Does the Vaccine Matter?" It was so bad that Mark Crislip did a paragraph-by-paragraph fisking of the article, while…

Problems in the scientific literature: vigilance and victim-blaming.

That post about how hard it is to clean up the scientific literature has spawned an interesting conversation in the comments. Perhaps predictably, the big points of contention seem to be how big a problem a few fraudulent papers in the literature really are (given the self-correcting nature of science and all that), and whether there larger (and mistaken) conclusions people might be drawing about science on the basis of a small fraction of the literature. I will note just in passing that we do not have reliable numbers on what percentage of the papers published in the scientific literature…

The Porn Post, Revisited

The first iteration of this post engendered quite a bit of discussion. Some of it within the scope of what I initially wrote about; much of it not. I closed the comments and un-published the post while I considered what to do about it. I've decided to go ahead and re-publish the post, stripped of all editorializing. So what you have now is just description and explanation of the studies. I had initially written: Let's make a few things clear: I am not taking sides in the issue of whether or not pornography should be censored or restricted (but most forms of censorship make me very…

Cancer quackery promoted on Fox News

I've always known that FOX News has a tendency to go for the sensationalistic story. I've also known that, given Rupert Murdoch's political leanings, politically motivated pseudoscience like anthropogenic global warming denialism is the order of the day on FOX. I've even noticed a disturbing tendency on FOX to promote antivaccine views, for example, when a FOX interviewer tried to blame a case of dystonia on the flu vaccine or when the infotainment drones on Fox and Friends let The Donald (a.k.a. Donald Trump) blather ignorantly about vaccines and autism. I knew all that. However, I didn't…

On "helping" that is anything but

Cancer is a bitch. Depending upon what organ is involved and what kind of cancer it is, it can be incredibly hard to cure. All too often, it is incurable, particularly when it involves the brain, pancreas, esophagus, or other organs. People wonder why, after over 40 years of a "war on cancer," we don't have better treatments and more cures. As I've explained before, it's because cancer is incredibly complex, and cancer cells have incredibly messed-up genomes. Even worse, cancer uses evolution against any efforts to treat it, producing such marked heterogeneity among tumor cells that not only…

When Are Nomads Not Really Nomads? (Efe Pygmy Ethnoarchaeology)

“First, we’re going to collect our data,” Jack, the archaeologist, was telling me as we slogged down the narrow overgrown path. He seemed annoyed. “Then, we’ll leave. Until we leave, they won’t leave. They think it would be rude. After they leave, we’ll go back and map in the abandoned camp.” I had just arrived at the research camp in the Ituri Forest, then Zaire and now the Congo, after a rather long and harrowing journey that took me from Boston to New York to London to Lagos to Kinshasa to Kisingani to Isiro, all by plane, then over 250 kilometers of increasingly less road-like road, to…

Bummer about them vitamins...again

I have to say, this is getting monotonous. Let me back up a minute. One of the most common beliefs among users and advocates of "complementary and alternative" medicine (CAM) is that supplementation with vitamins will have all sorts of beneficial health effects. True, this belief is also pervasive among people who wouldn't go to an acupuncturist if you held a gun to their head, but it has become most associated with CAM. That this is so can actually be viewed as evidence of just how successful CAM activists have been in completely yoking all manner of lifestyle interventions to prevent or…

Another Week of GW News, January 29, 2012

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 Another Week in the Ecological Crisis Sipping from the Internet Firehose...January 29, 2012 Chuckles, HotW, Poe, Strange, WEF, WSF, Fisheries, CSLDF, Intimidation Open Science, USDA, CCRA, Subsidies, Value, Cook, Post CRU Fukushima Note, Fukushima News Melting Arctic, Polar Bears, Freshwater, Methane, Geopolitics Food Crisis, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Carbon Cycle,…

Birds in the News 119 -- Presidents' Day Edition

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter New wintering sites for critically endangered Spoon-billed Sandpipers, Eurynorhynchus pygmeus, have been discovered in Myanmar. Image: Peter Ericsson. Birds in Science There is a lot of controversy among scientists regarding when modern birds first appeared. The current fossil record suggests that modern birds appeared approximately 60-65 million years ago when the other lineages of dinosaurs (along with at least half of all terrestrial animals) were extinguished by a bolide impact. However, it is possible that…

How was the vertebrate/arthropod LCA segmented?

Vertebrates are modified segmented worms; that is, their body plan is made up of sequentially repeated units, most apparent in skeletal structures like the vertebrae. Arthropods are also modified segmented worms. Look at a larval fly, for instance, and you can see they are made up of rings stacked together. So here's a simple and obvious question: can we infer that the last common ancestor of vertebrates and arthropods was also a segmented worm? That is, is segmentation a common ancestral trait, or did arthropods and vertebrates invent it independently? At first thought, you might assume they…

An unexpected confluence between ScienceBlogs advertising and HuffPo quackery

Apparently something's going on here on ScienceBlogs. It's something that I don't like at all. You, my readers, have been informing me of it. Oddly enough, it also jibes with potential blogging material that appeared on that wretched hive of scum and quackery, The Huffington Post. You'll see what I'm talking about in a moment. Suffice it to say that it is not a confluence that makes me happy. It's not even a confluence that amuses me. Rather, it's a confluence that should never, ever happen. But happen it has. It began with advertisements that have been popping up. Unfortunately, after a long…

A naturopath's got to know his limitations, but naturopaths never do

It's no secret that I'm not a big fan of naturopathy. It is, as my good bud Kimball Atwood has said, a prescientific system of medicine rooted in vitalism, the idea that there is a "life energy" and a "healing power of nature." Naturopaths invoke very simplistic concepts to explain the cause of disease, such as "toxins," widespread food allergies, gluten, imbalances in qi (the life force energy), and many other pseudoscientific principles. To give you an idea of the kind of pseudoscientific quackery naturopathy encompasses, consider this: You can't have naturopathy without homeopathy, which…

Animal rights terrorists target students as the "soft underbelly of the vivisection movement"

I've made no secret of my disdain for self-proclaimed "animal rights" activists, the ones who are more than willing to terrorize scientists doing research to understand disease better and thereby develop better treatments and even cures. None of this means that I am some sort of "animal abuser" (to steal the animal rights jargon) or that I'm cruel and advocate "torturing" animals. There is a difference between animal rights and animal welfare; animal rights activists in essence equate a mouse with a rat with a dog with a pig with a human being. In any case, I've reported how animal rights…

Quoth Katie Tietje: Stop being mean to non-vaccinators!

Here we are, into a new week, and the Disneyland measles outbreak continues to grow, the total number of cases now having topped 100 and the disease attributed to someone visiting Disneyland now having reached my state. More than ever, given the high proportion of victims who weren't vaccinated, antivaccinationists are feeling the heat. Rober, "Dr. Bob" Sears, MD might have been the most petulant one trying to downplay the seriousness of measles and then letting out a whole bunch of antivaccine dog whistles to his patients to let them know that, despite his assertion that the measles vaccine…

What is an "altie"? (2006 edition)

About a year ago, I introduced the blogosphere to a term that had become common on certain Usenet newsgroups. I can't take credit for coining the term, but I think I can take some degree of credit for disseminating it to a wider audience. That term is "altie," and has a meaning similar to the term "woo-woo," in that it describes people who are so militantly pro-alternative medicine and so distrustful of conventional medicine that they will never admit when conventional medicine is effective and refuse ever to concede that any alternative medical practitioner might, just might, possibly be a…

Comments of the Week #126: from Earth's demise to the Big Bang's predictions

“With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably.” -Aaron Satie, Star Trek It’s been a remarkable week at Starts With A Bang, and I'm especially proud of the stories we've run on Proxima b, Hubble's limits, the dream of Warp Drive and the Cosmic Neutrino background. If you missed any of them (or any of the others), here's what the past week has held: When will the Sun make Earth uninhabitable? (for Ask Ethan), What is the biggest black hole as seen from Earth? (for Mostly Mute Monday), Ten…

Alliances, Beginning and (Maybe) Ending

I'd been planning to write this post for several days, and then late last night, got a nasty surprise that changed the focus of it for me. By now many of you will have heard that Pepsi bought a blog on science blogs and is using to to establish credibility by writing a blog focused ummm...on food and nutrition. Note long pause for your comments...feel free not to censor. Let me be clear - my fellow science bloggers and I were blindsided on this - there was no advance notice, and let's just say that a lot of us are pretty pissed. All of us suffer credibility hits here, but for me and the…

My Favorite Things: Sportswriter

The third entry on my "These Are a Few of My Favorite Things" list is my favorite sportswriter. That honor goes to the legendary Sports Guy, Bill Simmons. The Sports Guy writes for espn.com, as well as for the Jimmy Kimmel show, and he's the funniest sportswriter this side of Bill Scheft. But whereas Scheft writes great one liners about sports, The Sports Guy writes great columns about sports, about his obsession with sports (especially his beloved Boston teams), and about his life. If you've been a longtime reader of his columns, you know all the telltale elements that he uses so skillfully…

Miracle Mineral Solution (MMS) and autism at Autism One: Kerri Rivera's apologists strike back

A couple of weeks ago, I was horrified to learn of a new "biomed" treatment that has been apparently gaining popularity in autism circles. Actually, it's not just autism circles in which this treatment is being promoted. Before the "autism biomed" movement discovered it, this particular variety of "miracle cure" has been touted as a treatment for cancer, AIDS, hepatitis A,B and C, malaria, herpes, TB, and who knows what else. I'm referring to something called MMS, which stands for "miracle mineral solution." As I pointed out when I discovered its promotion for various maladies and then later…

Another Week of GW News, February 3, 2008

Sipping from the internet firehose... 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) Top Stories:China, Major Economies Conference, FutureGen Killed Baffin Island, Antarctica, $20 Trillion?, AGU, Bali, Anthropocene Hurricanes, GHGs, Temperatures, Sea Levels, ENSO, DSCOVR Impacts, Forests, Corals, Desertification, Wacky Weather Floods & Droughts, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Mitigation, Transportation, Geoengineering Journals, Misc. Science Carbon Trade, Optimal Carbon…

Another Week of GW News, August 23, 2009

Sipping from the internet firehose... 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 Another week of Climate Disruption News Information overload is pattern recognition August 23, 2009 Chuckle, Alberta Clipper, RET, World Water Week, Bonner, API, Costs Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica, Methane, Carbon Tariffs, World Bank Misdirection, Late Comments Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Temperatures, Feedbacks, Aerosols, Paleoclimate, ENSO,…

Pouches, pockets and sacs in the heads, necks and chests of mammals, part III: baleen whales

Time to continue in the Tet Zoo series on laryngeal diverticula (and other pouches, pockets and sacs). This time, we look at baleen whales, or mysticetes. Like the primates we looked at previously, mysticetes have enlarged laryngeal ventricles* that (mostly) meet along the ventral midline of the throat and form a single large laryngeal pouch or sac. The presence of a raphe along the sac's ventral midline seems to mark the line of fusion between the two ancestral, bilateral sacs. It's probably understandable that few of us are aware of the presence of inflatable laryngeal sacs in mysticetes…

Peering into the Genetic Future: trends in human genomics in 2009

Well, it's a little late, but I finally have a list of what I see as some of the major trends that will play out in the human genomics field in 2009 - both in terms of research outcomes, and shifts in the rapidly-evolving consumer genomics industry. For genetics-savvy readers a lot of these predictions may seem, well, predictable, so I want to emphasise that my purpose here is not really to make risky forecasts; I'm more interested in laying out what I see as the major big picture trends for the year to come, with a few specific predictions about unknowns thrown in. In any case (as you will…

Open Laboratory 2007 - last call for submissions

[Bumped up for visibility - and it makes it easier for me to keep updating with new entries] Now that the Science Blogging Conference is getting very close, it is time to remind you that the new edition of the Science Blogging Anthology, "Open Laboratory 2007", is in the works and is (still) accepting your suggestions. Although the entire process, from the initial idea all the way to having a real book printed and up for sale, took only about a month, the Open Laboratory 2006 was a great success. This year, we have had much more time so we hope we will do an even better job of it. More…

Comments of the Week #106: From Jupiter's bombardment to the StarShot

“Not going to the Moon and banging on it with my own hammer has been the biggest disappointment in life.” -Gene Shoemaker, co-discoverer of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 Don't fret about your taxes here at Starts With A Bang; I'll continue to bring you the Universe for free! (Although I do take donations, and one reward you're sure to get is an early version of April's podcast, for those who don't want to wait!) If you missed anything this past week, don't be afraid to check it out now, including: Why is Jupiter hit by so many objects in space? (for Ask Ethan), NASA's Cassini reveals the full glory…

Trump touts racial segregation, antisemitism, lewd behavior, at Boy Scout rally

If you give your children over to the Boy Scouts for a day or two, they may do something to them akin to abuse. This happened. The Boy Scouts knew what they were getting into when they invited Donald Trump to speak at their national event. They even posted warnings for the troop leaders and scouts, on their blog. As a unit leader or staff member, you can help make the president’s visit a success by ensuring that any reactions to the president’s address are, as we state in our Scout Law, friendly, courteous, and kind. This includes understanding that chants of certain phrases heard during the…

When chiropractors play at being real doctors

It's rather odd that I'll be writing two posts in a row having to do with a chiropractor, given that chiropractic is at best an occasional topic on this blog. Certainly, I don't hesitate to take on chiropractic when the mood strikes me or, more importantly, when I come across some seriously burning stupid coming from a chiropractor, but other topics tend to dominate my blogging. Let's just put it this way. Two posts in a row on a cancer quack or about antivaccinationists would be nothing the least bit unusual here, but two posts in a row about chiropractors is. As regular readers probably…

On Kids and Conferences

Kate had to leave at 7am this morning to go to a "retreat" for her office, so I took the kids to Dunkin' Donuts for breakfast. That got us all out the door at the same time, avoiding the freakout from The Pip if he saw Mommy leave without him. Kate will be late getting home tonight, as well, so I've got dinner with the kids as well, and SteelyKid has already declared that she wants to go to the Irish pub downtown for sweet potato fries and fish & chips. I mention this not because I want to fill the blog with trivial details of my personal life-- that's what Twitter is for-- but because it…

Friday Sprog Blogging: Animal research and people who don't like it.

Because there are some conversations you have to have with your kids even if you wish you didn't have to have them: Dr. Free-Ride: I wanted to talk to you about a situation that has come up for a friend of mine and is a little worrisome. So, you know I went down to UCLA the other week, right? Younger offspring: Yeah. Dr. Free-Ride: Do you know what I was there for? Elder offspring: A conference? Dr. Free-Ride: Nope, it wasn't a conference. It was an event, a dialogue, where people were discussing scientific research with animals. In particular, some people were discussing why they support…

Apparently, Mike Adams thinks he can replace PubMed

Mike Adams (a.k.a. the "Health Ranger") has been a regular blog topic for several years now. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is that, among supporters of quackery, no one quite brings the crazy home the way Mike Adams does, be it writing antivaccine rap songs, abusing dead celebrities by claiming they would have survived if only they had used whatever quackery Adams supported at the time or painting them as victims of big pharma, or conspiracy mongering on a level that make Alex Jones blush. Truly, Mikey has a special talent among woo-meisters. Joe Mercola might have…

Another Week of GW News, October 21, 2012

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 Another Week in the Ecological Crisis Information Overload is Pattern Recognition October 21, 2012 Chuckles, COP18+, CBD-COP11, Mayor, Knight, OIF, Uranium, GCF, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Polar Bears, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food: Crisis, Fisheries, Prices, Food vs. Biofuel, GMOs, GMO Labelling, Production Hurricanes,…

Birds in the News 65 (v2n16)

Taking the Plunge (Female Belted Kingfisher, Ceryle alcyon). Image appears here with the kind permission of the photographer, David Seibel, who writes; "I never realized, until freezing the motion with my camera, that kingfishers dive from their perch with wings completely folded. I've captured woodpeckers doing the same thing." [email David] Birds in Science A biologist studying wild songbirds in New York State reported that all 178 woodland birds he tested last year had unusually high levels of mercury in their blood and feathers, a sign that the toxic chemical has spread farther in the…

Tangled Bank #109: LOL Evolution!

p>Welcome to the One Hundred and Ninth Edition of The Tangled Bank, the Weblog Carnival of Evolutionary Biology. This is the LOL edition of the Tangled Bank.... Carnival business ... The main page for The Tangled Bank is here. The previous edition of The Tangled Bank was here, at Wheatdogg, and the next edition of the Tangled Bank will be here, at Blue Collar Scientist. And now, on with the show. ... In Small Things Considered... Rational redesign of bacterial signaling proteins based on amino acid co-evolution at Chance and Necessity is a bit of Peer Reviewed Research Blogging…

Modeling the head of a beer

When you pour a beer, there is this foamy top called the head. The size of the head decreases over time. What is this process dependent on? Clearly, little bubbles of beer are popping. Does each bubble have an equal probability of popping? Do only the bubbles on the top (or bottom) pop? I became aware of this idea from a colleague. Maybe he was going to do an analysis, but I haven’t seen it yet. If you do (Gerard), I am sorry for doing this before you. This may have been investigated before, but in the spirit of re-doing everything I have not searched for previous beer head studies. Note: if…

So You (Don't Particularly) Want to Be a Farmer

Note: 1 1/2 feet of snow so far and still falling - we may get more than three by the end (the words "in the higher elevations" are generally the ones you want to listen to when forecasts are made for my area). Power so far, but not expecting it to last. Smaller dog must boing around in snow to keep from being fully submerged. Snowballs are being made. We're getting ready for the arrival of our new buck, Ring Bearer (no, I didn't name him) and for a quantity of baby chicks and ducklings. And it is time to start tomatoes, because despite what it looks like, there will be green stuff out…