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Another Week of GW News, Feruary 3, 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 Another Week of Climate Disruption News Sipping from the Internet Firehose... February 3, 2013 Chuckles, COP19+, Clean Air, Australian Floods, Tyee, Nigeria & Shell, Oh Oh Squad MDGs, GW & Rain, Bottom Line, IMF, Thermodynamics, Crap Detection, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Fisheries,…

From Earth to Moon

Ever wondered why it takes a tremendously huge rocket to launch people from the earth, but the Apollo astronauts managed to launch from the moon in a comparatively tiny lunar module? Easy, the whole thing was faked and NASA forgot to come up with a plausible explanation! Wow, it was almost physically painful to type that even as a joke. The real reason is some very easy but still pretty cool physics. Shall we take a look? For a given object, the gravitational potential energy per kilogram with respect to distant space is given by this easy little equation: So to pick up one kilogram of…

Announcing Genomes Unzipped, a new group blog on personal genomics

I'm pleased to announce the beta launch of a new group blog on personal genomics, Genomes Unzipped.  I've been working with a group of scientific colleagues and fellow bloggers on this project for quite a while now. Some of the group members will be familiar to regular readers: Dan Vorhaus from Genomics Law Report, Luke Jostins from Genetic Inference, and Caroline Wright from the PHG Foundation. Others are new to blogging, but have backgrounds in genomic analysis, statistical genetics and other fields that allow them to bring valuable insight into the scientific, ethical and social issues…

Another Week of GW News, October 23, 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 in the Ecological Crisis Information is not Knowledge...Knowledge is not WisdomOctober 23, 2011 Chuckles, COP17+, Horn of Africa, Monsoon, BEST Albedo, Drought, OWS, Monnett, Subsidies, GFI, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Megafauna, Geopolitics Food Crisis, Food Prices, Food vs. Biofuel, IP Issues, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes,…

Global warming in the mountains

People often say that GW is slow and hard to see. One place you can see it is in the mountains. I don't have many pix that show it well, but here's one pair. We're looking at the Sulzenauferner. The first is from 2014, and is taken from the path up to the Beiljoch (which said col is visible in the lower pair of pix) between the Sulzenauhutte and the Dresdener. The Zuckerhutl is straight on, buried in cloud, how unusual. And here's the same thing back in 2001, though taken from a slightly different and higher viewpoint, somewhere around the Trogler. The triangular buttress almost dead center…

Another Week in the Ecological Crisis, October 6, 2013

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 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years October 6, 2013 Chuckles, COP19+, WG1-AR5, AR5 Comments, ASEAN, IPSO, Crux, Fergus Bottom Line, Big Banks, Thermodynamics, Cook Fukushima: Note, News, Policies, Related Papers Melting Arctic, Megafauna, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food: Crisis, Fisheries, Land Grabs, GMOs, GMO Labelling, Production Hurricanes, Extreme Weather, New Weather, GHGs, Carbon Cycle,…

If things could be created out of nothing,...

If things could be created out of nothing, any kind of things could be produced from any source. In the first place, men could spring from the sea, squamous fish from the ground, and birds could be hatched from the sky; cattle and other farm animals, and every kind of wild beast, would bear young of unpredictable species, and would make their home in cultivated and barren parts without discrimination. Moreover, the same fruits would not invariably grow on the same trees, but would change: any tree could bear any fruit. Seeing that there would be no elements with the capacity to generate each…

Buckingham's Second Lie Under Oath

In addition to the first documented lie by former Dover school board member William Buckingham, there was another huge contradiction between his deposition answers and his testimony during the trial. This one involves the question of where the 60 copies of the book Of Pandas and People that were donated to the school actually came from. I'm going to post first Buckingham's answers during his January 3, 2005 deposition on this subject. Then I'll show you what he said during cross examination during the trial. When asked where those books came from in his deposition, Buckingham said that he…

USA Science and Engineering Expo--A few highlights

Maybe you made it to the Expo, maybe you couldn't and wished you were there. Here are a few highlights from the Expo. President Obama invited you to the Festival Check out some picture highlights from the festival! (and tons more on our facebook pages too) Winners of the engineering.com Physics Teacher's Contest A great video highlight from engineering.com of the Expo The final Nationwide Wordle to answer the question: What will be the greatest discoveries and advancements science and engineering will bring us in the 21st century? Walk on a little corn starch? (tweet video from @…

Global Temperatures since 1850

Anthropogenic global warming is a long term phenomenon that is caused by the release of Carbon, in the form of Carbon Dioxide, from fossil deposits, though burning of fuels such as oil, natural gas, and coal. There are other human causes as well, but some of those relate to the use of fossil fuels (such as the leakage of methane gas from oil extraction operations, or from delivery pipelines). The evidence for warming comes from a variety of sources, but mainly from land based thermometer stations from about the mid 19th century and later, higher tech measurements such as satellites. The…

Another Week of GW News, September 13, 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 Logging the Onset of the Bottleneck Years September 13, 2009 Chuckle, NorthEast Passage, Post et al., Nicholas Stern, WCC, Manila Conference Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica, Tariffs & Taxes, Walker et al., Magnetosphere, Late Comments Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Temperatures, Aerosols,…

What Will Human Microbiome Metagenomics Tell Us?

NIH, in about six months, will release a huge sum of money to fund the study of the human 'microbiome': those microorganisms that live on or in us. One of the things that will be done with this money is meta-genomics which is "the study of genomes recovered from environmental samples as opposed to from clonal cultures." (In this case, the samples would be fecal, vaginal, your mouth, etc.). In other words, we can sample the 'community' of genomes (or perhaps we should call it the community ecology of genomes). So I have a question: what do we learn from meta-genomics of the human…

New HIV-1 from gorillas

Nothing wakes me up on a rainy Monday morning like viral nomenclature! So we have two kinds of HIV. HIV-1 we got from chimpanzees. HIV-2 we got from sooty mangabeys. HIV-1 is further divided into Group M, N, and O, each resulting from a different zoonotic event from chimpanzees. Several years ago, we identified SIV in wild gorillas. It groups with HIV-1 Group O. Scientists have just published their findings from a patient they identified in 2004, who was infected with a 'new' kind of HIV. It clusters closer to SIVgorilla than anything else in a phylogenetic tree. A new human…

Secret to safer stem cell therapy or cure for cancer?

Image of a naked mole rat By Roman Klementschitz, Wien - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=252701 Researchers trying to find cures for cancer find naked mole rats rather interesting. Not only are these animals long-lived by rodent standards, they are also resistant to the development of cancer. By long-lived, we are talking up to 30 years! A team of researchers from Hokkaido University and Keio University in Japan have now isolated stem cells from the skin of naked mole rats and induced them to revert back to pluripotent stem cells, the type capable of…

Another Week of Climate Chaos News, March 24, 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 Another Week of Climate Chaos News Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years March 24, 2013 Chuckles, Equinox, COP19+, WWD, Earth Hour, Marcott, Grinsted World Bank, Cook, Weathermen Fukushima Note, Fukushima News Melting Arctic, Polar Bears, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Fisheries, Food vs. Biofuel, Land Grabs, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes, Monsoon, Notable Weather…

World Cup Soccer and visual memory

In many ways, my career has been dominated by efforts to make "work" bear as much resemblance to "having fun" as possible. Today's article only confirms that rule. Yesterday afternoon, I spent an hour watching a World Cup soccer match, and for once I could claim that it was completely relevant to work. I could still remember Diego Maradona's stunning 1986 run through the center of the English defense as vividly as if it happened yesterday, and was hoping to form a similarly vivid memory. Unfortunately, yesterday's lackluster 0-0 tie between France and Switzerland didn't provide me with…

How To Stuff Your Parrot on Thanksgiving

This amusing essay is making the rounds on the intertubes (as usual) this year, so I had to share it with you. Ingredients: Turkey Stuffing Sweet Potatoes Mashed Potatoes with Gravy Green Beans Cranberry Sauce Hot rolls and Butter Relish tray Pumpkin Pie with Whipped Cream Hot Coffee Instructions: Get up early in the morning and have a cup of coffee. It's going to be a long day, so place your parrot on a perch nearby to keep you company while you prepare the meal. Remove parrot from kitchen counter and return him to perch. Prepare stuffing, and remove parrot from edge of stuffing bowl and…

Particulate air pollution is local

Air pollution exists in two physical forms: as a gas (molecules) and as particles (usually heterogeneous agglomerations of huge numbers of molecules stuck together). Particles in the air are also called aerosols. Depending upon their size (really their aerodynamic behavior), their abundance and their composition, they can affect our lungs, vegetation or visibility. They can come from anywhere. Sometimes they are formed "in place" by secondary chemical reactions of precursor pollutants. Photochemical oxidant pollution ("smog") is of this type. Sometimes it is of natural origin and can be…

And the answer is...

Yes indeedy - the answer is... "The Tempest!" Which is to say, you pretty much got it from the last few PF3 related posts. But here's the full lowdown on how the images were initially chosen. Clue #1: (strange orbital looking thing). This is actually an image I found from a physicist/artist website - which I must confess, I can't seem to find again - that depicts the modeled path of the planets as viewed from Uranus looking towards the Sun. This is what the asterisk + eyeball doodle was suppose to suggest anyway. From here, Uranus was suppose to be a single degree of separation from The…

Another Week of GW News, August 28, 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 Global Warming News Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsAugust 28, 2011 Chuckles, Horn of Africa, Hsiang et al., Keystone XL Action, Kirby et al. Monnett, East Coast Nukes, Shell, ConocoPhillips, Subsidies, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy, Fukushima Talk Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food Riots, GMOs, Food…

Swine flu--deja vu all over again?

Back in 2007, I wrote about an outbreak of swine influenza from an Ohio county fair. The peer-reviewed paper analyzing the swine influenza isolated from that outbreak has just recently come out. From the abstract: The swine isolate, A/SW/OH/511445/2007 (OH07), was evaluated in an experimental challenge and transmission study reported here. Our results indicate that the OH07 virus was pathogenic in pigs, was transmissible among pigs, and failed to cross-react with many swine H1 anti-sera. Naturally exposed pigs shed virus as early as 3 days and as long as 7 days after contact with…

Update on UC Lawsuit

USA Today has an article about the ACSI lawsuit against the University of California system over the lack of accreditation for a few of their courses. Despite rhetoric from the ACSI about the UC discriminating against Christians and trying to keep kids from Christians schools from attending their colleges, the article notes: UC has certified 43 Calvary Chapel courses and has admitted 24 of the 32 applicants from the high school in the past four years, Patti says. They have objected to only a few courses that don't fit their criteria, they've certified 43 other courses from the school, and…

Quick Picks on ScienceBlogs, January 2nd, 2007

Ring in 2007 with manna for the science-starved. From Mike the Mad Biologist, So This is What Theistic Geology Looks Like. "You might not know this, but, due to pressure from Republicans beholden to batshit lunatic creationists theological conservatives, park rangers at the Grand Canyon are not allowed to discuss how old the Grand Canyon is." From Framing Science, Communicating Climate Change. "Despite historic amounts of media attention to global warming in 2006, most Americans still rank global warming as a lower level concern than other contemporary issues such as terrorism, the economy,…

Observing the Curve of the Earth

On the USA Science and Engineering Festival blog, astronaut John Grunsfeld describes what it's like to rocket into space. Astronauts first spend two hours strapped in on the launchpad, "flipping switches and thinking about our training and the jobs we have to do." They count down to ignition, mindful of the 4.5 million pounds of explosive in the fuel tanks. After liftoff, the shuttle accelerates out of Earth's atmosphere in less than nine minutes, causing each astronaut to feel like they weigh 700 pounds. An instant later, they are weightless. On Starts With a Bang, Ethan Siegel shares…

Global Weirding: Climate Anomalies Abound in 2010

Image source: NOAA. I am not a climatologist, but these recent data from The National Oceanic Atmospheric Association (NOAA) got my attention. There has been much discussion about "global warming," but relatively little attention has been given to a more descriptive term: "global weirding," coined by The New York Times reporter Thomas Freidman. There have been extreme shifts, colder and hotter, both in the air and in the oceans, and data from 2010 is a record. One report concludes: The race is over and the results are in: 2010 tied with 2005 for the title of the warmest year on record…

ENCEPHALON

Welcome to the 10th edition of the Encephalon, the blog carnival of brains, minds, neurons, behavior and cognition. This was a busy week (and weekend) for me, so I decided to give up on the spectacularly difficult idea I had for creative hosting and go with a traditional style. After all, it is the contributors' posts that you came here to find, not my artistic aspirations. So, let's get right into it! Coffee Mug, one of the bloggers on the original Gene Expression won the contest (by solving the neurotransmitter puzzle) last time I hosted The Synapse and the prize is - being highlighted…

Experimental Biology 2017 - Day 2

Yesterday was a great day for comparative physiology! Highlights from the seminars on comparative physiology: Melissa Reiterer, graduate student from Florida Atlantic University, presented her research on how freshwater turtles (Trachemys scripta) survive for long periods of time without oxygen and do not develop oxidative stress after oxygen is restored. The turtles are able to do this by creating their own antioxidants as well as eliminating oxidative stress. In contrast, mammals including humans, develop quite a bit of oxidative stress following a stroke as oxygen levels are restored…

Weekend Diversion: Happy Halloween 2012, with a Retrospective!

"Where there is no imagination there is no horror." -Arthur Conan Doyle Halloween, for those of you who've been here a while, is my favorite holiday. Every year for the past dozen years now, I've dressed up as whatever I've wanted for Halloween. And -- if you haven't seen the pattern yet -- it's almost always a partially-clothed, revered hero (or villain) from when I was a young child. In case you haven't figured out what character I've chosen for my Halloween costume this year, maybe this piece of music will make it more clear, from the video game Street Fighter II. It takes a bit of courage…

Copernicus corpse confirmed

Computerized reconstruction, via BBC from Nature's The Great Beyond: Copernicus corpse confirmed - November 21, 2008 A skull from Frombork cathedral in Poland has been identified as that of revolutionary astronomer Copernicus. Marie Allen, of Uppsala University, says DNA from the skull is a match for DNA from hairs found in books owned by Copernicus, whose book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium started the movement to viewing the sun -- rather than the Earth -- as the centre of the solar system. "The two strands of hair found in the book have the same genome sequence as the tooth from…

Ploidy and Sex Determination

There are a lot of different ways for animals to determine which individuals develop into boys and which ones become girls. You're probably most familiar with the form of chromosomal sex determination that utilizes X and Y chromosomes -- males are XY and females are XX. There are others, including ZW (males are ZZ, females are ZW) and environmental sex determination (e.g., sex can be determined by egg rearing temperature). One of the most interesting sex determination systems -- from an evolutionary perspective -- involves differences in ploidy between males and females. Hymenoptera (ants,…

Shazam!

Another lightning storm during ISEF 2007 Lightning has blazed in the skies over Albuquerque almost every night here at Intel ISEF 2007, providing a dazzing and dramatic backdrop to the Fair's events as they unfold. But the real electricity today wasn't in the wild blue yonder; it was inside Tingley Coliseum, where the finalists gathered to learn who earned this year's top honors. Here, fresh from the ceremony, are some highlights from the Grand Awards. The full listing is available here. Look out for more extensive coverage of the winners and their projects in the coming weeks! Intel…

Eyjafjallajökull update for 5/3/2010: Flights banned anew over Ireland

The steam plume from a lava flow moving down the slopes of Eyjafjallajökull on May 2, 2010. A quick note on the activity at Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland: The ash from the ongoing eruption has caused a partial closure of airspace over Ireland from 0600 to 1200 on Tuesday May 4. This is one of the first closures of European airspace since airspace reopened over 10 days ago. This closure is based on the predicted location of ash in flight corridors over Ireland tomorrow. The Icelandic Met Office has released two interesting updates on the activity at Eyjafjallajökull. The first describes the…

IEEE-USA History Project

Just yesterday I posted on preserving the the history of the computing field, musing at the end that digitization projects could save a lot of documents. Well, what comes along today in the latest What's New @ IEEE for Students is a note about the IEEE-USA History Project: Digital Archives, Organization's Four Decades of Service Unveiled IEEE-USA is building a digital archive featuring documents and photos of its 36-year history of promoting the careers and public policy interests of U.S. IEEE members. Part of the IEEE-USA History Project, the archive features: An overview of the first four…

Pin Exchange: Best of the Best

In the aftermath of last night's Student Pin Exchange, out of the dizzying array of commemorative pins, buttons, and cultural trinkets that were swapped, which emerged as the most eye-catching, coveted, and sought after? We asked three-time Intel ISEF finalist and New Mexico native Susannah Clary to canvas the exhibition floor to find out. Her report is below the fold. My personal favorite is my pin from Egypt. I love it because it represents the ancient Egyptian culture that still exists today. Lee Billings, from Brooklyn, New York: "Since this is my first time in New Mexico, I like the…

Ancient DNA from Fossil Eggshells May Provide Clues to Eggstinction of Giant Birds

tags: evolution, evolutionary biology, ancient DNA, aDNA, molecular biology, molecular ecology, archaeology, paleontology, fossil eggshell, extinct birds, giant moa, Dinornis robustus, elephant birds, Aepyornis maximus, Mullerornis, Thunderbirds, Genyornis, researchblogging.org,peer-reviewed research, peer-reviewed paper, journal club Elephant bird, Aepyornis maximus, egg compared to a human hand with a hummingbird egg balanced on a fingertip. To conduct my avian research, I've isolated and sequenced DNA from a variety of specimens, such as blood, muscle, skin and a variety of internal…

Gerald Warner: not the best advertisement for the Telegraph

Because Tim Blair gets political commentry about Australia from Taiwan, it comes as no surprise that he gets his commentry on the States from England, from one Gerald Warner who reckons that Obama's attempts to create a "Union of Soviet States of America" will fail and that he will be a one-term president. I think it is more likely that Warner has his fingers on a gin and tonic than on the pulse of the American people, but this claim intrigued me: The one glimmer of realism [Obama] displayed was when he recently told an audience in Montana that, with regard to health care, he was "not in…

Friday Random Ten

It's Friday, and I haven't done this for a long time; so here we go. I fired up iTunes, set it to Shuffle Play, and awaited with baited breath for what came out. See how this stuff compares to Mark's list today: 1. My Chemical Romance, Welcome to the Black Parade (from The Black Parade). OK, I admit it. I engineered this list so that MCR would be first on the list before the randomness follows. This album deserves it. I just got this CD a few days ago, and it hasn't left my car or the top of my playlist. MCR takes punk, glam, Goth, and sprinkles in a touch of Queen here and there like…

Dr. Sugarman must have been a pretty cool guy

Next week, PBA galleries in San Francisco will be auctioning rare books, prints, and ephemera from the medical library of Gerald I. Sugarman, MD. Joanna at Morbid Anatomy has distilled some of the best medical illustrations from this collection into two posts here and here. Thanks, Joanna! This is wonderful stuff. I think Dr. Sugarman must have been an interesting character. . . the kind of guy I wish lived down the hall from me so I could borrow his books. From "A System of Anatomy" by Samuel Collins, 1685 From "Anatomia Corporum Humanorum" by Joannem Arnoldum Langerak, 1739

Say Goodbye to Virgo…

Aaah, the Virgo cluster. A huge cluster of hundreds of galaxies, and our closest large neighbor in the Universe. People have known for a long time that although Virgo is still redshifting away from us, it isn't quite as fast as we would expect from the Hubble expansion rate of the Universe. Does this mean that we're gravitationally bound to it, and some day, we'll move into this dee-luxe apartment in the sky? Nope. Dark energy is here to push it away from us, and we'll unfortunately see this bright neighbor recede farther and farther from us, until it disappears from our sight. So say your…

Finishing the year somewhere other than on my computer

I'm finding the thing I need the most is a break from my computer. A break from emails saying I should do things, a break from my overflowing calendar, a break from long-overdue papers. So I'm doing other things instead. Like reading. And cleaning up the house. And putting away Christmas gifts and spoils from a quick trip to IKEA. Okay, and a little time on Facebook, because everyone else is too. I know I should write an update post about Christmas and my family's party and such, perhaps even a year-end post although I haven't been here at Scienceblogs for a whole year yet, and…

Four Knife Sheath Chapes

Friendly correspondent Peter Woods is working with chapes or ferrules, that is, metal mounts from the ends of knife sheaths or sword scabbards. He has sent me lovely images of these things in the hope that Aard's readers might be able to suggest parallels. Neither of the finds has any solid provenance, and though I believe them to be from north-west Europe and date from the 11th/12th centuries, I've never seen anything quite like them in my work with Scandinavian small finds. Being fragile yet excellently preserved, they're almost certainly grave finds, not metal detector finds from plough…

What Will Human Microbiome Metagenomics Tell Us (Redux)?

Since I'm attending a human microbiome meeting today, I'll repost this question about the utility of metagenomics: NIH, in about six months, will release a huge sum of money to fund the study of the human 'microbiome': those microorganisms that live on or in us. One of the things that will be done with this money is metagenomics which is "the study of genomes recovered from environmental samples as opposed to from clonal cultures." (In this case, the samples would be fecal, vaginal, your mouth, etc.). In other words, we can sample the 'community' of genomes (or perhaps we should call it the…

Three iconic graphs showing the climate fix we're in.

Here are three iconic graphs (unfortunately, there are many, many more) showing just some of the clear observational evidence that we're changing the climate. The first is the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, measured at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii. It shows the little ups and downs in concentration that varies with the seasons, but also the inexorable rise in this powerful greenhouse gas. There are now thousands of stations measuring these gases. The second is the deviation from global average temperatures over the past 130 years. It also shows the natural variability (…

I visit tropics, tropics visit me.

I grew up (and beyond) in the US northeast. There, the weather was pretty good at coming at us from the West, though a nor'easter blowing in from the North East (unsurprisingly) was not uncommon in New England. Although I had studied sea level rise and some Pleistocene climate reconstruction, when I first went to the field in Central Africa I was pretty unschooled in areas of climate and weather. I remember the first several days in the Ituri Forest. I though I knew which way was North, South, East, etc. but then I would get turned around because the big storms -- that came in every single…

Michele Bachmann promises to be a clown and kill teenagers

... And she still doesn't know where anything is ... Michele Bachmann promised, in an interview associated with her announcement to run for President of the United States (POTUS) and Effective Leader of the Free World (ELFW), that she would become a professional clown and murder dozens of teenage boys and young men. Or, perhaps, she is just confused ... Michele Bachmann is from Iowa, though she had many of us here in Minnesota convinced that she was from here. Well, given that the Iowa Caucus and Straw Polls are early events in the presidential primary process here in the US, she'll…

Memery

The cool kids are wondering what happens when you: Take out your iPod (or Zune, I guess...really, who buys a Zune?) Press shuffle songs. Answer the following: a) How many songs before you come to one that would absolutely disqualify you from being President? b) What is that song? After a random intro from the album Words that Shook the World, I got: "When A Man Loves A Woman" by Percy Sledge from the album The Best of Percy Sledge (1989, 2:55). Which I think is politically survivable, provided I wasn't fighting allegations of sexual improprieties. Then comes "Bamgufya Ba Kwoti" by John…

Indonesia and the First Law of Thermodynamics

I'm guessing few of you have heard of the physician, Robert Mayer. After all, he lived more than 150 years ago. Yet he is a discoverer of one of Nature's great laws, the First Law of Thermodynamics (otherwise known as Conservation of Energy). A strange topic for this site? My attention was drawn to it upon reading of the circumstances which prompted his discovery. In February of 1840, newly graduated he sailed as the doctor aboard the Dutch merchant ship Java enroute to Indonesia. During his enforced leisure aboard ship he studied physiology. Three months after setting off from Rotterdam he…

An Amazing Look at the Northern Lights!

"I came from the country, and when I came to the city, I was ridin' high, you know. I was seeing more lights than I ever dreamed to shine in the world. 'Cos where I came from, there wasn't too many lights. Bugs made a lot of light, but after that there wasn't no lights." -John Hunter John Hunter should have been at a higher latitude! Because if you're fortunate, at a high enough latitude (either north or south), the following sight will sometimes greet you in the night sky. Image credit: Thundafunda.com. In the northern hemisphere, we call it the Aurora Borealis, while the southern gets the…

Mud time capsules show evolutionary arms race between host and parasite

This is the fifth of eight posts on evolutionary research to celebrate Darwin's bicentennial. Life can sometimes be a futile contest. Throughout the natural world, pairs of species are locked in an evolutionary arms race where both competitors must continuously evolve new adaptations just to avoid ceding ground. Any advantage is temporary as every adaptive move from a predator or parasite is quickly neutralised by a counter-move from its prey or host. Coerced onward by the indifferent force of natural selection, neither side can withdraw from the stalemate. These patterns of evolution are…

Obama, Lobbyists - A "More Complicated Truth"

On Father's Day, I received an email from the First Lady celebrating an exemplary father giving back to his community. One line at the end of the message struck me, referring to the "Obama Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee authorized by Obama for America and the Democratic National Committee." We aren't funded by Washington lobbyists or corporate interests. We rely on donations from people like you. Is this really true? What do you think? I noted the specificity of the term "Washington lobbyists," and wondered about other qualifiers. Consider this: From a February 15, 2008…