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A poetry-writing chemist for National Poetry Month

Chemists can be quite a literary bunch. Consider Primo Levi. Carl Djerassi. And, of course, Nobel Prize - winning chemist Roald Hoffman. Below the fold, Hoffman's poem "An unusual state of matter": In the beach sands of Kerala, abraded from the gneiss, in the stream sands of North Carolina one finds monazite, the solitary mineral. In its crystalline beginning there was order, there was a lattice. And the atoms - cerium, lanthanum, thorium, yttrium, phosphate - danced round their predestined sites, tethered by the massless springs of electrostatics and by their neighbors' bulk. They…

Another Week of Global Warming News, March 30, 2014

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 Information is not Knowledge...Knowledge is not Wisdom March 30, 2014 Chuckles, COP20+, WG2, Earth Hour, WMO, Ponder CSLDF, Change?, Energiewende, Bottom Line, Cook Fukushima: Note, News, Policies Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food: Crisis, Fisheries, Prices, GMOs, Production Hurricanes, Notable Weather, Forecasts, Extreme Weather, New Weather GHGs, Aerosols, Weather Machine, Climate…

The many, many mouse-eared bats, aka little brown bats, aka Myotis bats (vesper bats part V)

One of the largest and most successful vesper bat clades is Myotis, the little brown bats or mouse-eared bats. As you can see from the simplified cladogram shown right down at the bottom of this article, recent work indicates that they form the sister-taxon to the remaining vespertilionine vesper bats (for more discussion of their phylogenetic position, see the vesper bat cladogram article). Myotis occurs virtually worldwide in diverse habitats, contains about 100 species, and has been described as the most widespread mammalian genus after Homo* [composite below shows - clockwise from far…

The small, recently extinct, island-dwelling crocodilians of the south Pacific

Here's an interesting contention: until just a few thousand years ago, small crocodilians inhabited the tropical islands of the South Pacific and elsewhere. In fact, judging from recent discoveries, small terrestrial crocodilians were an ordinary component of many tropical island groups, and they presumably still would be, had they not been made extinct by people. This article originally appeared in 2006 on Tet Zoo ver 1, and here it is again... The first of these animals to be discovered was Mekosuchus inexpectatus from New Caledonia (life restoration shown above), a species that most…

From Now on, I Read Only Esquire

For the political articles only, I swear. What I can't figure out is how a writer for Esquire can see through all the bullsht that the supposedly Very Serious People can't. Here's what was the most trechant part for me (italics mine): On May 15, Mike Huckabee, a greasy Rotarian gasbag from Arkansas, made a funny. Speaking at a debate with the other Republican presidential contenders, Huckabee said of the Congress that it had "spent money like John Edwards at a beauty shop." This nasty little bit solicited gales of laughter from the studio audience and almost unalloyed approval from the…

Explaining global cooling

The invaluable pseudonymous Tamino has a brilliant explanation of the causes of the "global cooling" trend in the mid-20th century. There's nothing new, except the clarity of the writing. So if you've ever been stumped by a skeptic who suggests that anthropogenic climate change theorists can't explain why the planet cooled for the three decades following the Second World War, bookmark this post. Just a tease: ... the 1940-1975 time period experienced anthropogenic global cooling. This cooling was from the same root cause as volcanic cooling, namely aerosols (mostly sulfate aerosols) in the…

Life Science and Physical Science Weekly Channel Highlights

In this post: the large versions of the Life Science and Physical Science channel photos, comments from readers, and the best posts of the week. Physical Science. Sparks jump from a flickering campfire. From Flickr, by Kirrus Life Science. From Flickr, by Snap® Reader comments of the week: In Giant Antarctic Marine Worm - Parbolasia Corrugatus, Andrew Bleiman of Zoillogix introduces the cuddly creature below: This Nemertean, or proboscis worm (proper name Parborlasia corrugatus) is a resident of Antarctic waters, and according to Andrew, eats almost anything, including sponges,…

Fracked Over for Natural Gas

Research makes it increasingly clear that along with drilling for oil and mining coal, extracting natural gas from deep underground causes serious damage to the environment and to public health. On The Pump Handle, Kim Krisberg examines the contamination that may result from dumping fracking wastewater into disposal wells, writing "about 1,000 different chemicals are used in the fracking industry, with more than 100 being known or suspected endocrine disruptors." Researchers collected water samples downstream from wells in West Virginia, and after "exposing both female and male mammalian sex…

Occupational Health News Roundup

Whistleblowers often play key roles in uncovering problems, from unsafe working conditions to embezzlement and fraud. Yet when the Project on Government Oversight examined the Inspectors General system, which receives and investigates complaints about federal agencies, it found that IGs too often treat whistleblowers as afterthoughts and fail to protect them from retaliation. The Washington Postâs Ed OâKeefe highlights some of POGOâs findings on his Federal Eye blog, and emphasizes the problems that the report found with the websites and call centers that are supposed to make it easy for…

Friday Blog Roundup

Bloggers worry about how a Wall Street bailout and economic turmoil might affect environmental issues, and they advocate for green avenues to help the economy. David Roberts at Gristmill compiles warnings from opinion leaders about not letting a bailout interfere with green investments, and advocates for an energy-efficiency initiative to help the economy. Alex Salta at Oh My Gov! cites recent events in Canada to suggest the U.S. economic crisis might take the focus off of global warming (via SEA). Angelique van Engelen at Triple Pundit reports on the findings from a new report on the…

How to triage nonsense

Both Orac and MarkCC have been having a blast tearing to shreds virtually every aspect of the latest nonsensical piece by Dennis Byrne based on this idiotic study at JPANDS. One thing struck me in the two analyses, was MarkCC's emphasis on the idea of triage in assessing the scientific literature. This is fundamentally a good concept, but I think he was too kind to JPANDS in saying that they merely lacked credibility as a journal thus raising red flags. If we're going to look at this from the perspective of triage, an article from JPANDS is like encountering a dead body on a gurney…

Dead Bowhead whale says "Ouch"

Whales are the most beautiful, perfect animals in the whole history of life. Shiny and flawless like pristine boiled eggs, they exist in perfect harmony with their environment, refuse to inflict needless suffering on other forms of life, and never suffer from disease or illness. Ha ha, just kidding! Check out these photos of a Bowhead Balaena mysticetus skeleton I encountered recently (IRSNB, Brussels). What can I say, other than "Ouch!". This first photo shows the base of the whale's tail in left lateral view (the end of the tail is to the far right). And here's the same region but seen…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 10 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Resurrection of a Bull by Cloning from Organs Frozen without Cryoprotectant in a â80°C Freezer for a Decade: Frozen animal tissues without cryoprotectant have been thought to be inappropriate for use as a nuclear…

Newish Finds from Old Uppsala

[More about archaeology, metaldetecting; arkeologi, metallsökare, Uppsala.] The view from my second investigation area. The great barrows were erected about AD 600. I spent Tuesday and Wednesday metal-detecting for my buddy John Ljungkvist on some of the most storied soil in Sweden: Old Uppsala. Archaeology and early historical sources unanimously point this village out as one of the Lake Mälaren region's most important power centres from shortly before AD 600 until about 1250, when it was superseded by the nearby town of (New) Uppsala. My Ãstergötland project in 2004-2009 largely aimed…

The Mind Boggles

Here's a real gem from the Worldnutdaily, from someone named Jane Chastain: President Bush has done more than any president in history to advance gay rights I'll give you a couple minutes to pick your jaw up off the floor....okay, ready? Want her evidence for this? Get this: "The Bush administration allowed money set aside for the families of the 9-11 victims to go to domestic partners." Egads! How horribly pro-gay could they be! They allowed maybe two dozen homosexuals who had lost their partners to share in the benefits given to those who lost loved ones in that great tragedy. Why, this is…

What light pollution costs us every night (Synopsis)

"Before we devised artificial lights and atmospheric pollution and modern forms of nocturnal entertainment we watched the stars. There were practical calendar reasons of course but there was more to it than that. Even today the most jaded city dweller can be unexpectedly moved upon encountering a clear night sky studded with thousands of twinkling stars. When it happens to me after all these years it still takes my breath away." -Carl Sagan For all of human history, we’ve battled against the limitations of our bodies and the natural world. That’s led to the development of artificial lighting…

Asteroid Will Pass Within Moon's Orbit on November 8th

YU55 is in the vicinity now, and will pass within the Moon's orbit tomorrow. NASA sent me a pretty crappy image but I fixed it up for you: The image was taken on Nov. 7 at 11:45 a.m. PST (2:45 p.m. EST/1945 UTC), when the asteroid was approximately 860,000 miles (1.38 million kilometers) away from Earth. Tracking of the aircraft carrier-sized asteroid began at Goldstone at 9:30 a.m. PDT on Nov. 4 with the 230-foot-wide (70-meter) antenna and lasted about two hours, with an additional four hours of tracking planned each day from Nov. 6 - 10. The asteroid safely will safely fly past our…

“like being inside Hansens head”

One of my favourite journal-club comments, from back in the days when I did science, about a previous Hansen paper that failed to find favour. I'm hoping to actually read the Hansen Noveau, and hopeful that it isn't just old wine in new bottles, but first a brief comment about comment policy. Blogs without a comment policy but with any degree of popularity tend to have a comment section full of mush. So what of the EGU open review journals? Generally, they're saved by lack of popularity, but as Tamino points out, one of the recent comments is just raving nutjobbery. Revkin, in his much-…

Update on Cupertino Lawsuit

The Alliance Defense Fund has apparently filed a modified complaint in the Steven Williams lawsuit in Cupertino. The new complaint includes a couple of other handouts that the principal wouldn't allow Williams to hand out, both of them apparently with some historical problems of their own. ERiposte has posted an update to his response that includes a critique of those two new handouts. He also quotes from a letter sent from the ADF to one of the parents in the Cupertino school district, with the ADF saying: "Some media reports have incorrectly characterized the lawsuit filed on behalf of…

STACLU on the Election

You had to figure that the STACLU crowd would have an interesting, if predictably irrational, reaction to the election; they did not disappoint. It started with Glib Fortuna's predictions for the election, which were just a tad bit off: Everyone is posting their predictions, so I guess I am obligated. My gut tells me that this won't be the big blowout the DemMedia Complex has been banking on. GOP holds Senate easily. The House comes out as a one or two seat majority either way. You might wanna have that gut checked, the calibration seems to be off. Better yet, you might start thinking with…

AID stats are off (and like the point is?)

Well, one of the big news items these days, is the "re-adjustment" of HIV infection statistics coming out of UNAIDS. Apparently, the numbers that have been used over the last couple of years have been too high and that the new numbers are significantly lower. For example, the worldwide infection numbers dropped from 40 million to 33 million. (news reports nyt, bbc) In many respects, this begs the question, "So what?" These numbers are still the sort that can merit strong words such as "genocide" and/or "carnage" to attempt to let ordinary individuals like ourselves understand the horror…

Experimental Biology 2017 - Day 5

Here are the highlights from the final day of the meeting: Carbon monoxide (CO) is not all that bad: Michael Tift, graduate student at Scripps Institute of Oceanography, described how the body naturally produces CO when red blood cells are broken down and CO can actually be protective against inflammation at low doses. His research was focused on measuring whether species that have more hemoglobin (from living in hypoxic environments) also have more CO. As it turns out, people native to high-altitude Peru do have higher CO levels than those living at lower elevations. Likewise, elephant…

2015 Arizona Physiological Society

The Arizona Physiological Society held their 8th annual conference Nov 13-14 at Midwestern University in Glendale. This was a great meeting for comparative physiologists! Here are some comparative physiology highlights from the meeting:   The 2015 Keynote Speaker was Dr. Andrew Biewener (Harvard University) who spoke about "How do running animals acheive stability? The neuromechanical control of rapid locomotion." In his talk he focused on understanding how Guinea fowl avoid tripping when running really fast over uneven surfaces. The 2015 Arizona Distinguished Lecture was given by Dr. Eldon…

2015 Experimental Biology - Day 4

Yesterday (Tuesday) was another great day for Comparative Physiology! Congratulations to Dr. Arthur DeVries (above; Professor Emeritus, Department of Molecular and Integrative Physiology; Professor of Animal Biology, University of Illinois), this year's recipient of the August Krogh Distinguished lecturer award from the Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology section of the American Physiological Society. Dr. DeVries gave an excellent seminar summarizing his career studying fish that live in some of the coldest waters without freezing! The fish accomplish this amazing task by having anti-…

Why dentists may have rats to thank

  Image of rat teeth from Scienceline (credit: The International Rice Research Institute, flickr.com) What does tooth decay have to do with rats? For Neandertals, tooth decay was a rare occurance. Research suggests that tooth decay became more prominent with the development of agriculture. Dr. Ordaz, Stanford School of Medicine, and colleagues analyzed common strains of bacteria (Streptococcus mutans) responsible for causing cavities. They found that the bacteria began expanding exponentially around 10,000 years ago, similar to the dawn of agriculture. The authors suggest that as humans…

Iraq = Vietnam, According to White House

In yet another moment guaranteed to make you wonder if there's been a mass defection of writers from the Daily Show to the White House, President Bush is expected to argue later today that the war in Iraq is, in fact, very similar to the war in Vietnam. Before you drop to the ground in shock, I should probably add that this does not appear to indicate in any way, shape, or form that the White House has suddenly discovered the appeal of reality. The comparison with Vietnam is apt, according to White House-released excerpts from a speech that the president will deliver later, because we…

BPR3.org goes live

If you haven't checked out the BPR3 initative (Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting), now's your chance to see everything that's going on with BPR3 in one place: The new web site has just gone live. Set your bookmarks to researchblogging.org for the latest news on our efforts to identify promote blogging about peer-reviewed research. I'll probably still occasionally post here and link back to BPR3, but from here on out, that's the site to visit for the latest news on the project. There's still a little dust in the corners as we build the site, and everything is pretty much plain-…

Never Trust the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page on Global Warming

Media Matters has the latest on dubious statements about science by the editorial page of this seemingly august paper. It seems that two ed page folks have claimed that new findings about methane emissions from trees somehow undercut the case for concern about human caused global warming. This is a ridiculous position: No matter what's going on with methane, we're still pumping oodles of CO2 into the atmosphere. That's not changing fast, and CO2 is the greenhouse gas that everyone is most worried about (not to say that the others don't matter). So this commentary from the Journal editors,…

"I Love Science, I Love it Not," Quoth the Raven

"Sonnet: To Science" words by Edgar Allan Poe song by Alex Colwell video by Jeff Burns From oilcanpress I love the pairing of Poe's sonnet, which basically accuses Science of destroying the poetic mysteries that make life meaningful, with the techno-optimistic nostalgia of early films glorifying science and technology. Yummy! Poe had a curious relationship with science. Despite the accusatory tone of his poem, Poe was fairly well-versed in contemporary scientific theory, with a solid grasp of astronomy in particular. Poe even wrote a small book called Eureka (1848) about his early,…

The Greatest Nerdiest Party Ever Thrown

Readers, Friends, Enemies, Members of the Press! My mildly authoritarian brother and I would like to remind you of the life-changing event we're throwing on Friday, September 26th, in San Francisco at Tonic. The party starts at 9pm and goes until ?. (That's right ladies, you read me correctly, it goes until "?"). EXCITING ANNOUNCEMENT #1 - Million Comment Party - Our Zooillogix Key Party happens to coincide with ScienceBlogs' Million Comment Parties everywhere! It is for this reason that we have banded together with Razib from Gene Expression, Gilligan Mcclain from Deep Sea News, Janet "…

The joys of home ownership

It's 1:30AM, and our daughter wakes us up, pounding on the door. We hear a babbling brook, the cheerful sound of a waterfall—wait a moment, we don't live in a rain forest! We run to the basement to see water rushing over the baseboards, and a lake, already ankle deep. I turn off the main water valve to our house, but it doesn't stop. We go outside, and there, rising from our lawn, is a huge dome rising up like a grassy pimple, and water gushing at a phenomenal rate from several points on it. That's one of those big waist-high garbage cans out there, for scale. My wife tossed it out there in…

Message to an Eagle Scout

[Editor's Note: The following letter was read at the ceremony yesterday where the C. O.'s nephew was awarded the Eagle Scout badge. The C. O. himself never made it to Eagle, which is no surprise to us here at upper management. Hope he doesn't read this.] "Jacob, we have enjoyed watching you grow from a little boy into an outstanding young man, but today you have gained a new level of admiration from all of us. Today you attain the highest rank a Boy Scout can ever achieve - Eagle Scout. Only one out of every twenty Boy Scouts earns the right to wear the Eagle badge on his uniform, and…

Are We Baking with Volcanic Ash?

I was trawling the USGS photo archive for upcoming Friday Rock Blog candidates when I came across this scanning electron micrograph of wheat. It's from a gargantuan volume published in 1981, full of initial reports about the eruption of Mt. St. Helens. Why is there a picture of wheat in a book about a volcano? It turns out people were curious about how quickly material from the ash would be incorporated into the soil nutrient supply, and particularly into crops. So a month after the eruption, USGS scientists sampled wheat and soil from fields that had been ashed on. The answer? Wheat from…

Vampire Forensics by Mark Jenkins

After a brief insurrection by their blue collar offspring, zombies, vampires have once more regained their prominence as the monster supreme, leaping out at us from every bookshelf, cinema screen and TV set. What better time then for Mark Jenkins to unleash his accomplished study of the bloodsucker legend, Vampire Forensics. Published through National Geographic Books and accompanied by a television documentary, Vampire Forensics delves into the long history of the vampire, one which began millennia before a certain Bram Stoker set pen to parchment. Drawing upon the latest research in…

Pfizer to pay out £50m for illegal human experiments in Nigeria

The Associated Press reports that lawyers working on a multi-billion dollar lawsuit against Pfizer are close to reaching a settlement. Nigerian authorities allege that Pfizer conducted deadly drug experiments in Nigeria's northern Kano state during devastating meningitis outbreak. They claim that the pharmaceutical giant used children there for an unlicensed trial of what it hoped would be a new "blockbuster" drug - a broad spectrum antibiotic that could be taken in tablet form. Pfizer disagrees, insisting that it acted with approval from the Nigerian government and with the consent of…

Bravo Harvard

Harvard announced yesterday that it would waive tuitions for undergrads whose families earn less than $60,000 annually. From the Harvard Crimson: The newly expanded financial aid program, which will also reduce the contributions of families with annual incomes between $60,000 and $80,000, is expected to cover more than 1,500 students--nearly a quarter of the College--in the next academic year, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William R. Fitzsimmons '67 and Vice President for Administration Sally Zeckhauser said in a joint interview this evening. With the announcement, Harvard jumps to…

Sarah is back from Chernobyl

So, this is a perfect time to take another look at her Notes From Ukraine and check out the last several posts from there. I hope the blog will continue as Notes From Durham including the coverage of her science at Duke and all the local blogger events...

Another Solstice Bonus

Behold! The Earth, as viewed from the sun. You can also view the Earth from the moon, a satellite, or above any point by entering coordinates for latitude and longitude. You can even look at the moon from the sun. (By John Walker of Fourmilab Switzerland.) Enjoy!

A plate of tomato and pepper stew a la FDA, hold the credibility [updated]

The FDA is saying they still aren't sure how over 1200 Salmonella stpaul cases resulted from food chain contamination but they are saying its from jalapeno peppers grown in Mexico. This from a press release July 25: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is advising consumers that jalapeño and Serrano peppers grown in the United States are not connected with the current Salmonella Saintpaul outbreak. However, the FDA continues to advise consumers to avoid raw jalapeño peppers--and the food that contains them--if they have been grown, harvested or packed in Mexico. [snip] The more narrow…

Emerging Disease and Zoonoses #19: Bats and emerging viruses

I've mentioned previously the role, or potential role, that bats play in disease transmission. They have long been suspected, and recently identified, as hosts for the Ebola virus. (Whether they're the main reservoir species and what--if any--role they play in transmission of the virus to humans remains to be determined). They've also been implicated in the emergence of SARS and Nipah virus, and of course, have long been associated with the maintenance of rabies virus. A new paper reviews the role of bats in the maintenance and emergence of novel viruses. Bats represent a huge portion…

Punkin Chunkin - they will never make a mile range

In my previous post on launching a pumpkin (punkin chunkin) I essentially just looked at what happens to the pumpkin after it is launched. How fast would you have to shoot it to go 1 mile? The answer seems to be around 1000 mph and they are currently shooting them around 600 mph. The question for this post, how fast can you launch a pumpkin so that it does not smash into smithereens? First, why would it smash at all? Here is a diagram of a pumpkin being launched while still in the tube. The pumpkin launcher works by releasing compressed air inside the tube. This means that the force…

Notes on Sewall Wright: the Measurement of Kinship

David Burbridge continues his awesome series of posts on the history of evolutionary genetic thought with Notes on Sewall Wright: the Measurement of Kinship. Here's a taste: In Malecot's system two genes at the same locus, in the same or different individuals, are defined as Identical by Descent (IBD) if they are both descended from the very same individual ancestral gene, without either of them undergoing mutation in the interim. The relatedness between two individuals can be measured, roughly speaking, by calculating the probability that two genes at the same locus in the two individuals…

Life imitates art imitating life

Or something like that. I rarely watch TV, but one of the few things I watch every now and then are reruns of the multiple incarnations of Law & Order shows when I run into them on TNT or one of those cable stations. They have all kinds of "ripped from the headlines" story plots, but this is the first time I can recall where a news story was ripped from L&O (well, except that it takes place in Danbury, Connecticut instead of Manhattan): Two people in Danbury have been infected with anthrax contracted from animal skins. Officials say Ase-AmenRa Kariamu contracted 'cutaneous anthrax…

Friday Random Ten, Jan 5

As an experiment, I decided to try making a iMix of the items in my FRT that are available via iTunes. Please let me know if you like this; it's a bit of extra work for me which I don't mind doing, as long as people use it... but if no one wants it, then I'd rather not spend the time setting it up. Dirty Three, "I offered it up to the stars & the Night Sky". As usual from my random lists, it's a post-rock ensemble. Dirty Three are classical leaning; not quite so much as the Clogs, but still very much on the classical side. They tend to be slow and mellow, with a gradually building…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE - the farm animal edition

There are 13 new articles in PLoS ONE today, as well as 12 articles published Friday night. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: The Multifaceted Origin of Taurine Cattle Reflected by the Mitochondrial Genome: A Neolithic domestication of taurine cattle in the Fertile Crescent from local…

Holocaust Children, part II (guest post by Mom)

This is the second part of my Mom's travelogue from Israel last month: Trauma of baptized Jews Friday, November 9th The Conference continues to work in groups. The topics are interesting but I had to choose one for the morning and one for the afternoon. The first group summoned together the people of the same age as me. I believed I had known much about the war and suffering. In the group of about 30 participants from different countries I realized how little I had known. Better to say, I knew quite a lot about what had been going going on here, in our country, but not much about the…

A Labor Day Message from Secretary of Labor Solis

The Department of Labor's Labor Day 2011 website features some interesting historical info on this holiday, and an address from Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis that focuses on job creation. What I found particularly interesting was an op-ed by Secretary Solis - one of many linked from the site's News page - published Friday in The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. It begins: On Labor Day, we honor the contributions working men and women have made throughout history to the strength and prosperity of our nation. There are many, and they deserve the tribute. But throughout our nation's history, there…

Polio cases in Nigeria are bad news for eradication effort

Last summer, Nigeria celebrated having gone a year without a case of polio. But then last month, just before meeting the two-year mark, two children in Nigeria were diagnosed with polio paralysis, and a third case has now been detected. All three cases are in Borno state (in northeastern Nigeria) in areas liberated from Boko Haram militants. NPR's Jason Beaubien reports: Dr. Chima Ohuabunwo, an epidemiologist who has been working with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Nigeria for the past five years, says Boko Haram has cut off parts of Borno state, in Nigeria's northeast…

Methane again

All over the world (my path: Timmy -> Torygraph -> google -> Nude scientist -> JOGMEC press release -> JOGMEC) there is excitement about "Japan cracks seabed 'ice gas' in dramatic leap for global energy". Which is indeed interesting, but not quite as dramatic as suggested. Because as the pic of the flare makes clear, this is a very small flow. If you read the press release, is clear this is still experimental: Methane hydrate (*1) receives attention as one of the unconventional gas resources in the future. During the period from FY2001 to FY2008, which is Phase 1 of the “Japan…

Is Dark Energy the same as Acceleration?

In a comment on my last post, What is Dark Energy, Kendall asks the following, which is such a good one I think it deserves its own post: I thought the expansion was accelerating? Aren’t you saying that it is on its way down to 85% of its current rate? Sounds like expansion is slowing, but still leaves us with an open universe… People do say the expansion of the Universe is accelerating. But that doesn't mean that the expansion rate is accelerating. It means that if you take a look at any one galaxy that isn't gravitationally bound to us in the Local Group (that is, any big galaxy that isn't…