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Cancer Death Rates Drop Again

Death rates from cancer continue to fall in the United States, dropping more than 2 percent per year from 2002 through 2004, cancer experts reported on Monday. They found important declines in deaths from lung, prostate and colorectal cancers in men, as well as in breast and colon cancer among women. Lung cancer deaths were still on the rise among women but this increase slowed, according to the report. We're always grateful to hear such encouraging news from medical statisticians, but how can we use this information in our daily lives? Perhaps it would help to first remind ourselves of…

Why I Love Science by the Pint

... because I love science and I love beer, obviously. I had a great time moderating Science by The Pint last night! It is always awesome to be reminded how enthusiastic non-scientists often are about science. I find events like this incredibly refreshing when I have been stuck in a science rut or simply less enthusiastic about my work than usual. I had participated in one of these events last year, when an upper level grad student was speaking. I wandered from table to table talking about how cool hydrothermal vents are, and why we think its important to study them. People asked…

Phylogeny Friday - 9 June 2006

You may have thought that Orin Scrivello was the worst dentist ever. Well, have I got a story for you. This dentist isn't a sadist, and his follies were far from intentional. But the implications of his conduct greatly affected the lives of at least five of his patients. This week's Phylogeny Friday is story fit for CSI. Learn about the dentist, the virus, and his patients below the fold. The story revolves around Dr. David Acer, a Florida dentist who died in 1990 from complications of AIDS. Dr. Acer's death would have been far from remarkable at the time -- the AIDS epidemic was quite…

Friday Galaxy Blogging : Active Galaxy Mk 509

Are you ready for this? This week's Friday Galaxy is Mk509: DSS2 image from Skyview Admittedly, the image of this galaxy does not rank very high on the "wow, what a cool and pretty looking galaxy" scale. However, this is an interesting galaxy because of what's going on at the nucleus. Like all large galaxies, there is a supermassive black hole at the core of this galaxy. The black hole in this galaxy is being fed, giving rise to what we call an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN). If you drop gas down into an accretion disk near a supermassive black hole, a tremendous amount of…

Hurray for Kismet

I've had Jesca Hoop's stunning "Intelligentactile 101" stuck in my head for months, ever since an mp3blog posted it. It came up in iTunes today, and I checked to see if the album is out yet and it is. Awesome. "Intelligentactile 101" by Jesca Hoop from the album Kismet (2007, 4:20). Fingertips introduced the song by writing: "Intelligentactile 101" springs along with a finger-tapping boppiness, and in the boppy course of things Hoop rather casually gives us a generous array of melodies (there seem to be four distinct sections: verse, bridge, chorus, and something else) to capture her…

Eruption update for 1/4/2009: Mayon, Nyamuragira, Galeras, Kilauea and Redoubt

A pile of news for the new week! The glow of new lava flows from Nyamuragira in the Congo, taken from the Virunga Park Headquarters, January 2, 2010. Mayon PHIVOLCS may lower the alert status at Mayon to Level 2 after almost a week of lower seismicity and no ash explosions since December 29th. Schools that were being used as evacuation centers were also returned to teachers and students for the start of classes after the Christmas holiday. However, the Albay provincial government is now considering a plan to permanently move everyone who lives within the 6-km danger zone around Mayon, even…

linkedy links IV

Mining the Astronomical Literature - yes, just ADS not the Asteroids, yet. Shamelessly cribbed from a thread on the fb Astronomers group In defence of string theory - rather good post by Matt Strassler Claim that founding node of networks can be efficiently localized by sparse sampling Don't Confuse Technology With College Teaching - from the Chronicle Kepler 11: A Six-Planet Sonata from Alex Parker on Vimeo.

Three reasons to distrust microarray results

From Reproducible Ideas: Even when lab work and statistical analysis carried out perfectly, microarray experiment conclusions have a high probability of being incorrect for probabilistic reasons. Of course lab work and statistical analysis are not carried out perfectly. I went to a talk earlier this week that demonstrated reproducibility problems coming both from the wet lab and from the statistical analysis. Continue the discussion here....

Domestic Propaganda much better done than Foreign Propaganda

From ProPublica: Coming Sunday: A 60 Minutes and ProPublica Investigation: '60 Minutes' and ProPublica Investigation Finds the Government's $100 Million a Year Broadcasts to the Arab World are Woefully Mismanaged and Poorly Supervised Despite Complaints From Congress. In Their First Joint Investigation, They Uncover Internal Documents from Diplomats Complaining about the Poor Quality of Al Hurra's Broadcast and Its Lack of Transparency and Professionalism.

Joke

Shamelessly ripped from an internal newsgroup (thanks to AY): A Buddhist went up to the hotdog seller and said: "Make me one with everything". Anyway, he got his hotdog and after not receiving his change, he asked for it. "My friend," replied the vendor, "the change must come from within". And if you don't like that... And pulled from the comments:

Moving on to Delft

... where the wireless is cheaper than in Amsterdam. W00T! Conference starts tomorrow (really more like a workshop, I think). And I just wanted to share a photo of this cool tile I just bought. It's from the 1940s, and is of a canal and the Oude Kerk (Old Church, that's the one from the 1300s, rather than the Nieuwe Kerk, New Church, from the 1600).

Maybe we humans know only measurable things

From friend-of-The-World's-Fair WJG comes a link to The Grass Seed, a graphic story/comic strip by Claudia Davila at Ballyhoo Stories. Read on from the link above. It's a five-sheet story. A meditation, in part, on embodied knowledge, sensory limitations, or the limits of knowledge. One composed from a view other than that of the practicing scientist. You'll have your own take.

Global Turndown?

From the New York Times: From Australia, to Asia and Europe and the United States on Wednesday, the message in the latest economic reports was clear: manufacturing continued to slump amid the worst slowdown since the Great Depression. And yet today, the fickle Dow topped 9,000, but I can't shake the memory of that email from September... Are readers optimistic for 2009?

Ouch!

(Photo from National Geographic) A young victim of Kenya's post-election violence waits at a hospital in Nakuru to have an arrow removed from the back of his skull. The ethnic conflicts have claimed the lives of more than 1,000 people, and the country now faces a humanitarian crisis, with about 310,000 people from the eastern and central provinces fleeing their homes.

Human Evolution News

A new genetic analysis of people from around the world adds further confirmation to the African origin of humans. The study of genetic details from 938 individuals from 51 populations provides evidence of how people are related and different, researchers led by Richard M. Myers of Stanford University report in Friday's issue of the journal Science. [Read it at the New York Times]

Breathe cleaner air while you cycle

An Industrial Design and Technology student from Brunel University in West London has designed an air-filtering cycle helmet and respirator that will filter out air pollutants and contaminants while you ride. It may be useful for those who suffer from severe allergies or hay fever. Would you wear this, though? Seems bulky to me. Read more from this Brunel University press release

Links

John Quiggin points to an interesting compilation of fake Internet identities. Tbogg is surprised that there are still media organizations that take Lott seriously. He also wonders where Lott got his numbers from. Well, the defensive gun use numbers come from this survey Lott says he did, while the statistic about public school shootings was manufactured by selective quoting from news stories.

Why I am a liar straight from the pit of hell

"It took less than an hour to make the atoms, a few hundred million years to make the stars and planets, but five billion years to make man!" -George Gamow Earlier today, a video (from last month) was released where one of the members of the US House of Representative -- a member who sits on the House Committee for Science, Space and Technology -- proudly proclaimed the following: "All that stuff I was taught about evolution, embryology, the big bang theory; all of that is lies straight from the pit of hell." -Paul Broun Well, if the Big Bang is a lie from the pit of hell, then the Universe…

Global Warming Advocate Shoots Self in Head?

According to robbservations.blogspot, which may not be the most reliable of sources. Also, it is from 2009, so not fresh either; but someone asked about it so I thought I'd reply. Context: The theory of anthropogenic Global Warming rests on the so-called "idealized greenhouse model". This Wikipedia link (Idealized greenhouse model) by a "climate researcher" and global warming advocate presents the core theory, and offers excellent insight into the problems of the fundamental premise of global warming, though that is not his intent. It might be fairer to look at the version from December 2009…

Direct and Indirect Heating: Why Don't Power Plants Change Local Climate?

This past weekend, I was at Boskone, where I appeared on a few science-y panels. One of these was on the possibility of beaming power down from space: Energy From Space Beam me down some juice, Scotty? Let's talk about the possibilities -- and practicalities -- of really long-distance power transmission. Tom Easton (M), Jordin T. Kare, Chad Orzel, Jeff Hecht, Joan Slonczewski This was a little odd, as Jordin does this for a living-- he's been working on a proposal to NASA for a solar power generating satellite that would use lasers to beam power down to photovoltaic panels on the ground--…

Argument from ignorance, ignorance the size of Alaska

She has so much of it to spread around, too. Sarah Palin's memoir reveals her unsurprising opinion about evolution. Elsewhere in this volume, she talks about creationism, saying she "didn't believe in the theory that human beings — thinking, loving beings — originated from fish that sprouted legs and crawled out of the sea" or from "monkeys who eventually swung down from the trees." In everything that happens to her, from meeting Todd to her selection by Mr. McCain for the Republican ticket, she sees the hand of God: "My life is in His hands. I encourage readers to do what I did many years…

Kodos or Kang?

I've always wondered where this strange meme of one-eyed cephalopods came from — here's a poster from the heyday of B movies that suggests it has been around for at least 50 years. That's from a site with a collection of old movie posters, that brings up old memories. I used to pedal my bike over by the old Vale movie theater in Kent right after school to browse the coming attractions. Most were pretty forgettable, but when it was always exciting to discover one of these cheesy posters (and the cheesier the better) heralding a monster movie for the Saturday matinee. A lot of these look very…

Nice essay by Simon A. Levin in the latest PLoS - Biology

Fundamental Questions in Biology. Here is a quote from the end: The questions that biologists from diverse subdisciplines are asking have commonalities that make clear the continued existence of fundamental challenges that unify biology and that should form the core of much research in the decades to come. Some of these questions are as follows: What features convey robustness to systems? How different should we expect the robustness of different systems to be, depending on whether selection is operating primarily on the whole system or on its parts? How does robustness trade off against…

Pretty bird

I have never seen these birds around here before, yet, over the last few days I saw tons of them all over the place. Where did they come from? Why do they seem to still be paired this late in the summer? At first, I saw them flying, mostly from the car, and their flight is undulating, almost pulsating. Then, yesterday when I was walking the dog, I followed a pair around, from tree to tree, until I managed to get a good look at one of them for a good minute or so. I was surprised at how much larger they look in flight than when sitting still. Anyway, after getting a good look, I went home…

Glöggt er gests augað

The Aspen Art Museum is doing a series of interdisciplinary lectures, titled "Another Look" Another Look Lecture: Gabriel Orozco & Cosmology - so this is a thing. I did one of the lectures. The first one, I gather. It was quite an interesting experience, for me at least. Good fun, riffing on the perspective from physics on Orozco's work, which is partially inspired by astronomy and thoughts on cosmology. MoMA was very helpful in providing a perspective on Orozco's work over the years. The actual exhibition was very interesting. The central floor display piece was quite startling in…

Double the volcano fun

Second fissure has opened up northwest of the original on Fimmvörðuháls, east of Eyjafjallajökull. This is NOT towards Katla. Geologists on site saw the fissure open as it happened. As of this evening it is still growing, with 7 centers of eruption. Þórsmörk has been closed, lave should flow north towards it. Hikers on the northside were evacuated by helicopter. RUV initial report with webcam photo (icelandic) webcam link you can see it even in the dark. Better live view from the south both from mila.is double your pleasure Original fissure has a spectacular lava fall, currently there is…

Going down

Cruise ship sinking off Argentina says the BBC. And "Passengers and crew have been rescued off Argentina from a cruise liner, which began sinking after it hit ice. The M/S Explorer ran into trouble near King George Island in the Antarctic Ocean, near the South Shetland Islands. Andy Cattrell, of the UK's Falmouth Coastguard, told the BBC about 100 passengers and 54 crew members have been evacuated and are in lifeboats." I hope "rescued" isn't too optimistic... they are still a long way from civilisation in small lifeboats. [Update: everyone is now xferred to another ship, it seems. And the…

The significance of 5 year trends

5 year trends from surface temperature are not very significant and are a bad measure of anything. As everyone should know. But it seems that some people don't. So in tedious detail... Pick up the HadCRU temperature series from here. Compute 5, 10 and 15 year trends running along the data since 1970 and get (black lines data, thicker black same but smoothed, thin straight lines non-sig trends; thick straight blue lines sig trends): From which you can see (I hope) that the series is definitely going up; that 15 year trends are pretty well all sig and all about the same; that about 1/2 the 10…

Veterans on Flag Burning

As the Senate prepares to debate a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning, and appears to be only one vote away from passing it, ThinkProgress has put together a short list of statements from veterans who are opposed to such an amendment. I'll just highlight a couple of them. From Colin Powell: The First Amendment exists to insure that freedom of speech and expression applies not just to that with which we agree or disagree, but also that which we find outrageous. I would not amend that great shield of democracy to hammer a few miscreants. The flag will still be flying proudly long…

#Ebola in West Africa: Update

WHO has put out very few updates in the last several days. The most current update is August 28th, and it pertains to information from August 26th and before. Based on that update, the total number of cases (confirmed, suspected, etc.) is ow 3069 with 1552 deaths. The number of new cases per day may be increasing, may be decreasing; hard to say at this point. Here's the new cases per day since the second week of July: Senegal now has one case, a person who traveled there from Guinea. He had contact with a lot of people including health workers and family before it was figured he may have…

Deepwater Horizon oil spill: "Top Kill" not looking so good

There remain more questions than answers at this point, but the BP spin from yesterday that "Top Kill" was working appears to have been a falsehood. BP is not the right source for what the actual data from the well head means, but unfortunately they are the only source of said data. I would like to offer interested readers a couple of better sources of technical information. This is the live feed from 5000 ft below the Gulf of Mexico. Apparently what this is showing now (11:02 AM Pacific time) is alot of drilling mud being ejected. This mud is what is intended to counteract the upward…

My Esteem for Calvin Coolidge Just Went Up

Recently i have been browsing through a book called What About Darwin?, which is a collection of quotations from various worthies regarding -- surprise! -- Charles Darwin. One that jumped out at me was a statement from Calvin Coolidge. This is from a letter he wrote to his father: I see [Oliver Wendell] Holmes [Sr] is dead, the Autocrat of the Breakfast table on whom the years sat so lightly and who had only just declared that he was 85 years young. No one but [William] Gladstone is left of those great men that were born in 1809. Darwin is gone, the great expounder of evolution, a…

Quantum Diet

Eat anything you want and lose weight? How? By using quantum physics of course!: Freedom From Food looks at food and weight from a unique vantage point. It examines the mind/body connection - how your thoughts and emotions affect your body. The book points out that there is abundant scientific evidence in quantum physics to show that our thoughts and emotions directly affect our physical form. From this perspective, food is not seen as "good" or "bad" for the body. I'm still looking through the postulates of quantum physics to find how thoughts and emotions are used in quantum theory?…

Newly described glue-spraying worm from Vietnam

Image of velvet worm from: Oliveira et al / Zoologischer Anzeiger A new species of velvet worm (Eoperipatus totoros) is the first to be described from Vietnam after its discovery in 2010. This 2.5 inch long worm is distinguished from other velvet worms by hairs with unique shapes that cover its body.  These animals are difficult to find and study because they are usually hiding in the moist soil to prevent dehydration. However, during the rainy season, they exit the soil and can be spotted. What is neat about these worms is that they hunt by spraying a glue-like substance from two…

Triumph in Canada

Remember that silly blood type nonsense from the Canadian Blood Services? It's gone, replaced with a much simpler page that states that your blood type will be determined when you give blood. A few people have received email from CBS admitting that they've removed the nonsense. Dr. Sher has asked me to respond to your recent e-mail regarding our What's Your Type? new donor recruitment program. I understand that you have also sent an e-mail communicating your concerns to www.whatsyourtype@blood.ca and that others from our organization have provided you with specific details in response. I…

I get email

It's a question from Israel, so it was right-aligned. Too bad it wasn't written from right to left or it would have been more interesting. sorry for my bad english. someone gave me a strong evidence for a design a)we know that all robots need a designer b)from a material prespective, the human is an organic self replicator robot a+b=the human need a designer what you think? yours... Ooooh, logic is fun! a) We know that all robots use batteries or plug into an electrical outlet. b)from a material prespective, the human is an organic self replicator robot a+b=the human need a battery or…

Plimer fails to answer Monbiot's questions

Instead of answering Monbiot's questions, Plimer has responded with his own set of questions. I suspect that this is a tactic so he can weasel out of answering Monbiot's questions. My favourite question from Plimer is this one (which isn't even a question): 6 From ocean current velocity, palaeotemperature and atmosphere measurements of ice cores and stable and radiogenic isotopes of seawater, atmospheric CO2 and fluid inclusions in ice and using atmospheric CO2 residence times of 4, 12, 50 and 400 years, numerically demonstrate that the modern increase in atmospheric CO2 could not derive…

Commenting on Zerhouni Commenting on the NIH Funding Decline

Since we had an interesting discussion here back in September about the rapid decline in success rates of NIH R01 grants, I should point readers over to Effect Measure for some informed commentary on a recent article in Science (subscription required) from NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni. The success rate of Type-1 grants, for example, fell by more than one half from 2000 to 2005, a bad sign coming from the nation's flagship biomedical research grant program. Certainly, then, Zerhouni has some 'splainin' to do. I'll defer to Effect Measure, though, to summarize and comment on Zerhouni's…

Plagiarists are really stupid

Another instance of a really dumb plagiarist, from The New York Times Corrections: In a number of business articles in The Times over the past year, and in posts on the DealBook blog on NYTimes.com, a Times reporter appears to have improperly appropriated wording and passages published by other news organizations. The reporter, Zachery Kouwe, reused language from The Wall Street Journal, Reuters and other sources without attribution or acknowledgment. You work for The New York Times, and you plagiarize from The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, etc.? Seriously. Dude even paid for J-school. Am I…

USGS/SI Weekly Volcanic Activity Report for May 12-18, 2010

The latest Weekly Volcanic Activity Report from our friends at the Smithsonian Global Volcanism Program and the USGS. Highlights (not including Eyjafjallajökull - you can check the latest IMO update on that eruption and the latest VAAC ash advisories.): Villarrica in Chile was raised from Alert Level 1 to 2 by the Chilean SERNAGEOMIN after an increase in seismicity, a rise in the lava lake levels at the summit and more vigorous fumarolic activity. In the first update in a while, a small ash plume was noticed at Chaiten in Chile, rising to ~1.8 km (8,000 feet) from the new domes. Karymsky in…

SI/USGS Weekly Volcano Activity Report for 7/15-21/2009

Your volcano news! Thanks, as always, to the USGS/SI Global Volcanism Program. Highlights include: The alert level at Sakurajima was raised from 2 to 3 by the Japanese Meteorological Agency. This was due to the increasing frequency of explosions at the volcano, some of which produced ash plumes up to 1.8-2.7 km / 6-9,000 feet. Ash was reported up to 3 km away from Ibu in Indonesia. However, officials in Indonesia lowered the alert from 3 to 2, but tourists are still restricted from going with 2 km of the volcano. Lots of activity at Shiveluch in Kamchatka. You can see some of the activity in…

Explosions and a pyroclastic flow at Soufriere Hills

Just to keep everyone on their toes, Soufriere Hills on Montserrat in the West Indies erupted today. The eruption produced a number of explosions and a pyroclastic flow that originated from the west side of the lava dome at the summit of the volcano. However, the most interesting bit comes from the Montserrat Volcano Observatory (MVO) report I received this morning: "The explosion happened without any warning. There was no precursory seismic activity." Sounds like it could have been a dome collapse caused by a rapid release of gas/steam? The explosion apparently threw blocks as far as a…

Abortion & blood groups

On page 380 of Population Genetics and Microevolutionary Theory I stumbled onto some interesting data from the 1970s. The paper was Admixture Studies and the Detection of Selection , and its aim was to gage the extent of white ancestry within black populations. They generated a measure, M, for the extent of ancestry across a range of loci like so: change in allele frequency between African Americans and West Africans ____________________________________________________________ change in allele frequency between Europeans and West Africans In short M relates the ratio of the genetic…

Promptness is not a virtue at the FDA

With all the concern about contamination of imported food ingredients, especially from a major exporter like China, you'd think the US Food and Drug Administration would be eager to make whatever information it has available to US food producers as quickly as possible. You know what's coming next: Lee Sanders, a senior vice president with the American Bakers Association, requested FDA documents on imported honey in 2002. The Washington-based association wanted to know about a pesticide in honey imported from China, she said in an interview. "You would hope that those types of requests would…

Time for MSHA to Redefine Mining-Related Deaths

The first story about the death of Mr. Ricky "Mud Puddle" Collins came on Thursday afternoon (3/27) in an AP story Massey Miner Killed in Logan County. The short news clip mentioned a miner employed at Massey Energy's Freeze Fork Surface Mine in Logan County, who we later learned was Mr. Collins, 43, of Dan's Branch, WV. The article said he: "died while working on a trailer at a railroad crossing near Stollings in Logan County Thursday,"  but "MSHA is not investigating the accident because it did not occur on mine property." An article the next day said the trailer "saddle-bagged" over the…

Emerging Disease and Zoonoses #13--new swine influenza virus detected

Novel Swine Influenza Virus Subtype H3N1, United States In several of my influenza posts, I've discussed ways that the viruses can evolve. These are termed "antigenic drift," where the virus accumulates small mutations in the RNA genome; and antigenic shift, where large sections of the genome are swapped, generally in their entirety. While it was long thought that the latter was the most likely type of mutation to cause a pandemic, we now know that even the right kind of antigenic drift may be enough to allow a novel influenza virus to enter the human population, which seems to have…

Chicken, UTIs, and a long-festering antibiotic problem

If you haven't yet read Maryn McKenna's riveting Atlantic article "How Your Chicken Dinner is Creating a Drug-Resistant Superbug," you should. McKenna, working with the with the Food and Environment Reporting Network, has delved into research that's been accumulating about the association between the extensive use of antibiotics in poultry and the increase in drug-resistant urinary tract infections. A quick bit of background: For decades, health officials and advocates have been concerned about the overuse of antibiotics. The more you use an antibiotic, the more quickly bacteria resistant to…

Jon Stewart Bad for Democracy?

The Washington Post has declared that Jon Stewart and the Daily Show may be "poisoning democracy." Why? Because by exposing the lies and contradictions of our leaders, the show makes people more cynical about politics. Well, duh. Why on earth is that a bad thing? We don't suffer from a lack of cynicism in this country, for crying out loud, we suffer from a lack of it. The reasoning behind this criticism is hilarious. Jody Baumgartner and Jonathan S. Morris of East Carolina University said previous research found that nearly half -- 48 percent -- of this age group watched "The Daily Show" and…

The Last 100 Years: The 1930s and Fritz Zwicky

There are many great discoveries that happened in the 1930s that changed our view of the Universe. From tiny discoveries (the neutron) to huge ones (Pluto), from theoretical explanations of antimatter to the neutrino to the start of quantum field theory, the 1930s were a great time for making new discoveries. But one man often gets left out of these discussions, IMO, because he was too far ahead of his time. Meet Fritz Zwicky. Born in Bulgaria, a citizen of Switzerland, and did his best work at Caltech. (In fact, his daughter Barberina has noticed my old site!) Fritz was in the very tough…

News From Space

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has acquired data that seems to indicate that Mars has dry-ice snowfalls. From a press release by NASA: Frozen carbon dioxide, better known as "dry ice," requires temperatures of about minus 193 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 125 Celsius), which is much colder than needed for freezing water. Carbon-dioxide snow reminds scientists that although some parts of Mars may look quite Earth-like, the Red Planet is very different. The report is being published in the Journal of Geophysical Research. "These are the first definitive detections of carbon-dioxide snow clouds,"…