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Michele Bachmann sneaks a correction into the record

From Dump Bachmann: In the beginning of this video Bachmann says she is a "former federal tax litigation attorney". Bachmann was introduced on a Fox talking heads show recently as a "federal tax attorney". Actually, if I recall correctly, Bachmann's J.D. is from Oral Roberts (since de-accredited), and her LL.M. in tax law is from William and Mary's Marshall-Wythe School. She has not been legally able on the bar, or whatever they call it, for a long time.

Quick, easy, 3D model from 2D flickr images

This group can build a 3D model from millions of flickr images from any city/location/public restroom. Amazing! Scholars at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have developed a method for creating 3D models of pretty much anything in pretty much no time. Using a sexy algorithm and the millions of photographs available from Flickr, the team can create a sophisticated three-dimensional model on a single personal computer in under a day. Check out the video:

Rorty has died

The Leiter Report has a brief obit. Richard Rorty was a significant thinker, although I must say that what I learned from his work Philosophy and the MIrror of Nature, I had to unlearn later on. But that is the way of philosophical discussions. More from Telos, courtesy of Mixing Memory. I just heard from those who knew him that he died after a 15 month battle with pancreatic cancer. Until shortly before his death, he was quite active.

Did I just lose half of my subscribers?

This morning, I noticed that the number of subscribers displayed in my feed count (the orange rectangle on the left) had dropped drastically, from more than 800 to 415, and started wondering why my readers are unsubscribing en masse from my RSS feed. But it turns out that there has been a glitch in the subscriber stats from Google Feedfetcher stats: they were offline all day yesterday, and the service should return to normal tomorrow.

IN Cells, in (fluorescent) color

These are images of cells from GE's IN Cell Analyzer Competition 2010: every year we invite IN Cell Analyzer users to submit their images to the IN Cell Image Competition. This year we have received over 70 fabulous images from researchers' worldwide, working in areas such as toxicology, malaria, dermatology, obesity, cancer and neurology. See the full-size images in all their fluorescent glory, and the winners from 2009, at GE's flickr page.

Open Access Beer

Generally, inhabitants of Bohemia (western region of the Czech Republic) are known to drink more beer than people from Moravia (eastern region of the country). This difference was confirmed for my sample of researchers: researchers from Bohemia drank significantly more beer per capita per year (median 200.0 litres) than those from Moravia What's it all about? You need to see this study of Open Access Beer by Coturnix at A Blog Around the Clock. Seriously.

Bringing Guns to Obama's Talk in Minneapolis

I discussed the Hendrickson Incident here (and now Josh Henderson has come to Quiche Moraine to defend himself from the Hippies from Uptown) but I had missed, until Hendrickson himself pointed it out to me, this coverage from the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. To see Hendrickson's response, and some great "examples" of the use of "quotation" marks, here's Henderson's "blog" post on the matter. I suggest you put on a pair of these before visiting Josh's site.

So much for a free press

The Wichita Eagle reports that a proposed state law would allow censorship of letters from sex offenders at a state medical hospital. The bill follows an Eagle report on dangerous conditions at the hotel which was based on a tip from an inmate. I understand the rationale for censoring communications to past or potential victims. But the news media and state officials regularly receive mail from many different people, and have ways to screen their communications.

Comments of the Week #107: from looking like a scientist to Earth Day lessons

“I left Earth three times and found no other place to go. Please take care of Spaceship Earth.” -Wally Schirra We've made it through another amazing week here at Starts With A Bang, and what many of you might not realize is that there was a fabulous new release thanks to the support of everyone on Patreon: a new Podcast, this time on Planet Nine! The Universe is still delivering hordes of wonder to anyone and everyone curious about it, and that's why last week saw us cover the following topics: Why don't you look like a scientist? (for Ask Ethan), Mars gears up for its closest approach to…

Comments of the Week #32: From black hole death to cold fusion crackpots

"Out, you impostors! Quack salving, cheating mountebanks! your skill Is to make sound men sick, and sick men kill." -Philip Massinger It's been a wild ride full of ups-and-downs this week, as we've covered topics from solidly-based science to the theoretically expected, all the way to physical impossibilities and unverifiable, outlandish claims. Sometimes, that's what you get here at Starts With A Bang! If you missed anything, take a look back at everything we've covered this past week, including: How do black holes die? (for Ask Ethan), Your city in fantasy (for our Weekend Diversion), The…

The body swap illusion

Body ownership - the sense that one's body belongs to one's self - is central to self-awareness, and yet is something that most of us take completely for granted. We experience our bodies as being an integral part of ourselves, without ever questioning how we know that our hands belong to us, or how we can distinguish our body from its surroundings. These issues have long intrigued philosophers and psychologists, but had not been investigated by neuroscientists until recently. Now researchers from the Karolinska Institute report that they have induced a "body-swap" illusion, whereby…

Did "electromagnetic hypersensitivity" lead to the suicide of a teenage girl?

Blog topics seem to come in waves, where I'll be stuck on more deeply examining a topic for days, only to have that topic dry up. Sometimes, you, my readers, make me aware of a topic. This is an example of the latter case. It's something I had been debating about whether to blog about because I just wasn't sure what to make of it, and it's also a very, very depressing—even tragic—story. But the drip, drip, drip of people pointing me to the story reminded me that with great power comes great responsibility. (OK, with middling blog power comes a modicum of responsibility.) So I thought I'd try…

This is getting fun! On to Monoidal Categories.

In the last post on groups and related stuff, I talked about the algebraic construction of monoids. A monoid is, basically, the algebraic construction of a category - it's based on the same ideas, and has the same properties; just the presentation of it is different. But you can also see a monoid in categorical terms. It's what we computer scientists would call a bootstrapped definition: we're relying on the fact that we have all of the constructs of category theory, and then using category theory to rebuild its own basic concepts. The basic idea of the construction is to start pretty much…

Swine flu: a quick overview--and new New York and Kansas cases

Sorry for the radio silence--I've been working on grants and manuscripts like a fiend, and so have tried to limit as many distractions as possible (which, unfortunately, includes blogging). However, the swine flu news is right up my alley, so I do just want to say a few words about it, and point you to some excellent stories already up elsewhere. First, in case you've not been paying attention to the news in the last few days, there have been 8 reported cases of swine influenza infections in humans (6 in California and 2 in Texas, with additional suspected cases) and reports from Mexico…

Horrible Anti-Evolution Article

Perhaps I awarded September's Robert O'Brien Trophy too soon, before I became aware of "Dr" Don Boys and this breathtakingly bad piece of anti-evolution agitprop. Even by creationist standards, this is a ridiculous article, chock full of unsourced "quotes" and lots of rhetoric, but virtually no substantive argument. And the very first sentence offers a great opportunity to take a look at "Dr" Boys: Evolution is pure quackery and purveyors of this foolishness should be branded as quacks. They are phony intellectuals (and a Ph.D. doesn't add credibility to a phony) and venders of ancient…

Being Casey Luskin

Sometimes I wonder what it is like to be a blogger for the Discovery Institute. Imagine the strain of getting up every morning, swallowing every ounce of pride and intellectual integrity you might possess, and searching desperately through the media for something, anything, you can present as hostile to evolution or favorable to ID. It's exhausting work. Yet somehow there are folks like Casey Luskin who seem not just able, but actually willing to do it. On Wednesday I discussed the recent hominid fossils found in Africa, one belonging to Homo habilis, the other to Homo erectus. From the…

Idle Physics Query: Whistling Bombs

Not that long ago, SteelyKid was doing something violent with toys (she's very tough, as you can see from the featured image above), and in the process made the canonical falling-bomb whistle noise. And it occurred to me to wonder, why that sound? I mean, I've seen footage of falling bombs and the canonical sound seems like an accurate enough. But I'm not sure I understand it from a physics perspective. Specifically, when you do the falling-bomb whistle, you do a whistle that decreases in pitch. But the bomb is falling faster as it approaches the ground, so if anything, I would expect the…

Worse than terrifying?

My favorite Sunday morning NPR radio host , Liane Hansen, introduced a story about the release of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change synthesis report by describing its contents as "terrifying." Later in the day I came across an AFP report on a study from Australia's Climate Institute, from which we learn that "greenhouse gas emissions are rising faster than worst-case predictions" from the IPCC. So reality is worse than terrifying? Hold on a sec. It is true that the Australian report does make for more worrisome reading than the IPCC synthesis. For one thing, the latter is…

Cultured chimps pass on new traditions between groups

For humans, our culture is a massive part of our identity, from the way we dress, speak and cook, to the social norms that govern how we interact with our peers. Our culture stems from our ability to pick up new behaviours through imitation, and we are so innately good at this that we often take it for granted. We now know that chimpanzees have a similar ability, and like us, different groups have their own distinct cultures and traditions. Now, Andrew Whiten from the University of St Andrews has published the first evidence that groups of chimpanzees can pick up new traditions from each…

The times they are a-changin'

Even if it is only due to repetition almost everyone is familiar with a few geological dates. That the non-avian dinosaurs became extinct about 65 million years ago and the earth is around 4.5 billion years old are figures that are at least familiar to many. (There are a few folks who would prefer to jam the entirety of geologic time into just a few thousand years, of course, but I will not worry over them here.) It truly is wonderful that we have been able to lay out such a detailed map of Deep Time but this was not always so. Today's standard geologic time scale, with all its time…

Rabid brain circuits

The brain is an organ of staggering complexity, consisting of hundreds of billions of cells (and tens of thousands of different cell types) which form millions of specialized circuits that are organized into thousands of discrete areas. Neuroscientists have a number of methods for investigating brain circuitry and the connectivity of neurons within circuits. One of these involves exploiting the abilities of certain viruses, such as the herpes viruses, to target nerve cells; genetically manipulated viruses can be used to trace the synaptic connections between cells. This method has its…

A Healthy Dose of Skepticism

With the latest Big Pharma debacle ("Hey, let's shoot ourselves in the other foot") from the Prozacasaurus' overmarketing of Zyprexa (see Grrl's, Jake's, and David's (addendum, 12/21) blog entries on the subject), this recent (and free access) article from PLoS Medicine: Educating Health Professionals about Drug and Device Promotion: Advocates' Recommendations seems particularly relevant. Nephrology News and Issues provided a good summary of the PLoS article: A group of physicians and advocacy groups is taking on pharmaceutical promotions, calling in a journal article for an overhaul of…

Odontogriphus omalus

(click for larger image) A new report in this week's Nature clears up a mystery about an enigmatic fossil from the Cambrian. This small creature has been pegged as everything from a chordate to a polychaete, but a detailed analysis has determined that it has a key feature, a radula, that places it firmly in the molluscan lineage. It was a kind of small Cambrian slug that crawled over matted sheets of algae and bacteria, scraping away a meal. Here it is, a most unprepossessing creature. It was small (less than a 5 inches long), a flattened oval with few striking features, with a small mouth…

Early abelisaurs and fan-crested and stretch-jawed hadrosaurs

Continuing the theme of discussing 'things in the news', we arrive, finally, at dinosaurs. The previous 'late news' pieces looked at fossil anurans and pterosaurs, and assorted mammals. So what news has been announced recently-ish in the world of dinosaurs? Well, frankly, there are always so many newly announced dinosaurs that it's difficult to keep up. But... ... particularly cool is the recent description of the basal abelisaur Kryptops palaios and the carcharodontosaurid Eocarcharia dinops, both from the Aptian-Albian Elrhaz Formation of Niger (Sereno & Brusatte 2008) [in adjacent…

Housing Prices Will Keep Dropping...

...and the Mad Biologist told you so. A while back, I looked at median incomes and median housing prices and concluded that housing prices had to drop twenty to forty percent from their highs. I also thought that, given the ARM recasts due in 2010 and that too many in the U.S. are already over their heads in debt, it would be much closer to forty percent than twenty. Well, by way of Calculated Risk, we find that Fitch Ratings concurs: The projected losses also reflect an assumption that from the first quarter of 2009, home prices will fall an additional 12.5% nationally and 36% in…

Happy birthday J.B.S. Haldane

From Quotes of the Day: John Burdon Sanderson Haldane was born at Edinburgh, Scotland on this day in 1892. He was educated at Eton and Oxford, but possibly most important is the fact that he assisted his scientist father in the lab from age eight. His primary work was in genetics, being the first to provide a mathematical basis for Mendelian genetics and for Darwin's evolution. He taught at Oxford, Cambridge, and the University of London. In 1957 he became disgusted with policies of the British government and moved to India where he spent the rest of his life. -------------------------------…

Big Beagle Project news

It appears that the Beagle Project crew will have a trial run on the Brazilian ship Tocorime - not a replacement for building the Beagle, but getting the feet wet, seeing what is involved, learning from the experience, before the Real Deal. Funded by the British Council, they will circumnavigate around South America following that portion of the original Darwin's trip. From the proposal: The year 2009 marks the bicentenary of Charles Darwin's birth. Without a doubt the greatest influence on Darwin and the development of his theory of evolution came during his travels in and around South…

Weekend Diversion: How did I miss Mr. T doing this?

"I'm going to fight if you touch me or hurt me or do harm to my family. But if you call me a bad name, or whatnot, I'm too smart for that. That's the message the kids need to hear coming from me. I tell them, 'If I fought every time somebody called me a name, I would never get out of jail. But I'm disciplined. I'm smarter than that.' So I tell them, like my mother said, 'Consider the source.' When you see who called you the name, then you understand why they're doing it. Then you don't have to stoop that low." -Mr. T Ahh, Mr. T. Perhaps my favorite of the muscular, brash, but positive role…

No, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Squashing Curiosity And Wonder Is Never Okay

"Curious that we spend more time congratulating people who have succeeded than encouraging people who have not." -Neil deGrasse Tyson Last week, millions of people across the United States got to experience the awe and wonder of a total solar eclipse, many for the very first time. But in a puzzling event, astrophysicist and one of the world’s most famous science communicators, Neil deGrasse Tyson, decided to use his fame to put down a great many people who were excited about this rare cosmic event. And sadly, when someone explained to him why they would (correctly) say that eclipses are rare…

Solving The Mystery of Nebulae In Astronomy (Synopsis)

“From our home on the Earth, we look out into the distances ... to imagine the sort of world into which we are born… . But with increasing distance our knowledge fades, and fades rapidly, until at the last dim horizon we search among ghostly errors of observations for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial. The search will continue. The urge is older than history. It is not satisfied and it will not be suppressed.” -Edwin Hubble Once thought to include anything that wasn’t a star, moon or planet in the night sky, our understanding of nebulae has grown tremendously over the centuries.…

Rocket Science: Still Hard

Bad news from the worthwhile sections of this morning's New York Times: another SpaceX rocket blew up. A privately funded rocket was lost on its way to space Saturday night, bringing a third failure in a row to an Internet multimillionaire's effort to create a market for low-cost space-delivery. The accident occurred a little more than two minutes after launch, and the two-stage Falcon 1 rocket appeared to be oscillating before the live signal from an on-board video camera went dead. On the one hand, I hate to see these things blow up. I'm no free-market zealot, but I'm all for cheap space…

Coyne on Morality

Your required reading for today is Jerry Coyne's essay in the USA Today. His topic? Where morality comes from if not from God. Here's an excerpt: So where does morality come from, if not from God? Two places: evolution and secular reasoning. Despite the notion that beasts behave bestially, scientists studying our primate relatives, such as chimpanzees, see evolutionary rudiments of morality: behaviors that look for all the world like altruism, sympathy, moral disapproval, sharing -- even notions of fairness. This is exactly what we'd expect if human morality, like many other behaviors, is…

Links for 2009-09-14

They Should Have Called It "Darwin: The Revengination" « Whatever "Maybe if Charles Darwin were played by Will Smith, was a gun-toting robot sent back from the future to learn how to love, and to kill the crap out of the alien baby eaters cleverly disguised as Galapagos tortoises, and then some way were contrived for Jennifer Connelly to expose her breasts to RoboDarwin two-thirds of the way through the film, and there were explosions and lasers and stunt men flying 150 feet into the air, then we might be talking wide-release from a modern major studio. Otherwise, you know, not so much.…

Darwinism after Darwin: new historical perspectives

A conference announcement, for all who are fond of this Darwin person, dear old Mister Darwin. "Darwinism after Darwin" (indeed the subject of many a Scienceblogs post) is being sponsored by the British Society for the History of Science (BSHS) and hosted by the University of Leeds, from September 3rd - 5th 2007. Should the drive to submit a paper proposal find its way to you, be a dear and click here for details on the official Call for Papers. This gives us a chance to plaster a portrait of the young Chuck D: (image credit) One might even accuse us of writing this otherwise rudimentary…

American Views of Religious Groups and Atheists

With Pope Benedict's visit to the United States this week, Gallup has released a survey measuring Americans views on various religious groups as well as atheists. Favorable perceptions of atheists are down 2% from 2006, though this variation falls within the margin of error for the two surveys. Overall, favorable perceptions of all religious groups are down, perhaps a sign of the kind of growing intolerance for outgroups or dissimilar others that occurs during times of economic hardship. For example the increased negativity towards Muslims detailed below is a classic "scapegoat" indicator.…

Blogging on the Brain 8/07

Having just returned from a 3 week vacation to purchase (and then move into) a new home, I am finally now able to get back to posting. Here's just a very small subset of the best in brain-blogging while I was away: Fundamental limitations in predicting individual differences: the margin of error in predictive algorithms of individual behavior (as used, for example, by the UK Department of Health to determine whether an individual is fit for release from a psychiatric institution, and much more widely in marketing and finance) may be so high as to render some of these algorithms unusable.…

Sponging up bacterial infections

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are a pretty scary thing, which is why researchers are working so hard to come up with new and creative ways to fight them off. Take for example nanosponges. In a presentation from the Experimental Biology meeting in Chicago last month, researchers from the University of California in San Diego are testing the use of nanosponges (shown on the right in the figure below) to bind and inactivate toxins that are released from bacteria.   Image Credit: Tamara Escajadillo, University of California, San Diego Nanosponges are basically the membrane of red blood cells…

Learning new songs

New research shows that premotor neurons are activated in the brains of adolescent male zebra finches whenever a young bird hears their father (a tutor) sing. These are the same neurons that are usually activated in anticipation of movement. What is special about this, is that as the birds learned new songs or pieces of new songs, activation of these neurons declined. This effect was due to inhibitory interneurons whose firing frequency increased as the birds practiced and improved their accuracy. Activation of these inhibitory interneurons prevented any further changes to the circuitry once…

Could Camels Cure Cancer?

Image of camel from ukmedix news. Researchers from King Abdulaziz University (Jeddah) have tested the effectiveness of micro and nanoshells for delivering a substance from camel urine, PMF701, thought to be a cure for cancer. These findings will be presented at the 2nd Biotechnology World Congress (Feb 18-21). PMF701, not yet approved by the Saudi Food and Drug Authority, is currently in clinical trials. In a quote published by SciDev.net, the head of the university's tissue culture unit and the principal investigator of the project Faten Abdel-Rahman Khorshid stated, "We made a natural…

MoD begins traumatic brain injury study

The Guardian reports that the Ministry of Defence has just started a major study into traumatic brain injury (TBI) in British troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. In an accompanying article, the behavioural, cognitive, emotional and physical symptoms of this "silent injury" are described by the father of an American soldier who sustained TBI during a 24-month tour of duty in Iraq.  The official figures on TBI in American troops are based only on cases involving a penetrative head wound, and evidence published earlier this year in the Journal of Neurosurgery suggests that the high…

Wiley, Wikipedia (and I) Via Newsweek

In the fair use story that just won't die, my internet romp over the use of a figure from the Journal of Science of Food and Agriculture was mentioned in this story on Newsweek now. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, this article in The Scientist describes that incident factually. The Newsweek story's main focus, however, is a small dust up where a book published by Wiley appeared to have two pages plagarized from Wikipedia. The offending passage was noticed by the wiki's author, Ydorb, who noted the identical text on a Wikipedia forum. From there it was submitted to Slashdot who…

Mystery Image #3

What is this? A. The escape response of the smallest known cephalopod B. A recently auctioned photo series by Man Ray C. A fungus launching its high-speed spore D. Latex squirting from an opium poppy pod E. A medical nanodevice deploying into the bloodstream Answer below the fold. . . Well, this reminds me of the primitive, strangely organic black-and-white F/X from Georges Meliers' classic 1902 film La Voyage Dans La Lune, in which humanity's first spacecraft blasts off, only to smack the hapless Man in the Moon in the eye! You don't agree? Well, it is a blastoff - in fact, it's the…

Korea bottles deep-sea water

The Chosun Ilbo reports that Korea is joining an exclusive club of countries now bottling deep-sea water, along with U.S., Japan, Norway and Taiwan. The deep-sea water industry claims health benefits to the deep-sea water because it's "clean and bacteria free". Craig hates the idea of this stuff, but he tried deep water from Kona, and he liked it. The first bottled deep sea water made its debut in Korea on Thursday, with the launch of CJ's Ulleung Mine-water. The drinking water is processed from sea water that is pumped from a depth of 650 m below the surface of the East Sea off Ulleung…

Enormous 'Devil Toad' Remains Discovered in Madagascar

Scientists in Madagascar recently discovered the remains of a giant prehistoric frog, a relative of today's horned toads, which blew away the previous record for the largest known frog, Bennicus Bleimanicus. Dubbed Beelzebufo, meaning "frog from hell," the Devil Frog had important differences from today's frogs. To begin with, it was freakin huge. Susan Evans, a researcher from the University College of London, explained that if it was anything like its closest living forebears, "it would have been quite mean." Considering the fact that it was "the size of a slightly squashed beach-ball,…

Links: in which Earth is gorgeous and cool

I got back from a conference Tuesday night, and came home to the craziness of the semester's end. Part of me wants to blog about how cool undergraduate research is, after we had our big school-wide undergraduate research symposium, but I really should be grading the proposals for next year's senior thesis projects. (Which will be fantastic, too, though right now the students are a bit overwhelmed at the thought of the work they're planning to do.) So here are some things that made me say "oh, WOW" when I skimmed through my rss reader & Twitter: Guest photographer at Through the Sandglass…

Besides, I'm out of the closet on the cephalopodophilia thing

Tsk, tsk, Zeno…you've got a lot to learn about blackmail. First of all, you threaten to release the photos to the press and family and then ask for the money to prevent that from happening; you don't get the pictures published everywhere first. Secondly, the photos have to look something like me. OK, there is a dim resemblance in the one on the left, but I have an alibi—I was nowhere near New Zealand at the time. The one on the right is clearly very old from the costume, which is from my days in our band* back in the 1970s, before I married my wife. And she knows about the relationship. And…

Student guest post: Captain, our sensors have detected Prions moving into the Medula Oblangata!

Student guest post by Bradley Christensen No, this isn’t a clip from a science fiction movie.  Although dramatic, this does occur in the brains of some people and animals around on our home planet.  What is a prion you ask?  Prions are almost as mysterious to the scientists that research them as they are to me, you and the neighbor down the street.  Prion is a term used to describe an abnormal and particularly destructive strand of protein found in the brain.  Proteins are the building blocks of the muscles and tissues of our bodies that work combine together to perform different functions. …

New flu viruses emerge in tropical Asia before going on one-way world tour

Of the different types of flu virus, influenza A poses the greatest threat to human health and at any point in time, about 5-15% of the world's entire population are infected with these strains. Together, they kill up to half a million people every year and the death toll rises sharply when pandemics sweep the globe. Today, two papers published in Nature and Science shed new light on the origins of these epidemics. By prying into the private lives of flu viruses, the studies provide fresh clues about the birthplaces of new strains, their flight plans around the world and the locations…

Tasmanian Tigers are back!

OK, the title is deceptive; but the reality is kind of cool in my opinion (you may not share my normative filter; some people prefer the dead). PLOS One is publishing a paper which takes Tasmanian Tiger genetic material, and re-expresses it in vivo in mice! The reasoning for this is pretty straightforward; there are phylogenetic questions which extant lineages can't always answer. With the emergence of the whole field of ancient DNA extraction and sequencing an entirely new avenue of scientific analysis is opening up. This paper cites the work from last year on Neandertal MC1R; if we're…

Periodic Table of the ScienceBlogs, Part 3: Blogs C-D

The Cheerful Oncologist Categories: Medicine After earning a BA in English from Iowa State University, Craig Hildreth went on to acquire an MD from the University of Iowa, complete a medical oncology fellowship at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and become a partner in a five-doctor private cancer-care practice in St. Louis. In 2004, the experience of caring for a friend's parents as they both died of cancer nudged the bibliophilic doctor back to his literary roots. The Cheerful Oncologist began as a way to write about the world of cancer, both to spread encouragement and provide…