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Why Jade scares me.

OK, if you clicked through the links in my answers to the ABC meme, you know an embarrassing personal detail about me: I rather enjoy watching America's Next Top Model. (Truth be told, I wouldn't enjoy it nearly so much were it not enhanced by the reading of snarky episode recaps by Potes. And, as it turns out, regular commenter Uncle Fishy knows Potes from when he lived in Providence -- so I had to read the recaps.) If you don't like wallowing in the depravity of others (which is to say, my depravity), feel free to go read a classic post from the vault. Otherwise, read on. So, Top Model…

Alternative Energy Isn't Always Expensive

There are so many depressing studies on energy policy that I thought it was worth highlighting an optimistic one. The Rand Corp. just produced an analysis which predicts that alternative energy sources (like wind, solar and ethanol) could furnish as much as 25% of the U.S.'s conventional energy by 2025 at little or no additional expense. From the WSJ: The Rand study concludes that because prices for gasoline, natural gas and coal are likely to remain high, their cost advantage over renewables will erode, furthered by the hope that ethanol from farm wastes will be available by 2020. Renewable…

Friday Flotsam: Caribou versus the volcano, watching Marianas volcanoes and the plume at Kilauea

Catching up with some news: Anatahan erupting in the northern Mariana Islands in 2003. I ran across this article right before I got sick, but its been popping up around the interwebs (and is pretty interesting). It details a study in Molecular Ecology that suggests that populations of caribou in Canada's Yukon Territory were strongly effected by the White River Tephra. The White River Tephra is supposedly the largest Holocene plinian tephra (from a ash cloud fallout), with two components dating from ~1900 years ago and ~1250 years ago. The vent for the WRT is likely from a vent beneath the…

Sarychev Peak eruption update for 6/16/2009

Matua Islands (also known as Matsuwa Island), home of Sarychev Peak. The eruption of Sarychev Peak in the Kuril Islands has been wreaking havoc on flights to and from Asia for the past few days (as many Eruptions readers can attest). You can see the latest VAAC (Volcano Ash Advisory Center) statement here that shows ash to at least FL380 (38,000 feet / 11 km). Predicted ash movement (see below) for the next couple of days has ash moving to the southeast of the volcano and the U.S. Air Force has detected ash as far as 1500 miles / 2400 km southeast and 575 miles / 900 km northwest of the…

Economic barriers in the elite University (and in science)

This week at #scio14, Danielle Lee is leading a discussion on privilege in science. I'd started this post and abandoned it a few weeks back, but I think it speaks to a similar phenomenon as she describes in her post. Low-income students are being lost not only to science, but often to the college experience in general. This is amplified at elite institutions, but even at the public institutions I've worked at, lower income students are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to preparing for any kind of graduate or professional post-bac training.  My first introduction to one of my…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 74 new articles in PLoS ONE today. Browse for your own choices - these are mine: A 28,000 Years Old Cro-Magnon mtDNA Sequence Differs from All Potentially Contaminating Modern Sequences: DNA sequences from ancient speciments may in fact result from undetected contamination of the ancient specimens by modern DNA, and the problem is particularly challenging in studies of human fossils. Doubts on the authenticity of the available sequences have so far hampered genetic comparisons between anatomically archaic (Neandertal) and early modern (Cro-Magnoid) Europeans. We typed the…

Counting work-related injuries, disease and death among U.S. workers: Part 3

If you want to keep all your digits and limbs, you probably want to avoid working at Anheuser-Busch's Metal Container Corp., in Arnold, Missouri. That worksite was recently cited by OSHA for hazards related to incidents last fall in which one worker lost fingers in machinery, and another worker had a foot amputated because of a forklift incident. The 13 serious and one willful violation come with a proposed $107,200 penalty. Those two work-related amputations are just two of the estimated 3.9 million cases of injuries and illness that occur each year in U.S. workplaces. About a third of…

How Big is the Entire Universe?

"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." -Stephen Hawking The Universe is a vast, seemingly unending marvel of existence. Over the past century, we've learned that the Universe stretches out beyond the billions of stars in our Milky Way, out across billions of light years, containing close to a trillion galaxies all told. Image credit: NASA, ESA, S. Beckwith (STScI) and the HUDF Team. And yet, that's just the observable Universe! There are good reasons to believe that the Universe continues on and on beyond the limits of what we can see; the…

Early "Baleen Whale" Was a Tooth-Bearing Mud-Grubber

A restoration of Mammalodon by Brian Choo (published in Fitzgerald, 2009). In the introduction to his 1883 lecture on whales, the English anatomist William Henry Flower said; Few natural groups present so many remarkable, very obvious, and easily appreciated illustrations of several of the most important general laws which appear to have determined the structure of animal bodies, as that selected for my lecture this evening. We shall find the effects of the two opposing forces--that of heredity or conformation to ancestral characters, and that of adaptation to changed environment, whether…

Dang #@$%& computer

I was going to blog along with the talks today, but my note-taking computer, a little netpc, decided to turn up dead on arrival when I sat down to start listening — I had to take notes on paper. It felt medieval. There were a bunch of good talks and I'll transcribe them later when I get a chance. For now, I just have a brief moment before I head off to the next event, so I'll leave you with a couple of Immensely Difficult Questions for Evolution that were just sent to me. Q1. If humans evolved from monkeys, why are there not any other intelligent beings that have evolved from other animals?…

Words as Weapons

While I'm away at the Evolution 2006 Meeting, I'll leave you with some posts from the archive of the Mad Biologist (Intelligent Designer, I love this scheduled post thingee). This one is about the misuse of language by creationists (originally published Feb. 9, 2005). From time to time, I get emails from people asking me about evolution (they range from the curious to dogmatic anti-evolutionists). One common refrain I hear from the anti-evolutionists is "evolution is just a theory." This comment also pops up over and over again on widely-read blogs, such as the Washington Monthly. Now, the…

Influenza and Antibiotics

From the archives comes this post about the effect antibiotic resistance could have during an influenza outbreak. I recently corresponded with someone in a position to make public health policy who wanted to know what effect antibiotic resistance would have on avian influenza (this makes me think of Kristof's recent column). Since I regularly encounter similar questions, I thought it worthwhile to share this (I've removed other parts that aren't relevant to the matter). Also, on occasion, I like to demonstrate that the Mad Biologist isn't always Mad...: Anti-viral resistance. While…

Lobbyists Have Feelings and McCain Hurt Them

This week, when McCain fired some lobbyists from his campaign, other lobbyists have been complaining how much this hurt them (italics mine): More than a few Republican lobbyists in Washington are scratching their heads these days, asking: So this is the thanks we get? It was a small band of loyal lobbyists who stood by presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain last August when his campaign went broke and his White House aspirations seemed doomed. They raised money for him under impossible odds and kept him company in budget hotels during his darkest days. Now they are under…

Chicken of the See-No-Evil in Detroit

The frozen chicken from China story has a follow-up. You may remember that a warehouse full of the chicken was found in Detroit although import is banned to the US because it came from an area where there is bird flu. An unstated amount of the meat was already in commerce in restaurants and retail stores. If you live in Detroit, you probably haven't received a recall notice, however: Health officials have begun contacting restaurants and markets supplied by a Troy warehouse suspected of importing Chinese poultry, but there was no plan Thursday for alerting the retail customers of Asia Food…

It’s a Quasicrystal! It’s a Topological Insulator! In 1-D!

Is anyone old enough to remember the ad in which two people walking down the street while snacking accidently bump into each other and discover peanut butter on a chocolate bar? Well, it turns out that when physics students run into each other on the street, the result is a quasicrystal with topological properties. The students in question were members of two different labs in two different physics departments who were both out for a stroll on the same street in Tel Aviv – far from Rehovot and the Weizmann Institute. One was experimenting with a new kind of quasicrystalline optical system –…

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. Life Science. From Flickr, by angela7dreams Physical Science. A "true color" mosaic of the Orion Nebula captured by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. From NASA/C.R. O'Dell, via pingnews.com on Flickr Reader comments of the week: On the Life Science channel, ERV describes how viruses have co-evolved with humans in Viruses know us better than we know ourselves. Certain viral molecules can mimic human proteins—called chemokines—that attract fresh…

Environment and Humanities & Social Science Weekly Channel Highlights

In this post: the large versions of the Environment and Humanities & Social Science channel photos, comments from readers, and the best posts of the week! Environment. From Flickr, by Jam Adams Humanities & Social Science. From Flickr, by jcheng Reader comments of the week: On the Environment channel, Benjamin Cohen of The World's Fair links to an article in The Gospel of Consumption which describes how our current culture of consumerism was driven by manufacturing giants in the early 20th century. According to the article's authors, such an excessive emphasis on production is…

DNA sequencing and the Chocolate Factory

It's been exciting to see the progress in getting the Theobroma cacao genome sequenced and off to the databases. But.... I've toured the Theo chocolate factory twice now, and there's a crucial piece in the story that appears to be missing. photo by S. Porter 2010 You see, chocolate is like wine. We don't get the chocolate we love from eating the fruit. We get the so-called "food of the gods" by eating the fruit after it's been fermented. And, just like wine, microorganisms are the ones doing the fermenting. I learned this from attending two separate tours at Theo chocolates, our local…

Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: Palin comparison, VI

Naturally I find Sarah Palin's mixing religion and politics odious. Whether it's believing that the War in Iraq is a task from God or that Alaska's young people should pray that "God's will" be done in constructing her preferred version of a natural gas pipeline or thinking that it's fine to teach Creationism in science class, this is a person who feels untroubled and confident about the rightness of her personal religious views. Moreover she believes in the literal interpretation of the bible. So naturally I find Sarah Palin's religion and politics odious. What's to like? I don't care about…

Tangled web, tangled bank and mercury poisoning

"Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive pollute." I know it doesn't rhyme. But the tangled web is real: Songbirds feeding near the contaminated South River are showing high levels of mercury, even though they aren't eating food from the river itself, according to a paper published by William and Mary researchers in the journal Science. Lead author Dan Cristol said his paper has wide-ranging international environmental implications. Mercury is one of the world's most troublesome pollutants, especially in water. The South River, a major tributary of Virginia's…

H5N1 and chlorination

There's a lot to know about influenza that we don't know. Unfortunately a lot of is things you thought we knew but don't. Like whether there is a risk from influenza virus in drinking water. Admittedly this hasn't been at the top of the list for seasonal flu, since the main reservoir for this virus is other people and that's who you catch it from. But with avian viruses there is the problem of aquatic birds (the main reservoir in the wild) shedding virus into ocean littorals and surface waters, including drinking water reservoirs. In addition, agricultural run-off, including fecal waste from…

Health insurance company whacked

If you want to know why I despise every Republican Senator and Democratic Senators Ben Nelson, Evan Bayh, Blanche Lincoln, Max Baucus, "Independent (of morals)" Joe Lieberman and probably a bunch more whose names I am repressing, it's because they enable and support and help entrench as the bedrock of our health care system, insurance companies. Here's what these companies are like: A Boulder County jury has ruled that a health insurance company must pay $37 million to a Lafayette woman whose health insurance policy was canceled after she was seriously injured in a car accident. The insurance…

Friday Fun: Panda poop, beer bottles and Icelandic banks

Yes, it's the IgNobel Awards for 2009! Let's take a look at a couple of the more amusing ones: PEACE PRIZE: Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael Thali and Beat Kneubuehl of the University of Bern, Switzerland, for determining -- by experiment -- whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle. REFERENCE: "Are Full or Empty Beer Bottles Sturdier and Does Their Fracture-Threshold Suffice to Break the Human Skull?" Stephan A. Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael J. Thali and Beat P. Kneubuehl, Journal of…

Occupational Health News Roundup

Wyoming has had the highest rate of workplace deaths in recent years â 15.6 fatalities per 100,000 workers from 2005-2007. Oil field workers, or roughnecks, are at particular risk, and some of them are pushing the state to make it easier for injured workers and dead workersâ survivors to sue oil companies. The Los Angeles Timesâ DeeDee Correll explains the situation in Wyoming: State law does not prohibit [workers from suing oil companies], but in recent years courts have made it increasingly difficult for them to even try, said Riverton Mayor John Vincent, a lawyer who represents injured…

Occupational Health News Roundup

The Washington Postâs Sholnn Freeman, noting that the last six fatal airplane accidents in the US involved regional airlines, investigated the conditions of regional air crewmembers and found that they struggle to get adequate sleep near the airports from which they fly: At first sight, the Sterling Park house looks like an ordinary split-level, complete with carport, backyard grill and freshly mowed grass. But instead of housing a growing suburban family, it offers accommodations for 30 pilots and flight attendants struggling to string together a few precious hours of sleep. This is a…

Worst measles epidemic in 20 years in Britain

Denial has real consequences-- MMR plea by doctors as measles cases treble in 11 weeks: Parents have been urged to give their children the MMR vaccine as it was revealed Britain is in the middle of the worst measles outbreak for 20 years. The unprecedented warning from the Health Protection Agency came as the number of children suffering from the disease trebled over the last 11 weeks. This is the worst outbreak since the controversial MMR vaccine was introduced in 1988. Take-up of the triple jab - which also protects against mumps and rubella - plummeted to 80 per cent after Dr Andrew…

Skull of the Moore's Beach monster revealed!

One last thing for sea monster week... but don't get your hopes up too much. We looked earlier at the Moore's Beach (or Santa Cruz) sea monster, a carcass that was identified as that of a Baird's beaked whale Berardius bairdii. I mentioned the fact that the skull was retained by the California Academy of Sciences. Well, here it is... As in all beaked whales (or ziphiids), the skull bones posterior to the external nares are elevated, forming a crest that Moore (1968) termed the synvertex. In most beaked whales, the anterior margin of the synvertex extends dorsally so steeply that it's…

Friday random Ten, Feb 2

Marillion, "Ocean Cloud": Long, wonderful piece of neo-prog rock from my favorite prog band. Mogwai, "Acid Food": Mogwai is a brilliant post-rock group, leaning more towards the rock than the classical. This is a slow track with vocals, with a very dark sound to it. Very cool. Trey Gunn Band, "Sozzle": Eh. Trey Gunn is a brilliant touch guitar player, but as a composer, he's really pretty dull. Pain of Salvation, "Lilium Cruentus (Deus Nova)": Another bit of neo-prog; PoS is a spinoff of the Flower Kings. This is off of a very strange album... It's a very pretentious piece of…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Duck-billed Dinosaurs Outgrew Predators To Survive: With long limbs and a soft body, the duck-billed hadrosaur had few defenses against predators such as tyrannosaurs. But new research on the bones of this plant-eating dinosaur suggests that it had at least one advantage: It grew to adulthood much faster than its predators, giving it superiority in size. Massive Numbers Of Critically Endangered Western Lowland Gorillas Discovered In Republic Of Congo: The world's population of critically endangered western lowland gorillas recently received a huge boost when the Wildlife Conservation Society…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Searching For Shut Eye: Possible 'Sleep Gene' Identified: While scientists and physicians know what happens if you don't get six to eight hours of shut-eye a night, investigators have long been puzzled about what controls the actual need for sleep. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine might have an answer, at least in fruit flies. In a recent study of fruit flies, they identified a gene that controls sleep. Did Dinosaur Soft Tissues Still Survive? New Research Challenges Notion: Paleontologists in 2005 hailed research that apparently showed that soft, pliable…

New and Exciting in PLoS

Plant Classification from Bat-Like Echolocation Signals: Bats are able to classify plants using echolocation. They emit ultrasonic signals and can recognize the plant according to the echo returning from it. This ability assists them in many of their daily activities, like finding food sources associated with certain plants or using landmarks for navigation or homing. The echoes created by plants are highly complex signals, combining together all the reflections from the many leaves that a plant contains. Classifying plants or other complex objects is therefore considered a troublesome task…

Worker Memorial Day 2016: Names, Faces, Places, Data

If only The Pump Handle had a crew of correspondents to report from the many Worker Memorial Day events held this past week. If you attended a Worker Memorial Day event, I’m calling on you to share some highlights from it in the comment section below. I spent time in Houston, TX where Mayor Sylvester Turner and the City Council issued a proclamation to remember workers who were killed, injured, or made ill because of their jobs. Our event featured remarks by Mr. Joseph Reyna, whose son Steven Reyna died in November 2015 while working for Atlantic Coffee Solutions, four workers from La Espiga…

Old Armenian Shoe Raises Hope for Archaeology in PLoS ONE

The Public Library of Science publishes a number of peer-reviewed Open Access research journals, most of which specialise in some specific field within the natural sciences. But PLoS ONE has a much wider remit within the sciences. When it first opened a few years ago, I looked for archaeology in it and was disappointed. But now you get 121 hits when you search the journal for "archaeology archeology". This means that PLoS One might be a potential publication venue for research in my discipline. So, what sort of archaeology does PLoS One publish? Well, just because a paper mentions the word…

Don't believe a word of it, guv

1.5 m sea level rise this century, that is. Nature sez the "estimate released today says that it could be as as much as 1.5 metres (4.9 feet) by the end of this century". Their source seems to be Reuters, and we'll pause briefly to condemn the oh-so-typical inflation of the worst case from the range into the only number mentioned in the headline. Sigh. So... Melting glaciers, disappearing ice sheets and warming water could lift sea levels by as much as 1.5 metres (4.9 feet) by the end of this century,... Presented at a European Geosciences Union conference, the research forecasts a rise in…

Three More Things Every Human Should Know About Light

Rhett Allain has a list of 5 Things Every Human Should Know About Light, to tie in with the International Year of Light, and it's a good list with lots of .gifs. Of course, there are some gaps, so let me offer some additional things that everyone ought to know about light: -- Light Is a Particle Rhett and I have a long-running argument about the use of photons in introductory physics; he's against them for reasons that make no sense to me. To my mind, it is unquestionably true that light has particle-like properties (and here's a follow-up with some math), and that's a thing that everybody…

Whose world is it, anyway?

"Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first." -Mark Twain So, you've been around a while, seen all sorts of things, and learned an awful lot about the world, solar system and Universe that we live in. But how well do you know it, really? Image credit: NASA / Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. To scale and in order, these are the eight planets you know so well. There are the four rocky worlds of our inner solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, and the four gas giants that dominate the outer solar system: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and…

Saturn: When One Ring doesn't Rule them All!

One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them. One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. --J.R.R. Tolkien Of course we're all familiar with the planet Saturn. Gas giant, many moons, and, of course, its prominent rings: Note that word, rings. Sure, at a distance, it may just look like one elongated ring. But our tools for measurement are better than our mere naked eyes. Saturn was known, very clearly, to have seven separate rings, many of which are separated by large moons in their orbits. But very recently, a team of astronomers from Maryland and Virginia have discovered…

Breaking: Arctic Sea Ice Reaches Historic Minimum

According to data just now available, the total surface area of the summertime Arctic Sea that is covered in ice has reached the lowest point ever recorded. Every (northern) summer the sea ice in the Arctic melts to some degree, reaching a minimum around the middle of September. Over the last several years, the amount of ice at this minimal point has been lower than previously recorded. Accurate records go back only a few decades, so this shift in ice cover reflects only the most recent period of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). Today, I got an email from my colleague John Abraham (the…

Best Reads of 2014

Jon Peterson: Playing at the World. Highly recommended to gamers! Here are my best reads in English during 2014. My total was 49 books and 14 of them were e-books. Find me at Goodreads! In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language. Arika Okrent 2009. Redshirts. John Scalzi 2012. Space opera from the viewpoint of the nameless extras. The Bone People. Keri Hulme 1984. This novel has great strengths in the language and characterisation. And a major weakness in the almost nonexistent plotting…

Bodice-Ripper Archaeology

In 2005, when Howard Williams and I and a bunch of hard-working people excavated a Viking Period boat grave at Skamby in Östergötland, we found a funny little silver pin. It wasn't in the grave, it was found just outside the edge of the superstructure, near the ground surface, though technically in a culture layer of the 2nd century BC. I've been trying off and on to find parallells to the pin, showing its picture to a lot of knowledgeable people, to no avail. Everybody has the same impression as myself: it doesn't quite look like anything from Swedish Prehistory. So in a recent paper I co-…

The Real Idiot of the Month

I should have learned my lesson about naming an Idiot of the Month too early in the month. In America, just when you think you've found the bottom of the barrell, you discover that it's barrells all the way down. Joseph Swank, move over. You've been out-moroned by Rep. Gerald Allen, a state Congressman from Alabama. In a move that would make George Wallace smile, Allen has proposed a bill that would ban any and all books that have gay characters in them from public libraries, in order to protect children from "the homosexual agenda": Allen said that if his bill passes, novels with gay…

Ike Friday PM -> Texas as Category II, II or IV

Some time Friday night or even late after noon on Friday, you can expect hurricane force winds from Hurricane Ike to affect the Texas coast, possibly not too far from Galveston/Houston. Note, however, that the Hurricane is still pretty far out at sea and it is just now beginning a slow right turn that is expected to get more curvy over the next 48 hours. So, the exact location of land fall of the eye is very difficult to predict. Note also that Ike is very large, and has unusually strong winds in places somewhat far from the eye. The strength of the hurricane at landfall will be Category…

Computer Science "Futures"

Ed Lazowska has penned an article over at the CCC blog about the state of computer science enrollments which is well worth reading. My favorite part of the post is where Ed points out that the "news" reported in the "news" is not really "news": The Taulbee Survey "headline" this year was (roughly) "computer science bachelors degrees drop again." In my view, this is not news -- it was entirely predictable from the legitimate headline four years ago: (roughly) "freshman interest and new enrollments drop again." The actual news right now in the CRA data is that freshman interest and new…

USAToday: Scientists Misreading the Polls on Climate Change

Dan Vergano of USA Today has an important column out this weekend. Vergano, I believe, is the first major journalist to call into question the now dominant narrative that "ClimateGate" has powerfully damaged public trust in scientists. In the column, he quotes Stanford professor Jon Krosnick with the following apt observation. As Vergano writes: What's really happening, suggests polling expert Jon Krosnick of Stanford University, is "scientists are over-reacting. It's another funny instance of scientists ignoring science." The science that Krosnick is referring to are the multiple polling…

DNA Repair and Thermodynamics - Paper Up

Yanling Yang, who just graduated with a Ph.D. from my lab, has a paper in the just published November issue of Biophysical Chemistry. The entire issue of the journal celebrates the 25th Anniversary of a conference called "The Gibbs Conference on Biothermodynamics", and each of the papers is from the laboratory of one of the organizers of one of the previous 25 annual meetings (I co-organized #24). Despite the restricted invitation list, however, all the papers were peer reviewed (some quite viciously according to reports) and some required several months of revisions to qualify for the…

Does Science Equal Progress?

Instead of me answering that, I wondered instead how other people have argued about the question. To be more specific, since I am interested in the role of scientific practice for defining the land, I wondered how people argued about whether or not science was better for agriculture. I wrote a book about it. It's called Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil, and Society in the American Countryside. I commented here a few months ago that the book was finally on its way. Although Amazon sales do not begin until October 20th (here is their link), the publisher has it officially listed for…

World's Fairs (Landscape and Modernity: Series 8)

The photographer Jade Doskow is capturing and creating images of the once-grand spectacles called World's Fairs. Her photographs do triple duty: they track down those old sites, in cities across the world (from Brussels to Seville, from New York to Spokane, from Paris to Philadelphia); they call back to the technological grandeur such exhibitions sought to promote; and they put those now-decaying sites into a contemporary landscape, setting up questions about past and present and hoped-for futures and the role of technological throughout. Caption from TMN: "'The Columbian Exposition,'…

Teens Not Engaging In More Sex

I was struck by this post over at the Well blog. In spite of media attention, teens are not engaging in more sex: The news is troubling, but it's also misleading. While some young people are clearly engaging in risky sexual behavior, a vast majority are not. The reality is that in many ways, today's teenagers are more conservative about sex than previous generations. Today, fewer than half of all high school students have had sex: 47.8 percent as of 2007, according to the National Youth Risk Behavior Survey, down from 54.1 percent in 1991. A less recent report suggests that teenagers are…

Cat hit by motorcycle turns into woman, is beaten

A cat hit by a motorcycle in Port Harcourt, Nigeria allegedly turned into a middle-aged woman. Good thing there were lots of people around to kill a second cat-person and beat the accident survivor into a confession of witchcraft. What could be described as a fairy tale turned real on Wednesday in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, as a cat allegedly turned into a middle-aged woman after being hit by a commercial motorcycle (Okada) on Aba/Port Harcourt Expressway. Nigerian Tribune learnt that three cats were crossing the busy road when the okada ran over one of them which immediately turned into a…

A Genetic Gastric Bypass

The platypus genome, which was published for the first time last week, has proved to be a Whitman's sampler of biological treats. In case you missed the initial reports, you can check out a good summary from PZ Myers (and also take a look at Ryan Gregory's take-down of the bad coverage). But today I just happened to come across another treat that, to my knowledge, hadn't yet been picked out from the box. It's a paper that came out today in Genome Biology. It concerns a very cool side of evolution that not many people appreciate. Species can evolve when their genes are modified, or when they…