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Local, Renewable Energy

Interesting story on the AP about a Vermont dairy that uses the methane from cow manure to help generate revenue for their farm. For the Audets, the electricity has created an important new income stream at a time when low wholesale milk prices have squeezed their margin. The utility pays 95 percent of the going New England wholesale power price for electricity from the Audets' generator. In addition, the utility charges customers willing to pay it a 4-cents-per-kilowatt-hour premium for renewable energy and then turns the money over to the Audets. So far, more than 3,000 CVPS customers have…

Simple checklist saves 1500 lives; feds axe it

A New York Times piece by Atul Gawande gives some good news and bad news about a life-saving checklist developed to prevent fatal infections in intensive care units. The good news: A year ago, researchers at Johns Hopkins University published the results of a program that instituted in nearly every intensive care unit in Michigan a simple five-step checklist designed to prevent certain hospital infections. It reminds doctors to make sure, for example, that before putting large intravenous lines into patients, they actually wash their hands and don a sterile gown and gloves. The results…

Our Book

Last week, we certainly had you folks guessing--sometimes in a pretty off-the-wall way--about the news we planned to announce. So here's what's really happening: We have just inked a deal to do a book together. Yes, that's right--my third, Sheril's first. And yes, the book is about science--and about "the Intersection." We don't want to reveal too much yet, but suffice it to say, it rolls together many of the preoccupations of this blog over the past year or more--ScienceDebate2008, science communication, how to fight back against political interference--into a package that we think could…

The 5-56 Meme

I was hoping someone would tag me for the "5-56" meme that has just started going around. (Thanks, Bora!) The rules are that you have to pick 10 books (of whatever genre, chosen any way you see fit) and transcribe the 5th sentence on page 56 of each book. If you're slick you can use Google Books to figure out where the quotes I have selected came from, but it's a lot more fun to guess. Here are my picks; 1: "Above, i.e. towards the elbow, a tubercle of the radius plays into a socket of the ulna; whilst below, i.e. towards the wrist, the radius finds the socket, and the ulna the tubercle." 2…

Scientists want to replace "cloning" with more confusing terms, raise approval

New Scientist is reporting on a movement among some scientists to replace the word "cloning" with "somatic cell nuclear transfer": Don't say cloning, say somatic cell nuclear transfer. That at least is the view of biologists who want the term to be used instead of "therapeutic cloning" to describe the technique that produces cloned embryos from which stem cells can then be isolated. This, they argue, will help to distinguish it from attempts to clone a human being. But will it? Kathy Hudson and her colleagues at the Genetics and Public Policy Center in Washington DC asked more than 2000…

A blood test for Alzheimer's?

An international team of researchers led by Tony Wyss-Coray of the Department of Neurology and Neurological Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine report that they have developed a blood test that can predict with 90% accuracy the early stages of Alzheimer's Disease. By analyzing the concentrations of 18 different biomarkers, Wyss-Coray and his colleagues were able to identify, long before any symptoms were evident, those patients with mild cognitive impairment that progressed to Alzheimer's 2-6 years later. Alzheimer's Disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder…

Dead Zones

No, it is not the name of a new rock band.  It is a phenomenon that is increasing in frequency in the world's oceans.  The dead zones are areas with very low oxygen content, so low that nothing can live there.   Neil Barry Rincover, writing on href="http://rincover.blogstream.com/v1/pid/137945.html">U.S. Politics and Other Nonsense, brings us notice of a report that the number of dead zones has increased by a third in the past two years.  There are now 200.   The study was sponsored by the Global Programme Action Global (GPA) for the Protection of the Marine Environment from Land-Based…

As if from inside the earth

"I'm a 70-year old basket case," he said. He was right. He'd been admitted a month before for workup of what was thought to be a relapse of a malignant melanoma--an aggressive cancer. His chart told a story of overwhelming chronic anxiety and depression dominating his adult life and resulting in a near-total inability to care for himself. His mental illness featured prominently in his hospitalization; most mornings, when I scanned his chart, there were notes from the nursing staff about him crying out in the night, and notes from the chaplaincy service about the previous day's existential…

When is an anemone not an anemone?

The pretty creatures pictured here look like anemones, but they are not true anemones. They are Cerianthids, commonly referred to as 'tube anemones', which are taxonomically quite distinct from true anemones. Cerianthids and true anemones do belong to the same phylum, Cnidaria, and the same class, Anthozoa, but tube anemones belong to the subclass Ceriantipatharia, a taxon that also includes the so-called 'black corals' (Antipatharia). One of the visible features that distinguishes Cerianthid tube anemones from true anemones is the morphology of their tentacles. The macro photo below…

Open Source Wins and Woes

Owing to public presure, the BBC iPlayer is now going to support Linux. But if you are a student in Newville, Pennsylvania who is into OpenSource, you may serve detention! (or NOT, see update below) From Slashdot: After previously limiting their iPlayer to only the Windows platform ... the BBC's content is now available to UK-based users of Linux and Mac OS X. From their site: 'From today we are pleased to announce that streaming is now available on BBC iPlayer. This means that Windows, Mac and Linux users can stream programs on iPlayer as long as their computer has the latest version of…

Jenny needs me again!

I was called upon once before, and now I'm called upon again. Jenny McCarthy needs me: From: "Jenny McCarthy" volunteer@generationrescue.org Reply-to: volunteer@generationrescue.org To: orac@scienceblogs.com Date: Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 11:26 AM Subject: News From Jenny McCarthy Become a Rescue Angel Today! Dear Orac, It's Jenny! Please join my team and help other families! I'm about to go on tour to promote my new book, Mother Warriors, which hits the bookstores everywhere, September 23rd (38 days from now!). I will also be on all the major talk shows showing the world that autism is…

Great Ocean Migrations

Satellite telemetry is a widely used tool to track the migration routes of numerous animals. Previously, sea turtles have been mainly studied while nesting on beaches, but these observations do little to inform scientists of what these animals are doing the majority of their time, which is spent away from their nests. Satellite imagery has allowed researchers to monitor the activity of these animals in the open ocean (image below from the Sea Turtle Conservancy). Data collected using this technique have shown that sea turtles will travel hundreds to thousands of miles between nesting beaches…

Music to sink whale carcasses to.

Musings from Kevin... So you are out on the ocean and need some inspiration for the long nights by the dredge? Well, have I got the CD for you! Here are a few of my favorites that bring me back a mile or two below the surface (metaphorically, as I spend my time usually in front of a computer): "What Does the Deep-Sea Say?" Done by Bill Monroe & Doc Watson, Woody Guthrie and Dave Alvin, this song is a harrowing tale of a sailor boy that is now sleeping at the bottom of the deep sea through the wrath and fury of the ocean. It doesn't say anything, but "It moans, it groans, it flashes…

But the shepherd never gets fleeced…

Soon, it will be the end of the year. Soon, all those various forms will come trickling into your mailbox, telling you how much money you earned. Soon, you will have to fill out a whole bunch of other forms and pay out your share to the state and federal government. For most of us, it's a big bite, but if only we were ministers of the lord, it wouldn't hurt so much. Read this summary from a tax preparer who did a local priests taxes, and feel your wallet cringe. The minister gets paid from his church, from which he received cash of $105,000 in 2009. He received a W-2 with wages of $40,000…

Cuba

Way back in April of 2004, I wrote the following note to Sam Brownback: I'm writing to you because you sit on the subcommittee which oversees the Treasury. I just saw an AP report that, since 1990, the Treasury has only opened 93 enforcement actions on terrorism financing, resulting in $9,425 in fines. In contrast, the Treasury has opened 10,683 actions over the Cuba embargo, yielding over $8 million since 1994. Had the Treasury taken the threat from Osama bin Laden as seriously as it took Fidel Castro, would we face as deadly an enemy today? This is not a partisan issue, it cuts across…

How Argentina became white

Apropos of my skepticism of Census projections of 2050 demographic balances, there's a new paper out on Argentina which is relevant. Here's Wikipedia on Argentina's self-conception: As with other areas of new settlement such as Canada, Australia and the United States, Argentina is considered a country of immigrants. Most Argentines are descended from colonial-era settlers and of the 19th and 20th century immigrants from Europe, and 86.4% of Argentina's population self-identify as European descent. An estimated 8% of the population is mestizo, and a further 4% of Argentines were of Arab or…

Another Week of Climate Disruption News - May 11, 2014

This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years May 11, 2014 Chuckles, COP20+, Abu Dhabi, WGx, NCA, Myers, Mengel & Levermann, Landslide Energiewende, Bottom Line, Subsidies, Economics, Cook, Meteorologists Fukushima: Note, News Melting Arctic, Polar Bears, Methane Food: Crisis, Fisheries, Prices, Land Grabs, GMOs, GMO Labelling, Production Hurricanes, Monsoon, Notable Weather, Forecasts, Extreme Weather GHGs,…

Statements on Climate Change from Major Scientific Academies, Societies, and Associations (January 2017 update)

(Updated January 2017 by Dr. Peter Gleick, Pacific Institute) Scientific understanding of the role of humans in influencing and altering the global climate has been evolving for over a century. That understanding is now extremely advanced, combining hundreds of years of observations of many different climatic variables, millions of years of paleoclimatic evidence of past natural climatic variations, extended application of fundamental physical, chemical, and biological processes, and the most sophisticated computer modeling ever conducted. There is no longer any reasonable doubt that humans…

Basics: The Turing Machine (with an interpreter!)

As long as I'm doing all of these basics posts, I thought it would be worth explaining just what a Turing machine is. I frequently talk about things being Turing equivalent, and about effective computing systems, and similar things, which all assume you have some clue of what a Turing machine is. And as a bonus, I'm also going to give you a nifty little piece of Haskell source code that's a very basic Turing machine interpreter. (It's for a future entry in the Haskell posts, and it's not entirely finished, but it does work!) The Turing machine is a very simple kind of theoretical computing…

Comments of the Week #119: From Time and Space to Star Trek Tech

“Even though the future seems far away, it is actually beginning right now.” -Mattie Stepanek After another tremendous week here at Starts With A Bang, including one where I recorded a new podcast (look for it later this week on SoundCloud), it's time to take a look back and review all that we've been through. From last Saturday through the past Friday, here's what we saw: Are there different types of time and space? (for Ask Ethan), Deepest view of the Orion nebula reveals shocking discoveries (for Mostly Mute Monday), Forty years ago, we landed on Mars... and found life?, Apollo 11's…

Stained beauty, naked neurons: visualizing the brain through history

Hippocampus: Broad Overview Tamily Weissman, Jeff Lichtman, and Joshua Sanes, 2005 from Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century by Carl Schoonover The first time I created a transgenic neuron, it was in a worm, C. elegans -- a tiny, transparent cousin of the earthworm. I injected DNA into the embryonic worm, let it grow up, and voila: there was one eerie green blotch like a little Pac-Man ghost, its long green axon a lime racing stripe running along the worm's transparent body. The worm wiggled, but I was the one hooked: science is beautiful. You…

Out of Africa: by the skulls?

Update: John Hawks weighs in. Here is the abstract. Several people have asked about a new paper coming out that uses the diversity in skulls to "prove" the Out of Africa hypothesis. The paper is going to be out in Nature yesterday. Yes, you read that right, it was supposed to be on the site on the 19th, but it still seems embargoed. But here is the headline from ScienceDaily, New Research Proves Single Origin Of Humans In Africa. Press releases are generally a little inflated, so no worries. The basic gist is that the authors used the variation in skulls to trace population bottlenecks…

A Chaotic Utopia [Chaotic Utopia]

With a click of your mouse, you find yourself in a chaotic utopia. That click sent an electrical signal inside your computer, passing through circuits, joined by a contact made of gold. The gold, you may find, was mined from a mafic vein, deep within the Rocky Mountains, surrounded by Precambrian gneiss. The gneiss, disguised by the mountains for billions of years, lays exposed to the north in a shaded canyon. The canyon, still being carved by the creek below, crumbles with age, loosening a piece of milky quartz. The quartz, lured by gravity, tumbles from the canyon wall, and lands with a…

Role Models in Science & Engineering Achievement: Rakesh Agrawal

Rakesh Agrawal -- Chemical engineer Developed effective process to cool natural gas to the point that it liquifies, thus helping the gas to be transported safely across long distances by ship, rail or other means. This has helped improve energy production and efficiency. Born in India, Rakesh Agrawal studied extensively there, earning his Bachelor's of Science degree in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in 1975. He then came to the U.S. to pursue his post-graduate studies, and here he continued to cultivate a keen interest in energy production and ways to improve…

Meetings in Lindau: Report from Day 4

From June 29th through July 4th, 25 Nobel laureates and over 550 young scientists from all over the world are gathering in Lindau, Germany, at the 58th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings. This year's meeting is dedicated to physics. Beatrice Lugger, managing editor of ScienceBlogs.de, is in Lindau and will be sending her impressions of the meeting daily through July 4. ScienceBlogs.de is also running a German-language blog covering the meetings. We will be airing short videos in English, of Nobelists at Lindau on the ScienceBlogs homepage, and archiving them at Page 3.14. Here are the first,…

Exoplanets in Multi-body Systems in the Kepler Era

The shadow of a shadow of a planet... and other fun Kepler discoveries Exoplanets in Multi-body Systems in the Kepler Era is a conference currently under way at the Aspen Center for Physics Physicists hard at work The meeting is very vibrant, with a mostly very young crowd of active researchers. There have been a number of very interesting talks reporting some very interesting discoveries, many of which are embargoed... One, still unpublished discovery, from Josh Carter et al, for a KOI-not-to-be-named, used transit geometry from two planets and measurements of the stellar spin from…

New Frontiers: Big Questions Conference III

Continued slow liveblog of the New Frontiers in Astronomy and Cosmology Conference at the Franklin Institute. We have had coffee and we are rested and ready after yesterdays 14 hour marathon session (graduate students please note - though it did include breakfast, lunch, dinner and two coffee breaks ("working breaks" natch, apart from the hour+ break before dinenr) - and I don't think any of the faculty could actually keep it up for more than 2-3 days, except in our imagination ('course we then went back to the hotel and had to catch up on class and administrative issues left unattended, but…

Chikungunya update

I feel a bit guilty. I still get occasional comments on this post about the outbreak of chikungunya on several islands in the Indian Ocean. Since I'm obviously not involved in the actual outbreak investigation, all I have to offer is news reported elsewhere--and it's not exactly been a landslide of information. However, Nature does have some news to offer, based largely on a new paper published in PLoS Medicine (summary here). Previously, the complete genomes of three isolates of the virus had been determined. Two were from strains isolated in 1952 during the first known Chikungunya…

Voracious snub-nosed robber

For shame, I have yet to cover Mesozoic marine reptiles in depth here at Tet Zoo: in another effort to bring balance, I here depict a skull of the awesome Jurassic pliosaur Simolestes vorax Andrews, 1909. The name means something like 'voracious snub-nosed robber'. This essentially complete skull, discovered with much of the rest of the skeleton, was found in 1990 in a waste disposal site at Dogsthorpe, Peterborough (Cambridgeshire, UK) and comes from one of the most famous units of Jurassic rock in the world: the Oxford Clay. Originally identified as a new specimen of Liopleurodon ferox,…

"Missing Link" Found

One of three newly-discovered specimens of the 383 million-year-old Tiktaalik roseae. These specimens fill a gap in the fossil record between aquatic and terrestrial animals. Image: Ted Daeschler. Making that transition from aquatic life to living on land was very important for vertebrates. However, there has been a gap in the fossil record at precisely that transitional point -- up until now, that is. Today, a group of scientists report that they found a group of three fossils from "crocodile-like" animals that neatly fit into the evolutionary progression as animals moved from water to…

The Fake Quotes Refuse to Die

Jon Rowe and I have spent a good deal of time over the last couple years documenting the numerous fake quotations from the founding fathers that circulate among the religious right continually, almost all of them traced back to David Barton and his pseudo-historical books and videos. No matter how many times they get pointed out, however, they continue to be repeated. And here's an example of them being repeated even after Barton has publicly disavowed them and admitted that they've never been found among the authentic writings of the founders - and it's for an organization that Barton…

Atheist Voices of Minnesota: an Anthology of Personal Stories

Atheist Voices of Minnesota: an Anthology of Personal Stories will be officially released on August 28th, though you can of course get it now if you click on this secret link (or this secret link for the Kindle edition). I just received a press release for the book, and thought I'd pass it on to you. Atheist Voices of Minnesota: an Anthology of Personal Stories will be released August 28th “A chorus not of arguments and positions but of shared human lives . . . At turns smart, funny, and deeply touching.” – Dale McGowan, author of Parenting Beyond Belief ST. PAUL, Minn. (8/14/2012) —…

The Evergreen Topic of Grade Inflation

There was a flurry of re-shares last week for this article about Yale shutting down a site that aggregated student course evaluations, which is fine as far as it goes, but repeats a stat that really bugs me: About 43 percent of college letter grades in 2011 were A’s, up from 31 percent in 1988 and 15 percent in 1960, a 2011 study found. Over roughly the same span, the average amount of studying by people enrolled in college declined almost 50 percent, a 2011 study found, from 25 hours per week to 13 hours. This is less bad than the usual, thanks to including the 1988 point, but it's still…

Links for 2011-02-12

Yemen: Protests Continue Away from International Media Eyes · Global Voices "With the entire world watching Egypt as it celebrates the uprooting of its dictator, Yemenis are calling for help and the world's media attention. On Twitter, the calls came loud and clear. A rally started in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, in celebration of the ousting of Hosni Mubarak. Soon, it turned into an anti-Saleh protest, calling for an end of Ali Abdullah Saleh's rule. Police surrounded the protesters, and there were reports of fire shots. Wounded protesters, taken to hospitals, were arrested - at least that…

The Infamous 123 Meme

That "post three sentences from page 123 of the book closest to you" Internet "meme" has come around again, with Bora calling me out in hopes of getting a short preview of Bunnies Made of Cheese (or whatever the book ends up being called). Unfortunately for him, I blog from a desk heaped with books, and that's not the closest physical book to me. The book at the top of the nearest stack is Volume I of Matter and Interactions by Chabay and Sherwood, and the relevant sentences are: Tarzan hangs from a vine, swining back and forth in a gentle arc. At the moment when he reaches his maximum…

Jakob the Hobbit?

It's been a little over a year and a half now since scientists announced the disocvery of the most controversial fossil in the field of human origins: Homo floresiensis a k a the Hobbit. Scientists found bones of a dimunitive hominid on the Indonesian island of Flores, and estimated that it lived there as recently as 12,000 years ago. It stood about as high as a normal three year old human child and had a brain the size of a chimpanzee's. But its bones were also found with stone tools. The scientists declared the bones were not human. Instead, they belonged to a species of their own--one that…

Newly-discovered bones answer questions about fossil primate locomotion

Utah may seem like an odd place to search for primates, but you can find them if you know where to look. Although scrubby and arid today, between 46-42 million years ago what is now the northeastern part of the state was a lush forest which was home to a variety of peculiar fossil primates. Called omomyids, these relatives of living tarsiers are primarily known from teeth and associated bits and pieces of bone, but newly discovered postcranial remains may provide paleontologists with a better idea of how some of these ancient primates moved. For most of their early evolution omomyids were…

Cool Visual Illusions: Mach Bands

Discovered in the 1860s by Ernst Mach (hence the name), Mach Bands are actually a set of interrelated phenomena. Take a look at this image: From here The individual bands should appear as gradients, and they may even appear to be curved. In fact, they are all solid colors. Now look at this one: From here If you look closely at the area above the center two arrows, you should see a thin bright line (left-middle arrow) and a thin dark line (right-middle arrow). Once again, this is despite the fact that each of the three areas (dark, light, and in between) are solid colors. This figure (from…

Can you go home for the holidays?

Having filed grades and extricated myself from the demands of my job, at least temporarily, I have come with my better half and offspring to the stomping grounds of my better half's youth. Well, kind of. The grandparents-who-lurk-but-seldom-comment actually live a couple towns over from where they did when my better half still lived at home. In fact, they only moved from that house a few years ago, so I'm much more familiar with the immediate vicinity of the childhood home than I am with the environs of the current house. But we do this thing that folks in this part of the country are…

My kind of meeting

The NY Times is reporting on a wonderful meeting, "Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival". I wish I could have been there, but at least there's the promise that recordings will be available. A meeting that is denounced by a spokesman from the Templeton Foundation is my kind of place. It sounds like there was a great deal of vigorous argument, which also makes for my favorite kind of meeting. And then there were all the scientists plainly making these kinds of statements: Carolyn Porco, a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., called, half…

Lubos Motl vs the logarithm function

Eli Rabett has a post where he corrects Lubos Motl's blunders about the greenhouse effect, but he left a few crumbs for me. Motl writes (warning, link goes to Motl's blog, which has a design so ugly it makes most MySpace pages look pretty): The Gentlemen at RealClimate.ORG have decided that my article about climate sensitivity and similar articles by others are too dangerous because they show that every new molecule of CO2 causes smaller greenhouse effect than the previous molecule: the absorption rate gradually approaches saturation. ... So what do these eleven climate scientists think…

The Blogging Blog Meme

On Thursday, my SciBling Coturnix tagged me with this meme. So, here goes: Why do you blog? Since 2nd or 3rd grade, I've wanted to write. When I reached my teens, it became a compulsion. Then I became an adult, and finally learned how to write. So, writing became my craft, a delicate art requiring constant practice and attention. I blog, because it seems to be the appropriate medium for the craft in the 21st century. How long have you been blogging? I kept journals as a teenager, but filled them primarily with angst. Some pages were devoted to miniature essays, noting convergences or…

A Chaotic Utopia

With a click of your mouse, you find yourself in a chaotic utopia. That click sent an electrical signal inside your computer, passing through circuits, joined by a contact made of gold. The gold, you may find, was mined from a mafic vein, deep within the Rocky Mountains, surrounded by Precambrian gneiss. The gneiss, disguised by the mountains for billions of years, lays exposed to the north in a shaded canyon. The canyon, still being carved by the creek below, crumbles with age, loosening a piece of milky quartz. The quartz, lured by gravity, tumbles from the canyon wall, and lands with a…

Media Spin: Conservation vs. Public Health

I found this article on Reuters this morning that tries to spin old news into a fresh bit of controversy: Doctors recommend a good dose of salmon or tuna in the diet because of its benefits to the heart. But is it good for the environment? Surging demand for salmon in particular has been spurred in part by numerous studies touting the health benefits of omega-3 fatty acids, which are present in some kinds of fish. A study published in June in the American Heart Association journal Circulation said a diet with liberal servings of fish, nuts and seeds rich in such nutrients can help lower a…

Rocket Propellant Types

Beyond the thrust curve, there is an art to the color of the propellant (achieved through special metal salt additives). My 9 ft tall Sledgehammer, lifting off on a M1550 Redline motor from Aerotech, one of my favorite photos: The shadow of dusk in the foreground really lets the color pop. The smoke and dust is not red, but looks like cotton candy illuminated by the intensely bright red flame. Here is a picture perfect launch of my V2.0 with an L730 motor imported from Cesaroni, a Canadian aerospace & defense company. Their unique thermoplastic propellant burns cleanly (few additives),…

Did Undergraduate Students PinPoint Bin Laden in 2009?

Credit: MIT International Review Did undergraduate students pinpoint Bin Laden in 2009? A paper published in the MIT International Review indicates that they might have. This story may well be a classic in the history of the war against terrorism and it is a compelling example of how students learning in the classroom can contribute to important, real-world problems involving human rights. From ScienceInsider: The bin Laden tracking idea began as a project in an undergraduate class on remote sensing that Gillespie {UCLA geographer}, whose expertise is using remote sensing data from…

Starbucks gets cozier with the DI

I like Seattle. I grew up near there. But it's got two things that annoy me: Starbucks coffee (OK, but overpriced and a little too pretentious) and the Discovery Institute (unspeakably vile inanity). Unfortunately, the proximity of those two institutions seems to encourage them to ooze into bed together and spawn expensive coffee with stupid ideas. They've done this before, publishing tripe from Wesley Smith on their cups, and now they've gotten worse, smearing lies from Jonathan Wells across the cups. "Darwinism's impact on traditional social values has not been as benign as its advocates…

Everybody Loves Pins

The Student Pin Exchange is two hours away, but finalists have already broken out their cultural booty to swap in the aisles between their projects. It's not just students who collect and exchange pins, though. For example, check out our friend Bill Chown: We caught up with another compulsive pin-hoarder, John Turner, and asked him a few questions about the habit. The Q&A is below the fold. Q: Can you tell us your name and where you're from? A: My name's John Turner, I'm from San Jose, California, and I'm on the Host Committee. We're putting on the 2010 international science fair. That'…

Cooking: A Primitive Protection Racket

Bloggingheads.tv has John Horgan interviewing Richard Wrangham of Harvard on a variety of topics related to his new book Catching Fire. The part of interest to me - and to our ongoing discussion on patriarchy - relates to cooking as a "primitive protection racket" in which men agree to protect women's food supply in return for being fed so they can just hang out and do manly shit. It's a fascinating discussion, if you can get past Horgan giggling in sheepish delight every time Wrangham points out what a shitty deal patriarchy is for women. Interestingly, this section of the interview is…

Molecular Gastronomy

Molecular gastronomy, a movement of chefs devoted to the experimental tools of the modern science lab, now has its own Italian convention: For three days last week some of the biggest names in "molecular gastronomy" (Ferran Adrià, Wylie Dufresne) were mixing and matching secrets with more traditional chefs from Italy, France, Scandinavia, even Japan. The result was a dazzling exploration of new ways to cook fish, present pasta and generally make a restaurant meal more like a night at La Scala. Throw in sugar surrealism for dessert and it was hard to remember this was all happening in the…