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Church and State in Russia

According to The New York Times, Russia is having some church / state issues: One of the most discordant debates in Russian society is playing out in public schools like those in this city not far from Moscow, where the other day a teacher named Irina Donshina set aside her textbooks, strode before her second graders and, as if speaking from a pulpit, posed a simple question: “Whom should we learn to do good from?” “From God!” the children said. “Right!” Ms. Donshina said. “Because people he created crucified him. But did he accuse them or curse them or hate them? Of course not! He…

The secret of drug-resistant bubonic plague

The plague, or the Black Death, is caused by a microbe called Yersinia pestis. In the 14th century, this microscopic enemy killed off a third of Europe's population. While many people consign the plague to centuries past, this attitude is a complacent one. Outbreaks have happened in Asia and Africa over the last decade and the plague is now recognised as a re-emerging disease. In 1996, two drug-resistant strains of plague were isolated from Madagascar. One of these, was completely resistant to all the drugs that are used to control outbreaks. Anyone interested in bacteria can attest to…

John McCain, professional weasel

John McCain recently spoke out on evolution and ID. He just managed to demonstrate that he's a dissembling fool. Responding to a question about a report that he thinks "intelligent design" should be taught in schools, the senator mocked the idea that American young people were so delicate and impressionable that they needed to be sheltered from the concept, which says God had a hand in creation and which has been challenged by Darwinists as unscientific. "Shhh, you shouldn't tell them," he said, mimicking those who would shield children from the fact that some people believe in intelligent…

The Moon is a Not-So-Harsh Mistress

Astronomers and space exploration enthusiasts around the web are expressing lots of enthusiasm for the discovery of water on the moon by the Indian Chandrayaan-1 orbiter. Long story short (Ethan has a good version of the long story), the probe discovered relatively large quantities of water frozen throughout the lunar soil just below the surface. It's not just at the bottom of craters in the polar regions, but instead seems to be quite widespread. It's a big deal for a lot of reasons. From a pure science perspective, it's exciting to learn such a major and mostly unexpected fact about or…

Awesome Gadgets for Science Geeks

A list of splendiferous gadgets compiled by yours truly! Below the fold! This Space Projector from Mathmos projects a constantly moving image (or chaotic oil swirls) onto walls or ceilings. Think of it as a cheap LCD projector; see it at work. Also from this company, Lunar Eclipse (mimics the night sky) and Tuba, which changes colors depending on ambient sounds. And how about this nifty video sniffer from Swann? It hooks up to any wireless video cameras with 330ft, and displays them in this handheld device. Good for being able to get the drop on ninjas sneaking up on ya. It picks up audio…

Return of the brain-controlling zombie-ant parasitic fungi

A dead ant infected with a parasitic Cordyceps fungus (David P. Hughes). A team of entomologists working in the Brazilian rain forest has discovered four new species of parasitic Cordyceps fungi, which infect insects and manipulate the behaviour of their hosts in order to disperse their spores as widely as possible. The modus operandi of Cordyceps is reminiscent of the famous chest-bursting scene in the movie Alien. Microscopic spores infiltrate the host via the spiracles - the holes in the exoskeleton through which insects breathe - and the fungus begins feeding on its non-vital organs. When…

Pebbles I stumbled on this week (notables from the web)

A Chopin Nocturne... from Derek Bownds' MindBlog by noreply@blogger.com (Deric)Bownds blogs on neuro matters -- and, each week, posts a video of him playing a bit of classical music on his piano. Gotta like it. FDA To Mine Big Databases For Safety Problems from Pharmalot The effort, called Sentinel Initiative,will be the first time the FDA will have an opportunity to monitoralmost immediately how drugs are affecting the public. To do so, theagency will mine databases of more than 20 million patients who receivetheir drugs through Medicare. The idea, of course, is to catch sideeffects…

Dolphins that hunt by beaching themselves

Here is a paper in the Canadian Journal of Zoology which documents learned hunting behaviour among Tursiops truncatus, the bottlenose dolphin, in Western Australia. Specialization and development of beach hunting, a rare foraging behavior, by wild bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops sp.) B. L. Sargeant, J. Mann, P. Berggren, and M. Krützen Abstract: Foraging behaviors of bottlenose dolphins vary within and among populations, but few studies attempt to address the causes of individual variation in foraging behavior. We examined how ecological, social, and developmental factors relate to the use of…

More Good Science Reporting

More and more, we're seeing top level reporters in the prestige press rejecting the concept of phony "balance," and exposing nonsense when they see it. A great example comes in a recent Times story covering debate over an anti-evolution bill in Utah: The Utah bill's main sponsor, State Senator D. Chris Buttars, a Republican from the Salt Lake City suburbs, said he was not surprised by the debate it had inspired. He said ordinary voters were deeply concerned about the teaching of evolution. "I got tired of people calling me and saying, 'Why is my kid coming home from high school and saying his…

Do we remember a pretty face?

Are attractiveness and distinctiveness related? Are we more likely to remember a pretty face than an ordinary one? This data suggests not: When people are asked to rate faces for attractiveness and deviation from an average face, there's a clear correlation: the more attractive the face, the less it deviates from average. Average faces are more beautiful, it seems. But now consider this data: Here, people were asked to rate faces on the same scale of attractiveness, but instead of rating whether a face deviated from the average, they were asked whether a face would stand out in a crowd…

Pangea Ultima

Geologists are using computer models to speculate where the continents are going to go in the next 100 million years. Their conclusion: the continents may again rejoin into a new Pangea -- Pangea Ultima: Today, some of his most ambitious efforts center on envisioning how Earth might look 250 million years from now. The easy part, Dr. Scotese said, is the continents. Their masses might change shape but seldom disappear altogether because their bedrock weighs little compared with dense ocean crust. Continents literally float above the action. So do mountains. Once formed, they tend to persist…

Compiling Firefox 3 From Source on Kubuntu

Responding to the innate human desire to have the faster browser possible, I am almost happy with Firefox 3.  But not quite.  Thus, the experiment: compile from source.  This is accomplished as follows: 0. Kubuntu does not come with the packages necessary to build from source, by default.  You must install a bunch of stuff first.  Fortunately, this is easy.  To install the prerequisites necessary to build Firefox from source, open a terminal and type: apt-get build-dep firefox 1. Download the Firefox source code href="ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.0/linux-i686/…

Yes, hate speech kills. Remembering Oklahoma City

Today is the fifteenth anniversary of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh with an assist from three others. That bombing was carried out in part as retaliation by McVeigh for a percieved slight at Ruby Ridge in 1992. That bombing is an example of the material outcome of hate speech of the kind we are seeing increasingly today by Republicans, Teabaggers and the like. One hundred and sixty eight people were killed by McVeigh and his right-wing conspirators, including 19 little children (there was a day care center at the facility…

Do not cite or quote

Steve McIntyre attempts to defend Martin Durkin against Bob Ward's criticism: In a legal complaint about inaccuracies in Swindle, one would expect meticulous accuracy, but once again in their statements about sulphates, RMS and the 37 profs [actually Bob Ward -TL] make claims in their complaint that are inaccurate according to the recent IPCC AR4. They say: It has been well-established in the scientific literature that the period of cooling that was most evident over North America and Europe between about 1940 and 1976 was largely due to increased concentrations of aerosols (particularly…

Presenting - The Homeless Oncologist!

Angels of rain and lightning! there are spread On the blue surface of thine airy surge, Like the bright hair uplifted from the head Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge Of the horizon to the zenith's height, The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge Of the dying year, to which this closing night Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre, Vaulted with all thy congregated might Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere Black rain, and fire, and hail, will burst: O hear! -from "Ode to the West Wind", by Percy Bysshe Shelley The St. Louis area was hit by the worst ice storm…

Rwandan Gorillas Are Even More Demanding Than Elton John

The scientifically esteemed Natalie Portman (at least by Jake) led a troupe of celebs in a baby gorilla naming ceremony/fundraiser at Rwanda's Volcanoes National Park the other day, trying to raise awareness to both the conservation of the critically endangered primates and Rwanda's attempts to attract ecotourists. This part of the article caught my eye: Speaking at the ceremony, Rwandan President Paul Kagame called for strict measures to ensure the protection of mountain gorillas. But with park entrance fees at 500 dollars, gorilla-watching by high-end foreign tourists is also a key source…

Lott's explanation for Mary Rosh doesn't hold water

I've done some more investigation in Lott's latest explanation for his Mary Rosh postings: I originally used my own name but switched after receiving threatening and obnoxious telephone calls from other Internet posters. The first group of Lott postings were made between 3 June 1998 and 14 July 1998. All the responses were polite. In one of his postings Lott complains about getting threatening phone calls, but not about phone calls from other Internet posters. You ought to see what happens to my telephone calls when someone like a Charles Schumer or Josh Sugarmann…

On The Trail of Physiology across America: Visiting our Iowa Family for the Holidays

Next stop: Iowa. The Iowa Physiological Society, a local chapter of The American Physiological Society, held their 15th annual meeting on Saturday October 9th at Des Moines University. Here are some of the comparative physiology highlights from their annual meeting: The Lizard "Kiss and Run": The main method of neurotransmitter release is usually thought to occur by exocytosis where a vesicle, which holds the neurotransmitters, fuses with the plasma membrane of a cell and releases its contents into the fluid outside of the cell. Some vesicles, however, have been described as only…

From The Desk of Zelnio: Benthobatis marcida

Benthobatis marcida (Chordata: Elasmobranchii: Torpediniformes: Narcinidae) "It is a clumsy fish about a yard long, and very ugly. Being too slow to catch its swift prey in fair chase, it stuns them with an electric shock, and then eats them. The electric power comes from the body of the Ray; if it wishes it can send a deadly shock through any fish which ventures near. Without chance of escape, it is at once stunned, and falls helpless." - R. Cadwallader Smith Within the Deep Description Described in 1909 in collections from the Albatross Steamer off of the coast of the…

One Effect of Low Rainfall

Here in the upper Mohawk Valley of central NY, we are accustomed to an abundance of water. Heck, the city of Utica typically receives around 100 inches of snow per year and that's nothing compared to the Tug Hill Plateau just north. The summer of 2007 has been notable for a lack of rainfall, though, with some areas seeing only 10 percent of their normal rainfall during September. In fact, some areas are now on water restriction (no washing your car, watering the lawn, or stuff like that). About 15 minutes north of town is the Hinckley Reservoir (known locally as Hinckley Lake) which was…

The great productivity transient

This comment from Chris is interesting: I would speculate that the the massive productivity gains were due to a massive resorting of American society along cognitive lines; from 1940 to 1970 a large number of high ability people who were previously locked into agriculture and industry were able to sort themselves into more innovative positions. This would lead to a massive burst of innovation, which led to increases in productivity, as previously unlocked talent was put to use. From 1970 to 1990 this resorting was mostly winding down and productivity in the economy was heavily constrained by…

Bully for Barosaurus

Barosaurus lentus by Michael Skrepnick Barosaurus lentus is one of the many dinosaurs that are both familiar and rare, one skeleton being mostly complete but the 5 others that are currently known are much less so. Known from the Late Jurassic Morrison Formation of the western United States, this dinosaur is perhaps most famously (and controversially) reconstructed in the Grand Rotunda of the American Museum of Natural History, rearing up to protect a juvenile from a marauding Allosaurus, although a recent news story from the Royal Ontario Museum tells of the second most complete specimen…

Composite test for positive selection in the genome

Update: Must read post from p-ter. A Composite of Multiple Signals Distinguishes Causal Variants in Regions of Positive Selection: The human genome contains hundreds of regions whose patterns of genetic variation indicate recent positive natural selection, yet for most the underlying gene and the advantageous mutation remain unknown. We developed a method, Composite of Multiple Signals (CMS), that combines tests for multiple signals of selection and increases resolution by up to 100-fold. Applying CMS to candidate regions from the International Haplotype Map, we localized population-specific…

The Dark Matter of American History

In the comments below, vanya states: But razib, upstate New York is not New England. I've never heard of "Greater New England." As a kid in New Hampshire I always understood that New England was superior to New York state, which was mostly a nest of Dutchmen and Tories in 1776 anyway. I never heard of "Greater New England" explicitly until I read this article by Michael Lind. I say explicitly because implicitly the region is obvious. You even know this from the biographies of prominent New Englanders, the perigrinations of Joseph Smith and John Brown follow the arc of Greater New England,…

Earthquakes subsiding in Saudi Arabia

Al-Qider volcano in western Saudi Arabia. Image courtesy of Ahmed Al-Hussaini. After a week's worth of worry, it appears that the seismicity in western Saudi Arabia is subsiding. The latest statement from Zuhair Nawab, the head of the SGS, is that over the past four days with fewer and less severe aftershocks. If this continues, people who have evacuated the area around Al Ais might be able to return to their homes in a few days. However, it is important to note that even though officials suggest the seismicity is waning (and there may be indications this is not entirely accurate), the swarm…

Descabezado Grande showing signs of eruption - UPDATED: False alarm!

Descabezado Grande, Chile showing increased fumarolic activity in 2009. Well, if they didn't have enough already between Llaima and Chaiten, another volcano in southern Chile has started erupting. Descabezado Grande (roughly translated: "The Big Beheaded One") has erupted or is showing of eruption (in spanish and NOTE that the picture in the article is of Llaima, NOT, I repeat, NOT Descabezado Grande ... grrr) but details are scant on the actual activity. However, scientists from the SERNAGEOMIN are headed to the area to evaluate the volcano - hopefully the reports are accurate. So far,…

The Growing Influence of Climate Change on the California Drought

Over the past three years (and indeed, for 10 of the past 14 years) California has experienced a particularly deep drought. How bad is the drought? Is it the worst in the instrumental record? The worst in over a century? The worst in 1200 years? The worst “ever”? And why has it been so bad? There is no single definition of “drought.” Drought, most simply defined, is the mismatch between (1) the amounts of water nature provides and (2) the amounts of water that humans and the environment demand. As the National Drought Mitigation Center puts it: “In the most general sense, drought originates…

Gigantoraptor, Eocursor and... baby Toni

The gigantic mystery coelurosaur alluded to here in one of the ornithomimosaur articles - yes, you heard it here first - has at last been published, and it is an immense long-legged oviraptorosaur, as big as a tyrannosaur. But it is just one of three fantastic new discoveries from the world of dinosaurs that, sorry, I just had to cover... Every now and again in the world of Mesozoic palaeontology a new discovery comes from left field and slams you in the ribs; something so surprising and counter-intuitive that it would have made a good April Fool's joke were it not actually real.…

The Tet Zoo field guide to ostrich dinosaurs (part I)

As events conspire, I again find myself unable to devote time to completing any new blog posts. That's a shame, as I'm desperate to finish and publish my article on the terrifying sex organs of male turtles (yes really: stay tuned). In desperation, I've opted to dig out and recycle some old text. If you like dinosaurs, you might be pleased... We've seen before that - perhaps more than most scientist-authors - I've lost/wasted an unbelievable amount of time on projects that ultimately failed, or have yet to come to fruition. There was the taphonomy book, and there are a long string of…

Dark Energy, Accelerated Expansion, and Energy Conservation: Does it all make sense?

"I have long held an opinion... that the various forms under which the forces of matter are made manifest have one common origin; or, in other words, are so directly related and mutually dependent, that they are convertible, as it were, one into another, and possess equivalents of power in their action." -Michael Faraday For centuries, the idea that you can't get something for nothing was floating around long before we knew about the most important conservation law in all of the Universe: the Conservation of Energy. Image credit: Mr. Torgerson's 6th grade class. For example, the ball…

On the "Hot Hand" in Basketball

A little while back, Jonah Lehrer did a nice blog post about reasoning that used the famous study by Gilovich, Vallone and Tversky, The Hot Hand in Basketball (PDF link) as an example of a case where people don't want to believe scientific results. The researchers found absolutely no statistical evidence of "hot" shooting-- a player who had made his previous couple of shots was, if anything, slightly less likely to make the next one. Lehrer writes: Why, then, do we believe in the hot hand? Confirmation bias is to blame. Once a player makes two shots in a row - an utterly unremarkable event…

More on the Bible Elective Curriculum

The full report on the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools' Bible course curriculum is now available from the Texas Freedom Network. The report was written by Mark Chancey, a professor of Biblical studies at Southern Methodist University. As Chancey notes, the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools has quite a select group of supporters and they've managed to compile an entire curriculum on how to teach about the Bible without a single Biblical scholar on either their 8 member Board of Directors or their 50+ member Advisory Committee. They do, however, have…

Not Exactly Pocket Science - panic aboard the Titanic, the rise of polar bears and emasculated frogs

I'm trying something new. Right from the start, I've always tried to write fairly long and detailed write-ups of new papers but this means that on any given week, there are always more stories than time and my desktop gets littered with PDFs awaiting interpretation. So, I'm going to start doing shorter write-ups of papers that don't make the cut, linking to more detailed treatments on other quality news sources. This is something that I hope science journalists will do more of. It stems from a Twitter conversation where I asked if I should (a) write up short versions of these stories, (b)…

Memory Suppression? How Inhibition May Allow for Flexible Control

Everyone does something they later regret. Can you ever intentionally forget that you did it? The idea of memory repression has rarely been considered within scientific psychology, but the processes involved in intentional forgetting (also covered last week) are the focus of a recent article by Michael Anderson. In his article, Anderson argues that the "cognitive control" required to suppress an unwanted memory is fundamentally similar to the processes involved in overcoming a habitual or "prepotent" response in favor of a weaker response. A simple example might be naming the ink color of…

Returning to my roots: A literary analysis of the Blogger SAT challenge

As of yesterday, readers had made an astonishing 3,878 individual ratings of the essays in the Blogger SAT Challenge. The average rating was 2.76, compared to 2.9 from the expert judges. Averaging the most popular rating for each essay comes up with an even lower number, 2.51. Anyone who thought that blog readers would judge bloggers more favorably than the experts was sorely mistaken. Of the 109 entries, just 11 received a score of 5 or higher. Casual readers of the challenge were even stingier with their marks: Only 8 essays were ranked 5 or higher by a plurality of readers. Interestingly…

The greatest science paper ever published in the history of humankind

That's not hyperbole. I really mean it. How else could I react when I open up the latest issue of Bioessays, and see this: Cephalopod origin and evolution: A congruent picture emerging from fossils, development and molecules. Just from the title alone, I'm immediately launched into my happy place: sitting on a rocky beach on the Pacific Northwest coast, enjoying the sea breeze while the my wife serves me a big platter of bacon, and the cannula in my hypothalamus slowly drips a potent cocktail of cocain and ecstasy direct into my pleasure centers…and there's pie for dessert. It's like the…

Physics of Fantastic Contraption I

One of my students showed me this game, [Fantastic Contraption](http://fantasticcontraption.com/). The basic idea is to use a couple of different "machine" parts to build something that will move an object into a target area. Not a bad game. But what do I do when I look at a game? I think - hey! I wonder what kind of physics this "world" uses. This is very similar to [my analysis of the game Line Rider](http://scienceblogs.com/dotphysics/2008/09/the-physics-of-linerider/) except completely different. Fantastic Contraption gives the unique opportunity to build whatever you want. This…

The politics of genetic history in India

A reader pointed me to an article, Aryan-Dravidian divide a myth: Study. Some of the authors of the paper I reviewed today (actually, I wrote the post yesterday and put it in schedule) had some interesting things to say: The great Indian divide along north-south lines now stands blurred. A pathbreaking study by Harvard and indigenous researchers on ancestral Indian populations says there is a genetic relationship between all Indians and more importantly, the hitherto believed ''fact'' that Aryans and Dravidians signify the ancestry of north and south Indians might after all, be a myth. ''…

No, childhood vaccines will not be "made from human tumors"

Every so often there's an article that starts making the rounds on social media, in particular Facebook and Twitter, that cries out for a treatment by yours truly. Actually, there are more such articles that are constantly circulating on social media that I could work full time blogging and still not cover them all. So I'm stuck picking and choosing ones that either (1) particularly pique my interest; (2) irritate me enough to goad me into action; or (3) reach a level of ubiquity that I can no longer ignore them. I don't think this one's hit #3 yet, but it certainly scores on #1 and #2.…

In the sky at night: stunning video from the International Space Station

View from the ISS at Night from Knate Myers on Vimeo.

Lakota Indians Unilaterally Break Treaties with U.S.

Fortunately, the Lakota don't seem to have a lot of neocons, so there probably won't be an outbreak of waterboarding. From Agence France-Presse: The Lakota Indians, who gave the world legendary warriors Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, have withdrawn from treaties with the United States, leaders said Wednesday. "We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us," long-time Indian rights activist Russell Means told a handful of reporters and a delegation from the Bolivian embassy, gathered in a…

A Decent Commander-in-Chief Doesn't Let This Happen

By now, stories about how poorly returning veterans are being treated hardly qualifies as 'news' because, shamefully, it is so common. But this story from the Washington Post is shocking: Behind the door of Army Spec. Jeremy Duncan's room, part of the wall is torn and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold. When the wounded combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. The entire building, constructed between the world wars, often smells like greasy carry-out. Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings,…

All That Is Gold Does Not Glitter: The Return of an Old Clade of E. coli O157:H7

When I started blogging, I never (EVAH!) thought I would describe the biology of E. coli with a Tolkein poem: All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost; The old that is strong does not wither, Deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, A light from the shadows shall spring; Renewed shall be blade that was broken, The crownless again shall be king. I'm referring, of course, the spinach outbreak strain of E. coli O157:H7. You know, this one: It turns out that this particular strain of E. coli O157:…

Dalton Conley on the Limitations of Science

Below, Dalton Conley responds to the question: The boundaries of science are continually expanding as scientists become increasingly integral to finding solutions for larger social issues, such as poverty, conflict, financial crises, etc. On what specific issue/problem do you feel we need to bring the scientific lens to bear? The Enlightenment Project--so to speak--tells us that all of human life can be better comprehended (and thus improved) by careful, scientific reasoning. I am not sure I believe that, but certainly, once a problem has been articulated, it can be addressed through a…

Best Science Books 2012: Amazon.ca

Another list for your reading, gift-giving and collection development pleasure. Every year for the last bunch of years I’ve been linking to and posting about all the “year’s best sciencey books” lists that appear in various media outlets and shining a bit of light on the best of the year. All the previous 2012 lists are here. This post includes the following: Amazon.ca Top 100 Editors' Picks. The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't by Nate Silver Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain The Power of Habit: Why We Do What…

Nothing significant

Just more eliminationist rhetoric from a good Catholic. Fortunately, this stuff is ebbing right now. From: JBWPSR@aol.com Subject: Your desecration of the Eucharist Date: October 1, 2008 1:25:00 PM CDT Received: by 10.141.86.17 with SMTP id o17cs33336rvl; Wed, 1 Oct 2008 11:25:06 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.65.40.16 with SMTP id s16mr14590483qbj.74.1222885505714; Wed, 01 Oct 2008 11:25:05 -0700 (PDT) Received: from mtain-w.tc.umn.edu (mtain-w.tc.umn.edu [134.84.119.8]) by mx.google.com with ESMTP id s12si172335qbs.9.2008.10.01.11.25.05; Wed, 01 Oct 2008 11:25:05 -0700 (PDT) Received: from…

Good news and bad

David Appell at Quark Soup draws our attention (via Stoat) to a graph in the recent America's Climate Choices report from the NAS/NRC. If the forecasts on which the authors rely come to pass, it's going to take almost a couple of decades for U.S. energy-related CO2 emissions to return to post-recession levels. Sounds like good news. Two years ago, Lester Brown at the Earth Policy Institute wrote of a watershed moment, and while it looks like he was a bit too enthusiastic -- long-term, carbon emissions still rise -- he might have been on to something. The United States has ended a century of…

Fit to be tied

So, 2010 is a statistical tie for warmest year on record. This from NASA's GISS and NOAA's NCDC. Some AGW refuseniks might cling to the fact that the year just past was 0.018 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than 2005, but then you'd know they never bothered to take a stats class. As the GISS press release puts it: The record temperature in 2010 is particularly noteworthy, because the last half of the year was marked by a transition to strong La Niña conditions, which bring cool sea surface temperatures to the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. We've also just come out of an unusually long "solar…

It's Just Engineering

I remember, all too painfully, in many of my high tech and life science start-ups, a common refrain from the scientists would be, "We got the device to work....it's just engineering from here." Then, invariably - millions of dollars later - I would learn (as the CEO): that's when the hard work really begins. It's one thing to get one device to work; it's another big thing to get the next hundred devices to all work. When I set out to start the "USA Science Festival" and received a phone call from Chuck Vest, the President of the National Academy of Engineering, suggesting that I should…

Call a Canadian

We get emails, all kinds of emails, from people thinking it would be great if we mentioned something near and dear to them on Effect Measure. We are flattered by this, of course, but we aren't journalists or a commercial site or a non-profit advocacy site (well, we are ultimately non-profit, but not intentionally). Occasionally, though, we get email that piques are interest and enthusiasm. This afternoon I got one from Jonathan Link, a writer for AboutKidsHealth, a project of the The Hospital for Sick Children at The University of Toronto. Back in the days when Quebec was a referendum in the…