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Occupational Health News Roundup

The human rights group Amnesty International has released a report criticizing forced labor and dangerous working conditions in Brazilâs sugar cane industry, which feeds the countryâs booming ethanol industry. Eduardo Simoes and Inae Riveras report for Reuters (via Gristmill): Amnesty said that in March 2007, 288 workers were rescued from forced labor at six cane plantations in Sao Paulo state, and 409 workers from an ethanol distillery in Mato Grosso do Sul state. In November 2007, inspection teams found 831 indigenous cane cutters working in poor conditions, also in Mato Grosso do Sul,…

Miner Files Lawsuit for Coal Dust Rule

A coal miner from eastern Kentucky filed a law suit yesterday requesting a federal court judge to compel MSHA to issue a health standard to prevent miners from developing black lung disease.  The Petition for Writ of Mandamus (Howard v. Chao) argues that Congress intended, through the Federal Coal Mine Health & Safety Act of 1969 (amended 1977), MSHA to promulgate regulations to prevent new cases of coal workers pnuemoconiosis, progressive massive fibrosis and other  illnesses related to miners' exposure to respirable coal mine dust.  Despite evidence over the last 12 years that…

Occupational Health News Roundup

On Thursday, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee released a report on the Crandall Canyon mining disaster that claimed nine lives in Utah last August. (Celesteâs posts on the disaster are in our August archive.) A Salt Lake Tribune editorial opines that âMost damning is the revelation that the coal company ignored a direct order from an MSHA inspector and continued to carve coal from a barrier pillar that served as a roof support in the mine.â The SLTâs Robert Gehrke focuses on what MSHA did wrong: Mine Safety and Health Administration officials yielded to pressure from…

Damn those women, out there ruining science and being lazy and depressed

Via Ed, if you puked on VoxDay's shoes after his column earlier this week in WorldNetDaily: But this is not to say there is not a genuine threat to all three aspects of science today. Unsurprisingly, it comes from the same force that is the primary threat to the survival of Western civilization: female equalitarianism. Flush with their success in decimating the collegiate sports programs of America, the equalitarians have now set their sights on applying the infamous Title IX quotas to science education, despite the fact that women already earn 57 percent of bachelor's degrees, 59 percent of…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Anthropologists Develop New Approach To Explain Religious Behavior: Without a way to measure religious beliefs, anthropologists have had difficulty studying religion. Now, two anthropologists from the University of Missouri and Arizona State University have developed a new approach to study religion by focusing on verbal communication, an identifiable behavior, instead of speculating about alleged beliefs in the supernatural that cannot actually be identified. White Men Attach Greater Stigma To Mental Health Care: Beyond financial and access barriers to mental health care, factors such as…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Loss Of Egg Yolk Genes In Mammals And The Origin Of Lactation And Placentation: If you are reading this, you did not start your life by hatching from an egg. This is one of the many traits that you share with our mammalian relatives. A new article explores the genetic changes that led mammals to feed their young via the placenta and with milk, rather then via the egg, and finds that these changes occurred fairly gradually in our evolutionary history. The paper shows that milk-protein genes arose in a common ancestor of all existing mammalian lineages and preceded the loss of the genes that…

McCain is an Anti-Choice Flip-Flopper

Speaking of flip-flopping, it appears that the rethuglicans hold the World Record for flip-flopping. For example, Senator McCain -- I am still waiting for him to fulfill his promise to the American people by committing suicide -- has recently flip-flopped on his position regarding abortion rights. Now he is saying that the decision whether to make abortion legal should be returned to the states. Why does he say this? Because McCain is now, conveniently, a federalist. However, that doesn't stop individual states from outlawing abortion and from outlawing women from seeking abortions in states…

Guardian mail orders 1/2000th of smallpox virus

Interesting piece of journalism by the Grauniad They ordered a 78 "letter" piece of DNA for a smallpox envelope protein. As they note, the actual genome is rather longer than that, but as they also note, there are techniques for reconstructing genomes from DNA pieces. I don't think anyone will be synthesizing smallpox from less than 100 base length pieces, got to be easier ways to do it (start from a chickenpox virus and edit it?); but they make an interesting if overhyped point. Update: Nick at Scientific Activist also comments. He notes that this suggests a need for more government…

Corn - it's not just in your food, it's in your packaging

Last spring, in a coffee shop in Berkeley, I saw an amazing thing. It was a cup made from corn. The information on the cup says that it is made from corn, is environmentally sustainable, and 100% compostable. My fellow ScienceBloggers have written several articles lately about corn in fast food (here, here, and here), but I'm not sure they realized that corn is used for more than fast food.  Corn is also used to make the packaging. The company that made this cup is called Fabri-Kal.  The cup is one of many compostable packaging items from Fabri-Kal's Greenware line.  Interestingly,…

Up or down?

A professor of religion has decided that atheism is in decline and the "New Atheists" are over. Why? Because sales of books by the "New Atheists" have declined since their release several years ago, Karen Armstrong has published her silly book, and surveys show that atheists are still a minority. And the reason they flopped is because atheists are such mean poopieheads. In other words, more bleary-eyed wishful thinking from a mind squicked by religion. Gosh, yes, older books sell at a much lower volume than fresh, new releases. And if you want to claim a trend, you can't just cite data from…

Swedish Landscape Surprises

Taking a hint from George Hrab's stage show, I asked my landscape history students to write me a question each anonymously on a small note. Or rather, I asked them to ”Tell me something that surprises you about the Swedish landscape you've seen so far”. This turned out to be a good teaching tool. I went through the stack of notes and discussed them with the students. The Finnish and Canadian students aren't surprised by anything at all. Their countries look like Sweden, because they have the same history of Ice Ages and a sparse population and are on the same latitude as Sweden. But 1/3 of…

Lead Seal and Engine Spec Plate, 20th Century

Today I did four hours of metal-detecting at a site in VÃ¥rdinge where a Wendelring bronze torque from about 600 BC has been found. Reiner Knizia's popular card game Lost Cities has a thinly applied archaeological theme, and on the board is actually an image of a Wendelring torque just like the one from VÃ¥rdinge. (A Lost Cities deck can easily be made from two packs of normal playing cards using a marker pen on a few cards.) The torques often come in twos and threes, so I was hoping to find another one today. In early April when my team was there, the site was still largely covered with…

Tracking Down a Creationist Misquote

Speaking of D. James Kennedy, a reader left a link in a comment below about the time-honored practice of tracking down creationist misquotations. Anyone involved in the evolution debate has had to do this at least once. A creationist gives you some juicy quote from a famous scientist that you know just couldn't possibly be accurate, so you ask for a specific citation. On the rare occasions you actually get one, it turns out to be false. Tracking down these things can be quite annoying. It's like playing the telephone game and watching a quote get more and more distorted as it's passed along…

What Do Our Students Do After Graduation?

Continuing the recent "careers in science" theme, Inside Higher Ed has a story about what people with science degrees do with their lives, based on a new NSF report. From the Inside Higher Ed piece: Many science and engineering degree recipients continue to get use from their undergraduate studies even years after they've graduated, and even if they've switched disciplines. According to a report from the National Science Foundation's Division of Science Resource Statistics, in 2003, two-thirds of workers whose highest degree was a bachelor's in a science or engineering field reported that…

The Sun’s Energy Doesn’t Come From Fusing Hydrogen Into Helium (Mostly)

"The sun is a miasma Of incandescent plasma The sun's not simply made out of gas No, no, no The sun is a quagmire It's not made of fire Forget what you've been told in the past" -They Might Be Giants Ask anyone where the Sun (or any star) gets its energy from, and most people will correctly answer “nuclear fusion.” But if you ask what’s getting fused, most people -- including most scientists -- will tell you that the Sun fuses hydrogen into helium, and that’s what powers it. It’s true that the Sun uses hydrogen as its initial fuel, and that helium-4 is indeed the end product, but the…

Republicans: US Government will wait 2 more years to address climate change

... at any serious level, and then, only if enough Republicans get thrown out of the House to allow committee work and legislation to happen. From The Hill: House Energy and Commerce Committee Republicans have rebuffed Democrats’ bid to require the high-profile panel to hold hearings on links between climate change, extreme weather and threats to coastal areas. On Wednesday the Committee, along party lines, voted down Democratic amendments to its formal oversight plan for the 113th Congress. One defeated amendment, from Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.), would have required hearings on the role of…

Weather Whiplash, and What Does (The) Fox Say?

Paul Douglas send me this photo: "Check out the piles of melting slush in the foreground; looks like half a foot (?) of dirty snow in that one clump. This takes weather whiplash to a new (and ridiculously jaw-dropping) level. Photo courtesy of Dana Cottingham Fricke, from Concord, Illinois." The biggest loss of containers from a container ship (that didn't just plain sink) happened a few days ago as the Svendborg Maersk was battered with hurricane like conditions including Waves Of Unusual Size generated in the Global Warming Enhanced megastorm, while at the same time tornadoes, some…

Bandwidth Blues

Here's something for the gearheads. At home, we've got a permanent Comhem broadband fiber connection offering 10 Mb/s down & up. Its actual performance is about 9 down and 10 up, which is OK. I like to have a swift uplink since I send a lot of large files and keep my data on a DAV server for easy access from the four computers I work with. This, to the majority who have never heard of a DAV server, means that with a slow uplink, it would take a lot of time for me to save my work when I press CTRL-S. (A funny thing about permanent internet cabling in Swedish apartment houses is that its…

links for 2007-10-06

Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education - Inside Higher Ed :: Early (Encouraging) Data on Early Colleges If you offer college courses to good high-school students, they do better in college. Also, grass tends to be green. (tags: education academia) Improbable Research The 2007 Ig Nobel Prizes have been awarded. (tags: science silly news) Off the Kuff: On nominating judges Comments from someone who knows the process from the inside (tags: politics news) OpinionJournal - Leisure & Arts The good news that only the WSJ will bring you... (tags: Iraq war politics news)…

USVI: Mise En Scene

I took a rather large number of pictures on the recent trip, and I'm very happy with at least some of them. I'm uploading the raw images to Flickr, but I'm also cropping and tweaking them in GIMP for posting here. Because, well, it's my blog, and if I want to try to make you all jealous of my tropical vacation, I can do that. This is the first post in what will be a series of vacation-picture posts, from our recent trip to St. John in the US Virgin Islands. This time out, I'll just talk about where we stayed, just outside of Cruz Bay: Our rooms were at Estate Lindholm, a small B&B on a…

Where You're At

Every now and then, I start poking at the stats in Google Analytics, and I almost always find something interesting. For example, in the last week, this site has been visited twice by someone from Mauritius, four times by someone from Iran, and six times by someone from Kyrgyzstan. I'm being read by somebody in a country I can't even pronounce. Google identifies visits from 61 different contries (well, 60 countries, plus "Satellite Provider"). Just over 75% are from the US, and adding Canada, the UK, and Australia accounts for better than 90% of them. But that still leaves an amazing number…

The Football Factor

Charles Kuffner is the latest to note that people would rather watch football with Obama than McCain. As always, they try to delve into the reasons: "I think he'd be fun to sit back with and hear his experiences, all his stories," said Kyle Ferguson, 28, a Republican from Santa Rosa, Calif., who picked McCain. But reflecting a sense some voters have of McCain based on the complaints of a few Senate colleagues, he added warily, "I bet he'd probably get pretty angry and lit up if his team was losing." The temper isn't the real issue, though. You see, it's all about the leagues. McCain is from…

Virus Sexy Time

No, I dont mean viruses you get from sexy time. I mean virus sexy time. Viruses having sex, ie, shuffling round their genetic material. They do it a lot. HIV-1 sexy time Ive written about before-- because HIV-1 is diploid, two copies of the genome are packaged into one virus. There is lots of 'hopping' during reverse transcription, so sometimes things dont 'hop' perfectly, and the resulting virus is different from both of its 'parents'. Thats how HIV-1 gets a shitload of its diversity (NOT just error-prone reverse transcription). So sometimes HIV-1 sexy time leads to subtle polymorphisms…

CANNONBALLLLLLL!!!!!!

You sometimes hear people say that it's good to make a splash when embarking on a new media project. David Sloan Wilson has apparently taken this to heart, and tucks himself into a tight ball as he leaps off the high board into the ScienceBlogs pool: Thinking of science as a religion that worships truth as it god enables me to praise its virtues and criticize its shortcomings at the same time. In my previous blogs, I have played the role of scientific reformer for two major issues. The first is the "new atheism" movement spearheaded by the so-called four horsemen: Richard Dawkins, Daniel…

The chronic taxonomic neglect of male ants

Amyrmex: Dolichoderinae? Leptanilloidinae? Who knew? A paper out this week in Zootaxa reminds us of the hazards of excessive reliance on the worker caste for ant taxonomy.  Phil Ward and Seán Brady sequenced DNA from few genes from the enigmatic Amyrmex, a rarely-collected dolichoderine genus known only from males in South America.  Except, it wasn't a dolichoderine.  Surprise!  Genetically, this little guy is part of the doryline section (the army ants and relatives) in the Leptanilloidinae. Where did we go wrong with Amyrmex?  In my opinion, it's in our dysfunctional dependence on…

Ants from a Kilometer Up

So you like insects, but can't be bothered to get up from your computer to go look for some? Google earth to the rescue! South of Tucson, Arizona (31°38.097'N 111°03.797'W) I found this lovely aerial image. Visualized from an elevation of about a kilometer and a half, it shows a hill just west of I-19 covered in freshly-sprouted grass. Except, there's this strange pattern of evenly-spaced polka-dots: What could account for the speckles? Alien crop-circles? Bizarre gardening accidents? Why no, those are the nest discs of one of our most conspicuous insects in the Sonoran desert, the red…

Remembering Virginia Tech Massacre, 2 years on

It's maybe hard for some of us to believe, but it has been 2 years since the Virginia Tech massacre. Day of Remembrance activities in Blacksburg include a candlelight vigil, a memorial run, and an open house in the renovated Norris Hall. It's amazing for me to think about how we are two years on from this event -- in particular, because I interviewed at Virginia Tech the week before, and turned down their offer the morning of the massacre, right before it happened. It was surreal, almost too much to believe. Once I heard the news, I immediately emailed the folks I had met with, terrified of…

Canadian Catholics come to their senses

We'll never know what role, if any, the mockery of the New Atheists had in the decision taken yesterday by the Toronto Catholic District School Board to let the girls in their charge get the HPV vaccine. But for once, it feels good to pass on the news that empirical evidence has trumped irrational faith. The decision came just a couple of days after the news spread that that another nearby school board, just down the road from Toronto in Halton, " could become the first in Ontario to ban public health nurses from administering the HPV vaccine to young girls at local schools." From the Globe…

Can WiFi shake up your molecules?

The good news from the Bay of Fundy is that the world's largest tides may soon be generating electricity. The bad news is there's at least one Globe and Mail copy editor who doesn't know the difference between waves and tides. But that's not the most amusing news from the region. For that, we turn to Kings County, where the local authorities have decided to deny approval to install a WiFi tower because a garlic farmer is worried about the damage it will do to his crops. According to the CBC: Lenny Levine, who has been planting and harvesting garlic by hand on his Annapolis Valley land since…

Macho B [UPDATED]

A few weeks back, I updated you on the story of Macho B, the male jaguar that was captured in southeastern Arizona and subsequently euthanized due to apparent chronic kidney failure. The Arizona Republic is reporting that Sharon Dial, a pathologist at Arizona Veterinary Diagnostic Lab, is claiming that the euthanization was premature and that the jaguar was not suffering from renal failure. The initial diagnosis was made from bloodwork and Dial examined the kidneys: "Nothing is absolute. There is nothing to say that he absolutely would have recovered, but I can say by looking at the kidneys…

Expect Obama to "Prime" the Scanner Moment

Is McCain's "House" Gaffe Similar to George Bush's 1992 "Scanner" Moment? In his first major negative ad of the campaign, Obama is defining McCain as out of touch with Americans' economic woes. Obama is seizing on McCain's gaffe yesterday when he stumbled over a question about how many homes he owns. "I think -- I'll have my staff get to you," McCain told the reporter. "It's condominiums where -- I'll have them get to you." (Either seven or eight homes, depending on reports.) (Wpost). The Obama strategy is to define McCain as a wealthy elitist so removed from the day-to-day financial…

The Anatomy of the Brain, Explained in a Series of Engravings

These gorgeous stipple-engraved plates come from The Anatomy of the Brain, Explained in a Series of Engravings, by Sir Charles Bell. The book was first published in 1802 and contained 12 plates, 11 of which were printed in colour; these come from an edition which appeared in 1823. In the introduction to the book, Bell wrote: In the Brain the appearance is so peculiar, and so little capable of illustration from other parts of the body, the surfaces are so soft, and so easily destroyed by rude dissection, and it is so difficult to follow an abstract description merely, that this part of…

Sleepless in Seattle: Re-Cap on Framing Science Tour

On Friday, I was in Seattle for our latest stop in the Speaking Science 2.0 tour. We were hosted by the University of Washington's Forum on Science Ethics and Policy (FOSEP), the Dept. of Communication, the Pacific Science Center, and Town Hall Seattle. (I will have a post up later about how FOSEP serves as an innovative model for regional collaborations around science communication.) The day started at 11am with a presentation I gave to about 60 faculty and graduate students on the communication dynamics of the stem cell debate. While I was wrapping up the presentation at the Student Union…

Carbon monoxide lowers breathing rate in fish too

Image of zebrafish By Pogrebnoj-Alexandroff from Wikimedia Commons We tend to think of carbon monoxide (CO) only in terms of being a poisonous gas. The reason for its toxicity is due to its ability to bind really tightly to our hemoglobin molecules, which prevents oxygen from being able to bind. In mammals, CO also decrease breathing rate. As you can imagine, it is a pretty terrible gas to breath in when you are a species dependent on hemoglobin for delivery of oxygen to tissues. Did you know that CO is also produced in our bodies when heme molecules are broken down by enzymes called…

2016 Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology Winners Announced!!

I am very excited to report this year's awardees from the Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology Section (CEPS) of the American Physiological Society! The New Investigator Award is given to a young investigator who has made contributed significantly to the field of comparative and evolutionary physiology. This year's awardee is Casey Mueller from California State University, San Marcos. Casey Mueller (middle) receiving the New Investigator Award. She is standing with the CEPS Chair, Dr. Michael Hedrick (left) and the 2016 August Krogh Distinguished Lecturer, Dr. Jon Harrison (right). The…

Centipede venom blocks pain more effectively than morphine

  Image of a Chinese red-headed centipede from Wikimedia Commons. Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and The University of Queensland have discovered a venom from centipedes capable of blocking pain more effectively than morphine! According to the study authors, centipedes have appeared in the fossil records as far back as 430 million years. They are also one of the first land-dwelling creatures to use venom to incapacitate their prey as shown in the image above of a Chinese red-headed centipede (Scolopendra subspinipes mutilansis) snacking on a roach. The venom is secreted…

Rise in bottlenose dolphin deaths in the Gulf of Mexico

A higher than normal mortality rate for bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) in the Gulf of Mexico during 2011 has been found to correspond with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill as well as colder weather conditions during 2010 leading to an influx of colder water into the Gulf from snowmelt. From January through April 2011, 186 bottlenose dolphins were found ashore between Louisiana and Florida, 46% of which were calves. This number is nearly twice that of preceding years (2003-2010). Using tissues collected from the animals, the actual cause of death is still under investigation. Figure…

Another idea from the scholarly evaluation metrics workshop

One thing that kind of bugs me is that people answer the question "what impact has your funding had" with things like "I hired 3 postdocs and 2 support staff." Dr Lane talked about this at the workshop, but to some extent, I don't think her solution actually got at the bigger problem: societal impact. How has your research - done with our money - made the world a better place (maybe it hasn't, but that's ok, too). In the last post I mentioned a way I think we could start to learn more about how much scientific articles were taken up in the general media. This is at least opportunity for…

Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) Annual Meeting Preview

I hope to be blogging this meeting over the course of the next few days. Last STS meeting I attended computer note-taking was completely frowned upon but hopefully this one will be more modern.  I'll be talking tomorrow in session 070. Scientific Communication, (4:00 to 6:00 pm, but I'm guessing my 20 minutes will be closer to 6). The conference has oodles of concurrent sessions from 8am to 6pm and then evening events. I'm staying at home - probably an hour and a half away with traffic (30-45 minutes without) - so I might miss half of the first session and will not stay for evening events. I…

What About Feeding Bugs to Pigs?

Bugmeal to replace fishmeal? We know it's wasteful to grind up one-third of our wild caught fish into fishmeal to feed it to pigs, chickens, and fish. But hope for our tiny fish might lie in an unlikely source: bugs. Apparently, a group of scientists and at least one entrepreneur is taking the need to find a substitute for fishmeal seriously. According to Seafood.com News, there is a new interest in mass-producing insects as a sustainable protein source to replace fish meal in fish and livestock feeds. Ernest Papadoyianis, president of Neptune Industries, said his company was searching for…

Defeat Rick Santorum!

What's the most important local political race to you this year (as a citizen, as a scientist)?... Dear god, please save me from Rick Santorum...oh wait. Is that a bit strange, to be praying for relief from Mr. RightWingChristianFundamentalist? Mr. EvolutionIsEvilNaziPropaganda? Mr. WomenShouldBeInTheHomeAndPregnant? Mr. ILiveInVirginiaButIWantPennsylvaniaToPayForMyKidsEducation? Last year I moved from Kansas and thought with great relief, "No more Sam Brownback as my senator!!!" Of course, coming to Pennsylvania, I just exchanged him for Rick Santorum. However, there is the very real…

Age of the Earth

Just as a lark and as a little exercise in making HTML tables (and to make clear what one error was in that last post), I threw together this table of the geological time scale, taken from Mayr's What Evolution Is. I come from that generation of biologists where we were required to memorize the timescale to this level of detail; I'm a bit rusty on the dates now (but these are pretty much the same as what I had to learn in the late 1970s), and I was just realizing that we don't even mention this stuff in introductory biology anymore. The Geological Timescale Eon Era Period Epoch Age(Ma)…

Euro-update 3: Don't mess with perspective

We've been in Rome for a few days now, and we've seen several wonderful examples of how Renaissance and Baroque artists were beginning to re-learn the lessons of perspective, which, if 20-year-old memory of art history class serves me, had been discarded during the medieval period while artists focused on the social and religious dimensions of art. Realistic perspective in paintings requires artists to understand a lot about the human vision system. If you can accurately portray perspective, you might just be able to build a jumbo-sized cathedral on a moderate-sized budget. The most ambitious…

Back When Whales Were Fish

Move over, all you monkey trials from primordial American history (and from, like, 2005). Here comes a high stakes whale trial that has been lost to our memories, but that we really should learn about and remember. I'm talking about the 1818 court case Maurice v. Judd, chronicled in Princeton historian (and former Chris Mooney professor) D. Graham Burnett's new book Trying Leviathan. Back in those days, Linneaus's taxonomic system already classified the whale as a mammal, but folk wisdom (rooted, of course, in the Bible) said otherwise. Or as Ishmael puts it in Melville's Moby Dick: "Be it…

Simply Bad Science Reporting ...

I usually don't comment on sensational science news (unless it has to do with basic cell biology) but this is just really ... bad. According to several news we can now use radio waves to convert water into hydrogen, which of course can be burned back into water. What exactly are these reports saying? From an AP article: The discovery has scientists excited by the prospect of using salt water, the most abundant resource on earth, as a fuel. And read this, from Wired: Rustum Roy, a Penn State University chemist ... called Kanzius' discovery "the most remarkable in water science in 100 years."…

Bleak times for postdocs in the biomedical sciences?

From the last week's issue of Nature, More biologists but tenure stays static. From the article: The data, compiled by the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) (opa.faseb.org/pages/PolicyIssues/training_datappt.htm), are from many sources, including the US National Science Foundation (NSF), the Council of Graduate Schools and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). And one message is clear: increasing numbers of bright young students are eager for a career in biology and biomedicine, but fewer than before will gain the coveted tenured academic positions. Although…

New England RNA Data Club - The Day After

Wow, yesterday was great! We had food, beer, wine and over a hundred people in attendance. There was plenty of conversation and I got a chance to talk to many people, although I wish we had more time to socialize. Thanks to everyone who came. And thanks to our sponsors Alnylam and NEB. Here is funny story for you. I started giving my power point presentation and everything seemed fine except that the room kept on getting hotter and hotter. It turns out that the thermostat was set to 85 degrees. So there I am in a long-sleeved shirt, drenched in sweat. By the end of my 30min talk (well closer…

Deep shrimp fishery swept away by currents

Deep-water formation is one of the most fascinating aspects of global thermohaline circulation. Deep-water doesn't form only at the poles, though, as cold water sinks below warm. Subtropical Underwater, for example, is formed in the central Atlantic where the difference between evaporation and precipitation is highest. Dense, high salinity water sinks down to about 500m before spreading into the bathyl zone of the Caribbean Sea. So, you should ask yourself, where's my deep water coming from? And, how is it effecting my local shrimp fishery? Read the open-access, full-text article here at…

World's Largest Zoo and Aquarium Shot Glass Collection

Many people collect baseball cards, stamps, coins, comic books, rocks, fossils or nutcrackers. I believe I have opened up a whole new field of nerd-dom with my zoo and aquarium shot glass collection. Given that it is the only zoo and aquarium shot glass collection I know of, I have also decided it is the world's largest. In no particular order, I currently have shot glasses from the San Diego Zoo, Newport Aquarium, Cincinnati Zoo, Knoxville Zoo, Ripley's Aquarium of the Smokies, Tennessee Aquarium, New York Aquarium, Smithsonian National Zoo, Bronx Zoo, New England Aquarium, Georgia Aquarium…

Nothing strange about this

An "integrative" medical practitioner observes: I just came from a lecture by a Chinese Prof. who has a cancer hospital in China (Fuda Cancer hospital). What is strange, was it didn't use therapies from China, but rather technologies from the USA. They have cryoablation, photodynamic therapies, dendritic cell therapies, immunotherapy as well as chemoablation. They claimed to have a very good success rate in increasing survival. Patients from all over have come to this hospital in Guangzhuo. Why is he surprised? As I've pointed out before, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is losing out to…