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Mashey on a promising new technology for carbon sequestration

This is a guest post from John Mashey. If there isn't some hidden gotcha (there might be, I'm no expert), it's one of the best single things I've heard. It's especially good for places with a lot of coal, who use concrete, who are near the ocean, and might have use for softer water for desalination. 1) Calera is a just-barely-out-of-stealth, but very impressive startup ... It already has 65 people and a pilot plant at Moss Landing, CA just South of the Dynergy gas plant there. [CA doesn't have any coal plants handy, they'd be better for this, actually.] GooglelEarth: 36deg48'10.29"N,…

AFP author--DAY 2

I want to thank all of you who took the time to read the book and comment. Many of you had kind things to say about the writing and content, clearly understanding what I was trying to do and why I did it. I'll try and answer as many questions that were directed at me as I can, writing a blog entry every morning. I'll start with the easier questions. We tried to get companies that publish audio books interested in this book, but were unsuccessful. All of my royalties from the sale of this book will be donated to the Center for Autism Research at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. I have…

O Brave New World, please come to pass

A reader has asked me to comment on this interesting and controversial technique for generating stem cells. Investigators in the UK are requesting permission to do this: Collect ova from cows. This is routine, done-all-the-time stuff. The cows can't complain. Extract the nuclei from the eggs and throw them away, so that all you have is a lovely membrane-bound sack of cytoplasm and other organelles. People who eat hamburgers don't get to complain about destroying potential life, so this is OK, too. Extract nuclei from human cells and throw the cytoplasm away. These can be taken from non-…

Do some goddamn math

It seems that my clinical activities this month have been assigned a theme: "cognitively disabled people who reproduce." Themes like this do not exactly renew one's faith in freedom of choice; after providing care to three developmentally delayed mother-child pairs over the last month, I feel that there are some people who maybe shouldn't have complete control over their uteruses. Uteri. Whatever--no more babies for these people. On Friday, I did a newborn exam on a baby born to a 28-year old woman who's been pregnant nine times. This was the fourth child she's given birth to, and the fourth…

I'll Take Genomes for $1000

Nature Genetics is asking: What would you do if it became possible to sequence the equivalent of a full human genome for only $1,000? George Church would repeat the Applera dataset for everyone on earth, sequencing every exon from every human being. Francis Collins would sequence people with diseases and old people. Stephen O'Brien would sequence the genomes of all 38 extant species of cats (big surprise) to study the evolution of that taxon and generate SNP markers. O'Brien would also sequence the genomes of the 100 most endangered mammals and every species of primate. Evan Eichler would…

Conflict over conflict-resolution research

Mike Spagat writes: I hope that this new paper [by Michael Spagat, Andrew Mack, Tara Cooper, and Joakim Kreutz] on serious errors in a paper on conflict mortality published in the British Medical Journal will interest you. For one thing I believe that it is highly teachable. Beyond I think that it's important for the conflict field (if I do say so myself). Another aspect of this is that the BMJ is refusing to recognized that there are any problems with the paper. This seems to be sadly typical behavior of journals when they make mistakes. Spagat et al's paper begins: In a much-cited…

Using Bayesian meta-analysis to adjust for bias in experiments and observational studies

Commenter RogerH pointed me to this article by Welton, Ades, Carlin, Altman, and Sterne on models for potentially biased evidence in meta-analysis using empirically based priors. The "Carlin" in the author list is my longtime collaborator John, so I really shouldn't have had to hear about this through a blog comment. Anyway, they write: We present models for the combined analysis of evidence from randomized controlled trials categorized as being at either low or high risk of bias due to a flaw in their conduct. We formulate a bias model that incorporates between-study and between-meta-…

Volcano Profile: Erta Ale

The latest in my Volcano Profiles series, this one on Erta Ale in Ethiopia. The summit crater at Erta Ale in 1994 Location: The Afar region of Ethiopia. Height: 613 m / 2,011 feet Tectonic setting: Erta Ale (meaning "smoking mountain") is part of the East African Rift, where the African Continent is tearing apart along a seam that runs from the Red Sea/Gulf of Aden (two other arms of the rift themselves) south through eastern Africa. Many of the large lakes of eastern Africa such as Lakes Albert, Tanganyika, Nyasa and Kariba fill rift valleys created by the cracking of the continental plate…

Canids seem to have different dialects too

Check out this video from Scientific American discussing how canids from different areas have different 'dialects':

Twin Juvenile Pandas Wrestle

This is another irresistable panda video; I got this from href="http://www.neatorama.com/2007/12/17/baby-pandas-wrestling/">Neatorama, who got it from href="http://xo.typepad.com/blog/2007/12/video-baby-pand.html">A Welsh View.

In the field II

Leftover from last week's zoonotic diseases course: I do sometimes get away from the hind end of animals. http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v164/roland98/IMG_6134_JPG.jpg"

Mother Earth Is Going To Have Her Face Lifted!

Geo-engineering from the '40s. From Military Engineer, 1944 (via C. Pursell's Technology in Postwar America, 2007)

Ice-cold eye candy: glaciers from space

via wired.com Another fine story from Wired Science. Posted via web from David Dobbs's Somatic Marker

Bonus Friday Picture

A Scottish Sea Spider without kilt (from the Metro.co.uk) from the Rockall Trough off NW Scotland.  

Japan nuke news 18: Reactor facilities smoke, sputter. Fission continues?

Claims are being made that the situation at Fukushima is starting to improve, but there is no actual evidence of this. We probably (but not certainly) passed the point where nuclear fuel is likely to accumulate in such a way as to cause a major fission event or explosion, but there is still sufficient heat to cause, apparently, water to split into hydrogen and oxygen, or at least, there is concern of this possibility. (Hydrogen explosions have already occurred here early on in the crisis, and there is concern that this may happen again.) All of the basic safety systems are still not working…

The Physics of why the e-Cat's Cold Fusion Claims Collapse

"Every time you look up at the sky, every one of those points of light is a reminder that fusion power is extractable from hydrogen and other light elements, and it is an everyday reality throughout the Milky Way Galaxy." -Carl Sagan (This post is coauthored by Dr. Peter Thieberger, Senior Physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory.) A cheap, clean, efficient and virtually limitless source of energy would be just what our world needs right about now. The cheap sources -- coal, oil, and gas -- are dirty, destructive, and limited, while the clean sources -- wind and solar -- are expensive and…

Comments of the Week #151: from lost information to the atmosphere of Mars

“A theory is a supposition which we hope to be true, a hypothesis is a supposition which we expect to be useful; fictions belong to the realm of art; if made to intrude elsewhere, they become either make-believes or mistakes.” -G. Johnstone Stoney It's been another exciting week here at Starts With A Bang! This coming Thursday, I'll be speaking at Jacksonville University in Florida; if you're around that area come and say hello! Before we get any further, I'm pleased to announce that thanks to two very generous new Patreon donations from Ryan Schultz and Samir Kumar (shout-out!), we've now…

Comments of the Week #132: from dark comets to alien searches

"Ships that could circumnavigate the galaxy in a few years, and count every cell in your body from light-years off, but he wasn't able to go back one miserable day and alter one tiny, stupid, idiotic, shameful decision..." -Iain Banks And while we can't travel back in time at all to change the actions or events of the past, our incomplete knowledge of the past can always be improved as we move forward. This month's Starts With A Bang podcast is one of the most fun of all, as we cover how we went from mere lower limit estimates of how many galaxies are in the Universe to the first true,…

Democracy Now! - Greenhouse Emissions Rising at Unexpected Rate

Today's DemocracyNow! has a segment with Chris Field, a leading member of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other guest discussing worsening outlooks of future warming and increased lobbying efforts from the fossil fuel industry. We speak to Chris Field, a leading member of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, about his warning that the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is rising more rapidly than expected in recent years. Field says the current trajectory of climate change is now much worse than the IPCC had…

Friday Fun: 31 Days of Halloween!

The science fiction news site blastr has a very entertaining series going for the month of October, 31 Days of Halloween. As you would imagine, every day this month they are featuring a post about Halloween. And fortunately the topics range from the bizarre to the ridiculous all the way to the barely safe for work. Here's a sampling: 33 scary stories you can read RIGHT NOW from great horror writers Vader, Spock, Spidey and 26 other sci-fi icons as rotting zombies 18 LEGO creations so unnerving they could give you nightmares Zombies and vampires rule in 14 horrific Halloween board games What…

The Buzz 3/24: What If the Montreal Protocol Were Never Signed?

If climatologists saved the world and nobody experienced the alternative, would it make an impact? New research conducted at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center suggests that it should. The Center used cutting-edge computer modeling technologies to address the question: "What if the Montreal Protocol that regulated the emission of ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) had not been signed?" The answer, it turns out, is catastrophe. The findings are a welcome change from the usual "doom and gloom" tune that frequently accompanies environmental reports, and gives evidence that intervention…

Prehistoric Dental Hygiene

Our Neanderthal ancestors probably cleaned their teeth, Spanish newspaper El Pais reported recently. Spanish paleontologists recently uncovered two, 63,400-year-old tooth fossils near Madrid. The molars, found in near-perfect condition, once resided in the jaw of an approximately 30-year-old Neanderthal. It's been 25 years since another human specimen has been unearthed from that region. But even more exciting, head researcher Juan Luis Asuarga told El Pais, is that the teeth showed grooves that were likely formed by some kind of pointed object—presumably, a small stick used for cleaning…

DonorsChoose

You may remember back in June when ScienceBloggers successfully raised over $30,000 for various science & math teaching projects in schools around the country. Now that the school year has started, the materials this effort helped fund are in use in classroom and we are all receiving e-mails of gratitude from teachers who often work with disadvantaged children in poor school districts. If you wish, you can always continue adding to the funds for the science projects - just click on this button: Alternatively, you may want to pick your own from around the country, or from a particular…

Tet Zoo picture of the day # 12

When most people (and that includes palaeontologists and dinosaur specialists) think of Brachiosaurus, they think of the east African taxon B. brancai, named by Werner Janensch in 1914. But they shouldn't: the 'real' Brachiosaurus is B. altithorax from the Morrison Formation of Colorado [later reported from Utah, Wyoming and Oklahoma], named by Elmer Riggs in 1903. The two species are actually quite different, leading Greg Paul to coin a new name - Giraffatitan - for the African taxon. This photo, kindly provided by Dr Matt Wedel (aka Dr Vector), shows the mounted B. altithorax skeleton that…

Dinosaurs are coming to Raleigh!

OK, I live here, yet I had to learn from Brian that the AMNH dinosaur exhibit is coming to the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in downtown Raleigh. The exhibit will be open from October 26, 2007 till March 2, 2008 and I will make sure to go and see it while it is in town (and take pictures if they'll let me and then blog about it). If you come from out of town to see the exhibit, don't forget to also see the dinos that are on permanent display at the Museum: the Acrocanthosaurus (the only skeleton of its kind displayed anywhere - and it is not a cast either but the real thing) and…

The Fly Buzz Continues

The Fly Spontaneous Behavior paper is generating quite a lot of buzz. Bjorn has collected some of the best blogospheric responses, including these from Mark Chu-Carroll, Mark Hoofnagle and Kate. He also got Slashdotted - of course, whoever posted that on Slashdot failed to a) link to the paper, b) link to the press release and c) link to Bjorn's blog. Instead, a little blurb from one of the worst media articles from MSNBC is the only link. Those got linked later in the comments, so I hope Bjorn enjoys the traffic (it will go away tomorrow never to come back again). Bjorn has also posted…

Where Are You From?

Reader demographics based on 100 visitors. While I take a brief break from writing this week's issue of Birds in the News, I want to mention that I am proud to say that once again, nearly half of my visitors are from outside of the United States. Not that I have anything against Americans, because I do not, but it pleases me to think that the topics that I write about have an international appeal. Since I have your attention, I am curious to know where you are from? Is this your first visit to Scientific Life or to ScienceBlogs? How did you find ScienceBlogs/Scientific Life? What do you…

Another Gold Foil Figure Die from Zealand

Another one of the rare production dies for 6/7/8th century gold foil figures has come to light, again on Zealand! This is an unusual design depicting a lady from the front. She's wearing a long dress, a cloak and two bead strings. She seems to be cupping her hands around a ring at her abdomen. The rings on her dress hem are quite odd. Parallels to the general motif and design are known from Eketorp on Öland (a foil) and Sättuna in Östergötland (a die). Congratulations to detectorist Hans, and thanks for doing other folks with an interest in the past a big favour! Update 4 Feb: Aard regular…

TVs and computers breeding generation of 'screen kids'?

Sez the Grauniad. So far so dull. More interesting was TVs and computers are the "electronic babysitters" for a generation of children who are losing out on family life and becoming more materialistic, a report says today. The study paints a picture of a breed of "screen kids" who are spending more and more time watching TV and surfing the net in their bedrooms, unsupervised by adults. The Watching, Wanting and Wellbeing report from the National Consumer Council found nearly half the children from better-off families surveyed had televisions in their bedrooms, compared with 97% of the nine-…

074/366: Gotham City

This is a pure document-my-day shot, not one of my random attempts at artsy effects. One of The Pip's birthday presents was a big vinyl wall decal from Chic Walls, a gift from Aunt Erin in California. These are a little complicated to install, and SteelyKid being sick messed up the whole week, but I finally got around to putting it up Friday: The Pip's new Gotham City wall decal. So, our superhero-crazy Little Dude now has Gotham City on his wall. He's all fired up about this. And that's it from Friday; I'm still fighting a cold of my own, so between this and some video shooting for a…

GP for the masses

My colleague Nic McPhee (with a couple of other people) is an author of a new book, A Field Guide to Genetic Programming — I think I'm going to have to read it. Genetic programming (GP) is a systematic, domain-independent method for getting computers to solve problems automatically starting from a high-level statement of what needs to be done. Using ideas from natural evolution, GP starts from an ooze of random computer programs, and progressively refines them through processes of mutation and sexual recombination, until high-fitness solutions emerge. All this without the user having to know…

Metal Detectorist Tattoo #6 - Kvanli

Detectorist John Kvanli is the chairman of Rygene detektorklubb and one of Norway's most prominent proponents of collaboration between amateurs and professionals in field archaeology. Of course he has a tattoo! It's an Urnes brooch from c. AD 1100, in the final exquisite Christian style of Scandinavian animal art. John tells me he has found several fragments of these fragile objects, but the one inked onto his upper right arm is a settlement excavation find from Lindholm Høje, across the fjord from Aalborg in northern Jutland. The needlework was done by the Martin Tattoo Studio in Bangkok,…

Baby Blogging Backlog

I've been really bad about documenting The Pip's growth here. The annoying thing is, I've actually taken pictures of him over the last couple of weeks, but I've been too busy to edit and post them. If there's one thing transcontinental flights are good for, though, it's providing you with time to do stuff like this. So, here are some photos of The Pip from the last few weeks, starting with one of this first shots of him smiling: This is a couple of weeks old, already, and he's much more expressive now. Here's an Appa-for-scale shot from the same day: And here's an Appa-for-scale shot from…

Achilles and Hector Cannot Both Walk into the Sunset Alive

Bummer news from Making Light this morning: one of my favorite authors, John M. Ford, has died. That's a shitty way to start the week. The post title is from his poem Troy: The Movie, which does not involve Brad Pitt. Also well worth reading is his September 11th memorial poem 110 Stories, which I had taped up outside my office for a long time. His NESFA collection, From the End of the Twentieth Century is full of good stuff, as is the more recent Heast of Fusion, and Growing Up Weightless may be my favorite coming-of-age SF story ever. He was also an occasional poster to Making Light, and an…

Why does your voice sound different than you expect it to sound?

... like, when you hear it on playback from a tape recorder. Sound can reach the inner ear by way of two separate paths, and those paths in turn affect what we perceive. Air-conducted sound is transmitted from the surrounding environment through the external auditory canal, eardrum and middle ear to the cochlea, the fluid-filled spiral in the inner ear. Bone-conducted sound reaches the cochlea directly through the tissues of the head. When you speak, sound energy spreads in the air around you and reaches your cochlea through your external ear by air conduction. Sound also travels from your…

OVER 1 MILLION!

This past Tuesday a troupe of SciBlog readers met up in OKC for pizza, beer, and cookies!! Ill leave it to readers to out themselves if they want (or email me to anonymize you!), but I had to put up a funny pic of Logan, my partner-in-crime from Dembskis infamous OU visit: And a pic of the good sports at 'the other table' (we didnt have the room I thought we had reserved, so the group got broken up *sad* ), plus a crazy ranting atheist: Some nice OESE folks sent home some pizza for poor Arnie. It was amazing how fast he went from 'poor baby who cant get up from bed' to '…

Vote for your story of the year - evolution

We're into the home stretch now. This is the seventh of nine polls where you get to pick your favourite stories of the year from this blog. We've had a variety of topics already and today, it's evolution. Your choices: Robots evolve to deceive one another How the turtle got its shell through skeletal shifts and muscular origami Scientists tickle apes to reveal evolutionary origins of human laughter How diversity creates itself - cascades of new species among flies and parasitic wasps Museum butterfly collections chronicle evolutionary war against male-killers Decay of enamel-forming…

Welcome Students from UVA's Political Communication Seminar

University classes for the spring semester are in full swing, and several courses have integrated blogs and the evaluation of such into their class content. As previously posted, UNC's English 12 course has paid a visit here to Framing Science, and now UVA's Dept. of Politics seminar on Political Communication is doing likewise. Welcome students from Prof. Claiborne's course. Please have fun navigating and evaluating my blog. Feel free to leave comments, suggestions, and feedback in the comments section of this post or others. Of interest as political science majors, from the fall…

INCONVENIENT TRUTH'S PROFITS LEVEL OFF: Opens in 73 More Theaters, But Weekend Gross Falls Short of Previous Two Weekend's Earnings

It appears that while audiences continue to go see Inconvenient Truth, some of the excitement has worn off. According to BoxOffice Mojo, the film opened in 73 more theaters this weekend, bringing its total to 587, still a tiny number compared to the 3000 screens that blockbusters run on. Across these theaters, the film earned 1.597 million over the weekend, down from the 2.016 million the week before, and the 1.911 million from two weeks back. So far, the film has earned a total of 12.359 million, ranking it fifth all-time among documentaries, just behind Madonna's Truth or Dare Meanwhile…

Top 10 New Species of 2012

The top 10 new species discovered in 2012 has been announced by the International Institute of Species Exploration at Arizona State University. Tope 10 new species discovered in 2012. Image from: International Institute for Species Exploration, Arizona State University My favorites: The adorable tiny frog, Paedophryne amanuensis, from New Guinea that is only 7mm (pictured above on a dime). It is currently considered the smallest living vertebrate. Glow-in-the-dark cockroaches, Lucihormetica luckae, from Ecuador (top right in composite above). Consider them night lights. Species of glow-in-…

Bionic arm in the news

Beebs on Claudia Mitchell, the second person to be fitted with the bionic arm. Cool video there. What is a bionic arm? From the RIC page: The "Bionic Arm," or myoelectric arm, is driven using electrical signals from the muscles of the chest, now activated by the user's own thought-generated nerve impulses. These impulses are sensed, via surface electrodes, from the pectoral muscle and carried through to the mechanical arm, causing the arm to move. Very impressive. We can now replace hearts, eyes, ears and limbs. The list keeps growing. I personally would like to see the day when we can…

Debris Threat to International Space Station; Crew Evacuating to Soyuz as Precaution

A moderately large piece of space debris has only recently been identified as a threat to the International Space Station - too recently for the station to be moved out of the way. The object is now projected to pass close enough to the ISS to put it into the high threat category. As a result, the astronauts onboard the ISS will be moving from the station into the Soyuz escape capsule as a safety precaution. The closest approach is predicted to occur at 11:39 CDT - about 20 minutes from now. The crew is currently preparing to board the Soyuz. If all goes well, they'll be in the Soyuz from…

New Feminist Blog and Nifty Database

There's a great post over at the blog Women in Science on a resource, the Harvard Open Collections Program Women Working 1800-1930. ...a great digital database of books, photos, diaries, and trade catalogs. It covers all kinds of work, from unpaid household labor to lawyers and politicians. And, of course, scientists. Go read the post for a sampling of goodies from the collection. Many thanks to Women in Science for pointing us all to this rich archive! Also, from the WMST-L listserv, I learned of a new Feminist Philosophers blog . This is not a philosophy of science blog, it's subject…

Bits and pieces

I'm away from what serves as my computer these days for a while - off to Sydney to find a place to live. Also, the Seed Masters (whom I for one welcome) are upgrading Moveable Type from 3 to 4, so we can't blog for a few days anyway. But I would like to announce that my paper with Gareth J. Nelson on a possible precursor to punctuated equilibrium and the biological species concept, Pierre Trémaux, has been published in the journal History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences. The full details are: Wilkins, John S., and Gareth J. Nelson. 2008. Trémaux on species: A theory of allopatric…

Casual Friday postponed til Saturday

I'm not quite finished analyzing the data from last week's Casual Friday's study and I've got some personal business to attend to this afternoon, so I'm going to have to postpone my writeup of the results until tomorrow. Sorry! One item of interest from today's results: Some commenters this morning wanted to know what percentage of our readers are Americans. Here's the breakdown based on this study (however I think it's quite possible that non-Americans weren't as interested in this study as usual): So 78 percent of our readers are U.S. Citizens living in the U.S., and just 12 percent are…

Please Give to Cyclone Relief!

The Intersection just got an email from Oxfam America, asking for our help getting the word out about the urgent need to help cyclone survivors in Myanmar. To quote in brief: "In the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis - which struck Myanmar on May 3, washing away entire communities - conditions remain dire for millions of people. Food and water shortages are rapidly increasing risk of disease, and more bad weather threatens those who have survived....With death tolls climbing - the latest count puts deaths above 120,000, with 500,000 homeless - we are urgently looking for support from outlets like…

Tips for writing behavioural studies grants

I've just received this email from Stephanie Porter, one of the authors of the Oxford University Press blog: I wanted to share with you a compelling series of posts from our new Complete Writing Guide to NIH Behavioral Studies Grants. Both posts are excerpts from the book that extend pointers on how to write a successful grant submission. The book is a hefty but invaluable resource, and these tips are just the thing to get you refocused on your grant writing! I am hoping you will encourage your readers to check out the series. Grant Writing: Things That You Can Do To Learn Scholarship…

Early color circles: Newton for artists

C.B., circa 1708: "These color circles, from a 1708 edition, are the earliest published examples of Newton-style color circles in an artist's manual." Moses Harris, 1766: "Mimicking the spread of light from a source, Harris places the pure colors at the center of his circle and the lightest at the outer edge." Schiffermuller, 1772: "Like many others with the same goals, he assumed that there is a knowable natural order to color, one that would confirm the relationship among all forms of knowledge." More quotes and images from Sarah Lowengard's e-book The Creation of Color in 18th Century…

Newly Discovered Antarctic Marine Life Attacks and Consumes Researchers

Researchers from New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research have discovered hundreds of potentially new species. Part of the International Polar Year survey program, the critters were hauled up from the briny depths around Antarctica. Among the 30,000 once living beings now in formaldehyde are huge sea spiders, jellyfish with 12-foot tentacles, enormous sea snails and starfish. The expedition was also made into a documentary entitled DeepStar Six... Giant Macroptychaster sea star measuring 60 cm across Antarctic toothfish (1.81 m long, 57 kg) CR McClain from Deep…

Recommended reads on women in math, science, engineering.

They're both by men, but sometimes it happens that way. Mark Chu-Carroll ridicules Vox Day's ridiculous claim that women are too dumb to do long division, let alone program computers. While Day's claim was silly from the get-go, Mark's take-down in really nice. A friend from the three-dimensional world (specifically math camp), Jonathan Kulick, who cannot hide from the blogosphere even in Tbilisi, examines claims that women are underrepresented in science for reasons other than bias. Will it surprise you to hear that Christina Hoff Sommers may be dismissing research she doesn't like out of…