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In Memoriam: John Martonik

John F. Martonik, 58, former deputy director of OSHA's Health Standards Program passed away on July 11 at his home in Annandale, Virginia.  John retired from OSHA in 2002 and since then used his industrial hygiene expertise to assist workers in compensation and liability cases.  He was especially expert in evaluating occupational exposures to benzene and petroleum distillates, and was deeply committed to seeking justice for workers and their surviving spouses. John Martonik earned a Bachelor of Science in chemical engineering and a Masters degree in industrial hygiene from the…

The Face of Chile's Anti-Tobacco Campaign

by Liz Borkowski   Since November of 2006, all cigarette packages and advertising in Chile have been required to devote half of their space to hard-hitting anti-tobacco messages. In addition to a âThese cigarettes are killing youâ warning, this includes a haunting photo of Miguel GarcÃa MartÃn, a 72-year-old Chilean who lost his larynx to cancer after smoking for 20 years:       Don Miguel, Chilean, smoked for 20 years. He lost his larynx to cancer.     Caution! These cigarettes are killing you. Ministry of Health, Government of Chile     The smoke of each cigarette you smoke contains,…

A life secretly devoted to fish-lizards

You wouldn't know it from Tet Zoo's content, but for many, many months now I've been working continually on ichthyosaurs, the 'fish lizards' of the Mesozoic. I'm not ready to talk about the project yet, but will do at some stage. An awful lot has happened on ichthyosaurs since the late 1990s, mostly thanks to the research of Ryosuke* Motani and Michael Maisch and their collagues, but to be honest things have become quieter in the last few years and we certainly are not in any sort of 'ichthyosaur research renaissance' as we are with plesiosaurs, dinosaurs, pterosaurs and Mesozoic…

Friday Random Ten, Oct 27

It's friday, so it's time for more of my highly warped taste in music. 1. **Tempest, "Turn of the Wheel"**. Tempest is a really cool band. They're a cross between an electrified folk band and a neo-progressive rock band. Strong Irish and Swedish influences on the folky side, and a vaguely ELP-ish sound on the rock side. 2. **Mel Brooks, "In Old Bavaria" from the Producers**. 3. **The National, "Baby We'll Be Fine"**. Probably my favorite track from this album by the National. 4. **Hamster Theatre, "The Quasi Day Room Ceremonila Quadrille"**. HT is an offshoot of Thinking Plague. Every bit as…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Dolphins Maintain Round-the-clock Visual Vigilance: Dolphins have a clever trick for overcoming sleep deprivation. Sam Ridgway from the US Navy Marine Mammal Program explains that they are able to send half of their brains to sleep while the other half remains conscious. What is more, the mammals seem to be able to remain continually vigilant for sounds for days on end. All of this made Ridgway and his colleagues from San Diego and Tel Aviv wonder whether the dolphins' unrelenting auditory vigilance tired them and took a toll on the animals' other senses? Dietary Fats Trigger Long-term Memory…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Fridges And Washing Machines Liberated Women, Study Suggests: The advent of modern appliances such as washing machines and refrigerators had a profound impact on 20th Century society, according to a new Université de Montréal study. Plug-in conveniences transformed women's lives and enabled them to enter the workforce, says Professor Emanuela Cardia, from the Department of Economics. Human-generated Sounds May Be Killing Fish: Anthropogenic, or human generated, sounds have the potential to significantly affect the lives of aquatic animals - from the individual animal's well-being, right…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 12 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: An Examination of Morphometric Variations in a Neotropical Toad Population (Proceratophrys cristiceps, Amphibia, Anura, Cycloramphidae): The species Proceratophrys cristiceps belongs to the genus Proceratophrys…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 23 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: The Microcephalin Ancestral Allele in a Neanderthal Individual: The high frequency (around 0.70 worlwide) and the relatively young age (between 14,000 and 62,000 years) of a derived group of haplotypes,…

'On The Grid' is coming in two days

Scott Huler (blog, Twitter), the author of 'Defining the Wind', has a new book coming out this Tuesday. 'On The Grid' (amazon.com) is the story of infrastructure. For this book, Scott started with his own house (unlike me, Scott did the work) and traced where all those pipes, drains, cables and wires were coming from and going to, how does it all work, does it work well, where does it all come from historically, and how its current state of (dis)repair portends to the future. You can read a review in Raleigh News & Observer, as well as an article by Scott in the same paper and another one…

The five little Boogers and how they grew

Leave it to those wacky Korean cloners. In December, scientists from Gyeongsang National University gave us fluorescent kitties. Now, we have cute little puppies! These aren't the first cloned pets on the market, we have stores that sell glowing fish. But these clones have a bit higher price tag. For $50,000 Bernann McKinney got 5 new "Boogers" from RNL Bio; "Booger McKinney," "Booger Lee," "Booger Ra," "Booger Hong and "Booger Park." That's $10,000 a Booger! Still, who can resist these cute little boogers? I have a picture of the puppies below the fold and as you can see, they're…

So, who the heck is still on ScienceBlogs anyways!?

I know I'm sure as hell having a hard time keeping up with all the comings and goings. If anything, the impression is probably that the lights are practically out and we're all singing Old Lang Syne. This, of course, is far from the case. The lights are still on, we're most of us blogging away. Here's a list compiled from the Blog Index page and from the drop down on every page. I'm also only including reasonably active blogs, ones with posts since January 1, 2010. WCG Common Sense has also provided a nice graphical representation of some of the recent science blogospheric ebbs and flows…

Tom Coburn: RepublicanSpeak for Dickhead

Those of you who have been unemployed realize that businesses are always trying to figure out another way to punish you for committing the crime of being unemployed while not being wealthy, but hey, this has got to be the worst: one of our elected congresscritters is working on another way to further disenfranchise you. According to a news story that was published today, Senator Tom Coburn (a rethuglican from the proud goat-roping state of Oklahoma) is actively seeking to prevent people from protecting themselves from genetic discrimination. HUH?? Okay, let's just pretend that you have lost…

Occupational Health News Roundup

Yan Jie of China Daily reports that four mine disasters have occurred in China during July alone - and we don't yet know how many miners and rescuers will survive. Three rescuers have died already, and hope dims for the remaining miners the longer they remain trapped by high water and collapsed walls. Here is what I've been able to gather on the various cases, although the articles are all from earlier this week and there may be more up-to-date information elsewhere: Flooded iron ore mine in Weifang, Shandong province: AFP reports 21 workers remain trapped underground Fire in a coal mine in…

WATN, 2015

A successor to Where Are They Now, 2014. First and foremost, and although not quite in 2015 I shall ignore that, was David Bowie. 2015 was the year I finally kicked the habit of reading denialist blogs - well, nearly - which was a good idea, but it does mean I'm not as in touch as I used to be, since I now get it second hand from Sou mostly. The only new thing I can think of that died in 2015 was The Pause. A somewhat shameful episode in climate history, as I said in my review of the year. Other than that, we're onto the probably-still-dead things from 2014. Pattern Recognition in Physics…

Dog poo and car stereos

To the annual parish meeting. Thankfully I am no longer a parish councillor so am not obliged to go; but since a friend told me it was on I turned up. Of those who did, most were parish councillors, one was the district councillor, two were dogs walkers (I'll come on to that), two were my friend and me, and the remaining one was my friends daughter (who had done a very good hand-drawn childrens newspaper). [Update: oops, I forgot the sole stoic parishioner who turned up, and has turned up to every one for the last 20 years.] Humour of the evening came from the county councillors report. The…

Polar amplification, again

When I was a wee mustelid, I wrote about this; and there is an RC piece, and as far as I know, its all still valid. But this post is aimed at those who put an "s" into poles in "What exactly is the mechanism that causes the poles to warm faster than the tropics as a result of climate change?" when they mean the real world, as opposed to a simplified or equilibrium one. Mind you, since the ar4 sez Models of the 21st century project that future warming is amplified at high latitudes resulting from positive feedbacks involving snow and sea ice, and other processes (10.3.3.1) you can hardly blame…

Religious Exemptions: What Are The Limits?

The New York Times is doing a series of articles on religous exemptions from generally applicable laws (first and second). This is an interesting subject for me, but not one on which I have fully formed views. In general, I am in favor of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and similar laws. I think the RFRA sets up a very reasonable standard, in fact one that I think should be applied in all situations where a law impedes an individual's right to self-determination; every law should be narrowly tailored to achieve a compelling state interest and should be the least restrictive means of…

Advent Calendar of Science Stories 7: Apocryphal Empress

Following on yesterday's story of transformative discoveries starting by accident, we'll jump from the Middle East to the Far East for the probably apocryphal story of the Empress Leizu (also sometimes referred to as Xi Lingshi) who is credited with the discovery of silk around 2600 BCE. One of the many versions of the story has it that she was drinking tea in her garden, and a silkworm coccoon fell into her tea. When she poked at it to get it out of the hot water, the thread unraveled, and she became fascinated with it. From there, her experiments with silk threads and silkworms led her to…

Pluto has been Melting!

Sure, astronomers might not call it a planet anymore, but every schoolchild knows how badass Pluto really is. It's got a giant moon, Charon, and two smaller ones, Hydra and Nix. In addition to being colder than ice with an average temperature of 44 Kelvin (that's colder than liquid nitrogen), I'm here to bring you the news that despite the fact that it's so cold and so far from the Sun, Pluto has been melting! Since its discovery by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930, astronomers have been fascinated with Pluto, making very careful observations of it, trying to learn more about this bizarre, icy sphere…

Undead pirates, undead Jesus…same difference

Arrrr, curse ye, jpf. How dare you reveal this abomination to me? What's this crazy born-again doing reviewing a pirate movie as a justification for his dogma? But back to Jack for a second — sorry, Captain Jack. I was thinking about one of the central themes of this movie which involves the principal characters, one that you've most likely picked up on it as well: Resurrection from the dead As it turns out, getting swallowed by a nasty beastie called the Kraken is a bad thing, so one of the key story lines in this film is a desperate need for Captain Jack to come back from the dead so the…

Inflation Isn't Just Science, It's The Origin Of Our Universe

"There's no obvious reason to assume that the very same rare properties that allow for our existence would also provide the best overall setting to make discoveries about the world around us. We don't think this is merely coincidental." -Guillermo Gonzalez Beginning in 1979, a new idea arose in theoretical physics, seeking to improve upon the idea of the Big Bang: cosmic inflation. Recently, a number of physicists, including one of inflation’s cofounders, Paul Steinhardt, have come out with vitriol against the theory of inflation, calling it not even science. It’s true that inflation may not…

Today's Weather #Icestorm #Noreaster #Flooding #RuhRoh

For the first time in weeks we are experiencing warm weather in central Minnesota (it is now 21 degrees F) with a bit of snow off and on. But elsewhere there are interesting things happening. First, in far northern California and the Pacific Northwest there will be rain. A LOT of rain. That's great because it will help a little with the drought. But, it will also probably cause some severe flooding. Also, everywhere on the east coast from Atlanta up to New England is experiencing some kind of bad. Snomageddonapocalypse. On fire. A friend of mine in the Raleigh-Durham area told me…

The Electric Car/Hybrid Car Lottery

I would like to propose a lottery. Cost of ticket: $10.00 Prize: The winner's choice of an American-made electric car or hybrid car off of an approved list. The cars would be provided at discount from them manufacturer. The manufacturer benefits from the publicity (free-ish advertising) and from having more of their cars on the road in communities where they might otherwise be very rare. This would act like a Rotating Savings and Credit Association (ROSCA). A ROSCA is a way that a group of people can obtain a costly item with little available cash and low or zero interest loan. Every…

Reconsidering Nuclear Energy

Risk, Trust, and the Arrogance of Numbers ...The coal and biofuel safety numbers don't come with a disclaimer that the greatest number of additional deaths from these fuels are due to indoor use for cooking, not from industrial energy production. Wind and solar energy numbers don't reflect that these are developing industries, without decades of safety standards behind them. (Including development numbers for nuclear would drastically change the picture there, given that it was a technology born out of war.) None of these numbers include the costs of destruction of ecosystems, displacement,…

Japan quake, tsunami, nuke news 05

... continued ... Ana's Feed Starting about midnight, March 17th Today's chopper missions over Daiichi have been canceled. The IAEA has asked Japan to cooperate with the international community. Kan says he will do the utmost to overcome the crisis - vows to disclose more info to the int'l community. -kyodo news The new electrical cables are on site, but radiation may prevent the workers from connecting them. Readings of 20mSv/hr. are regular. - NHK 2 more fire trucks and 1 borrowed US pump truck have cycled through . -NHK 4AM March 18th "High radiation detected 30km from nuke plant" - NHK "…

A Medieval Lady's Seal

My detectorist friend and long-time collaborator Svante Tibell found a seal matrix in the field next to Skällvik Castle this past summer. In the Middle Ages of Sweden, people of means didn't sign their names to documents. They carried seals around, with which they made imprints into chalk-mixed wax, and these were affixed to paperwork such as property deeds and wills. If you lost your seal matrix, you lost your ability to sign documents – and you theoretically gave that ability to whoever found your seal. When people died during this period, their seal matrices were carefully destroyed.…

A Fee For Metal Detector Permits Would Be Highly Damaging

From 2014 on, Swedish metal detectorists have had to report all finds datable to before 1850 to the authorities. I have recently shown in a note in Fornvännen that this rule came about by mistake, and that it has broken the County Archaeologist system. It takes hours for a county heritage administrator to process one metal detector permit. It also takes only a few hours for a detectorist to find a copper coin from the 1840s, which voids her/his permit for that site. S/he then applies for a new permit, which means that the pile of unprocessed permit applications on each administrator's desk…

EGU: Friday

To start off, an image from the commercial district. Sorry I couldn't centre myself properly. Zorita (and von S): ECHO-G-II fits NCAR quite well (ECHO-I has higher T during MWP-ish; no mention of HadCM3) and he explicitly notes the hockey stick shape. HadCM3 comes in a bit later, and if you look at the scale the mag is half ECHO; but this is not mentioned. There is a note re un-detrended vs detrended - undetrended method underestimates less. Notes Mann et al (RegEM) with CSM, which has a lower bias than von S, and *they think* that it *may* be the non-detrending. They say, they have not…

Djurhamn Sword Excavated

Happy Djurhamn project co-directors Katarina Schoerner and August Boj. Aided by many volunteers and using tools borrowed from my dad and the Stockholm County Museum, I've spent the day getting the Djurhamn sword out of the ground. I found the sword on 30 August while metal detecting around the Harbour of the Sheaf Kings. Today we marked out a 2.5 by 2.0 metre trench around the sword, got rid of a lot of vegetation, dug and sieved 2.5 square metres and got the sword out. Its point was wedged between the roots of a large hazel bush, so I only got it out in one piece thanks to its excellent…

Battle of Baggensstäket

[More blog entries about archaeology, Sweden, history; arkeologi, Nacka, historia.] Long-time Dear Readers may remember the visit I paid last May to the wooded Skogsö hills where the Battle of Baggensstäket was fought in 1719. Bo Knarrström, Tomas Englund and the others on their project team are now back on the site with their metal detectors, finding more and more objects from the battle. This time, I'm joining the team for two days. Tuesday, they were visited by celebrated military historian Peter Englund. A battle fought with firearms seeds an area thickly with evidence for what has taken…

Viking Period Amber Gaming Pieces

The other day, I collected the larger finds from 2005's boat grave excavations at the conservator's studio. Among them are 23 amber gaming pieces, of which I have now taken nice photographs. The pieces' median dimensions are about 35 by 24 mm. If it weren't for these gaming pieces, the boat grave dig myself and Howard Williams directed at Skamby in Kuddby parish, Östergötland, would have been quite a disappointment for me. The other grave furnishings were few and understated, consisting mainly of a symbolic (indeed, incomplete) set of horse and driving gear. But these gaming pieces are…

New Apples in Stereo Album

Robert Schneider, one of my favourite neopsychedelic musicians, has a new album out, this time with his main band again, The Apples in Stereo. His previous album Expo was issued in 2005 with The Marbles and is an excellent synth-driven yet lo-fi effort. Before that he did two non-psych albums in 2005 (with Ulysses) and 2002 (with the Apples) which didn't do much for me, so the last time the Apples released anything good was in 2000 with the radiant Discovery of a World Inside the Moone. The new disc, New Magnetic Wonder, consists of no less than 24 songs recorded from late 2005 to late 2006…

US energy agency asked scientists to scrub references to climate change

Sez Nurture (via SR's fb feed). Notice how good I've been: I didn't even put a question mark at the end, because Nurture is a WP:RS. Let's quote: Multiple researchers who received grants from the US Department of Energy (DOE) say that they have been asked to remove references to “climate change” and “global warming” from the descriptions of their projects, they say. As usual, exactly why this is done is lost in a bureaucratic maze or mirrors (the official...’s office told Nature that she was unavailable for comment, and a PNNL spokesperson referred questions to DOE headquarters in Washington…

Swiss Auto Graveyard

From Aard regular CCBC, a heritage management conundrum to ponder. This is a curious situation that I heard about on metafilter.com. I have included some of the links. Near Kaufdorf, Switzerland there is an auto junkyard that was in use from the 1930s to 1970. It has become overgrown with various forest flora and people have found it an interesting place to take photos. Recently, the Swiss government has decreed the place an environmental hazard and says that it must be cleared and paved to prevent fluids from seeping into the ground. Many people have protested on the grounds that: This is…

Apples : Oranges :: New SAT : Old SAT

OK, they dumped the analogy questions ages ago, but for oldsters like myself, those are still the signature SAT questions... Inside Higher Ed has a piece today on the new SAT results, which expresses concern over some declines: Mean scores on the SAT fell this year by more than they have in decades. A five-point drop in critical reading, to 503, was the largest decline since 1975 and the two-point drop in mathematics, to 518, was the largest dip since 1978. Gaps among racial and ethnic groups continued to be significant on the SAT, including the new writing test, for which the first mean…

Blogging is the Answer

PhysicsWeb provides me with yet another blog post topic today, posting a lament about the death of letter writing, which makes life more difficult for historians: Now that e-mail has replaced letter writing as the principal means of informal communication, one has to feel sorry for future science historians, who will be unable to use letters and telegrams to establish facts and gauge reactions to events. In addition to the Copenhagen episode, another example of the role of letters is Stillman Drake's startling conclusion, based on a careful reading of Galileo's correspondence, that the…

Fraternity Weekend

Here's the crew I spent this past Saturday morning with: The guys who are younger than I am are a bunch of students from the local chapter of Sigma Phi. The one guy older than I am is from a volunteer group who help maintain the local bike path. The stone wall behind us is part of a lock from the Erie Canal, built around 1839. We were there clearing away the bushes and weeds that overgrow the site every summer, as part of a restoration project organized by a colleague from the History department. That's right, I spent my Saturday clearing brush. I feel all Presidential. I may just bomb…

JFK Slain

Today, in 1963, President John F. Kennedy was killed in Dallas. I have only the vaguest of memories of this event, but I do remember it. I remember being sent home from school, and I remember anguish and uncertainty, and I remember hearing the report of Kennedy's assasin, Lee Harvey Oswald, being gunned down while in police custody. Here is the BBC report from that time, to give you a sense of the event: The President of the United States has been assassinated by a gunman in Dallas, Texas. John F Kennedy was hit in the head and throat when three shots were fired at his open-topped car.…

Winter Break Physics Contest

While we were in Florida last weekend, we got a bunch of snow at home, so we came home to the proverbial winter wonderland. It's warmed up quite a bit since, though, and stuff is now melting. When I got home this morning after doing a bunch of revisions to the book-in-progress, I looked out the kitchen window to see the scene in the "featured image" above, which I will duplicate below: Snow hanging off the edge of SteelyKid's playset. That's the snowpack from the top of SteelyKid's playset, now melting, just barely hanging on from sliding off the edge of the plastic cloth stretched over…

From Eternity to the Web

The Firedoglake Book Salon with Sean Carroll last night was a lot of fun. I was generally impressed with the level of the questions, and the tone of the discussion. We went through all of the questions I had typed out in advance (I type fairly slowly, and revise obsessively, so it's hard for me to do this stuff in real time), and got a decent range of questions from the audience. The introductory post I wrote for the salon is more or less what I would put in a review post here: ean Carroll's From Eternity to Here sets out to explain the nature of time, particularly what's known as the "arrow…

Cool Old Person: Charles Best of DonorsChoose.org

Yesterday we spoke a bit on the progress of our DonorsChoose blogger challenge to raise funds that will support teacher projects in underserved areas to "Save the Science." Before joining this effort a year-and-a-half ago, I had not heard of DonorsChoose but I knew it was a great idea as soon as I learned of the model. Well, I also now just learned a little more about the guy who got it all started, Charles Best. Best was just recognized a "Cool Old Person" by DoSomething.org ("the site for old people who want to help young people do something"). By my account, Best does not qualify as an…

Monsanto Patents Rejected

"Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) announced [on July 24th] that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has rejected four key Monsanto patents related to genetically modified crops that PUBPAT challenged last year because the agricultural giant is using them to harass, intimidate, sue - and in some cases literally bankrupt - American farmers." The article "MONSANTO PATENTS ASSERTED AGAINST AMERICAN FARMERS REJECTED BY PATENT OFFICE: PUBPAT Initiated Review Leads PTO to Find All Claims of All Four Patents Invalid" from the Public Patent Foundation, explains recent follow up action in…

Quantum Canada

Quantum computing continues to grow in Canada. Congrats to the IQC at the University of Waterloo who now, truly are the center of the quantum computing universe: With matching funds from the province of Ontario and RIM founder Mike Lazaridis, University of Waterloo's Institute for Quantum Computing will receive $150 million to build a research facility and attract talent Canada will become home to the largest concentration of quantum computing talent in the world, thanks to $150 million in funding from government and the founder of Research In Motion Ltd. The 2009 federal budget plan…

MIT Scores New Quantum Information Science Graduate Training Program

News from the other coast: MIT has won an IGERT to start an interdisciplinary graduate program in quantum information science. From the press release: MIT has been awarded a $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation to establish a pioneering doctoral-study program in the growing field of quantum information science (QIS), which has evolved rapidly recently with a new influx of ideas from quantum physics and poses great potential in supercomputing. Website up an running here. Isaac Chuang sends me some info on the program. Note for undergraduates: looks like a summer program is…

Similarities between the BP Disaster and the Tepco Disaster

A little less than one year ago, the major environmental news pertained to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.  From Wikipedia: The Deepwater Horizon oil spill (also referred to as the BP oil spill, the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the BP oil disaster or the Macondo blowout)[4][5][6] is an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico which flowed for three months in 2010. The impact of the spill continues even after the well has been capped. It is the largest accidental marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry.[7][8][9] The spill stemmed from a sea-floor oil gusher that resulted from the April…

Top Chef Barton Seaver Uses Fish to Communicate Sustainability

The Washington Post profiles Barton Seaver today, the chef who put 14th street's Saint X on the map foodwise and then helped launch the ultra-successful Hook in Georgetown. Seaver is now opening a fish market and restaurant around the corner from this blogger in Logan Circle, strategically proximate to the busiest Whole Foods in the country. More importantly, the article discusses how Seaver views food as a way to engage Americans on issues of sustainability. It's one more example of a novel medium for environmental communication. Here's the quick summary on his approach with affirmations…

Hither and Yon

For the past few days I've been rushing around, first to Woods Hole, Massachusetts, to talk to some people at the Marine Biological Laboratory about the E. coli book, and then on an infinite chain of connecting flights to come out to Aspen to participate in a science-media summit. It's a relief to be finally sitting down in one place, and the view of the mountains from here making blogging very fine. But until my blood thickens up a little, I probably won't be writing much. As I've been driving and flying and driving again, I've gotten some emails from readers, pointing me to new papers that…

Darwin Day Festivities

In celebration of Darwin's 198th birthday, there will be lots of events--talks, etc.--going on around the world next week. I'll be doing my part, heading to the Rockies to talk at Western State College in Gunnison, Colorado. My talk is entitled, "The Descent of Man, From Darwin to DNA." I'll be speaking at 7 on Tuesday, February 13, in the Kebler Ballroom at the College Union Building. It's free and open to the public. (Map) Here's a guide to a lot of the planned events at the official Darwin Day site. (Full disclosure: I'm on the board of advisors.) This year is distinguished by a big roll-…

The Ten-Mile-Wide Bullet

In 1980, Walter Alvarez, a geologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues proposed that the dinosaurs had been exterminated by an asteroid that smashed into the Earth. I was fourteen at the time, and that mix of dinosaurs, asteroids, and apocalyptic explosions was impossible to resist. I can still see the pictures that appeared in magazines and books--paintings of crooked rocks crashing into Earth, sometimes seen from the heavens, sometimes from the point of view of an about-to-become-extinct dinosaur. Suddenly the history of life was more cinematic than any science…

A dose of woo: Martial Idiocy

Recently Orac took apart the findings of another acupuncture study. Those who administer acupuncture typically insinuate that a mysterious vital energy known as "chi" travels along meridians in the body, and that normal flow of chi is necessary for good health. Orac pointed out that this recent study effectively disproved the notion of meridians in traditional Chinese medicine. Similar woo also permeates the martial arts. If one's chi is properly aligned, supposedly the practitioner can make their body do amazing things such as selectively exploding an opponent's internal organs when…