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Is there any idiot theory UD won't credulously repeat?

Now it's the "Rachel Carson killed millions" nonsense over at Uncommon Descent and it's based upon this WSJ editorial from Dr. Zaramba, the health minister for Uganda. What's really embarrassing is how they link the entire article and it's clear they didn't even read it. BarryA writes: When I got home I did some research and was horrified to learn that the malaria epidemic in Africa is perhaps the most preventable health care tragedy in the history of the world. We could eradicate African malaria if only we would allow them to use DDT to combat the mosquitos that spread the disease. I also…

Ankylosaur week, day 2: Tarchia

Welcome to day 2 of the 'ankylosaur week' series - for the background on this go see day 1 on Hungarosaurus. Before talking about today's ankylosaur, here's a quick 'everything you wanted to know about ankylosaurs but were afraid to ask'. Ankylosaurs were ornithischian dinosaurs from the Jurassic and Cretaceous, they have a highly modified skull where the sutures are closed, the external openings are mostly or entirely closed, the dorsal surface is covered with thick bony layers and bony bosses, and the small teeth are inset from the jaw margins. Horns often project from the cheek and rear…

OSHA adds 25 employers to Severe Violators list, 163 employers named in total

Tucked away on federal OSHA's website is a list of 163 employers with the dishonorable label "severe violator." The designation comes from an enforcement program launched in April 2010 to identify "recalcitrant employers who endanger workers by demonstrating indifference to their responsibilities under the law." The label is not easy to get. In any given year, less than 1% of U.S. worksites are subject to an OSHA inspection, and few violations (only about 4%) are classified as "willful," "repeat," or "failure-to-abate" ----one of the necessary criteria for the severe violator designation…

Q & A: How long would we have if the Sun went out?

Yo ho! It's hot, the sun is not a place where we could live. But here on earth there'd be no life without the light it gives. We need its light. We need its heat. We need its energy. Without the sun without a doubt there'd be no you and me. -They Might Be Giants Ahh, the Sun. Beautiful and blinding to the naked eye, it's still the source of energy that gave rise to all of the life on Earth that we know. Image credit: GOES satellite, in the X-ray. The Sun emits energy all over the light spectrum, from long-wavelength radio waves (many meters long) to visible light to X-rays (just a small…

Ebola found in pigs (thankfully, it's the one harmless type)

As the world is now painfully aware, pigs can act as reservoirs for viruses that have the potential to jump into humans, triggering mass epidemics. Influenza is one such virus, but a group of Texan scientists have found another example in domestic Philippine pigs, and its one that's simultaneously more and less worrying - ebola.  There are five species of ebolaviruses and among them, only one - the so-called Reston ebolavirus - doesn't cause disease in humans. By fortuitous coincidence, this is also the species that Roger Barrette and colleagues have found among Philippine pigs and even…

The Primate Diaries' One Year Blogoversary

Thanks to Greg Laden for the anniversary wishes. One year ago today I wrote my first post here at ScienceBlogs (technically, my first post was yesterday, but that was posting the live twitter transcript of my son's birth). I would like to thank everyone at Sb (bloggers, administrators, and commenters alike) for their support as well as for their arguments. Without the feedback I'm certain I wouldn't have been challenged to interrogate my own assumptions and produce the best analysis that I could. I haven't had the opportunity to write as often as I would like the last few weeks since I'm…

Kleck on Kennesaw

On pages 136-138 of "Point Blank" Kleck discusses Kennesaw burglaries. He states that after Kennesaw passed a (purely symbolic) law requiring a gun in every household, residential burglaries fell by 89%. His explanation for this decrease is that publicity about the law reminded criminals of the risks they faced from potential victims' gun possession and scared them away from burglaries in Kennesaw. Kleck goes on to criticize a study that came to a contrary conclusion. He writes "an ARIMA analysis of monthly burglary data found no evidence of a statistically significant drop in burglary in…

What if you could predict PTSD in combat troops? Oh, who cares...

Photo: Tyler Hicks, via Scientific American What if you could predict which troops are most likely to get PTSD from combat exposure -- and takes steps to either bolster them mentally or keep them out of combat situations? A new study suggests we could make a start on that right now -- and cut combat PTSD rates in half by simply keeping the least mentally and physically fit soldiers away from combat zones. The study was part of the Millenium Study, huge, prospective study in which US Department of Defense researchers have been tracking the physical and mental health of nearly 100,000 service…

Veteran's Mental Health Burden Greater Than First Thought

The Department of Defense appears to be making a real effort to determine the scope of the problem.  They now have published the results of a second screening of 88,235 returning soldiers.  In their most recent study, they acknowledge that the prior study missed a lot.  Moreover, they now worry that even the second study is missing some.  In a nice gesture, the style="font-style: italic;">Journal of the American Medical Association has made the results openly accessible. (The results of the first study also are openly accessible, href="http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/295/9/…

Good Electricity News from Iraq

In May, last year I summarized the good news about Iraqi reconstruction: Due to lack of maintenance, electricity production fell from 9000 MW in 1991 to 4400 MW before the war. Since then, there have been many announcements of improved generating capacity and production has fallen further to 3560 MW. Since then, things haven't improved much, Brookings' Iraq index says that electricity production in January 2006 was 3600 MW. What's gone wrong? Let's look at an example. Arthur Chrenkoff's Good news from Iraq, part 32 has this: The army engineers will soon be adding a lot of electricity…

Defending Your Territory: Be Smelly, Be Fast

Welcome to the third installment of Animal Territoriality Week. See part 1 here, and part 2 here. In 1994, a disease called sarcoptic mange swept through Bristol's fox population, severely crippling the population and killing most of the individuals. Professor Stephen Harris of the University of Bristol, who had been studying the movements and territories of those foxes, noticed that as the animals in one territory died, neighboring foxes were able to colonize the vacant areas in 3-4 days. He suspected that this was because the scent marks of the foxes remained active for 3-4 days, but didn'…

Darwin, sexist asshat

That same bozo who sent me the Hitler quote sent me another image in reply: Fair enough. Darwin got a lot of things wrong. I'm actually going to be lecturing my intro biology students on where Darwin screwed up in a few weeks, focusing mainly on his bad genetics, but I'll toss that quote into the mix, too. To be perfectly fair, I'll also include the more complete quote below the fold…and no, nothing in the larger context excuses it. The quote is from the Descent of Man, and not only is it a sexist comment, he throws in some casual racism, too. Difference in the Mental Powers of the two Sexes…

Coelacanth evolution

I was reminded of one of the more comical, but persistent misconceptions by creationists in a thread on Internet Infidels, on The Coelacanth. Try doing a google search for “coelacanth creation" and be amazed at the volume of ignorance pumped out on this subject. I've also run across a more recent example of the misrepresentation of the coelacanth that I'll mention later … this poor fish has a long history of abuse by creationists, though, so here's a brief rundown of wacky creationist interpretations. Crystal Clear Creation: Unlock the secrets of nature, wildlife, the world, from a…

Genome-wide associations, HERC2 and eye color

Sound familiar? Well, good things come in pairs. A few days ago I posted on a paper which used a linkage analysis to come to the conclusion that an SNP on HERC2 was responsible for the variation in eye color in Europeans. Some background, a gene, OCA2, was implicated in the variation in eye color, and it turns out that a few haplotypes on this locus can be used to predict with reasonable accuracy the phenotype in question. The paper I blogged a few days ago was a extension of the work of this work; the same group found that one SNP on HERC2 could actually better explain the variation (…

Bumping uglies with the Neandertal (aka but they did interbreed!)

Update: Update at the bottom.... In reference to the sequencing of the Neandertal genome, Kambiz at Anthropology.net states: I have one little gripe with the New York Times article. Wade quotes a geneticist, Dr. Bruce Lahn saying there is, "evidence from the human genome suggests some interbreeding with an archaic species." Has he not read Paabo's paper 2004 PLoS paper, "No Evidence of Neandertal mtDNA Contribution to Early Modern Humans?" There is significant mtDNA evidence to stongly conclude that humans and Neandertals did not interbread directly. I left a comment on that website, but I…

Day 2 of flu virus sharing summit: participant account

We have an on-the-ground view of the critical influenza virus sharing summit, provided by Ed Hammond in Geneva. I am promoting his comment thread notes from earlier today and a fuller account from late in the evening on Wednesday (Geneva time) sent me by email. It is clear that the atmosphere is tense and not convivial. First, if you haven't been following the issue here or elsewhere, here's a bit of background from an excellent piece at Intellectual Property Watch (h/t Agitant): The politically explosive issue of ensuring everyone benefits from vaccines in the event of an influenza pandemic…

WSJ and anti-government conspiracies

Leave it to AEI writing for the WSJ editorial page to allege a grand conspiracy of the government against pharmaceutical companies. Their proof? The government wants to compare the efficacy of new drugs to older ones to make sure they're actually better. The reauthorization of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (Schip), created in 1997 to cover children from lower-income families who make too much to qualify for Medicaid, is up for renewal this fall. Tucked into page 414, section 904 of the House bill is a provision to spend more than $300 million to establish a new federal "…

Mosasaurs might have used the same microscopic streamlining tricks as sharks and dolphins

Thanks to Monday's article on the unusual African mosasaur Goronyosaurus, I will admit that I was - quite seriously - considering doing a 'mosasaur week', perhaps even a 'weird mosasaur week'. Alas, I have not had the time. However: brand-new in the journals is Johan Lindgren et al.'s article on the skin of a Plotosaurus bennisoni specimen from the Upper Cretaceous Moreno Formation of central California (Lindgren et al. 2009) [adjacent Plotosaurus life restoration from wikipedia]. The specimen was collected by Anthony Fiorillo in 1993 and belongs to an individual that was about 6.4 m long…

Vermont Yankee Closes

by Anthony Robbins, MD, MPA The final closing of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power plant in Vernon got few headlines outside Vermont, but for me it brought back a flood of memories and an important lesson. I am convinced that public involvement with nuclear power in Vermont was a factor preventing an accident over the plant’s life of more than 40 years. From 1973 to 1976 I was the State Health Commissioner, and, due to a strange set of historical circumstances, Vermont had a special relationship to its nuclear utility. The Health Department took the lead for the State, assigning one full-time…

Ask Ethan #12: How far is the distant Universe?

“Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.” -Terry Pratchett It’s the end of the week once again, and so let's have a go at another Ask Ethan! Perhaps inspired by a great giveaway, there have been so many great questions pouring in (and you can submit yours here for four more chances to win), but this week’s comes from our reader and winner Brad (you owe me your email address, Brad), who asks, When an object is quoted as being 13.8 billion light years away is that…

Incredible Star Trails, from Earth and Beyond

"Building one space station for everyone was and is insane: we should have built a dozen." -Larry Niven Here on the solid ground of the Earth, the Sun and Moon rise and set on a daily basis. During the hours where the Sun is invisible, blocked by the solid Earth, the stars twirl overhead in the great canopy of the night sky. Image credit: Chris Luckhardt at flickr. In the northern hemisphere, they appear to rotate around the North Star, while in the southern hemisphere, the stars appear to rotate about the South Celestial Pole. The longer you observe -- or for photography, the longer you…

A Feast for your Naked Eyes: Supermoon, Solar Eclipse and Venus Transit!

"Without a wish, without a will, I stood upon that silent hill And stared into the sky until My eyes were blind with stars and still I stared into the sky." -Ralph Hodgson The next month -- from May 5th to June 5th -- brings three of the most spectacular astronomy sights possible on Earth back-to-back-to-back for skywatchers of all types, without telescopes, binoculars, or any special equipment. Tonight, May 5th, marks what's come to be known as a Supermoon, or the largest, brightest full Moon of the year. Image credit: Chris Kotsiopoulos at Earth Science Picture of the Day. Not that you'll…

Celebrating 50 years of humans in space!

"I could have gone on flying through space forever." -Yuri Gagarin It was April 12th, 1961, or fifty years ago today, that Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to leave Earth -- the ground, the atmosphere, the stratosphere -- and to soar into outer space. Image credit: GETTY images. What was unimaginable just half-a-century ago has become an amazing journey full of accomplishments, setbacks, disasters and unmitigated triumphs. And to recap some of our greatest achievements, I thought I'd make up a fun little ten-question quiz for you, with answers (and pictures) below! Ready? 1.) What…

What are the odds? Part 3: The Big Bang!

"It took less than an hour to make the atoms, a few hundred million years to make the stars and planets, but five billion years to make man!" -George Gamow Some people are never satisfied. After I wrote last time on the odds for cosmic inflation, I started noticing a flurry of comments on an older post about alternatives to the big bang. So, might as well go back to the basics, and ask what the odds are that the Big Bang is correct! Let's start by taking a look at what's out there in the Universe. Image credit: Hubble Space Telescope. Sure, we've got stars surrounding us: hundreds of…

Tar Heel Tavern - NC Primary Edition

Well, we kept the polls open as long as possible and some bloggers voted early and often while others waited 'til the last minute. We've had some locals and some out-of-staters with recollections of North Carolina. So, without further adieu, the NC primary edition of the Tar Heel Tavern: NC Politics Political bloggers in the state were not surprisingly among the first to submit entries. Perennial NC blogging fave, The Olive Ridley Crawl, gives us NC Primary - Vote for a Non Panderer. Jim Buie submitted several of which I picked Obama, in Raleigh, Shows He's No Elitist Egghead and In NC,…

Review of Times Right Now by smokin' Piedmont acoustic singer-songwriter, Jon Shain

Jon Shain and his Trio will be performing this evening (Saturday, July 17) at The Soul Cafe in Durham, NC, together with Washington, DC's The Grandsons and Pat Wictor. The Soul Cafe is an alcohol-free venue near Durham's Brightleaf Square. Sadly, I'm out of town and can't attend - but you should. Click here for more information on tonight's show from Jon's Facebook page. Times Right Now is the 6th album by Piedmont Blues guitarist Jon Shain since he went solo in 1998 after a decade with his folk-rock group, Flyin' Mice, and their spinoff, WAKE. Shain's album covers as much diverse ground as…

The Astroturf de Tocqueville Institute

Last year I wrote about how Tech Central Station was an astroturf operation, drafted by a public relations company to provide supposedly independent support for the PR companies clients. The Alexis de Tocqueville Institute (ADTI) is another astroturf operation. As part of the Tobacco Settlement Agreement Philip Morris (PM) agreed to release millions of documents about their operations. These detail how ADTI was hired by PM to conduct a public relations campaign against the Clinton health plan in 1994. ADTI provided PM with regular progress reports to prove…

The Grassroots of Scientific Revolution

Rejection of authority and working-class values inspired the scientific method. As everyone knows, when food is digested it is processed into chyle and turned into blood by the liver. This blood then flows to the lungs where it releases any impurities into the air. Flowing from the lungs into the left ventricle of the heart the blood then mixes with air and is charged with animal spirit - where it changes from dark purple to bright red. This charged blood then passes through the arteries and throughout the body.At least, if you had lived anywhere in the Western world up until the early 1600s…

Spider silk & spider senses

Spiders make my skin crawl, but it's always amazed me that, despite being mechanical and grotesque, they produce silk, which is not only one of nature's finest materials, but also one of the lightest and strongest. The creator of the fictional superhero Spiderman wasn't too far off the mark when he decided that the character would have the ability to spin webs from his hands, because it is now known at least one species of spider - the Costa Rican zebra tarantula (Aphonopelma seemanni) - can secrete silk from its feet. Stanislav Gorb and his colleagues filmed the spiders as they crawled…

Review: Wunderkammer at the MoMA

Very Slow, Very Tired Machine-Animals Nicholas Lampert, 2006 I promised last week to review the MoMA exhibition "Wunderkammer: A Century of Curiosities." Since making that promise, I've heard from several more friends that they've been to see it - so perhaps this review is preaching to the choir! I was extremely impressed with the breadth and curation of this show, and would go again, if I were in NYC. Wunderkammern, or cabinets of curiosities, arose in mid-sixteenth-century Europe as repositories for all manner of wondrous and exotic objects. In essence these collections--combining…

The George Washington School of Public Health and Health Services screws up big time

NOTE: There is a followup to this post here. Last night, I had a function related to my department to attend, which means that I didn't get home until after 9 PM. However, two blog posts have come to my attention that demand a response from me because they involve an old "friend" of the blog. This "friend" is someone whose scientific and medical misadventures over the last eight years since I became aware of him are legion. This is someone whose "biomedical" treatments for autism were based on an unshakeable belief that mercury in thimerosal, the preservative that was used in many childhood…

RP 5: MythBusters: How small could a lead balloon be?

On a previous episode of The MythBusters, Adam and Jamie made a lead balloon float. I was impressed. Anyway, I decided to give a more detailed explanation on how this happens. Using the thickness of foil they had, what is the smallest balloon that would float? If the one they created were filled all the way, how much could it lift? First, how does stuff float at all? There are many levels that this question could be answered. I could start with the nature of pressure, but maybe I will save that for another day. So, let me start with pressure. The reason a balloon floats is because the air…

Population substructure within China

The state of China has 1/5 of humanity within its borders, so it's genetic structure is of interest. It is obviously important for medical reasons to clarify issues of population structure so that disease susceptibility among the Han is well characterized, in particular with the heightened medical needs of an aging population in the coming generation. And of course, there are the nationalistic concerns. About 20 years ago L. L. Cavalli-Sforza reported that his South Chinese samples were genetically closer to Southeast Asians than North Chinese in The History and Geography of Human Genes.…

Why "But We Walked On the Moon!" Doesn't Mean What They Think It Does

If you have followed energy issues from anywhere other than a cave on a mountain peak, you've probably heard technoutopians utter some variation on the following sentence two or three hundred times "We walked on the moon - of course we can do whatever it takes to shift from fossil fuels to some other source of energy." The moon shot is perceived as the ultimate example of "put in a quarter and get out the technological outcome you want" in our history. If we could set out to put a man on the moon and do it in less than decade, can't we do anything we want to, with just enough ingenuity?…

Guns in DC: What Will Stop the Violence?

Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard District of Columbia v. Heller, which pits DCâs handgun ban against the Second Amendment. DCâs gun law is the strictest in the nation, since it effectively all handguns; it does, however, allow for rifles and shotguns if theyâre kept disassembled or under trigger lock. The big issue is whether the Second Amendment â âA well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringedâ â guarantees an individual right to gun ownership, or only a collective right that hinges on…

Europe, where the sabre-tooths, lions and leopards are

So, on to the contents of my BCiB talk (see previous article for preamble). We began by looking at Homotherium latidens, sometimes called the scimitar cat, scimitar-toothed cat or dirk-toothed cat. H. latidens is one of several Homotherium species that inhabited North America, Eurasia and Africa during the Pleistocene: the different species varied in body size, skull shape, the proportional length of the forelimbs, and in other features. It's repeatedly been suggested that H. latidens might have survived in Britain until as recently as 11,000 years ago (close to the start of the Holocene):…

Acoelomorph flatworms and precambrian evolution

One of many open questions in evolution is the nature of bilaterian origins—when the first bilaterally symmetrical common ancestor (the Last Common Bilaterian, or LCB) to all of us mammals and insects and molluscs and polychaetes and so forth arose, and what it looked like. We know it had to have been small, soft, and wormlike, and that it lived over 600 million years ago, but unfortunately, it wasn't the kind of beast likely to be preserved in fossil deposits. We do have a tool to help us get a glimpse of it, though: the analysis of extant organisms, searching for those common features that…

Redshift (Basic Concepts)

"Redshift" is a term that astronomers use a lot. This is particularly true if they are extragalactic astronomers or (especially) cosmologists, but even galactic astronomers use it, and it is absolutely central to the method use to discover most of the extrasolar planets known today. This post is going to be divided into three parts. First, I am going to explain that redshift itself is just a definition of an observable or measurable quantity, without any need to reference what caused it. Second, I'm going to talk about the more familiar source of redshift -- the Doppler shift. Finally, I'…

To be Coloured in South Africa means being all of the above

About six months ago I had a post up on the Cape Coloureds of South Africa. As a reminder, the Cape Coloureds are a mixed-race population who are the plural majority in the southwestern Cape region of South Africa. Like the white Boers they are a mostly Afrikaans speaking population who are adherents of Reformed Christianity. After the collapse of white racial supremacy many white Afrikaners have argued that it is natural and logical to form a cultural alliance with the Cape Coloureds because of the affinity of language and faith (Afrikaans speaking Coloureds outnumber Afrikaans speaking…

Replying to macht

My essay on the nature of science has provoked this limp response from macht, over at Telic Thoughts. My essay emphasized the fact that science has a specific goal in mind: To understand the workings of nature. Understanding is measured via predictability and control. Investigative methods are scientific to the extent to which they bring us closer to this goal. I went on to emphasize that many of the terms used in discussing the problem of defining science - such as testability, falsifiability, or methodological naturalism (MN) - are just short hand ways of saying that science cares about…

Comments of the Week #120: from the Great Attractor to the highest-energy particles

“Even though the future seems far away, it is actually beginning right now.” -Mattie Stepanek It's been a fantastic week here at Starts With A Bang, where we've covered even more ground than normal! First off, for those of you not following me on SoundCloud, we've got a new science podcast out, on the last star in the Universe. Have a listen and enjoy; that's all possible thanks to the generous donations of our Patreon supporters, as are the re-runs of each article, ad-free, on a 7-day delay over on Medium. Here were the new pieces of this past week: Will the 'Great Attractor' defeat dark…

Another very bad day for antivaccinationists: Yet another study fails to find a link between thimerosal and autism

A little more than three months ago there came to pass a very bad day for antivaccinationists. On that day, in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine appeared a study that was powerful evidence that vaccines are not associated with adverse neuropsychiatric outcomes in children. Not surprisingly, the usual suspects in the mercury militia went on the attack immediately, not wanting to believe that yet another strong piece of evidence was attacking their hallowed belief that mercury in the thimerosal preservative previously used in vaccines is a major cause or contributer to the…

Clock Quotes

Sometimes I have a terrible feeling that I am dying not from the virus, but from being untouchable. - Amanda Heggs, AIDS sufferer, quoted in The Guardian, June 12, 1989

Star Wars: Botany edition

All I can say is, is that this is brilliant... And there's much more here from Christopher Niemann from the NYT Abstract City Blog. (via Magpie&Whiskeyjack)

Flowcharts for Science and for Faith

This came in an email from a neighbor.  It's from href="http://www.freethoughtpedia.com/wiki/Main_Page">FreeThoughtPedia.com While not as sophisticated as href="http://scienceblogs.com/ethicsandscience/2007/02/scientific_and_unscientific_co.php">Janet's treatment, I think it is amusing.  Image below the fold.

And the Amoeba Will Lie Down With the Newt

Science education + sixties mod design sense = funkily compelling artwork from the inside of a childrens' biology book. Captured by Mohawk, a photographer and Flickr user from Liverpool, UK. (Source)

Welcome to the new SciBling!

Josh Rosenau has moved from his old Blogger blog to my virtual neighborhood here on Seed. Go check out the brand new version of Thoughts From Kansas!

Social Media - excellent slideshow

Best Slideshow About Social Media: What the F**K is Social Media: One Year Later View more documents from Marta Kagan. The follow-up to this., from Berci

Abstinence Only? Not During World War II

Reeve 078948-36, originally uploaded by otisarchives1. Another picture from the Walter Reed collection. This one comes from a series of really cheesy military issue anti-VD posters.

The bear awakens

Taking a much needed break from vocational productivity, Dan MacArthur of Genetic Future has been on something of a blogging tear this week. Check out his emergence from hibernation.