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Meet Krill Bill

So I'm buzzin' through the internet looking for inspiration towards a logo for a new project from the Harte Research Institute when I stumble upon this website touting the wonders of "Neptune Krill Oil" (NKO) - "the purest combination of phospholipids, antioxidants, omega-3, omega-6, and omega-9 fatty acids." Hail distraction. Consider this a companion piece to Craig's "Why don't all whales have cancer", below. The sweetly monikered krill-oil product from Krill Bill claims a 15:1 ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acids, compared to 3:1 ratio for fish oil fatty acids. That's an impressive…

But What If You Can't Afford To Stay Home?

What's a good citizen to do if he or she thinks that cough and sneeze is swine flu? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends: Stay home if you get sick. CDC recommends that you stay home from work or school and limit contact with others to keep from infecting them. This afternoon I've been reading Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich - which is ever so more relevant now, if that were possible, than when it was originally released. Near the end she notes: It is common, among the nonpoor, to think of poverty as a sustainable condition -…

Helping "John Doe" understand evolution

When do you think that the following passage was first published? John Doe guesses that evolution is true, but he rather wishes it were not. ... John Doe suspects from head-lines in his newspaper that evolution is a debatable theory, that it is being overthrown every six months, and that it may be discarded before long. Those of you who saw the list of the new items I picked up yesterday probably guessed correctly; that the quote came from the 1925 popular book Evolution for John Doe by Henshaw Ward. Although written in 1925 it still (unfortunately) relevant, particularly when newspapers that…

Monday Musings: Russian activity, tremors at Ngauruhoe and Mayon climbers beware

News for Monday! Ngauruhoe in New Zealand, showing the dark lava flows of basaltic andesite on the slopes of the young volcanic cone. Image by Erik Klemetti, taken January 2009. A couple pieces of news from two Russian volcanoes on the Kamchatka Peninsula: (1) last week's report of activity at Gorely appears to be semi-substantiated with new photos on the KVERT website (Russian). The images from June 6 and 12 (2010) shows steam plumes coming from the volcano - one as tall as 500 meters. Now, this doesn't imply that an eruption occurred, but it might suggest activity on on the upswing. KVERT…

A Propaganda Moment of Zen: The "United We Are Strong" Edition

(picture from here) I'm fortunate enough to own one of the Koerner originals from 1942, so I thought I would post this. We used to form real coalitions when we conducted foreign policy. Sigh.

Clock Quotes

All of us who grew up before World War II are immigrants in time, immigrants from an earlier world, living in an age essentially different from anything we knew before. - Margaret Mead

Botanical Wednesday: Doesn't look a day over 25,000 to me

This is a plant germinated from 32,000 year old tissue recovered from permafrost. I'll take their word for it, but I'd like to see some ID. (via NatGeo) (Also on FtB)

Using silk to repair eardrums

Dr. Marcus Atlas, from the Ear Science Institute in Australia, and his team have pioneered a novel treatment for repairing damaged eardrums using silk obtained from silkworm cocoons, like the one pictured above.

Photos From Cali

After coming back from a vacation, how many days does it take you before you can work? It seems like I can't even blog. So instead here are some photos from my last trip...

The Cretaceous birds and pterosaurs of Cornet: part I, the birds

Among one of many interesting and perplexing Mesozoic fossil assemblages is that known from Cornet, Romania. I've been really interested in this collection of archosaur remains - currently housed at the Tarii Crisurilor Museum, Oradea - ever since I first heard about it in the 1990s, and recently I've been lucky enough to work with Gareth Dyke, Michael Benton and Erika Posmosanu in re-evaluating the more controversial of the Cornet fossils: namely, those claimed to represent a bizarre and motley assortment of Mesozoic birds and pterosaurs. Our paper on these fossils has just been published…

The resurrection of Anaxyrus

After a little delay, it's time to embark once more into the World of Toads!!! Having previously looked at toads in general, and at the toads of Europe, we here continue the series by looking at yet more familiar, northern toads: this time at those of North America. As with some of the other 'northern' toads we've looked at (the Natterjack and the Green toad and its relatives), North America's many toad species have conventionally been subsumed into the anuran genus-that-ate-the-world, Bufo. However, genetic studies have shown that the North American toad clade that includes the Common…

Evolution: What The Fossils Say And Why it Matters

tags: Evolution: What The Fossils Say And Why it Matters, fossils, dinosaurs, creationism, Donald Prothero, book review I was in love with dinosaurs when I was a kid, and I still am. It was my love for dinosaurs and fossils and especially my time spent learning the minutea of the evolutionary history of horses that quickly brought me into direct conflict with the church that I was being inculcated into when I was very young and innocent. Subsequently, I had to learn about evolution in small niblets on the sly. But I wish I had been able to read paleontologist Don Prothero's beautifully…

Comments of the Week #13: From Writing to Relativity

“Einstein, my upset stomach hates your theory — it almost hates you yourself! How am I to' provide for my students? What am I to answer to the philosophers?!!” -Paul Ehrenfest It's been another great week here at Starts With A Bang, and we've shed light on a number of wonders of the Universe, from galaxies to dark matter to some of the amazing properties of relativity itself. As always you’ve had plenty to say about it as well. Over the past week, in case you missed anything, we covered: How do I write a science blog? (for Ask Ethan), The Best (Worst) Fake Astro Pics (for our Weekend…

Comparing models and empirical estimates of noise in the climate system

This is Part I of a two part treatment of new research on climate change. Part II is here. There is a new paper out, Comparing the model-simulated global warming signal to observations using empirical estimates of unforced noise, by Patrick T. Brown,Wenhong Li, Eugene C. Cordero & Steven A. Mauget. It is potentially important for two reasons. One is because of what it says about how to interpret the available data on global warming caused by human generated greenhouse gas pollution. The other is because of the way in which the results are being interpreted, willfully or through…

The comparison to jabberwocky is inevitable

Lots of people have been sending me this paper by Erik Andrulis, and most of you have done so with eyebrows raised, pointing out that it's bizarre and unbelievable; some of you wrote asking whether it was believable, at which point my eyebrows went up. Come on people: when you see one grand cosmic explanation that is summarized with cartoons, which the author claims explains everything from the behavior of subatomic particles to the formation of the moon, shouldn't you immediately sense crankery? It's also getting cited all over the place, from World of Warcraft fan sites to the Discovery…

In which creationists make me giddily, joyfully gleeful!

Oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy. This is wonderful news, happy happy joy joy, gosha'mighty, I'm wiggling in my chair like a tickled puppy. What has made me so happy, you might ask? A week from today I'm going to be speaking at the Crystal Palace in Glasgow, Scotland. I'll be talking about the developmental evidence for evolution, and it should be great fun. But that's not the exciting news. Glasgow has its very own Centre for Intelligent Design, and a fine collection of know-nothings it is. And they are being encouraged to attend my talk! So maybe there will be a contingent of critics present —…

Build Me A Tapeworm

Darwin gave a lot of thought to the strangest creatures on this planet, wondering how they had evolved from less strange ancestors. Whales today might be fish-like warm-blooded beasts with blowholes and flukes, but long ago, Darwin argued, their ancestors were ordinary mammals that walked on land with legs. His suggestion was greeted with shock and disbelief; neverthless, scientists have found bones from ancient walking whales. Humans, Darwin argued, evolved from apes, most likely in Africa where chimpanzees and gorillas are found today. And today scientists have found about twenty different…

What? Removing thimerosal from vaccines caused the autism epidemic?

The blog post of mine that arguably "put me on the map" in the skeptical blogosphere was my very Insolent, very sarcastic deconstruction of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s deceptive pseudoscience-ridden bit of fear mongering that he called Deadly Immunity. It was originally jointly published both by Salon.com and Rolling Stone, a blot that neither publication will ever overcome. At least Salon.com retracted the article over five years later. Rolling Stone never did, although the article is now available only to its paid subscribers. The reason I mention this "past glory" (if you can call it that) is…

Bird flu weirdness

What is it about the Avian flu that seems to inspire all sorts of wild craziness? Yes, the avian flu has the potential to be a big problem in humans (but is not one yet--so far its main lethal affect has been in birds). Yes, if it ever acquired the ability to be transmitted from person to person, rather than only from bird to human, it could cause a pandemic as nasty as the 1918 influenza pandemic, but, as far as can be determined, it has not acquired such an ability yet. Nonetheless, the avian flu inspires a lot more kookiness than more likely threats, such as the return or emergence of a…

Kevin back from China

For those of you who have enjoyed Kevin's herpetology dispatches from China two years ago, you may want to go over to the FieldHerpForum.com and read his reports from this year's trip.

ClockQuotes

The function of a briefing paper is to prevent the ambassador from saying something dreadfully indiscreet. I sometimes think its true object is to prevent the ambassador from saying anything at all. - Kingman Brewster, Jr

Restoring the Oceans

tags: oceans, marine reserves, fish, streaming video This video explores how the establishment of marine reserves can save our oceans from overexploitation from overfishing and other damages. Narrated by Mariella Frostrup. [12:53]

bite

Fresh, local grown sweet organic apples from the Farmer's Market: $2.75 Grabbing one this morning for lunch, to find the Munchkin has taken exactly one small bite from every single apple: Priceless

Aurora Islandica

Time lapse movie of extensive aurora series over Iceland Gorgeous. AURORA ISLANDICA - a Northern Lights Timelapse from Agust Ingvarsson on Vimeo. From pressan.is Over many nights and multiple locations in and near Reykjavík.

Video of heat shield hitting Mars

The Angry Red Planet just gut a little angrier: This sequence of images shows the heat shield from NASA's Mars Science Laboratory hitting the ground on Mars and raising a cloud of dust. From NASA

A Government of Sociopaths

I have no idea if Bush administration officials individually suffer from manifest antisocial personality disorder, but when you get enough of them together, they certainly do on an institutional level. Here's a relatively unremarked upon tidbit from the recent Surgeon General scandal: And administration officials even discouraged him from attending the Special Olympics because, he said, of that charitable organization's longtime ties to a "prominent family" that he refused to name. "I was specifically told by a senior person, 'Why would you want to help those people?' " Dr. Carmona said. The…

The annual Bio-Link summer fellows forum is coming

Every June, an incredible event takes place. Biotechnology educators gather in Berkeley, California, from across the US, to discuss new trends in biotechnology education, learn from each other and share information about educating students for the biotechnology workforce. There are tours of local biotech companies like Genentech and local research institutes like the cancer center at UCSF. New kits and techniques can be tried and practiced in hands-on workshops. And instructors get to practice new bioinformatics techniques like analyzing Next Generation DNA sequencing data or working with…

Bored on Thanksgiving?

If you're still awake tomorrow after the feast and managing to withstand the sopoforic effects of the tryptophan from the turkey and the carbohydrates from the potatoes and pie, you might want to consider doing a little science at home. Fellow SciBlings Tara Smith (here & here), Mike Dunford (here & here), GrrlScientist, and I (here) have all experimented with the wonders of Mentos and carbonated soft drinks. Orac even found a Mentos and Diet Coke plug for organ donation. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it for myself. Now, it's your turn. According to the WSTA…

"...they're just itching to get out!"

Back To The Woom is a blog that needs to get much more exposure. It is written by a very smart couple here in Raleigh, NC. The posts are always very thoughtfull and well-researched and the topics range from Ann Raynd to immigration, from capital punishment to harsh capitalism. Always worth your time to read (even if you disagree on a detail or two). This time, I'd like to point your attention to the latest post - The moral majority is watching your inner child molester: The implication is that, without the threat of eventual punishment at the hands of an omniscient cosmic dictator, many…

Franken-sense: it's about time

Al Franken may have made his name as a comedian on Saturday Night Live, but as a Senator (D-MN) he's a force to reckon with. In this clip from hearings this week he nails a witness from the right wing Hudson Institute pimping for the health care industry. Her claim? That health care reform would lead to more bankruptcies. He makes his point and thanks the witness, but she tries to score with a question of her own. Bad move. It turns out Franken knows the answer: Smart, serious, prepared. Live from Washington, DC. It's not Saturday Night Live! Addendum, 1 pm EST: Just had to take my son-in-…

It's Not Rumsfeld, Stupid!

Demand an Exit Strategy Not a Facelift: By pointing the finger at Rumsfeld, they deflect blame from Bush's neo-conservative agenda. It is that agenda that drew the nation to Iraq, that has distracted from a smarter struggle against terrorists and terrorism, that has resulted in the erosion of our civil liberties, that has incurred the wrath of the international community. Identifying Rumsfeld as the problem reinforces the "bad apple frame," which is among the common frames we examine in our new book, Thinking Points. This frame derives from the old saying that one bad apple spoils the barrel…

More on Dolphin Intelligence

Chris Chatham of Developing Intelligence blog wrote an excellent summary of the controversy over dolphin intelligence and adds his own thoughts on the matter, with which I agree: In conclusion, there are countless reasons to doubt that dolphins are "dumber than goldfish," or indeed that popular musings about dolphin intelligence have been inaccurate. Of course, as Cognitive Daily points out, it is clear that they don't have human-level intelligence - whatever that may mean. On the other hand, Manger has developed a new theory about the evolution of the dolphin brain; unfortunately, any…

Linkedy Links VIII

MINERVA - clever idea for high cadence RV searches around nearby bright stars, now under way. Kardashev IV - from AstroWright. Or, why the best way to achieve immortality is to not die. how to make your bike sound like a horse - Brilliant! #ObMontyPython! From From Trotify. Physicists open mouth - PZ inserts booted foot B on search for Planck scale physics on tabletops The slightly more breathless view on the tabletop Seeing the elephant - BaBar sees T violation. CPT rules! Pontification on MOOCs Astrobio MOOC (not for credit) News Higgs results... Death of SUSY? Long live SUSYN! Colossal…

Planetary Habitability Laboratory

The University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo has a very interesting facility that has put out some fun stuff The Planetary Habitability Laboratory led by Prof Abel Mendez, who gave a most excellent presentation on their tools and resources at the "Planet around Stellar Remnants" workshop last week. The Habitable Exoplanets Catalog tabulates potentially habitable exoplanets and exomoons from the known and candidate exoplanets in the literature. They have a press release on some related new result thursday 2nd Feb. Their Visible Paleo Earth project also looks very interesting, and I suspect I'll…

Andrea Ghez wins Crafoord Prize in Astronomy

The 2012 Crafoord Prizes in Astronomy and Mathematics were announced this morning. Crafoord Prize 2012 Announcement In Astronomy, Prof. Andrea Ghez, UCLA won for her patient and groundbreaking work on stellar dynamics in the core of the Milky Way and the robust mass measurement of the central black hole. Dr Genzel, MPIE, shared the prize for independent research on the same problem. Stellar Orbits Around the Central Black Hole in the Milky Way (from Ghez et al) Andrea's DeWolf lecture at ACP in 2010 (full 1 hour video from GrassRootsTV) The Crafoord Prize, awarded by the Swedish Academy,…

Sonnenuntergang, 3

tags: Sonnenuntergang, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, travel, nature, sunset, photography Sonnenuntergang. Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Image: Bob O'Hara, 18 April 2010 [larger view] Sunset over Frankfurt, as photographed from the bedroom window. This sunset was influenced by the Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajökull. This is probably the last sunset photograph you'll see from Frankfurt that doesn't have a dozen or more (disgustingly ugly!!) contrails messing it up because the latest news is that the eruptions from the Icelandic volcano are slowing down .. and there are some EU flights…

Peroxide wash on Mars

From American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle: Prof Schulze-Makuch from Washington State has a conjecture that reconciles the Viking experiments - which were generally inconsistent with life on Mars but showed some residual puzzles - with the current thinking that there might be persistent life. He suggests the surface life uses a H2O2/H2O mixture to adapt to low temperatures and oxidised surface this, they claim, would facilitiate a water based oxygen metabolism. here is the paper and the press release from WSU Grrl Scientist is not amused Hm. Well, it is a testable hypothesis,…

Grandpa's Gruesome Punjab Crocodile Tale

My maternal grandpa Ingemar Leander worked as a sales agent of the Swedish Match Company in Punjab in the 30s before he got married. It was the adventure of his lifetime. Here's the story of his that I remember best. Once when he went crocodile hunting on the river the party was a little clumsy and startled their prey into the water from the sandbank the animals had been basking on. Only one crocodile stayed behind and was shot. This turned out to be because it was in poor health. When they gutted the animal they found that a bone had pierced its stomach from inside. It was the arm bone of a…

Facebook Fail

Facebook has turned up security a notch and effectively locked me out when I'm on the road. I have hundreds of Fb contacts that I don't actually know and wouldn't recognise if I met them in the street. Mention their names to me and they ring no bell. This is partly because of this blog, partly because skeptics around the world like to have exotic Scandy contacts. Now, Facebook notes that somebody's trying to log onto my account from an unfamiliar location. Imagine what happens when it starts to show me pictures of random people from my contact list, with a selection of seven names each to…

Eureka on the Radio

Yesterday, I drove through the slush to Albany to do an appearance on KERA radio's "Think" from a studio there. The audio is at that link. It was a bit of a strange experience, because I drove to a place to do the interview in a radio studio, but I was the only one in the room, taking questions from a disembodied voice. I enjoyed it, though, and the audio quality is a lot better than you would've gotten from even a land-line phone. This was a live show, including some call-in questions, and that always has a working-without-a-net quality that is kind of exciting. I got in a bunch of stories…

Thursday Toddler Blogging 031711

SteelyKid is actually at Grandma and Grandpa's this week, having a ball, and freeing Kate from having to do solo toddler duty for the days that I'm traveling. As a result, you get some week-old pics (though if Grandma and Grandpa send us a picture from this week, I'll post it). Here we have an action shot of one of her current favorite games, which is riding on Kate's back like a backpack, while Kate runs around the house: This is a big hit, but as you may well imagine, it's exhausting for everyone: It's been a productive day here-- I wrote almost 4000 words on the book today, which mostly…

Going to Cons

Two months from now I'm going to spend a week on the US East Coast, attending two conferences and doing some sightseeing. From 18 to 22 January I'll be in the Chapel Hill/Durham area of North Carolina for the 2nd Science Blogging Conference, where I'm co-chairing a session on blogging about the humanities and social sciences. From 23 to 27 January I'll be in Plantation/Ft Lauderdale, Florida, for The Amazing Meeting 5.5, a skeptical conference hosted by James Randi. I think there's a seat on a panel for me there. Dear Reader, both of these conferences are looking really good, and I'd love to…

New Golden Sword Hilt From Lincolnshire

The British Museum has purchased a set of 7th century golden garnet-studded sword hilt mounts from a metal detectorist who found them at Market Rasen, Lincolnshire, England, in 2002. It's a funny find: the hilt has clearly been deposited in one piece with all the mounts held together by the tang of the sword, but there's no trace of the blade and no evidence for any ploughed-out grave. It seems to be a well-documented case of a contextless find. Unless there's a settlement there that isn't mentioned in the BM press release. The interlace decoration looks non-animal-art from the pics and is…

Truffles

And now for something completely different: a man with a stoat through his head. Nonono, not that. Instead, a thing from the garden: It is, or so I understand, a truffle. Or rather two. I found them while mowing the front lawn on Sunday. This was somewhat unexpected. And indeed, I might not even have found them had I set the lawnmower to "high" instead of "low". Here's the ground they came from: That's one; the other is equally uninteresting. The ground doesn't obviously satisfy the truffle-bearing criteria. There are tree roots around, true, including hazel (no oak in the front) but there…

Mostly Mute Monday: The Glory Of Saturn’s Rings (Synopsis)

“This then, I thought, as I looked round about me, is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was.” -W.G. Sebald From their discovery in the 1600s, Saturn's rings have been a source of wonder and puzzlement to skywatchers everywhere. The only ring system visible through most telescopes from Earth, Saturn's main rings at more than 70,000 km long, yet no more than 1 km in thickness. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute. Once thought to have only…

Quantum Immortality (Synopsis)

They say that a cat has nine lives, mostly because of their uncanny ability to find themselves in -- and escape from -- frequently perilous situations. Perhaps, of all the animals that he could have chosen, that's why Schrödinger made his famous thought experiment about the most diminutive of felines. Image credit: retrieved from Øystein Elgarøy at http://fritanke.no/index.php?page=vis_nyhet&NyhetID=8513. But there's an incredible outcome that one interpretation -- the Many-Worlds Interpretation -- of quantum mechanics allow for: that any time there's a situation where you have the…

Fantasy Football Nightmare

Just a short break from my usual subjects for a little whining. My fantasy football team is a keeper league, which means we can each keep up to 3 players from the last year's roster on our team for this year and everyone else goes back into the draft pool. I only kept one player this year and he happened to be the highest scoring player in all of fantasy football last year, Daunte Culpepper. And how bad has he been this year? In 2 games, he's thrown 8 interceptions and 0 touchdowns. Oh, and he also has 2 fumbles. In fact, in two games the Vikings offense has had a total of 24 offensive…

Einstein and Millikan

In the previous post, I promised to say something more about Einstein and the photoelectric effect. It turns out that I already wrote about this, back in 2005. That post is the end of a long chain of links about the history of photons. This is a good thing, because it frees me from having to try to type a new post with a baby on my lap. You're kind of getting short-changed, though, so to make up for the lack of new content, here's a relevant footnote from Chapter 1 of the book-in-progress: Millikan thought the Einstein model lacked "any sort of satisfactory theoretical foundation," and…

A Word from Our Middle East Correspondant

Checking in from Cairo, Senior Uncertain Principles Middle East Correspondant Paul Schemm, with a wire story titled "Ultraconservative Islam on Rise in Mideast": Critics worry that the rise of Salafists in Egypt, as well as in other Arab countries such as Jordan and Lebanon, will crowd out the more liberal and tolerant version of Islam long practiced there. They also warn that the doctrine is only a few shades away from that of violent groups like al-Qaida -- that it effectively preaches "Yes to jihad, just not now." In the broad spectrum of Islamic thought, Salafism is on the extreme…

Thursday Baby Blogging 060310

I sometimes get comments asking why so many of the baby blogging pictures are taken from above. The answer is twofold: 1) I'm rather tall, and thus it's hard for me to get down to baby level to take pictures straight on, and 2) when I do try to get down to baby level, most of the pictures come out like this: SteelyKid, like Emmy, interprets "Daddy near ground level" as "time to play" and comes charging over to me. It's usually dumb luck if I manage to get the camera up before she pounces on me. So, if you want Appa-for-scale images, you're generally stuck with shots from above: Fortunately…