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Science Cafe Raleigh - Energy for the Future

The Science Café for July (description below) will be held on July 21st at Tir Na Nog. This is the season when our utility bills begin to skyrocket. Our costly electric bills often bring into focus the high demand our community has for energy, as well as questions about where electricity will be coming from in the future as North Carolina's population grows. This will be the subject of our next cafe. We will be meeting Dr. David McNelis from UNC-Chapel Hill's Institute for the Environment. Dr. McNelis will give us information about options that we have for energy production in our…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Ants Can Learn To Forage On One-way Trails: Ant trails fascinate children and scientists alike. With so many ants traveling in both directions, meeting and contacting one another, carrying their loads and giving the impression that they have a sense of urgency and duty, they pose the following question: how do they organize themselves? A new study may have some answers. Bone Deformities Linked To Inbreeding In Isle Royale Wolves: The wolves on Isle Royale are suffering from genetically deformed bones. Scientists from Michigan Technological University blame the extreme inbreeding of the small…

Good news from outer space! The aliens are coming!

Would you believe the aliens are on the way? The words 'Nous ne sommes pas seuls' or 'We are not alone' will be somberly pronounced this week by a senior Government official of the nation that brought the world 'Liberté, égalité, fraternité'. France is set to concede that it is aware of an alien presence on earth by no later than Friday. Paris has chosen follow the lead of maverick UFO nation Brazil and resist US pressure to continue delaying disclosure until America feels it is ready for the event. It is believed that a telephone hot-line has been set up in Paris to deal with queries…

Things we're apparently tired of

LisaJ here: A new survey shows that 48% of the American public is suffering from a frightening new illness, termed 'Obama fatigue'. Apparently a lot of people's Obama receptors have reached saturation, and we're all hoping that a week long Hawaiian vacation will relieve this little issue. Now even I have noticed that Barack gets a lot more airtime than his opponent Johnnie, but how could you wish him away? He's just so damn charismatic, with his little rock star style. So the question here is, even if you support Obama (or at least prefer him to your other choice), are you suffering from…

How do I love thee SQL? Let me COUNT the ways. Number 1...

I love the way you show me secret things. All I do is type: Select * from name_of_a_table And you share everything with me. Without you, my vision is obscured, and all I see is the display on the page. In fact, this was the push that finally made me decide to learn SQL. In our bacterial metagenomics experiment, I realized that my students could use FinchTV to enter their blast results into our iFinch database. That was cool, but with the web interface, we could only view one result at a time. On the other hand, if we use the right SQL query in the iFinch query window, we can see…

Lead contamination lingers in some communities; what do we expect of EPA?

Thanks to regulations limiting the use of lead in gasoline, paint, and plumbing supplies, the median blood lead concentration for US children age five and younger has dropped from 15 µg/dL in 1976-1980 to 1.4 µg/dL in 2007-2008. This is important because lead is a neurotoxicant that can lead to developmental delays and behavioral problems, among other health concerns. But this public health victory is far from complete. Lead poisoning still occurs among children who live in housing with lead paint or areas where lead contaminates the soil. A new series from USA Today, Ghost Factories:…

Recent Archaeomags

Current World Archaeology #58 (April/May) has a seven-page feature on the 8th century mass graves in ships at Salme on Saaremaa in Estonia. This astonishing find interests me greatly as the ships and the dead men's equipment are Scandinavian, and so I mentioned it here back in 2008. One of the sword pommels is an example of the animal-figurine weaponry Jan Peder Lamm and myself have published on and suggest Finnish involvement. And boat burial in and of itself is a theme with which I have worked a lot. Here we seem to be dealing with Scandies who got badly beaten when attempting a raid, and…

Its all about me (again, yawn)

Its all about me refers. This wasn't terribly exciting the first time round, but now that dullard AW has finally noticed - its only taken him three+ weeks. And AW has only noticed because the Kalte cretins have recycled it. Apparently I openly sympathized with the views of the controversial IPCC which is of course true, at least the "sympathising" bit. My position on GW is hard to distinguish from the IPCC's, and I've defended them in the past. As for the rest: the substance of AW's regurgitation dates back to nonsense I refuted ages ago. AW deliberately gets my title wrong, but one learns…

Top Blogging Actually Done in 2014

As a follow-up to yesterday's post about what draws the most traffic here, I went through and pulled out the top 20 posts from the blog (by traffic) for the calendar year 2014 that were first published in 2014. Numbers after the links are the fraction of the total pageviews for the year that each of these drew, according to Google Analytics: "Earthing" Is a Bunch of Crap 1.03% Tennis Ball Plus Soccer Ball Equals Blown Minds 0.65% Impossible Thruster Probably Impossible 0.55% Quick Interstellar Thoughts 0.54% What Is Color? 0.52% The Physics of Crazy Sleds 0.45% Method and Its Discontents 0.…

Falling into a Black Hole sucks!

Why it is that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos -- novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes -- you are beyond doubt the strangest? -Walker Percy When you watch someone fall into a black hole, what you actually see is pretty surprising. You see, a black hole's gravity distorts the space around it, and it does so without providing any light of its own, giving you a unique perspective on the Universe. Well, if you watch someone else fall in, you'd see them approach the black hole normally, and then the bizarreness starts. As they go deeper and deeper into the…

New Links on El Tejon ID Suit

We have many media reports today on the El Tejon ID suit. The full press release from Americans United is available on their website. The LA Times has an article about the controversy that includes a couple of interesting tidbits. Of the district's legal advice, it says: At a special meeting of the El Tejon Unified School District on Jan. 1, at which the board approved the new course, "Philosophy of Design," school Supt. John W. Wight said that he had consulted the school district's attorneys and that they "had told him that as long as the course was called 'philosophy,' " it could pass legal…

New Links on El Tejon ID Suit

We have many media reports today on the El Tejon ID suit. The full press release from Americans United is available on their website. The LA Times has an article about the controversy that includes a couple of interesting tidbits. Of the district's legal advice, it says: At a special meeting of the El Tejon Unified School District on Jan. 1, at which the board approved the new course, "Philosophy of Design," school Supt. John W. Wight said that he had consulted the school district's attorneys and that they "had told him that as long as the course was called 'philosophy,' " it could pass legal…

So Who Else is Here?

For those who have not gone exploring, I thought you might like to get some idea of what other blogs are part of this project. At this point there are about ten blogs total, but that will likely grow. It starts with a couple of "big boys" in the blogosphere, Chris Mooney and PZ Myers. Mooney is the author of The Republican War on Science and a prominent writer/commentator on science issues in the media. PZ Myers you may know from the Panda's Thumb, but his Pharyngula blog has become huge and gets in the range of 10,000 hits a day. He and I don't get along, as many of you probably know, but I'…

Primary Cilia Connect

Here is a press release from BioMed Central that is just so interesting I had to give it to you as it is without delay: Connecting cilia: cellular antennae help cells stick together Primary cilia are hair-like structures which protrude from almost all mammalian cells. They are thought to be sensory and involved in sampling the cell's environment. New research, published in BioMed Central's open access journal Cilia, launched today, shows that cilia on cells in the retina and liver are able to make stable connections with each other - indicating that cilia not only are able to sense their…

Time magazine on politics & science

This is obviously more Chris's area more than it is mine, but Time's cover story this week is on, essentially, the Republican war on science (the actual "war," not Chris's book of the same title). Boehlert [Republican chairman of the House Science Committee] does not see a larger problem of Administration meddling ... And he noted that politics and science have never had an easy, hands-off relationship in Washington. "This is a town where people like to say they're for science-based decision making, until the scientific consensus leads to a politically inconvenient conclusion. Then they…

More gene therapy for more kinds of blindness!

This therapy isnt perfect, but its a cool start! Retinal gene therapy in patients with choroideremia: initial findings from a phase 1/2 clinical trial 'Choroideremia' is a kind of blindness caused by deletion of a gene called REP1. Because REP1 is on the X-chromosome, there is  no 'second chance gene' on the other chromosome in men. They have no functional REP1, so, men with this deletion get choroideremia. This makes treating choroideremia with gene therapy attractive because we know what is going on. It is not an overly complex network-- its a deleted gene that is causing the trouble. We…

CDC recommends HPV vaccine for boys!

The HPV vaccine is one of my most favoritest vaccines. From a public health perspective, its efficacy is unprecedented. From an immunological perspective, learning how the HPV vaccine works is going to teach us something about our immune system we didnt know before. From a virological and evolutionary perspective, we dont have to be worried HPV is going to evolve 'around' our vaccine, or 'new evils' will take the eliminated variants place. Its a beautiful vaccine! It would be great, for women, if boys got the vaccine too. Of course, boys cannot get cervical cancer, but they can carry the…

Turned out warm again

As we all kinda knew in advance, 2016 turns out to be a record warm year. If you read UKMO you get Provisional full-year figures for global average near-surface temperatures confirm that last year, 2016, was one of the warmest two years on record, nominally exceeding the record temperature of 2015 but that's because they don't handle the Arctic very well, and the Arctic was very warm this year. NOAA is a bit more forthright (or see Moyhu): With eight consecutive record warm months from January to August, the globally averaged temperature over land and ocean surfaces for 2016 was the highest…

Climate Scientists Hide Water Vapor

This is just one of dozens of responses to common climate change denial arguments, which can all be found at How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic. Objection: Climate scientists never talk about water vapor, which is the strongest greenhouse gas, because it undermines their CO2 theory. Answer: There is no climate model or climate textbook that does not discuss the role water vapor plays in the Greenhouse Effect. It is the strongest Greenhouse gas, contributing 36% - 66% to the overall effect for vapor alone, 66% to 85% when you include clouds. It is however, not considered as a climate "forcing…

How to Lie With Test Scores

Sean Carroll comments on an item in the Atlantic Monthly on test scores compared across nations. There are two things that really bug me about this item, the most important of which is the deeply dishonest graphic the Atlantic did to illustrate the item. Here's the honest version of the graph, redone using data from this table (the relevant figures don't appear in the report cited in the original piece). (Click on the graph for a larger version.) I've plotted the normalized test score (the score for each country divided by the reported maximum score, because I'm a physicist and like…

Recent Pop Music

I bought a bunch of stuff recently, and as is my usual practice, iTunes has been shuffle playing the recent purchases for the last couple of weeks. The albums in question: Janelle Monae, the Arch-Android. Not usually my sort of thing, but I saw a bunch of absolutely rapturous reviews calling it groundbreaking, etc, so I gave it a shot. Verdict: Enh. Not my thing. Some decent songs, but I suspect anything with the drum/bass line from "Tightrope" would sound pretty cool. Gaslight Anthem, American Slang. A post-punk band from New Jersey with the inevitable Springsteen complex (at least they're…

What does Climate Model output look like?

Lots of FUD about climate models get thrown around in the Climate Wars, but what is it they are really doing anyway? The contrarians would have us believe they just take in a bunch of contrived parameters and spit out the worst case possible scenario for global average temperature increase. But the truth is the kinds of models the IPCC report on are very complex and nuanced. Since I'm no expert and pictures are worth thousands of words, I would like to offer a few beautiful video realizations of GCM output. The first is from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) CCSM climate…

Welcome Spring Storm Season

This picture, from a current (as of this writing) accuweather forecast page, is an excellent illustration of what happens here in the upper Midwest the spring. The overall pattern of movement of air masses at the continental scale is west to east, with extra moist and extra warm air secondarily moving north from the Gulf of Mexico, and cool and usually dry air coming form the Northwest (not shown here but note the "blizzard" part) and with dry Pacific/Rocky Mountain air coming from the west. The main energy flow to keep an eye on is that coming from the Gulf. There is a rule of thumb you…

Darwin Day Party

Thursday, February 12, 2009, 7 to 9 p.m. Bell Museum Auditorium $10/ free to museum members and University students The speakers will present in the auditorium from 7 to 8 pm. Birthday cake and refreshments are served after the presentations. Celebrate the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birthday! Part of a world wide celebration, the Twin Cities' version is at The Bell Museum of Natural History this Thursday night. Join in the fun with cake, drinks and presentations by U of M scientists and educators. They will present funny, outrageous and controversial rapid-fire, media-rich…

Best Op-Ed Ever!

From the Louisville Courier-Journal: There is a great educational injustice being inflicted upon thousands of children in this country, a large percentage of whom come from the Kentucky, Ohio and, Indiana areas. The source of this injustice is a sophisticated Christian ministry that uses the hook of dinosaurs, the guarantee of an afterlife, and the horrors of hell to convince children and their families to believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible. The tax-exempt ministry, Answers in Genesis, and its new $28 million creation museum in Boone County has become the de facto source of…

Social Class and Educational Access

Via Matt Yglesias, the Quick and the Ed offers an absolutely terrific article about the effect of class on access to college, using AJ Soprano as an example. On The Sopranos, AJ was a delinquent, who nevertheless got sent off to college because of the tireless efforts of his mother, and the family's money. Drawing on new data from the Department of Education, the authors show that this is all too real: The fourth bar on the graph represents the A.J. Sopranos of the world, those who scored in the bottom 25 percent (the first achievement quartile) on standardized tests as high school sophomores…

What do you do in Key West, The Conch Republic?

Welcome readers of the It's Only Key West (IOKW) discussion forum (and thanks to Kategoe for sending you here) - keep your suggestions coming in the comments below the post. I just came from Hogfish tonight where I sat between two people thrown out of the bar by 7:15 pm, one for regular old drunkenness and the other for nearly starting a fight. Cynical me wants to say they were paid actors. But the food was superb. Seizing upon our new tradition of getting out of Dodge for the week before Christmas madness, the Family Pharmboy will be broadcasting this week from Key West, Florida, The Conch…

Loss of a Science Journalism Giant: Jerry E. Bishop

Over at the WSJ Health Blog, Ron Winslow breaks the news that Jerry Bishop has passed away from lung cancer at age 76. Winslow is an outstanding sci/med journalist in his own right and provides us with a detailed retrospective of Bishop's career and his role as a science writing mentor. In his 42 years with the Journal, Bishop broke many critical stories with what Winslow describes as "uncommon clarity and insight": A page-one story published in 1966 included a spot-on prediction of what became the Internet--some three decades before the Web transformed communications... ...Another scoop was…

Clams got legs!

Well, not clams. And not legs as such. But there's a neat piece out in Nature on the evolutionary leap, so to speak, between fish fins and the limbs of land critters. A team of researchers has "discovered that the median fin of Catsharks, although originating from different embryonic cells, uses the same genes (Hox and Tbx18) during development as limbs and paired fins." It's not quite that simple, of course. But before we get to the details, allow me to quote from an AP story that appeared within 24 hours of the announcement of the fin-limbs paper. It's about the Creation Museum that's "…

A Raman Rainbow

Hey, how about that! Three people in our optics group here at Texas A&M (Professor Alexei Sokolov, postdoc Miaochan Zhi, and grad student Kai Wang) had a photograph from one of their optics experiments make the Optics and Photonics News Image of the Week: Image of the Week: Raman sidebands from a femtosecond pulse The crystal in the foreground is being hit by two pulses of light, which interact with the material and each other in such a way as to form numerous other beams with different wavelengths, forming the rainbow of discrete beams seen in the photograph. This is an effect which…

Time and Navigation

We've seen that it's pretty easy to determine your latitude using the sun as a reference point. All you need is a shadow and chart that was easily available to sailors of previous centuries and you're set. Finding your longitude is another story. The reason for the difference in difficulty is one of time. The sun varies very little in its north-south position from day to day, but it varies enormously in its east-west position by virtue of the whole "rising and setting" thing. It's easy to look up on a chart to find a correction factor that varies day-by-day, but when you need a…

Star Light, Star Bright

The power output of the sun is often talked about in awe-inspiring terms. You'll be told that it's like a continuous thermonuclear blast, or that a tiny fraction of the tiny fraction of power that happens to hit the earth would support humanity's energy needs. It's all true. The light and heat from a campfire can make you uncomfortable from a few feet away, while the light from the sun can scorch deserts from almost a hundred million miles distant. Let me quantify this, since it's what we physicists compulsively do. The total power output of the sun is something in the vicinity of 3.8 x…

Veteran Filmmaker Criticizes Violent "Wildlife Pornography" on TV and at Amusement Parks

Chris Palmer, director of the Center for Environmental Filmmaking at American University, argues in an op-ed at CNN.com that the tragic accident at SeaWorld Orlando should draw renewed attention to the ethics and safety of keeping Orcas as captive performing animals for spectators. As Palmer, a veteran of more than 25 years of wildlife filmmaking, writes: Orcas and other large predators should not be held in captivity unless those doing so can make an overpoweringly persuasive case for it -- mainly that the animal's release into the wild, perhaps after an injury, will mean certain,…

Foodscapes (Landscape and Modernity: Series 5)

Here's something tasty. Or odd. You decide. Fruit Balloons, by C. Warner From the Telegraph (as found through Arts and Letters Daily), comes a unique series by London-based photographer Carl Warner. It says there he "makes foodscapes: landscapes made of food." The images below are borrowed from the Telegraph's slideshow, who borrowed it from Warner's homepage. To keep them under the same umbrella as the prior landscape and modernity images (trees; the West; the pasture; the A-bomb), I'll note this: we have here food items from actual physical landscapes (not represented landscapes), re-…

Which fits better? Gradual decline or abrupt decrease?

Frank Crary said: In an effort to clear up this statistical game, I'm posting a detailed comparison of Mr. Lambert's and my models of the crime rate in New South Wales, between 1910 and 1930. The data, taken from the graph he posted on the 15th of this month, is: [Numbers deleted] (Please correct me if I'm in error, Mr. Lambert's ascii graph reached me in a slightly garbled form.) Eeek! About half of those numbers are incorrect. I guess ascii graphs are not the most robust ways to transmit information. I have appended the correct numbers to the end of this posting, so that my calculations…

The dangers of intertwingularity

When I was but a young digital preservationist, I was presented with an archival problem I couldn't solve. This should not sound unusual. It happens a lot, for all sorts of reasons. If I can keep a few people from falling into traps that make digital preservationists throw up their hands in despair, I'm happy. Anyway, the problem was a website with some interactions coded in Javascript. If those interactions didn't work, the site made significantly less sense. (It could have been worse; even without the Javascript, the materials on the site were still reachable.) The Javascript had been coded…

Lott says that Mary Rosh was "based upon some type of truth"

Lott was on MSNBC's Buchanan & Press on May 26. From the transcript: PRESS: After that book came out, there was a person who showed up on the Internet by the name of Mary Rosh, who said you were the best professor she ever had in college. She praised the book in her review on the Internet. She said any critics of your book should slink away into a hole and hide. And it turns out this Mary Rosh is a total invention of yours. Now, why should I believe anything you say in this book if you are lying to people on the Internet? LOTT: Well, first of all, not all of those were from me. PRESS…

Journal pricing in these hard times: are publishers listening?

As I've mentioned, science libraries are very much in financial trouble just as their parent institutions and other organizations are right now.  There have been many calls for publishers to hold the line on price increases and some have done so. Some, like SPIE, have decreased prices -yay them! Others, like a chemistry database that was recently purchased by a large publisher, have given my parent institution a quote that raises our subscription price over 40% over the period of the contract. Nature Publishing Group has raised institutional subscriptions for Scientific American from about $…

Lott vs the Stanford Law Review

I asked Ben Horwich, the president of volume 55 of the Stanford Law Review to comment on Lott's latest complaints<.phpa>. He writes: I did not categorically promise Lott that we'd run a verbatim statement by Plassmann and Whitley. I did express my interest in working with them to clear up the confusion. I think that's the crux of the misunderstanding. The statement that did run was prepared in consultation with Plassmann and Whitley; indeed, they provided the original draft. Of course, it's modified a great deal from that version, but I wanted to print something that…

Bad News about Corals, Good News about Coral Reef Scientists

I am here in Ft. Lauderdale at the 11th International Coral Reefs Symposium, which only happens once every four years. It's a big deal and more than 3000 scientists have gathered to discuss coral reefs for the week. The news for coral reefs, as you might suspect, is grim (one scientist described them as the living dead--the zombies of the sea). But there is good news about the scientists involved in reef research. Given that this is my first coral reef conference, my baseline is this week. But for scientists such as Jeremy Jackson from Scripps and Daniel Pauly and Dirk Zeller from the…

FrankenPenis!

Sci-Fi authors will tell you that the next big breakthrough in medical technology will be the ability to grow our own organs for transplants. In the idealized future, you'll have a heart or kidney cultured from your own cells on hand for whatever emergency might come up. Well, scientists have taken another step closer to creating functional replacement tissues, detailing the creation fully-functional penis part replacements in rabbits in a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. . Yes, I did say penis part replacements. They are serious. Hey, if you're…

Exclusive Michael Pollan interview by Ewen Callaway at Complex Medium

(This is a repost from 4 June that was supposed to have been here for our launch on Sb - Ewen Callaway's interview with Michael Pollan is definitely worthy of a wider audience) Here a belated plug to my Colorado compatriot, hard-working microbiologist, and real-life journalist, Ewen, at his microbiology/infectious diseases blog, Complex Medium. If you're a fan of Michael Pollan from reading The Botany of Desire or have been thinking about buying his new book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, take 28 minutes and listen to Ewen's interview with Pollan on one of nation's best public radio stations, KGNU…

Sanchez on Iraq: Where the hell was he last week, last month, and last year.

I am certainly no fan of the Iraq war, but I found it difficult to read the media reports about retired Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez's recent comments on the war without getting angry. Reading the full text of his remarks took me from anger to outrage. As good as it is to hear an unvarnished, blunt assessment of the situation from someone who, as a former commander of the forces in Iraq, is very familiar with what happens there, I'm left wondering where the hell he was before he gave his little talk. Let's look at some of what the little pissant had to say: Since 2003, the politics…

It just makes you want to...

...laugh. Or cry. Or both. Or something. I don't know. Just when it seems like the White House has managed to exhaust the possibilities when it comes to showing their complete and utter lack of regard for American troops, they manage to scrape up something new. The latest entry comes from the aptly named Tony Snow, during yesterday's press briefing: Q Is the Iraqi government and the Iraqi parliament taking the month of August off? MR. SNOW: Probably, yes. Just not -- Q They're taking the entire month of August off, before the September deadline? MR. SNOW: It looks like they may, yes.…

Limited updates loom (again) but it's not my fault this time - it's Comcast's

Up to this morning, I really thought I'd be able to get some real work done on this blog over the next couple of weeks. We're moving out of the hotel and into the apartment tomorrow (finally), and I had planned to catch up on a lot of the housekeeping around here once I have regular access to things like a desk, a desk chair, my books, and the ability to throw everyone else out of the room I'm working in. Then I called Comcast to set up service. Tried to call Comcast, I should say. I called their 1-800-Comcast number on the 3rd, followed the automated prompts, and was routed to a call…

The Christian Science Monitor reviews Darwin

The Christian Science Monitor has a reasonable review of David Quammen's latest book, The Reluctant Mr Darwin, but there are a couple of interesting tells. One of my pet hates is this sort of journalistic boilerplate: Centuries before, Copernicus removed the Earth from the center of the universe; now Darwin had removed man as "God's chosen" among life forms. First of all, Copernicus did not dethrone the Earth from the center of the universe. He elevated it to the same high status of the heavens, which was what people objected to. Prior to that, the Earth was the universe's garbage dump, where…

Ultimate Fighting Between Scientists of Note (The Movie)

Well, it looks like units of our Psyche Strainers are shipping robustly. So much so, that we are perhaps close to thinking about bankrolling a possible movie venture. In this respect, we're thinking specifically of adapting a screenplay from a previous SCQ piece called "WHO IS THE GREATEST SCIENTIST OF THEM ALL,", but having taken a lesson from the "Snakes on a Plane" phenomenon, we have decided to promote this venture as "SCIENTISTS DOING ULTIMATE FIGHTING." Catchy right? And assuming the Pysche Strainers continue to do well, we figure we can raise enough funds to attract even the…

Cortical blindness: A potential cure?

My aunt Jeannie died of brain cancer when she was just in her 30s. Though her death was tragic, her illness did allow me to witness firsthand a most curious vision impairment. A few months after her cancer was diagnosed, she suffered a stroke in her right visual cortex. Since the visual cortex in some ways serves as a mirror image of the area we're looking at, this meant that she had a very large blind spot covering most of the left side of her field of vision. This cortical blindness is different from other sorts of blindness, because the viewer doesn't perceive that something is "missing"…

New monitor technology may expand range of visible colors

Television sets and video monitors rely on tricking the visual system into believing it is seeing the full range of possible colors. In reality, they are only generating approximations of the light that would actually enter the eye if we were looking at a real object. The problem is this: the visible spectrum actually consists of an infinite number of possible light wavelengths in the range from 380 to 700 nm; light waves from across that range enter the eye and are capable of activating photoreceptors within the eye: this corresponds to the wide range of colors we can perceive. But TVs and…

Richard Doerflinger on Stem Cells and Cloning

Turns out he had a big article on this subject in the neoconservative New Atlantis fairly recently. As we've done before--very successfully--I'm going to pull out three numbered quotes and invite you to respond: 1. "It is true that Alzheimer's is not a promising candidate for stem cell therapies," says Dr. Stephen Minger of King's College London, "but it was not scientists who suggested it was--that was all politics in the U.S. driven by Nancy Reagan." But in the United States, Mrs. Reagan was backed by myriad scientific and patient advocacy groups who want public funding of ESC research,…