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I Told You the Pork Lobbyists Would Comment on Kristof's Column

Always listen to the Mad Biologist. By way of Joe Windish at The Moderate Voice, we find out, just as I predicted, that the pork lobby would claim we don't know enough about the MRSA ST398 problem: Livestock scientists call the opinion piece "highly speculative", and point to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) statements on MRSA that say most if not all cases of MRSA come from person to person contact, not person to animal. The column also does not define this strain as one that is found on any swine farm in the vicinity of Camden, Ind. "They are making a huge leap…

Mendenhall Glacier Berg headed your way!

Wow...A 1500lb glacial berg is on its way to the Expo! The amazing things that will be seen at the Expo. Listen to the journey of the Ice Berg to the USA Science And Engineering Festival! Check out more pictures of the iceberg here. Read about the Iceberg from Juneau Empire By Sarah Day | JUNEAU EMPIRE Thousands of people will have the chance to view a roughly 1,500 pound Mendenhall iceberg later this month in Washington, D.C. The Juneau Economic Development Council's STEM SpringBoard program leaders learned this week that it's not so easy to wrangle an iceberg. The U.S. Department of…

Flight of the bumblebee

We don't usually talk about stories published in Physics Today, a publication of the American Institute of Physics. But a recent one caught our attention for two reasons. One, it is about the effects of non-ionizing radiation (in this case an oscillating electric field) and a biological effect, cell division. The second reason is that physicists have been telling us for decades such effects are physically impossible. The only physical effect would be heating a cell, they said. They ridiculed epidemiologists who found an association between powerline frequency electromagnetic fields and…

The evolving Swine Flu story

This afternoon CDC held a "media availability" on the evolving swine flu cases. Evolving is an understatement. There are now more recognized cases, although not all cases are "new," with some cases retrospectively recognized now that more intense investigation is occurring. The total is now seven cases. Two occurred in San Antonio, Texas, two sixteen year old boys in the same school. Three more were found in California (in addition to the initial two cases), including a father - daughter pair. All California cases are in San Diego and neighboring Imperial counties, the location of the initial…

Strengthening the Surgeon General

In an editorial in the October 12th issue of Science, former Assistant Surgeon General Fitzhugh Mullan highlights the challenges inherent in the position of Surgeon General. Mullan recounts a July hearing held by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which featured testimony from former Surgeons Generals from the Reagan, Clinton, and Bush administrations: Drs. C. Everett Koop, David Satcher, and Richard Carmona.  In his opening statement, Chairman Henry Waxman noted that the hearing was one in a series asking âwhy federal agencies that were once admired as the finest in the…

Obama Makes Hospital Charge Masters Public

And the best article on the implications of this, surprisingly, comes from Huffington post authors Young and Kirkham: The database released on Wednesday by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services lays out for the first time and in voluminous detail how much the vast majority of American hospitals charge for the 100 most common inpatient procedures billed to Medicare. The database -- which covers claims filed within fiscal year 2011 -- spans 163,065 individual charges recorded at 3,337 hospitals located in 306 metropolitan areas. ... Within the nation’s largest metropolitan area…

The human origins of "pig" Staph ST398

I recently gave a talk to a group here in Iowa City, emphasizing just how frequently we share microbes. It was a noontime talk over a nice lunch, and of course I discussed how basically we humans are hosts to all kinds of organisms, and analysis of our "extended microbiome" shows that we share not only with each other, but also with a large number of other species. We certainly do this with my particular organism of interest, Staphylococcus aureus. There are many reports in the literature showing where humans have apparently spread their strains of S. aureus to their pets (dogs, cats,…

Emerging Diseases and Zoonoses #24: Rift Valley Fever outbreak in Kenya

When it comes to hemorrhagic fevers, Ebola and Marburg tend to get the lions' share of the press. Both are highly fatal, both can cause people to die in excruciating ways, and both have come to represent somewhat our fear of and fascination with emerging exotic diseases. However, as I've pointed out previously, as far as actual fatalities--or even illnesses go--both viruses are small potatoes. Other viruses that can also have hemorrhagic manifestations--including dengue and yellow fever--are much more common. One of these other viruses that frequently causes hemorrhagic fever is Rift…

An "Informed Decision" on Ground-Level Ozone

By Liz Borkowski When EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson announced last week that the agency would lower the limit for ground-level ozone pollution, he acknowledged that the current standard of 0.08 parts per million was insufficiently protective of public health. This was an appropriate rationale for changing the limit, since the EPA is required to establish air quality standards exclusively on the basis of health consideration. The proposal of 0.07 â 0.075 ppm isnât as low as the 0.06 â 0.07 ppm that the agencyâs Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee recommended (PDF), but at least itâs…

300 years of gecko literature, and the 'Salamandre aquatique' (gekkotans part VI)

So, you've had an introduction to the incredible leaf-tailed geckos (Uroplatus). In view of their bizarre appearance, it's perhaps not so surprising that leaf-tailed geckos have commanded attention for a long time and there's a large historical literature on these animals (see Bauer & Russell (1989) for review) [U. fimbriatus shown here; image by J. W. Connelly, from wikipedia]. The very first description comes from Etienne de Flacourt's L'Histoire de la Grand Ãle de Madagascar, published in 1658, and some accounts from the early 1700s - referring to animals from Chile, Arabia and Egypt…

What the hell is going on with dromaeosaur tails?

One of the few things that everybody knows about dromaeosaurs - the sickle-clawed maniraptoran theropods best represented by Velociraptor from Mongolia and Deinonychus from Montana - is that they possessed a peculiar tail. Super-long zygapophyses and chevrons formed a bizarre, inter-twined array of body rods that ran the length of the tail and apparently assisted in its function as a dynamic stabiliser [image, © Greg Paul, shows Velociraptor versus two troodontids]. In describing this remarkable conformation in Deinonychus, Ostrom (1969) suggested that these bundles of bony rods would have…

My picks from ScienceDaily

New 'Light' On Fascinating Rhythms Of Circadian Clock: ....Using DNA microarray techniques, Duffield and the other researchers identified an important gene called the "Inhibitor of DNA-binding 2" (Id2) and found that the gene is rhythmically expressed in various tissues including the suprachiasmatic nucleus. "In the last few years, my laboratory has focused on a family of transcription factor genes expressed in the suprachiasmatic nucleus, liver and heart," Duffield said. "In conjunction with colleagues at Dartmouth Medical School and Norris Cotton Cancer Center, we produced a knockout mouse…

Labor Secretary talks nominations, safe jobs at Senate hearing

I had one ear tuned this morning to the webcast of Labor Secretary Alex Acosta’s appearance before a subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee on his Department’s FY 2018 budget request. You never know what bumble bee might be in a lawmaker’s bonnet or how they might use their time to gush about Department-funded pet project in their home State. That's why I tuned in. Two moments during the hearing were most memorable to me. The first involved Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander (R) who expressed dissatisfaction with the Administration’s slow pace of nominating individuals for top jobs at…

Luskin on Judge Jones, Round 2

Casey Luskin has responded, apparently, to my post about his seemingly conspiratorial question for Judge Jones. I noted that he had clearly implied that Judge Jones had allowed someone else to write his ruling. The only alternative was that Luskin was making a terrible analogy. Now he says the latter was correct: [Note added 5/5/06: Apparently this question has caused some controversy so I want to clarify: This post was a parody. My intent is not to imply that Judge Jones plagiarized, nor do I think he did. The point was that the arguments in his decision so-closely resembled those of the…

Sirens of Titan Less Impossible than Previously Thought

Just so you know, scientists do not seem to be able to detect the difference between a 3 foot and a 30 foot deformation of the surface of a planetoid body that is about one and a half billion kilometers away, and we know this because NASA's Cassini space ship had to actually go all the way to one of Saturn's moons, Titan, to discover that the tidal deformation of the surface is more like 30 than 3 feet in magnitude. This, in turn, strongly suggests that Titan has an ocean of some kind under its surface. Thus, the Sirens. The Sirens of Titan. NASA provides us with the following artists…

August Pieces Of My Mind #2

Registering the bones from this summer's fieldwork at Landsjö. Getting rid of excess stuff. Azerbaijani dude with a huge beautiful beard showed up on his wife's orders and collected both bike baby seats, the rolling baby stool, the dinner table lamp and the microwave oven. *happy* My wife's workout app is giving her orders. It sounds like a very, very strange satnav. User interface fail: our new microwave oven has not only start/stop buttons, but also on/off buttons that control whether the start/stop buttons are responsive or not. Oh great, LinkedIn. You tried to find a job for me and…

First Week of 2015 Excavations at Stensö Castle

This year's first week of fieldwork at Stensö Castle went exceptionally well, even though I drove a camper van belonging to a team member into a ditch. We're a team of thirteen, four of whom took part in last year's fieldwork at the site. All except me and co-director Ethan Aines are Umeå archaeology students. We're excavating the ruin of a castle that flourished in the 13th and 14th centuries. This year we have a very nice base at Smedstad, let to us by the genial B&B host Hans-Ola. But we cook our own meals, each day having its designated cooks and dishwashers, and in the evenings we…

Vaccinate your pets #2

Vaccinate your pets #1 Apparently, this summer is going to be a banner year for West Nile Virus.  Im not an insect person, so I have no idea how we have mosquitoes when we have had no rain in forever and surging temperatures every day (mosquitoes can lay eggs in dust and dried up grass?), but its shaping up to be a 'bad' year for West Nile. 'Bad' is relative, though.  A 'bad' year for West Nile in humans isnt really that bad (compared to other things), so there is not much motivation to formulate a human West Nile vaccine. Thats not true for horses, however. Mosquito-born illnesses like West…

Simple Answers to Stupid Rhetorical Devices

Over at Scientific American, John Horgan has a blog post titled In Physics, Telling Cranks from Experts Ain't Easy, which opens with an anecdote any scientist will recognize: A couple of decades ago, I made the mistake of faxing an ironic response to what I thought was an ironic faxed letter. The writer--let's call him Tachyon Tad--had "discovered" a new physics, one that allowed for faster-than-light travel. In my reply, I told Tad that if he built a warp-drive spaceship, I'd love to hitch a ride. Dumb joke. For months, my fax machine churned out sheets covered with Tad's dense elaborations…

The Tricky Thing About Simulated Dynamics

In the previous post about simulating the attraction between sticky tapes using VPython, I ended with a teaser mentioning that there was a discrepancy between the simulation and the theoretical solution from directly solving the equations. The problem is kind of subtle, but clearly visible in this graph from that post: Data for the toy model version of the system, showing the equilibrium position as a function of initial separation. In this, we see the equilibrium position that the mass-on-a-spring settles into as a function of the initial separation between the charges in the toy model.…

A Few More Thoughts About Original Sin

Jerry Coyne weighs in with a few thoughts about the various attempts, considered in my last post, to preserve the notion of original sin in the light of modern science. It turns out he's even less impressed by those attempts than I am. Go have a look! Since Wednesday's post was already quite long, I didn't get around to mentioning one additional attempt to promote an evolutionary understanding of original sin. It comes from theologian John Haught. In his book God After Darwin he writes: What, then, might original sin mean? Superficially, it means a systematic turning away from God by…

ID and Catholicism

Over at HuffPo, John Farrell has an interesting post up about the dissatisfacton with ID expressed by many Catholics. He writes: The Discovery Institute has from its beginning claimed it would in short order get actual scientists to consider intelligent design as a viable scientific theory, by publishing peer-reviewed articles in the leading science journals. But they've failed. And no matter how much cheering the Institute Fellows get from friendly audiences at Bible schools and church socials, the reality is: this was not the way things were supposed to turn out. And now, they're losing…

Energy from Mass, Mass from Energy

I probably ought to get a start on the big pile of grading I have waiting for me, but I just finished a draft of the problematic Chapter 7, on E=mc2, so I'm going to celebrate a little by blogging about that. One thing that caught my eye in the not-entirely-successful chapter on momentum and energy in An Illustrated Guide to Relativity was a slightly rant-y paragraph on how it's misleading to talk about the energy released in nuclear reactions as being the conversion of mass into energy, because what's really involved is just the release of energy due to the strong force. It struck me as…

Space Invader DNA jumped across mammalian genomes

Mammals like ourselves pass our genes 'vertically' from parent to child. But bacteria aren't quite so limited; they have mastered the art of gene-swapping and regularly transfer DNA 'horizontally' from one cell to another. This "horizontal gene transfer" has been largely viewed as a trademark of single-celled organisms, with few examples among animals and plants. That is, until now. A group of American researchers have discovered a group of genetic sequences that have clearly jumped around the genomes of several mammals, one reptile and one amphibian. It's the most dramatic example yet that…

Beetles transform Canadian forest from carbon sink into carbon source

In the story of climate change, humans and the carbon dioxide we pump into the atmosphere are the villains of the piece. Now, it seems that we have an accomplice and a most unexpected one at that. It lives in the pine forests of North America and even though it measures just 5 millimetres in length, it is turning these woods from carbon sinks into carbon sources. It's the mountain pine beetle. The beetle bores into pine trees and feeds from nutrient-carrying vessels called phloem. It also lays its eggs there. Once a beetle has colonised a pine, it pumps out pheromones that attract others,…

New plant species arise from conflicts between immune system genes

This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. "Congratulations, it's a stunted, malformed, necrotic hybrid!" Those aren't really the words that new parents want to hear but thankfully, plants aren't in a position to be that upset. In several species of plants, a surprising number of offspring turn out to be malformed hybrids that quickly wither and die. Now, Kirsten Bomblies and colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology have found out why. Two genes, one passed down by each parent, ignite an reaction in the hybrid…

Ballet postures have become more extreme over time

Classical ballet is one of the more conservative of art forms. Dancers express emotion and character through the same vocabulary of postures that was originally set in 1760, and often with entire choreographies that have been handed down for centuries. But even amid this rigorous cascade of tradition, there is room for change. Over the years, successive generations of ballet dancers have subtly tinkered with positions that are ostensibly fixed and limited by the physical constraints of a dancer's body. The only changes ought to be a result of the dancers' varying abilities. But that's not…

If you go out in the woods today ...

... you could be in for a surprise. If, that is, you're not up on the latest climate research. Figuring out what role the forests will play in the Earth's climate regulating mechanisms have long proved more than a little tricky. And it just keeps getting more complicated. Back at the turn of the century, for example, it was widely assumed that heavily forested countries would be in an enviable position when it comes to calculating net carbon emissions. Canada went to Kyoto negotiations in 2001 arguing that it should get credit for maintaining its vast boreal forests, because "everyone knows…

The Earth is the New Moon

Stewart Brand, writing about space colonies, observed that "if you live in a satellite, the Earth is something that goes on in your sky." For Felix Baumgartner, the daredevil skydiver who seduced the world with his chiseled jaw and seeming invulnerability to fear (and who broke the sound barrier with his body last weekend) the Earth is something else. The satellite he leapt from, a weather balloon 24 miles above the Earth, wasn't his home. But briefly, and especially for the millions who watched the gossamer balloon float upwards to the strange blue-black gradient of space's edge, it turned…

Looking in the Philip Morris Documents Archive

When I was looking in the Philip Morris Documents Archive for information on their astroturf operations, I noticed some familiar names: The American Enterprise Institute, The Heartland Institute and the Cato Institute. All have been involved in employing and/or promoting John Lott. For example, here is a quote from Philip Morris' 1999 communications plan: Our communications plan will include enlisting allies and other potential third parties to help provide an "echo chamber" of opinion in local, regional and national media, consistent with our messages. Some…

Reaction to my Milloy post

There has been quite a bit of reaction to my post on Milloy. Michael Peckham writes "Milloy's criticism may be right some of the time, but only when it fits his preconceived anti-regulatory agenda. " John Quiggin, at Crooked Timber and at his own blog observes that the link between Cato and Milloy reflects badly on Cato. Also the comments in the Crooked Timber have some attempts to defend Milloy against the charge that he is boosting creationism. Yes, Milloy offers the Theory of Evolution some faint praise, but he also thinks Creationism should get equal time with…

A Humble PharmBoy Begins to Sow

OK, so I'm a latecomer to blogging. I was also more than a week late for my own birth. The blogging spark for me was an Aug 1 2005 article in The Scientist by David Secko. That's where I first learned of Derek Lowe over at In The Pipeline...and GrrlScientist, Pharyngula, BotanicalGirl, and, YoungFemaleScientist, among others. Secko's tagline was "Few scientists have caught onto the Internet's power of posting, commenting, and debating - where are the rest?" IMHO, pardon the pun, I've always been a rather humble scientist. So I first ran "natural products," "pharmacology," and "pharmacognosy"…

Parasite causes uninfected females to evolve new mating behaviour

This is a really cool study. It's been known for some time that species of insects infected by the intracellular parasite Wolbachia are occasionally infertile with uninfected members of their own species, and hypothesised that this might cause speciation to occur. What nobody that I read, at any rate, seems to have thought is that this might in fact be the motivation for the uninfected females to change their mating behaviours. But so it seems it has, in the two species of Drosophila - subquinaria and recens - that cross the north American continent. The uninfected sister species, or perhaps…

Book Review: The People's Peking Man

Ancestors are important. We like to know where we came from and what sort of legacy our forebears left, but it has only been recently that we have been able to trace the concept of "ancestor" through the depths of geological strata. I may not know the detailed history of my family during the last hundred years or so, but I do know that a number of hominins figure into my family tree. I am not proud or ashamed of this deeper ancestry which I share with every other Homo sapiens on the planet. It is simply historical fact, but I have to wonder what my education would have been like if earlier…

Andrew Wakefield: Pushed out by the board of directors at Thoughtful House?

Last night, it came to light from a posting on the Thoughtful House Yahoo! discussion group that Andrew Wakefield has apparently resigned from Thoughtful House. I have yet to see confirmation anywhere, although Brian Deer has chimed in that this comes as no surprise to him and that he suspects that Dr. Arthur Krigsman, Anyssa Ryland, and Jane Johnson are behind Wakefield's ouster. However, more interesting is this comment from Liz Ditz. In it, she points out a couple of interesting bits of background. Tidbit #1 from 2008: In 2007 alone, Thoughtful House saw 1,500 new patient requests -- or…

The People's Peking Man, by Sigrid Schmalzer

Originally posted by Brian Switek On March 15, 2009, at 12:05 PM Ancestors are important. We like to know where we came from and what sort of legacy our forebears left, but it has only been recently that we have been able to trace the concept of "ancestor" through the depths of geological strata. I may not know the detailed history of my family during the last hundred years or so, but I do know that a number of hominins figure into my family tree. I am not proud or ashamed of this deeper ancestry which I share with every other Homo sapiens on the planet. It is simply historical fact, but I…

Might Pleistocene Fido Have Been A Fox?

There is a small bit of land, only about a square kilometer, that has added a new wrinkle to the story of animal domestication. This bit of land located in Northern Jordan, just southeast of the Sea of Galilee near the banks of the Jordan River, is home to an archaeological site known as 'Uyun al-Hammam. One key feature of this site, excavated in 2005, is a burial ground containing the remains of at least eleven humans in eight different gravesites. The early humans were buried here sometime during the pre-Natufian period, or around 16,500 years ago. Layout of the 'Uyun al-Hammam site, and…

Intellectual Property and Open Access to Biomedical Data

A discussion of open access data using bird flu and other disease data as examples. The recent scares over bird flu have led many researchers to investigate the epidemiology, genetics, and disease risks of the virus. The researchers are focused on both preventing the transmission of the virus into human populations and preparing for a potential pandemic. By analyzing DNA sequences from different viral strains, researchers can understand how the virus spreads within and between populations, how it changes over seasons, and what (if anything) we can do to predict its next evolutionary jump.…

Pan-resistant?? The rise of Acinetobacter

A set of papers published this month in two journals provide an unsettling glimpse into the rocketing incidence and complex epidemiology of one really scary pathogen, Acinetobacter baumanii. In the all-star annuals of resistant bugs, A. baumanii is an underappreciated player. If people -- other than, you know, disease geeks -- recognize it, that is because it's become known in the past few years for its propensity to attack wounded veterans shipped to military hospitals from Iraq and Afghanistan, earning it the nickname "Iraqibacter." (Important note: Steve Silberman of Wired magazine took an…

Chapter 4: Natural Selection

Mathematicians and physicists speak of a result 'falling out of the equations', implying that if you set things up properly, the rest takes care of itself. Chapter 4 of the Origin, 'Natural Selection', is where evolution falls out of the machinery that Darwin has spent the three previous chapters assembling. And I hate to say it, but it's a bit of an anticlimax. In retrospect, it's difficult to see how it could be otherwise. Darwin has manoeuvred us into position so carefully, showing the power of artificial selection, the mutability of species and nature's cutthroat struggle, that we're…

I moved the over-the-top profanity below the fold

Here at ScienceBlogs we have a (very) informal agreement to try to avoid profanity-laden titles. Personally, they don't bother me at all, but I can see the point---there are lots of folks who probably don't want their feed reader to pop up with what I'm about to say. What the FUCK hath swine flu wrought???? I warned you that swine flu would bring out the charlatans. In the course of hours to days, a virtual zombie army of immoral, idiotic, evil fucking quacks has risen to fan your fears and take you cash. It's really hard to overstate this, but the people who engage in this fact- and…

Eat Your Soup! If You Can...

This is a story about making chicken soup completely from scratch, with local, organic ingredients, and starting with the carcass of a roasted chicken. The soup was very, very good, and looked like this: The chicken in question came from Pikeland Pastured Poultry. All the vegetables in the soup came from Landisdale Farm. But the chicken had to do a little traveling before its bones came to rest in my soup pot. I bought the chicken frozen at my local farmer's market. And then, on a trip home to see mom last fall, I took it with me for a dinner I had planned to cook for her and her…

Stratos Space Jump

Red Bull is sponsoring this sky dive from really really really high up - Stratos: Mission to the Edge of Space. Seems dangerous. The basic idea is that Felix Baumgartner will take a balloon ride up to 120,000 feet and jump out. Here are some questions: Will he reach supersonic speeds? The Red Bull site says: "can Felix react to a 35 second acceleration to mach 1?" How about the claim that he will free fall for 5 minutes and 35 seconds? That seems pretty short. In 1960, Joe Kittinger jumped from 102,800 feet. Will 20,000 feet make a large difference? Assumptions Clearly, this can be a…

Iowa predictions

I don't really know much about politics...but that never stops people from blogging about politics, so here are my Iowa predictions ranked ordered from first to last. Republican: Huckabee Romney Thompson Mccain Paul Giuliani Hunter Keyes Democrat: Obama Edwards Clinton Biden Richardson Dodd Kucinich Gravell

When You are Having a Rough Day, Remember It Can Be Worse

Israel has recalled its ambassador to El Salvador after he was found drunk and naked apart from bondage gear. Reports say he was able to identify himself to police only after a rubber ball had been removed from his mouth. How. Incredibly. Embarassing. Cited story.

Gannon's Plagiarism of White House Statements

Media Matters has a side by side comparison of various "news reports" written by Jeff Gannon/James Guckert for Talon News that were simply taken word for word from either the President's speeches or from RNC or White House "fact sheets". It's a pretty funny comparison.

You say apostate, I say apostle...

From John Lynch Via Twitter: PROVO, Utah -- Thousands of issues of the Daily Universe student newspaper at Brigham Young University were pulled from newsstands because a photo caption on the front page misidentified leaders of the Mormon church as apostates instead of apostles. source

Rwandan Sentenced

One of Rwanda's most famous singers, Simon Bikindi, has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for inciting violence during the 1994 genocide. His conviction stems from a speech he made from a vehicle equipped with a public address system encouraging ethnic Hutus to kill Tutsis. bbc

Masking tape saves endangered kiwi chick

In true MacGyver fashion, an employee at the Rainbow Springs Nature Park in New Zealand repaired a damaged kiwi bird egg with masking tape thus protecting the chick from dehydration. The newly hatched bird was appropriately named Fissure. Photo of Fissure from Rainbow Springs Nature Park.  

There will always be a Britain

RT @AlexConnor At UK space launch. There is an astronaut, a load of well-badged kids, a couple of lords and a soldier wearing gold rope. Sent from Echofon - http://echofon.com/ David Dobbs Typos courtesy of thumbs and iPhone Posted via email from David Dobbs's Somatic Marker