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Students: How Much Debt Are You In?

This generation of students will graduate with more student loans and debt than any previous to it (adjusted for inflation, of course). Rising school costs, living costs in college towns, and credit card debt may all be to blame. I came across a state-by-state interactive map over at USA Today, which breaks down the average debt accrued by students graduating from public and private universities. Something I thought was strange: Iowa's private university grad debt is lower than its public grad debt. Wonder why.... Anyway, if you want to know a bit more, go here.

Saturday Shocker: US Trends in Obesity 1985-2005

I was stunned as I scrolled through this short Powerpoint presentation composed by the CDC, published in JAMA over the years. Its a compliation of obesity rates beginning in 1985, going up until 2005. What might be the cause for the surge in obesity rates? Possibly the over-availability of cheap oils and starches, says the International Task Force on Obesity. Makes this recent news release regarding the risk of polycystic ovary syndrome even more important. Want better gas miliage? Some suggest shedding the pounds. A new pill from a Belgian group, called Rimonabant, may speed the process.

TGIF Video: Italian Spiderman

You can't say farewell to Summer 2008 without a loving look back at... the Italian Spiderman. This viral video came on the scene like a Jersey girl on the boardwalk, sweeping Philly boys off their feet. We're showing Episode 6, in which our hero seeks remnants of the the asteroid that formed the Chicxulub Crater off the coast of the Yucatan Penninsula. Check out YouTube for the full series from Alrugo Entertainment if you haven't seen it. Special shout out to the 2-1-5. Miss you guys. Congrats Bill and Kika, welcome baby Alexa Capozzoli!

Just Science

In case you haven't heard from other bloggers, Just Science, in which bloggers choose to post about, well, just science for a week (5 days, this time) is back. The details are here, and you can sign up here. Everyone who signs up is added to the feed, so even if you don't sign up, you can read all of the Just Science posts by signing up for the feed here. The dates for this year's version are February 4-8, but you can sign up any time before then.

How many?

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Art Exhibit

I just got back from my brother's photography exhibit at Dancing Cranes. It was part of what they call the href="http://www.kalamazooarts.com/calendar/pdf/Art_Hop_10_06.pdf">Art Hop in Kalamazoo, Michigan.  A bunch of artistic types agree to exhibit their works in various upscale shops in the area, all at the same time. People go downtown, mill around, chat, and spend money.   It is a win-win kind of a deal for the artists and the merchants.  And the community as a whole, which I guess makes it win-win-win. He sold three photographs for $500 apiece. Which is quite good.

Plastinated haemorrhaged brain

This image comes from Marc Steinmetz's photoessay about plastination, the tissue preservation technique invented by the controversial German anatomist Gunther von Hagens. Plastination involves replacing the water and fats in the tissues with silicon or some other polymer. The specimen is first fixed in alcohol, then dehydrated, impregnated with the polymer and finally allowed to harden. In the photograph above, the coronal brain sections have been placed under ultraviolet light for curing. The black stains visible in the slices show the sites of a massive haemorrhage which killed this…

Drew Gilpin Faust new Harvard Prez.

First female president in Harvard's history. Article here in today's NY Times. My only complaint - she's not a scientist (she's a civil war historian). Here's something I hadn't heard: Dr. Faust emerged in recent weeks as a finalist among the candidates being considered by the university's search committee, particularly after Thomas R. Cech, a biochemist who is the president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a Nobel Prize winner, took the unusual step of announcing publicly that he had withdrawn from the competition. (Karl you went to lunch with the guy ... you didn't know this?)

Cell podcast, a one time affair?

A couple of weeks ago I was happy to see that Cell had launched a podcast. From my experience with Nature and Science, podcasts are a good way of keeping up-to-date with the latest papers published in these journals while performing mind numbing activities, like mini-preps or cell quantitation. Cell's podcast was great - with interviews (Craig Mello, Roger Kornberg, Paul Nurse ...) and a wrap up of some of last year's biggest findings. So I've been waiting, waiting, and waiting for the second podcast ... but it seems like it ain't comming. Whatzup Cell?

Signal for the nuclear import of miRNA

From the latest issue of Science: We demonstrated that despite their small size, specific miRNAs contain additional sequence elements that control their posttranscriptional behavior, including their subcellular localization. We showed that human miR-29b, in contrast to other studied animal miRNAs, is predominantly localized to the nucleus. The distinctive hexanucleotide terminal motif of miR-29b acts as a transferable nuclear localization element that directs nuclear enrichment of miRNAs or small interfering RNAs to which it is attached. Cool. Ref: Hwang HW, Wentzel EA, Mendell JT. A…

Ocean Fertilization...Not So Fast!

This just on the wire from ETC... In a shot across the bows of geoengineering companies, the London Convention (the International Maritime Organization body that oversees dumping of wastes at sea) today unanimously endorsed a scientific statement of concern on ocean fertilisation and declared its intention to develop international regulations to oversee the controversial activities. It further advised states that such large-scale schemes are "currently not justified." This is a smart move by the LC allowing for substantial assessment before large-scale 'trials' are conducted in biodiversity…

All You Have To Give is $10

We are slowly creeping toward our $1100 goal. I know from our site stats that we have several hundred returning readers. Now if 100 of you all gave $10 then we would could reach our goal! All that for $10! You probably have $10 in loose change laying around. Of course if you gave $20 not only could we reach our goal faster but may have extra to fund other projects. I am counting on you to make this happen! Just remember there is a negative correlation between me nagging and you giving!

Sprog art: dreaming of a rat.

The elder Free-Ride offspring drew this lovely rat in a thought-bubble. The critter who is dreaming of an encounter with this rat is revealed below. Technical note: I'm sure some eagle-eyed (owl-eyed?) readers will have noticed that I uploaded this drawing from a digital photograph. For some reason, I could not get the scanner to import the drawing without losing much of the delicate lines of the feathers. If anyone has good advice on how to get a scanner (and Photoshop) to upload a pencil drawing without losing the fine details, I'd be much obliged.

Commencement LOLdrums

I want to lay this at Julie's feet, or maybe John Lynch's, but I'm starting to think the LOLcats are taking over! My kids speak to each other in LOL dialect, and I've been mentally captioning ... well, everything. My internal dialogue from part of commencement transcribed below. If you know a good deprogrammer, please email me! On noes! Where da sientistz? Lookin for LOLrus bukkit? Grapplin wid invizible labware? Mebbe invizible sience grads?! O hai! Weer in ur stadium, makin u proud. Bukkitz iz kool, but nowlij iz teh bestest! Thx k bai!

Local loon

We've got 'em. A St Cloud minister took out an ad: Oooh, it's the usual fear-mongering. I had to do a double-take when I saw Dennis Campbell's summary of the Islamic Strategy, though… Moslems seek to influence a nation by immigration, reproduction, education, the government, illegal drugs, and by supporting the gay agenda. …because when I think "gay friendly", I picture the Taliban. I'm also wondering if Pastor Campbell thinks that a good way to oppose the influence of immigrating Muslims would be to counterbalance it with more immigration from those Catholics south of the border.

Huzzah for Smoot and Mather!

Chad broke the story, at least in the ScienceBlogs galaxy, but I wanted to add my own "Woo-hoo!" for John C. Mather and George F. Smoot, who have won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics. I didn't want this one to go unnoted, as my mom worked to analyze piles of COBE data and, during this period of her life, made the acquaintance of George Smoot, who (from what I can gather) is not only a really smart scientist but also a good and decent human being. I'm hoping Mom will leave some good Smoot tidbits in the comments.

Garden update: carrot-pulling challenges.

It's been a long time since I posted a garden update. As we're on the cusp of summer, there's a lot to update you on. And I will, soon. But today, I wanted to share two reasons carrots are sometimes hard to pull up. Reason #1: The carrot you're trying to pull up is wrapped around another carrot that you aren't trying to harvest. Reason #2: The carrot you're trying to harvest has grown a barb. I think I'm only a few weeks away from being able to discover features that make it hard to harvest potatoes.

Ohio Christians DEFY god!

This was the Touchdown Jesus of Solid Rock Church in Monroe, Ohio. That monstrosity was six stories tall — a giant eyesore. This was Touchdown Jesus last night. Here's the odd thing: they're promising to rebuild it. You would think that it's a rather unambiguous sign when your giant idol is smitten by a bolt of lightning from heaven, erupts into an all-consuming conflagration, and burns to the ground that maybe Jehovah is a little bit fed up. Yet the Solid Rock Church plans to offend God again. I guess they don't really believe.

The future of American medicine

This happens to be a holiday weekend. Believe it or not, sometimes even Orac needs a break from life, the universe, and every blog, particularly this one. I'll be back tomorrow. In the meantime, I realize that I've posted videos like this before (in fact, I'm sure that at some point or another I've linked to this one, but, hey, it's a holiday). However, this one is amazingly prescient, given that it dates back to the early 1990s. Have fun commenting, and Orac will return on Tuesday--or even possibly before that....

Darwinian theatrics

This sounds fun: a music theatre production illustrating Darwin's theory of evolution. Based on Haydn's The Creation, Darwin's Dream imagines the founder of evolution meeting modern children and challenging them to explore how his theory has advanced since his death in 1882. Their quest takes them from the oceans where life is believed to have begun, to Africa to meet a fossil hunter looking for evidence of the earliest humans. It's also got a dance about DNA. Unfortunately, it's in London…let's at least have some of the music put on the web!

What kind of atheist are you?

I'm not really fond of the idea of categorizing atheists (you either are or aren't, and the game of labeling is often a short step away from ranking, and then you're on the slippery slope to the No True Atheist fallacy), but Hank Fox has an interesting comment that categorizes reasons for being an atheist. It's relevant to that video of a mother reacting to her son's 'coming out', though — one category is the "Rebel Atheist" who adopts the idea to piss off his mother. Now let's all aspire to be Awakened Atheists.

Got woo?

If not, then American Medical Student Association's got it for you, all in a nice, compact 15 page pocket manual. True, there's some standard advice about diet and some useful information about herbal remedies, but there's the now usual (from AMSA, anyway) credulous treatment of all sorts of woo, including homeopathy, Reiki, fasting, vitamin supplements, reflexology, and naturopathy. All the woo you need to know, all in a little manual you can stuff in the pocket of your labcoat. (Hat tip, as is usual for AMSA-related woo, to Dr. R.W.)

A defense of the Blasphemy Challenge

Greta Christina has an excellent and lengthy defense of the idea behind the Blasphemy Challenge— that exercise on YouTube that received a lot of criticism from certain quarters because it wasn't serious or respectful enough. She gets it exactly right: that was the point, to show that religion receives a lot of unwarranted deference. If you're one of those people who got irate because the challenge mocked and ridiculed religion, thanks for making the case for us: your irritation is what was being pointed to as part of the problem.

Galapagos Diary

Galapagos Diary: A Complete Guide to the Archipelgo's Birdlife ... Continuing in our look at bird books to consider, I wanted to bring in the Galapagos Diary. I cannot tell you which is the best book for birding in the Galapagos, because, sadly, I've never done that myself. But my daughter, Julia, has, and she recommends this title. She brought a copy home from the Galapagos, and I am personally quite impressed by it. If you are planning a trip to the Galapagos, have a look at it. ~ A repost for Back to School Special ~

Ad using religious iconography banned in Britian

Do you remember the controversy over nuns painting a naked guy as part of an advertising campaign? (Click here, not work safe if anyone is looking and they're a prude.) Well, apparently one thing led to another and one of the nuns got pregnant! An ice cream company banned from using an advert displaying a pregnant nun has vowed to position similar posters in London in time for the Pope's visit. Antonio Federici's advert showed a pregnant nun eating ice cream in a church, together with the strap line "immaculately conceived". Brilliant!!! Details here at the BBC

I've never been paid a dime by a Democrat

Obviously, I have to switch parties: Katie Couric once described bloggers as journalists who gnaw at new information "like piranhas in a pool." But increasingly, many bloggers are also secretly feeding on cash from political campaigns, in a form of partisan payola that erases the line between journalism and paid endorsement. "It's standard operating procedure" to pay bloggers for favorable coverage, says one Republican campaign operative. A GOP blogger-for-hire estimates that "at least half the bloggers that are out there" on the Republican side "are getting remuneration in some way beyond…

And now, announcing the PLoS ONE Blog Pick of the Month Award

The Blog Pick of the Month is a monthly award given for the best (well, they don't actually say best, but I'll assume) blog post covering a story from PLoS ONE and aggregated in ResearchBlogging.org. (There are several such posts each month.) This is considered one of the most prestigious awards on the entire Internet. (If you area blogger, please remember, YOU can get one of these awards!) Anyway, the June Award goes to ... (drum roll) ... .... Moii! For This Post, which was about this PLoS ONE paper.

"Everything you know is .. wrong" and "Transhumanism"

The next installment of my new falsehoods series, on Skeptically Speaking radio with Desiree Schell, is tonight at 6PM Mountain Standard Time. You can listen on line or wait until emacsDay, I mean Sunday, and download it. The main guests (my bit is a little add in pre-recorded thing) are George Dvorsky and Greg Fish. Details, and a place to leave comments are here. I will post this installment's sister blog post some time before the show. The falsehood in question is: "Humans Evolved from Apes" ... A statement that is indubitably true yet clearly wrong.

Phoenix will not rise from the ashes.

Or should I say "ice." The Phoenix Mars Lander seems to be dead in the dust, with its solar panels having suffered severe winter ice damage as shown by photos from the Odyssey Orbiter: The blue color on the left shows clean, reflective, round solar panels. The blacky-browny image on the right indicates that one of the solar panels is, essentially, gone and the other is yecked up. More imagery and information about the photos are here. More information about the Phoenix mission here: Press release by D.C. Agle and Dwayne Brown.

Info, Review of Latest Firefox 3 Beta

Firefox 3 is in testing, with the latest build, beta 4, released Monday. Mozilla is aiming for a final release of its flagship product before the end of the first quarter of 2008. Let's take a look at the changes coming down the pike. You can grab a copy of the latest Firefox 3 beta from mozilla.com. Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X Universal Binaries are provided in more than 40 languages. The Linux version is a bzip2-compressed tar archive. You can unpack into any location on your system. Read the rest here.

Las Vegas Clinic was Typhoid Maryesque

A public service announcement for those of you living in or passing through Nevada: Vegas Clinic May Have Sickened Thousands from PhysOrg.com (AP) -- Nearly 40,000 people learned this week that a trip to the doctor may have made them sick. In a type of scandal more often associated with Third World countries, a Las Vegas clinic was found to be reusing syringes and vials of medication for nearly four years. The shoddy practices may have led to an outbreak of the potentially fatal hepatitis C virus and exposed patients to HIV, too. [...]

Hitler doesn't like the iPad

You knew it was coming. You knew from many previous incidents that it was inevitable: Who knew Hitler was such a Mac geek? Personally, although I think the iPad looks like a really cool device, I'm really not sure where it would fit into my life. I already have an iPhone, which I love, and I already have a MacBook Pro, which I also love. Given that, I just don't see the need for the iPad, at least not for me. However, I also know that I'm not the sort of person for whom the iPad was designed.

Send a Grrl to Antarctica

I can't help but have noticed that one of our own, GrrlScientist, is in the running to be selected as the blogger to go on a trip to Antarctica and blog from there with the Quark Expedition in February. As of my checking, Grrl is in third place. I have no doubt that She'd do a hell of a job, given her writing talent, and who can resist a chance to send a fellow ScienceBlogger to some frigid, desolate plain at the bottom of the world? There's not much time left, only until September 30. So vote, already!

Spirit of the season

As everyone knows (or should know), October is the month named in honor of the octopus, and we're supposed to celebrate cephalopods every day. It culminates in the great festival of Octoween, when all the good children who keep molluscs in their heart are rewarded with sushi, while all the wicked children who think eight or ten arms are too many get surprised by tentacles rising up from the ground to snatch them away to a pelagic doom.* Whoever carved this is going to get a whole bucket of tako. *Don't you dare criticize my mythology!

Friday Cephalopod: I've been there

The paternal view of childbirth is that you watch the mother struggle for hours, the child finally emerges, the midwife cleans him* up, hands him to you, and that's when he unloads a bladder full of pee on you. This photo of a newly hatched bobtail squid's first reflex reminds me of that… Euprymna tasmanica juvenile releasing ink on hatching. Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman. *Boys are the most obvious culprits, since when they cut loose they hose down your shirt; girls discreetly dampen their blankies.

Wegman one of The Scientist's top five science scandals

The Wegman scandal has made The Scientist's list of the top 5 science scandals of 2011: A controversial climate change paper was retracted when it was found to contain passages lifted from other sources, including Wikipedia. The paper, published by climate change skeptic Edward Wegman of George Mason University in Computational Statistics and Data Analysis in 2008, showed that climatology is an inbred field where most researchers collaborate with and review each other’s work. But a resourceful blogger uncovered evidence of plagiarism, and the journal retracted the paper, which was cited 8…

Michael Mann exonerated yet yet again

Penn State investigation concludes: The Investigatory Committee, after careful review of all available evidence, determined that there is no substance to the allegation against Dr. Michael E. Mann, Professor, Department of Meteorology, The Pennsylvania State University. More specifically, the Investigatory Committee determined that Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research, or other scholarly activities. The…

Global Warming Skeptics score own goal

Fred Singer and co petitioned the American Physical Society to replace its statement on Climate Change. Instead, it got reaffirmed The Council of the American Physical Society has overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to replace the Society's 2007 Statement on Climate Change with a version that raised doubts about global warming. The Council's vote came after it received a report from a committee of eminent scientists who reviewed the existing statement in response to a petition submitted by a group of APS members. Eli Rabett has more details, while John Mashey has investigated the petitioner'…

Sarah Palin didn't know that Africa was a continent?

Geez, it's getting ugly. When FOX News reports this about Palin, you know she was bad: Of course, it's possible, even likely, that McCain campaign staffers are trying to make Palin the scapegoat for the failure of their candidate and them, but there's abundant other evidence that Palin was pretty ignorant about a great many things--far too ignorant to be a heartbeat away from the Presidency. Regardless of whether this report is true or not, that makes it easy for the knives to come out, now that the election's been lost.

School Assembly Prayer

Prayer, according to Martha, a clever girl, and therefore not a believer. From Julian Barnes novel "England, England": Alfalfa, who farts in Devon, Bellowed be thy name. Thy wigwam come. Thy swill be scum In Bath, which is near the Severn. Give us this day our sandwich spread, And give us our bus-passes, As we give those who bus-pass against us, And lead us not into Penn station, Butter the liver and the weevil. For thine is the wigwam, the flowers and the story, For ever and ever ARE MEN.

The taste of the Star Wars Imperial March - if you had synaesthesia

Thanks to a reader, Daniel Keogh, we have a wonderful video detailing what the Imperial March from Star Wars would taste like to one particular synaesthete who has some particularly odd sensation pairings. Check it out: The Professor Funk also has a whole bunch of other entertaining looking videos about other aspects of science. We give them 4 thumbs up. I never did understand why Ebert, et. al. could only ever give a single thumbs up. After all there were two people with four total thumbs. Meh whatever, not everyone can be as awesome as Shelley and I.

A Funny Thing Happened on My Way to the Mountains...

The binturong posts were supposed to last all weekend, but Blogger was down the day I left for the mountains and I couldn't access my archives. I tried to find a wireless signal in podunk PA, but that little venture was doomed before it began. Sorry about the slackage; I'm going away for Labor Day as well, so the rest will post starting Thursday or Friday. It was a crazy few days, not exactly the ideal vacation, but I'll have the full story tomorrow. I need a day to recoop from the vacation (/sigh).

Did Kopel attribute the 98% to Kleck?

Julian Sanchez has another thoughtful post on the question of whether it was Lott or Kopel who attributed the 98% to Kleck. I'm still trying to collect my thoughts on this one, but I should correct one statement he makes. Even if the attribution is established to be Kopel's it does not follow that Lott did not get the 98% by misreading Kleck. Lott got the defensive gun use numbers 2.5 million, 760,000, and 3.6 million,from Kleck but never attributed them to him in his public statements.

Clips

"It is a lovely and terrible wilderness, such as wilderness as Christ and the prophets went out into; harshly and beautifully colored, broken and worn until its bones are exposed, its great sky without a smudge of taint from Technocracy, and in hidden corners and pockets under its cliffs the sudden poetry of springs. Save a piece of country like that intact, and it does not matter in the slightest that only a few people every year will go into it. That is precisely its value." -Wallace Stegner, referring to the deserts of Southeastern Utah

Lubiprostone (What can't prostaglandins do?)

Yesterday, I discussed a laxative drug that works by drawing water into the intestines (and introduced you to a helpful chart to aid description of particularly ineffable bowel movements). Here is a drug that works on the same principle, but indirectly - it induces your intestines to secrete ions, which, in turn, cause water to transfer to your intestines and induce bowel movements. The drug is a prostaglandin - you may know these from drugs that inhibit the formation of certain prostaglandins, such as ibuprofen. As you can see, the class of hormones has a broad range of physiological…

Picric Acid (Explodey Acids)

Picric acid is a simple enough organic acid - its nitro groups withdraw electrons, making it a pretty strong acid for a phenol. However, it's got a slightly darker side: it's to TNT what phenol is to toluene. Those nitroes come with a price. Picric acid is funny; like raney nickel, it's much more benign under water. For this reason, it's sold that way. Dry picric acid or its metal salts can be quite nasty. From time to time you hear about an old container of the stuff being discovered and the bomb squad coming out.

What is knowledge?

Sorry for the radio silence on my part lately. My house got broken into... again... and I'm dealing with the fallout. I'm thinking about a post on knowledge, where it comes from, what it's good for and if it matters. But before I write it, I'd like to get your input. What do you think "knowledge" is? Is it different than Truth? Do you agree with the idea, "Ignorance is Bliss"? Is it ever? What about, "Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise?" What does it mean to be wrong?

Spinners

Near the ground we call them land sharks: My rocket buddy Erik and I have developed a knack for spotting a likely train wreck in the sky. There was a certain lack of craftsmanship in this Sonotube build that cued us to be ready with the camera: I just held the motor drive down for this one... Click...click...click... It does a hop over Black Rock in the first frame, and the O-size motor separates from the body in frame 14/15: And a couple close ups of this Twisted Firestarter: Pop goes the motor.

New Accretionary Wedge!

This month's geoblog carnival is on Geologeeeee.... innnn... SPAAAAAAACE!!1! - you simply must click through to see the cover. If you need more geoblog goodness, Lutz at geoberg.de is working on a complete list of the entire geoblogosphere! See it in English or German. There are currently 101 blogs on the list, more than twice as many as covered by Callan's geoblogosphere survey results. Guess it's time to update my blogroll... (h/t: NOVA Geoblog) Conversely, if you need a perspective check from non-geologists, go read what freelance writers think is interesting about a volcano photograph.

Stupid Thesis Tricks

Today, I am excited because I get to use the word "stomping" in some of my peer-reviewed serious science business. I like the word "stomping". I also like the word "puddle" but I haven't managed to work that one in yet. Nor "titillating" (though I am citing a paper on "vibro-agitation", hur hur). Anyway, since I am currently engaged in 24/7 thesis-related keyboard-smashing, perhaps you could give me some other challenge words to think about? The joy that I get from typing "impute" over and over and over is reaching a point of diminishing marginal utility.