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New species of walking sharks

A new species of walking epaulette sharks (Hemiscyillum freycineti) has been discovered off the coast of Indonesia. These sharks actually walk using their pectoral fins. Take time out for a dive alongside this shark and see some other amazing ocean wildlife in this diver's video: Video Source: Conservation International. As if walking is not interesting enough, another species of epaulette sharks (Hemiscyllium ocellatum) are actually resistant to hypoxia (low oxygen), which is important if you are living in an environment wherein the oxygen concentrations can vary dramatically (Wise et al., J…

Why Bears Hibernate

Image source: www.etsy.com It may be hot outside now, but soon enough black bears will be entering their annual hibernating ritual. This brief BBC clip is worth watching (and learning from) over a tall glass of iced tea or lemonade. In the meantime, if you see bears and their offspring while you are out and about during summer vacation, send along any photos you take. The Doctor will post the best ones and the winner of the photo contest will get the latest, "Want to Know What's New in Comparative Physiology?" t-shirt. To get things started: Here is a photo showing how one bear is spending…

Origin of Patterns

Image: Copyright BrotherSoft Ever wonder how the patterns of stripes and spots develop in animals? Researchers Michael Cohen, Buzz Baum and Mark Miodownik were wondering the same thing and have published their findings in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. They were able to construct a mathematical model to show how developing cells communicate with each other through actin-based filopodia, which are little projections from the cells. These filopodia communicate with other cells through chemical signals that can inhibit or stimulate to indicate which color each cell should be. As…

Hiatus: Yeah, me too.

I'm taking SUPERBUG offline while the Pepsi mess plays out. I dislike and resent having to do this: I was flattered to join Sb and I have great respect for my Sciblings. I acknowledge that Sb's management, Seed Media Group, made some concessions today, but I am dissatisfied that those changes came only after community protests, when they addressed issues that should -- could -- have been foreseen. I'm also not convinced they go far enough, since the central issue of a corporate-sponsored blog that appears (still, functionally) indistinguishable from the independent blogs here has not been…

Apropos of Nothing At All

Question 1 What do the toaster companies have against rye bread? Attempt 1 Attempt 2 Question 2: How does The Times Magazine's in-house interviewer Deborah Solomon continue to land interviews with the newsworthy and notable? Case in point: An excerpt from this week's Q&A with the creator of HBO's Entourage. DS: I assume your milieu was less flashy than the one in "Entourage." Doug Ellin: My father is an accountant. Growing up on Long Island, I'd have one basketball for seven years. There was no grip left on this basketball. I don't want to sound like I had a cheap father. He was not…

Coming up at WCU

For some reason I'm really excited about tomorrow's post. I don't usually write very far ahead of time, but this one took a little bit of extra research. You see, I got this letter from a PR firm hyping some altmed doc, and it was much more interesting than the usual similar things I get. It highlights some of the subtleties at the intersection of science-based medicine and the other stuff. The post is going up here tomorrow morning, and at Science-Based Medicine in the afternoon. One thing I've found about blogging, though, is a piece I really work hard on and like a lot may go over like…

Lindgren on the NAS Panel on Firearms and Violence

Jim Lindgren thinks the panel was too generous to Lott: From the portions that I have read, I found the report sober, impressive, and fair, though there are substantial parts of this literature that I am unfamiliar with. As to Lott's work, I actually thought that the Council's report was too generous to his research in spots. In particular, I thought that it failed to point out just how much Lott's results are driven by poorly executed demographic controls, a point that Ayres and Donohue make effectively in their Stanford exchange. While the Council's report raises a lot of questions about…

Which alt-med is which Republican candidate?

Best analogy ever? I think it's a contender, straight from Balloon Juice: The Republican party in Iowa reminds me of a patient with a terminal disease (Romneyitis) desperately turning to alternative medacine. They've cycled through homeopathy (Bachmann), naturopathy (Cain), chelation (Perry) and aromatherapy (Paul). Now they've hit the final frontier--urotherapy. I'm glad that I've never been so desperately ill that I've contemplated drinking my own piss, but I can imagine what it might feel like if I consider the level of desperation needed to vote for Rick Santorum. I must admit, I laughed…

How hot is it?

... so hot that the cable on my laptop's AC adapter MELTED. (If any of you is expecting an email from me - this would explain the delay.) Last night I was typing a summary of the recent rasiRNA/piRNA papers (while playing scorched3D) when my computer switches to battery mode. At that point my wife asks me "do you smell burning plastic?" (Maybe I can blame that on scorched - a ridiculous game that my brother and I used to play about 15 years ago - little tanks lobing missiles at each other while uttering insults and bizarre quotes - "I love the smell of napalm in the morning". I guess some…

A Deep Sea Rated Flash Drive

So when I am down in a submersible, I worry about protection. What happens if I accidentally drop my USB flash drive out the window at 600 feet down? What if I am scuba diving and I need 8GB of memory? What if an evil deep-sea biologist snatches my USB wand and uses my data for his evil deeds? What if..? I worry a lot about data storage but luckily Corsair has just released its Flash Survivor GT with a 8GB or 4GB option. The Survivor's case is CNC-milled, anodized aircraft-grade aluminum, water resistant to 200M, and impervious to shock through its dampening collar. It also has…

Deep Ocean Web Event

In case you missed Peter and I discussing this program, here is another reminder. DEEP OCEAN AIRS TOMORROW NIGHT ON THE DISCOVERY CHANNEL. The series is from the BBC. Last year at a deep-sea meeting a BBC representative presented some of the video. Even in its unformatted state, it was truly marvelous. As I recall, a segment shows Giant Isopods swarming a food fall. There will also be excellent footage of coral/sponge meadows on Davidson Seamount here off the California coast. Having seen some of this video and diving on the seamount with ROV's, I can say you will not want to mist this.…

Flipping the bird: Guido Daniele's handimals

Guido Daniele is a superb illustrator. I've seen some of his sportswear bodypainting, for example, check out this track suit: Yes, he is naked. I had not encountered his hand critters. This really gives a whole new meaning to flipping the bird. If you can tolerate the barrage of advertisements, Animal Planet features videos of Signor Daniele creating handworks. I realize that these images have made the blog rounds before, but hey, we geriatrics tend to repeat ourselves. The level of detail is amazing and straddles the boundary between the avant-garde and scientific illustration. Most…

Friday Flower Porn: Pump Kin!

Er, make that just pumpkin. This little critter was caught crimson fisted packing her saddle bags with pumpkin pollen recently. I wonder if they fly around looking for some nutmeg and cinnamon, too? In any case, in spite of the numerous pumpkin blossoms that have been produced in the garden over the past couple of months, not a single pumpkin has emerged. Of course, this particular pumpkin patch was a bit of a lark, coming from the seeds of last year's jack-o-lantern. My guess is that this particular variety isn't particularly fertile, in spite of the bee's knees. Note: This was originally…

Watch out for Zombie Newton and Zombie Leibnitz!

They might be stirring in their graves and preparing to rise to do battle. A medical researcher named Tai has published a method that he has called "Tai's Model", which is "a mathematical model for the determination of total areas under curves from various metabolic studies". I think — now I am a mere biologist, so this might be beyond my feeble gooey brain — that I vaguely recall doing something sort of similar to this many, many years ago, as a way to approximate an integral, and it might be something like 350 years old. I guess we've forgotten. By the way, I've discovered a marvelous and…

Rearranging Pipet Tips...

A friend of mine (maybe YOU are that friend?) will be soon be leaving a job at Wackaloon Scientific Enterprises where said friend is supervised by sadistic micromanaging douchebags from hell with poor reading comprehension skills. How best to spend the remaining time my friend must clock at WSE? I suggest devoting large chunks of it to rearranging pipet tips in their boxes while singing some version of this song. Oh it was sad, Oh it was sad, It was sad when the research went down to the journal. All the postdocs and techs. Little grad students lost their lives. It was sad when the…

Speakers

The Bill Richardson staff pass along video of the Governor's speech to the DNC's winter meeting. I don't know that he's an orator on the scale of John Edwards or Barack Obama, but he definitely has a record of accomplishments and knows how to talk to Democrats. Coturnix thinks he's merely the best vice-presidential candidate, but I think it's still too early to say. I've seen Barack Obama and John Edwards speak in person, and they have a level of charisma that I don't feel in this video, and didn't see in Richardson's announcement on ABC's This Week. I don't know if that makes Richardson…

Bald Eagles' populations recovering

Bald Eagle to Be Taken Off Endangered List: Seven years after the U.S. government moved to take the bald eagle off the endangered species list, the Bush administration intends to complete the step by February… The delisting, supported by mainstream environmental groups, would represent a formal declaration that the eagle population has sufficiently rebounded, increasing more than 15-fold since its 1963 nadir to more than 7,000 nesting pairs. Bald eagles were hurt badly by DDT, and continue to be at risk from mercury pollution, which concentrates in the fish that they eat. As it happens, the…

Working hard to be less popular

Presidential advisor Dan Bartlett sez: WALLACE: You’re saying you don’t need to have Medicare negotiate lower prices. it’s already happened. BARTLETT: The marketplace is working. We’re more than happy to have that debate with Republicans, Democrats, whoever wants to talk about it. The proof is in the pudding. It’s been working. It’s been benefitting America’s seniors. But the American people disagree. In the same Newsweek poll that showed the President with a 31% approval rating, allowing HHS to negotiate drug prices was the highest priority for voters. That has support from 76% of the…

Pelosi congratulates Boyda

I was hanging out with the Boyda gang when Speaker-to-be Pelosi called to congratulate Nancy Boyda. Meanwhile it looks like Republicans swept the challenged Board of Ed seats. There will be 6 moderates on the Board, and I believe they've all stated a desire to see Bob Corkins fired, and all campaigned on establishing science standards that reflect the actually nature of science. Nationally, George Bush got his ass handed to him. He came to Kansas to stump for Jim Ryun, and Ryun lost. He lost the House and possibly the Senate. Candidates across the country ran away from him or against…

Turnout is key

In the key races for Board of Education and the US House, the balance of power rests on who can turn out the most voters. Republicans love to crow about their system, and in Kansas that system is dominated by church-based groups. Democratic volunteers are out knocking doors, ringing phones and driving voters to polls. If you can help those efforts, now is the time. And if you just want to give a few friends a call and remind them to vote, that's important, too. My guess is that Don Weiss, Jack Wempe and Nancy Boyda will not have clear answers until every vote is counted. If you didn't…

Don't start with "In the first place..."

I have been meaning to post this quote for quite a while now, for no other reason than I found it amusing. It is from R.M. Ballantyne's novel The Gorilla Hunters; "And in the first place-" "O Ralph, I entreat you," interrupted Peterkin, "do not begin with a 'first place.' When men begin a discourse with that, however many intermediate places they may have to roam about and enlarge on, they never have a place of any kind to terminate in, but go skimming along with a couple of dozen 'lastlies,' like a stone thrown over the surface of a pond, which, after the first two or three big and promising…

Stephen Jay Gould, circa 1984

I have no idea where it came from (I assume it was made by PBS), but I just happened to stumble across this program all about Stephen Jay Gould called "This View of Life." Watching the documentary is a bit strange because I never knew the young, gangly Gould. The first time I ever saw him on television (although I had no idea who he was), he was a stouter man talking about paleontology in a European museum, Palaeotherium being associated with the memory although I can't really recall how. In any case, it's definitely interesting to watch this program now, and I do appreciate the brief…

Keeping up with Bob Bakker

If you enjoyed this week's interview with paleontologist Robert Bakker, then you'll definitely want to stop by the new blog of the Houston Museum of Natural Science, Beyond Bones. In addition to posts from people covering all aspects of the museum, Bakker will contribute to the blog as well, so I definitely would encourage you to keep your eye on it. Speaking of blogging paleontologists, the Museum of the Rockies has its own Bone Blog where you can learn about what Jack Horner and his students have been studying lately. I definitely want to try and feature an interview with Horner here in the…

Paleontological Profiles #1, coming this Monday

This coming Monday I'll be putting up the first in what I hope will be a long series of interviews with paleontologists, and I'm setting the bar high with Bob Bakker. The predatory habits of Tyrannosaurus, the relationship of Dracorex to Pachycephalosaurus, and the current evolution v. creationism controversy are all discussed (plus much more), so be sure to check back on Monday to see the full interview. I don't know how often I'll be able to post interviews (that will depend on the paleontologists), but I've got a few other people in mind. Who else would you like to hear from? I'm…

Montealtosuchus arrudacamposi

The new crocodylian Montealtosuchus arrudacamposi. [Image source]. I guess this one slipped by without getting proper attention. In October of 2007 research described a new genus of species of crocodylian, Montealtosuchus arrudacamposi (pictured above) in the journal Zootaxa. It was a late Cretaceous member of the Peirosauridae found in Bauru Basin, Brazil, although it was only one representative of a larger diversity of crocodylians from the location that also included notosuchids, sphagesaurids, baurusuchids, and trematochampsids. Unfortunately the paper is behind a subscription wall (…

"I feel like flamingo tonight, flamingo tonight..."

I'm still trying to figure out how to best divide up my term paper from last semester about the evolution of hunting behavior in primates and hominids, but one thing that I learned was that a number of living primates will eat meat or catch prey if given the opportunity to do so. Chimpanzees have taken meat-eating to a more organized level than every other living primate except our own species (although behaviors associated with hunting may be used in raids on desirable plant food resources), but baboons frequently take animal prey, too. The narration is a little over-the-top (as is the slow-…

Photo of the Day #74: Spectacled Bear

The Spectacled Bear (Tremarctos ornatus) is usually identified by light-colored markings on its face and chest that sometimes cause the bear to look like it has glasses on, although not in this individual (which, to be honest, bears something of a resemblance to Jeremy Irons). Naturally occurring along the Andes mountain range in South America, these bears live near rain forests and make use of the rich variety of resources there (from roots to carrion). Unfortunately, these bears are not only victims of Traditional Chinese Medicine, their gall bladders being especially prized, but they are…

Another theocrat for Kansas

Maybe somebody from Kansas can say whether this crazy woman has a chance. Joan Farr Heffington is running for governor, and she has a few priorities. Require that a Biblical and Constitutional reason exist for the passage of any new laws Allow teaching of Christianity vs. evolution in schools I guess there won't be any laws regulating GMO crops in Kansas, or prohibiting stem cell research, or funding the creation of any wind farms. Anything more recent than the 18th century is going to have to be neglected, along with anything not mentioned in the Constitution. At least she's upfront…

Hello, my name is

I feel like a just came to a new school, or a new place. Well, I have migrated servers before, so this shouldn't be too bad. It really is nice to be here at ScienceBlogs. If you are unfamiliar with what I do, basically I can summarize: Analyze stuff I see. This is usually from a TV show or a movie. I often will use video analysis and/or numerical calculations with python. Explanation of basic physics concepts. I like to include diagrams. Teaching and learning stuff. I like to teach, I like to learn. It is only natural that I talk about teaching and learning. Science, the nature of…

Mississippi Misery

There are good people living in Mississippi, I just don't know how they can bear it. At least this first story can't be blamed on Mississippi. Fred Phelps is planning to picket Constance McMillen's graduation. This will be very interesting … how will the town and her fellow students respond? Will they be cheering the Phelpsians on, or will they finally get a good look in the mirror? Residents of the state can be blamed for this one: another lesbian student, Ceara Sturgis, had her photo expunged from her high school yearbook. Her crime was dressing up in a formal tuxedo while being female.…

Expelled

I haven't written a lot here about Expelled: No Intelligence. It'll be a crappy movie, and all the PR in the world won't change that. All the whining about PZ Myers, and criticism of his desire to see the movie he's featured in won't make the movie any better. Plus, I'm helping develop NCSE's response to Expelled, and I don't want to tip our hand. That said, I will predict that Mike Huckabee's endorsement will not save the movie. By all accounts it is boring, and everything I've seen from the producers and writers has been laced through with inaccuracies. I doubt the movie is any better…

The Real Mysteries of Our Time

These are just a few questions that Slate's Explainer couldn't, or wouldn't, answer: What comes after 999 trillion? Lasers are now powerful and small (at least I think they are), so why don't our troops carry laser guns? Is it possible to collect all the cookie dough in Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream and actually bake cookies from it? How clean is bar soap in a public bathroom? Is it "self-cleaning," since it's soap? It seems like a health hazard to me. Why is grilled chicken tasting increasingly rubbery and odd? I have noticed that a lot of mainstream movies feature men peeing. Are…

Catholic teachers are strongly discouraged from thinking

There are no atheists allowed in Catholic schools. A teacher at a Catholic HS in Iowa was fired because she answered a poll about personal beliefs in a way her employer didn't like. Apparently, Abby Nurre was surfing around Facebook last summer (before she started her job at the Catholic school) and decided to answer a poll question she found. The poll asked whether she believed in God, angels or miracles - she answered "no". Now she's out of a job because, as the school board put it, she violated "a policy that prohibits employees from advocating principles contrary to the dogmatic and…

Is Pot the New Prozac?

If anxiety is the new depression, then weed might be our next miracle drug. And no, this isn't the same seedy crap you get from your local delivery service. I'm talking about medically targeted spliffs, designed to only affect your amygdala (the neural source of fear and anxiety). Over at the new NY Inquirer, I make a case for the future of medical marijuana: Despite the fact marijuana was first cultivated almost 10,000 years ago, modern medicine has yet to find a pharmaceutical equal. No other substance melts away our fears with such slick efficiency. But that may soon change. A cadre of…

All alone now

I just saw the TrophyWife™ to the door, where she's leaving for work. And from there, she's going to Minneapolis to spend the night. And then in the morning she's flying off to The Amazing Meeting 8, and I'm not. She's going to spend almost a week away, while I'm just a hyper-focused drudge with a keyboard for a while. I'll be fine, I'll just be single-minded for a while. But how many of you are going to TAM? Keep an eye out for the TrophyWife™, and keep her out of trouble. I've seen what she's going to wear to the Skepchick party, and I'm a little concerned — why couldn't it have had a…

Democrats want kids; won't or can't have them

A few years ago it was shown that white America fertility correlated 0.86 to voting for George W. Bush in 2004 on a state by state level. What that means is pretty simple, if you have the 50 states + DC, and plot their white fertility on the X axis and % voting for George W. Bush on the Y axis the variation of X could predict about 3/4 of the variation of Y. That's pretty good. But what about on an individual level? The differences here aren't so stark. In short, those whites who voted for John F. Kerry wanted nearly as many children as those whites who voted for George W. Bush. They…

A request from me

As I've mentioned, I will be giving a talk here at Denison on the Eyjafjallajökull eruption and how the events unfolded on the internet - specifically, I'm interested in the idea of the general public taking an active role in volcano monitoring. So, I have a request from Eruptions readers - and by no means do you have to take part. However, if you are willing, I'd like to know your professional/"day job" and your geologic background - be sure, I will not use your real name or connect your Eruptions pseudonym to any information you send. I am just looking to get a hold on the backgrounds of…

GVP Weekly Volcanic Activity Report for 6/2-8/2010

The latest update from the Smithsonian/USGS Global Volcanism Program! Highlights (not including Taal, Eyjafjallajökull and Bezymianny) include: Another thermal anomaly was spotted on an Kuril Island volcano - this one being Tiatia. The volcano has no seismic monitoring network, so the thermal anomaly is all that has been observed. Lava flows and strombolian explosions continue at Guatemala's Pacaya. Some of the explosions have launched bombs hundreds of meters into the air. Kliuchevskoi was another busy Russian volcano, with a large thermal anomaly and ash explosions that produced a plume…

SI/USGS Weekly Volcano Report for 1/13-19/2010

This week's USGS/Smithsonian GVP Volcano Update! Highlights include: A volcano I had never heard of in the Kuril islands is showing signs of life: Kharimkotan. Satellite images show a thermal anomaly at the summit of the volcano - its last known eruption was in 1933. Ash, sulfur dioxide and steam continue to erupt from Nyamuragira in the Congo, although lava flows have abated. Crater C at Arenal had sporadic strombolian activity - which is par for the course for the Costa Rican volcano. I must have missed this, but since December 14, the ash erupted at Gaua in Vanuatu has become denser and…

Galeras has large eruption - 12 km ash plume?

Undated image of the crater at Galeras in Colombia. UPDATE 1/3/09 Midnight: I'm bumping this up from the comments, but INGEOMINAS posted some stunning webcam video of the eruption as it happened. Wow is all I say. {Hat tip to Doug C. for the video} A quick note tonight: Eruptions reader Chance Metz alerted me to an impressive eruption of Galeras in Colombia tonight. The VAAC warning issued for the eruption suggests a 40,000 foot / 12 km ash plume and the reports seem to back it up, with the Red Cross reporting "very high ash cloud". No injuries/fatalities have been reported, but Galeras is…

SI/USGS Weekly Volcano Activity Report for 9/30-10/6/2009

Somehow I missed a week of the SI/USGS Weekly Volcano Activity Reports and almost missed another. Here is this week's update! Highlights (not including Chaiten, Soufriere Hills or Cleveland) include: The alert level at Galeras in Colombia was raised to Red after an explosion on September 30 and returned to orange ... and then yellow ... after activity tapered. Sakurajima in Japan produced 1.8-4.3 km / 6,000-14,000-tall ash-and-steam plumes, along with incandescent tephra that was thrown almost two kilometers from the vent. Multiple steam-and-ash plumes reached 4.3 km / 14,000 feet at Langila…

Llaima eruption intensifies

Llaima erupting in April 2009. Just a quick note about the eruption currently ongoing at Llaima in Chile. The volcano continues to explosively (and effusively) erupt, sending ash ~22,000 feet / 7,000 meters into the air. This eruption has produced 37 hours of intense eruption (in spanish) so far and the ash from the eruption is drifting into Argentina, almost 100 km to the SE of the volcano. More evacuations are being called for by ONEMI and so far 71 people have left the vicinity of the volcano due to fears of lahars and significant ash fall (In spanish, but it does provide video of the…

Redoubt evening update for 3/24/2009

Image by AVO/USGS/Game McGimsey, March 23, 2009 Redoubt has simmered down some today with no new eruptions since yesterday evening. AVO's field crew not only fixed the Hut webcam, but also spotted massive lahar deposits (see above) in the Drift River valley that traveled 35 kilometers downstream and have officials on local and national levels worried about the Drift River Oil Terminal. Funny, it sounds so familiar somehow? As usual, an ounce of planning and thought about locating an oil terminal at the foot of an active volcano would have prevented about 10 tons of problems now. AVO will be…

Southern Chile says it is ready for your visit

It has been awhile since we've talked of Chaiten, so I thought I'd touch upon "the eruption of 2008" (really, no one else is close). Spring time has arrived in southern Chile, and the Patagonia area has cleaned up a lot of the ash from the eruption (but not the town of Chaiten). National Tourism Service says that most towns and parks in the region are ready for tourists and even some tourist companies near Chaiten are good to go. As for the volcano itself, the latest USGS update reports ash columns still being erupted and reaching up to 12,000 ft (3,700 meters), along with a "thermal…

Chaiten roars back?

So, this was a bit of a surprise to me. Six weeks into the Chaiten eruption in Chile, apparently the volcano has picked up the tempo again. Not much in the report except that apparently two new vents/craters have opened, there is an increase in ash emission and seismic activity. What this might be is difficult to ascertain from the report, but it could indicate that the volcano might be heading down the road toward a collapse, such as the one previously alluded to by scientist-in-charge Luis Lara. Another report - albeit almost identical to the first - does mention in the headline that the…

It's addictive

Shorter Martin Cothran: Snow in 49 states: Winter proves Al Gore is fat. To quote science policy professor Roger Pielke, Jr. (not always a friend to conventional climate science): What happens in the weather this week or next tells us absolutely nothing about the role of humans in influencing the climate system. It is unjustifiable to claim that a cold snap or heavy snow disproves or even casts doubts [on] predictions of long-term climate change. It is equally unjustifiable to say that a cold snap or heavy snow in any way offers empirical support for predictions of long-term climate change.…

Who's afraid of atheism? (and agnosticism)

From American Nones: The Profile of the No Religion Population: "Belonging" refers to people who self-identify as "X." For example, someone who asserts that they are an atheist. "Belief" refers to the content of one's avowed beliefs, as opposed to label. Someone who asserts that they "do not believe in God" is placed within the atheist category. As you can see, many more people avow atheist & agnostic beliefs than will own up to the terms. "Soft agnostic" refers to those who say they're not sure about the existence of god, while "hard agnostic" are those who believe there's no way to…

How they celebrated Easter down under

First, they had their church leaders focus their Easter sermons on how yucky those atheists are. Then one fanatical group decided to show how wonderful Christianity is by staging a crucifixion in public, complete with blood and nails and moaning dying hippie. I find this hilarious. Hamlyn Heights mother Louise Bridges slammed the performance, calling it an "absolutely disgusting stunt". She said she was "fuming" at the public display and said it would "scare children away from religion". But it's in the Bible, Mrs Bridges! I'm a bit chagrined, though, that we didn't do anything as fun and…

Brian Switek in Times Online on Ida

Brian Switek of Laelaps has an op-ed in on Ida. Here's the conclusion: What could have been a unique opportunity to communicate science has quickly developed into a fiasco. Science proceeds through discovery and debate, and hypotheses do not become accepted by flooding the media with press releases. Scientific scrutiny of Ida has only just begun, and regardless of who her closest living relatives are, I hope the debate surrounding her will not sink away from sight. She truly is an amazing find, but for now I think that she has taught us more about science communication than our ancestry. It…

Egypt going to kill its pigs?

UN says Egypt pig cull real mistake: The United Nations has called Egypt's move to cull 400,000 pigs as a precaution against swine flu "a real mistake". The Egyptian government ordered the slaughter of the pigs on Wednesday, saying it could help quell any panic in the country that is largely Muslim, who view pigs as unclean. No pigs in the country have been found with the new strain of H1N1 virus of the so-called swine flu and the World Health Organisation (WHO) says the disease cannot be caught from eating pork that is properly prepared. I just heard on NPR that urban pigs apparently process…