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Where the flu's at

In his morning news roundup at Slate today, Daniel Politi hits what seems to me -- this morning, anyway -- about the right tone, which is that the events of the last 24 hours are encouraging. (Though I wouldn't throw out those flu masks just yet.) The New York Times points out that while the WHO urged calm, Chan "at times spoke as if a pandemic had already begun." Speaking to reporters, Chan said: "The biggest question right now is this: How severe will the pandemic be?" The Los Angeles Times is by far the most optimistic and points out that experts seem to be coming to the conclusion that,…

Paul Ekman Exhibit at the Exploratorium

Check this out: A Photographic Exhibition from Pioneering Psychologist Paul Ekman The Search for Universals in Human Emotion Ekman is One of the Most Influential Psychologists of the 20th Century At the Exploratorium January 22-April 27, 2008 The Exploratorium presents a photographic exhibition, The Search for Universals in Human Emotion, from the internationally acclaimed psychologist Paul Ekman, celebrating the fortieth anniversary of his influential work with the isolated South Fore people of New Guinea. Ekman was named by the American Psychological Association as one of the most…

APA to condemn psychologists participation in torture and why it won't make a difference

According to an article in Salon, via Mind Hacks: The American Psychological Association, the world's largest professional organization of psychologists, is poised to issue a formal condemnation of a raft of notorious interrogation tactics employed by U.S. authorities against detainees during the so-called war on terror, from simulated drowning to sensory deprivation. The move is expected during the APA's annual convention in San Francisco this weekend. The APA's anti-torture resolution follows a string of revelations in recent months of the key role played by psychologists in the development…

Politics Tuesday (on Wednesday): We Got Punk'd!

Posted by Jack Sterne, jack@oceanchampions.org Let me be the first one to say, "I was wrong." Jennifer asked a few weeks back whether fisheries subsidies were an issue for Ocean Champions, and I rambled on with a response about how it hasn't really been an issue since the original days of the Magnuson Act, when we over-capitalized our domestic fleets while we were kicking out the foreign ones, etc., etc., blah, blah, blah. Well, that was true until this weekend, when the Senate passed its version of the farm bill with an outrageous provision making fishermen eligible for the Farm Service…

Fishing for a Depleted Resource: Sea Cucumber Season Opens (Again) in Galapagos

The Galapagos National Park announced last week that the Ecuadorian government will open sea cucumber fishing in the Galapagos Islands beginning on June 25th for 50 days or two million sea cucumbers, whichever comes first. This news is a disappointment to many conservationists in the islands and means a lot more work for Dr. Idrovo and his treatment of decompressed fishermen. One echinoderm (Stichopus fuscus) can cause a lot of excitement. In 1991, after sea cucumbers had been depleted from the continental Ecuadorian coast, an uncontrolled sea cucumber fishery began in Galapagos. Harvest…

Three steps for the FDA, too many for Everest climbers, and other wonders

Rolling deadlines have kept me from the blogging desk, but I can occupy it long enough now to call out a few items that either haven't received as much coverage as they might have -- or that have gotten several interesting hits. ⢠At Huffpost, Jeanne Lenzer and Shannon Brownlee offer the FDA a three-step program: Step One: Admit that you are currently powerless over the industry you are supposed to be regulating. You have let Big Pharma take over your life. You have become dependent on drug company money that comes from the Prescription Drug Fee User Act (PDUFA) of 1992, and over the…

This Week's Sci-Fi Worthy Parasite: Hymenoepimecis argyraphaga

There is an entire family of wasps who use other species to raise their young, and they're a seemingly endless source of sci-fi worthy parasites. I've covered a few of them before, but none is quite so elegant as Hymenoepimecis argyraphaga, a Costa Rican wasp with a fascinating and unique way of keeping its young safe until they can cocoon and turn into adults: it preys on spiders. Spiders wouldn't seem like the best choice for nanny, what with their taste for bugs and all. But the daring Hymenoepimecis argyraphaga uses them anyhow. Unlike many parasitic wasps which lay hundreds or thousands…

This is not a case about abortion

I have been receiving lots of triumphant mail from anti-choice people claiming vindication, that abortion is wrong, and demanding to know how I can possibly support abortion rights after hearing about the case of Dr Kermit Gosnell. Gosnell ran an abortion mill in Philadelphia, and was a hack who maimed and killed women while doing abortions on demand, for a substantial fee. He was unqualified, uncertified in obstetrics and gynecology, and his facility was unmonitored and relatively uninspected. He gave untrained, inexperienced staff critical jobs in the surgery — he allowed a 15 year old high…

Unions are a free-market solution

Like most people who pay attention to the news, I've been treated to several weeks of Republicans using the Detroit bailout as an excuse to bash unions. Like a broken record, it was easy to ignore for a while, but the repetitive droning of discredited canards (like $70/hr wages) is getting more and more and more annoying. And it's particularly annoying because the vast bulk of the union-bashing is coming from the alleged free-market conservatives. What the hell is so conservative about beating up on unions, anyway. Unions are the quintessential model of a market based solution to a problem…

This Just In: Feminism Is A Religion!

I read it in the Philadelphia Inquirer. (Longer version here in the LA Times.) In a news release, Roy Den Hollander, who's best-known for suing Manhattan nightclubs because they offered free or discounted Ladies' Night drinks to women, contended that [Columbia] university could not use government money, such as federal financial aid, to fund its Institute for Research on Women and Gender. Women's studies courses, he maintained, discriminate against men and are therefore in violation of the Fifth and 14th amendments. He also called Columbia a "bastion of bigotry against men . . . [that has…

Our Philadelphia Staycation

Mr. Z and I are celebrating America's Fourth of July holiday with that great new American tradition, the STAYCATION! Later I'll blog about how I began my staycation on July 3rd. Yesterday, Mr. Z and I staycated in style, cleaning out a large and extraordinarily untidy closet. Triumphant but exhausted, we elected to go out to dinner rather than grill something. We are hoping that Homeland Security does not get wind of us having Chinese food on the 4th as opposed to A-merrycan grilled slabs of meat. We did hie ourselves unto the local fireworks display after dinner and despite the rain it…

African-American Men: 4.3% of College Enrollment Since 1976!!!!

I am breaking my word from yesterday in order to post news about this report because the results are so disturbing I can't keep them to myself. I want someone else to be upset with me. From The Chronicle of Higher Education: Black men are underrepresented at institutions of higher learning over all, and even more so at flagship universities in the 50 states, says a report released on Wednesday by a national research center. The report, "Black Male Students at Public Flagship Universities in the U.S.: Status, Trends, and Implications for Policy and Practice," was written for the Joint…

Casual Fridays: Troxler's not for everyone

Whenever I create a demo for this site, there's always a balance: Do I make the demo dramatic, so it's most surprising when it works? Or do I make it less dramatic, so it works for more people? (There are other things to balance as well, such as my time and technical proficiency) The Troxler effect is a particularly dramatic and simple demonstration of how much our visual system adapts to the environment. Just stare at the center dot in this figure for about 15 seconds, and the outer ring should fade completely from view! But the illusion, like nearly all illusions, doesn't work for everyone…

Measuring extinctions

In 1972, David Raup published an influential paper on taxonomic diversity during the Phanerozoic. In that paper, he estimated extinction rates based on the number of fossil families and genera for the period and before and after. The idea was to estimate the "kill rate" of major disruptions in earth's history. A new paper by Sarda Sahney and Michael J. Benton attempts to do this for the Permian extinction, arguably the biggest of all time. They attempt to reconstruct the "guilds", or ecological roles communities, of the Permian, and assess the biological diversity in terms of taxonomic…

SfN: Posters as far as the eye can see

There are a bagillion people here -- a bagillion. No other word appropriately conveys how many neuroscientists are in this building. That being the case and there being so many exhibits and lectures and craziness going on absolutely simultaneously, it has become an issue about how to break down the problem of seeing everything without becoming overwhelmed and starting to babble incoherently in the corner about NRG1 signaling. There is to my mind two ways of dealing with this 1) You can run around like a head with your chicken cut off, and lose your mind. or 2) You can just go with the…

The changing shape of fear as we age

Take a look at these two pictures. Who is more dangerous? It's not hard to decide, although I wouldn't hurt a fly, and Nora, even at age three, could be brutal with her sarcasm. Now, what's the most dangerous situation? Again, an easy decision. While Carhenge is certainly an awe-inspiring monument (and perhaps Jim could scratch himself on one of those cars), Nora's descent of this rock spire gives me shivers. You might think that there aren't many differences in how adults judge threats in examples such as this, but there is some reason to believe that older adults may have a different…

The true value of talent: Around $104

Yesterday, we conducted a poll asking how often our readers would give money to truly talented street performers. The poll was in response to a Washington Post experiment where world-famous violinist Joshua Bell performed in a subway station for 45 minutes and only earned $32, an amount that would pay for less than a third of a seat at one of his concerts. One objection to the Post experiment is that Bell wasn't in a very good location: he was at the entrance to the station, during morning rush hour, when people have the least time to stop and listen. Our poll tried to determine what might…

When is it all right to cry?

For children younger than three, most of us agree that crying is acceptable, especially if they are in physical pain. But even for adults, crying is acceptable during periods of grief. Indeed, we often look askance at a person who does not to cry at a funeral or memorial service of a close friend, loved one, or family member. And crying in such cases is not only acceptable, but helpful, both for men and women. From WebMD: Men and women both feel better after crying, especially when experiencing a major loss. "But men are more likely to cry as a result of positive feelings, like at sporting…

Why we can't all be divas

[originally posted April 6, 2005] Listen to these two musical excerpts and note any differences you discern: Ave Maria, version 1 Ave Maria, version 2 (Source: courtesy of Mayumi Hamamoto and Kyota Ko) If you're a typical nonmusician, you will probably notice some sort of difference between the two excerpts. Maybe one seems to be played at a different tempo, or with different instrumentation, or is a bit longer or shorter. You probably won't think either clip sounds unpleasant, and you might not notice any differences at all. If you are a professional musician, on the other hand, you may find…

Two Days to Go: The Conservative Mind on Science

Recently, several folks have sent me this link to Blogs for Bush, where one Mark Noonan has pronounced the "Death of Science." "We have reached the end of the Age of Science," Noonan writes. "What will come after, I don't know, but I don't think that we'll ever again have a time when Science is enshrined as some sort of god-like arbiter of right and wrong." I have to say, the post is really a bit shocking, if also quite revealing. You can see here for another takedown, but let me just offer a few reflections. First, the post itself is extremely silly. It says things like this: "Science…

Stronger Storms, Less Frequently, Except in the Atlantic?

Not surprisingly, in the wake of Tropical Cyclone Larry Australians are beginning to chatter about possible links between global warming and hurricanes. And in at least one venue (The Age), the discussion has taken an interesting turn. Specifically, it appears that CSIRO, Australia's national scientific research organization, is expecting that the country will indeed have to deal with stronger cyclones due to global warming in the future. But here's the catch--based upon its own modeling studies, CSIRO is also expecting to see less storms in total. CSIRO's models aren't the only ones that…

Learning to Speak Science

One response I got from readers of The Republican War on Science was that the book depressed and outraged them, but provided little release, and didn't devote adequate energy to proposing positive solutions to the problems I had identified. I fully understand where this reaction is coming from, and began trying to address it in my column in the latest issue of Seed, available here. There are many things that can be done to address the problem of science politicization and abuse, but certainly part of the burden falls on scientists themselves. They must work much harder to communicate their…

Boundary extension and kids

We've posted on boundary extension before, here, here, and here, but we've never written about boundary extension and kids. Boundary extension is when we remember more of a picture than was actually shown to us, as if our mind is actively creating a portion of the image we didn't see, beyond its boundaries. A 2002 team led by John Seamon found that people of all ages experience boundary extension. Some research has found evidence that boundary extension doesn't work for all images. We reported on a study by Andrew Mathews and Bundy Mackintosh suggesting that for emotional, arousing images,…

How do we decide what we're seeing?

One of the most famous perceptual demos is the ambiguous image or "bi-stable figure" of a duck - rabbit: (source: curiouser.co.uk) As presented, it looks like a duck, but rotated to the right, it suddenly "transforms" into a rabbit. There are also images that can transform simply based on how you look at them. Artists like Eshcher were fascinated by such images, but it was Salvador Dali who took the phenomenon to the next level with paintings like Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire: (source: Artchive) It's worth checking out the image on the Artchive site because you can…

The Science Writer's Lament

My latest Science Progress column just went up...it's about the decline of science reporting in newspapers, and what we can do to fight back against this trend. I start out with the story of Peter Calamai, until recently the staff science writer of the Toronto Star: Peter Calamai describes himself--and only half jokingly--as a "grizzled veteran" of the newspaper industry. Over the course of his forty-year career, he has covered a wide range of subjects, but for the past decade Calamai served as the dedicated science reporter for Canada's most widely read newspaper, the Toronto Star. That's…

How Science Defenders Enable Anti-Science Forces

My latest piece for Science Progress--where I am now a contributing editor--has just gone up. It's entitled "Enablers," and it's how people like us, who care about science, are often guilty of actually empowering those who who are attacking it. A great example occurred recently with the Heartland Institute's climate skeptic conference in New York. Climate skepticism is totally passe--this event should have been completely ignored. Instead, many of my intellectual allies were screaming their heads off denouncing it, and thereby drawing greater attention to it. In the piece I give other…

Quick Thoughts: The People's Peking Man

I cannot write a full review of it yet as I am only about 70 pages in, but so far I am very impressed by Sigrid Schmalzer's new book The People's Peking Man: Popular Science and Human Identity in 20th Century Science. Most of what I have previously learned about "Peking Man" (Homo erectus specimens from Dragon Bone Hill) had to do with its identification of it as an early human that, at the time, confirmed that Asia was the birthplace of humans. Unfortunately the fossils were lost when scientists tried to ship them out of the country for safekeeping at the onset of WWII, but surprisingly the…

I'm lazy today

In the past week, there have been a couple of anti-atheist articles published in the newspapers. I have it easy, though: other people have taken care of the rebuttals. Gary Gutting thinks Dawkins missed the boat on the serious philosophical reasoning behind god-belief. Unfortunately, he doesn't offer any. As is typical for this genre of apologetics, it founders on an incoherent, absurdist definition of deity. Here Dawkins ignores the possibility that God is a very different sort of being than brains and computers. His argument for God's complexity either assumes that God is material or, at…

Other segments of the blogging universe also have pointless polls

It's a whole new world I'm not in the least bit interested in exploring: it turns out that healthcare information technology people have professional blogs about their field, which is cool and useful, but the jargon is impenetrable, the acronyms prolific, and the subjects tend to be far from my interest areas. But that's cool, the feelings are probably mutual, and everyone has got to follow their own path, so I have no objections at all — I'm just warning you that you generally won't find much to get you excited on these things. But still, I was sent a link to a weird blog entry, and as a…

How I will celebrate Origin Day

Today is the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, and there is a whole list of things I am not going to do; I am not going to set aside time to read On the Origin of Species when I get home. I am not going to write a long ode to Darwin in which I pontificate on how his view of nature changed science and society. I am not going to stop by any Darwin-themed parties, lectures, or other events. And so on. I really do not have any special celebratory plans for today at all. Instead I intend to honor the work of Charles…

Science: Appreciating the process, not just the products

One evening, about a year ago, my wife returned home from some church function or other and said "I just saw a juvenile baboon beg to handle a mother's baby." I had no idea what she was talking about. Where had she seen a baboon? Had she gone to the zoo instead? In truth Tracey did not see an actual baboon. What she saw was an adolescent female human approach a new mother in an attempt to handle the mother's newborn child. This behavior is not restricted to humans. It is seen in other primates, such as baboons, something Tracey and I had both recently learned about through Dorothy Cheney and…

My Big News: Moving to Los Angeles

I don't know how many readers of "the Intersection" remember the blog's very earliest days. So let us reminisce: It was mid 2003, and I was living in California at the time, in Berkeley and later in Palo Alto. I'm not sure exactly when "The Intersection" launched, but I remember posting constantly during 2003 about a decidedly non-scientific subject--the California recall. Back then I opposed Schwarzenegger, unaware that he would later become a leader on climate change. Heck, back then I didn't even really write about climate change. In any event, the move to California didn't work out and…

'Jerry, at that moment... I was a marine biologist!'

posted by Sheril R. Kirshenbaum Tell people you're a marine biologist and they usually react one of two ways.. 'I wanted to be a marine biologist when I was little!' or 'You probably never hear this but, ever seen that episode of Seinfeld with George?' [Before I go on, for future reference, Yes, I've seen it. And on the Seinfeld note, please stop telling me I look like Elaine.] It's encouraging that people remember something from pop culture relevant to what I do. I don't realistically expect friends to reference the 2003 Pew Oceans Report, so this collective interest in my field for…

What does it take to make the Mona Lisa "happy"?

Take a look at these two pictures of the Mona Lisa: They're derived from a series of images of the famous painting that had been obscured by random noise filters (like when your old analog TV wasn't getting a signal), like this: Each picture appears to have a slightly different facial expression -- some happier, some sadder, depending on the random alteration of the image due to the visual noise. The two color pictures above are composites, made by picking the saddest (for picture B) and happiest (picture C) from over a hundred random images -- rated by 12 volunteers -- and combining them…

The reception of Phreno-Geology

Last week I wrote about an obscure little book called Phreno-Geology by J. Stanley Grimes which, surprisingly, proposed a mechanism of evolution that combined Lamarckism with natural selection. Since I wrote it, I have been informed that this particular work is significant to the history of science, so I tried to do a little more digging to try and find reviews or reactions to the book. As I speculated in my previous post, the good theoretical concepts Grimes came up with may have been marred with his associated with phrenology, mesmerism, and other "fads," as well as the fact that a number…

Selection of Antidepressants: Asendin -- amoxapine

face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">This is an interesting drug.  Rarely prescribed, but interesting.  It is older than what we typically give today.  It is an antidepressant with a twist. face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">In order to understand why it is interesting, you need to know a little bit about the pharmacology of the drug. rel="tag" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amoxapine">Amoxapine is a tricyclic antidepressant, in my book, or at least in my head; but I have seen it referred to as a tetracyclic.  It depends on whether you think all the rings have to have…

Skeptical Inquirer on Intelligent Design

face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">This is one of the first publications that I subscribed to, after Popular Electronics, and maybe Mad Magazine.  I must confess that I have not renewed the subscription, but from time to time I check their website.   There is a bunch of good skeptical writing in the Blogosphere, but so far nothing matches the quality and expertise you will find in Skeptical Inquirer.  Plus, they have a long and distinguished history, which no blog has.   This issue, they feature a tribute to href="http://www.csicop.org/si/2007-01/sagan.html" rel="tag">Carl Sagan…

White privilege and raising a child (Mommy Monday)

I always feel acutely ignorant when I begin to talk about racial prejudice, diversity or discrimination. I grew up in a blindingly white hometown. In elementary school, my best friend was Indian - but she was part of one of two Indian families in town - both there because a parent was on the university faculty. I'm pretty sure that the first time I ever saw a person of African descent, it was the child of another faculty member. I didn't hear much explicitly racist talk from friends or family, but minorities were so rare that maybe it just didn't come up as a topic of conversation. My…

van Gogh & the history of manic depression

The introductory chapter of Manic-Depressive Illness: Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression, by Frederick K. Goodwin and Kay Redfield Jamison, provides an excellent description of how Emil Kraepelin first classified manic depression (or bipolar disorder) and related conditions in the late 19th century, and how his work has influenced the way in which psychiatrists treat these illnesses today. Kraepelin (1856-1926, right), who is considered to be the founder of modern psychiatry, was the first to distinguish between manic depression and schizophrenia, which were at the time both…

The birth of Frankenstein

Giovanni Aldini's electrical experiments on executed criminals in Bologna, from Essai theorique et experimental sur le galvanisme, published in 1804. (Image from the Rare Book and Manuscript Collections at Cornell University Library.) The experiments of Italian physicist Giovanni Aldini (1762-1834) provided Mary Shelley with some of the inspiration for her classic gothic novel Frankenstein. Aldini was the nephew of Luigi Galvani, who, in the 1700s, made a major contribution to the understanding of nerve function. In 1798, Aldini became a professor of physics at the University of Bologna,…

New Bionic Ear Mixes Cochlear Implant And Hearing Aid

If you are hearing impaired, or if you just like hearing about interesting new sensory gadgets, lend me your ears. Well, actually, lend them to neuroscientists at UNC Chapel Hill who have just opened the first clinical trial to test a new device which combines cochlear implant and hearing aid technology--in the same ear. The device (which hearkens to a small handgun with a droopy trigger worn behind the ear) is shown to the right and is called the Electro-Acoustic System (EAS). This past April, two hearing-impaired North Carolina adults were the first to receive the device, and now the…

In the details: how i paint an insect

Recently a reader commented that my painting, Fall:The Cicada, is a little, um, insect-y. Yes, I have a propensity to paint insects-lots of 'em. I have a box of dead ones just waiting for the day I get around to painting them, so I thought I'd explain why. About the same time, I was encouraging a friend who is also an artist to start blogging about her works-in-progress. I don't have any works-in-progress at the moment, but I figured why not follow my own advice, so here you go: a post about painting insects. I enjoy insects as subjects because they're like tiny jewels, each one with many…

Is Economics a science?

Many people took issue with my post about Milton Friedman's death. Actually I don't think they were taking issue with my post; most of them were taking issue with Milton Friedman's existence. Whatever. Everyone has their own heroes. While I remain puzzled by the vast distaste directed at someone whose fundamental assertion was that you should have the ability to make the important decisions in your life, it is not likely that the debate is resolvable. However, several people took issue with economics as a science -- and organized system of theories and facts capable of making verifiable…

Question For An Economist

I am wondering if the USA, as a whole, is more prosperous now that it was in 2000.   We are told that the GDP has gone up every year.  Population growth has been modest.  The published per-capita GDP has gone up, from $33,000 to $46,000 (as of 1 January 2008).  That seems positive... From CIA World Factbook, via href="http://indexmundi.com/g/g.aspx?c=us&v=67">Index Mundi: But we are running a deficit.  The USA's href="https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2187rank.html">account balance was $ -738,600,000,000 in 2007.  There has been…

Look-Alike Sound-Alike, Only Different

The FDA has been making a strenuous effort to combat the problem of href="http://www.fda.gov/fdac/features/2005/405_confusion.html"> look-alike, sound-alike drug names.  The reason is simple: there have been tens of thousands of documented medication errors, in which the wrong drug is substituted for a different one with a similar name.   An 8-year-old died, it was suspected, after receiving methadone instead of methylphenidate, a drug used to treat attention deficit disorders. A 19-year-old man showed signs of potentially fatal complications after he was given clozapine instead of…

Growing new brain cells to treat depression: A clinical trial

MIT Tech Review reports that a San Diego-based pharmaceuticals company BrainCells Inc. is carrying out a phase II clinical trial to test the efficacy of a neurogenesis-stimulating compound as a treatment for depression. It has been known, for about 20 years, that the brains of mammals (including humans) contain stem cells which are capable of dividing to generate new neurons. This process, called neurogenesis, occurs throughout adulthood in several discrete areas of the brain (the hippocampus and olfactory bulb), but the exact function of the newly-generated cells remains unclear. Reduced…

The Transient Nature of Academia

I'm in Italy. Until I get back I've set up my blog to repost some old entries. Here's a post from last year. Yesterday, while driving up to Ipswich to spend the day at Crane beach and watch the see the annual July 3rd Fireworks, a group of us gabbed about the transient nature of being an academic. Living from place to place, moving until you are in your late 30s, an academic is expected to travel and see the world. You live in various places; experience the day to day hustle of different cities, towns and often countries. You absorb the local customs, the ideas, the history. You attempt to…

Explorers & Crusaders

I have no time to blog today (and no time for Map that Campus - next week I'll have a new Northwestern mystery campus for ya). Here's an entry from last year. You can clearly divide scientists into two categories, those who build new models and those who prove old models. The explorers and the crusaders. Usually the former are seeking the truth, or something close to it, while the latter are trying to confirm their own theories as if the idea was more important than reality. As you can guess, I do not have a high regard for the latter group. Unfortunately there are a lot of crusaders around…

More trivial excuses for the anti-choicers

Oh gob, the stupidity. The latest wave of anti-choice legislation is based on one trivial premise: it's got a heartbeat! You can't kill it if its heart is beating! So stupid bills have been flitting about in the Ohio, Mississippi, Wyoming, Arkansas, and North Dakota legislatures trying to redefine human life as beginning at the instant that a heartbeat can be detected. Here's Wyoming's story, for instance: About two weeks ago, state Rep. Kendell Kroeker (R) introduced a measure to supersede the medical definition of viability. Current state law says abortions are prohibited after a fetus has…

Pissing in the Ocean

Ocean Nourishment Corporation of Sydney, Australia just got the green light to dump several hundred tons of industrially-produced urea in to the Sulu Sea between the Philippines and Borneo. Assuming you urinate about 1.5 liters a day (range is 800ml to 2000ml) that is about the same amount of 500 years of your collected urine...if you actually decided to collect your urine. Several international civil societies called upon the London Convention, the UN committee that regulates ocean dumping to prevent the experiment. Again the idea, is to promote phytoplankton growth and eventually sequester…