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Origins: From the Universe to Humanity

Mark your calendars for the launch of ASU's new Origins Initiative on April 6, 2009. Tickets go on sale next week and the event will be broadcast live online. It looks like a terrific line up including Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Brian Greene, and new Director, (and Science Debate co-founder) Lawrence Krauss. The Origins Symposium will inaugurate the new Origins Initiative at ASU, which will be a University-wide transdisciplinary endeavor supporting research building on key areas of strength at ASU including: the origin of the universe, origins of stars and planet, the origins of life,…

Can Scientists Dance?

Generally, no.  But some can.  Some are rather good at it.  A contest was reported in Science Magazine: The rules were simple: Using no words or images, interpret your Ph.D. thesis in dance form. Entrants were divided into three categories—graduate student, postdoc, and professor—and the prize for each was a year's subscription to Science. The winning videos are href="http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/319/5865/905b#dancegallery">here.  Want more? Wait until next year: 2009 Dance Your PhD contest: Want to dance your own thesis? Stay tuned to href="http://www.johnbohannon.…

Fifth Estate on the Denial Machine

The CBC's Fifth Estate has produced a documentary on the global warming denial industry: The documentary shows how fossil fuel corporations have kept the global warming debate alive long after most scientists believed that global warming was real and had potentially catastrophic consequences. It shows that companies such as Exxon Mobil are working with top public relations firms and using many of the same tactics and personnel as those employed by Phillip Morris and RJ Reynolds to dispute the cigarette-cancer link in the 1990s. Exxon Mobil sought out those willing to question the science…

The Complete BBC Doc: A War On Science

Found this on Google Vids this morning. It features all the regulars in the discussion - Miller, Dawkins - but to me, this doc is valuable and distinct because it features David Attenborough opining on ID and the neocon's dismissal of science, a man who has, for the most part, kept his opinions about this sort of thing to himself over his long career. As an aside, damn American broadcasting. This is the third doc that has been produced for the BBC that I've wanted to watch for a while and couldn't until it was released online (the other's were A Short History of Disbelief, which I never…

Ants in the New York Times

Temnothorax marked for studies of individual behavior at the University of Arizona Today's New York Times is carrying a profile of myrmecologist Anna Dornhaus. It is nice to see Anna's work receiving such attention, great and important, blah blah blah, but the really important part is this. The editors had the excellent taste to illustrate their piece with some ant and bee photographs of mine. The online edition also hosts an ant slide show to accompany the story. The Times trimmed the 22 photos I suggested down to an efficient 15, but I've preserved the director's cut here. For…

Delicious Internet Noms

The Bacon Story -- How science can make even bacon disgusting. Building a Google Earth Geology Layer -- Lots of great resources accumulating in the comments here. Magma Cum Laude: Using Google Earth to visualize volcanic and seismic activity -- A discussion of the different data layers available Geoblogosphere Search -- Can't remember where you saw that awesome geology blog post? Ron Schott has put together a handy custom Google search just for you. Grow Your Own Bismuth Crystals -- Bismuth seems to go for about $15/lb. online, and you can melt it on a household stove. Bismuth photo credit…

Lott misrepresents what happened at the Appalachian School of Law

Lott has an article in the National Review Online where once more misleads his readers about what happened at the Appalachian School of Law: "Last year, two law students with law-enforcement backgrounds as deputy sheriffs in another state stopped the shooting at the Appalachian Law School in Virginia. When the attack started the students ran to their cars, got their guns, pointed their guns at the attacker, ordered him to drop his gun, and then tackled him and held him until police were able to arrive." Lott implies that the law students were former…

Trust and Critical Thinking: Zvan, Myers, Schell, Sanford and Laden

Several blog posts posts were written (by me or Stephanie Zvan) explicitly in preparation for Science Online 2010 Session C, Trust and Critical Thinking organized by Stephanie Zvan and including PZ Myers, Desiree Schell, Greg Laden, and Kirsten Sanford The most recent post, just put up, is this one: Who Do You Trust When It Comes to Your Precious Bodily Fluids? For many topics of interest to the average person, there seem to be two utterly different and diametrically opposed worlds of information. These worlds are so different that one might be called "Normal World" and the other might be…

I'm the ER

I guess that's why I study it. I usually never take these dumb online quiz things but provoked by another science blogger's entry I did this one anyway ... and yes I'm the ER. You scored 46 Industriousness, 48 Centrality, and 7 Causticity! You're the Endoplasmic reticulum! The ER modifies proteins, makes macromolecules, and transfers substances throughout the cell. It has its own membrane, and translation of mRNA happens within it. You tend to have two sides to you - sort of a jekyll and Hyde kind of story. One side of you tends to be rough and tumble, but also very useful. Your other side…

Why, that poll is almost virginal!

Atheist Ireland is looking to determine the most fervent believer of the year with an online poll (frivolous topic, frivolous poll), and I was astounded to discover it had hardly been touched. It was an almost virginal poll. The really, truly True Believer™ of the YEAR 2010 And the winner of 2010 is… Islamic breast hacking clerics 0% [ 0 ] Vatican Child Abuse as bad as Ordination of Women. 0% [ 0 ] God phoning children in Massachusetts. 0% [ 0 ] Conor Lenihan and the anti science anti evolution book. 100% [ 2 ] Sheikh Maulana Rape ok in marriage 0% [ 0 ] Irish Minister for Social…

SCC meeting tomorrow night

Just in case any of you haven't heard yet, tomorrow night the Science Communication Consortium is going to hold its next meeting on "emerging media outlets" & science communication. The SCC was formed by my fellow Scibling Kate (among others), and Carl Zimmer will be speaking on the panel tomorrow, so Sb will have a definite presence during the gathering. You can register at the door or online (details about the location can also be found here), and I'm sure the discussion will be vibrant. Previously I had said that I would be at the meeting, but that's before I realized that my human…

Laelaps gets covered in AppleSauce

It's interesting where my name or photographs end up. As I vainly searched google to make sure no one was talking smack about me on the 'net, I saw that one of my photos of an Amur leopard (pictured above) ended up in the November 2007 edition of AppleSauce by the South Australian Apple Users' Club (which can be seen online here). If you end up borrowing one of my photos for your own publications or blog (it'd be great if you asked first, but I'm not going to cry about it), just shoot me an e-mail and let me know so I can have a look, too. Even if I stumble upon one of my pictures somewhere…

Shakespeare Goes Multiplayer

I've been hankering for Hamlet: The Game for a long time now. Imagine the possibilities: a first-person-shooter (FPS) that lets you inhabit some of the most famous characters of all time. I'd be Hamlet, but I wouldn't stab Polonius. Or mabye I'd be King Lear, and decide that Cordelia isn't so bad after all: Three-dimensional digital worlds and the world of William Shakespeare--it's hard to imagine two more disparate universes. But bridging the gap between them is exactly what Edward Castronova, an associate professor of telecommunications at Indiana University and the leading expert on the…

Jane Austen LARP

Though I played a lot of tabletop role playing games in the 80s and 90s, I've never been much of a live action role-player (LARPer). Just seems to be way too much preparation for such short events. So the only real LARP I ever took part in was in May of 1992 (it was called Saturday Night Live, ha-ha-ha) - until this past Sunday, when I tried again. And it was fun! Boardgaming buddies head-hunted me for this extremely well organised LARP because they had a male deficit. The event was titled Kärlek och fördel, "Love and Advantage". The idea was basically to collect all the main characters…

NASA: double down on Science

I heard it from a man who, heard it from a man who, heard it from another... ok, it was an e-mail, but it confirmed the strange tale I had been told. NASA is about to do a Mad Max on its Science Missions. Five missions enter, one mission leaves. Literally. NASA has many houses. Within one is the Science Mission Directorate, which does space science, including Earth observations, Solar/Magnetosphere, Solar System Planets and "Astrophysics" (formerly known as the "Universe" division). Space Science missions are housed within the divisions, and not always where you'd think. Within Astrophysics…

The Friday Fermentable: A Pinot Noir Revelation with Erleichda

I must extend hearty apologies to my colleague, wine and research mentor, and guest blogger Erleichda for overlooking a great wine column he wrote for Terra Sig back in November. November! How could I overlook a post whose third paragraph begins, "The evening began with three different champagnes..."?!? As The Friday Fermentable has been running on-and-off, I should be more grateful to him for keeping this Friday fun feature alive. So, here ya go - cheers! Recent Wine Experiences : A Pinot Noir Revelation By Erleichda I grew up with limited exposure to wine, primarily my father's…

Some links for the weekend

I decided, since there are many, to put them under the fold now. But you should check them out - some excellent, thought-provoking stuff: Journalism is not a zero-sum game If you think the web is useless, make it useful. If you think Wikipedia is full of errors, correct the ones you find, or shut up. If you think the web only consists of ill-informed echo chambers, get in there and add an informed view. Along the way, you might just find that there are hundreds of thousands of people doing exactly the same thing. Guest Post: Energy Ministers of the Americas Come Together in D.C - State…

Spotlight on Kavli Science Contest Advisor Joanne Manaster

By Stacy Jannis The Kavli Science in Fiction Video Contest challenges Gr 6-12 students to examine the science in fiction, including science fiction movies, TV shows, and games. Our contest advisors include science educators , scientists, and Hollywood scifi visual effects experts. Follow #SciInSciFi on twitter  for contest updates. Joanne Manaster is a faculty lecturer teaching online biology courses for the Master of Science Teaching-Biology program at the School of Integrative Biology at the University of Illinois, and has taught lab courses in Bioengineering and Cell and Developmental…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Ernie Hood

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009. Today, I asked Ernie Hood to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around the Clock. Would you please tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?…

Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: economist freaked out over atheist bestsellers

Steven D. Levitt, the economist and author of Freakonomics, has made a living explaining counterintuitive notions to people on the basis of hidden incentives for human behavior. I haven't read Freakonomics, although it sounds interesting. My behavior is constrained by time. Maybe an incentive will come out of hiding and ratchet the book up my priority list. Still, you'd think a best-selling author of an economics book wouldn't be so surprised when another genre, that on its face doesn't seem like the stuff of best-sellerdom, makes the grade. But Levitt is still surprised that atheist books (…

Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: in praise of Christmas celebration

PZ and Greg Laden have 'fessed up and long time readers know I write the same thing on my Sermonette each Christmas: I am a big fan of Christmas, godless bastard that I am. It is my favorite secular holiday and there is hardly anything about it I don't like. Well, there are a few things: like the whining about how commercial it has become and how its "true meaning" has gotten lost. Why do I like Christmas so much? I want to preface this by saying there are valid reasons some people hate Christmas. It's a dark and gloomy time of year in the northern hemisphere and some people react badly.…

The 10xs the Price=10xs Crappier Rule Hits the Healthcare Bill

A while back I argued that there's a rule - when the US spends a whole lot more and uses a whole lot more than everyone else, what we usually get back isn't just less than everyone else gets for the same buck, it is dramatically worse. I called it my rule of 10 times the price = 10 times crappier. It applies to an astonishing range of American actions - from our military budget and its results to the oil we invest in agriculture. Back then, one of my examples was healthcare, which I pointed out was at least 4 times crappier (and at least 10xs or more for those who can't get it at all, an…

Healthcare Legislation Worth Passing

This post was originally published on our Wordpress site In a historic achievement, 60 Senators have agreed to a healthcare bill that will dramatically expand health insurance coverage and curb some of the insurance industry’s worst practices. Getting agreement between the Senate and the House, which has passed its own healthcare bill, will still be an arduous process, but the chambers agree on most essential elements, and this is the farthest Congress has come in decades towards fixing our healthcare system’s serious problems. (If you want to compare the House and Senate bills, the Kaiser…

NYC Street Fair

tags: NYCLife, Manhattan street fair, NYC through my eye, photography, NYC There are so many reasons to love NYC, and surely, the best reason is the street fairs that occur all over Manhattan during the summer. Street fair "season" in NYC runs between Memorial Day weekend and Labor Day weekend. Street fairs occupy huge stretches of the surface streets in Manhattan on either a Saturday or Sunday between the hours of 9am and 6pm. This street fair, for example, occupies the downtown-bound lanes of Broadway between West 72nd and West 86th streets. Every weekend and holiday day has at least one…

The WTO Just Ruled Against India's Booming Solar Program?

Says HuffoPo. It is bullshit, of course, but lots of people seem to have fallen for it. I found the HuffPo link because mt posted it; and DA quotes FOE saying Trade agreement trumps climate accord: WTO rules against India solar program. As usual, the usual suspects are so busy being outraged they barely tell you what the actual issue is. The WTO ruling is here. There's some lawyerly blather, but not much of it, and its not too hard to read. Skip to the "Summary of key findings" which starts: The claims brought by the United States concern domestic content requirements (DCR measures) imposed…

Please Don't Paint Our Planet Pink!

"Please Don't Paint Our Planet Pink!: A Story for Children and their Adults" is a new children's book by Gregg Kleiner about global warming. The idea is simple. Imagine if you could see CO2? In the book, it is imagined to be pink. The imagining takes the form of a quirky father, one imagines him to be an inventor of some sort, coming up with the idea of making goggles that would allow you to see CO2 as a pink gas. This is all described by the man's patient but clearly all suffering son, who eventually dons the prototype goggles and sees for himself. I read this to Huxley, age 5, and he…

Recommended music player and radio for the gym

Several weeks ago I tried once again, after many prior ill fated attempts over several years, to get a device that would play music, audio books, and be a radio. The audiobook part wasn't the most important part, but the ability to play various audio files AND act as a radio AND not be a big giant thing I had to strap to a body part AND be sturdy were all important. This latest attempt has gone very well, and I now have a device that is very nice and therefore, I figured you'd want one too. This time I tried the AGPtEK M20S 8GB Mini MP3 Player(Expandable Up to 64GB), Lossless Sound Touch…

Links for 2012-01-26

slacktivist » Mark Driscoll, John Woolman, Zacchaeus and grace That [Quaker abolitionist John] Woolman was so miraculously persuasive suggests to me that he likely wasn't as monomaniacally focused on a single subject as the old preacher in the story I shared in the previous post. And the more I think about that story and Woolman's, the more I want to qualify my commendation of such a single-minded relentlessness. Woolman certainly was single-minded and relentless. He did one thing for decades, obsessively. Yet he also convinced people to change -- he convinced hundreds of people to change…

REPOST: Message to Traditional Media: Ur doin it rite!

This is a repost from the old ERV. A retrotransposed ERV :P I dont trust them staying up at Blogger, and the SEED overlords are letting me have 4 reposts a week, so Im gonna take advantage of that! I am going to try to add more comments to these posts for the old readers-- Think of these as 'directors cut' posts ;) I like to make fun of how crappy traditional media has become as much as the next person, but I also hate it when people complain about how bad something is, without offering positive, constructive criticism. Examples of what is right, so the offending parties can improve…

Building a better polio vaccine: Revisited

Last year I wrote about a cool paper, arguing for the creation of a new polio vaccine. Briefly, polio is an RNA virus, thus has an error-prone RNA-RNA polymerase, thus acts like a quasispecies like HIV-1. Now, a live attenuated polio vaccine is the 'best' because you activate lots of branches of your immune system, which 'remember' the polio virus for a really long time. But because of polios potential genetic diversity, the attenuated vaccine variant can revert back to the wild-type variant, which is 'more fit'. This doesnt matter to you, because youve been vaccinated. But if you shed…

Best Music of 2010

I've shifted the iTunes shuffle from the Christmas-music playlist over to the top-rated songs of the year playlist because, well, it's the time of year when anybody with any pretension of writing about pop culture does some sort of Top N list to wrap up the year. And, since I've got "pop culture" right up there in the masthead, that means I should do one as well. The following list is all the five-star rated songs that iTunes has a "2010" date for, with a bunch of remastered Rolling Stones tracks deleted, because really, while "Sweet Virginia" is a fantastic song, it's not remotely a 2010…

It's not their fault, it's ours.

I take a big issue with breed-specific legislation. Politicians target innocent breeds that they claim are "dangerous" because they're too small-minded to look at the facts of how dogs become aggressive. If you were to outlaw "dangerous" breeds, you'd have to start with the most aggressive - like Dachshunds, Chihuahuas, and Jack Russell Terriers. Pit Bulls don't even make the list - and have only ranked higher than 5th on the Vicious Animal Legislation Task Force's Reports once (in 1992, and were still below Cocker Spaniels). People are killed often by other breeds, including the ever-lovable…

How do kids decide robots are worth talking to?

Kids love robots. I have a three-year-old friend who can identify the 1950s cult icon Robbie the Robot at 20 paces. My own son Jim could do an impressive multi-voiced impression of R2D2 by age five. Now that real robots are beginning to be everyday household items (when I was a kid, if I'd known I'd be able to buy a vacuum-cleaner robot from Sears when I was a grown-up, I'd be ashamed to learn that I never actually bought one!), one wonders how real kids will respond to them. When, for example, might a child begin to believe that a robot has a conscious mind, and that humans might…

DonorsChoose Time for ScienceBlogs!

This year I'm taking part in the the DonorsChoose fundraiser taking place at ScienceBlogs. DonorsChoose is a website where teachers can ask to have small teaching projects funded, and potential donors can peruse the proposals can fund ones that seemed worthwhile. Many of the teachers who submit proposals to DonorsChoose are in areas of the country with poor educational funding and high poverty rates, and are for basic teaching materials. I'm trying to raise $1000 to fund three projects, described below: 1. I Want To Go To College But How Do I Do That? This proposal, submitted by a concerned…

Mommy Monday: A taste of a different life (what I've learned)

A quick synopsis of the back story: Minnow is intolerant of dairy, soy, and corn, and since I am breast feeding her, I've been on a three month elimination diet. Because of Minnow's intolerances, about 99% of prepared and restaurant foods are out. The full back story is here. My experiences on an elimination diet have made me much more aware of what life must be like with a disability. This might sound odd at first, but bear with me for a second. I walk into a grocery store or a restaurant, and I can't participate in (i.e., eat) most of the offerings. I have to carefully scan the list of…

Chris Green - Tasmanian Hero

I met Chris Green on a boat in Lake Titicaca in September, 2007. Immediately we realized that we had something in common...Weird animals, well kinda. For starters, I just write about weird animals, and Chris actually works with them. Also because he lives on Tasmania, he doesn't really consider the animals he works with weird; they are pretty much the most normal animals he can think of...Whoa, that's deep. Normal day at the office... If Andrew and I were trying to make a joke about a typical Tasmanian person, we'd probably use Chris' resume as material. He has spent the last few years at a…

I guess J. B. Handley isn't so proud of Age of Autism after all...

Remember the truly despicable and disgusting post by Age of Autism, in which its enemies were portrayed in a crudely Photoshopped picture as preparing to eat a dead baby for their Thanksgiving feast? It was an image that I likened to the blood libel against the Jews, as did Rene at EpiRen in a much more detailed post. It's gone now. If you go to the link, earlier this evening you'd get a message "Nothing to see, move along now." Now, if you go to the link, it's a blank page. Fortunately, for now at least, the it's stlll cached in Google, and I, of course, have saved web archives, a screen…

My brief moment of fame

Hrm. Well. Since so many people are emailing me about this (I guess the book is officially out now, since so many are reading it), I'll come clean: I am mentioned briefly but flatteringly in Dawkins' new book, The God Delusion(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). I'll spare you all the mystery, and quote it here, blushingly. It's on page 69, in a section titled "The Neville Chamberlain School of Evolutionists" (no, I'm not one of the members, I'm a critic; but as you can tell from the title, it's a strong criticism of a school of thought that says we must appease the fence-straddlers who fear the…

A Love/Hate Thing for Spring

This is supposed to be my favorite time of year. Things are blooming, memories of winter are fading, waterfalls are melting, and the trees are turning green. It's that last one that always gets me... I've always considered it to be a magical moment when the trees change in spring. Not the gradual show of colors we see in the fall, spring brings an abrupt explosion of color. Not only are the greens striking and vivid after months of winter grey, but the white and pink blossoms on the apple and cherry trees are a crowning touch. I've been anxiously eyeing the tall maple tree (Acer rubrum) in my…

"Scientific" Whaling

Japan managed to buy enought votes at the recent meeting of the International Whaling Commission to pass a resolution declaring that the moratorium on whaling was meant to be temporary and is no longer needed. The resolution is not all that significant from a practical standpoint - it takes a super-majority to actually end the moratorium, and Japan's going to have to bribe a bunch more countries before they hit that mark. However, it apparently did enough for the morale of the Japanese whalers enough for them to unilaterally declare that they are going to increase their "scientific" whale…

Tripoli 6 trial: 114 Nobel Laureates speak up

Contrary to expectation, the trial of the five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor for capital crimes in a Libyan court did not conclude yesterday but was continued until November 4 to allow the prosecutors to answer arguments by the defense that Libyan authorities have framed the Tripoli Six. Meanwhile in a significant development over one hundred Nobel Laureates have sent a letter to Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi of Libya protesting the exclusion of scientific evidence potentially exonerating the defendants. From Declan Butler's blog: In the letter, to be published online this week by…

Cancer Breakthrough 20 Years in the Making

Last month, Penn Medicine put out a press release heralding a "cancer treatment breakthrough 20 years in the making." In a small clinical trial, three patients with advanced chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) were treated with genetically engineered versions of their own T cells. Just a few weeks after treatment the tumors had disappeared, and the patients remained in remission for a year before the study was published. The release didn't, however, explain those "20 years in the making." In 1989, Prof. Zelig Eshhar of the Weizmann Institute's Immunology Department first published a paper…

MSHA said WHAT about asbestos?

The Associated Press is reporting that last month MSHA inspectors found tremolite asbestos at a quarry owned by the Ash Grove Cement Company, part of its Kaiser plant in Jefferson County, Montana.  The article quotes MSHA spokeswoman Amy Louviere saying that asbestos is present in the pit as âisolated occurrencesâ due to geologic intrusions in certain zones of the quarry. Isolated occurrences?....of asbestos? I pray this quote was taken out of context.  Surely no one at MSHA would dare minimize the serious risk to workers' health from exposure to asbestos---even if the source of…

What Exxon Knew and When?

Eli is, in my view, rather over-excited by insideclimatenews's Exxon's Own Research Confirmed Fossil Fuels' Role in Global Warming Decades Ago. The interesting question that remains is that since they did not disclose their knowledge to shareholders, will some lawyers get rich? is, I think, not an interesting question at all. The answer is No - at least, they won't get rich by winning payouts against Exxon because of this. All this seems like a re-tread of the similarly unspectactular The Climate Deception Dossiers? insideclimatenews breathlessly tells us that Top executives were warned of…

Caribbean Fish Populations Declining For At Least A Decade

A new study published online in Current Biology has analyzed the results from over 48 population studies in the Caribbean from 1955 - 2007, and the results aren't pretty. Caribbean fish have been declining in a big way for at least the past decade, and the culprit isn't commercial fishing. The study used meta analysis to look for trends across trophic groups, locations, fishing status, and overall density at over 300 different reefs. What they found wasn't good. Not only are species falling from fishing pressures, species which aren't commercially fished are losing numbers, too, suggesting…

Happy Birthday, Ellen!

I should have posted this yesterday but wasn't able to...so this is a belated birthday celebration for Ellen Swallow Richards. Thanks again to Penny Richards for sending along the following information. December 3, 1842--birthdate of Ellen Swallow Richards (1842-1911), first woman admitted to study at MIT. She was a chemist; she was also married to the head of the mining engineering department. She worked to establish the Women's Laboratory at MIT (1876-1883), and had an (unpaid) instructor's position teaching chemistry courses. She was the official water analyst for the Massachusetts…

Science swirling down the drain

Lots of stuff about the intersection of science and politics in the US today—here are three things to read over breakfast. Bruce Sterling suggests that American science is experiencing creeping Lysenkoism, and reports that "the Bush administration has systematically manipulated scientific inquiry into climate change, forest management, lead and mercury contamination, and a host of other issues." He predicts a rather grim end for our science and science policy. Before long, the damage will spread beyond our borders. International scientific bodies will treat American scientists as pariahs.…

Math in Medicine

One of our constant themes is the innovative ways that tools and ideas from math and physics can lead to new insights in the life sciences. Take, for example, a recent study produced by a group that included a professor of mathematics, an oncologist who works in pharmaceutical research and has a Ph.D. in mathematics, an electrical engineer and applied mathematician who is doing a postdoc at Harvard Medical School, and physicians in a medical center research lab. The idea was to create a mathematical model of a medical syndrome – in this case neutropenia, the low counts of the white blood…

Fact or Friction: Slow Earthquakes

Earthquakes are once again in the news, this time in Mexico. Although it is only the biggest quakes that make international headlines, we might take a minute to contemplate other quakes - the ones you'll never feel. So-called "slow" or "silent" earthquakes slip so softly they don't even show up on regular seismographic equipment. As the name implies, slow quakes release the energy built up along the fault over hours or even days, as opposed to mere seconds for a fast, shaking quake. So why should we care about what happens in earthquakes that even scientists have barely noticed? For one…

The Clade

Introducing The Clade. It has now been launched and you can read all about it and see the first contributions (and perhaps decide to join in and contribute yourself): The Clade will bring together environmentally concerned writers, artists, photographers, videographers and podcasters who want to go beyond "environmentalism as usual." Environmentalism encompasses wilderness protection and human social justice, women's rights and artistic freedom, online organizing and solitary contemplation. We intend to reclaim environmental journalism from the Hearsts and Knight-Ridders of the world, to open…