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Reacting to Obama's Surgeon General Pick

Word is out that Obama will probably nominate Sanjay Gupta, a neurosurgeon and television correspondent, for the post of U.S. Surgeon General. Reactions in my office yesterday werenât very positive, but several bloggers have pointed out that Guptaâs high profile and credibility with the general public can help him advance the administrationâs health priorities. First, Revere helpfully reminds us what the Surgeon General actually does: The SG is the head of the uniformed services of the United States Public Health Service, wears a Navy uniform and holds a rank equivalent to a Vice Admiral. If…

Health in Recession

As the unemployment rate climbs, many of the newly unemployed are losing insurance coverage. Candice Choi of the Associated Press summarizes the options for replacing employer-sponsored health insurance: extending benefits for up to 18 months through COBRA; getting an individual policy; and, for those who qualify, getting coverage under a government program like Medicaid.  As weâve noted here before, securing an insurance policy on the individual market can be difficult and expensive â especially if youâre a woman. Medicaid eligibility varies from state to state. Childless adults generally…

Still more BPA sleaze from FDA

by revere, cross-posted at Effect Measure Everyone knows newspapers are struggling, which means cutting back on everything, including investigative reporting. So it is nice to acknowledge that there is still some wonderful reporting going on. A particular standout has been Susanne Rust and her colleagues at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, whose investigation of FDA's handling of the bispheonal A (BPA) episode has been superlative. Yesterday they hit paydirt again. The FDA is currently considering an August draft report of a task force convened last April to re-examine the safety of BPA. The…

CPSCâs New Budget Needed for Long-Overdue Tasks

Congress left town last month without passing legislation that would overhaul the Consumer Product Safety Commission, whose weakness has been apparent in recent problems with toys containing lead, dangerous magnets, and a chemical that metabolizes into the so-called date rape drug gamma hydroxy butyrate. They did pass a ban on industry-sponsored travel (after the Washington Post reported on trips for CPSC officials sponsored by the toy industry), and they gave the CPSC an $80 million budget for the next fiscal year, which represents the agencyâs biggest budget increase in 30 years. The…

Flagrant Disgregard for Miners' Safety Leads to $220,000 Penalty

A coal mine operator in Hazard, Kentucky received a $220,000 penalty from MSHA for flagrantly violating electrical lockout/tagout procedures (such as padlocking an on/off switch to ensure that a machine is not unexpectedly turned-on, plugged in or energized while it is being serviced.)  The hefty monetary penalty was authorized under the 2006 MINER Act for flagrant violations, defined as: "a reckless or repeated failure to make reasonable efforts to eliminate a known violation of a mandatory safety and health standard that substantially and proximately caused, or reasonably could have…

John Oliver, right on drug rep influence

It is amazing how powerful a free lunch is. And the data are real, that people tend to favor those who do nice things for them. That is why, despite new rules about the amount drug companies can give to doctors, or all the rules on disclosure, the pharma reps are always going to push the boundary to try to gain any advantage because it results in real world financial benefits to pharmaceutical companies. Leave it to John Oliver to nail this. Reps are pervasive. They are influential. Their influence comes not necessarily from the right impulses of science and data, but from attractiveness…

Don't Switch to the Mediterranean Diet Just Yet

The New York Times made big news with reports that the New England Journal of Medicine study on the beneficial effects of the Mediterranean diet showed it could dramatically reduce the rates of heart attack and stroke. But this study has major issues that bear directly on whether or not physicians should make new recommendations about dietary intake of fats like olive oil, or whether patients should adopt the diet as a whole. Let's talk about the trial. First of all, this is a randomized, controlled trial, in which 7447 men and women between 55 and 80 years of age who had major risk factors…

NCCAM: the not-even-wrong agency

The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) is a government agency tasked with (among other things), "[exploring] complementary and alternative healing practices in the context of rigorous science." In this space we have talked about NCCAM quite a bit, but I have to admit that I don't think about them very much. The other day, though, I was reading though JAMA and I came across a study funded by the agency. The study, which showed that Ginkgo does not prevent Alzheimer's-type dementia, was pretty good, so I cruised on over to NCCAM's website to see what else they'…

Theocracy in action---HHS proposes to limit birth control

I'm so angry I can barely type coherently. I have very strong feelings about abortion, but I believe it is possible to respectfully disagree about the ethical issues involved. I have an obstetrics colleague who does not perform abortions, but refers patients needing this service to others. That's the ethical way for a doctor to oppose abortion---don't do it, don't prosteletize, refer out. My personal feeling is a woman has the right to control her body and all that dwells within, but I can see why others would disagree. All that being said, if you chose a profession that will, by its…

More flu woo from Mercola

OK, I never really liked Joe Mercola, but when I read about this story on his website, I was encouraged. Boy, do I feel like a sucker. He started out so well, telling us about the tragic case of a child who died of influenza this year, and how health officials rapidly responded by increasing vaccine availability. Yea! He finally gets it! Or not. After the reasonably good piece of journalism, Mercola hops back on to the bat-shit insane wagon. Joe's commentary starts thusly: This tragic story is, unfortunately, being used for all the wrong reasons; namely to promote the "universal…

E. coli O104:H4 in Europe--is it new?

Mike has has a great new post up looking at some molecular analyses of the current European outbreak strain. For anyone who hasn't been paying close attention to what's happening across the pond, there's an ongoing outbreak of enterohemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC)--the type of E. coli that includes O157:H7, which has been associated with outbreaks of disease associated with food. The most infamous outbreak was the 1993 Jack-in-the-Box disaster, associated with undercooked hamburgers contaminated with the organism, but there have also been outbreaks associated with contaminated vegetables (such as…

Food Fight over Conflict of Interest Article

By Dick Clapp  Opponents in the debate over conflict of interest in cancer research are duking it out, and the current forum for their fight is the American Journal of Industrial Medicine. The article that touched off this particular scuffle was âSecret Ties to Industry and Conflicting Interests in Cancer Research,â by Hardell L, et al. (Am J Ind Med 2007;50:227-233), which details a number of examples of researchers working for industries and not disclosing their ties.  The most widely publicized revelations (see this Guardian story) were about Sir Richard Doll, one of the icons of 20th…

Massey Wins Award for Safety??

Massey Energy, a major US coal mine operator, is boasting that its safety program has won the âhighly covetedâ Golden Pyramid Award.  Isnât it a bit peculiar that a mining company where three workers were killed in 2006 would be recognized for its workplace safety and health program?  And, we wonder what kind of organization would give Massey this distinction? You may recall that Masseyâs Aracoma Alma mine was the site of the January 19, 2006 mine fire where coal miners Don Bragg, 33, and Ellery "Elvis" Hatfield, 47, perished underground.  Investigations by the State of West VirginiaÂ…

Bad news for lying "Family Values" associations

One of the problems with denialists is that they simply can't accept that science doesn't conform to their ideology. For instance, it's not enough to just be morally opposed to abortion, the anti-choice organizations have to misrepresent risks of the procedure, including promoting the false link (NCI) between abortion and breast cancer. Recently, Talk to Action exposed the lies of Crisis Pregnancy centers, and the dishonest tactics they use to misrepresent the services they offer and lie about the risks of abortion. These centers which use federal money to misrepresent the science, are…

The familiar Matamata, known to us all since the 1700s, and its long, fat neck (matamatas part II)

Some weeks ago I wrote a bit about the Matamata Chelus fimbriatus: a weird, flat-headed South American pleurodiran turtle. It's one of the strangest creatures tetrapods on the planet, and there's so much to say about it that the previous article ended up being nothing more than the briefest of introductions. Today we start looking at the Matamata in a bit more depth. We start with its affinities and its long neck... Chelus is a chelid: that is, a member of the pleurodire turtle clade Chelidae. Despite - or perhaps because of - its bizarre appearance, the Matamata is sometimes regarded as…

Arithmetic with Surreal Numbers

Last thursday, I introduced the construction of John Conway's beautiful surreal numbers. Today I'm going to show you how to do arithmetic using surreals. It's really quite amazing how it all works! If you haven't read the original post introducing surreals, you'll definitely want to [go back and read that][surreals] before looking at this post! Transfinite Induction and ≤ -------------------------------- I'm going to start off by working through the way that the recursive definition of the surreals and the "≤" operator work. It's based on something called *transfinite induction*. Transfinite…

Friday Pathological Programming: Unlambda, or Programming Without Variables

Todays tasty treat: a variable-free nearly-pure functional programming language: Unlambda. Unlambda is based on the SKI combinator calculus. The [SKI calculus][ski] is a way of writing lambda calculus without variables, and without lambda. It's based on three combinators: S, K, and I: 1. S = λ x y z . x z (y z) 2. K = λ x y . x 3. I = λ x . x Given only S and K, you can actually write *any* lambda calculus expression - and therefore, you can write any computable function using nothing but S and K. I is often added for convenience; it's just a shorthand for "SKK". You can do recursion in SKI…

A Math Geek on Dr. Egnor's Evasions of Evolutionary Information

PZ has already commented on this, but I thought that I'd throw in my two cents. A surgeon, Dr. Michael Egnor, posted a bunch of comments on a Time magazine blog that was criticizing ID. Dr. Egnor's response to the criticism was to ask: "How much new information can Darwinians mechanisms generate?" Of course, the Discovery Institute grabbed this as if it was something profound, and posted an article on it - and that's where they really start to get stupid: Egnor concludes: I did a PubMed search just now. I searched for 'measurement', and 'information' and 'random' and 'e coli'. There were…

Using Monads for Control: Maybe it's worth a look?

So, after our last installment, describing the theory of monads, and the previous posts, which focused on representing things like state and I/O, I thought it was worth taking a moment to look at a different kind of thing that can be done with monads. We so often think of them as being state wrappers; and yet, that's only really a part of what we can get from them. Monads are ways of tying together almost anything that involves sequences. In previous parts of this tutorial, we've seen the Maybe type. It's a useful type for all sorts of things where there might be a value. For example, a…

Basics: Standard Deviation

When we look at a the data for a population+ often the first thing we do is look at the mean. But even if we know that the distribution is perfectly normal, the mean isn't enough to tell us what we know to understand what the mean is telling us about the population. We also need to know something about how the data is spread out around the mean - that is, how wide the bell curve is around the mean. There's a basic measure that tells us that: it's called the standard deviation. The standard deviation describes the spread of the data, and is the basis for how we compute things like the degree…

How badly can a paper summary be botched?

Perhaps you are a scientist. And perhaps you have wondered how badly the popular press could possibly mangle your research. Wonder no more: we have discovered a new maximum. Behold this research summary in The Daily Galaxy, and be amazed! It's about a paper in the ACS Journal of Physical Chemistry B. It's straightforward physical chemistry using some cool tools to image the formation of double helices of DNA: it's simply addressing the question of how complementary strands align themselves in solution. It's physical chemistry, OK? It's about tiny molecular interactions…until the Daily Galaxy…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 24 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Regulation of Clock-Controlled Genes in Mammals: The complexity of tissue- and day time-specific regulation of thousands of clock-controlled genes (CCGs) suggests that many regulatory mechanisms contribute to the…

New and Exciting in PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine

Specialization Does Not Predict Individual Efficiency in an Ant: Social insects, including ants, bees, and termites, may make up 75% of the world's insect biomass. This success is often attributed to their complex colony organization. Each individual is thought to specialize in a particular task and thus become an "expert" for this task. Researchers have long assumed that the ecological success of social insects derives from division of labor, just as the increase in productivity achieved in human societies; however, this assumption has not been thoroughly tested. Here, I have measured task…

Jerry Coyne lobs another bomb at the accommodationists…to the barricades!

It's another one of those long traveling days for me today. I'm on my way to Oregon (I'm at the airport already, so don't worry about any more accidents!), so I may be a bit quiet for a while. Which means I should put something here to keep everyone in a busy uproar for a while. My job is done, and Jerry Coyne has done the dirty work for me. He has put up a long post criticizing the accommodationist stance of several pro-evolution organizations, particularly the NCSE. Among professional organizations that defend the teaching of evolution, perhaps the biggest offender in endorsing the harmony…

Eroding our intellectual infrastructure

One of the challenges facing the country right now in this time of economic crisis is that we're also about to be confronted by the result of a decade of neglect of the nation's infrastructure, in particular, the chronic starvation of our universities. It's an insidious problem, because as administrations have discovered time and again, you can cut an education budget and nothing bad happens, from their perspective. The faculty get a pay freeze; we tighten our belts. The universities lose public funds; we raise tuition a little bit. A few faculty are lost to attrition, and the state decides…

Has the word "gene" outlived its usefulness?

When Wilhelm Johannsen coined the word "gene" back in 1909 (hmmm, less than two years until the Centennial), the word was quite unambiguous - it meant "a unit of heredity". Its material basis, while widely speculated on, was immaterial for its usefulness as a concept. It could have been tiny little Martians inside the cells, it would have been OK, as they could have been plugged into the growing body of mathematics describing the changes and properties of genes in populations. In other words, gene referred to a concept that can be mathematically and experimentally studied without a…

Iran strike speculations

Lots of news and speculation on possible steps to mobilization by US forces to position for a strike on Iran. They couldn't be that stupid, could they? Old Speculation Updated. So... in my humble and uninformed opinion, if the US were to launch a air strike on Iran, supported by Navy aircraft and possibly a Marine expeditionary force, some things would have to move into place first. First you need a MEF in the gulf. Well, one group has been loitering in the Arabian Sea. Then you need, I estimate, three aircraft carrier groups in place. this japanese web site tracks the US Navy carriers (…

The benefits of multiculturalism

Happy Winter Solstice! Gleðileg Jól! Festive Yule. I just wrote "Merry Christmas" in elvish. You see, we found ourselves in a position where we have folded four separate winter solstice festival traditions into the season, much the the delight of the munchkins. However, the Big Kid is definitely getting suspicious and decided to do some hypothesis testing. Now, the primary event this season is the arrival of the 13 jólasveinar on successive days before christmas (and their in order departure through Jan 6th). Just remember - on the 13th day of Jól you take the tree (which is dry by now) and…

Has a Supernova type Ia progenitor finally been found?

Prof. Sion and collaborators at Villanova think they have found a genuine progenitor system for type Ia supernova, in our neighbourhood, in the Milky Way. Type Ia supernovae are thermonuclear detonations of white dwarfs which acquire more mass, somehow, and go over the Chandrasekhar limit (about 1.4 solar masses). Type Ia supernovae are not as common as the core-collapse type II/Ib/Ic supernovae from massive young stars. They are astrophysically important, since most should involve the detonation of a Chandrasekhar mass of light elements, probably O/Ne/Mg mixture, to iron, with associated…

Bombed Box on the Euphrates

the mystery of the "box" in Syria that was bombed by the Israelis was claimed to be a North Korean design nuclear reactor the LA Times originally leaked the news of the briefing, claiming there was video evidence showing the interior and the top of a Yongbyon type reactor, and presence of "Korean looking" scientists... There's a lot of rubbish being written about this. The Yongbyon reactor is a Plutonium production reactor. It runs at ~ 5 MW(e), but is not very efficient. It is a Magnox type reactor - ripoff of the old Calder Hall UK reactor. The Magnox design works with natural uranium - no…

Fifty Degrees Below

tags: global warming, LabLit, science fiction, book review Fifty Degrees Below (Bantam Books, NYC: 2005) is the second novel in Kim Stanley Robinson's global warming trilogy (the first is Forty Signs of Rain). In this book, the novel shifts its attention from Anna and Charlie Quibler and their quirky sons onto NSF scientists/beaureaucrats Frank Vanderwal and Diane Chang. The first book in this trilogy, Forty Signs of Rain, developed slowly, which seemed to reflect the author's perception of America's slow reaction to impending global climate change. However, that book ended with a stunning…

Sexual Imprinting Provides Helping Hand to Speciation

tags: evolution, beak and body size, Geospiza fortis, inbreeding, mating patterns, reproductive isolation, sexual imprinting A family tree depicts the evolution of the 14 species of "Darwin's finches". (The focus of this study, the Medium Ground Finch, Geospiza fortis, is denoted with a red dot). [larger image]. I have always been fascinated by the process of speciation throughout my scientific career because speciation is the "engine" that generates biological diversity. But what are the evolutionary mechanisms that lead to speciation? We know that mate choice can be one important…

Mean and Lowly Things: Snakes, Science, and Survival in the Congo

tags: Mean and Lowly Things, herpetology, reptiles, venomous snakes, amphibians, field research, Congo Brazzaville, Kate Jackson, book review Are you familiar with the aphorism, "Do what you love and the money will follow"? Well, the money part of that equation is probably questionable, but I think you will be convinced that a person who pursues her passions will never live a boring life, especially after you've finished reading Kate Jackson's book, Mean and Lowly Things: Snakes, Science, and Survival in the Congo (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press; 2008). This book tells the…

Evolution versus Creation: Crossing the Divide

tags: Creationism-vs-evolution, fundamentalism, religion, culture wars A friend, Dave, sent me an interesting article that was published several months ago in Science. This insightful and well-written article by Jennifer Couzin is important because it focuses on one scientist's trauma and ensuing lifelong journey with rejecting his evangelical creationist upbringing to accept evolution as scientific fact. Below the fold is a summary of this article for you to read. Paleontologist Stephen Godfrey, curator of the Calvert Marine Museum in Solomons, Maryland, started out his life incongruously as…

White House again uses worker safety regulations as a whipping boy

The White House's regulatory czar Cass Sunstein announced today agency roadmaps for a 21-century regulatory system, and the results of the Obama Administration's "unprecedented government-wide review" of existing regulations. I don't know what history books Mr. Sunstein has been reading, but for at least the last 20 years, every Administration has engaged in these regulatory review exercises to identify rules that are "out-of-date, unnecessary, excessively burdensome or in conflict with other rules." It's a real stretch for him to call this review "unprecedented." I only quibble about…

Making the case for precautionary action to improve worker health and safety

The Lowell Center for Sustainable Production (LCSP) is known for challenging the status quo. Its scientists and policy analysts refuse to accept we have to live in a world where parents are worried about toxic toys, or companies feel forced to choose between earning profits and protecting the environment. Leave it to LCSP researchers to describe six cases of systemic worker health and safety failures, yet manage to identify small successes or opportunities to create them. That's the Lowell way: "...infuse hope and opportunity into a system that may appear severely broken." In "Lessons…

Injury and illness prevention strategy can't ignore working conditions

Lena works in a turkey processing plant in Iowa. She's up by 5:30 am, eats sensibly, is not overweight and has never smoked tobacco. Lena should be the picture of health, but her job makes her feel much older than her 32 years. Over her 10-hour work shift, she makes about 20,000 cuts on the turkey carcasses that move in front of her at a rate of 30 per minute. Lena has chronic pain in her wrist, arms and shoulders. Her physical pain is exacerbated by other work-related stress. Lena earns several dollars per hour over minimum wage, but she has to work another job part-time to help pay…

Occupational Health News Roundup

At the Sacramento Bee, Ryan Lillis and Jose Luis Villegas report on the effects that Trump’s immigration crackdown is having on California farms, writing that fear of deportation is spreading throughout the state’s farming communities. While many farmworkers believe immigration raids are inevitable, farm operators, many who voted for Trump, hope the president will bring more water to the region and keep immigration officials off their fields. Lillis and Villegas write: Fear is everywhere. The night before, the local school board became one of the first in California to declare its campuses a…

Recent Archaeomags

I'm very pleased to have made it back onto the courtesy subscription list of Current Archaeology, which is a popular zine about UK archaeology. Not only does it offer good writing and photography, but it covers an area whose archaeology is actually relevant to what I do. Not too many millennia ago you could walk a straight dry-shod line from Gothenburg to Edinburgh. I recently received Current Archaeology #250, whose cover story is a collection of attempts to look in a positive light at the future of UK archaeology after radical public spending cuts. These were occasioned by two unfortunate…

Swedish Pyramidologist

"Pyramidology", says Wikipedia, "is a term used, sometimes disparagingly, to refer to various pseudoscientific speculations regarding pyramids, most often the Giza Necropolis and the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt." The encyclopedia goes on to explain that there are several kinds of pyramidology that do not necessarily correspond, one of which is the metrological kind, where the dimensions of these great edifices are studied. In the archaeological trade, we sometimes (uncharitably) refer to writings of this kind as "pyramidiocy". In late March I got a call from Lars Lison Almkvist who has…

Larry's Plea for Attention

I received the following e-mail from Larry Fafarman: Ed, It is easy for you and your pals to take cowardly potshots at me from the safety of your blog, where I am banned. So I am challenging you to either unban me on your blog or debate me on my blog. Larry Fafarman What is it about right wingers thinking that if you don't play by their rules you're a "coward"? Larry, Larry, Larry. You're banned here because you annoy me. It's my blog, which means I get to ban anyone I want for any reason I want. You started your own blog just so you could respond to me. I've even been nice enough to link to…

Happy 4th of July

I remember a poll from several years ago that showed that a staggering percentage of the American public had no idea what event the 4th of July was meant to celebrate. That event, of course, was the signing of the Declaration of Independence, easily among the most important documents in the history of mankind. In declaring our separation from the rule of King George of England, the founders also declared, for the first time in history, that the only legitimate purpose of government is to protect those unalienable rights which preexist its formation. That declaration was more profound and…

Fallaci Trial Begins

The trial of Oriana Fallaci, charged in Italy with defaming Islam, began on Monday. Fallaci has said a lot of outrageous things, many of them in my view a bit too broad in her attacks on Islam (she bluntly declares that there is no such thing as a good Muslim), but there is nothing in them that should be illegal in any country. You cannot defame a religion, only an individual, and even then where it is a matter of one's opinion, her views should absolutely be protected as free speech. Italy is absolutely wrong to prosecute her for such a non-existent crime. Having said that, one can only…

UD Comments Again

There is an update at the bottom Another commenter at UD made the following argument: Under open meetings laws in most states, school boards can only consider items placed on the agenda IN ADVANCE. The old board decided not to put the ID policy on the December agenda. Yes, the new board was sworn in during the December meeting but could only consider items already on the agenda. They voted to put the ID policy on the agenda for the January meeting. THIS IS ALL THEY COULD DO LEGALLY. And DaveScot responded: Well, at least this is an attempt at an answer. I can't find any prohibition in the…

True Lab Stories: The Sodium Incident

For technical reasons, it turns out that alkali metal atoms are particularly good candidates for laser cooling. Rubidium is probably the most favorable of all of them-- some atomic physicists jokingly refer to it as "God's atom"-- but all of the alkalis, even Francium, have been cooled and trapped. Of course, alkali metal elements are also the ones that explode when they come in contact with water. They're insanely reactive, so you have to be very careful handling them. As a result, they're usually shipped either in vacuum-sealed ampoules, or as chunks of metal packed in some oily liquid, to…

A tale of two court cases

Neither of which has anything to do with climate change. They are: * Foster parent ban: 'extreme distress' of 'anti-gay' Christians' over ruling courtesy of the Torygraph; and * ECJ gender ruling hits insurance costs God hates fags I was going to rant about the first one but I won't (err, other than my mildly provocative headline). Instead, I'll ask you to compare the Torygraph and the Beeb to the actual judgement, which helpfully contains a summary of the case. From which I quote a bit of background: The claimants are members of the Pentecostalist Church and believe that sexual relations…

Weekend Diversion: Reason Enough

"[F]or those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us." -Charles Bukowski Making sense of our existence is one of the most daunting tasks -- should we choose to accept it -- set before any…

Why does your galaxy spin?

"Sometimes I don't want to see the puppeteers, sometimes I just want to see the magic therein, and sometimes I just want to pry open the atoms and know why they spin." -Glen Sutton But it isn't just the atoms -- the minuscule building blocks of matter -- that spin. It's also the individual galaxies, collections of some mind-boggling number (like 1068) of atoms, that spin. Image credit: Jean-Charles Cuillandre, Giovanni Anselmi and the CFHT. Messier 95, above, is just one such example. But how did these galaxies get to be this way? To answer this question, we have to go all the way back to…

Monday Funday WE WON Day!

"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt." -Sylvia Plath A few weeks ago, I told you about a science writing contest going on over at 3 Quarks Daily, open to all areas of science writing. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that one of my posts made the finals. Well, this morning, I woke up to find that the winners were announced! Without further ado, who were they? Top Quark (First prize): my former scibling, SciCurious, for her article, Serotonin and Sexual…

How Gravitational Lensing Shows Us Dark Matter!

"You may hate gravity, but gravity doesn't care." -Clayton Christensen What's the deal with gravity, dark matter, and this whole "lensing" business anyway? You've probably heard that energy -- most commonly mass -- bends light. And perhaps you've seen an image or two like this one to illustrate that. Image credit: ESA, NASA, J.-P. Kneib and Richard Ellis. Above is the great galaxy cluster Abell Cluster 2218. But those giant, stretched arcs you see? Those are actually background galaxies that get distorted and magnified by the giant cluster. As the light leaves its source, the mighty gravity…