Search Content

Displaying results 65101 - 65150 of 87947

Climate Smart and Energy Wise

Climate Smart & Energy Wise: Advancing Science Literacy, Knowledge, and Know-How by Mark McCaffrey is a book written primarily for teachers, to give them the information and tools they need to bring the topic of climate change effectively to their classrooms. It addresses the Climate Literacy and Energy Literacy frameworks, designed to guide teaching this important topic. The book provides basics on climate and energy, approaches to teaching about climate and energy, and of special interest for teachers, syncing the topics with existing standards. The main point of the book is to get…

Are we witnessing an Arctic Sea meltdown, right now?

The Arctic Sea freezes over. The Arctic Sea melts. This happens every year. The average date for the maximum extent of Arctic Sea ice, based on a period of 1981-2010, is March 12. The minimum extent is reached, on average, about September 15h. Every year for the last several years, the minimum ice has been much lower than average in extent, and many years in a row have seen record minima. This is considered to be the result of global surface warming caused by human release of greenhouse gas pollution. It is said that we can't use the maximum ice cover to predict the minimum ice cover…

Important Thanksgiving Information

First and foremost, depending on when you are reading this, TAKE THE TURKEY OUT OF THE FREEZER. But seriously, Thanksgiving is, to me, one of the more interesting holidays. It is a "feast." You knew that already, but what you may not have known is that "feasting" is a human activity found world wide and often studied by anthropologists. Feasting is not exactly a human universal, as it is rare in foraging societies. But whenever certain conditions arise, feasting seems to emerge as a part of normative culture. As a human, you may automatically think of feasting as a pleasantry, a fun thing…

Roy Spencer Is The Worst Person In The World

Dr. Roy W. Spencer has a blog and a facebook page, is a famous climate science denier, and, it turns out, an unmitigated ass. Peter Sinclair notes, Roy Spencer is of course, most famous for consistently misreading his own data for some decade or more, insisting that the planet was cooling, even during some of the fastest warming trend of the last millennium. He remains the “official climatologist of the Rush Limbaugh Show”. Must be a good gig. The wronger you are, the more fans and funding you attract. And now, following hard on the Paris attacks, he wrote this: Why ISIS Should Support COP21…

Are alarming whale deaths linked to climate change?

We need to act urgently to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas pollution we humans create in order to slow down and eventually stop climate change. In the mean time we see case after case of something happening that seems unusual and that seems linked to global warming. We need not wait for the jury to return a verdict in every single case in order to act. We already know what many of the effects of climate change are, and we have a reasonably good idea of what effects will arise in the future. Even so, every now and then something happens that any reasonable person might guess is linked…

What the Hell is a Supermoon?

"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." -Anton Chekhov Ahh, Chekhov, you old sour puss, what do you have against the brilliance of our Moon? Beautiful in our sky, the Moon typically takes up half-a-degree in the night sky, where it's by far the largest and brightest object visible to the naked eye (well, for those of you who can't see the full Andromeda galaxy with your naked eye). But the Moon actually varies in its apparent size in the sky! If you photograph the Moon when it appears to be at its largest, it actually appears about 14% bigger than…

The Great March Storm of 2017 (updated)

The Key for the above graphic: Donald Trump's FEMA is not ready for this storm. The entire federal government is understaffed, and there are funding problems, and this applies to FEMA as well. So, if you are anywhere in the area to be affected by this storm (the weather channel calls it Stella, I call it Trump's Storm One because it is the first big storm on his watch) you need to know that the usual help is not necessarily going to be available. Maybe we should call it the Ides of March Storm. A very large area will probably get a very large amount of snow. Keep up with your local NWS…

Subscribe to your eight favorite newspapers for $18.99 a month?

Wouldn't that be great? Many high end newspapers charge something like $10 a month to subscribe, just to the digital edition. But most people who use digital editions of newspapers scan several, pick and chose what to read, and end up reading them all for free because they don't reach the limit of number of articles provided to a certain web browser per month. But sometimes, one runs into that limit and suddenly can't access articles for the last several days of the month. This hurts readers. (In some cases it hurts the papers. There are a half dozen items in the Washington Post right now…

First Known Climate Change Extinction

When the sea levels rose following the last major glaciation, most rapidly between around 18,000 and 10,000 years ago, somewhat less rapidly until about 6,000 years ago, a lot of interesting things happened. I used to live, and do archaeology in, New England (the one in the US). It was always fun to contemplate George's Bank. George's Bank is a high place out in the ocean, not far from Boston. If you've ever been whale watching off P-town, you were probably out on George's Bank, where the baleen whales forage and frolic, and are easily found during the right season. This is also a great…

Our first (second) Atlantic Tropical Storm?

Friday, May 27, 11 AM cst The probability of this disturbance turning into a tropical storm has been upgraded to 90%, and this transformation is expected to happen some time this evening or on Saturday. Once that happens, the NWS will probably start issuing maps and probability information for where the storm will go and how strong it will be. For now, the NWS is indicating that "all interests along the southeast coast from Georgia through North Carolina should monitor the progress of this low." There is not much to look at yet, but here is a moving GIF of the area. The low pressure system is…

Globular Clusters: A minor mystery?

"I may be an old lion, but if someone puts his hand in my mouth, I can still bite it off." -Wilhelm Steinitz When you look at a typical galaxy, you usually find a disk, a bulge, and a few dots diffusely strewn about the exterior. Like an old lion, these dots have been around for a very long time: often for longer than the galactic disk itself! Just what are these things? Well, we can learn a little more if we look in the X-ray (with Chandra) and the infrared (with Spitzer), in addition to a visible light image (from Hubble). Let's take a look at a composite: Just what are these dots that…

Focus on one thing, do not be distracted by anything else. Oh look tacos!

I don't use clickbait titles very often, but this was one, because I want to talk to people who think that nine out of ten things that the collective known as Donald Trump, his white house staff, and the Republicans in Congress do is a distraction from ... whatever. Yes, distractions can happen, but most of what happens is not a distraction. The Trump administration is incapable of that much forethought and planning. When Trump throws trans people under the bus, telling that is a distraction is YOU throwing trans people under the bus. Here are some examples of the distraction meme playing…

Q & A: Sailors Delight? Fact or Fiction?

Last week, we got a chance to talk about why the sky is red toward sunset and sunrise but blue everywhere else: the atmosphere. Red light passes through the atmosphere pretty well, but blue light gets scattered more easily. When you look to the horizon at sunset/sunrise, the light passes through a tremendous amount of atmosphere, scattering the blue light all over the sky, but allowing the red light through to your eyes. But then, I got a very good follow-up question: Sometimes, either at night or in the morning, not just the horizon but nearly the entire sky turns red! Why does this happen…

Older than Dirt?

Every once in awhile, a question makes it to my inbox that's too good to ignore. A friend and I were joking about being "older than dirt" and he asked a question I thought you might enjoy: "Hey, ask Ethan how old dirt is and how it got here." You did the smart thing by coming to me, because the alternative is to ask yahoo. (Shudder!) Well, right away, we've got an upper limit, because the entire Solar System is only about 4.5 billion years old. So, there's no way that this: is any older than this: Now, you can definitely go looking for the oldest rocks on Earth, and if you look very hard,…

The Camera that Changed the Universe: Part 5

It is done! The longest-running and most famous camera in the world, Hubble's WFPC2, has been removed and replaced. Scientists will now get to use the Wide-Field Camera 3 (below), and WFPC2 is headed to the Smithsonian. You've already gotten a chance to taste what WFPC2 has done for our understanding of the Universe, Planets, Galaxies, and Clusters of Galaxies in the first four parts of our series on The Camera that Changed the Universe. What else is left? Part FiveWell, the only thing I didn't cover yet is stars. And yet, perhaps no other tool -- ever -- has been more useful for discovering…

Do all Stars Eventually Explode?

What's going to happen to all the stars in the Universe as they get older? Well, just as nothing can live forever, stars can't live forever also. Why? Because they run on fuel: burning hydrogen into helium, for example. When they run out of fuel, something's gotta give. Barbara Ryden reminds us of an excellent and appropriate quote by Dylan Thomas: Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. But what exactly happens to the star depends very sensitively on what the mass of the star is. If you've got a tiny little star, less than about 40% of the mass of…

More Convention Coverage

Okay, now that I've had a nap and I'm reasonably refreshed and alert, I can talk some more about the rest of the conference. On Friday (the day I thought was Saturday), we had one guy come by the table who was a student at Cornerstone University and he was a young earther. He's not a teacher, but he's getting his degree in education and hopes to teach science someday. We can only hope that he doesn't. Greg engaged him in conversation for a bit and asked him, just out of curiosity, what he had been taught at Cornerstone about the geological evidence for a 4.55 billion year Earth. His answer,…

StopTheACLU Gets It Wrong Again

Not only wrong, but completely backwards. Here's the situation. Polk County, Florida, has announced that it is doing away with what it called the "free speech zone" on the grounds of the county administration building. This was an area that they designated as a public forum where community groups could put up nativity displays at Christmas time and other such public scenes, at their own expense. StopTheACLU is blaming the ACLU for this because they had sued Polk County over it. But as usual, they have their facts completely wrong. There is a history behind this. Two years ago, the ACLU filed…

Buttars Finally Offers a Bill

The recent spasms of reaction from Utat state Senator Chris Buttars in many ways echoes the entire ID movement over the last few years. If one were to describe the strategic plans of the ID movement in that time, it might well be called the Incredible Shrinking Agenda. First they wanted ID taught alongside evolution with equal time, but it became clear that wasn't going to happen. Then in 2002, in the middle of a fight over ID in Ohio, they suddenly changed to just wanting to "teach the controversy". More recently, they've been arguing for just having the "evidence for and against evolution"…

Guest Post: Sheila Kennedy on Rights

This is a guest post from Sheila Kennedy, former director of the Indiana ACLU and now professor of law and public policy at IUPUI. She emailed it to me and said she was having trouble registering with Typekey and wanted to leave it as a comment. But it's so long and detailed that I offered instead to make it a full guest post: What the Constitution Protects By Sheila Kennedy, IUPUI There's been a lot of discussion of a memo written by Samuel Alito, President Bush's Supreme Court nominee, in which he stated "The constitution does not protect a right to…

Partial Dover Update

We won't have a transcript of the Behe cross examination for a few days yet, but here are a couple of reports on it. Laurie Goodstein's article in the NY Times details some of the problems that Behe ran into. For instance, he is arguing for an incredibly broad definition of science, one not accepted by any scientific organization. Under questioning, he admitted that under his definition, astrology would be considered a scientific theory. The cross examination poked a lot of big holes in Behe's testimony and in the defendant's case: The cross-examination of Professor Behe on Tuesday made it…

Sandefur Joins the 9th Amendment Battle

Tim Sandefur has responded to my brief mention of his blog earlier. He thanks me for the mention, and I likewise thank him for his. I think he may have misunderstood something I said though. He quoted my statement in response to Rusty that if the government could show a legitimate state interest for banning sneakers, then such a law might pass constitutional muster, then says, This would be true only if we define what a legitimate government interest is...When the Court tried to avoid it, it simply assumes the answer: whatever the people want. But the Ninth Amendment indicates to us that that…

Court Upholds Firing of Anti-gay Employee

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld Hewlett-Packard's right to fire an employee who insisted on posting anti-gay bible verses on his office cubicle in response to the company having posters encouraging respect for diversity in the office building he worked in. The diversity campaign, as the Chronicle reports, was the sort of empty sloganeering that anyone in the corporate world is used to seeing: The conflict started in 2000 after the company began implementing a diversity policy that was developed at staff meetings and put up workplace posters showing different employees, with labels…

The rebranding of Intelligent Design

So the Republicans find themselves confused about science (especially evolution), and are arguing among themselves about how to cope with reality. Perhaps you think this is a promising development—they're at least considering the issues, and their hidebound attachment to fantasy is weakening. Can we someday hope that the Republican Party will once again be the home of pragmatists? Will the political props supporting creationism disappear? Does the fact that only 3 of the Republican candidates raised their hands to deny evolution promise that reason may yet reign? No. There is another tactic…

Question for my readers.

Don't make a move until you've CLICKED HERE. Then you can continue on to this post. Thanks. ___________________ I think the accusation that I've "stalked" fellow blogger Abbie Smith have been made one too many times. But I'm not sure. Is this the point where I lay out the exact sequence of events of what happened between us? What do you think? OK, here's the story. Abbie Smith had created an informal group of people who were to eventually become known as the Slyme Pit, mostly Mens Rights Activists, who had come together to object to feminist writings by various bloggers and others,…

A Test For River Blindness

River blindness, also called Onchocerciasis, is the result of the infection of several different eye tissues by the nematode Onchocerca volvulus. The bacterium Wolbachia pipientis lives symbiotically in the gut of the nematode, and escapes the small roundworm to cause an inflammatory response in human tissues, which results in damage to the tissue. These infections can occur in a number of different human tissues causing a variety of effects, but when the eye tissues are involved, the result can be river blindness. It is endemic and widespread in several areas of Africa, as well as more…

Charles Darwin, Geologist

Everyone knows that Darwin was a biologist, and in many ways he was the first prominent modern biologist. Though Darwin scholars know this, many people do not realize that he was also a geologist. Really, he was mainly a geologist on the day he stepped foot on The Beagle for his famous five year tour. This is especially true if we count his work on coral reefs as a geological study, even though coral reefs are a biological phenomenon. After all, the standing model for coral reef formation at the time came from the field of Geology. To exemplify this, I've put together a list of several…

Department of Foot-Shooting, Intelligent Design Division

There's a fascinating exchange of views in the student newspaper at SMU, where the recent "Darwin vs. Design" dog and pony show was held. Leading up to the event, the Discovery Institute shills were busy trying to lay the groundwork. In particular, there was an editorial that tried to distance ID from old-school creationism. What's more, the authority he cites is nonexistent because the U.S. Supreme Court has never dealt with the teaching of intelligent design. The only time it did strike down a non-evolutionary theory was when it struck down the teaching of "creation science" in 1987. Even…

Charles Darwin, Geologist

We know that Darwin was a biologist, and in many ways he was the first prominent modern biologist. But many people do not realize that he was also a geologist. Really, he was mainly a geologist on the day he stepped foot on The Beagle for his famous five year tour. This is especially true if we count his work on coral reefs as a geological study, even though coral reefs are a biological phenomenon. After all, the standing model for coral reef formation at the time came from the field of Geology. Here is a list of several of Darwin's first publications with their publication dates: 1839…

Gay-Linked Group Banned From Community Parade: Petition

On July 9th, 2012, Anoka High School student Justin Aaberg committed suicide. Here in Minnesota, when a kid commits suicide we don't talk about it; often the other kids in the school are never told. There's just a funeral service and a yearbook page but no discussion, no action, no response. But, Justin was one of several kids who successfully took their own lives in the Anoka Hennepin School District, the largest school district in Minnesota, and they were among a much larger group who came close to doing so, because they were gay or thought to be so, and were thus bullied and shunned and…

Talk on Climate Change and Religion

April 27th, I'll be giving a talk hosted by Minnesota Atheists at the Maplewood Library, 3025 Southlawn Dr, Maplewood, Minnesota. Details are here. Details: You may attend any part of the meeting you wish, here's the schedule: 1:00-1:15 p.m. – Social Time 1:15-1:45 p.m. – Business Meeting 1:45-2:00 p.m. – Break 2:00-3:30 p.m. – Talk by Greg Laden 4:00-whenever – Dinner at Pizza Ranch (1845 County Road D East, Maplewood MN) This will be a talk about climate change focusing on current and challenging research questions that everyone needs to know about, as well as the relationship between…

Petrels, Albatrosses, and Storm-Petrels of North America

Did you know that there is an entire group of birds called "Tube Noses" because they have tubes on their noses? Well, to be more exact, the term is "tubenoses" and the noses are beaks. The tubes are tubular nostril-like thingies that most (all?) birds have which are extra tube-like in the tubenoses. Thus the name. Albatrosses, petrels, and storm-petrels, which includes shearwaters, make up the tubenoses, and the newly produced book Petrels, Albatrosses, and Storm-Petrels of North America: A Photographic Guide is about the North American species of this order, scientifically known as the…

IQ Varies with Context

In a very interesting way. As a regular reader of this blog, you know that IQ and similar measures are determined by a number of factors, and for most "normal" (modal?) individuals, one's heritage (genes) is rarely important. Putting it another way, variation across individuals in IQ and other measures have been shown again and again to be determined by things like home environment, diet and nutrition, and even immediate social context. Here's another finding supporting this: Our cognitive abilities and decision-making skills can be dramatically hindered in social settings where we feel…

Atlantic Tropical Update Updated: Humberto is Back

The big, current, story in the Atlantic is, of course, hurrican/tropical storm (there is some confusion on the status of the storm over the last 12 hours) Ingrid. Regardless of how it is classified, Ingrid is going to cause major flooding in Mexico. But over the next several days a second and potentially very interesting but less threatening story is going to develop. The first hurricane of the season, almost breaking the record for the latest first Atlantic hurricane that we've observed, was Humberto. Humberto degraded into an unnamed storm, a bloby stormy thing, moving roughly north way…

CNBC's Joe Kernen Makes Up A Fake Story about Climate Change on Squawk Box.

Joe Kernen is a business finance talking head who co-hosts CNBC's Squawk Box. I don't know if he actually knows much about Wall Street, but I can prove he doesn't know squawk about Climate Science. Have a look (warning: Might make you dizzy): Something about a low participation rate because people are getting older. But that's kind of unclear. Obviously, what is needed is a nice clear analogy from .... climate science! So, the warmest period ever was in the 1930s when there were much lower CO2 levels. I did not know that. Then the glaciers retreat and there are big forests. Arm…

Doing it

... Continued ... When it comes down to it, it is all a matter of just how hard you are willing to work. Then, you start with that and work harder. This guy had it easy. I got my six free sessions, and then I paid for a lot more. In the end, I've paid less for cars I've driven for years, but it was worth it. Having never been part of the "workout" culture, having never gone to a gym before, I found Lenora's training to be invaluable. We were efficient. I would arrive at the gym way before hand and do all my warm-ups. I'd do my post-workout stretches after the session, as well as selected…

Libya and Muammar al-Gaddafi (Qaddafi)

As Libya and Gaddafi move to a more prominent place in the news, I thought I'd point to a few posts on the topic. As an Africanist Archaeologist, I've got a special interest in Libya (though I've never worked there or visited). Haua Fteah is there. Haua Fteah is a cave facing north and overlooking the Mediterranean. It has sediments in it dating to over 120,000 years ago, which thus transcend the entire recent ice age, going all the way back to the last full interglacial. It was excavated by the guy who trained, at that site, two of the three archaeologists whom I had as advisors, Ofer…

Dobzhansky and anthrax

The Washington Post today reminds us that there has been little progress in uncovering the source of the 2001 anthrax attacks. [1] First, a disclaimer. I'm not an "evolutionary biologist," per se. I have what is I swear the longest job title ever--molecular infectious disease epidemiologist. As such, I often get asked, "what's the relevance of evolution to your work?" Or, I'll read editorials such as Dr. Skell's recently in The Scientist [2] questioning the use of evolutionary theory in experimental biology, and be disheartened. Yet the method of investigating the anthrax attacks shows…

Boardgaming Retreat

This past weekend saw my seventh annual boardgaming retreat: 43 hours in good company at a small hotel (in Nynäshamn for the first time), all meals included. My buddy Oscar organises everything. This year we broke the attendance record, with 28 participants, mainly guys in our 30s and 40s. Before Sunday lunch I left early and went to the release event for Karin Bojs and Peter Sjölund's interesting new book on X-chromosome haplotypes, Swedish male-line descent and genealogy: Svenskarna och deras fäder, “The Swedes And Their Fathers”. I played thirteen sessions of ten different games in…

Boardgaming Retreat

Hans, Jan and Urban learning Istanbul. This past weekend saw my sixth annual boardgaming retreat: 43 hours in good company at our usual small Nyköping hotel, all meals included. My buddy Oscar organises everything. There were a bit more than 20 of us this year after a few late cancellations, mainly guys in our 30s and 40s. After Sunday lunch I left early and drove to Norrköping where I gave a talk about my recent excavations to 50 keen members the Friends of the Town Museum association, just like after the 2010 retreat. I played thirteen sessions of nine different games in Nyköping. To…

December Pieces Of My Mind #2

Yay! The new reading chair finally arrived! Sw. kujon "coward" is cognate with Sp. cojon "testicle". Both go back to Lat. coleus "leather sack". In the Swedish case the cowardly sense comes by way of a word for eunuch. I never did understand what exe2bin did. Wife: ”After I've been out running I always feel so good-looking!” Me: ”You mean running improves the accuracy of your eyesight and your powers of objective observation?” Rossi, the founder of the French ski manufacturer Rossignol, was the son of a gnome and a troll and did much to improve tolerance of gnolls in Alpine sports.…

Viga-Glum's Fits Of Murderous Laughter

Sweden doesn't have much of a written record for the Viking Period. We have most of the rune stones but hardly any of the sagas. And thus among Swedish Viking scholars it is not uncommon to be rather poorly read, like I am, in the eddas, the sagas and the other written sources of the period. The Viking Period is pretty much prehistoric archaeology to us. Still, even in Sweden you can't study the period without picking up a few fragments of the written lore. And in my reading, one of the best passages I've come across is this description of Viga-Glum's reaction to trespassing neighbours from…

The second baby

Holy crap the HIV news last week! So much HIV news! First on the list: Early Treatment Is Found to Clear H.I.V. in a 2nd Baby Just in case you have forgotten, the first baby. What happened to ‘the baby cured of HIV’? Now, the second baby-- I must emphasize that I only know what has been reported to pop media. There is no publication associated with this second baby, yet. So I am going to operate under the assumption that Baby #2 was, in fact, infected with HIV, and not transiently exposed to HIV via Mom/anti-HIV antibodies from Mom/not really infected. In this case, the mother was known to be…

GMO virus vs B-Cell Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia: Why is this not a standard therapy yet??

WHY IS THIS NOT STANDARD THERAPY YET? Efficacy and Toxicity Management of 19-28z CAR T Cell Therapy in B Cell Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia I wrote about this last year: ‘Dismal prognosis’ with leukemia? Nothing a GMO virus cant fix. In the previous study, scientists took cytotoxic T-cells from five B-ALL patients, and infected them with a genetically modified virus. This GMO virus had a genome that essentially contained a 'cheat sheet' for teaching those CTLs how to kill B-ALL cancer cells. Four out of the five B-ALL patients recovered enough that they could get a bone marrow transplant. In…

OMFGWARBLEGARBLE! THERE IS ANOTHER AIDS!

NOH MAH GAWD!!! Mysterious Disease Leaves Patients With AIDS-like Symptons, But Not HIV Researchers have identified a mysterious new disease that has left scores of people in Asia and some in the United States with AIDS-like symptoms even though they are not infected with HIV. [bolding original] Researchers identify rare adult immune disease in Asia Researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have identified a new disease among people in Asia that causes AIDS-like symptoms but is not associated with HIV. HIV-like immunodeficiency observed in Asia Researchers have discovered…

Church peddling miracle 'cures' in England

Via Coffee Loving Skeptic-- The laziest example of peddling snake-oil I have ever seen. Revealed: Gorton church sells olive oil and blackcurrant squash as miracle 'cure' for cancer and HIV M.E.N. reporter: After just 15 minutes I was offered church's ‘miracle cure’ Pastor: We are trying to help ... we aren’t hurting anyone See, normally when people are scamming desperate people for money, the scammers put in quite a bit of effort on the front end, concocting a story for why their 'alternative treatment' is so fabulous.  A good back-story can up your profit by orders of magnitude. Its not a…

XMRV: This is what you should do if you mess up

In 2006, long before ERV was a twinkle in my eye-- A really cool paper was published in PLOS Pathogens: Identification of a novel Gammaretrovirus in prostate tumors of patients homozygous for R462Q RNASEL variant. They found a 'new' retrovirus, XMRV ('new' to humans, old to mice).  A new retrovirus in prostate tumors.  Especially in prostate tumors that had a defect in an anti-viral protein, RNASEL.  Not only was the idea that there was another human retrovirus out there incredible, it was an incredible finding for patients-- if a virus causes prostate tumors, then antiretrovirals could…

Vaccinate your pets

Anti-vaxers are horrible people-- They refuse to receive the recommended/required vaccinations and put everyone else (not just the very young, very old, or otherwise immunocompromised) at risk of contracting preventable diseases. Anti-vaxers are horrible parents-- They abuse their children with their own personal ignorance and fears, dooming the poor things to preventable diseases and their associated side-effects, and turn their children into little disease spreading monsters (see above, see this years Superbowl, see the day-care fraud story). Anti-vaxers are also horrible pet owners-- Back…

I CANT INTO SCIENCE, I HAVE THE DUMB.

Integralmath, our Justicar, recently reposted my 'debate' with Steve Kern on his YouTube channel, and its gotten some fun comments. One was from someone making fun of Kern: I CAN'T INTO SCIENCE, I HAVE THE DUMB. I love it and literally loled*. While the commentor was making fun of Kern, I also had to laugh because even though I am a scientist, I TOTALLY feel like this sometimes. For instance, last Friday I was really busy. Experiment after experiment after experiment. Not one thing worked. Not one goddamn thing. New stuff I was trying didnt work. Old stuff I have done a million times…

24 hours of absurdity in virology

The strangest things have happened in the past 24 hours. 1-- New FDA approved clinical trial of anti-HIV vaccine YAY, right? Except I have no idea what the hell they are proposing to do in this clinical trial, other than what was mentioned in press releases-- Its some kind of killed virus. Why the hell putting one killed virus of a currently innumerable quasispecies will do anything, I have no idea. So I tried to look up some back-info on this vaccine, SAV001, in PubMed. Nothing. Tried to look up what this researcher, Chil-Yong Kang, has done with HIV-1 vaccines ("Kang CY"[Author] hiv…