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Odd question about the lying mirror

This weekend I got a haircut and noticed for the umpteenth time that the hair from the top of my head (I still have plenty) that landed in my lap as I sat in the barber's chair was grey. This always surprises me because when I look in the mirror I don't have much grey hair. I have some, but not that much. When I look at old photos of myself I can see my hair is very dark and in more recent photos it is pretty grey, but not when I look in the mirror. I mentioned this today at grant writing meeting with our large team of investigators, some of whom are more or less my age, and one of them came…

Studying how many are infected with swine flu

While I was otherwise occupied with family matters last week there was news on the flu front that got past me. Declan Butler at Nature News reported on the extensive efforts to get a handle on the prevalence of swine flu infection in various populations by looking for evidence the immune system has reacted to the presence of the virus. All of the studies mentioned are still underway or being peer reviewed so Butler didn't report results, but Fergus Walsh did report some preliminary but leaked results from one of the smaller studies in the UK. Both reports have interesting information, but I'…

Fatal work injury that killed Juan Carlos Reyes was preventable, OSHA cites Angel’s AAA

Juan Carlos Reyes’ work-related death could have been prevented. That’s how I see the findings of federal OSHA in the agency’s citations against his employer, Angel AAA Electric, LLC. The 35-year-old was working at a construction site in Harlingen, TX for a new Marriott hotel. He suffered fatal traumatic injuries in May 2014 when he fell from scaffolding while moving supplies into a fourth floor window. I wrote about the incident shortly after it was reported by local press. Federal inspectors out of OSHA’s Corpus Christi, TX office conducted an inspection of the worksite following Reyes’…

Worth reading: Burdened black lung victims, poor people's logic, and underground infrastructure

If you only have time for one long read this week, make it the excellent "Breathless and Burdened" series by Chris Hamby of the Center for Public Integrity. The series website explains, "This yearlong investigation examines how doctors and lawyers, working at the behest of the coal industry, have helped defeat the benefits claims of miners sick and dying of black lung, even as disease rates are on the rise and an increasing number of miners are turning to a system that was supposed to help alleviate their suffering." This is investigative reporting at its finest! Other recent pieces I've…

Back to the Post-Apocalypse!

With November coming 'round tomorrow, I realize my chances of re-starting the post-apocalyptic reading group for November 1 are probably pretty faint ;-). Again, this is pretty much a reflection of where my brain is these days. I *meant* to get us started for ummm...tomorrow. But while I realize my readers are a brilliant and uniquely talented bunch, probably obtaining and reading the novel by tomorrow is a little unfair. I would, of course, never suggest that your genius blogiste couldn't do it. So, here is my official announcement - we're getting started again as of December 1, and I…

Would You Like to Attend the ASPO-USA Conference...Free?!?!

I know there has been a lot of ASPO posting right now - what can I say except it is consuming my entire existence, so it creeps into your blog posts too ;-). The fun part will come when the conference liveblogging begins and all that great information starts flowing! But this is pretty awesome. A kind and wonderful donor has offered to subsidize three spots for people who would otherwise be unable to attend the conference. She'll pay for registration for three people - you do have to handle your own transport and find someplace to crash, but that seems achievable! You can hear all these…

Home Again

If you've ever done a long car trip with four kids - 10+ hours up and back, with multiple stops along the way, you know just how I feel. The trip was wonderful - I got to talk about food and agriculture right in front of Thomas Jefferson's own vegetable garden, got to let my kids see enormously cool things they would otherwise have had no chance to view, and had a wonderful time visiting friends and family. We made some wonderful, wonderful new friends - including our hosts in Charlottesville who were insane enough to take in our whole family, sight unseen! 99% of the time, I take Amtrak…

Friday Fun: Five songs I love, Derek Trucks edition

I've more or less promised sets of Canadian and jazz songs for this series, but lately I've been so entranced with the latest Derek Trucks Band CD, Already Free, that I thought I'd feature a Derek Trucks extended family post, all featuring laid back blues rock. Not only does Trucks release his own music, but he's also one of the guitarists for the Allman Brothers Band. Here are five great songs showcasing Derek Trucks and his extended musical family: Down in the Flood by The Derek Trucks Band. The first single off the new album. Desdemona by The Allman Brothers Band. A great track…

A Kind of Alternative Magic

In which we ask, what would you do if you could change your own personal history? A Kind of Magic! - No, that is not a non-Higgs boson, it is the Astronomy Magazine competition to win a signed copy of Brian May's PhD thesis in astronomy. "To enter the contest, submit a short essay (200 to 500 words) that describes what you would do — what would your subject be and why? — if you could magically go back to school and earn a doctoral degree in astronomy. How would you change the astronomy world? What research subject would entice you? Planetary science? Cosmology? Galaxy investigations? And what…

random dump

stuff I need to contemplate and therefore you probably should do: "So Forget Jesus, Stars Died So You Could Live" - Miley Cyrus, aka Hannah Montana gets death threats for quoting Lawrence Krauss on twitter... Philocosmology - Our Blog - Templeton foundation sponsors a Cosmology/Philosophy blog at Rutgers. Looks like a good crew - now put up some content folks! Walker reviews the origins of radial velocity searches for exoplanets Xcode and fortran fix for OSX 10.7 Lion - yup, they broke it, again. Iceland Goes Loonie - eh? It is, actually, an interesting idea, thinking about it. NASA Senior…

iPod iChing: Little Green Men

stormy friday as portends gather and it is move-in day! Yes, They Are Back. So, we probe a puzzle dujour: the Definitely Not NASA ponderings on Scenarios for SETI Success - aka Alien Ecoterrorists Attack!!!. So, oh mighty iPod One: any Thennanin out There Threatening to Thwart Us? Whoosh goes the randomizer. Whoosh. The Covering: Serenade for the Doll The Crossing: Some Days You Gotta Dance - Dixie Chicks The Crown: Það er Jólasveinninn Minn The Root: Not Ready to Make Nice - Dixie Chicks The Past: Menuett F-Dur - Mozart The Future: This War is Over - Melissa Etheridge The Questioner:…

iPod iChing: indebted

steamy sultry friday, and the randomizer puts the Grandmaster on to remind me that it is iPod iChing time! So, Mighty iPod One: the whole debt ceiling chatter - kabuki or crisis? The Covering: The Message - Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five The Crossing: Telegraph Road (Live Remix) - Dire Straits The Crown: Black Coffee in Bed The Root: I Shot the Sheriff - Bob Marley & The Wailers The Past: Gridlock - The Pogues The Future: Twydale's Lament - Half Man Half Biscuit The Questioner: Dansi Dansi Dúkkan mín The House: Il Pieut Bergere - Sien Diels The Inside: Smells Like Teen…

Occupational Health News Roundup

In the Wausau Daily Herald, Gannett Wisconsin Media reports that an explosion at the Packaging Corp of America in Bradley, Wisconsin killed three workers: Randy Hoegger, 55, and Steve Voermans, 52, both of Tomahawk, and Donald Snyder, 46, of Merrill. According to a company human resources manager, the men were performing maintenance on top of a recycling fiber storage tank when it exploded. The cause of the blast is under investigation. In other news: Pantagraph (Illinois): Ironworker Josh M. Dawe, 33, was killed when a crane collapsed on the basket in which he was working at a construction…

Dr. Greg Wagner appointed as MSHA deputy

I'm not one to keep good news under a bushel basket, but in deference to my perception of some Labor Department protocol, I kept waiting for an official announcement.   But, the news is too good to wait any longer:  Secretary Solis has appointed Gregory R. Wagner, MD as the senior official at MSHA until an assistant secretary (Joe Main, nominee) is confirmed.   Many of us in the OHS world know Greg for his many years of service at NIOSH, including as director of the division of respiratory disease studies in Morgantown, WV, and as an active member of the American Public Health…

Reminder: Workers Memorial Day Tomorrow

Tomorrow, April 28th, is Workers Memorial Day. Tammy at United Support and Memorial for Workplace Fatalities has compiled an extensive list of events taking place across the US, and Hazards Magazine has links to events from around the world. Commenter Joan Lichterman also alerted us to an event at UC Berkeley. If you're in the DC area, join us in front of the Department of Labor (200 Constitution Ave. NW) at 8am for a rally with family members who've lost loved ones to workplace fatalities. At 9am, we'll march to the Senate and House hearing chambers. At 10am, two Congressional committees…

National Public Health Week

It's National Public Health Week, and the American Public Health Association is encouraging people to recognize public health's contributions and get involved in advancing public health. This year's theme is "the healthiest nation in one generation" - in other words, the U.S. is currently far from being the healthiest nation, but we can turn that around in the space of a generation. Since I'm already immersed in the field, I find it hard to judge how effective these efforts are at reaching people don't think much about public health. That seems to be the audience APHA is aiming for with its…

Good Hospital News

We spend a lot of time writing about all of the things that are going wrong, so it's nice to highlight some promising news periodically. In particular, it seems like there have been a lot of positive news stories about hospitals lately. The Washington Post's Ceci Connolly profiles Pennsylvania's Geisinger Health system, which is demonstrating that it's possible to save money on healthcare by doing procedures right the first time. At ProPublica, Sherri Fink describes the orderly evacuation of hundreds of patients from North Dakota hospitals and nursing homes, and finds that increased…

Budget Bill Restores Toxics Reporting Requirement

The Washington Postâs Juliet Eilperin reports that a âlittle-noticedâ provision in the spending bill signed into law this week will reverse the Bush administrationâs loosening of Toxics Release Inventory reporting requirements. (Check out our past posts on the watered-down requirements and the TRIâs importance for background.) The TRI is important because it lets community members, lawmakers, government agencies, journalists, and researchers learn about the amount and type of toxic chemicals being released by thousands of facilities across the country. Corporations that manufacture, process…

Environmental Health News on BPA and Much More

Environmental Health News is a key resource for people who want to stay up-to-date on environmental issues, and itâs now gotten even better. John Peterson Myers, whoâs made the site (especially its Above the Fold daily news update) an invaluable resource that so many of us rely on, has now recruited some new talent and moved into the role of publisher. Marla Cone, who many readers will recognize from her top-notch environmental reporting for the Los Angeles Times, has joined as Editor-in-Chief, and will be writing feature stories for the site. As a glimpse of what the new EHN has to offer,…

Is Huffington Post no longer a denialist site?

Seth Mnookin has reasons to hope. It has been clear though for years that Huffpo was a clearinghouse for what I would describe as liberal crankery, which includes things like Jenny McCarthy's anti-vaccine crankery, or Bill Maher's anti-pharma paranoia. But now they have a new site, Huffpo Science, and after my head stopped ringing from that particular oxymoron I went and checked it out. A lead article on going to Mars by Buzz Aldrin was interesting. An article on Frankenmeat came out relatively clean without getting all paranoid about GMO foods or lab-grown nutrients being less pure…

Diabetic foot disease

As I continue to fight the good fight against my first respiratory infection of the season, I will serve you a few portions of learnin' from the old blog. --PalMD We've spoken a bit lately of the micro- and macrovascular complications of diabetes. Let's see what that means in real life. One of the most devastating complications of diabetes is amputation, which is often due to the microvascular complication of peripheral neuropathy. This can begin as a tingling, burning pain in the feet, but can lead to loss of sensation. Small injuries can rapidly become limb-threatening...(Warning: Yucky…

Squish

That's the sound you should hear when Joe Felsenstein takes on an idiotic claim by Sal Cordova. Would you believe that Cordova claims that Kimura and Ohta's classic 1971 paper "shatters the modern synthesis"? That's what he claims, on the basis of his poor understanding of the mathematics of population genetics, which is ridiculous on the face of it. So it's very satisfying to see one of the big guns of population genetics take him down with one brief explanation: contrary to Cordova, the principle he's describing confirms the effectiveness of natural selection. Just to help everyone follow…

Ben Goldacre on Homeopathy

Sometimes people wonder why the skeptic types get all worked up over a behavior that is usually seen as at-worst harmless. Ben Goldacre explains why, in one of the best, and clearest articles on the problem of homeopathic medicine. This is exactly what I said, albeit in nerdier academic language, in today's edition of the Lancet, Britain's biggest medical journal. These views are what homeopaths are describing as an "attack". But I am very clear. There is no single right way to package up all of this undeniable and true information into a "view" on homeopathy. When I'm feeling generous, I…

Assuming that prayer actually has some power, of course…

I'm confused by the consequences of the Virginia twisters. Brenda Williams, 43, returned Tuesday to the shopping center where she was buried beneath a collapsed ceiling in a manicure shop during the storm. She was pulled to safety by a stranger, she said. "I'm not lucky, I'm blessed," said Williams, who had a 2-inch gash stitched above her left eyebrow and stitches on her right forearm. "I'm fine. I'm here. I'm in the land of the living." She retrieved possessions from her car, which was flipped on its roof and destroyed in the parking lot. Why was Ms Williams praying to be buried beneath a…

Misc. link-lovin'

I've been really terrible at spreading around some link love this year, largely because my time to read other blogs has been significantly diminished due to my other responsibilities. However yesterday I was able to do a tiny bit of catching up. I've not blogged much on HIV denial recently (no time, alas, to keep the comments cleaned up). However, regular readers may recall how much the HIV folks hated to be compared to creationists. ERV points out a post by an evolution denier championing HIV denial as well. Birds of a feather... In a related vein, James muses what should be done…

PLoS Biology: blogging and academia

Along with Shelley Batts and Nick Anthis, I have a new paper out today in PLoS Biology on academic blogging: a short commentary on potential ways to integrate blogs into academia. Nick already has a bit of the history and goals of the manuscript over at The Scientific Activist so I won't repeat those here; long story short, we started out with the goal of simply reviewing academic blogs, and the paper ended up morphing into a road map describing potential ways to integrate blogs into academia. Many, many readers and writers in the blogosphere donated their time to send us messages about…

Progeria researchers, anyone?

I received a very nice email from a high school student looking for a mentor for a research project on progeria: Currently, I'm in a science research program at school where we choose a topic of interest and study it for a period of three years, as well as design an experiment and carry it out based on this topic. Eventually, students are able to present their work for competition purposes or just to share their knowledge in symposia or other forums, such as the Intel Science Competition, or the Siemens Competition. I am studying Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome for my project and…

Occupational Health News Roundup

The big news is that the House passed the Popcorn Workers Lung Disease Prevention Act, as David reports below. In other occupational health and safety news: China Daily: A fire in a coal mine shaft has killed three miners and trapped 15 more. Occupational Health & Safety: South Carolinaâs OSHA has assessed more than $42,000 in penalties against the Charleston fire department and the owner of a furniture store where nine firefighters died fighting a blaze in June. Sacramento Bee: Since California launched a campaign to address on-the-job heat stress, inspections have increased and heat-…

Happy Blog Day!

Coturnix at A Blog Around the Clock alerted me that today is the third annual Blog Day, which âwas created with the belief that bloggers should have one day dedicated to getting to know other bloggers from other countries and areas of interest.â To participate, bloggers link to five new blogs â and Iâm going to interpret ânewâ as meaning âa blog I discovered fairly recently and suspect most readers donât know about yet.â So, here are my five blog links for Blog Day 2007: The Nata village blog provides an up-close view of the battle to control the spread of HIV/AIDS in one village in Botswana…

Another reason to wear underwear at all times

Uh-oh. The creationist expectation of an abrupt transformation from one species to another has been demonstrated: the picture below is of a chicken egg that was cracked open to make a meal, and inside … a dead gecko. A bird giving birth to a reptile? Actually, no, sorry. A chicken giving birth to a lizard is the kind of thing creationists imagine that evolution predicts, but which would actually surprise and disturb scientists if it happened — we'd have to rethink a lot of genetics if a solid instance were documented. In this case, there's an alternative, if rather disgusting, explanation.…

Friday Blog Roundup

The blogosphere has been buzzing all week about Andrew Revkin's New York Times piece on the new "middle stance" in the climate debate. Real Climate authors have one of the most comprehensive responses to it (as well as links to several other bloggers' posts); Revkin himself responds in the extensive comment thread. On other topics: Ross Gelbspan at DeSmogBlog lays out "One Path to Climate Peace." At Scientific American's blog, JR Minkel discusses the gap between the need and demand for vaccines in developing countries, and Ciara Curtin sets the record straight on treating jellyfish stings (…

RU486

After I summarized how Plan B contraception works, I'm still getting letters confusing it with RU486. RU486 induces abortions. Plan B does not. RU486 is the opposite of Plan B. Remember that what Plan B is is an artificially high dose of progesterone (it actually uses a progesterone analog, but it's effectively the same.) Progesterone is a hormone that maintains the uterine lining in a nice, rich, spongy, receptive state, and it also suppresses another hormone, LH, that is what triggers ovulation. Plan B keeps the uterus primed for implantation, but tells the ovary to hold its fire and not…

IDists make another bonehead move

So, the Discovery Institute is planning the "largest conference on Intelligent Design ever held," sponsored by Physicians for Scientific Integrity (yeah, this group I wrote about previously) and being held in Florida in two parts--late September and early November. In the latter portion (held in a church, of course--but nooo, it's all science, not religion), they claim to be hosting "The Great Debate." Who's it between, you ask? Nick Matzke has the answer: Featuring: Dr. Stephen Meyer, Ph.D. in philosophy of science, Cambridge University and Dr. Donald Duh, professor (emeritus) at…

At least those Icelanders have some sense...

Via Stranger Fruit, Panda's Thumb, and elsewhere in the blogosphere comes this Science paper discussing attitudes regarding evolution in a number of countries, including the United States. As noted in John's title, the U.S. comes in second....from the bottom. Only Turkey has a greater proprtion of citizens that doubt evolution. People sometimes ask why I bother even writing about "intelligent design" and other such supposed "challenges" to established scientific theories. Evolutionary biology is so overwhelmingly supported by the evidence, why even take the time to address those who deny…

Contradictions in Ohio

As I mentioned here, it looks like there is additional rumbling over Ohio's education standards. Sunday's Columbus Dispatch has more information on the topic, and something just isn't right: Colleen Grady, a board member from the Cleveland suburb of Strongsville, wants to add guidelines to the state science standards for teaching on such topics as evolution, global warming, stem-cell research and cloning. Grady said she views her proposal as a compromise to ensure that differing views are considered when teaching such hot-button issues. "We would provide a template so schools would be…

Sean Carroll Reviews Behe's "Edge of Evolution"

It's a good read, also check out MarkCC's review It's another example of cranks not recognizing talent - or rather the absence of it. And Sean Carroll hits pretty hard in his review making the point that there are so many basic errors in the book that Behe isn't doing ID any favors. He ends with this: The continuing futile attacks by evolution's opponents reminds me of another legendary confrontation, that between Arthur and the Black Knight in the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The Black Knight, like evolution's challengers, continues to fight even as each of his limbs is hacked…

The Penitent Paris

As Paris Hilton gets ready for her short stay in jail, she increasingly is photographed carrying Jesus books. And today, she appears on my favorite blog wearing a "Faith" hoodie, and carrying Count Your Blessings, Spiritual Warrior, and some others. Her behavior recalls Machiavelli's advice: ...a prince ought to take care that he never lets anything slip from his lips that is not replete with the...five qualities, that he may appear to him who sees and hears him altogether merciful, faithful, humane, upright, and religious. There is nothing more necessary to appear to have than this last…

Duck sex: to interfere, or to watch?

Ducks - like the Mallards Anas platyrhynchos shown here - lead fairly violent sex lives. As I said in a previous article... [A]s you'll know if you've spent any time watching ducks, 'forced extra-pair copulations' are very common in ducks. The Mallard Anas platyrhynchos is the best (or should that be worst?) example of the lot: females are handled so roughly by males (sometimes by groups of as many as 12) that it's quite common for people to speak of witnessing 'duck rape', and forced copulation is a common strategy used by males of this species. Over the weekend I was fortunate enough to be…

The tangled mammoths

It's reasonably well known that fighting male deer are sometimes unable to extricate themselves after tangling their antlers together. Mammoths - which had more strongly curved tusks that living elephants - sometimes had a similar problem, as demonstrated by the famous fighting mammoths from Crawford, Sioux County, Nebraska... Yes, this fossil is for real (it's accessioned in Washington, D.C. as USNM 2449). The animals belong to the North American species Mammuthus columbi and must have died after becoming locked together. The fossil has been figured a few times since Boucot (1990) discussed…

Yet another bizarre and unfortunate giraffe death

I've said it before: it isn't that I don't like giraffes - quite the contrary - it's just that they have a nasty habit of dying in the most bizarre, fascinating ways. And, because they're such big, obvious, famous animals, when they do die in bizarre and fascinating ways, people tend to record it photographically. So, we've previously seen a giraffe killed in a fight by another giraffe, a giraffe hit by a plane, and a giraffe killed on a road by lions. Giraffes also get struck by lightning sometimes, but nobody's yet photographed this happening to my knowledge. The death featured here is…

My week in pictures

Here are some neat things I saw this week. You get points for identifying stuff or saying interesting things about it. What you see in the adjacent pictures was visible from my back garden within the last few hours. Amazing stuff, though my rather limited photography meant that I couldn't capture everything that happened. Remember: stuff like this is happening all around you, all the time, every day. You already know that of course, but 95% of the urbanised human population of the world don't know it, and it's difficult to know whether they care, or are interested. Ooh - neat beasts!…

Leopard vs crocodile (better late than never)

Very late to the party here (the story was first published waaaaaay back on the 18th), but it just seems wrong not to cover this at Tet Zoo. Sincere apologies to the Bleiman brothers at Zooillogix and to John Lynch at Stranger Fruit, both of whom covered the following several days ago, but what the hey, there still might be some people who haven't seen the amazing photos... Taken by American wildlife photographer Hal Brindley in Kruger National Park, they show that leopards can kill crocodiles when they want to. The leopard tackled the crocodile in the water, pulled it on to land, and…

Its cute little face

Late in the evening I sat in an airport lounge, finally reading Robert Twigger's book on python hunting, my head full of Robert Appleby's legacy, fossil giraffes, giant mustelids, and the song from the end of Portal. I thought about the wolfhounds I'd seen, the bullfinches, stock doves and plovers; the bones we'd found; the teeth and vertebrae I'd handled or photographed; a futile search for hares and about the leverets I discovered in Germany once; the pile of correspondence I'd gone through; and the work I had yet to do on all those hundreds and hundreds of unlabelled diagrams. I thought…

It could look a giraffe in the eyes

The day-job, a dinner date, a committee meeting, and some work identifying Tanzanian reptiles from photos means that I don't have time to post more conference thoughts on the blog today. In, as always, an effort to keep hits coming in (remember: visit, visit, and visit again), I'll therefore default to the 'picture of the day' game... By now, I'm guessing that everyone who's been reading the stuff on the Wellnhofer pterosaur meeting has seen the above pic: Mark Witton used it in his talk on pterosaur mass estimates - he discusses that issue here, and I'll say things about it whenever I post…

I haven't even touched this poll yet!

Lately, all the polls people have been sending me are already going in the right direction — have I become superfluous? Are atheists everywhere already gleefully clicking buttons in polls without my prompting? Oh, well, here's another one. An ambitious priest gets assigned to Brighton, which he calls "the most Godless city in Britain". He has declared that it is now his intention to transform the place into a sanctuary for unctuous old farts with their brains scrambled by nonsense (uh, those are my words, not his, if you couldn't tell.) So the local newspaper ran a poll to see what people…

Innumerate Fundamentalists and π

The stupidity and innumeracy of Americans, and in particular American fundamentalists, never ceases to astound me. Recently on Yahoo, some bozo posted [something claiming that the bible was all correct][yahoo], and that genetics would show that bats were actually birds. But that's not the real prize. The *real* prize of the discussion was in the ensuing thread. A doubter posted the following question: >please explain 1 kings 7.23 and how a circle can have a circumference of 30 of >a unit and a radiius of 10 of a unit and i will become a christian > >23 And he made the Sea of cast…

Mark Witton's secret: finally out

First of all, I've been away (speaking about fossil cats again), though - as previously - you might not have known this given that a list of posts were scheduled to appear in my absence. Is there more on mesonychians to come? There might be, but I haven't yet had the time to finish it. Meanwhile.... For months and months now my esteemed colleague and coauthor Mark Witton has been working on a secret project. It's pretty incredible and the temptation to blab about it and post some of the neat photos I have has been overwhelming (one of the photos is shown below: it was taken back in May).…

Mystery Bird: Swallow-tailed Kite, Elanoides forficatus

tags: Swallow-tailed Kite, Fork-tailed Hawk, Swallow-tailed Hawk, Snake Hawk, Fish Hawk, Elanoides forficatus, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz [Mystery bird] Swallow-tailed Kite, also known by a bunch of other common names, such as the Fork-tailed Hawk, Swallow-tailed Hawk, Snake Hawk and Fish Hawk, Elanoides forficatus, photographed at Double Bayou Park, Chambers County, Anahuac, Texas. [I will identify this bird for you in 48 hours] Image: Joseph Kennedy, 26 June 2010 [larger view]. Nikon D200, Kowa 883 telescope with TSN-PZ camera eyepiece 1/400s f/8.0 at 1000.0mm iso400. Please…

The Tiger Next Door

tags: The Tiger Next Door, documentary, film, ethics, social commentary, exotic pets, wild animals, large cats, Dennis Hill, streaming video This interesting video is a trailer for a documentary, "The Tiger Next Door," the story of a man named Dennis Hill who has been breeding and selling tigers from his backyard for over 15 years. Hill's dream is to breed a stripeless white tiger -- but at what cost to the animals, and at what risk to the community? As the film begins, Hill has 24 tigers, 3 bears, 6 leopards and one cougar. But after a surprise government inspection, he loses the license…

Care for Some Crude With Your Sushi?

tags: Care for Some Crude With Your Sushi?, toro sushi, maguro sushi, Atlantic Bluefin Tuna, Thunnus thynnus, Gulf of Mexico, pollution, oil spill, Deepwater Horizon, BP, British Petroleum, overfishing, endangered species, conservation, marine biology, streaming video The Gulf of Mexico oil spill is the worst environmental disaster the US has faced. Toxic oil from the Deepwater Horizon well threatens the region's sensitive shorelines and the nesting birds along the Louisiana coast. But there's another species at serious risk: the Atlantic bluefin tuna, Thunnus thynnus. This disturbing video…