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Hayseed Dixie

Bluegrass music is rootsy acoustic proto-country. 70s heavy metal is bluesy electrified hard rock. Imagine what classic heavy metal songs would sound like if played by a bluegrass band -- banjo, fiddle, mandolin, bass... Imagine that. Imagine Hayseed Dixie! This US quartet has released nine albums in the past eight years. The first one was all AC/DC covers -- thus the name Hayseed Dixie. But they record a lot of their own material too, and they rock. Excellent stuff if you like bluegrass, or classic heavy metal, or both! On Sunday 6 April, at 19:00 hours, the Hayseed Dixie will perform at my…

The Journal of the North Atlantic

The Journal of the North Atlantic is a new on-line archaeology and environmental-history journal published in Maine. You can apply for a login and read it for free until the end of the year. So far, they have three papers up, and they offer some really cool stuff. One is an apparently nature-deterministic GIS study of Medieval property demarcation in the Reykholt area of Iceland where Snorri Sturluson lived. Another one explores the ethno-political situation in Medieval Greenland, where two different eskimo cultures coexisted with Norse settlers. My favourite is an unbelievably exotic paper…

Orsten fossils

Bredocaris admirabilis Ooooh, there's a gorgeous gallery of Orsten fossils online. These are some very pretty SEMs of tiny Cambrian animals, preserved in a kind of rock called Orsten, or stinkstone (apparently, the high sulfur content of the rock makes it smell awful). What are Orsten fossils? Orsten fossils in the strict sense are spectacular minute secondarily phosphatised (apatitic) fossils, among them many Crustacea of different evolutionary levels, but also other arthropods and nemathelminths. The largest fragments we have do not exceed two mm. Orsten-type fossils, on the other hand,…

The Purpling of Blogdom

Williams has long held a dominant position in a number of categories of blogging: Dan Drezner on economics and politics, Marc Lynch on the Middle East, Ethan Zuckerman on the developing world and really cool conferences, Derek Catsam on history and Red Sox fandom, yours truly on canine physics. And I'm sure I'm forgetting several people. The number of blogging fields with prominent Eph contributions has increased this week, with the entire Williams math department making the jump into blogging. It's a bold move, but math blogging has always been more respectable than other types. At this…

Nomadic Mushroom-Eating Ants

Euprenolepis procera (photo by Witte and Maschwitz) This is cool. A new paper by Volker Witte and Ulrich Maschwitz details a previously unknown behavior for ants: nomadic fungivory.  Here's the cite and the abstract: Witte, V. and U. Maschwitz. 2008. Mushroom harvesting ants in the topical rain forest. Naturwissenschaften, online early. Abstract: Ants belong to the most important groups of arthropods, inhabiting and commonly dominating most terrestrial habitats, especially tropical rainforests. Their highly collective behavior enables exploitation of various resources and is viewed as a key…

Something to make Bora smile

Awhile back, I was given a PLoS T-shirt by Bora Zivkovic, science blogger extraordinaire and online community manager for PLoS-ONE, the flagship journal of the Public Library of Science. Every time I wear the dang thing, someone says something to me about the Open Access journal movement. Of course, I live in a rather science-dense town so I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I guess I'm just surprised at the kinds of comments I get. Yesterday I took a brief jaunt to our local indy bookstore. To get some ideas for my Tar Heel Tavern post for this weekend (submit your entries!!!), I was…

NY Times Ends Pay for Premium Content

This e-mail just came in overnight - a great move by the New York Times: Dear TimesSelect Subscriber, We are ending TimesSelect, effective today. The Times's Op-Ed and news columns are now available to everyone free of charge, along with Times File and News Tracker. In addition, The New York Times online Archive is now free back to 1987 for all of our readers. Why the change? Since we launched TimesSelect, the Web has evolved into an increasingly open environment. Readers find more news in a greater number of places and interact with it in more meaningful ways. This decision enhances the free…

City birds struggle to make themselves heard

My first ever feature article has just been published in this week's issue of New Scientist. It's about the ways in which songbirds are coping with the noisy din of cities. Low-frequency urban noises mask the calls that they use to attract mates, defend territories and compete with rivals. The race to adapt to this new soundscape has already seen some losers being forced out and some winners developing some intriguing strategies to cope with the clamour. Robins have started to sing at night when it's quieter, while nightingales just belt out their tunes more loudly (breaking noise safety…

Love and Marriage and Wind

This Saturday I'm getting married! The following week I'll be in Barbados relaxing on my honeymoon. While Barbados is a highly developed Caribbean economy with no shortage of internet access, in the interests of relaxation and matrimonial bliss I shall not be online. Posting will resume the following week. Until then, I'll leave you with this Wired article about a wind-powered car that travels directly downwind faster than the wind. When I first read the idea, I thought "No, that's an obvious violation of the laws of nature and everyone involved is an idiot." Well, the proof is in the pudding…

D-Wave Talk

So did anyone at MIT go to this talk and care to comment: Mohammad Amin (D-Wave) Adiabatic Quantum Computation with Noisy Qubits Adiabatic quantum computation (AQC) is an attractive model of quantum computation as it may naturally possess some degree of fault tolerance. Nonetheless, any practical quantum circuit is noisy and one must answer important questions regarding what level of noise can be tolerated. Gate model quantum computation relies on three important quantum resources: superposition, entanglement, and phase coherence. In this presentation, I will discuss the role of these three…

Two Essays on Expelled, Dawkins, and PZ

Two essays I wrote on Expelled are now in print and I have placed PDFs of the articles online. The first shorter essay appears at Skeptical Inquirer magazine and reviews the impact of the film at the state level, as it has shaped local news coverage and the legislative agenda. I conclude that as a strategic communication campaign, the film's impact has been greatly underestimated. The second longer essay appears at the Kean Review, a new arts and ideas journal sold at Barnes & Noble and other larger bookstores. In this essay I review the impact of the film but also anchor Expelled in the…

Where 'Thin Means AIDS' African Women Become Obese

Note: ScienceBlogs has been following the 16th Annual AIDS Conference, with a special temporary blog reporting on the goings-on. I encourage you to all check it out. ------------- As more and more women are acquiring AIDS in South Africa, a new trend is emerging: in order to not look HIV positive, women are becoming obese in large numbers. According to the Independent Online, half of all women in South Africa are overweight, and almost one-third are severely overweight. More than 5 million of South Africa's 45 million people are infected with HIV/AIDS, and the cultural perception is that if a…

Heading to ICPAPH!

This week I will be heading to the International Congress on Physical Activity and Public Health in Toronto, Ontario.  It should be a terrific conference - the program includes presentations by friends of Obesity Panacea including Drs Jen Kuk and Meghann Lloyd, not to mention other internationally renowned physical activity researchers like Steve Blair, Peter Katzmarzyk and Neville Owen.  There will also be a large number of oral and poster presentations on a variety of topics by my own lab group, including my own poster ("Relationship between daily steps and clustered cardiometabolic risk…

Pink Is For Boys, Blue Is For Girls

A wonderful blog, FairerScience.org, has brought us this delightful piece on our innate biological womanliness. ...last winter, the Times Online published an editorial by Anjana Ahuja suggesting that little girls' preference for "pink fluff" is a biologically determined feature of girlhood. Perhaps Ahuja is not aware that this premise is not universally supported: There has been a great diversity of opinion on the subject, but the generally accepted rule is pink for the boy and blue for the girl. The reason is that pink being a more decided and stronger color is more suitable for the boy…

Silence of the Bees

You may have heard that honeybees in this country are dying off. You may know that scientists have called this epidemic "CCD," or colony collapse disorder, where honeybees seem to lose the ability to find the hive again, and disappear forever. Scientists think CCD may be caused by a virus, or a combination of other factors, such as the presence of pesticides or the poor nutrition and high antibiotic use of commercial bee populations. There are other theories too. Nature on PBS reports that, if the rate of collapse continues, all honeybee populations in the US will die out by 2035. But did…

Silly me, I clearly misread you... didn't I?

I'm going through the training that Purdue requires before I submit any research protocols to the Institutional Review Board. It's good to care about your faculty doing ethical research, but I confess it is taking FOREVER. So I'm reading the part on the problems with peer review, and I come across this chestnut: Gender bias may occur in reviewing. Okay, so far so good, I think. Maybe this is an enlightened group of folks writing this who are aware of the research that says that reviewers are biased against manuscripts authored by people with identifiably female names. I continue to read…

Minnow at the Science Blogging Conference

Minnow's big adventure this weekend was attending the 2nd Annual NC Science Blogging Conference (and staying with one of my college roomies). In the morning she went to the discussion on ethics in science blogging, lead by the incomparable Janet Stemwedel. Afterwards she had a little bonus discussion. Then Minnow participated in a panel on Gender and Race in Science: Online and Offline, moderated by the excellent Zuska. Other panel participants were Karen Ventii of Science to Life and Pat Campbell of Fairer Science. After a great box lunch, Minnow went to Dave Munger's session on Building…

What's Your Internet Importance? (Your QDos Number)

There's a new way to gauge your importance on the 'Net, a little app in beta stage called QDOS. The forumula used to compile your QDOS number (which made me think of Erdos number) is a propriatary blend of Myspace, Facebook, activity, searches, popularity, blogging, online buying, chatting, and more. "We're trying to find a way for the consumer to take ownership of their digital status," said Tom Ilobe, chief executive of Garlik (as in, "powerful stuff," one of its mottoes). "Businesses are doing it pretty well, but the consumer is in danger of being left out of the game. Their information is…

Video Game Addiction Study and Survey

A few months back I wrote a post on the topic of the psychology video game addiction, and today was contacted by a student who trying to study video game addiction in efforts of finding an effective treatment. A survey-based study being conducted by a Southern California university is now seeking anonymous participants to take the 4 minute online survey. This study is sponsored by The Center for Survey Research at an anonymous private university in Southern California. The results will be used to help understand how video game addiction affects the lives and family members of those who are…

The Anecdote of the Murdered Book, continued

Following up on last month's buzz about the Internet killing literacy, this NYT article baldly states, Clearly, reading in print and on the Internet are different. On paper, text has a predetermined beginning, middle and end, where readers focus for a sustained period on one author's vision. On the Internet, readers skate through cyberspace at will and, in effect, compose their own beginnings, middles and ends. Yes, internet reading is nonlinear. Yes, it may be tied to some disturbing trends in youth literacy (the article cites the same National Endowment for the Arts data and Atlantic…

March Madness Links: A Contest, Cabinets, Carl and CSPAN

--A great NYT article on science museums and cabinets of curiosities: This antic miscellany is dizzying. But there are lineaments of sustained conflict in the apparent chaos. Over the last two generations, the science museum has become a place where politics, history and sociology often crowd out physics and the hard sciences. There are museums that believe their mission is to inspire political action, and others that seek to inspire nascent scientists; there are even fundamental disagreements on how humanity itself is to be regarded. The experimentation may be a sign of the science museum's…

Can the Internet be used to treat physiological disorders?

Apparently. In particular, this approach was tried with GAD (Generalized Anxiety Disorder). A current study in PLoS investigated whether iCBT (Internet-based cognitive behavioral therapy) works when the process is guided by a clinician. The research was done in connection with the "VirtualClinic," self described as " ... the Internet-based Research Clinic that develops and evaluates free online education and treatment programs for people with anxiety and depression."*. The study involved 150 GAD participants, who were randomly assigned to three groups: "Clinician-assisted vs. technician-…

Complain to CBS: CBS resident anti-vaccine propagandist Sharyl Attkisson sucks up to anti-vaccine pseudoscientist Andrew Wakefield

Watch CBS News Videos Online A number of you sent me this link. It's to a video (above) of Sharyl Attkisson, CBS News' resident anti-vaccine propagandist, putting on a nauseating display of sucking up to Andrew Wakefield over his recent monkey study, the one that I deconstructed yesterday to show it for the lousy science that it is. Attkisson is a true believer. She's done this sort of thing before, occasionally to unintentionally hilarious effect; she's especially enamored of writing hit pieces on Paul Offit. Even worse, Attkisson is in bed with Generation Rescue and Age of Autism,…

Do the survey dude....

ScienceBlogs wants your help... and is willing to pay. Well sorta... they're giving away some ipod type goodies to some people who complete a short survey. Here's the schtick: Dear Reader, We launched Seed and ScienceBlogs because we believe that science can change the world and science literacy is how we get there. In the pages of our magazine we've tried to capture the ideas and issues fueling this cultural shift. Online we've aimed to foster a lively and spirited conversation about where it's all heading. Now, we invite you to share with us directly your perspective on the state of…

Congratulations, Its a Blog!

Welcome to the birth of a new blog, with Steve and I as the happy and glowing parents! Despite the labor pains and the fears that it wouldn't be perfectly normal, we've decided to love it anyway and do our best to raise it into a healthy, dysfucntional adult. The idea for "Of Two Minds" began when Steve and I went out drinking in Lexington, Kentucky right after the holidays last year. I was bemoaning the amount of time I spent blogging, and Steve had just lost Sandra as a coblogger, so the merger seemed to make sense. Despite being a bit tipsy that night, the idea of a 'superblog' withstood…

Health Care Reform: It's a Matter of Convenience

I recently had the pleasure of writing an op-ed piece about health care reform for my hometown newspaper, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and it ran in the paper today. You can check it out online here. I grew up reading the Star-Telegram, so this was an exciting opportunity. My article discusses the need for robust health care reform in the form of a strong public option, comparing and contrasting my health care experiences in the US and the UK to build my case. For regular readers of my blog, you will note that this is a theme I have often explored. I would have preferred that the Star-…

In the Wake of Science Online (#scio11): Using Prezi

The first proper session I attended at Science Online was I-wish-my-science-teachers-had-been-like Stacy Baker's workshop on Prezi. Despite some issues with the hotel wifi, it was a fantastic session, and I learned quite a bit. Clearly, there are some things better suited to Keynote/Powerpoint, and some presentations perhaps better suited to Prezi (just as they are still some types of presentations best suited to whiteboards or chalkboards). I think Prezi can be really effective for teaching part-whole relationships, and the zooming tool can be really useful for, for example, getting deeper…

PLoS Takes On Science and Nature... and Blogs All About It!

Via Evolving Thoughts comes news that the Public Library of Science (PLoS) is starting a series of blogs to promote its recently announced interdisciplinary PLoS ONE journal. PLoS publishes several prestigious open access scientific journals and is now taking things a step further with a new journal that will, among other things, "empower the scientific community to engage in a discussion on every paper and provide readers with tools to annotate and comment on papers directly." In the stuffy culture of science publishing, this is a pretty big deal. Although PLoS ONE won't use open peer…

A Theory Worth Sharing

Those of you who have been following this blog since the beginning will already have heard about Rutgers Anthropologist Helen Fisher's theory that SSRI's are endangering people's ability to fall in love and stay in love. If you have, the title of the the article I just wrote for Psychology Today online will be familiar: Sex Love, and SSRIs, but this piece delves into the issue far more deeply than my previous posting. I hope you'll take the time to read it. While no long term studies have yet confirmed Fisher's theory, there's enough evidence to warrant further inquiry. Everything we know…

Update on Gender Knot Post Due Today

I promised you the first post on The Gender Knot today, and I still plan to get it up today if at all possible. My plan had been to work on it Monday and Tuesday but most of those days I was plagued with headache and it was difficult to concentrate on writing. So, it's not done yet. Please note Chapter 1 is available online here. In the meantime, perhaps you'd like to listen to fellow Scienceblogger Pal MD's latest Palcast, The Kitchen Edition, which relates to my post On Being A Patient. Or maybe you'd like to read this post by Sheril Kirshenbaum at The Intersection and just puke, puke…

Finding "cousins" through personal genomics

The odds of knowing your cousins: 23andme Part 1: Bizarrely, Jonathan Zittrain turns out to be my cousin -- which is odd because I have known him for some time and he is also very active in the online civil rights world. How we came to learn this will be the first of my postings on the future of DNA sequencing and the company 23andMe. Just read the whole thing. This is really a matter of the humanities, not science. Specifically, the almost mystical significance people seem to put into the finding that they share genetic ancestry with people, even people who they knew and were friendly with…

A presidential debate about science

A bunch of bloggers and some other fancy folks have gotten together to endorse a simple request: Given the many urgent scientific and technological challenges facing America and the rest of the world, the increasing need for accurate scientific information in political decision making, and the vital role scientific innovation plays in spurring economic growth and competitiveness, we, the undersigned, call for a public debate in which the U.S. presidential candidates share their views on the issues of The Environment, Medicine and Health, and Science and Technology Policy. The hope is for a…

Why didn't I see that before? (World Cup edition)

I've always liked soccer balls -- and not just because you can play soccer with them. The arrangement of pentagons and hexagons to form a surfaces that's reasonable spherical always seemed outstandingly clever. Who was the genius who first realized you could do that? Well, my world has been rocked. I still think the soccer ball is clever, but in and entirely different kind of way. Tonight I was flipping through the copy of American Scientist that arrived with today's mail, looking at the pictures*, and I came across this article on the topology (and combinatorics) of soccer balls. (The…

Mind Hacks

Over at Mind Hacks, Vaughan has generously allowed me to answer a few of his excellent questions. Check it out. Q: You seem to mostly focus on past artists but jokingly mentioned in a recent interview that maybe your next book will be called 'Kanye West was a neuroscientist'. Are there contemporary artists that you value as potentially inspiring progress in the brain sciences? A: There are some obvious candidates, like Richard Powers and Ian McEwan, who have written wonderful novels about modern neuroscience. (See, for example, Galatea 2.2 or Saturday or The Echo Maker.) But I don't think it…

An Atypical Night of Poker

Went to Soaring Eagle last night to play some poker for the first time since they reopened the poker room. I arrived about 4, but there were already fairly substantial lists going for most of the games. I put myself on the lists for 3/6 and 6/12 holdem and went to the buffet for some dinner. Came back in perfect time to get called for a 3/6 game, but was still well down the list for 6/12. I buy a rack of chips and as I'm walking to the table I hear my name. I turn around to see an old friend of mine that I haven't seen in probably a decade sitting in a 10/20 game. I've known Will since he was…

Modeling antiviral resistance, II: a modeling paper

[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post.] In this post we start to dig into a mathematical model of antiviral resistance in influenza. The modern era of mathematical modeling started early in the last century with attempts to understand malaria spread, almost exactly 100 years ago. For the first 50 of those years scientists used pure…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Julie Kelsey

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009. Today, I asked Julie Kelsey to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? My name is Julie Bloss Kelsey. I am a full-time stay-at-home mom and a part-time freelance writer with a…

New DOT policy promises better health and safety protections for flight attendants

[Updated 1/5/2013] [Updated 8/25/2013] The world's largest labor organization for airline flight attendants--- the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA) ---says it took four decades of work, but now its members working in airplane cabins will finally have rights and protections provided by federal OSHA.   In an on-line letter to members, the AFA-CWA calls the victory: "OSHA extended to our cabins." For decades AFA has pursued legal and regulatory solutions to extend OSHA safety and health protections to workers in the airline industry.  The roadblocks have been enormous, but our union…

Announcing the Schrödinger Sessions: Science for Science Fiction

A few years back, I became aware of Mike Brotherton's Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop, and said "somebody should do this for quantum physics." At the time, I wasn't in a position to do that, but in the interim, the APS Outreach program launched the Public Outreach and Informing the Public Grant program, providing smallish grants for new public outreach efforts. So, because I apparently don't have enough on my plate as it is, I floated the idea with Steve Rolston at Maryland (my immediate supervisor when I was a grad student), who liked it, and we put together a proposal with their Director of…

Editorializing Mike S. Adams

Well, I thought I was done with Mike S. Adams, but I keep getting sucked back in. I was asked by the University Register, our weekly campus newspaper, to submit an editorial on Adams' talk last week. "Sure," I said, and whipped out eleven hundred words. You can read them in situ in the online edition of the Register, or you can look below the fold. Talk by Mike S. Adams lacked that certain je ne sais quois I attended part of Mike S. Adams' talk last Thursday. I have to say that I was very disappointed. He spent on hour telling us about his victimhood—that he has been continually oppressed by…

Using our powers for good - how web security software can help to transcribe old books

What would you do if someone asked you to help transcribe an old book onto a website? Chances are, you'd say no on the basis that you have other things to do, or simply that it just doesn't sound very interesting. And yet, millions of people every day are helping with precisely this task, and most are completely unaware that they're helping out. It's all thanks to a computer program developing by Luis von Ahn and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University. Their goal was to slightly alter a simple task that all web users encounter and convert it from wasted time into something productive. That…

Is the Man Flu a Reality?

We all get sick. Young or old, male or female, everyone gets sick at some point in their lives. But only some are susceptible to a specialized disease known as the "Man Flu," which somehow causes men to think they have the flu when, in fact, they have only a little cold. Where did the idea of a Man Flu come from? It's origins are uncertain. In general, a lot of people tend to think they're worse off than they really are when they're sick - a poll by Panadol Cold and Flu, for example, found that 61% of people who went to pharmacists claiming to have the flu didn't. Somewhere along the line,…

Browsing through the Philosophical Transactions on species and generation

One of the major events in the history of science was the foundation of a number of published communications, so that the results of observation and research could be relatively quickly shared amongst scholars, and one of the first of these was the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, which institution was founded in part by my illustrious namesake, Bp John Wilkins. Although the actual publications are online only in JStor, to which a subscription is required, the Philosophical Transactions were republished by the Royal Society in the early 1800s, and they are online…

Periodic Table of the ScienceBlogs, Part 6: Blogs G-I

Gene Expression Categories: Biology, Philosophy of Science Razib has a degree in the life sciences and works in information technology, but he also nurses a strong interest in evolutionary genetics and paleoanthropology. Gene Expression deals primarily with the intersection between new developments in molecular and evolutionary biology, and older established fields such as systematics and paleoanthropology. In person, Razib is an 'adult kid' who doesn't plan on growing up any time soon, and his non-science interests span from ancient Chinese history to science fiction. Good Math, Bad Math…

Role Models in Science & Engineering Achievement: Gregorio Zara

Gregorio Zara -- Filipino physicist and aeronautical engineer Creator of the first videophone ( a forerunner of such video telecommunication applications as Skype, Webcam and videoconferencing) and discoverer of the physical law known as the "Zara Effect." PLEASE SHARE IF YOU ARE INSPIRED BY THIS STORY! Back in the 1950's, the videophone -- a telephone device that allows you to see the individual you are speaking with in real (or near-real) time -- was a mere dream of science fiction.  But physicist and aeronautical engineer Gregorio Zara, one of the Philippines' most celebrated inventors,…

90 days and counting for Labor Department rule to prevent black lung disease

This week will mark the 90-day point of the Labor Department submitting for White House review one of its top priority regulations to protect coal miners' health. It's a rule to prevent black lung disease. The director of the office that conducts those reviews, Howard Shelanski, promised earlier this year during his confirmation hearing that timely review of agencies' regulations would be a top priority. Mr. Shelanski said: “I absolutely share the concern you just raised about timeliness. ...I recognized that EO 12866 establishes the initial 90 day review process, and it would be one of my…

Fall Gardening Class Starting Up!

Just to let you know, I'm starting another class this week - this one helping people get started with fall gardening and season extension. If you are like most folks, you probably start out enthusiastic about your garden, but around the middle of the summer, you get focused on harvesting, or overwhelmed by the heat and the weeds and let the cool season garden peter out. That's a mistake, because with very simple and cheap methods of season extension and a little attention right about now (for those as northerly as me, a bit later for folks south of me in this hemisphere), you can be…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Bird Song Discoveries May Lead To Refinement Of Darwinian Theory: For Williams College biology professor Heather Williams, the songs birds sing are more than a pleasant part of a spring day. They are a window into how communication works in the natural world. A birdsong is more than just an encapsulated package of information, it is "a behavior frozen in time." One of her projects is to record and map out the songs of Savannah sparrows that spend the warmer months on a small Canadian island, Kent Island, in the Bay of Fundy. With the help of microphones, binoculars, and a well-documented set…

My Picks From ScienceDaily

Secret Of The Sweet-Sounding Stradivarius: Wood Density Explains Sound Quality Of Great Master Violins: The advantage of using medical equipment to study classical musical instruments has been proven by a Dutch researcher from the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC). In collaboration with a renowned luthier, Dr. Berend Stoel put classical violins, including several made by Stradivarius, in a CT scanner. The homogeneity in the densities of the wood from which the classical violins are made, in marked contrast to the modern violins studied, may very well explain their superior sound…

"Unlicensed Acupuncturist intentionally infects patients with HIV" Wait, what?

This story has been making the rounds online-- Unlicensed Acupuncturist intentionally infects patients with HIV Unlicensed Acupuncturist Charged In 16 HIV Infections In Switzerland Swiss acupuncturist charged in 16 HIV infections Swiss "healer" accused of intentionally infecting 16 people with HIV using acupuncture needles -- I only have the details you all can see there. Im not exactly sure what to make of this. Long-time readers of ERV might expect me to do a post on how a psychotic woo-meister used his powers of woo to kill people, the trust people put into woo-ers who are uneducated…