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Great Blog Discovered

I just found another great blog through a link from somewhere, Opinionistas. This is the blog of a 27 year old associate at a Manhattan law firm. Well, former associate because she just quit her job to write full time after her blog became a huge hit (a million hits in 9 months) and got a ton of media attention. This is really good writing and the stories she tells will look recognizable to anyone who has worked in a law firm (I haven't, but have enough friends who have to know the archetypes by heart). Most of the writing revolves around the absurdities of life at the law firm, sprinkled in…

7 Questions with... Zen Faulkes

Here at Thoughtful Animal headquarters, we are conducting series of seven-question interviews with people who are doing or have done animal research of all kinds - biomedical, behavioral, cognitive, and so forth. Interested in how animal research is conducted, or why animal research is important? Think you might want to do some animal research of your own someday? This is the interview series for you. Dr. Zen Faulkes (website, twitter) is Associate Professor of Biology at the University of Texas-Pan American, where he studies the evolution of behavior and nervous systems, particularly the…

A board certification in "integrating" quackery and pseudoscience with real medicine

It's hard to believe that it's been nearly two years since I first noticed that a board certification in quackery was in the works and appeared to be nearly ready to go. I'm referring, of course, to Andrew Weil's effort to create a board certification in so-called "integrative medicine," better known to those of us on the science-based side of medicine as integrating quackery and pseudoscience with real medicine. Since it's been so long since I last addressed this issue, it's probably worth a brief recap. Basically, back in 2011, Andrew Weil and his Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine (…

Firing Ward Churchill

Remember Ward Churchill? He's the apparenty-soon-to-be-former University of Colorado academic who stirred up controversy when he referred to 9-11 victims as "little Eichmanns" in a 2001 essay. Today, the UC Boulder Interim Chancellor announced that the university, following a very lengthy investigation, intends to fire Churchill for cause. (Hat tip: No Se Nada) Back in 2005, when the whole Churchill affair was big news, I wrote a letter to the campus paper explaining why I disagreed with the decision a number of university groups had made to bring him out to UH as a speaker. That was in my…

"Plausibility bias"? Try "reality bias" when it comes to clinical trials.

Last week, I pointed out that, when referring to a therapy and considering whether it should be tested in clinical trials, plausibility does not mean knowing the mechanism. Today, I intend to elaborate a bit on that. As my jumping-off point, I couldn't ask for anything better (if you can call it that) than an article by homeopaths published last week online in Medicine, Health Care, and Philosophy entitled Plausibility and evidence: the case of homeopathy. You'll get an idea of what it is that affected Orac like the proverbial matador waving his cape in front of a bull by reading this brief…

Birds in the News 83 (v3n10): International Migratory Bird Day

Rock Wren, Salpinctes obsoletus. (spring song). The photographer writes; [This bird] was scurrying along a wall covered with petroglyphs on the NE side of Chaco Canyon. Perky and hardy little birds, and definitely emblematic of the desert Southwest. Image: Dave Rintoul, KSU. Birds in Science A study of European robins in Sheffield, England, suggests that it is noise, not light, that drives birds to sing at night. The study, by Richard A. Fuller and colleagues at the University of Sheffield, measured noise levels and singing at 67 sites around the city, where on average ambient noise was an…

Comments of the Week #3: From the Beginning to Today

"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." -T.S. Eliot It's been a remarkably exciting week for science, and you've had a lot to say about our new articles at the main Starts With A Bang blog. After all, it isn't every week that we possibly discover the imprint of gravitational waves on the Cosmic Microwave Background! Images credit: Seljak & Zaldarriaga (L), Wayne Hu (R), via http://cosmology.berkeley.edu/~yuki/CMBpol/CMBpol.htm. Let's dive right in -- and respond -- to your comments…

Fantasy Football Draft Report

Last night was draft night for a fantasy football league that I've joined for the first time. My brother has been in this league for several years and they decided to expand this year, so I finally got a spot in it. About half the people in the league I knew socially before the draft, and the other half I didn't know at all or only by appearance, so while I was the new guy, I wasn't completely unknown. As one of the guys I knew fairly well in the group said when I walked in, "The smartass quotient just went up. And whatever you do, don't play poker with this guy." This is gonna be fun. There…

Is "Blacks have excellent rhythm" a racist thing to say?

Well, yes. But the question raises some interesting points. Does a person endorse near slavery, horrific working conditions, the purchase of moral "indulgences" by the privileged, and the manipulation of the population with religious woo-woo when appreciating the architecture of a medieval European cathedral? Because that bad stuff is what happened to make that cathedral exist. If you visit the Sistine Chapel or Notre Dame in Paris you endorse all that is connected to the creation of these edifices. You might as well have personally carried out the inquisition! Especially if you pay to…

Plumbing the depth of quackery at HuffPo

One of the questions addressed in this space is, "what makes a particular condition susceptible to quackery?"  Some of the common features we've seen over time are: Diverse and protean symptoms: fatigue, "brain fog", diffuse pain, and other vague symptoms are often used as diagnostic criteria for controversial entities such as morgellons and chronic Lyme disease. Lack of diagnostic certainty: there are no definitive tests to make the diagnosis of chronic Lyme disease or morgellons (or fibromyalgia for that matter) making objective diagnosis difficult.  Children affected: autism affects…

I wonder if Donald Trump even knows who this guy is.

One mean spirited decision intended to end the effort to end slavery led to one million dead and the end of slavery anyway. I spent some time this weekend comparing prosecutors and other legal eagles, who were all hoping to get the job of Attorney General. They were Candidates General, I guess. Trump was mentioned, and somewhere along the line, Dred Scott was mentioned as well. I turned to a highly placed official sort of dude and said, "Did you know that Dred Scott lived in Minnesota?" He did not know that. So I asked a couple of other people if they knew, and they did not. Finally I…

LungMutiny2010 continues: reflections on chronic illnesses

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about being stricken with pneumonia and my reflections on what it must be like for people who live continually with chronic illnesses. I was surprised by the response from many readers, quite a few of whom I've never seen comment here, who voiced understanding and even relief that a "normal" would take the time to reflect on what their life might be like. Well, my illness is continuing even longer than my pulmonologist had expected and this has evoked for me a whole new layer of emotions. I write the following not for sympathy or concern, but rather for the…

What's wrong with Steve Jobs?

Regular readers of this blog know that I'm an Apple geek. The Macintosh is my preferred axe and has been, with few interruptions, since the late 1980s. Indeed, the only time I've used anything other than a Mac is when I've had no choice. The first time I saw one was in 1984, not long after the original Mac was released. My roommate somehow managed to come up with the money to buy one through the University of Michigan towards the end of my senior year. I really liked it right from the start but only got to play with it occasionally for a few months. After I graduated, I didn't even own a…

Pretend that ghosts don't exist

A week ago I interviewed cogntive psychologist Justin L. Barrett. Dr. Barrett studies religion as a natural phenomenon, and I asked about the nature of individuals who are atheists. He responded: As self-proclaimed atheist Jesse Bering has observed it can be very hard to identify true atheists. He even suspects that they comprise a very tiny number of people. By true atheists, I mean people that consistently hold no belief (cognitive commitment that motivates behavior) in superhuman agency. Lots of people say they don't believe in superhuman agency (including gods and ghosts) but will…

This week in swine flu vaccines

There's been a great deal in the news regarding the first reports on the swine flu vaccine trials, so we didn't feel the need to be the first off the mark for something you could read anywhere (and everywhere). We still don't have much to add, but since there was intense discussion and debate about vaccines here this week we thought it appropriate to take a look again now that there are some actual data to see if it changes things for us or not. The short answer (but typical for us) is: yes and no. First, let's review what we think we know at this point (this is big picture; we might have…

Blood on Our Hands: Dealing Ethically With the Problems of Husbandry

One of the roles our farm has, rather unintentionally, taken on is as sanctuary (mostly temporary) for the unwanted roosters of friends and loved ones. First, there was Cora, who turned out to be Corey - and not permissable under town regulations. My step-mother relocated him here and found Eunice, a hen, and Corey lived a happy life on our farm for about a year, until he got aggressive and started attacking my children. After he jumped Asher, then two, as Asher puts (still with some satisfaction), "We ate Corey." There are far too many gentle animals in the world you can't keep to hold…

Weekend Diversion: Science Book Reviews for the Holidays

"A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting." -Henry David Thoreau Every day that we have free or leisure time, there's this great conflict as to how we spend it: working to better ourselves and improve our knowledge, and taking the time to enjoy our lives in whatever way we see fit. Sometimes, this goes horribly awry, as the B-52s would attest in their (relatively) new song, Funplex. But there's often no better way to combine these two pursuits than by reading a good book.…

After all this time, Dr. Bob Sears finally tips his hand on vaccines, part IV

As hard as it is to believe, there was once a time when I (sort of) gave "Dr. Bob" Sears the benefit of the doubt. You remember Dr. Bob, don't you? Son of the famous pediatrician Dr. William Sears, who was best known for his "Sears Parenting Library" and is a not infrequent guest on TV, where he goes by the name of "Dr. Bill." Like his father, Bob Sears, likes to do the "Dr. First Name" thing and calls himself "Dr. Bob." (What is it with pediatricians and this annoying affectation?) Along with his wife Martha Sears, RN, Dr. Bill is known as a major proponent of "attachment parenting."…

All drugs are poisons, and that's OK

There are a number of aphorisms that one imbibes over many years of medical education, especially in medical school. Some are useful; some are not; but some stick with you for reasons that even you can't figure out. For example, I still remember my first day of medical school over 30 (!) years ago. It started with an introductory session beginning at 8 AM that lasted about an hour, an "orientation," if you will, after which classes began as normal. During this orientation, members of the medical school leadership, such as deans and the chairs of certain major departments, got a chance to…

Clocks in Bacteria II: Adaptive Function of Clocks in Cyanobacteria

Second post in a series of five (from April 05, 2006): In the previous two posts, here and here, I have mentioned how the discovery of circadian clocks in Cyanobacteria changed the way we think about the origin and evolution of circadian clocks. Quite soon after the initial discovery, the team from Carl Johnson's laboratory published two papers [1,2] describing a more direct test of adaptive function of circadian clocks in the Synechococcus elongatus. Wild-type and various clock-mutants in Synechoccocus, when raised in isolation in light-dark cycles, have comparable reproductive rates.…

Clocks in Bacteria II: Adaptive Function of Clocks in Cyanobacteria

Second post in a series of five (from April 05, 2006): In the previous two posts, here and here, I have mentioned how the discovery of circadian clocks in Cyanobacteria changed the way we think about the origin and evolution of circadian clocks. Quite soon after the initial discovery, the team from Carl Johnson's laboratory published two papers [1,2] describing a more direct test of adaptive function of circadian clocks in the Synechococcus elongatus. Wild-type and various clock-mutants in Synechoccocus, when raised in isolation in light-dark cycles, have comparable reproductive rates.…

What's So Interesting About AMO Physics?

That's the title of my slightly insane talk at the DAMOP (Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics of the American Physical Society) conference a couple of weeks ago, summarizing current topics of interest in Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics. I'll re-embed the slides at the end of this post, for anyone who missed my earlier discussion. I put a ton of work into that talk, and had a huge amount of material that I didn't have time to include. I'd hate for that to go to waste, so I'm going to repurpose it for blog content over the next week or so. It'll probably be about a half-…

Asking "why?" without the blame game

In my post yesterday about the shooting of Rep. Gabby Giffords, I tried hard not to say that Loughner's mass murder was caused by insanity, or by violent political rhetoric. We don't know anything about that, and we'll know more once he goes to trial. What we'll find at trial is surely that his actions had complex causes that are hard to untangle: that's the nature of most things people do. But we can still look for major causes, even if they can't explain all of his tragic decisions. Vaughan Bell has an important essay at Slate, making clear that "he did it because he's crazy" isn't…

The Framing Fracas

I really had intended for Tuesday's dog pictures to be my only comment on the recent framing debacle (well, Monday's expertise post was an oblique commentary on it, but nobody got that, which you can tell because the comments were civil and intelligent and interesting to read). But Chris Mooney is making a good-faith effort to clear things up with his current series, including an effort to define common ground, and he's getting absolutely pounded, for no good reason. I think Chris and Matt Nisbet have made some tactical errors in making their case to ScienceBlogs, chief among them forgetting…

Ethical use of student labor.

MommyProf wonders whether some of the goings on in her department are ethical. She presents two cases. I'm going to look at them in reverse order. Case 2: Faculty member is tenure-track and he and I have collaborated on a paper. He was supposed to work on the literature, and sends me a literature review. It reads a little strangely to me, and I check the properties and find that it was actually written by an undergraduate in one of his classes. I write back to him and ask if that undergrad should be an author on the paper, since it would be a fairly major contribution, and he says yes, he…

Darwin and the Voyage: 01 ~ Introduction

Of his time on the Beagle (1832 - 1836), Darwin wrote, "The voyage of the Beagle has been by far the most important event in my life and has determined my whole career." Of the manuscript describing that voyage, he wrote, "The success of this my first literary child always tickles my vanity more than that of any of my other books." An early version of "The Voyage."Taking a cue from these reflections, I'd like to spend some time with this book. To begin with, it is appropriate to clear up some potential confusion. Or if not clearing it up, perhaps creating it because you may not be aware of…

Yet another clean energy disinformation campaign

The flaws with Wednesday's anti-renewables op-ed in the New York Times begin with the headline and continue through just about every paragraph. On second thought, perhaps the problems begin with the decision of the New York Times to run "The Gas Is Greener" in the first place. But let's start with the headline. "The Gas is Greener" may seem like a clever double entendre, referring as it does to wishful thinking and the alleged merits of natural gas as a relatively clean source of energy. But it fails on both counts. First, the entire essay is predicated on the notion that environmentalists…

Hey, is the blog still here?

Tap, tap. Can you hear me? You sure? I heard that International Authorities were going to disappear me. If you hadn't heard that, you missed one of the most hilarious comment threads ever. After we made light of a pointless poll about the afterlife, various fans of that site were so horrified that many complaints were launched…and of course, the owner was so deeply committed to free speech that he simply deleted our contribution. One fellow was so indignant that he charged off to the Richard Dawkins forums to complain. He lists his grievances, and, boy, are you readers wicked people. You use…

Expelled comes to the NY Times' attention

And it's in an article by Cornelia Dean, one of their best science people. I have to single out this short summary of the argument as a good example of the right way to handle the "controversy". The growing furor over the movie, visible in blogs, on Web sites and in conversations among scientists, is the latest episode in the long-running conflict between science and advocates of intelligent design, who assert that the theory of evolution has obvious scientific flaws and that students should learn that intelligent design, a creationist idea, is an alternative approach. There is no credible…

Creating a culture of collegiality

So here I am in sunny and unsustainable Tempe, enjoying the warm weather and empty morning (the workshop I'm here to attend doesn't start until 1:30 local time). I spent this morning sleeping in (gasp!), chatting to my mom on iChat, calling a friend whose birthday it is (Hi, Sarah!), and -- even more shockingly -- beginning to read a new book. The book is called Rethinking Faculty Work: Higher Education's Strategic Imperative, by Judith Gappa, Ann Austin, and Andrea Trice. I don't know Gappa or Trice, but Ann Austin is a truly marvelous human being -- I know her through my grad work at the…

Sources, sources

Behold conservapedia, which calls itself "an online resource and meeting place where we favor Christianity and America"--and where we don't like Wikipedia at all. My fellow Sciencebloggers have been finding all sorts of factual troubles with the site over the past few days. I didn't think I had all that much to add, until I started entering a few basic science terms in the search engine and detected a certain pattern... Geology The study of the earth's history as revealed in the rocks that make up the earth.[1] 1. Wile, Dr. Jay L. Exploring Creation With General Science. Anderson:…

Still More Junk Talk: A Challenge to Readers, and A Challenge to Casey Luskin

It's another day, and Casey "The Energizer Bunny" Luskin is at it again, claiming that ID successfully predicted that "junk DNA" would be found to have a function. He has yet to explain how and why he believes that "Darwinism" somehow stifled research into those areas of the genome, and ignores the fact that scientists routinely use our understanding of evolution, common descent, and natural selection to identify areas of the genome to identify non-coding regions that are likely to have function. He does, however, provide us with an explanation for why he thinks that Intelligent Design…

Nature's report on open peer review

I was on the way out the door for a vacation when the journal Nature published its much-anticipated report on the results of its open peer review experiment, but I did want to offer a few comments on the report, even if I'm arriving to the discussion a bit late. Peer review, of course, is the gold standard for academic publishing. I believe one of the reasons for Cognitive Daily's success is our clear delineation between reports on peer-reviewed research and commentary on news items reported in the popular press (you can always click on the Just the Research tab above to see only reports on…

The "I.D." Code

The following missive was slipped over my transom in the dead of night. It reveals a dark secret, a clandestine society that has been working for years to hide their origins and true purpose. It begins with a murder and wends its way through a series of codes that are, as it turns out, reducible and simple, to reach a shocking conclusion. I know who the author is, but I'm not telling. I will say that it is not Dan Brown (fortunately!). The "I.D." Code: An Evolutionary Fantasy I. The sounds came in the middle of the night. At first I thought it was a drunken hotel guest stumbling in the…

Women and the ACA: Coverage, contraception, and disparities

Last week was National Women’s Health Week, and the Kaiser Family Foundation used the occasion to release the report Women and Health Care in the Early Years of the ACA: Key Findings from the 2013 Kaiser Women’s Health Survey, by Alina Salganicoff, Usha Ranji, Adara Beamesderfer, and Nisha Kurani. The telephone survey of 3,015 women ages 15 – 64 was conducted before the launch of the health-insurance exchanges and several states’ Medicaid expansions, but after several other key provisions of the Affordable Care Act took effect. Starting with plan years beginning after September 22, 2010,…

Meet the Milk

Note: Another new reader asked if I could say a little more about the goats. Here's more. If you were to come to visit right now, you wouldn't see The Milk Truck until you started to get out of your car. But the moment you opened your door, the little vacuum cleaners would stick their heads in, just to make sure there's no food on the floor. You see, at my house, there's always food on the floor. My children drip crumbs and leave apple cores, and the litte vacuum cleaners feel it is there job to clean up. But let's back up. The little vacuum cleaners are Tekiah (Tekky) and Arava. They…

OpenLab09 - submissions so far

Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 180 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes and the bookmarklet, are under the fold. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays): A Blog Around The Clock: On Being a Nurse- a guest post A Blog Around The Clock: Yes, Archaea also have circadian clocks! A Blog Around The Clock: Why social insects do not suffer from…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - the submissions so far

Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 170 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes and the bookmarklet, are under the fold. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays): A Blog Around The Clock: On Being a Nurse- a guest post A Blog Around The Clock: Yes, Archaea also have circadian clocks! A Blog Around The Clock: Why social insects do not suffer from…

STEM Kids Holiday Presents Ideas

I know a lot of you are looking for ideas for science-related children's presents for Christmas or whatever holiday you like to celebrate this time of year. I have a couple of ideas, and hopefully you will add some of your ideas below. Not everything that helps encourage the skills of scientific tinkering is found in a science kit, and I'll provide a few ideas for toys that do this. Also, some of the best science experiments are found by using things that don't come in kits, but by following the advice in books. So I'll suggest a few books as well. Purely science kits or tools are of…

The Truth About Our Political System

The charm of democracy, as HL Mencken noted so long ago, is that it is the only truly amusing form of government ever invented. Unlike Mencken, however, I can't feel only joy and mirth when watching how ridiculous our entire political system is. That great American democracy that we're always talking about amounts to this: Rich men (the candidates) sell themselves to Richer Men (CEOs and other corporate fatcats), promising to pass laws that will make them even richer and more powerful. The Richer Men, knowing a profitable relationship when they see it, promise to fund the efforts of the Rich…

How 'bout them Pistons?

As long time readers of this blog know, basketball is the one sport I really am crazy about, college basketball in particular. But over the last 2 weeks, I've been glued to the TV watching the Pistons do what everyone, including me, assumed was impossible - beat the Lakers for the NBA championship. At the beginning of the series, I predicted it would only go 5 games, but with the Lakers winning. It only went 5 games, alright, but the Pistons - improbably, miraculously - came out on top. And without a miracle shot from Kobe in game 2, it would have been a sweep! I don't know what the odds…

The Structural Links Between Infection and Depression

This is kind of a rambling rehash of an old href="http://corpus-callosum.blogspot.com/2004/03/multidrug-resistant-tb-lessons-about.html">post.  But it turns out to be topical now.  What is more it illustrates some interesting points about evolution: some obvious, others subtle.  One thing is shows very nicely is that once nature solves a problem, the same solution keeps cropping up in other places.   On March 16, 2004, the World Health Organization released a report on multidrug-resistant tuberculosis.  This is a serious problem, especially in the former Soviet states of eastern Europe…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: The pit and the pendulum, or: How I learned to stop worrying and love Kreskin

Believe it or not, it's been almost nine months since, almost on a whim, I first started this little indulgence of mine known as Your Friday Dose of Woo, with some truly fine woo known as quantum homeopathy. Before you know it, we'll be celebrating a full year of woo. (Yes, I know that woo is eternal, and my little project represents a mere grain of sand on all the beaches of, for instance, California. If I'm going to be overwhelmed with woo and unreason, though, I might as well have a few laughs along the way.) One thing I've noticed over these months is that there are definitely recurring…

Homage to The Velvet Claw (part II)

On to more of my thoughts about the TV series The Velvet Claw (part I is here). In the previous article, I discussed the art and animation used in the series, all of which was really quite good and very interesting in often featuring fairly obscure creatures... There's one really important thing I haven't yet mentioned about The Velvet Claw: the fact that both the book and the TV series was written by David Macdonald, director of the Wildlife Conservation Research University at Oxford University and very well known for his many, many publications on biology, ecology and conservation […

The Tet Zoo tour of Libya (part III): frasercots and Tripoli Zoo

By now you might have read my two previous articles (part I, part II) on the assorted tetrapods I encountered in Libya last month. Here's the third and final part in the series [image below shows chital at left, melanistic fallow top-centre, nilgai bottom-centre, blackbuck at right]. It's a bit unusual for a Tet Zoo article, as it contains a whole paragraph of boring travel-writing stuff, but I hope you can grit your teeth and get through this - the meat and potatoes on obscure subspecies and so on is delivered towards the end, I promise. So, without further ado... Having spent our time in…

The Imaginary Bugaboos of Conservative Judicial Rhetoric

Jay at STACLU has a post that is little more than a rote recitation of all the favorite conservative catchphrases about judicial nominations. It makes a good starting point for discussing the fact that the typical rhetoric we hear from conservatives on constitutional law references things that simply do not exist in any coherent manner. Here's a textbook example from his post of this imaginary rhetoric: Getting judges that have a originalist interpretation of the Constitution should be of major importance to Conservatives in today's world of judicial activism. And then, for some odd reason, a…

Another cell therapy quackery for autism rears its ugly head

Many are the forms of quackery to which autistic children are subjected to. It's amazing just how many dubious and dangerous treatments (dubbed "biomedical treatments" or "autism biomed") parents will try in an effort to "recover" their children. Perhaps the most shocking of this quackery that I've recently covered is something called "miracle mineral solution" (MMS), which is in reality nothing more than a powerful bleach. Parents make their autistic children drink diluted MMS, bathe in it, and even take bleach as an enema. They try to claim that what they are using is no more powerful than…

Seasons Change (Development on the Front Range, Part III)

Continued from: "Taming the Great American Desert" John Frank Church was born in the Wild West--a young cowboy on the Front Range. He used to help his Pa, George, with the harvest and driving cattle across the continental divide each spring to graze. The famous (or infamous, depending on your perspective) Buffalo Bill used to stop by the ranch to visit the family. President Grant and his daughter once spent the night, as well. Passengers on the Overland Stage Coach frequently dropped in on their way to Denver or Boulder. Frank's mother, Sarah, was always ready to greet the road-wearied…

Flightlessness in azhdarchids, marsupial brains and pelagic desmostylians: SVPCA 2010 (part II)

In the previous article on the 58th Symposium on Vertebrate Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy (SVPCA), held in Cambridge, UK, I discussed some of the work that was presented on stem-tetrapods and sauropods. This time round, we look at more Mesozoic stuff - pterosaurs in particular - before getting on to Cenozoic mammals. Steve Sweetman presented the first outing of a new miniscule maniraptoran theropod that he and I have been working on. When it gets published, nothing will ever be the same again (massive hyperbole fully intended: Steve's talk was more to do with salamanders, anurans…

New Research Shows Exceptional Slowdown In Major Atlantic Ocean Currents (UPDATED)

Climate scientists have noticed a disturbing pattern in the North Atlantic. This is the relative cooling of surface waters in the area fed by the Gulf Stream. This pattern has emerged over recent decades, and may portend very rapid and potentially disruptive climate change in the upcoming decades. The cooling is not subtle at all, and looks like this: Map based on NASA GISS data of warming 1901-2013 So what does this mean? A paper out just today describes, explains, and discusses this odd anomaly and its potential consequences. First, a bit of context. The Earth’s climate follows certain…