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Good and Bad News on Bush Administration and the Environment

First, the good news: A federal appeals court has struck down a 2006 EPA rule that prohibited state and local governments from strengthening efforts to monitor pollution from power plants, factories, and refineries. Under the Clean Air Act, state and local governments are tasked with issuing pollution permits to power plants, factories, and other polluters. Theyâre supposed to update their monitoring requirements with EPA guidance, but such guidance hasnât been forthcoming. When EPA proposed requiring that state and local governments improve their monitoring without that guidance, industry…

New Rolling Stones E-Book

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the Rolling Stones's first gig, at the Marquee Club in London. Journalist Hanspeter Kuenzler and Bavarian e-book publishers The eBook People GmbH celebrate the occasion with a massive illustrated two-volume biographical anthology in English on the band. Counting the pages in an e-book is of course difficult. But suffice to say that the first volume, that Aard has received for review, extends to 694 pages on my smartphone, where I read it. Kuenzler provides the year-by-year narrative backbone of the story and, in a nice touch, for each year lists…

A dietary supplement to slow aging

This is great news if you are a mouse! Here's the summary of the paper: NAD+ repletion improves mitochondrial and stem cell function and enhances life span in mice, by Hongbo Zhang, Dongryeol Ryu, Yibo Wu, Karim Gariani, Xu Wang, Peiling Luan, Davide D’Amico, Eduardo R. Ropelle, Matthias P. Lutolf, Ruedi Aebersold, Kristina Schoonjans, Keir J. Menzies, Johan Auwerx, (here, if you subscribe to Science.) The oxidized form of cellular nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) is critical for mitochondrial function, and its supplementation can lead to increased longevity. Zhang et al. found that…

Battle Over Private Nativity Scene

In Novi, Michigan, there's a big battle kicking up over a family's nativity scene in their front yard. The problem is that they live in a neighborhood with a neighborhood association that has rules against such displays: The Samonas' neighborhood association has ordered the Novi family to remove its seven-piece plastic display or face possible fines of $25 to $100 per week. The family isn't budging and neither are its three wise men. The Samonas have vowed not only to keep the display, but also are threatening to enhance it."If you take this out, it's not Christmas anymore," said Joe Samona,…

Brain has rebooted now

I have been sleeping the sleep of the dead—it turns out that if you don't bother to sleep for 40 hours you get really tired and when you lie down your brain shuts off. This is very good to know. It means I've been completely ignoring Pharyngula for a long, long time, and wow, did the comments pile up. So let me deal with a few things quickly. I am pleased to see that the comments did not descend into total anarchy, but come on, don't pick on Robert O'Brien because he looks like a dork. I look like a dork. I suspect that if you people had to verify your comments with your passport photos we'…

Inconvenient no more

Oscar winner An Inconvenient Truth available online.

Moore on the air

Dennis Moore's latest TV ad is online.

Closing Commenting

Popular Science, one of the longest running and, well, popular, magazines that deals with science has a website. Last Tuesday, on-line editor Suzanne LaBarre announced that Popular Science would no longer have comment sections on most of its pages. The reason sited was that "Comments can be bad for science." She noted: A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another…

CPB Report on Best Practices in Digital Journalism: Implications for Science Communication

This week, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting released a report on best practices in digital journalism that I co-authored with several colleagues here at American University and the Center for Social Media. Titled Scan and Analysis of Best Practices in Digital Journalism In and Outside U.S. Public Broadcasting, the report was commissioned by CPB as part of the organization's planning for future directions in online reporting and media. In keeping with CPB's mission, the report has a strong emphasis on strategies for using digital journalism to promote civic engagement, public…

Best of May

I posted only 127 times in May. Apart from many cool videos and various updates, I did blog about other things as well. I went to the WWW2010 conference and wrote my thoughts about it. Open Laboratory submissions are in full swing so I decided to post the old Prefaces and Introductions I wrote for the first three books. Dennis Meredith came to town to talk about Explaining Research so I reported from the event. I also reported on the presentation about Serious Gaming at Sigma Xi. Two of my friends and neighbors published books in May so I announced the sites and times for local readings - 'On…

Self-Referential Ethan Miller

I've been following Californian rock singer and guitarist Ethan Miller off and on since Comets on Fire's 2002 album Field Recordings from the Sun. I love his singing and psychedelic song writing. And so recently the song "Nomads" from the 2008 album Magnificent Fiend (with Miller's current band Howlin' Rain) has been playing in my head. I couldn't quite make sense of the lyrics, so I checked on-line, and found them (perhaps predictably) to be stonerishly meandering. But also bluntly self-referential in a way that is either really stupid or neatly self-ironic. You be the judge, Dear Reader.…

NASA's Revived STEREO-B Could Save Us From A Trillion Dollar Disaster (Synopsis)

“Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.” -Alexander Graham Bell In 1859, the Sun surprisingly increased in brightness so significantly for just a brief while that it was noticeable from Earth during the day. Less than 24 hours later, aurorae were visible so brightly and so far south that people awoke in the middle of the night, thinking it was dawn. But in addition to the spectacular sights, there were also downsides: telegraph wires spontaneously caught on fire, causing significant amounts of damage. The atmospheric effects…

How the last great American eclipse almost shocked Einstein (Synopsis)

“Astronomers are greatly disappointed when, having traveled halfway around the world to see an eclipse, clouds prevent a sight of it; and yet a sense of relief accompanies the disappointment.” -Simon Newcomb Next year, on August 21st, 2017, millions of Americans will delight in the first total solar eclipse to go from coast-to-coast in 99 years. The path of totality will range from Oregon to South Carolina, giving more than two minutes of the Sun being blocked by the Moon’s shadow to all along its central path. Image credit: Mir / RSA, 1999, of the Moon's shadow falling on Earth, during a…

Historic images coming to iPhone on DukeMobile 1.1

Seen yesterday in the local AP feed: Looks like a great partnership to access historic images on the iPhone or iTouch to satisfy pretty much any scholar or history enthusiast: Duke and Apple to join forces DURHAM -- Scholars and students who once had to travel to museums or libraries to view collections of historic images can now do so by clicking on their mobile device instead. With the launch of DukeMobile 1.1, Duke University Libraries now offer the most comprehensive university digital image collection specifically formatted for Apple's iPhone or iTouch devices. It includes thousands of…

Locavores go iPhone

Add this to the list from my prior post: a Locavore app from Enjoymentland, available at the iTunes store. Local agricultural advocates are already using social networking and building virtual marketplaces and identifying market and farm sites nationwide. This feature extends the connection between on-line consumer practices and local food advocacy. Two of my students bought it and are giving it a test run. I'll try to get an update a few weeks into this Spring season. According to the guy at Enjoymentland who made the app, the iPhone feature does this: * Automatically detects which…

New study attempts to quantify "internet addiction"

The idea of a distinct "internet addiction" problem separate from, say, compulsive gambling or obsession with pornography isn't especially new. It's been studied since at least 1999, and we reported on one attempt to describe it in 2004. Yet in the U.S., there has been no serious effort to quantify it until now. A new study of over 2,500 adults has found some dramatic results: 13.7 percent (more than one out of eight respondents) found it hard to stay away from the Internet for several days at a time 12.4 percent stayed online longer than intended very often or often 12.3 percent had seen a…

Extracting Genetic Material

The first (and sometimes 3rd, 12th, 25th, 134th...) step of any genetic engineering experiment is often extracting DNA from some organism or another. While novel gene synthesis technology will likely make this procedure obsolete, these days it's still most economical to do it by hand. Extracting DNA from fruits like strawberries has also seen a popular resurgence thanks to groups like DIYbio, with instructions for making DNA shots available online for a fun and nerdy party activity. Today my iGEM team extracted RNA from strawberries and oranges to isolate the genes responsible for strawberry…

Diplodocus according to G.G. Simpson

A cartoon of Diplodocus from Simpson's letter. The accompanying text reads (starting at the head); Diplodocus longus; CRANIUM, or to use the technical term, BEAN; Beaming Orbs; Neck like a tail; The Rest of Him (or Her as the case may be); Diplodocus tootsies; Relative size of a man (Homo sap) of relative size; Irregularity due to being dropped by nurse in infirmary; Tail like a neck; (From a late Jurassic Tintype). Earlier today I reviewed Oliver Hay's ideas about the habits and posture of Diplodocus, and being that today was already history-heavy I thought it fitting to put up a poem by…

Class

Online and Offline. Obligatory Readings of the Day.

Simpsons & Evolution online

Last night's Simpson's episode is available online here.

Some Sunday Links

Here are your links. Science goes firstest: Here's one more way antibiotics are misused: treating respiratory viruses. ScienceBlogling Tara describes how epidemiologists realized that we had an XDR-TB problem. Here's how fast a fastball really is. Joe Lieberman was so successful at foreign policy, he's decided to move into global warming. We're all going to die... I agree with PZ: we need to teach calculus in high school. The other stuff: Fox News: teaching grandmothers how to hate their grandchildren. If S-CHIP isn't adequately funded, parents could always buy pet health insurance…

Tickets to Dawkins!

All you Minnesotans should know by now that Richard Dawkins will be speaking at UMTC, in Northrup Auditorium, at 7pm on Wednesday, 4 March…next week! If you haven't got your tickets yet, you can join Minnesota Atheists and get one for free — so act fast. As an additional inducement, guess who is going to introduce Dawkins at the lecture? Me! Now you might be saying, "Bleh, who wants to listen to Myers babble?", but you'd be missing the important point: I'm only going to talk for 30 seconds to a minute, and then get out of the way. More Dawkins, less annoying functionary! In fact, if we can…

dog days of blogging

is the physics blogosphere a bit boring right now? Angry Physicist says it is, and he's mostly right... so, I got nothing - maybe I'll say something mean about Yarn Theory again later this week just to stir things up, or something... actually, I lie, I have about two hundred items that I have thought of, been asked to do or feel obliged to blog on, but no time Nuclear Mangos has a frightening set of quick hits - but not science per se. Calculated Risk is probably the best blog on the planet right now but getting frightfully busy In the meantime, I have a moral dilemma: clotheshorse that I…

Solution: blame scientists, add fluff

Mooney and Kirshenbaum continue their campaign with an op-ed in the Boston Globe, which, as we all know, has rigorous standards. Their explanation for scientific illiteracy in America is simple: it's the scientists' fault for being so aloof and distant. Their solution is also simple: philanthropists and universities need to give more money to employ media-savvy scientists. How…nice. I will say one good thing about their op-ed, though. It contains the full content of their entire book. Read the essay, now you don't need to buy the book, since it covers it fully, including all the non-existent…

Avuncular

Teaching 20-year-olds for the past term has begun to make me feel a little avuncular. But yesterday I had this sudden surge in my avuncularity. First, in the morning I finally took the step of shaving the sparse fuzz remaining on my forehead all the way up to the coronal suture. (That's the lateral seam in your skull that you feel if you put three fingertips between your eyebrows and slide them up to the top of your head.) To salvage a little dignity, I've always been one step ahead of the male pattern baldness. Then I talked to the heat pump repairman (31) about what it'll be like for him to…

Drugstore Misunderstanding About Saltpetre

Saltpetre, potassium nitrate, is added to food to give meat products a nicer colour. One winter in the 70s when we were living in Connecticut, my dad went to a New York drug store to buy saltpetre for our traditional Christmas ham. And the elderly druggist winked at him and said this odd thing. "Hehe, it's an old army trick!" As my dad told us later that night, he had to ask what on Earth the guy meant. And then he learned that the druggist thought he was going to take the saltpetre as an anaphrodisiac, to decrease his sex drive. Supposedly the US armed forces did this as a matter of course…

Theocon Priorities

Think Progress has video of Rep. Marilyn Musgrave, chief sponsor of the Marriage Protection Act, speaking at last weekend's Values Voters Summit. It includes gems like this: Musgrave declared that gay marriage "is the most important issue that we face today." She told the audience that "when you're in a cultural war like this, you have to respond with equal and hopefully greater force if you want to win," and warned that the "future is grim" if gay marriage is not banned. How's that for having your priorities straight? We've got a government flouting the constitution at every turn, we've got…

Secret voting for whales

Via JA I find David @ Tokyo who blogs about Caribbean Loses Drive For Secret Ballot At Whale Meet. Now I find this a bit weird... the caribbean nations don't have any interest in whaling; they are interested only because they are being bought off by the Japanese (is this wrong? why else do they want to whale?). So... they want to vote in favour of whaling, but can't do this in public because they might get boycotted etc. So they want to vote in favour in private. But then... how does anyone know how they've voted? Who will buy their votes? Or is there some kind of loyalty/honesty to the being…

Links for 2011-08-03

The Worlds Weirdest Book A truly unique work of fiction, ââ¬ËThe Codex Seraphinianusââ¬Ë is a book that appears to be a visual encyclopedia of some unknown world or dimension. Written down in one of that worlds beautiful curving languages, the book by Italian artist, architect and industrial designer Luigi Serafini, explains the odd inhabitants and their colorful behaviors. The book was created between 1976 and 1978 and for the low price of about $500.00 you can ponder over your own copyââ¬Â¦ Views: Myths About Fair Use - Inside Higher Ed "Academics potentially enjoy some of the greatest…

links for 2008-11-18

Kevin Drum - Mother Jones Blog: Conservatives and Unions "Overturning Roe is certainly a conservative priority, but it's only been on the list for about 30 years. Fighting unions has been on the list for more like 130 years. If it's not central to the conservative identity in America, I don't know what is." (tags: politics law us blogs society class-war) Cocktail Party Physics: a spark in the dark "This also establishes [Francis] Bacon as the earliest to record the phenomenon, known as triboluminescence, a.k.a., "the Wint-O-Green Life Saver Effect." " (tags: science physics chemistry…

Miss Prism has a brilliant idea

You all recall the Beagle Project that I recently mentioned was trying to raise money to reconstruct the Beagle and sail off to Patagonia (with me hiding belowdecks, of course). Miss Prism had a terrific idea: she's knitting a Darwin puppet that she'll sell off to some lucky commenter on Darwin's birthday, with all the proceeds sent off to build the Beagle. I should get in on this, although I have no talent for knitting. Any suggestions? Is there some little personal Pharyngula tchotchke I could convince people to bid on, knowing that their pennies would go to the construction of a boat? I…

The Speed of Money

Wow! Either it's an odd coincidence, or the Latisse marketers are highly vigilant monetizers, because in less than 24 hours after I posted yesterday's rambling little piece about the eyelash wonder drug, a tasteful little ad for it showed up on the Scienceblogs homepage (cue spooky music now). Robot voice: "Oh yes, I will go buy Latisse now." I will try it on my cats, because I have always thought that cats with long eyelashes are wickedly beautiful. But, Latisse, your ad says "ask your doctor about Latisse" -- I'm a bit disappointed. How could you pass up such a ripe possibility for pun…

Faitheist wins Templeton prize

Another year goes by, and yet again the Templetonians have failed to throw a million pounds at me. I feel the same way I do when they announce the Powerball lottery winners and my ticket isn't among the winners — of course, I never buy lottery tickets anyway, but that just makes the analogy even more perfect. The word for the seething emotional and intellectual turmoil I'm feeling right now is…"meh." So this year the Templeton Foundation has made the cunning decision to suborn somebody already sympathetic to their cause and with a respectable scientific reputation: an astronomer who doesn't…

Today's Technology Dump

Latest TWiT episode has Brewster Kahle speaking of archive.org and more. He is extremely persuasive. Must listen. Zattoo, a new IPTV service that serves free TV on the computer (low resolution, like youtube, but uses p2p like BBC's iPlayer) in Europe and hopes to make money by sticking ads while users switch channels. It'll probably succeed. Picked this up at YC.news. I've setup a box at home (dual boot with Ubuntu and Windows XP) for iPlayer and Miro. I hope to add Zattoo to it, buy a shipload of popcorn and spend the rest of my life watching a shiny screen and be eternally entertained.…

5 Things Meme

5 Things I Was Doing 10 Years Ago: well, I was all of 13, so...Freezing in WardsboroFinishing 8th grade (I'm just a baby!)Watching Saved By The BellListening to 'N Sync (hey, I was 13!)Getting my first iBook (A blueberry one!) 5 Things On My To-Do List Today:Take barry to the airportTake the dog to the vetGet cat foodGet my oil changedGo to the doctor (I'm a sickie) 5 Snacks I Love:CheezitsRice CrackersChips & SalsaCheese. In general.Poke 5 Things Iâd do if I was a Millionaire:Buy a house in HawaiiInvest enough to live comfortablyDonate someEat a lot of sushiPay off my family and my debts…

Happiness Is....

spending money on your friends and strangers? According to new research published in Science, spending money on other people has a more positive impact on happiness than spending money on oneself. This may come to a surprise to some, but makes perfect sense to others. Given that we are creatures of reciprocity and live our lives not in absolute terms but in relative ones - both spending less money and spending it on others seems a reasonable path to increased happiness. Ethicist Jonathon Haidt has written a length about such dilemmas in his book The Happiness Hypothesis. There are important…

Friday Cephalopod: Where am I going to put a 300 gallon salt water aquarium?

This is a new one: an octopus farm. Kanaloa Octopus Farm is open for business -- for $200, you can get your very own pet octopus. Unfortunately, they're caught in a chicken-and-egg problem. You should not encourage the capture of cephalopods in the wild, so it's a great idea to have a breeding program to provide animals for aquarists. But they're still in the process of building up their stocks, so they're selling their smaller wild-caught octopuses, which isn't so good. Need I point out that you also should not buy an octopus unless you have the facilities and experience to care for them…

Terry Pratchett donates $1m for Alzheimer's research

Best-selling fantasy writer Terry Pratchett, who announced in December that he has a rare form of early onset Alzheimer's, has pledged $1million for research into the disease. In a speech given ealier today at the Alzheimer's Research Trust Netowrk Conference in Bristol, Pratchett said that he compliments his conventional treatment with various unspecified alternative remedies, in the hope that he can slow the progression of the illness: The NHS kindly allows me to buy my own Aricept because I'm too young to have Alzheimer's for free...But, on the whole, you try to be your own doctor. Teh…

Is Bill Maher really that ignorant? (Part II)

Here's part 1. Here's part II. It's Bill Maher on David Letterman ranting about "toxins," how we are being "poisoned by America," and how your body is trying to produce a "river of mucus" to rid itself of the toxins, all standard tropes of "alternative" medicine and quackery. Sadly, David Letterman seems to buy right into the whole rant, more or less. Maher's mindless parroting of the vague claims of quacks who think that "detoxification" is the cure for every ill, combined with his being an antivaccination wingnut and a germ theory denialist, are just three reasons why, whenever I see anyone…

Dieting to fit into your genes

Mary Mangan at Open Helix predicts that personal genomics will trigger the appearance of a brand new eating disorder: geneorexia nervosa. ...there will be a proportion of people who take their genetic information (which I know is of varying utility at best right now to those who have been sequenced ), and they'll change their diets.  They'll upend their and their family's lifestyles.  They will be in fear of substances, of foods, of fabrics, of everything-beyond reason.  And they'll buy products and services of dubious quality-even potentially dangerous ones. I do agree that widespread…

Monkeying Around

This is a tamarind: The fruit pulp is edible and popular. The hard green pulp of a young fruit is considered by many to be too sour and acidic, but is often used as a component of savory dishes, as a pickling agent or as a means of making certain poisonous yams in Ghana safe for human consumption. The ripened fruit is considered the more palatable as it becomes sweeter and less sour (acidic) as it matures. It is used in desserts as a jam, blended into juices or sweetened drinks, sorbets, ice-creams and all manner of snack. It is also consumed as a natural laxative. (via wikipedia) This is a…

The longest lecture - evah...

This is quite an old piece of news...but still pretty ridiculous. Mangalore University Applied Botany Professor Annaiah Ramesh is all set to enter the Guinness Book of World Records as he successfully completed a marathon lecture, running to 96 hours and 40 minutes, here on Sunday. Dr Ramesh who started his lecture on the subject, "Molecular Logic of Life," on March 22, completed it at 03:45 hrs on Sunday, surpassing the record set by South African Moosawazi (88 hours and 4 seconds). Dr Ramesh, who delivered the non-stop lecture at the jampacked Old Senate Hall in the varsity without any…

Images from New York, part 1: The unbearable lightness of fraud

Seen in a bookstore in the Delta terminal at LaGuardia: It makes perfect sense. What's left after fleecing millions of gullible readers selling books about "alternative" medicine and secret cures "they" don't want you to know about? Fleecing millions of gullible readers by selling books rife financial scams, of course. (I wonder how many pyramid schemes--excuse me, multilevel marketing investment opportunites"--are within this new book.) Of course, Kevin Trudeau definitely knows about financial scams. After all, he did spend time in jail for swindling banks and another for bilking his…

Like plums? Do something right away!

This is the first I've heard of this, but there is a devastating disease called Plum Pox Virus that kills trees bearing stone fruits, like plums and peaches, and the only way to deal with infected plants is to rip them out of the ground and destroy them. There has been a recent outbreak in Pennsylvania; don't rush out to buy the last of the fruits in an apocalyptic terror, it's just a hint of a potential problem for the future, but you can worry a little bit. And maybe you can promote some science that will help. A new variety of plum called the Honey Sweet has been genetically engineered…

Raise the Gas Tax

Bob Lutz, the vice-chairman for development at GM, is best known for creating gas-guzzling and eye-catching icons, like the Dodge Viper, Camaro concept and latest generation Corvette. He loves V-12's and ridiculous amounts of horsepower. So I was shocked to read this quote in today's WSJ: "I'd say the best thing the (U.S.) government can do is to raise the gas tax by 10 or 15 cents a year until it reaches European levels," Mr. Lutz said, during an impromptu interview just before GM Europe's media event last Thursday. That way, he says, car makers could concentrate on designing for the U.S.…

Palfrey, John and Urs Gasser. Born digital: Understanding the first generation of digital natives. New York: Basic, 2008. 375pp.

Digital Natives will move markets and transform industries, education, and global politics. the changes they bring about as they move into the workforce could have an immendsely positive effect on the world we live in. By and large, the digital revolution has already made this world a better place. And Digital Natives have every chance of propelling society further forward in myriad ways -- if we let them. (p. 7) Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser is a fine and useful book. Every page is brimming with facts and analysis…

Open Education Declaration

On the heels of David Warlick's session on using online tools in the science classroom, this initiative is really exciting: Teachers, Students, Web Gurus, and Foundations Launch Campaign to Transform Education, Call for Free, Adaptable Learning Materials Online Cape Town, January 22nd, 2008--A coalition of educators, foundations, and internet pioneers today urged governments and publishers to make publicly-funded educational materials available freely over the internet. The Cape Town Open Education Declaration, launched today, is part of a dynamic effort to make learning and teaching…

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Science Online 2012

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CoE 49

The latest Carnival of Evolution is online at Mousetrap.