cultural observation
grrlscientist | March 2, 2007British physicist Professor Stephen Hawking is ready to take a zero-gravity flight in a specially modified airplane next month. His trip is being paid for by Zero Gravity, an American company that normally charges $3,750. Hawking, who is almost completely paralyzed and frail after decades in a wheelchair, will be accompanied by medical staff.
Hawking will take off on April 26 aboard the vomit comet, a padded Boeing 727 that flies a roller-coaster trajectory to produce periods of weightlessness. This plane will take off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The airplane flies to an…
grrlscientist | February 23, 2007... especially in America.
Governor Rick Perry angrily defended his relationship with Merck & Co. and his executive order requiring that schoolgirls receive the drugmaker's vaccine against the sexually transmitted cervical-cancer virus. The Associated Press reported Wednesday that Perry's chief of staff had met with key aides about the vaccine on Oct. 16, the same day Merck's political action committee donated $5,000 to the governor's campaign.
Despite the donated money, I still think the governor did the right thing, that Gardasil (or an equivalent anti-HPV vaccine) should be mandatory,…
grrlscientist | February 23, 2007Although the government has approved meat and milk from cloned animals while it conducts further studies, the nation's largest milk company, Dean Foods Co. of Dallas, said recently that its customers and consumers won't purchase milk from cloned animals. The $10 billion company owns Land O'Lakes and Horizon Organic, among dozens of other brands.
"Numerous surveys have shown that Americans are not interested in buying dairy products that contain milk from cloned cows and Dean Foods is responding to the needs of our consumers," the company said in a statement.
Well, what about milk and other…
grrlscientist | February 22, 2007The immigration debate blows up when the Pilgrims protest limitations to their rights in America. See the streaming video below the fold.
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tags: streaming video, humor, immigration debate
grrlscientist | February 21, 2007Rogelio Zacaula plucks an ear of corn from his field with the pride of a prospector unearthing the gold that legend says is buried in the slopes surrounding the nearby Orizaba volcano.
International corn prices driven by the burgeoning U.S. ethanol industry have soared to their highest in a decade, making farmers like Zacaula feel like they just won the jackpot.
''I have never seen prices like this,'' said Zacaula, 66, who has been growing corn since he was 10. "We suffered for so many years, years in which no one even wanted to buy our crop -- until now.''
Corn had languished around $2 a…
grrlscientist | February 20, 2007What is it about email that causes an otherwise civilized person to write and send an offensive, rude or downright mean message to someone else? That is the question that John Suler, a psychologist at Rider University in Lawrenceville, N.J., addressed in his 2004 paper published in CyberPsychology & Behavior.
Suler found that several psychological factors lead to disinhibition online: the anonymity of a Web pseudonym; invisibility to others; the time lag between sending an e-mail message and getting feedback; the exaggerated sense of self from being alone; and the lack of any online…
grrlscientist | February 19, 2007There is some good news on the battle against scientific illiteracy: Americans know more about basic science today than they did two decades ago. Perversely, this increasing knowledge is tempered by a growth in the belief in pseudoscience such as astrology and visits by extraterrestrial aliens.
In 1988, only about 10 percent knew enough about science to understand reports in major newspapers, a figure that grew to 28 percent by 2005, according to Jon Miller, a Michigan State University professor. He presented his findings at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement…
grrlscientist | February 14, 2007Villagers in southwestern China are puzzled by a county government's decision to paint an entire barren mountainside green.
Workers who began spraying Laoshou mountain in August told villagers that they were doing so on orders of the county government but were not told why, media reports said Wednesday.
Some villagers guessed that officials of the surrounding county, Fumin, whose office building faces the mountain, were trying to change the area's feng shui -- the ancient Chinese belief of harmonizing one's physical environment for maximum health and financial benefit.
Others speculated that…
grrlscientist | February 10, 2007Researchers revealed that grocery store shopping cart handles are one of the worst public places for germs. How germy can shopping carts really be? Very, according to researchers at the University of Arizona who tested all kinds of public surfaces. They found that shopping carts were loaded with more saliva, bacteria and even fecal matter than escalators, public telephones, and even public bathrooms.
"Every kid in America teethes on shopping cart handles," said Dr. Chuck Gerba at the University of Arizona. "They don't have the best sanitary habits. ... I mean, you're putting your broccoli…
grrlscientist | February 9, 2007The Liverpool Women's Hospital in Britain has appealed for public help with knitting the "woolly breasts" that they use to show new mothers how to breastfeed and how to express milk, especially for premature babies that are in the hospital. These knitted versions are cheaper that the latex model that they were using.
"We've taken loads of calls with offers of knitting, which is brilliant, from Scotland, England, Ireland and the USA.
"The Lactation Consultants of Great Britain are happy to put the pattern on the website for free for people to download after the weekend.
"I'm accepting all…
grrlscientist | February 8, 2007Did you hear the one about the NYC cabbie who returned a suitcase full of diamond rings to a Texas woman who only gave him a 30-cent tip on a $10.70 fare?
No, I am serious. It really happened here in NYC. Then, after the cabbie went to some time and expense to return the loot, she gave him a check for $100, snort. Some people just don't get it do they??
Cited story.
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tags: NYCLife, cabbie, diamond rings
grrlscientist | February 7, 2007I grew up in the state of Washington, and always thought that the west side of the state was politically liberal, however, things are looking mighty strange in that state because of an intitiative that would require all married couples to have kids within three years of saying "I do" or their marriage would be automatically annulled.
Who filed this initiative? Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance (WA-DoMA), that's who. That group was formed last summer after the state Supreme Court upheld Washington's ban on same-sex marriage. Why did they file this initiative? Because they are trying to…
grrlscientist | February 6, 2007.. and why tell the press all about it? Was that really necessary??
A NASA astronaut who drove hundreds of miles to confront a romantic rival, wearing diapers on the journey so that she would not have to stop to use the restroom, appeared in court today after being arrested on attempted kidnapping and other charges.
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She was arrested on Monday on charges of attempted kidnapping, vehicle burglary with battery, destruction of evidence and battery. Bail was set at $15,500, and Captain Nowak, who has been working at NASA, was ordered to wear a tracking device.
Cited story.
grrlscientist | January 19, 2007tags: Cambodia, wild girl,jungle girl
A Cambodian girl who disappeared while tending buffalo when she was eight years old has apparently been found after living in the wild for 19 years. A man identified himself as her father after recognizing a scar on her right arm, and plans to have DNA tests done to prove his paternity.
However, it is possible that this woman could instead be lost from one of the Vietnamese tribes that often cross through the jungles into this same region of Cambodia to avoid religious persecution.
Local police said the woman was "half-human and half-animal" and…
grrlscientist | January 16, 2007The NY Times poll found that, for the first time in American history, more women are single than married, up from 35 percent in 1950 and 49 percent in 2000.
Coupled with the fact that in 2005 married couples became a minority of all American households for the first time, the trend could ultimately shape social and workplace policies, including the ways government and employers distribute benefits.
Several factors are driving the statistical shift. At one end of the age spectrum, women are marrying later or living with unmarried partners more often and for longer periods. At the other end,…
grrlscientist | January 12, 2007A study carried out at the University of Tromso, Norway, found that blue-eyed men prefer women with blue eyes, whereas brown-eyed men and women with either eye color showed no such preference for eye color in their prospective romantic partners.
This could be tied in to the evolutionary laws of genetics for eye color; since blue eye color is a recessive trait to brown, a blue-eyed couple can only produce blue-eyed offspring, which helps reinforce the father's sense of paternity. If a child with brown eyes is born to a blue-eyed couple, there is no way that the blue-eyed father can be the…
grrlscientist | January 12, 2007In a Federal Way school district near Seattle, a parent objected to the showing of Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, in his daughter's classroom. Perhaps not surprisingly, this same parent opposes sex education in the classroom;
"Condoms don't belong in school, and neither does Al Gore. He's not a schoolteacher," said Frosty Hardison, a parent of seven who also said that he believes the Earth is 14,000 years old. "The information that's being presented is a very cockeyed view of what the truth is. ... The Bible says that in the end times everything will burn up, but that perspective isn'…
grrlscientist | January 11, 2007Liberal media, my ass! If you believe that the majority of the mainstream media (MSM) is a bastion of "liberal" reporting, then you need to open your mind and read Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush by Eric Boehlert (New York: Free Press, 2006). In this book, the author examines the press coverage of the Bush administration during that turbulent year between September 2004 and September 2005.
Boehlert is an award-winning journalist who researches and writes extensively about media, politics and pop culture, and is a contributing editor to Rolling Stone. In Lapdogs, he unflinchingly…
grrlscientist | January 10, 2007According to a new national study using data collected by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, there are somewhere between 444,000 and 842,000 homeless people in America. It found that nearly 25% were chronically homeless, and it found that many of the chronically homeless people had mental health or substance abuse problems while others simply could not afford housing. This study also reported that while most of the homeless were single adults, 41% were families.
Some cities and states have done their own counts of the homeless, providing a mix of trends, said Nan Roman,…
grrlscientist | January 10, 2007After my own experience with feces on my airplane seat cushion on US Airways, I was hardly surprised to learn that a scorpion had made its way onto a plane .. except this was a United flight rather than US Airways. Anyway, this scorpion stung a man twice, once on his leg and then on his shin.
A scorpion stung David Sullivan on the back of his right leg, just below the knee, then continued up that leg and down the other, he believes, before getting him again in the shin.
It wasn't what he was expecting on a flight from Chicago to Vermont.
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"My right leg felt like it was asleep, but that…