News
grrlscientist | December 4, 2009tags: ScienceBlogs, National Geographic, news
I have friends at National Geographic, so I was most pleased to read early this morning (last night, USA time), that ScienceBlogs and National Geographic have teamed up to provide outstanding science and nature content to the public!
I am sure it has not been a mystery to any of you that ScienceBlogs and National Geographic share the same ultimate mission: to cultivate widespread interest in science and the natural world. Starting today, SB-NG will work together to advance this common mission by providing new content, applications, and…
grrlscientist | December 1, 2009tags: Tiger Woods, Taiwanese News, Apple-1 News, Taiwan, animation, streaming video
This video is an interesting news report from Apple-1 News in Taiwan regarding what really happened to cause Tiger Woods to drive into a tree after bouncing off a fire hydrant in front of his Florida home.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Are animations such as these legal for use by news organizations in the US? I suspect not; otherwise, they'd be making use of them many years ago.
Anyway; there is precedent for making allegations of Domestic Violence against Woods' wife, Elin Nordegren, since her stories that she told…
illconsidered | December 1, 2009Well, I see no one takes my advice on anything!
The Associated Press
LONDON -- Britain's University of East Anglia says the director of its prestigious Climatic Research Unit is stepping down pending an investigation into allegations that he overstated the case for man-made climate change.
The university says Phil Jones will relinquish his position until the completion of an independent review into allegations that he worked to alter the way in which global temperature data was presented.
The allegations were made after more than a decade of correspondence between leading British and U.S.…
illconsidered | November 30, 2009 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsThis weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I ho8pe you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another Week of Global Warming News Information overload is pattern recognition November 29, 2009 Chuckle, Copenhagen, CHOGM, G77, Save-the-Jungle, Copenhagen Diagnosis, CS Statement, CSIRO, Health & CC Bottom Line, Patents, Broken Promises, Garrett, Solar, CRU Hack Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica, EAIS Losing Mass Food Crisis, Land Grabs, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs…
illconsidered | November 24, 2009 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsThis weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I ho8pe you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another week of Climate Disruption News November 22, 2009 Chuckle, Copenhagen, APEC, Clouds, Bristlecone Pine, Carbon Sinks, Knorr, Mammoth Extinction Bottom Line, Carbon Tariffs, 6 Degrees, Open Access, Superfree, CRU Hack Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, WSFS, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Carbon Cycle, Temperatures, Ozone, Paleoclimate, ENSO, Glaciers…
illconsidered | November 23, 2009 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsThis weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I ho8pe you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another Week of Climate Disruption News November 15, 2009 Chuckle, Copenhagen, APEC, France & Brazil, WSFS, Montreal Protocol, Merida Message, Front Line Nations, Polls Younger Dryas, Himalayan Glaciers, Williams & Zabel, Bottom Line, CSIRO, Amazon, CO2 Forcing, Superfree, G20 Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Land Grabs, Food Production…
illconsidered | November 23, 2009 Sipping from the internet firehose...This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I ho8pe you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Information overload is pattern recognition November 8, 2009 Chuckle, Copenhagen, Barcelona, G20, EU-US Meeting, Rudd, SuperFree, Dogs, Bottom Line, Desertec Melting Arctic, Polar Bears, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Land Grabs, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Carbon Cycle, Temperatures, Paleoclimate, ENSO, Glaciers, Sea Levels, Satellites Impacts, Forests…
rskloot | October 26, 2009
Yes folks, it's that time again: Registration is now open for the great ScienceOnline2010 meeting that will take place (as always) in Durham, NC in January. The program features many great scientists, science bloggers, and science journalists, and promises to be lots of fun. I'll be running a session with Tom Levenson and Brian Switek called "From Blog to Book: Using Blogs and Social Networks to Develop Your Professional Writing," and I'll also be doing a hands-on, nuts-and-bolts workshop helping folks develop proposals for books and articles. See the program for details, and sign up!
rskloot | October 5, 2009
It's fitting that today -- the day after the 58th anniversary of Henrietta Lacks's death -- the Nobel Prize in medicine has been awarded to Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider, and Jack Szostak for the discovery of how telomeres and the enzyme telomerase protect chromosomes from degrading over time. In the late eighties, a scientist at Yale used Henrietta's cells (aka HeLa, pictured left) to discover that human cancer cells contain telomerase, which regenerates their chromosomes and prevents them from aging and dying like normal cells. This is one of the reasons why Henrietta's cells are…
grrlscientist | September 14, 2009tags: Cyprus, illegal migratory bird trapping, songbird slaughter, Committee Against Bird Slaughter, CABS, streaming video
This video below the jump records and documents the astonishing arrogance and viciousness of Cypriot bird slaughterers who continue to wantonly kill tens of millions of migratory songbirds every year so their bodies can be sold to restaurants who then sell them as a delicacy, often to tourists. These slaughterers kill endangered species as well as common; songbirds as well as owls, birds of prey and other non-passerine species. In fact, NO BIRD IS SAFE from them. Since…
pharyngula | September 2, 2009If you're going to build a massive con to defraud people out of $50 million, you want to pick your marks carefully. You want people who are gullible, don't demand a lot of evidence, and are willing to go along with you as long as it takes to milk them dry, as long as you promise bliss. Where would you go to find a large number of such people? It's obvious: go to church, like Tri Energy did.
Like those caught up in other get-rich scams -- from Bernard Madoff's $65 billion Ponzi scheme, which initially snared wealthy Jews, to an alleged $4.4 million fraud aimed at deaf people -- Tri Energy's…
grrlscientist | August 9, 2009
Mount Wank is a German mountain close to the Austrian border in the southwestern Estergebirge range near Garmisch-Partenkirchen. The peak is 1780 metres above mean sea level.
Image: Stephan Baum, Wikipedia Commons.
I do have some potentially interesting news to share with you. I am not at liberty to share all of this news with you at this moment, but I can share some of it.
First, I am relocating to Germany! I am not relocating to Wank (an extinct Bavarian volcano, ahem, joking) although I promise I will visit this molehill .. erm, mountain [map]. They even have a Wank webcam, although I…
pharyngula | August 6, 2009I griped before about those sleazy credit report ads with Ben Stein that were appearing all over the site. Well, they seem to have had one fortunate effect: they got Ben Stein fired for ethics violations from his gig at the New York Times.
The NYT has yet to explain why they thought Stein could usefully contribute a column on economics in the first place, however.
pharyngula | July 17, 2009It's a regular event nowadays that the Humboldt squid move up the coast of California, stirring up a little hysteria as they go. These are big squid and they can be aggressive, but San Diego is probably safe.
Probably.
Although you might wonder why a cephalopod enthusiast lives in Minnesota, about as far from the sea as anyone can get…
pharyngula | July 13, 2009First, California is hit with a small earthquake (that never happens, does it?) and then…the squid appear.
Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn!
It's sweet how the Californians try to throw them back in the sea. Have they no knives, no garlic, no pans with hot oil? Because if the squid did, we know what they'd do.
pharyngula | July 12, 2009How often have you seen this? An affectionate couple are walking along holding hands, and one gives the other a kiss on the cheek.
The only way you might have missed seeing that fairly often is if you are legally blind. It's common, it's harmless, and it's rather sweet — and we normally approve of such mild public expressions of affection.
Unless, of course, the couple consists of two young men, and especially if it is in Utah.
A gay couple says they were detained by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints security guards after one man kissed another on the cheek Thursday on Main…
drorzel | July 7, 2009No, this isn't another "How dare those journalists muddle the explanation of some scientific topic" post. The concept here is journalism itself, as seen in Ed Yong's discussion of different modes of science journalism. Writing about the recent World Conference of Science Journalists, he talks about some controversy over what "science journalism" actually means:
Certainly, the idea that journalism equated to talking or writing about science in any form was unpopular. In the opening plenary, Fiona Fox drew a fine line between science communication and journalism, the latter characterised…
illconsidered | July 1, 2009Just wondering how the conspiracy theories about the climatological-industrial complex handle this:Funding cut for UK climate research?
Hadley's climate research was not alarmist enough?
pharyngula | June 25, 2009How strange: he was a little younger than me (but not much!), so it's sad to learn that the King of Pop has died of a heart attack. He had real talent.
Die young, leave a strange corpse.
dmunger | June 25, 2009There's an interesting article in the Washington Post today exploring one line of reasoning suggesting that the Iranian election is fraudulent. Basically, it comes down to this: the results aren't random enough. In a fair election, you'd expect that each digit, from 0 to 9, would be the final digit the results in each region roughly ten percent of the time: you'd see a vote count like 12,437 just as often as 12,435. But in fact certain digits come up more often:
The numbers look suspicious. We find too many 7s and not enough 5s in the last digit. We expect each digit (0, 1, 2, and so on) to…