News
illconsidered | June 23, 2009James Hansen was arrested today for trespassing at a protest against mountaintop removal coal mining in Coal River Valley, West Virginia.
Today Top Climate Scientist James Hansen and Actress Daryl Hannah were Arrested in Effort to Stop Mountaintop Removal
Also arrested was former Representative Ken Hechler, Michael Brune of Rainforest Action Network, Goldman Winner Judy Bonds and more than a dozen Appalachian residents and allies
Protest on the heels of Obama administration's new policy on the destructive coal mining practice
The question is: does this diminish his scientific integrity or…
pharyngula | June 10, 2009The rats really are scuttling out of the woodwork: last week, it's a right-wing anti-abortion hater gunning down a doctor, and this week, we get a white supremacist opening fire in the US Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. Fortunately, no one has died in this incident, but a security guard and the gunman were wounded.
They really are afraid and desperate, and violence is all they have left.
(via Greg Laden)
In case you're wondering about the motives behind this attack, they're rather obvious.
The suspect in Wednesday's shooting at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is James von Brunn, an 88-…
dmunger | June 8, 2009Here at Encephalon's temporary North Carolina headquarters, we were miffed to learn that our long-scheduled Keynote address has been upstaged by some upstart computer company's manufactured "event" in California.
Not to be outdone, we're giving Encephalon an upgrade of our own. Encephalon is now iCephalon. And boy, do we have an exciting lineup of products for you!
First up, iPeople. Our Neurocritic division discusses the exciting discovery touted as the "people person brain area." Really? That almost sounds too good to be true! If you're skeptical, all we ask is that you follow the link.…
dmunger | May 19, 2009For nine months, you've been able to read posts on ResearchBlogging.org in German and English. Soon, the site will be launching support for Spanish. Evaristo Rojas-Mayoral has created a blog to collect the names and URLs of interested blogs. If you blog in Spanish, or you know someone who does, send them to http://spanish.researchblogginglanguages.org/, where they'll find Spanish-language instructions and information about the new site.
Once the site has assembled a critical mass of bloggers, they'll select administrators and start signing up Spanish-language blogs.
In principle, there is no…
illconsidered | May 18, 2009 Sipping from the internet firehose...
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another week of Climate Disruption News Sipping from the internet firehose... May 17, 2009 Chuckle, World Ocean Conference, Ocean Circulation, Sol, Climate Project, Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Carbon Cycle, Temperatures, Paleoclimate Impacts, Forests, Corals, Climate Refugees, Wacky Weather, Tornadoes, Wildfires, Floods & Droughts…
illconsidered | May 11, 2009 Sipping from the internet firehose...
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another week of Climate Disruption News May 10, 2009 Chuckle, Top Stories:Aus-ETS, Sol, Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica, Late Comments Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Carbon Cycle, Temperatures, Ozone, Paleoclimate, ENSO, Glaciers, Sea Levels, Satellites Impacts, Forests, Climate Refugees, Desertification, Wacky Weather, Tornadoes, Wildfires, Floods &…
pharyngula | May 6, 2009You know why? Because the governor of Maine just signed a bill into law that legalizes same-sex marriage.
pharyngula | April 27, 2009There is some cause for worry in the current reports on the swine flu outbreak — while the possibility of a global pandemic is being raised, at this point it really is only a possibility. The accounts from Mexico are not reassuring, however.
Health officials reported that at least eight students at a private high school in New York City had "probable" swine flu. They also confirmed three new cases -- two in Kansas and one in California -- bringing the total number of confirmed U.S. cases to 11. The president of Mexico, where the outbreak has killed as many as 81 people, issued an order…
illconsidered | April 17, 2009This just reported today from the Washington Post:
The Environmental Protection Agency issued a proposal today finding greenhouse gas emissions pose a danger to the public's health and welfare, a determination that could trigger a series of sweeping regulations affecting everything from vehicles to coal-fired power plants.
In a statement issued at noon, EPA administrator Lisa P. Jackson said, "This finding confirms that greenhouse gas pollution is a serious problem now and for future generations."
She added, "This pollution problem has a solution -- one that will create millions of green jobs…
pharyngula | April 12, 2009I'm sad to report that John Maddox, former editor of Nature, has died. He was one of those fellows who shaped the direction of science for quite a long period of time with the power of one of the most influential science journals in the world.
I suspect every scientist of my generation read his editorials in our weekly perusal of the journal. The one I remember most vividly, and probably the one that got the most attention in general, was his ferocious denunciation of Rupert Sheldrake's work — he went so far as to say that if ever there was a book suitable for burning, it was that one. So of…
bioephemera | April 6, 2009Scibling Bora has expressed his wish "to end once for all the entire genre of discussing the "bloggers vs. journalists" trope," and tried to do so with perhaps the most massive science-journalism-Web2.0 post evah.
Bora says,
the whole "bloggers will replace journalists" trope is silly and wrong. No, journalists will replace journalists. It's just that there will be fewer of them paid, and more of us unpaid. Some will be ex-newspapermen, others ex-bloggers, but both will be journalists. Instead of on paper, journalism will happen online. Instead of massaging your article to fit into two inches…
rskloot | April 2, 2009
After seven happy years serving as a vice president, I have just finished my second term on the National Book Critics Circle board of directors. While I was on the board, I put together a document of tips for breaking into book reviewing called, Strategies for Breaking in and Staying in: Getting started as a critic, building your reviewing portfolio, going national, and keeping editors happy. It's no longer available on the NBCC's website, and I've gotten quite a few requests for it recently, so I've posted it here for those interested.
I put these tips together a few years ago --…
rskloot | March 21, 2009
I'm pleased to announce that, starting in May 2009, I'll be writing a weekly science and health column for Slate's new Double X Magazine. I'll be covering any and all science that might be of interest to women (note: I won't just be covering science about specific female issues -- though I'll definitely cover those). Here, from Double X's website, is a description of the new magazine:
Double X is a new Web magazine, founded by women but not just for women, that Slate will launch in spring 2009. The site will spin off from Slate 's XX Factor blog,
where we've started a conversation among…
rskloot | March 18, 2009
Can't blog ... lost in AMAZING ARCHIVE OF MEDICAL IMAGES! Today from BoingBoing:
This previously unreported archive at the National Museum of Health and
Medicine in Washington, D.C., contains 500,000 scans of unique images
so far, with another 225,000 set to be digitized this year. Mike Rhode, the museum's head archivist, is working to make tens of
thousands of those images, which have been buried in the museum's
archive, available on Flickr. Working after hours, his team has posted
a curated selection of almost 800 photos on the service already,
without the express permission of the Army…
illconsidered | March 16, 2009If you're in the same boat as I am (ie, you have a job and/or a life) you probably never get a chance to read every last article linked to in the latest "Another Week of GW news" posting (or even 1 in 100!) So I just wanted to point to the set of stories about "spin batteries" or nanoball-batteries (scroll down a couple of pages from this page anchor), an example of which is here at New Scientist.
Cell phones recharging in 10 seconds and electric car batteries in 5 minutes, sounds promising!
ddobbs | March 2, 2009The Nieman Journalism Lab has a nice round-up of some beautifully informative and often luscious work that "visualizes" news -- that is, turns news trends (and the social concerns and changes they document) into visual representations of data, like changing maps, splats of paint, or -- a favorite -- a simple needle meter.
For example:
An interview with Tim Schwartz (who has more great stuff at his site) about his indexing of various terms as used by the Times over the decades:
Tim Schwartz visualizes history (1851-2008) through word usage in The New York Times from Nieman Journalism Lab on…
rskloot | March 2, 2009
The other day, the NY Times ran a story called "Picture Emerging on Genetic Risks of IVF. It reported on a new Centers for Disease Control study that found that children conceived through the most common infertility treatments had a slightly increased risk of several birth defects, including cleft palate and septal heart defects.  believe this is one of the largest studies looking into the connection between Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) and birth defects, but it's not  the first. Â
Way back in 2003, I wrote a story for Popular Science called "Sally Has Two Mommies + One Daddy…
rskloot | February 28, 2009
London (and much of the U.S.) is currently obsessed with Jade Goody, who is dying of stage 4 cervical cancer at the age of 27 in a very public way: On television. One thing I find amazing is that, in the mountain of media coverage on this (including articles in the New York Times, the Guardian, BBC, etc), I'm not seeing reporters mentioning one very important fact: According to one story (no longer online, but quoted in this interesting post at TBTAM), Goody had multiple abnormal pap smears in her teens. She went in for a few treatments to have the abnormal cells removed, then ignored…
illconsidered | February 27, 2009Things Break does a thorough take-down of George Will's continued dishonesty in the Washington Post. For the background, if somehow you have missed this kerfuffle, check his earlier post.
The story in a nutshell is not remarkable: mainstream columnist prints op-ed full of outright falsehoods, complaints are rejected, paper stands by its right to fill the information age with disinformation. ie Facts don't matter.
The only remarkable thing really is the attention it is receiving and who knows, perhaps there will be some real consequences... like maybe people will remember this for a change.…
drorzel | February 11, 2009Back in the fall, I got all caught up in the election, like everybody else, and I added a bunch of blogs to my RSS feeds in Google Reader. I'm thinking that I might need to cut back to pre-election levels, if not lower, though. Following too many political blogs is giving me whiplash.
This has really been brought home to me as the progress of the stimulus bill has coincided with a busy patch, meaning that I've been sitting down in the evening to 60-80 posts worth of stimulus bill commentary. Going through a whole day's worth of blog posts about the stimulus reads something like:
The bill's in…