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gregladen | April 21, 2009African Union troops are physically disarming 21,000 fighters from Burundi's last active rebel group, the Forces for National Liberation (FNL).
It follows a weekend ceremony where FNL leader Agathon Rwasa symbolically surrendered his own weapons to the AU.
A grenade attack killed six people but the BBC's Prime Ndikumagenge says it was not linked to the rebels.
But he says it shows how many weapons are circulating in Burundi following more than 10 years of ethnic conflict.
bbc
pharyngula | April 21, 2009Those astronomers keep finding new extrasolar planets — 350 of them so far — but none are just right. Two new planets have been discovered that are almost earthlike.
Gliese 581 e is the closest in size to Earth, only 1.9 times larger. Unfortunately, it's also too close to its star, and is probably way, way too hot.
Gliese 581 d is even larger, but it's sitting square in the habitable zone, where liquid water would be possible. The gravity would be a killer there, but…hmmm. If it were covered in water, it could be a perfect place for squid — huge colonies of space squid in a vast ocean. And it…
grrlscientist | April 21, 2009Here are the latest blog carnivals that have been published in the blogosphere;
Scientia Pro Publica, #2. This biweekly blog carnival, started by me to replace the now extinct Tangled Bank, celebrates the best science, nature and medical writing published in the blogosphere.
SurgExperiences, #221. This blog carnival focuses on medicine; specifically, on medicine that requires surgery.
Carnival of the Green, #176. This blog carnival is all about green living and other Earth-friendly topics.
All Things Eco, #47. This blog carnival links to writings about ecology and conservation.
Just Write…
cortex | April 21, 2009I've got a new article in the latest issue of Wired, guest-edited by J.J. Abrams. It's quite an excellent issue, I think, although I'm still utterly befuddled by the hidden puzzles on the glossy pages. My article is an investigation of what stage magicians can teach us about the human mind and the frailties of perception:
For Teller (that's his full legal name), magic is more than entertainment. He wants his tricks to reveal the everyday fraud of perception so that people become aware of the tension between what is and what seems to be. Our brains don't see everything--the world is too big,…
pontiff | April 21, 2009In Vienna, Virginia on April 23-25th a workshop is being held in response to a report, "A Federal Vision for Quantum Information Science" issued by the United States National Science and Technology Council. While this workshop looks, from the outside, like any other typical quantum computing workshop, this is a bit deceiving, as from what I understand this workshop is supposed to provide the impetus for a report arguing for a major spending for quantum information science in the United States, especially from the National Science Foundation. The Quantum Pontiff, unfortunately, is stuck…
sb admin | April 21, 2009Our countryâs food-safety system may leave a lot to be desired, but the New York Timesâ Gardiner Harris reminds us that we should be grateful to the epidemiologists who let us know an outbreak is occurring at all. And it turns out that many of these alarm-sounding professionals work in Minnesota. âIf not for the Minnesota Department of Health, the Peanut Corporation of America might still be selling salmonella-laced peanuts, Dole might still be selling contaminated lettuce, and ConAgra might still be selling dangerous Banquet brand pot pies,â Harris reports.
Detecting a food-borne outbreak…
mspringer | April 21, 2009Reader Timothy writes in with a question:
It seems that the north pole would get more daylight during the summer solstice than the equator does during an equinox. During the summer solstice, the north pole would get the equivalent of (24hrs)sin(23.5 ° ) = 9.57 hours of sunlight from directly overhead (the zenith). During the equinox, the equator would get the equivalent of (12 hrs / pi radians) ⫠sin θ d θ (integrating from zero to pi) = 7.64 hours of sunlight from the zenith. We only integrate from zero to pi, when the sun is above the horizon.
I am curious as the reasons why the north…
gregladen | April 21, 2009... somewhat ironically named Scientia Pro Publica, is a new Blog Carnival started by science blogger GrrlScientist. I think her objective is to create a general science carnival with reinvigorated interest that will give people fingertip access to current blog posts in any and all of the sciences, and this seems to be working. The second edition is now available, and it is one of the better carnivals I've seen.
Please go to Scientia Pro Publica 2, The Science, Nature and Medicine Blog Carnival and then click on all the links so people know you ae out there. In the mean time, do read at…
tqa | April 20, 2009
I introduced my daughter to a cinematic gem today:
"How can you close me up? On what grounds?"
"I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here."
Casablanca
gregladen | April 20, 2009President Mobotu Sese Seku, Kuku Kibombi, dictator of Zaire and arch typical fascist leader, once shoved a book in my hand, sort of like how Hugo Chavez shoved a book in Obama's hand. Republicans did not mock me as they are now mocking Obama, mainly because I was not President of the United States of America at the time. It was a little embarrassing, but I kept the book. It's called "Mobutu ... something something something." (I wonder if that is the same book Chavez gave to Obama? D'ya think?)
Anyway, the Yahoos are all over Obama because some drone paparazzi copped a photograph of Obama…
dgmacarthur | April 20, 2009Mark Henderson reports that an influential UK think-tank, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, has launched an inquiry into personalised medicine:
The Nuffield working party includes nine scientists, social scientists,
lawyers and philosophers. It will consider whether genetic tests ought to be
regulated more tightly, and whether people who buy them and then consult
their GPs about the results should have to pay for such follow-up advice.
The inquiry will also examine other aspects of direct-to-consumer healthcare,
such as MRI and CT scans [...] Hugh
Whittall, director of the Nuffield Council,…
gregladen | April 20, 2009Physicist Stephen Hawking, the author of "A Brief History of Time" who is almost completely paralyzed by motor neurone disease, has been urgently admitted to hospital, Cambridge University said on Monday.
Hawking, 67, was taken by ambulance to a local hospital in Cambridge, where he teaches as a professor of applied mathematics and theoretical physics.
"Professor Hawking is very ill and has been taken by ambulance to Addenbrooke's Hospital," the university said.
details
h/t Ben
pharyngula | April 20, 2009The physicist Stephen Hawking has been hospitalized, a serious business for a 67 year old man with ALS. We should all hope for the best, but don't pray — we shall trust in modern medicine and science, and the stamina of a man who has demonstrated remarkable persistence in the face of daunting health problems.
gregladen | April 20, 2009...I sat in the bar with the old man from Italy and thought about how much of our common knowledge of historical events is based on the plots of movies. Talking to Vincenzo forced me to step back and question these assumptions that I myself make. If I learn something from a movie, before I convict someone in my own mind, fairness dictates that I research a bit more....
Salieri and Mozart in Vesuvio Saloon @ Quiche Moraine Dot Com
cortex | April 20, 2009Virginia Heffernan, writing in the Times magazine, takes Bruce Sterling's SXSW talk about connectivity and poverty mainstream:
Bruce Sterling, the cyberpunk writer, proposed at the South by Southwest tech conference in Austin that the clearest symbol of poverty is dependence on "connections" like the Internet, Skype and texting. "Poor folk love their cellphones!" he said.
In his speech, Sterling seemed to affect Nietzschean disdain for regular people. If the goal was to provoke, it worked. To a crowd that typically prefers onward-and-upward news about technology, Sterling's was a sadistically…
cortex | April 20, 2009Robert Krulwich has a typically brilliant piece on Shakespeare, roses, gendered language and the latest version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
Boroditsky proposes that because the word for "bridge" in German -- die brucke -- is a feminine noun, and the word for "bridge" in Spanish -- el puente -- is a masculine noun, native speakers unconsciously give nouns the characteristics of their grammatical gender.
"Does treating chairs as masculine and beds as feminine in the grammar make Russian speakers think of chairs as being more like men and beds as more like women in some way?" she asks in a…
dgmacarthur | April 19, 2009Jonathan Eisen summarises the major themes from the Joint Genome Institute meeting. He has a numbered list of 20 highlights - here's a few that I thought would be of most interest to Genetic Future readers:
2. Ecological and population genomics are truly the next big thing. 3. Related to the above point, one of the next revolutions is going to be in high throughput phenotyping --- after all, we cannot solve the genotype-phenotype problem when we only know the genotype.Â
5. NextGen sequencing has completely outrun the ability of even good bioinformatics people to keep up with the data and…
grrlscientist | April 19, 2009
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) blog carnival is seeking your recently published blog entries about science, nature and medicine for inclusion in its upcoming edition on Monday, 20 April 2009. To send submissions to Scientia Pro Publica, either use this automated submission form or send it directly to ScientiaBlogCarnival at gmail. Be sure to include the URL or "permalink", the essay title and a brief summary.
If you are interested in hosting an…