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cwilcox | March 30, 2009Remember the story I wrote about a kid who was a dad at 13 yrs old?
Little Alfie was supposedly only 12 when he had sex for the first time, unprotected, with his 15 yr old girlfriend Chantelle Steadman. At the time, she told him and the news that he was the only person she'd slept with.
Yeah, well it turns out he's not the father, according to a DNA test.
Apparently, she's had LOTS of sex. Around half a dozen boys came forward saying they'd slept with her, and after she told her 17 yr old half sister about her behavior, Alfie was pressured to take a paternity test. The results proved he was…
gregladen | March 30, 2009
The caption of this photograph at The Guardian says only, "Nowruz celebrations in Afghanistan." Nowruz is the name of the Iranian New Year, which is celebrated in a number of countries by people of several faiths. The baskets of dried fruits eaten during the holiday provide the only visual connection to the colorful festivities, and you have to know more than the paper tells you to see that. For many viewers, this will a thoroughly conventional image of the Middle East.
How do you view a photograph when the ethnicity represented is the context? How do you view a photograph when the…
mspringer | March 30, 2009Before we figured out that the universe was a very large open space with lots of stuff scattered about, the ancients had some interesting ideas on how the sky worked. Roughly speaking, celestial phenomena came in three kinds. There are the stars, which remain a constant, fixed background. There are the planets, which move about the sky in complicated but predictable patterns. And finally there were other transient phenomena - nova, supernova, comets, meteors, and the rest. These last were often seen as particularly significant by virtue of their rarity.
If you go outside tonight and look…
sciencepunk | March 30, 2009I keep thinking I should write more worthy articles, but then, I keep finding fantastic things that don't need 800 words of discussion getting in the way. This is one of the latter, and comes courtesy of George Kourounis, ballsy explorer and general badass.
Kourounis took a trip to Indonesia's Kawah Ijen volcano, where miners earn $10 a day for journeying into the depths of a volcano to retrieve sulphur. Here is the site of the world's largest lake of sulphuric acid:
Here is an aluminium can dissolving in the extreme acid (pH ~0.5!):
And here is Kourounis, going for a leisurely paddle…
cortex | March 30, 2009My short post on breast-feeding from a few days ago (inspired by this article by Hanna Rosin) has inspired a lot of dissenting email. Since comments are still disabled - I hope to have them back soon, though - I want to post a selection of the criticism. Just to reiterate and clarify: I don't want to minimize the slight but statistically significant benefits of breast-feeding. My simple point is that if breast-feeding is a burden to the mother, then those health benefits should be weighed against other variables, such as the psychological well-being of the mother. After all, the well-being of…
gregladen | March 29, 2009Check it out.
I saw you working out on that new machine," the personal trainer, folding towels at the counter by the locker room, was saying to some guy he knew. You see more trainers folding towels these days, what with the economy and all.
"The new machine?" was the reply.
"Yea. The wave."
"The wave?! Oh, you mean the thing next to the Stair Master. The Hockey Machine."
"... Ah, right.... the 'Hockey Machine ..."
The wave is a low impact aerobic machine that simulates shushing, like with skate-skiing. Apparently the guys like to call it the "Hockey Machine." Which it isn't It's "…
gregladen | March 29, 2009
OBJECTIVE: To establish if the 'myth' about whether the size of a man's penis can be estimated from his shoe size has any basis, in fact. SUBJECTS AND METHODS: Two urologists measured the stretched penile length of 104 men in a prospective study and related this to their shoe size. RESULTS: The median stretched penile length for the sampled population was 13 cm and the median UK shoe size was 9 (European 43). There was no statistically significant correlation between shoe size and stretched penile length. CONCLUSION: The supposed association of penile length and shoe size has no scientific…
gregladen | March 29, 2009Hanna Rosin paints breast feeding, in a recent item in The Atlantic, as a social requirement for the privileged, a "no-exceptions requirement" and a badge of being a good mother. She also examines the possibility that breast-feeding is " ... an instrument of misery that mostly just keeps women down."
I dutifully breast-fed each of my first two children for the full year that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends. I have experienced what the Babytalk story calls breast-feeding-induced "maternal nirvana." This time around, nirvana did not describe my state of mind; I was launching a…
gregladen | March 29, 2009
A new study warns that cold-blooded land animals like lizards and insects in the tropics may wither as the world warms. "Cold-blooded" is the layman's term for ectotherms--animals whose body temperature is contingent on the surrounding environment, rather than internally regulated like that of warm-blooded creatures. They thrive in temperatures ranging from 68 degrees to 104 degrees Fahrenheit (20 to 40 degrees Celsius), above which they overheat. As the globe warms, researchers warn they may be forced to swelter in burrows and under bushes with little time to eat, find mates or rear young…
grrlscientist | March 29, 2009Do you remember how I've been campaigning to save several science-y blog carnivals from oblivion? Well, since one blog carnival is currently being revived, partially due to my noisemaking, I am taking my support one step further: I am hosting the upcoming issue of the Circus of the Spineless on 6 April. So this means that I need your help. If you have written a "translation" of a scientific paper, or an essay, a photoessay or if you have a stunning image of a squishy (or crusty) animal that lacks a backbone -- not including American politicians -- to share with the world, please send the…
pharyngula | March 28, 2009Your ornamental function must be your important asset — never mind those degrees and skills and various non-superficial attributes. I can imagine how Sheril must feel, but have never experienced it myself. Strangely, I've never met a distinguished stranger and had them compliment my looks or ask after my marriage status.
It's the Western complement to the burka: women aren't hidden away overtly, but instead every one is seen as if they're wearing a beauty queen/cheerleader costume.
mspringer | March 28, 2009Saturdays I tend to use for soapboxing on things which may or may not be related to physics. Today I think it will be free speech. There's a Supreme Court case involving Hillary: The Movie in the context of McCain-Fiengold campaign finance law. Suffice it to say that free speech is non-negotiable in my opinion, political speech most of all. SCOTUS really screwed the pooch by not overturning the law with prejudice the first time it came up, and here's hoping they get it right this time.
"It's not a musical comedy", sniffed Souter and Breyer. No, it's not. It is obviously partisan…
cortex | March 28, 2009A quick note: I'll be giving my stump speech at the Dartmouth Bookstore in Hanover, NH tomorrow (3/29) at 3 PM.
cortex | March 28, 2009In the latest Atlantic, Hanna Rosin has a very interesting article/manifesto that rails against the "cult of breast-feeding":
The medical literature [on breast-feeding] shows that breast-feeding is probably, maybe, a little better; but it is far from the stampede of evidence that Sears describes. More like tiny, unsure baby steps: two forward, two back, with much meandering and bumping into walls. A couple of studies will show fewer allergies, and then the next one will turn up no difference. Same with mother-infant bonding, IQ, leukemia, cholesterol, diabetes. Even where consensus is…
cwilcox | March 27, 2009Things like this just turn on my nerd switch.
A new study, published in Science, used amazing molecular techniques to film HIV spreading from one cell to another.
See for yourself:
The breakthrough footage was obtained by creating a molecular clone of HIV which included fluorescent genetic code that glows green under blue light. In the video, you can see the infected T-cell interact and infect a healthy one by creating what is called a virological synapse - which is a fancy word for a tunnel of sorts between the two cells.
Before the video, scientists didn't know that the virus particles…
grrlscientist | March 27, 2009Here's the latest carnivalia that has been published in the blogosphere;
Carnival of the Vanities, A Touch of Spring. This blog carnival links to the best writing in the blogopshere, regardless of topic.
Carnival of the Cities. This blog carnival focuses on writing about and photography of cities throughout the world.
mspringer | March 27, 2009Apologies for the light posting. Busy week, and it's going to be a busy weekend too in physics land. Well, that's what I signed up for.
This caught my eye though. Via Swans on Tea though, I see a great demonstration of physics as art. There's a story of Feynman and several other physics lecturers who liked to attach a bowling ball to the high roof of their lecture halls and pull the ball out to an angle right by their faces and let it swing. Of course it comes almost back to hit them in the face,but not quite. The laws of nature just can't provide more energy than went in to the system…