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tqa | August 15, 2007
Right now, I'm sitting under one of the outer rain bands associated with newly-formed Tropical Storm Erin. We're seeing a moderately heavy thunderstorm right now. The rain's coming down fast and heavy. There's a lot of lightning right now, with thunder that's loud enough to set off the occasional car alarm and close enough to send my thunderphobic dog off to the dubious shelter of the bathtub. Under the circumstances, it seems like a pretty good time to talk about getting prepared for a storm.
This really should go without saying, but while this might be a very good time for me to write…
tqa | August 15, 2007
Deadeye Dick Cheney, talking about why we shouldn't invade Iraq:
That was back in 1994. It's sad how right - and prophetic - he was ten years before the big screw-up started.
cmcclain | August 15, 2007And two the highest bidder goes Papua New Guinea's government, mineral rights, and everything else is up for sale in this huge mid-year blowout sale. Over at Malaria, Bedbugs, Sea Lice, and Sunsets (the only blog I read more than mine) a great article about PNG's impending fall.
Somare [the re-elected PM] said he will probably continue granting exploration licenses to mineral and fossil fuel mining companies, 15 of which were issued in the past 5 years.
One of those was to Nautilus Mining.
cmcclain | August 15, 2007In the race for the Arctic there is Canada, United States, and Russia all staking claim on the increasingly accessible Northwest Passage and the mineral rights for the region. You have Canada building up a polar fleet and Arctic bases at the cost of several billion dollars. You have the Russians planting flags on the polar floor in sham expeditions which has Russian experts divided on the implications. Now it is the U.S. who is pursuing the Arctic.
NOAA's Office of Coast Survey, in partnership with the University of New Hampshire's Joint Hydrographic Center and the National Science…
petnoyer | August 14, 2007How many times have you seen pallets of bottled water coming off the forklift at the grocery store, and felt your stomach turning in disgust? Never? Not once? That's not enough! You should be sick. When you see soccer coaches and construction workers throwing cases of little plastic water bottles into the back of their SUV, your stomach should turn. Bottled water is sooo not sexy.
Bottled water is plastic-wrapped with more bacteria than regular tap water, and less fluoride, according to university researchers. More than 60 million gallons of petroleum are used annually to make the 38 billion…
grrlscientist | August 13, 2007tags: encephalon, neuroscience, neurobiology, blog carnivals
The 29th edition of the neuroscience blog carnival, Encephalon is now available for you to read. Be sure to pop in and support them with your presence!
grrlscientist | August 13, 2007tags: bookworms, books, book reviews, blog carnivals
Even though this is only the second edition of the Bookworms blog carnival that has been published, it's a big one, packed full of book reading goodness.
petnoyer | August 13, 2007It's a good thing marine biologist Buki Rinkevich and his colleagues at the Israel Oceanographic and Limnological Research Station decided to test the effects of detergents on corals before using them to clean up an oil spill.
The researchers reported recently in Environmental Science and Technology that millimeter sized coral fragments succumbed to the detergent before the oil itself. The detergents and the dispersed oil droplets all proved significantly more toxic to the coral than crude oil, causing rapid, widespread death or stunted growth rates, even at doses recommended by the…
tqa | August 12, 2007
There's an old saying in Tennessee -- I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee -- that says, fool me once, shame on -- shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again.
George W. Bush
17 September, 2002
It seems like just yesterday that AT&T was telling us that their decision to silence Pearl Jam's critique of President Bush during their webcast of the Lollapalooza concert was an "unfortunate mistake" that shouldn't have happened and wouldn't happen again. Hopefully, it won't. But based on the past behavior of AT&T, I'm not making any large bets on that.
That's because it…
cmcclain | August 12, 2007In the deep dark sea, bioluminescence is the name of game. Its central role is unequivocal for many organisms. Do different sexes of species display dimorphism with respect to bioluminescence? Does it have a role in the dirty deeds that occur in the dark? The following is an illuminating dirty laundry list of all sex and lights in the deep.
The most obvious would be to make the business parts light up. Ovaries and eggs of asteroids, ophiuroids, and meduase can bioluminescence. Surprisingly, no cases of glowing testes are known. So males may have to resort to other tactics. However, this…
cmcclain | August 10, 2007
It's Friday afternoon and your setting there staring at the monitor. Sure you could be productive and continue on until 5. But hey, it's Friday afternoon why be productive and if you are reading this already I know you are looking for a way out. Over at The Other 95%, Kevin posts a new invertebrate themed song every week. You can download the mp3 and listen to Kevin wail on the acoustic guitar and exercise his chops. This week it's Sea Squirts Just Want To Have Fun. Absolutely brilliant...
I'm attached to rock in the moonlight
My colony says 'when you gonna live your life right?'
Oh but…
grrlscientist | August 10, 2007tags: online quiz, NYC, LA
You Belong in New York
You're a girl on the go, and LA's laid back lifestyle isn't really your thing.
You prefer a city that never sleeps, and people as ambitious as you are.
Cultured and street smart, you can truly appreciate everything New York has to offer.
Are You an LA Girl or a NY Girl?
I think I was stretching the boundaries since I think my answers made me really close to "half and half". How about you?
petnoyer | August 10, 2007
"Holy jumping jellyfish, Batman. Watch out! That thing's heading straight for us."
"Not to fear, young ward. That's Enypniastes sp., a swimming sea cucumber."
"A pelagic deposit feeder, I should have known..."
"...from the cape alone. You can access the video from Deep Slope Expedition 2007 at the Batlink here."
Photo from the weblog Kingdom of the Echinoderm by Bob Carney, LSU at Deep Slope Expedition 2007 Website.
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tqa | August 9, 2007
There are a lot of news articles out today that feature some just-published research on early human research. The research itself - a paper in the journal Nature by a team of scientists including the mother-daughter combinationon of Meave and Louise Leakey- features two partial skulls found east of Lake Turkana in Kenya. One of the fossils, a cranial dome that's been identified as belonging to a young Homo erectus, has been dated at about 1.55 million years old. The other, a partial upper jaw from Homo habilis, is about 100,000 years younger (1.44 million years old). This shows that the two…
mikethemadbiologist | August 9, 2007Glenn Greenwald had a great post Wednesday about establishment foreign policy scholars, and how they delimit the 'acceptable' foreign policy debate:
The Foreign Policy Community is more secretive than the Fight Club. They believe that all foreign policy should be formulated only by our secret "scholar"-geniuses in the think tanks and institutes comprising the Foreign Policy Community and that the American people should not and need not know anything about any of it short of the most meaningless platitudes. They are the Guardians of Seriousness. "Serious" really means the extent to which one…
cortex | August 9, 2007The shit is hitting the fan: all those sub-prime mortgages given out so recklessly over the past two years are getting their interest rates re-adjusted. And that, of course, is when the foreclosures begin.
By most measures, sub-prime loans are a bad idea. Look, for example, at the popular 2/28 loan, which consists of a low, fixed-interest rate for the first two years and a much higher, adjustable rate for the next twenty-eight. Most people taking out a 2/28 loan can't afford the higher interest rates that will hit later on. It's not unusual for interest payments on a 2/28 loan to double…
tqa | August 8, 2007
Today, while at the Johnson Space Center, I accidentally heard a very disturbing conversation. A young boy, probably five or six years old, was asking his mother about the moon. She proceeded to explain to him how the moon got here. It was created by God, she told him, on the fourth day.
It was created on the fourth day. After the plants, but before the animals. That's what she told this poor child, as he stood there next to a football-field-sized rocket, looking at a beautiful 10-foot diameter picture of the moon that was hanging on the wall right in front of the Saturn V. The moon was…
mixingmemory | August 8, 2007So mirror neurons have been back in the news recently, as the result of a paper in the July 2007 issue of PLoS one titled, "Do you see what I mean? Corticospinal excitability during observation of culture-specific gestures"(1). Sounds interesting in a geeky sort of way, right? The paper starts with the observation that
At this stage we still know very little about how special classes of actions such as communicative hand gestures are understood. (p. 1)
So the authors, Molnar--Szakacs et al., conducted an experiment in an attempt to rectify this. Let me tell you about it...
But before I do,…
tqa | August 8, 2007
Today, Mitt "I Like To Veto, Veto" Romney outdid himself in the "things candidates say" category of hysterical stupidity. After Mitt called for a "surge of support" for the war in Iraq at an Iowa campaign stop today, he took some questions. One of the questioners asked him why none of his five sons served in the military. His answer:
"The good news is, we have a volunteer Army and that's the way we're going to keep it. My sons are adults. They've chosen not to serve in the military in active duty and I respect their decision in that regard.
That's a good answer - or at least as close to…