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cmcclain | February 2, 2007Over at BlogCritics Magazine someone has critiqued DSN. ggwfung has not been so nice to my Sb'lings and they have in turn not been so nice back. That being said, ggwfung had some really nice things to say about us...
Deep Sea News is a partnership between Craig, a "post-doctoral fellow at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute", and Peter, a "Graduate Research Associate at the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies." Fairly impressive titles, but this blog is salt of the earth, or in this case, salt of the sea. It casts back to the best traditions of popular science,…
tqa | February 2, 2007Over at the Discovery Institute's Media Complaints Division, Michael Behe seems to be a wee bit concerned by the attention that a recent Nature paper is getting, moaning that, "It seems some scientists have discovered that one way to hype otherwise-lackluster work is to claim that it discredits ID."
OK. To start with, watching Michael Behe whine about someone else using ID to hype "otherwise-lackluster work" creates a concentration of irony so dense that four mining firms have put in bids for that post. Sorry, but I had to get that one out of my system. Now that I've more or less managed to…
sb admin | February 2, 2007The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released the policymakersâ summary of its 2007 report today, and it was at once a momentous occasion and nothing new. Nothing new, that is, to the people whoâve been following the science for the past few decades and had already figured out that humans are causing global warming and are going to suffer for our folly.
IPCC reports have tremendous authority, because they represent the work of the worldâs leading scientists conducting the most comprehensive review of scientific research produced on climate change. Now, theyâve said that they are 90%…
tqa | February 2, 2007I didn't join the crowd of Sciencebloggers paying tribute to Molly Ivins yesterday because I didn't know what to say. Everything, it seemed, had been said - frequently by Ms. Ivins.
Today, I read her last column. The whole thing is worth reading, but the last paragraph is truly spectacular:
We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we're for them and trying to get them out…
integrityofscience | February 2, 2007In Wednesday's column, Boston Globe opinion writer Derrick Z. Jackson draws an interesting contrast between two presidents' handling of the nation's body of science in the face of adversity.
Publicly, President Eisenhower downplayed the significance of Sputnik. A "useless hunk of iron." Privately, he rallied his cabinet under its guidance created NASA and expanded the NSF.
On the eve of the latest IPCC report and in the face of increasingly dramatic evidence of climate change, President George W. Bush has, well, done the opposite. From the column "Bush spaces out during Sputnik moment":
The…
cmcclain | February 2, 2007
Alepisaurus ferox which washed up alive on the beach in front of MBARI in the spring of 2002. Tonatiuh Trejo, a graduate student at Moss Landing Marine Laboratory, and Jeff Drazen are holding up the specimen after dissecting it for various tissues and stomach contents. Several strandings of this species occurred in 2002 in Monterey Bay, and strandings are usual in the spring (Bond, 1996). From Jeff Drazen's Deep-Sea Fishes
mikethemadbiologist | February 1, 2007I never knew that Niagra Falls had frozen in 1911 until a friend sent me some photos. Here they are:
tqa | February 1, 2007. . . there is an equal and opposite reaction, plus an unlimited number of unintended consequences.
The Flintshire County Council in Wales recently decided to change their procedures for de-icing the local roads. Instead of spreading rock salt, which is effective but can be corrosive to vehicles and roads, they shifted to a more environmentally-friendly product - a starch and grit mixture that is coated in molasses to allow it to stick to the roads more easily than the salt did.
In principle, this was a fantastic move. The new material is derived from agricultural byproducts and is totally…
tqa | February 1, 2007As several bloggers have already noted today, the White House has somehow altered the search function on their website so that it ignores virtually all mentions of the phrase "global warming." The funny thing is, they couldn't even manage to do that without screwing up.
At the moment, if you go to and type "global warming" (in quotes) into their search box, you get exactly one hit - a poorly scanned pdf version of a news article claiming - wait for it - that things were warmer in the recent past than they are now. If you do the same search, but use Google to search their site instead of…
tqa | January 31, 2007In a previous post, I discussed the highly inappropriate Pentagon response to Linda Bilmes' study of the potential financial costs stemming from servicemembers wounded or injured in Iraq and Afghanistan. In this post, I'm going to talk about a very serious flaw that I found while examining that report. I've kept the two posts separate because I don't want the inappropriate Pentagon response to cloud an objective look at the paper itself.
There are actually a number of places where I think her analysis does not adequately consider various factors, but one of the errors is so large that its…
tqa | January 31, 2007Revere, at Effect Measure, comments on a story that just appeared in Inside Higher Education. The article detals a completely outrageous attempt at dealing with unfavorable information:
What set off the Pentagon was Bilmes' estimate for the current number of injured of 50,500. William Winkenwender Jr., assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, called the Los Angeles Times, Bilmes, and David T. Ellwood -- dean of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government -- to complain that the real figure is less than half that -- just over 22,000.
Let's set aside the question of fact involved…
pharyngula | January 31, 2007Molly Ivins has died.
I'm surprised at how this affects me. She was a wonderful woman, wise and funny, and this is a great loss to the nation. Whenever I'm tempted to just write off the whole state of Texas (thanks to a few of its rather prominent representatives), I just remind myself, "Molly Ivins," and know that I'm being unfair.
Kevin Hayden has put together a sweet tribute to Molly Ivins. We're all going to miss her.
sb admin | January 31, 2007Yesterday, the US House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held a hearing on âAllegations of Political interference with the Work of Government Climate Change Scientists.â As committee chair Henry Waxman noted in his opening statement, the committee had been investigating this matter for several months, and had good reason to be concerned:
According to the documents we reviewed, Administration officials sought to edit an EPA report (1) to add âbalanceâ by emphasizing the âbeneficial effectsâ of climate change, (2) to delete a discussion of the human health and…
petnoyer | January 31, 2007SEED Magazine is running a welcome news story on a Japanese/EU agreement to ease their collective appetite for tuna. This is a very important development. The Japanese have been a significant source of politicial pressure at ICCAT in the past. This cooperative atmosphere for marine conservation may herald a new era in fisheries management.
If you're interested in learning more about bluefin tuna (the most expensive fish in the world), there's addtional background information on the Gulf of Mexico spawning grounds for bluefin tuna from a DSN story posted October 2006.
cmcclain | January 31, 2007I am orginally from Arkansas so I am all too acquainted with the evil that is Wal-Mart. In Conway, AR, my favorite hardware store and a lot of the local downtown shops are gone now thanks to the new supercenter. Apparenlty, ADSA has fallen far(?) from the tree. ASDA is a supermarket chain found throughout the U.K. and is part of the Wal-Mart "family". The BBC reports today that ASDA is to stop selling Monkfish.
The retail giant says it will no longer supply the restaurant favourite until there are more sustainable ways of catching it. Asda said the technique used to harvest the deep-sea…
pharyngula | January 31, 2007Since I got ribbed a bit for my antique D&D lore in a previous comment, I have to defend myself from charges of extreme nerdlitude by distracting you all with a real nerdfest: a discussion of who would win in hand-to-hand combat between a first level magic-user and a housecat, complete with computer simulations.
The answer: under the modern rules, the cat usually wins. (When I played, if you said something like "I whack the cat with my staff", there might be a quick check to see if the cat dodged, and otherwise, we'd just say, "OK, you killed the cat. Now what?" Dang rules lawyers and…
grrlscientist | January 31, 2007Not long ago in the country of Colombia, a chicken was born with webbed feet, similar to a duck (pictured).
As some people suggested, this bird isn't the result of a duck sneaking into the hen house because experts say it's impossible for the two species to interbreed. Instead, experts said the bird is a genetic mutation.
My guess is that the developmental genes that were supposed to cause programmed cell death for those cells located between the bird's toes did not activate and do their job properly. As a result, those cells survived, leaving the bird with skin remaining between its toes.…
tqa | January 31, 2007There's an interesting op-ed on teaching evolution in today's edition of the International Herald Tribune. The opinion piece is written by Michael Balter, and suggests that, "The best way to teach the theory of evolution is to teach this contentious history." To support this position, Balter points to a 2005 study by Steven Verhey that was published in the November, 2005 issue of BioScience, that suggested that creationist students were more likely to change their views if the curriculum directly addressed creationist objections to evolution.
Balter has been advocating this position for a…