I keep wanting to do something with pictures, and I keep procrastinating dreadfully. But just because I drop the ball all the time is no reason not to pick up again. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have anything to drop, would I? This is a close-up of Dracula venefica taken at the Leiden Botanical Garden in 2000. (A bit more on Dracula at — where else? — Wikipedia.) It’s a small plant that grows in the Colombian Andes. The little “face” is smaller than a centimeter. Technorati Tags: orchids, Colombia, Dracula venefica

reality has a well known depressing bent just now. Via the BBC, I noticed this article in Nature Geoscience by Zeebe & Caldeira. They’ve absolutely nailed down a carbon cycle some mouthbreathers were hoping didn’t explain much. Volcanoes spew vast quantities of greenhouse gases into the air, so their thinking — the mouthbreathers’ thinking, not the volcanoes — was that greenhouse gases are natural and couldn’t possibly be a problem. Mother Nature would take care of everything. Thus it ever was. Thus it ever shall be. (No, I’m not being fair to the scientists, as opposed to the politicians, who […]

This is one of those feel-good stories that just lights up my day. (It’s night here, but you know what I mean.) NZ dolphin rescues beached whales. … The pygmy sperm whales had repeatedly beached, and both they and the humans were tired and set to give up, he said. But then the dolphin appeared, communicated with the whales, and led them to safety. The bottlenose dolphin, called Moko by local residents, is well known for playing with swimmers off Mahia beach on the east coast of the North Island. … Technorati Tags: dolphins, whales, interspecies, communication

The Second Law, that is. This should not be possible unless you add energy to the system. For instance, if there were a giant fan in Los Angeles, blowing their so-called air out to sea.   But there is no giant fan. I saw this while hiking northwest of LA, and it’s not the first time I’ve seen it. This is what the plume of LA pollution normally does. It’s not a matter of ground and upper level winds either. The pollution is near ground level and so was I, going from sea level to about a thousand feet up […]

I can’t say I’m surprised. I’m mainly wondering why it took 17 years…. From the BBC: There is evidence linking chronic health problems suffered by Gulf War veterans to exposure to pesticides and nerve agents, US research has found. … These were an anti-nerve gas agent given to troops, pesticides used to control sand-flies, and the nerve-gas sarin that troops may have been exposed to during the demolition of a weapons depot. “Convergent evidence now strongly links a class of chemicals – acetyl cholinesterase inhibitors – to illness in Gulf War veterans,” Dr [Beatrice] Golomb [the committee’s chief scientist] told […]

There’s so much we don’t know about this third planet from the Sun that living on it is a good practice run for when we find other new worlds. This just blew me away: (Science via Ars Technica) [A] team of scientists has taken a closer look at the particulates that cause snow to form, and it seems that most of them are… alive. Ice formation in the troposphere doesn’t tend to happen on its own if the temperatures are higher than -40°C (coincidentally -40°F), but biological particulates can catalyze ice formation at higher temperatures by acting as a nucleus. […]

The planet’s big problems relate to energy. Using it is warming the planet. Getting it is causing wars. Running out of it will end in poverty and famine. Now that we’re getting closer to the apocalypse, it looks like the four horsemen are all riding one cloned horse. The first task is to figure out the scope of the problem. How much energy do we use? How much will we need in, say, 2050? (That’s a favorite year for projections: it’s nice and round, and within many current lifetimes, but not so close that there’s no hope.) The next task […]

What can I say?   I love these things. These are some new friends I recently met at Point Dume near Malibu.  During very low tides, such as we had at the end of December, you can just wander around among the tide pools and find things that you’d normally only see snorkeling. Crossposted to Shakesville. Technorati tags: sea squirts, tunicates, Malibu, Pyura haustor

You know, so long as you avoid politics and stick to science, the world is full of wonderful stories. Via Wired Blog: A young professor has used her favorite childhood toy, a laser printer, and a toaster oven to make microfluidic devices – tiny computer chips with plumbing that are usually fabricated in multimillion dollar labs. Microfluidics are essential to the whole new field of genomics and proteomics, which are at the center of the new advances we hear about in curing things like multiple sclerosis, diabetes, cancers, alzheimers, etc., etc. Her method makes the guts of the microfluidics chip […]

Social security is not in crisis, but even economists I respect say that Medicare really is a looming disaster. Huge scary numbers get tossed out whose extent can only be understood by using a faster-than-light spacecraft. I’m not an economist, and I don’t know the best solution to solve the financial issues. But I think an important point is being missed by starting with the costs and going on from there. This is medicine, not banking. Economics is the last link in this particular series, not the first, so we need to think outside the (economics) box to really have […]

Although, really, I guess that would depend on how you define their work. Let me put it this way: the government is continuing not to protect and help the citizens who pay the government to help and protect them. Via Shaker Nik E. Poo, another depressing bit of news. Despite the protests of more than 50 scientists, including five Nobel laureates in chemistry, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Friday approved use of a new, highly toxic fumigant, mainly for strawberry fields. The new pesticide, methyl iodide, is designed for growers, mainly in California and Florida, who need to replace […]

That’s the AP headline, and for once they’re not exaggerating. The germ: Salmonella, best known as a culprit of food poisoning. The trip: Space Shuttle STS-115, September 2006. The reason: Scientists wanted to see how space travel affects germs. … “Wherever humans go, microbes go, you can’t sterilize humans. … and it’s important that we understand … how they’re going to change,” explained Cheryl Nickerson [professor at Arizona State University]. The researchers placed identical strains of salmonella in containers and sent one into space aboard the shuttle, while the second was kept on Earth, under similar temperature conditions to the […]

Evidence from a sudden climate warming 55 million years ago suggests that increased production of methane by warming bogs accelerated the warming. Feedback loops are something scientists have been worrying about for years. They could speed up warming beyond any hope of controlling it. One of the scary loops is coral reef dieback, and the millions of tons of carbon locked up there dissolving into the ocean. The other real biggie is what happens when all the carbon locked up in frozen northern bogs starts unfreezing. Well, roads in Alaska are buckling as the permafrost melts. The Northwest Passage is […]

Everyone’s been beaten to boredom, or at least I have, by the news that liberals are better at processing visuals and pressing the right key, an M or a W. (Abstract of article) Not that there’s anything wrong with the research. The data support the conclusions, they’ve shown quite clearly that brain activity is different in the two groups, yadda, yadda yadda. (You can quibble about how well they’ve distinguished political leanings, or how big a deal pressing “M” or “W” is, but the results are pretty clear-cut.) But this is boring because it is old news. Very old news. […]

Amoeba zombies, that is. As a headline in thedailygreen.com put it, “Brain-eating Amoeba Deaths Spike in Warmer U. S. Climate.” [link not working, deleted, 2007-10-22] These brain-eaters are for real. They’re amoeba that like warm water, live in lakes, infect swimmers via the nose, migrate to the brain, and start living it up. Naegleria fowleri is said to be very rare. But as lakes warm up, it’s getting less rare. From the LATimes report: “This is definitely something we need to track,” said Michael Beach, a specialist in recreational waterborne illnesses with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “This […]

One bizarre effect of global warming is how it’s become a reason to make the problems worse. Global warming is so bad, that we have to pull out all the stops. That’s true. So far, so good. But then people go on to lobby for fuel that doesn’t reduce greenhouse gases, that takes land away from food production, and that’s already causing food crises and environmental destruction. They lobby for hydrogen made from coal, because hydrogen is so clean-burning. (No, no, don’t look at the coal plant. Look over here at the hydrogen car.) And they lobby for nuclear power. […]