At first glance, an avantgarde diagnostic technique might seem to have little in common with a beancounter topic like insurance. The first glance couldn’t be more wrong. Gene scanning means you’ll soon be able to find out just how susceptible you are to a whole series of diseases. And so will other people.

With the Live Earth concerts rolling and the wingnuts whining in the woodwork, I thought it might be useful to give the Shakers one of the best links I’ve seen for the facts about global warming. Just in case you find yourself contending with wingnut talking points. (The acronym being WTP, interestingly enough.) The New Scientist (May, 2007) had an excellent and complete rebuttal of WTPs: Climate Change: A Guide for the Perplexed. They cover everything. From what I’ve seen without looking for it, the wingnuts seem to have moved away from the “hockey stick graph is false” bullshit. I […]

People went on red alert about SARS, where the fatality rate was approximately 10%. Bird flu doesn’t even spread between people (yet), but we’re on red alert about bird flu. Don’t get me wrong. Prevention is way better than cure. But it would make sense to deal with actual current threats before panicking about possible ones. Tuberculosis is a much bigger problem than SARS, and it’s here, now, and killing millions. Untreated TB has a fatality rate of around 55%. TB treatment in the days before drugs reduced that rate to around 30%. In developed countries, with anti-TB drugs, the […]

For some reason, the New Yorker has this only online. There are six of these surreal drawings by Harri Kallio are on their site.

Everything from health to wealth depends on science in the modern world, so, obviously, scientific results had better be rock-solid. And yet honesty in science is enforced by what amounts to a gentleman’s agreement, and the penalities for breaking it are nothing more than career damage. Contrast that to financial dishonesty. Its only direct effect is loss of money, but it is regulated by hundreds of laws, and the penalties include jail time. Scientific honesty has been in the spotlight recently because of fraud in stem cell work by Dr. Hwang in South Korea. Science, which is the premier forum […]

Advertising is a nuisance. We tune that stuff out. Right? Well, yes. Right. Which turns out to be exactly what gives it its power. If we didn’t tune it out, it wouldn’t work. A while back, 1997 to be precise, there was an article in Nature showing that subliminal messages (i.e. below-the-threshold messages, tuned-out messages) influenced product choice more than conscious ones (via Mindhacks). This study was done by Adrian North and colleagues from the University of Leicester. They played traditional French (accordion music) or traditional German (a Bierkeller brass band – oompah music) music at customers and watched the […]

It sure looks like NASA photos show liquid water currently present on Mars. Now. Not a few hundred billion years ago. (Caption: New Gully Deposit in a Crater in the Centauri Montes Region.) If that’s not a frozen water seep, I’ll eat my hat. The implications are vast. So far, we’ve found life everywhere on Earth that has even the occasional molecule of liquid water. Maybe that’s just Earth. But if it’s something that happens whenever there’s liquid water, the implications for finding life in the rest of the universe are huge. And the news of water now on Mars […]

Not among humans, of course. This is among chimps, as reported in the Nov 25th, Science News (sub. reqd.), based on work done by Martin N. Muller and others reported in the Nov 21 issue of Current Biology (abstract). (I’m not sure why this is big news at this point. I heard much the same thing in primate anthropology classes I took decades ago. This has been observed repeatedly.) Muller’s explanation, though, is what led to this post, just as soon as I stopped hooting with disbelieving laughter. From the SciNews article, “…nothing beats the sex appeal of an old […]

It’s here, it’s queer, get used to it. Really it is. Stanley Shawyer, a senior aerospace engineer in England, has built a working prototype, and it is beyond queer. It’s downright magic. He’s calling it a staid-sounding “electromagnetic drive,” or emdrive, but he could have called it the Infinite Improbability Drive. (Hat tip: Douglas Adams, of course). As far as I can tell, this has not appeared in a peer-reviewed journal (Physical Review Letters, are you asleep at the switch?) so maybe it is a load of bollocks as one scientist quoted in the article below says, but on the […]

Evidence of harm from genetically modified (GM) food is one of the under-reported issues discussed by the generally excellent Project Censored for 2006. Specifically, they report on studies of rats and mice fed “GM soy” and that the rats died young, were underweight, and/or had other anomalies. There are several things that are missing in almost all the non-technical reporting on GM food (and plenty of things missing from the scientific reports, too). First, they don’t specify what kind of genetic modification took place. (PC at least does say “Mon863,” but that doesn’t tell us much.) The beans could have […]

That is not a difficult question, thanks to the miracles of modern science. Pluto is a large ball of rock and ice. Dan Durda’s concept of the Pluto-Charon system on the Astronomy Picture of the Day archive. Update Sep. 2nd. Also from the APOD Archive, Pluto in true color at the highest resolution currently available. Pluto is the same today as it was last year. The only difference is that the Astronomical Union decided to put it in a different category. That means nothing, absolutely nothing, outside our own heads. Inside our heads, however, which is where we spend much […]

Not spaceships. Not aliens. Models of biological molecules at the Chimera Image Gallery. Powers of Ten looks at Everything, including Life and the Universe. An astonishing animation in barely forty frames.

I mean it. 1) Neutrinos have mass. This means we may have found a significant chunk (not all, but some) of that missing “dark matter” you were worried about. (Minos experiment at Fermilab by Dr. Lisa Falk Harris and others. Understandable explanation and links to the research at the BBC.) 2) A new fundamental particle may exist. Axions. These are sort of like photons with a tiny bit of mass, if I understand the gist, which I probably don’t. (Somewhat understandable explanation and links at physicsweb.) 3) The Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft, launched in 1972 and 1973, are not […]

From the NYTimes report: [Requires free registration. Or use BugMeNot for Firefox] “Providing the strongest evidence yet that humans are still evolving, researchers have detected some 700 regions of the human genome where genes appear to have been reshaped by natural selection, a principal force of evolution, within the last 5,000 to 15,000 years. The genes that show this evolutionary change include some responsible for the senses of taste and smell, digestion, bone structure, skin color and brain function. Many of these instances of selection may reflect the pressures that came to bear as people abandoned their hunting and gathering […]

Everybody is boggling over the sudden news about a whole new generation of solar panels that have burst upon us from South Africa. So they’re discussed very tentatively (see below). The news first broke in South Africa on February 11, and was reported in Treehugger on Feb 16. If this is really true, this is the beginning of a new and different world. It’d be nice if we could keep the oil addicts from turning it all gross and greasy, like everything else they touch. From Pure Energy Systems wiki: Professor Vivian Alberts of the University of Johannesburg . . […]

For years I’ve been carrying around an idea about how homosexuality could be inherited. The news reports that jogged me to post are the ones about the work of Mustanski et al. (Human Genetics, online, Jan 12, 2005). The research is currently being widely reported under titles like: Moms’ Genetics Might Help Produce Gay Sons (By Randy Dotinga, Feb 21, 2006) [link no longer active, article removed] [apparent repost without attribution here.] First a few carps about the reported research, and then some thoughts on my wild(?) ideas. The Article on genetics and gay sons Very briefly, this is the […]