Somebody in the comments makes the statement that:

“That being said I kind of disagree with Brian here, because I think the Mythbusters have done more for skepticism by *not* focusing on deeply cherished beliefs. They have pulled thousands into the idea of testing beliefs. Had they challenged deeply held beliefs (like P&T’s Bullshit), I doubt they would have gotten the audience they have now, and so they wouldn’t have had the positive effect they have.

I think skepticism needs to be injected in the harmless areas in order to get people thinking skeptically. They need to bring that around to their sacred cows on their own.”

What I wanted to say in response is:

This brings up a point I think I’ve made on a couple of other comment threads, something that I learned from my days before giving up my Christian beliefs. There was some conference thing that I was dragged to (it was towards the end of my time with church, but I went) and in one of their sessions on ‘how to convert people’ (or “How to Bring People to the Lord!”) somebody made a point that I wish the skeptical community could get… the number line.

Picture a number-line from 0-10, with 0 being woo-woo land, and 10 being “pure skepticism” (their version of this has a cross at the “10″ end of it… my version has an image of Carl Sagan & Randi hanging out at “10″ the end). Your/My job isn’t necessarily to bring somebody all the way from 0-10… from woo-woo land to “pure” skepticism. Sometimes, and for some people, our job is simply to move them from 0-1, or 1-3, or whatever. I also suspect that the person/method/thing with the skill-set best suited to moving a person from 2-3 isn’t likely to be the same person/situation/information that would also move them from 8-9.

For me, the book that moved me from 2-3 was actually Francis Collins’s The Language of God, which was approachable as somebody raised YEC (and went to all church run schools) and flipped my brain into “you’re 30 and a bit of an autodidact… maybe it’s time to fill out some of that science knowledge you missed out on when you dropped out of college instead of just the literature/arts stuff” mode. Between that, and how anti-convincing Lee Strobel’s Case for anything was, I started a path that went through Sagan, Shubin, DS Wilson, Shermer, Dawkins, Coyne, Dennett… all the way to becoming an Agnostic Atheist Skeptic now. Though, for the first two years it still involved Christian counters to the works, it wasn’t until I realized how rarely I was agreeing with anything the x-tian authors came up with as defense that I fully owned the “I’m a Skeptic” and “I’m an atheist” badges. Dawkins wasn’t convincing to me when I was still at 3 or 4, but he was useful and interesting when I had gotten up to 6 or 7 on the skeptic scale.

The point, and I do have one, is that (though it was obviously not his goal) Collins moved me further along the skeptic line, and as Brian points out, that’s what Mythbusters is doing for a lot of people. Could they “do more”? yes… But I’d hate to risk losing what they’re doing now by pushing it too far into people’s discomfort realm and losing the viewers. What I think would be better, is for somebody else to pick up the torch at #3-4, where the Mythbusters have left a few people, and move them to #6 or 7 (where maybe Dawkins & PZ can pick them up).

I’ve written before about how, in the last few years, I’ve gone from being a fairly religious (and certainly religiously active) young earth creationist to a skeptic and an atheist. I didn’t have anybody in my life “preaching” science and atheism to me, but as I had doubts about my religion and religious upbringing, I started to read work from both (many?) sides of the science/religion debate, and ultimately found the scientific world view to be compelling and true. During that time I also had religious friends who did some of the same reading, but stuck to their religious world view. I’ve also had some friends who are occupying a middle ground of doubt. It’s easy to dismiss the true believers as not giving the evidence a fair shake, but I think that at least some of them read with as open a mind as they could based on their history. So what is the inoculation?

To me, their “evidence” for God is weak and ridiculous when natural explanations are readily available and more in-line with the evidence. To me, they’re being close-minded. For them, that scientific evidence is ignoring a whole realm of emotional reality which, though untestable, is real to them to such a degree that by my not accepting it I’m the one being close-minded.

We all want our loved ones to share at least a fairly high percentage of our ideals, so while much of my family would like my children to be religious and are interested in promoting that world view in them and how they think, I want them to be Skeptics. I want them to have the tools to analyze evidence and information and make informed decisions. I don’t want them to be cold calculating robots, but in addition to having compassion and human understanding (rooted in philosophically sound thought as well as emotional intelligence) I do want them to be able to use proper logic and reason and know the tricks our minds can play on us when we desperately want to believe in something.

To that end… I’m looking for a Skeptic parent’s bookshelf. Not just the Demon Haunted World books for the adults, but books that can be read at bed time to your toddler, through YA, that promote critical, scientific, free thinking.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

Desire Utilitarianism claims that a good desire tends to fulfill more and stronger desires than it thwarts. A right action is one that an agent with good desires would perform.

They’ve both said a lot on the subject, and it’s probably better to point you there for further info on it. Luke did an interview with Alonzo for his podcast and has some nice links on the subject, or you can just hit his FAQ on it.

The following was my long-winded response to a member on Wordtrip regarding his dismissal of the Kindle because a retailer pushing their proprietary format “never works” in his opinion, and that he thought the device that will really be the tipping point for ebooks will be an “iPod” that plays anything.

—————————————————————–

The iPod was A big gun in the portable music market, but it was when they introduced the iTunes music store selling their proprietary audio format that locked people into using the iPod to keep using their newly purchased collection, that it became THE big gun in the portable music market (even though it was way more expensive than the competition).

The iPod always played mp3s, just like the Kindle will display PDF and HTML and DOC formats, but it was the easy digital delivery and purchasing of proprietary AAC, which gave the producers happy feelings about their stuff not being stolen, that made the legal on-line music market (and they’ve sold a few billion songs that way before going DRM free). Now you’ve got a lot of DRM free versions of music (amazon’s mp3 store for example) because the producers didn’t like to be locked into Apple, and what I suspect will happen is something similar when the Kindle has shown enough publishers that people will pay for digital content the producers will then start unlocking it for other eBook readers.

The Phone idea isn’t unlikely per se, and the Kindle app for iPhone is a step in that direction (they’re apparently going to be making for other devices as well), though I think the BIG dig against a blackberry/phone concept is that having read a few things on the iPhone and Blackbery, it’s just not as comfortable to try and read any quantity of content on a small screen. For me I think the more likely scenario would be something in the Netbook realm which cost about the same (or less) than an iPhone/smartphone, are about the size of a large hardback, and have a large subset of the computer functions. Acer (or Asus) has demoed that dual-touch-screen netbook that could be used as normal netbook, or held open like a book and read. They’re already working built-in wi-fi and cell in the netbooks, so if they tweak that technology a bit to allow for longer battery life it could be a Kindle killer (even though with a browser and mp3 player built in already the Kindle is going to make other people work for it).

The thing to notice on Amazon though is that, unlike Apple who keeps a stranglehold on “their market”, Amazon has shown incredible willingness to market their competitors. If you go to Amazon and search for a product, they show the used and new people selling items cheaper than they do AND if it’s a non-book product they usually default a sale to the cheapest people selling it even if they sell it as well. I’m not sure how they’d monetize that in a digital content market, but I’m not sure they couldn’t come up with a way. Bezos tries to be very customer-centric in the company’s decisions.

Secondarily an eBook reader will almost by design be a one-off market catering to a higher-end customer UNLESS the book industry figures out a way to drop prices on digital books to be consistently at the paperback (sub $Cool price range. Most people I know who are book lovers don’t go buy every hardback they own at retail price. Most are used book store people who pick up a ton of their collection at sub $3 per book pricing. The main market for the eBook is going to be the business traveler who would otherwise be buying a book in the airport.

It’s rough. It’s certainly using parts of other’s arguments I’ve heard but don’t recall where. I’d love to hear what you think of it.

————————–

I don’t think that an atheist must disallow a possibility of the supernatural resurrection, but in the same way one doesn’t assume David Blaine or David Copperfield are actually performing “magic”, one would go from a basis of natural causes and disallow it as anything even vaguely probable. In the same way you would be incredulous if somebody claimed to have spontaneously regrown a limb (or been abducted by aliens), it would take more than even a few people claiming it as truth for you to believe it happened. You would want evidence. You would have to have great, extraordinary, evidence because it is an extra-ordinary claim.

An extraordinary claim (being raised from the dead counts) for which we have no other instance in history with any level of reasonable evidence (and I use “other” not to imply we have any level of reasonable evidence, but to take that instance out of the timeline so we have a baseline of the REST of history to use), would require extra-ordinary evidence for belief. I would wager that you’re unlikely to believe Joseph Smith received any golden plates with the story of Jesus and his visit to the Americas (or the Isrealites in America, I forget the details), and yet there are 13 million people who have found his story compelling enough to be members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. There were even enough people in his day who believed that extra-ordinary claim to propogate the Mormon system of belief in much the way the desciples propogated the Jesus resurrection myth. We have seen time and time again that there is almost no spectacular story that won’t be believed and repeated by people as “truth”. The bottom line is that a story of Jesus resurrection is much more likely to be because there were believers who believed it (truth or not) and shared it with other people willing to believe without any real proof (this was a time of much belief in many things) than because somebody was actually raised from the dead.

In X million (or less than 10K if you swing that way) years of humanity we have no surviving evidence sufficient to convince everybody that anybody, ever, has been raised from the dead. We do have many groups who are willing to believe THEIR guy was raised from the dead, talked to God, did some other impossible thing. As spectacularly improbable as winning the lottery is, I can still point and say “that guy over there won” and know that however miniscule the chance, I conceivably could win (ignoring the mathematical improbability of it and the non-sound investment of even a dollar due the odds factor). What I can’t do is look over at somebody and say “well THAT guy was raised from the dead so I’ve nothing to fear and I can jump off buildings for fun” because we don’t have ANY evidence for somebody being raised from the dead in modern times, and in fact the only claim any really significant number of modern western civilization people give any credence to is for somebody 2000 years ago. If I find an eye-witness account that says “Jethro fed his sheep in the year 12BCE” I have no reason to believe it didn’t happen because that is entirely consistent with what we expect people from that era to have done. However if I find an eye-witness account that says “I saw a mermaid in the middle of the Indian Ocean in 12BCE and she had a nice rack” we would believe the author to have been mistaken because we have seen no evidence for us to believe that there is anything resembling a “mermaid” out there and it was most likely just a Dugong or some other similar animal. Even with multiple eye-witnesses of the mermaid it wouldn’t be compelling enough for us to think The Little Mermaid was a pseudo-documentary.

In any given scenario the supernatural is the least likely possible cause, or it wouldn’t be supernatural. Two thousand, or even two hundred, years ago the collective knowledge of the way things work was so spectacularly limited that while we knew sex had something to do with it, we didn’t even know how babies were made (I believe it was the 1600s when somebody discovered sperm and for quite some time the theory was then that the head of each sperm contained a tiny little person from which we grew). In such a world, where few of the (very obvious to us now) naturalistic explanations have been discovered or understood in any meaningful way, the supernatural seems to be a reasonable means of explanation. In that context the combination of lack of naturalistic knowledge combined with a fervent desire to believe make the likelihood of a physical resurrection so infinitesimal as to make belief in God as the guide to your life because of Jesus’s resurrection to be akin to (but not even as practical as) belief in the lottery as a retirement plan.

This is not to discount the practical wisdom in the Bible (or many other religious texts), and I think one of the primary reasons many of the major world religions have endured is because they do give practical advice and insight on how enterpersonal life works (or can). If they didn’t offer something practical that helped people get through day to day life, they wouldn’t have endured (they would’ve naturally been selected out as viable belief systems ). I think it’s that practical aspect of religions that are the reasons they “work” at all. They have been the cheat sheet to getting through life, because so many of the questions they answer for people (“How should I treat my family?”, “how should I feel about my country?”) it doesn’t matter where the answer comes from as to how practical the advice is. It’s the Santa Clause… if telling you that misbehaving gets you on the naughty list works to get you to behave, it doesn’t so much “matter” (in the context of results) if your motivation is based on a falsehood until that falsehood is revealed… and most religions that stick around have that reveal safely tucked away in the after-life.

In other words, science is a method that chiefly expands our ignorance rather than our knowledge.

[From Kevin Kelly -- The Technium]

Now go and read the archives of The Technium.

from the Mars Phoenix Lander’s Twitter at 5:15 p.m.: “Are you ready to celebrate? Well, get ready: We have ICE!!!!! Yes, ICE, *WATER ICE* on Mars! w00t!!! Best day ever!!” It was just two days ago that media outlets were reporting that there were no signs of water yet.

Then nine minutes after that: “Whoohoo! Was keeping my eye on some chunks of bright stuff & they disappeared! Sublimated! So it can’t be salt, it’s ice.”

[From LAist: Water Ice Found on Mars]

When I was designing the structure of my categories, the first change I had to make was to get rid of a top-level category for insurance. Instead, I put insurance expenses where they belong: auto insurance under transportation, health insurance under medical, and homeowner/renter insurance under housing.

I also eliminated a top-level category for utilities. I put the power bill under housing. (I’d put heat, water, garbage, sewer, etc. there too, but those items are included in the rent where I live right now.) I put the cell phone and internet charges in a new top-level category for communications, and put postage there as well.

[From Refactor your budget categories | Wise Bread]

The crosses, zigzags, and spirals woven by some spiders have long puzzled web watchers. But those seemingly superfluous decorations may be traps that use light to lure prey, a new study of Australian spiders finds

[From "Artistic" Spiders Trap Prey With Light, Study Finds]

Fascinating how things/traits/behaviors we can’t see with our naked eye are still being discovered. I know it often times feels (to me) like all the “big” discoveries have been made, all the important technological advances done, but our knowledge is still so incomplete.

A third of the population have genes that could help them in the fight against heart disease, say scientists.
A study of 147,000 patients suggests that certain types of the CETP gene might increase the levels of so-called “good” cholesterol.
UK and Dutch research, published in the Journal of the American Heart Association, found a 5% cut in heart attacks for those with the key types.
A UK geneticist said it could point to drugs which help many more people.

[From BBC NEWS | Health | Cholesterol genes 'protect heart']

The Keyboard

Forget about Dvorak for a moment: no one’s talking about keyboard layouts here. There’s a surprising number of tattooing patterns for the flat protrusions of the modern keyboard… some better for different countries, some better for Unix dorks.

But isn’t that, in itself, some sort of wonderful commentary on the conceptual purity of the keyboard? That the only bickering going on is in the way alphanumeric keys are arranged… but not the base technology of the device?

[From Top X: 10 Perfectly Pure Gadgets - Boing Boing Gadgets]

If you purchased your digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) as part of a kit, you already have a basic lens that takes pretty good pictures. However, part of the attraction of this type of camera is that you can switch out lenses to get the best shot in any situation. From powerful zooms that get you up close to high-speed lenses that specialize in low-light settings, you have plenty of options for your second lens. While some lenses may go for more than you spent on your camera, you don’t have to pay a lot to get a great lens. The real question is: how do you find the right one for your needs?

[From Macworld | How to buy a camera lens]

Nasa’s Phoenix lander touched down on Mars at the end of May for a mission planned to last three months.
The robotic lab is investigating the region’s climate and geology and could determine whether the planet was capable of supporting life.

[From BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Phoenix diary: Mission to Mars]

“Her methods probably are finer, but our conclusions are very similar.”
He also criticised the emphasis placed by the McGill University researcher on the “low” figure of 350kg, when her analysis suggests the rodent’s body mass could have been as great as 1,534kg, or one-and-a-half tonnes.

[From BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Biggest rodent 'shrinks in size']

UK researchers have pinpointed a protein on immune cells which they hope will help them harness the body’s defences to attack a tumour.
A vaccine designed to “home in” on the protein would deliver a message to the immune system to attack the invading cancer, they said.

[From BBC NEWS | Health | Cancer vaccine target pinpointed]

Experts are to investigate whether magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners can damage health.
The Health Protection Agency (HPA) study is likely to focus mainly on the impact on health workers who regularly operate the machines.

[From BBC NEWS | Health | Study into health impact of MRI]

More than half of the world’s ocean-going sharks are at risk of extinction, a new analysis concludes.
Specialists with IUCN (formerly the World Conservation Union) found that 11 species are on the high-risk list, with five more showing signs of decline.
Sharks are particularly affected by over-fishing as they reproduce slowly.
The scientists are calling for global catch limits, an end to the practice of removing fins, and measures to minimise incidental catches (bycatch).

[From BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Sharks swim closer to extinction]

The WikiProfessional project (like Wikipedia, but for narrow and deep exploration of highly specialized domains) just launched with its first beta wiki: WikiProteins is a place where biologists can collectively annotate an enormous database of proteins, a database culled from the best open science journals in the field.

[From WikiProteins: a collaborative space for biologists to annotate proteins - Boing Boing]

The 380 million-year-old specimen has been preserved with an embryo still attached by its umbilical cord.
The find, reported in Nature, pushes back the emergence of this reproductive strategy by some 200 million years.
Until now, scientists thought creatures from these times were only able to develop their young inside eggs.

[From BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Fossil reveals oldest live birth]

In January, the Brazilian government announced that the rate of deforestation in the Amazon jungle had soared in the last half of 2007, just months after officials had celebrated three years of steep falls.
It was an embarrassing admission for Brazil’s president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who had said his government’s efforts to control illegal logging and introduce better certification of land ownership were working.

[From BBC NEWS | Americas | Amazon's future in delicate balance]

The 2008 Bird Red List warns that long-term droughts and extreme weather puts additional stress on key habitats.
The assessment lists 1,226 species as threatened with extinction – one-in-eight of all bird species.
The list, reviewed every four years, is compiled by conservation charity BirdLife International.
“It is very hard to precisely attribute particular changes in specific species to climate change,” said Stuart Butchart, BirdLife’s global research and indicators co-ordinator.
“But there is now a whole suite of species that are clearly becoming threatened by extreme weather events and droughts.”
In the revised Red List, eight species have been added to the “critically endangered” category.

[From BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Climate 'accelerating bird loss']

Small-scale biomass power plants can have a greater environmental impact than other renewables, a study says.
UK researchers found that although the facilities offered carbon savings, they produced more pollutants per unit of electricity than larger biomass plants.
They suggested the way the feedstock was transported produced proportionally more pollutants than larger sites.
The findings challenged the view that such schemes offer an green alternative to grid-based electricity, they added.
Supporters of community biomass schemes say the power plants are sustainable because the fuel, such as wood chips, can be sourced from the local area.

[From BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Concern over small biomass option]

Scientists have long wondered why early primates inhabited forest canopies, given that climbing appears to consume more energy than walking.
US researchers studied primates climbing and walking on treadmills.
They say there was no difference in energy consumption for small primates, giving clues to how their ancestors entered the trees 65 million years ago.

[From BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Ancestors had leg-up to trees]

Between a quarter and a third of the world’s wildlife has been lost since 1970, according to data compiled by the Zoological Society of London.
Populations of land-based species fell by 25%, marine by 28% and freshwater by 29%, it says.
Humans are wiping out about 1% of all other species every year, and one of the “great extinction episodes” in the Earth’s history is under way, it says.
Pollution, farming and urban expansion, over-fishing and hunting are blamed.

[From BBC NEWS | UK | Wildlife populations 'plummeting']

This NYT article on global food wastage is timely — just as the food riots have begun to break out around the world — and shocking.

[From US wastes "27% of food available for consumption" - Boing Boing]

Astronomers have been able to capture and record the first moments when a massive star blows itself apart.
After decades of searching, researchers have used the world’s top telescopes to observe the remarkable event.
Previously, scientists had only been able to study these “supernovas” several days after the event.

[From BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Exploding star caught in the act]

Sticking to a diet which includes fruit, vegetables, fibre and healthier fats could protect against type two diabetes, a study suggests.
More than 14,000 Spanish volunteers were quizzed about eating habits, then checked over four years to see who developed the condition.
The results pointed to an 83% lower risk for those who followed the diet, the British Medical Journal reported.
But UK experts said the study was not conclusive.

[From BBC NEWS | Health | Med diet 'helps prevent diabetes']

US researchers, reports the New England Journal of Medicine, took cancer-fighting immune cells, made five billion copies, then put them all back.

[From BBC NEWS | Health | Clone cell cancer 'cure' hailed]

Global temperatures did not dip sharply in the 1940s as the conventional graph shows, scientists believe.
They say an abrupt dip of 0.3C in 1945 actually reflects a change in how temperatures were measured at sea.
Until 1945, most readings were taken by US ships; but after the war, UK vessels resumed measurements, and they took the sea’s temperature differently.

[From BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Ships rewrite temperature record]

The Drugstore Game involves combining manufacturer and store coupons, and taking advantage of a store’s best deals. When played at the highest level, the Drugstore Game requires only a couple of dollars out of pocket each week to keep you and your family stocked on necessities like toiletries, paper goods and even groceries.

[From How to Save Hundreds by Playing the Drugstore Game ∞ Get Rich Slowly]

Rather than snoozing for more than 16 hours a day, as observed in captivity, sloths in the wild doze for less than 10 hours, research suggests.
Scientists caught sloths living in the rainforest of Panama and fitted them with a device that monitors sleep.
The findings, published in a Royal Society journal, may help shed light on human sleep disorders, they say.

[From BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Sloth's lazy image 'a myth']

Maybe not… I don’t guess they move much faster in the wild, they just sleep a bit less.

How should Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) respond to the “food crisis”? Our environment analyst Roger Harrabin examines how worries about food are stimulating a debate about the long-term future of the CAP.
The Common Agricultural Policy – the vast system that costs Europe’s taxpayers more than £30bn pounds a year – will be spruced up on Tuesday.
The European Commission will introduce a series of proposals aimed at making farmers more responsive to the market and distancing the CAP from the old system in which farmers were paid to produce food.
The Commission wants to get rid of almost all direct payments to farmers for production.
It wants to scrap controversial set-aside policies in which farmers are paid to leave land fallow; to remove quotas on producing things like milk; and to shift more farm support into a broader rural development fund.

[From BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Europe's farming future debated]

Is it just me, or does this sound like Europe is going free market in the farming realm?

A fragment of DNA from the Tasmanian tiger has been brought back to life.
Australian scientists extracted genetic material from a 100-year-old museum specimen, and put it into a mouse embryo to study how it worked.
It is the first time DNA of an extinct species has been used in this way, says a University of Melbourne team.
The study, published online by the Public Library of Science (PLoS), suggests the marsupial’s genetic biodiversity may not be lost.
Dr Andrew Pask, of the Department of Zoology, who led the research, said it was the first time that DNA from an extinct species had been used to carry out a function in a living organism.
“As more and more species of animals become extinct, we are continuing to lose critical knowledge of gene function and its potential,” he said.
“Up until now we have only been able to examine gene sequences from extinct animals. This research was developed to go one step further to examine extinct gene function in a whole organism.”

[From BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Tasmanian tiger DNA 'resurrected']

Nations should avoid planting biofuel crops that have a high risk of becoming invasive species, a report warns.
A study by the Global Invasive Species Programme (GISP) said only a few countries have systems in place to assess the risk or contain an outbreak.
It has listed all the crops used to produce biofuels, and urged governments to only select low-risk varieties.
The global cost of tackling invasive species costs $1.4 trillion (£700bn) each year, the report estimates.
“Many countries are currently looking at growing high-yielding crops for the production of biofuels to address imminent energy shortages and reduce the impact of climate change,” the report’s authors wrote.

[From BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Fuel crops 'pose invasion risk']

Which brings up the best challenge… how to make fuel of some form, from Kudzu.

Scientists have shown relying on the sleep deprived-brain to perform well is potentially fraught with danger.
They found that even after sleep deprivation, people have periods of near normal brain function in which they can finish tasks quickly.
However, this is mixed with periods of slow response and severe drops in visual processing and attention.

[From BBC NEWS | Health | No sleep 'renders brain erratic']

So while you can perform well after some sleep deprivation, it’s unlikely you’ll know when or if it’s this time that you’re not quite up to snuff.

Super-fast pilot whales have been observed sprinting after prey, likely to include giant squid.
The rapid pursuit has brought comparisons with the fleet-footed land predator, the cheetah.
The cetaceans even use the same, highly specialised hunting strategy that cheetahs use, scientists report in the Journal of Animal Ecology.
They say it gives the lie to our perception that deep sea whales are slow, energy-saving creatures.

[From BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Whales are 'cheetahs of the deep']

The Jason-2 satellite will become the primary means of measuring the shape of the world’s oceans, taking readings with an accuracy of better than 4cm.
Its data will track not only sea level rise but reveal how the great mass of waters are moving around the globe.
This information will be fundamental in helping weather and climate agencies make better forecasts.

[From BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Key ocean mission goes into orbit]

That is what I hate most about the Global Warming “debate”, that both sides do such an inordinate amount of fear-mongering (The evil Oil Companies are trying to kill us all! The evil Environmentalists just want to ruin our economy!). Of course that applies to most public debates these days (and it may have always been that way, but these are the days I live in, so now I notice them) from Religion vs Science to Republican vs Democrats.

an interesting paper (Thompson et al) was published in Nature, pointing to a clear artifact in the sea surface temperatures in 1945 and associating it with the changing mix of fleets and measurement techniques at the end of World War II. The mainstream media by and large got the story right – puzzling anomaly tracked down, corrections in progress after a little scientific detective work, consequences minor – even though a few headline writers got a little carried away in equating a specific dip in 1945 ocean temperatures with the more gentle 1940s-1970s cooling that is seen in the land measurements.

[From RealClimate]

Early efforts to grab samples for study in the onboard lab had been frustrated by the cloddy nature of the ground.
But by shaking the scoop bucket on the end of its robotic arm, Phoenix now has a very effective technique to deliver fine samples to test instruments.
Mission scientists report that Phoenix has made a very delicate dusting of material across a microscope.

[From BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Phoenix starts to get some reward]

I’ve been watching “When We Left Earth” on Discovery Channel the last couple weeks and I’m psyched about human space travel, but robots going to Mars is still pretty freaking cool too.

Studies in mice have shown cAMP – a common signalling molecule – is involved in keeping the body clock “rhythms” going.
The team hope to develop drugs that target cAMP to help shift workers, frequent flyers or those with sleep disorders reset their body clocks.
But the research, published in Science, is still a long way from the clinic.
The body’s internal clock is a highly sensitive mechanism able to anticipate changes in the environment and regulate a host of body functions, from sleep patterns to metabolism and behaviour.
Disruption of these “circadian” rhythms have been shown to be linked with insomnia, depression, heart disease, cancer and neurodegenerative disorders.

At the beginning of the circadian day, genes are switched on which then produce proteins which in turn go on to switch off the same genes at the end of the day.
The proteins are broken down over the circadian night and the process starts all over again in the morning.

[From BBC NEWS | Health | Body clock reset clue discovered]

So the theoretical advice is to fast a bit on long flights to help cut back on jetlag. I’m not sure we’re ready to give up tiny bags of pretzels just to avoid a little jetlag are we?

The UK government confirmed in January that it was in the country’s long-term interest that nuclear power should play a role in providing Britain with clean, secure and affordable energy.
So why is nuclear power back on the national agenda? While there is no perfect answer and no perfect energy source, each method of generating electricity has advantages and disadvantages.
Like every other country, the UK is faced with the challenge of developing an energy programme that balances environmental issues, such as carbon emission reduction, with energy demand, security of supply and economics

[From BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Re-energising the nuclear industry]

A plan for a manned spacecraft has been announced by the European firm EADS.
Its Astrium division has designed a variant of its space station freighter that could also transport astronauts.
Limited details were released in Bremen, Germany, on Tuesday; further information and a mock-up are expected at the Berlin Air Show this month.
Europe does not currently possess its own human space transportation system and is reliant on the Americans and the Russians to get its people into orbit.
European Space Agency (Esa) boss Jean-Jacques Dordain has spoken frequently of his desire to see an independent system; and the US space agency (Nasa) chief, Mike Griffin, has also urged Europe to build its own crew carrier.

[From BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Europe could get manned spaceship]

The black-winged and orange bodied Ethmia pyrausta is so rare it has gained almost mythical status, said Butterfly Conservation Scotland (BCS).
It was spotted and photographed by Andy Scott and Margaret Currie.

…

Apart from the original 1853 specimen, only four others have ever been found in the UK.
Two were found in 1996 on the top of Glas Maol in the Grampians with a further two found nearby.
The caterpillars have never been found in Britain.

[From BBC NEWS | UK | Scotland | Highlands and Islands | 'Mythical' moth rescued from web]

The Archbishop of Westminster has urged Christians to treat atheists and agnostics with “deep esteem”.

…

Last year, Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor complained of a “new secularist intolerance of religion” and the state’s “increasing acceptance” of anti-religious views.
To stem this tide, he said Christians must understand they have something in common with those who do not believe.
God is not a “fact in the world” as though God could be treated as “one thing among other things to be empirically investigated” and affirmed or denied on the “basis of observation”, said Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor.
“If Christians really believed in the mystery of God, we would realise that proper talk about God is always difficult, always tentative.
“I want to encourage people of faith to regard those without faith with deep esteem because the hidden God is active in their lives as well as in the lives of those who believe.”

[From BBC NEWS | UK | 'Respect atheists', says cardinal]

Next we have the Einstein letter recently released that showed he felt religions were on the whole “pretty childish.” This is something he was, I believe, fairly careful not to say in his public discourse. One could argue this was because he knew it would be unpopular and effect his ability to influence policy and/or funding. One could also argue that he realized picking a fight with the religions of the world wasn’t a particularly useful thing to do.

The great scientist’s views on religion have long been debated, with many seizing upon phrases such as “He [God] does not throw dice” as evidence that he believed in a creator.

But the newly-unveiled letter, a response to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, has cast doubt on the theory that Einstein had any belief in God at all towards to the end of his life.

In the letter, dated January 3 1954, he wrote: “The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.

“No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.”

[From Einstein thought religions were 'childish' - Telegraph]

The last was found on Boing boing, as so many wonderful things are.

WITH economic and communications globalisation, some form of a global civilisation is beginning to emerge, perhaps homogeneous, perhaps forever diverse. We all face the challenges of global warming. We face peak oil, that year after which we shall never recover so much oil again – with unknown economic consequences, including hunger and resource wars. And all the while, our diverse cultures are being crushed together.

One response is a retreat into fundamentalisms, often religious, often hostile. This is hardly surprising, as humanity is still split between 3 billion who believe in the Abrahamic God (the majority of whom are Muslim, though a powerful minority are fundamentalist Christians), a billion who, like myself, believe in no supernatural god (though some of these are militant atheists), and the other traditions such as Buddhism. Clearly there is an urgent need for some new thinking.

That is why I wrote Reinventing the Sacred, though I am well aware that the very possibility and wisdom of such an enterprise is suspect. For those of faith, it is sacrilegious; those who are not religious remember Galileo recanting before the Inquisition and the millions killed in the name of God, and want no part of a God or a sacred that demands retreat from the truth of the world.

[From Perspectives: Why humanity needs a God of creativity - opinion - 07 May 2008 - New Scientist]

I’ll be picking up his book in some form or other, and reporting back to you. I think he’s got an interesting point, that we have an almost visceral need for something to hold sacred (religions point to this as evidence of God). I mentioned a couple days ago the Ann Druyan quote on “Sacred” as “those truths that inspire awe,” I’m hoping to build on that with this.

Scientists have been looking at ways liver disease could be treated using embryonic stem cells, reducing the need for transplantation.
The research is one of two projects at Edinburgh University receiving £3.6m from Scottish Enterprise and the Medical Research Council (MRC).
The second project, which also involves embryonic stem cells, will look at new ways to repair damaged bone.

[From BBC NEWS | UK | Scotland | Edinburgh, East and Fife | Stem cells may reduce transplants]

I think the repairing of damaged bone is probably the easier research to get funding for. I have a suspicion there’s a viewpoint of liver damage as being a “you brought it on yourself by being such a lush” sort of thing.

“His argument was not with God, but with those who believed that our understanding of the sacred had been completed.” — Ann Druyan on Carl Sagan’s view on religion.

“What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the desire to find out, which is the exact opposite.” — Bertrand Russell (as quoted by Ann Druyan).

In the introduction to The Varieties of Scientific Experience Ann Druyan loosely defines “sacred” as “those truths that inspire love and awe.” This is the journey I’m trying to make, to discover what is sacred to me. I don’t see this journey as one with an end, though there may be stops along the way. I think the thing that has prompted me most in my recent scientific exploration is that, as the Bertrand Russell quote above says: I don’t want to have the will to believe; I’m much happier to have the desire to find out.

It is very hard to look at your infant child, or your ailing grandparent, and not know what is most sacred to you. As spectacular as the vistas of space, or those here on earth, are, they’ve got a tough job competing with the awe and love you feel when a tiny hand wraps around your finger for the first time (or five thousandth time for that matter). The same goes for when you see the look in their eyes when something clicks for the first time. Likewise, there’s an awful lot of love and awe I feel when thinking of my now deceased grandparents, and the time I had with them while they were still here. My wife is a source of awe and love as well, what she does with and for our children, the caring and love she brings to those in her life, and that she’s been with me for almost 15 years now.

But those are personal, unique to me and my perspective (not that others don’t find awe in their family, but not many find awe in mine), things that invoke awe. I find the journey of learning to be pretty awe inspiring as well. To see how we’ve put our minds to work in the past and present, how we’ve built the collective knowledge to its current impressive (and yet impressively incomplete) levels, is a thing of great wonder to me. The “motto” of this site is such because of that awe: Count that day lost in which you do not learn at least one new thing. My goal here is to help myself, and others, experience that awe (the learning one, not the one about your family, that’s up to you).

There have been so many social/historical/philosophical/scientific discoveries that I get to continue to experience the existing information as if it were new to the world, for the rest of my life, because it is new to me. If I’m lucky I’ll be able to learn things that are new to you too, and we’ll share that journey. If I’m particularly fortunate I may stumble upon some insight or information that is new to everybody and thus contribute to future generations in more ways than just my genes.

I’ve got visions of radioactive mushroom monsters roaming the countryside eating stray dogs… but aside from that it sounds like an interesting idea.

Dundee University researchers have found evidence that fungi can “lock” depleted uranium into a mineral form.
This would make it more difficult for the heavy metal – used in armour-piercing shells – to find its way into plants, animals or the water supply.
The fungal-produced minerals are capable of long-term uranium retention, the scientists say.

[From BBC NEWS | UK | Scotland | Tayside and Central | Fungi to fight 'toxic war zones']

Yesterday I mentioned I’m fan of Big Cats, I’m also a fan of lizards, and Iguanas in particular. As a kid I had a few pet iguanas, and there’s a minimal chance that our next pet will be an iguana (we’ve already got two Euromastyx lizards, a doc, and a couple fire-belly toads). That said, I found this story about a slaughter of some critically endangered iguanas disturbing (not on the level of genocide in Darfur mind you, but it’s still disturbing).

Police on Grand Cayman are hunting criminals who slaughtered six of the island’s iconic and critically endangered giant blue iguanas.
The attacks, which also left three other animals injured, occurred on Saturday night in a captive breeding facility on the Caribbean island.
The police are confident the crime was perpetrated by humans.
The dead and injured iguanas seem to have been gouged by knives and show evidence of being kicked and jumped on.

[From BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Probe into giant iguana slaughter]

Fourteen tiger cubs have been spotted in a reserve in north-western India, forestry officials say.
The sightings are a rare piece of good news in the fight to halt the steep decline in tiger numbers in India

[From BBC NEWS | South Asia | Joy over India tiger cubs births]

Appropriate treatment can all but eradicate the risk that a pregnant woman with HIV will pass the virus to her child, research shows.
Data on 5,151 HIV pregnancies in the UK and Ireland between 2000 and 2006 found an infant infection rate of just 1.2% where preventative steps were taken.
In the mid-1990s, before effective drug therapy became available, the infant infection rate was over 20%.

[From BBC NEWS | Health | Treatment 'slashes baby HIV risk']

Subcutaneous fat often collects on the buttocks and legs. Body fat found under the skin – and particularly on the buttocks – may help reduce the risk of developing type 2 diabetes, research suggests.
The study contrasts this subcutaneous fat with visceral fat, which is wrapped around the organs, and raises the risk of ill health.

[From BBC NEWS | Health | Type of body fat 'boosts health']

Scientists have deciphered the genetic blueprint of the duck-billed platypus, one of the oddest creatures on Earth.
The animal comes from an early branch of the mammal family, and like mammals it is covered in fur and produces milk. However, it lays eggs like a reptile.
Researchers say this unique mixture of features is reflected in its DNA.

[From BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Platypus genetic code unravelled]

The Robert L. Capp collection at the Hoover Institution Archives contains ten never-before-published photographs illustrating the immediate aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing. These photographs, taken by an unknown Japanese photographer, were found in 1945 among rolls of undeveloped film in a cave outside Hiroshima by U.S. serviceman Robert L. Capp, who was attached to the occupation forces. Unlike most photos of the Hiroshima bombing, these dramatically convey the human as well as material destruction unleashed by the atomic bomb. Mr. Capp donated them to the Hoover Archives in 1998 with the provision that they not be reproduced until 2008.

[From Atomic Tragedy -- Photos]

The revamped machine created by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project looks like an e-book and has had its price slashed to $75 per device.
OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte gave a glimpse of the “book like” device at an unveiling event at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The first XO2 machines should be ready to deliver to children in 2010.

[From BBC NEWS | Technology | Design revamp for '$100 laptop']

The more I think about it, the more I realize that this is how they should’ve done it the first time. Though learning the lesson after 1.0 isn’t too bad either.

A cup of enriched cocoa may help improve the working of blood vessels in diabetic patients, research suggests.
Doctors prescribed three mugs of specially formulated cocoa a day for a month, and found “severely impaired” arteries regained normal function.

[From BBC NEWS | Health | Cocoa can be 'boost to diabetics']

B) Though I’m highly un-fond of shots, if an intensive set of them may prevent or slow a need for more shots late it might be worth it.

A short course of intensive insulin treatment may delay disease progression in people newly diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, a Chinese study suggests.

[From BBC NEWS | Health | Insulin boost for early diabetes]

First-born babies may be programmed in the womb to have a higher risk of asthma and allergy, research suggests.
A University of South Carolina led team carried out tests on more than 1,200 newborns from the Isle of Wight.
They found first borns were more likely to carry a gene variant which raised their risk of allergy.

[From BBC NEWS | Health | Allergy risk 'may be set in womb']

I guess the real info to take from this is that if it is a gene variant, then it would in theory be something gene therapy treatable.

The New York Times’ Well section has reassuring news for anyone hitting the gym and not seeing results. Many researchers agree that muscle size and definition are not as important to your long-term health as those muscles’ endurance and strength, which prevent atrophy and weakness in old a

[From Fitness: Keep Your Muscles Healthy, Not Big]

Scientists have discovered a group of chemicals which protect one of the body’s most important anti-cancer genes from destruction.
They hope the chemicals – dubbed tenovins – could be used to develop effective new cancer treatments.
The researchers showed tenovins form a protective shield around the p53 gene, which is either switched off or impaired in many cancers.

[From BBC NEWS | Health | Anti-cancer gene shield discovery]

The average life of a dollar bill is only 18 months. As such, new dollar bills have to be printed all the time to replace those that leave circulation (due to wear, et cetera). Ten dollar bills last about as long as one dollar bills.

It costs about 4.2 cents to produce a single US federal reserve note (the technical term for a “bill” issued by the treasury to be used as money).

…

Dollar coins (like the Sacajawea and the new Presidential dollars) cost a little under twice as much to make as dollar bills. On the other hand, the dollar coin has an estimated lifespan of thirty years.

That means that the cost of a dollar bill is about 2.8 cents per year, while that of a dollar coin is about one fourth of one cent per year. Put another way, dollar bills are costing us about eleven times as much in taxes as dollar coins, on a per-unit basis.

[From Chad Perrin: SOB » Capital Coinage]

Long-term use of ibuprofen may reduce the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, a large US study reports.
Data from almost 250,000 veterans showed those who used the painkiller for more than five years were more than 40% less likely to develop Alzheimer’s.

…

A separate study also published in Neurology showed people with shorter arms and legs may be at a higher risk for developing dementia later in life.
The US researchers said poor nutrition in early life may be the link between the two.

[From BBC NEWS | Health | Painkiller may cut dementia risk]

Cardboard Playhouse Plans & Instructions

Use these cardboard playhouse plans for a quick, eco-friendly and thrifty way to make your child their very own mini home!

It is easiest to start with a large cardboard box such as a refrigerator or other large appliance. I called my local appliance store and had them save me a box. I told them I was making a cardboard playhouse and they were more than happy to set one aside. If you can’t find one large enough you can certainly construct one out of smaller boxes, it will just take more time to piece it together.

[From Free Cardboard Playhouse Plans & Instructions]

Australian scientists believe they may have discovered how to help people lose weight without cutting back on food.
Researchers in Melbourne found that by manipulating fat cells in mice they were able to speed up metabolism.
After removing a particular enzyme, scientists found the mice were able to eat the same amount as others but burn more calories and gain less weight.

[From BBC NEWS | Health | Scientists make weight loss claim]

Children who live in tree-lined streets have lower rates of asthma, a New York-based study suggests.
Columbia University researchers found that asthma rates among children aged four and five fell by 25% for every extra 343 trees per square kilometre.

[From BBC NEWS | Health | Tree-lined streets 'cut asthma']

Spiders “talk” to potential mates using a type of light not visible to the human eye, scientists report.
A team found that male jumping spiders (Phintella vittata) are using ultraviolet B (UVB) rays to communicate with females.
While UVA rays are often used in animal communication, this is the first evidence that UVB light is also being used, the researchers said.
The study is published in the journal Current Biology.

[From BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Study sheds light on spider sex]

No amount of dieting will alter the number of fat-hoarding cells in our bodies, research has suggested.
Scientists at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden say that the number is set during adolescence and stays the same, regardless of obesity later in life.

[From BBC NEWS | Health | Fat cell numbers 'set for life']

The right time to practice is just at the moment you’re about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for every person and each bit of information. Imagine a pile of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing right now. Which are they?
Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward over time and then levels off. This pattern has long been known to cognitive psychology, but it has been difficult to put to practical use. It’s too complex for us to employ with our naked brains.
Twenty years ago, Wozniak realized that computers could easily calculate the moment of forgetting if he could discover the right algorithm. SuperMemo is the result of his research. It predicts the future state of a person’s memory and schedules information reviews at the optimal time. The effect is striking. Users can seal huge quantities of vocabulary into their brains.

[From Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm ]

10 more memory hacks

The Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, was quoted as saying the vastness of the universe means it is possible there could be other forms of life outside Earth, even intelligent ones.

“How can we rule out that life may have developed elsewhere?” Funes said. “Just as we consider earthly creatures as ‘a brother,’ and ’sister,’ why should we not talk about an ‘extraterrestrial brother’? It would still be part of creation.”

In the interview by the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, Funes said that such a notion “doesn’t contradict our faith” because aliens would still be God’s creatures. Ruling out the existence of aliens would be like “putting limits” on God’s creative freedom, he said.

…

The Bible “is not a science book,” Funes said, adding that he believes the Big Bang theory is the most “reasonable” explanation for the creation of the universe. The theory says the universe began billions of years ago in the explosion of a single, super-dense point that contained all matter.

But he said he continues to believe that “God is the creator of the universe and that we are not the result of chance.”

[From Vatican: It's OK to believe in aliens - Yahoo! News]

Coming up in a day or two I’ve got another link where a bishop talks about respecting atheists. It’s strange to see Catholicism as the progressive Christianity. The intersection & conflict between science and religion is a subject that I’m greatly interested in, and you’ll probably see some more links on it in the future.

HABITS are a funny thing. We reach for them mindlessly, setting our brains on auto-pilot and relaxing into the unconscious comfort of familiar routine. “Not choice, but habit rules the unreflecting herd,” William Wordsworth said in the 19th century. In the ever-changing 21st century, even the word “habit” carries a negative connotation.

So it seems antithetical to talk about habits in the same context as creativity and innovation. But brain researchers have discovered that when we consciously develop new habits, we create parallel synaptic paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can jump our trains of thought onto new, innovative tracks.

[From Can You Become a Creature of New Habits? - New York Times]

Flowers “wave” at insects to get their attention, scientists have discovered.
The finding helps explain why many flowers waft in the breeze, and reveals a hitherto unknown trick used to attract pollinators.
Scientists made the discovery while studying common wildflowers known as sea campion on the Welsh coast.

[From BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Flowers 'wave' at passing insects]

To the untrained eye, the never-ending green of the maize, rice and sugar cane fields of northern Tanzania look lush and bountiful.
It is rice harvest time, and under the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro the roads are jammed with tractors and bicycles stacked with bags of rice destined for market.

Perhaps the perfect setting for Africa’s “green revolution”, a concept being pushed by former United Nations head Kofi Annan and his successor Ban Ki-Moon, for the continent to better feed itself.
But these small-scale farmers around the city of Arusha are beset by problems.
“I have three acres of paddy and this year I harvested 25 bags from each acre,” says Lucas Chacha, a rice farmer from the village of Magugu.
“I sold each back for 35,000 Tanzanian shillings ($30; £15). Compared to the running costs it is not a fair price.
“I had to sell because I had some family problems and I needed the money.

[From BBC NEWS | Africa | Can Tanzania reap bumper harvests?]

“A genuinely African green revolution could lead to a doubling or tripling of food production,” he told the BBC.
Africa needs direct, immediate help for farmers to stop food imports including new seeds and fertilisers, he said.
But political analyst and South African beef farmer Moeletsi Mbeki said the heart of the crisis was property rights – as most farmers do not own land.
“The farmers in Africa have no secure property rights – their land doesn’t belong to them it can be taken away from them just about any time,” Mr Mbeki, brother of South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki, told the BBC.

[From BBC NEWS | Africa | Africa needs 'green revolution']

The last piece is on the need for conservation of the mpingo tree in Tanzania. Obviously less vital than food and water, but it would be a pity if future generations never heard the instruments that are made from these trees.

The wood from Tanzania’s “mpingo” tree is used to make flutes, clarinets, oboes and even bagpipes, making it one of the most valuable plants in the world.

But illegal logging has threatened its very existence and numbers are in severe decline.

[From BBC NEWS | Africa | Tanzania tree strikes right note]

At a Glance
MIT’s Deb Roy wants to understand how children learn language. Until now, scientists lacked the technology to implement the intense observation, data gathering, and analysis they need to properly investigate this question. With help from his research team at the MIT Media Lab, computing tools from Apple, and offering himself and his family as test subjects, Roy is developing that technology.

Apple Solution
Through its observation phase, the Human Speechome Program will archive 200,000 hours of audio and video recordings, approaching a petabyte of data. Macintosh Xserves and Xserve RAIDs, interfaced with other computing platforms, collect, process, and store the vast dataset. TotalRecall, a Mac OS X-based application being developed at MIT, is the central tool for navigating and making sense of it all.

[From Apple - Science - Profiles - MIT Media Laboratory: The Human Speechome Project, pg. 1]

Keyboard shortcuts

Driving your computer using a mouse pointer may be easiest, but it’s also the slowest way to get things done. Take the time to learn Windows’ built-in keyboard shortcuts for tasks you perform often, and assign your own to shortcuts you always launch.
Global Windows shortcuts: Windows comes with dozens of keyboard combinations built in. Here are a few of our favorites:

• Control+Esc opens the Start Menu. Update: So does one tap of the Windows key.
• F3 starts a file search
• Alt+Tab cycles through open programs
• First letter of a Desktop shortcut name places the focus on that shortcut, Enter to launch.
• Win+D toggles Show Desktop
• Win+E starts Windows Explorer

[From Windows: Make Windows More Productive Without Installing a Thing]

The No Credit Needed financial blog suggests a “$100 rule,” in which any purchase price is divided by that amount and considered for that many days—a $300 PlayStation 3 gets re-considered for three days, a $1,400 MacBook is delayed for two weeks of researching, and so forth.

[From Money: Apply the $100 Rule to Kill Impulse Purchases]

Granted, as somebody who waits a long time to make a big purchase ANYWAY, I may have to modify it to 3 days per $100, or a week per $100, but the principle is what I like: Institute something that gives you time to not spend money you don’t have.

Pollan’s In Defense of Food is a fascinating treatise on eating and food, taking as its central tenet, “Eat food, mostly plants, not too much,” and cutting through all the “nutritionism” science that proposes to feed us on individual molecules instead of whole food. Link

[From Explaining food vs. nutrition: Michael Pollan talks at Google - Boing Boing]

Artress found work with another clinic in Arusha, where he ended up in what amounted to a crash course in tropical diseases.
On his first day, a patient with a neck abscess the size of a baseball came in. The resident doctor handed Artress a scalpel.
“I am an anesthesiologist. I don’t do this,” Artress protested.
“You do now.”

[From Doctor finds higher calling when death knocks]

Great series of articles in sfgate on my favorite charity (www.fameafrica.org). It is my favorite charity not just because of the work they do, but also because “Dr Frank” is also my uncle (not to be confused with “Dr” Frank Portman the author and musician).

Looking forward, the model projects a weakening of the MOC and a resulting cooling of north Atlantic waters, which will act to keep temperatures in check around the world, much as the warming and cooling associated with El Nino and La Nina in the Pacific bring global consequences.
“We have to take into account that there are uncertainties in our model; but it does suggest a plateauing of temperatures, and then a continued rise,” said Dr Keenlyside.

[From BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Next decade 'may see no warming']

This is either a way to be unfalsifiable (when the “we’re warming up now” predictions don’t come true “they” can always just say it’s a result of natural cooling counteracting things and buy themselves another 10 years), or a grand tragedy (in 10 years all hell breaks loose when the cumulative effect comes into play)..

These systems rely heavily on contrast. That’s why when you have low light, low contrast scenes, autofocus rarely works well.

If you want to get the best autofocus possible on your digital camera, aim at an area of high contrast on your subject. For instance, if you are photographing a blonde person against a black background, point the autofocus sensor at the area where the hair and the background merge to get a focus point. Then allow enough depth of field with the proper aperture selection to get the face features in focus.

[From TWIP » Improving Autofocus Performance - TWIP]

Researchers from Glasgow University observed that fish given a “binge then diet” food regime had a reduced lifespan of up to 25%.
Their study compared the growth rate, success of reproduction and lifespan of stickleback fish.

[From BBC NEWS | UK | Scotland | Glasgow, Lanarkshire and West | Crash diets 'may reduce lifespan']

I’m not sure the stickleback fish is the most accurate way of running a test, but it makes sense that the crash dieting might cause some long term biological problems.

The case for nuclear power as a low carbon energy source to replace fossil fuels has been challenged in a new report by Australian academics.
It suggests greenhouse emissions from the mining of uranium – on which nuclear power relies – are on the rise.
Availability of high-grade uranium ore is set to decline with time, it says, making the fuel less environmentally friendly and more costly to extract.

[From BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Nuclear's CO2 cost 'will climb']

Call me captain obvious (no really, it would be a fun nickname), but don’t we have a few dozen thousand nuclear weapons here and in the former USSR that could be decommissioned and that ore could be used? I’ll admit to not knowing how much Uranium it takes to run a reactor, but I would think there’s probably a fair bit of the stuff in all those bombs we made during the cold war. If you’re using them for powering the world’s energy needs I think leaders would be less tempted to use them for blowing people up (which is largely a good idea).

The huge eye of the world’s largest squid has been revealed by scientists dissecting a rare, intact half-tonne specimen in New Zealand.
About 27cm (11in) across, researchers believe the colossal squid’s eye is the biggest animal eye ever found.

[From BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Colossal squid's big eye revealed]

The Mara Conservancy says tourists have stayed away since the violence which followed last year’s disputed election.
The group, which manages a 510 sq km area called the Mara Triangle, can no longer pay pastoralists compensation for cattle killed by lions or leopards.
This could force local people to kill the cats in order to protect livestock.

[From BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Tourism crash threatens big cats]

This is apparently a fine line to tread. Too much interaction and the animals die off from habitat destruction and such, too little and they die off from lack of funds for us to prevent local farmers from killing them.

Even the slower-witted among us can improve mental agility with a few daily brain teasers, a study suggests.
For those who hate crosswords but still fancy shining at work – fear not.

[From BBC NEWS | Health | Mental workout 'boosts the brain']

Apparently they’re all good, but the Brain Age style of software can help just about anybody get their brain in shape. It may not make your butt look as nice in jeans, but it’s probably more important to your daily life than doing a few extra squats. Now if I can just wrest the DS from my son’s hands.

Led by secretary general Ban Ki-Moon, officials want to mitigate the impact of the steep rise in staple food prices and prevent food shortages worsening.
The World Food Programme (WFP) says an extra 100 million people cannot afford enough food because of higher prices.
Food has become increasingly expensive, triggering unrest in several countries.

[From BBC NEWS | Business | UN meeting to address food crisis]

So does that mean if we get the biofuels to limit greenhouse gas, we doom millions to death by starvation. But, if we don’t get the biofuels we keep burning the fossil fuels and doom them to drowning? There’s probably a lesson to be learned about unchecked consumption here somewhere.

Pizza and spaghetti bolognese could become new tools in the fight against sunburn and wrinkles, a study suggests.
A team found adding five tablespoons of tomato paste to the daily diet of 10 volunteers improved the skin’s ability to protect against harmful UV rays.

[From BBC NEWS | Health | Tomato dishes 'may protect skin']

Scientists are to investigate whether eating chocolate can reduce the risk of heart disease in women with diabetes.
Volunteers – postmenopausal women with type 2 diabetes – will be asked to eat a bar of chocolate a day for a year.
Cocoa is rich in compounds called flavonoids, which are thought to benefit the heart.

[From BBC NEWS | Health | Chocolate 'may cut diabetes risk']

Ancient humans started down the path of evolving into two separate species before merging back into a single population, a genetic study suggests.
The genetic split in Africa resulted in distinct populations that lived in isolation for as much as 100,000 years, the scientists say.
This could have been caused by arid conditions driving a wedge between humans in eastern and southern Africa.

[From BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Human line 'nearly split in two']

Apparently the two main genetic “groups” are Khoisan and everybody else. I recall reading about the differences in Khoisan in Guns, Germs, and Steel, but can’t recall all the details. It could be an interesting study to see what the differences are now, and compare how those difference can effect the overall human population.

She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

[From Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody]

How many people have said to you (yourself included) something along the lines of “Some people have too much time on their hands”? I know I’ve said it often enough that when you put it in context of “everybody doing a little” it’s not that much. Granted, this doesn’t take into account the people who spend two years worth of evenings and weekends building an arcade video-game cabinet in the shape of the Tardis (which I’m very impressed by), but it’s a fine way to look at the internet information phenomenon.

Red Eye

1. For best results, skip Auto Smart Fix and use the Elliptical Marquee tool (b) to trace the iris.
2. Hit Ctrl+U (Apple+U on Macs) to bring up the Hue/Saturation dialog box. Set Saturation to -60, then adjust Hue and Lightness to match the true eye color.

[From Touch Up Your Pics - Wired How-To Wiki]

At this year’s Great Moonbuggy Race in Huntsville, Alabama, Prof. Paul Shiue of Christian Brothers University was overheard joking that duct tape was his team’s “best engineering tool.” Others felt the same way. The sound of gray tape being torn from rolls practically filled the race course as dozens of college and high school student engineers busily assembled and repaired their homemade moonbuggies.

[From NASA - Moondust and Duct Tape]

Cernan: “And I hate to say it, but I’m going to have to take some time to try … to get that fender back on. Jack, is the tape under my seat, do you remember?” (He’s referring to a roll of ordinary, gray duct tape.)

Schmitt: “Yes.”

Cernan: “Okay. I can’t say I’m very adept at putting fenders back on. But I sure don’t want to start without it. I’m just going to put a couple of pieces of good old-fashioned American gray tape on it…(and) see whether we can’t make sure it stays.”

In spite of his thick gloves, Cernan managed to unroll and tear off the needed pieces, but moondust foiled his first repair:

Cernan: “…good old-fashioned gray tape doesn’t want to stick very well.” (At a post flight briefing he explained: “Because there was dust on everything, once you got a piece of tape off the roll, the first thing the tape stuck to was dust; and then it didn’t stick to anything else.”)

His second attempt succeeded, however. “I am done!” crowed Cernan. “If that fender stays on … I’d like some sort of mending award.” And with that, they were off.

[From NASA - Moondust and Duct Tape]

reflect the challenge of describing ’spiritual’ ‘mystical’ or ‘metaphysical’ experiences in a language of science and reason.

Secularists following a material reductionist model of science see mysticism as a manifestation of a physical brain state; spiritualists see mysticism as a relationship with God or the universe. Yet mysticism may be both – an experience with corresponding physical brain correlates and an experience of relationship to the universe at large. Quantum physics is providing a clue as to how relationship can influence physical reality at the quantum level of neurobiology and consciousness (see Mindful Universe by Stapp).

…

Third, in every major religion, there are practices to enhance mysticism such as the use of peyote or the practices of sweat lodges in Native American traditions, meditation or yoga in Buddhism or Hinduism, Sufi dancing in Islam, or centering prayer in Christianity. Secular variants of such practices are now being introduced to the West as their benefits to health and well-being are realized. Self-transcendent experiences can also be realized in human-human experiences as well, such as that found in a mother-infant bond or sexual intimacy.

…

As metaphysical experiences become a larger part of culture in the 21st century, we need to look carefully at the culture in which they will arise, the language we use to describe them, and the direction we choose to evolve as a species. We need to see that mystical experiences may be a profound tool for sharing an interconnected view of the universe and our place in it, yet also a profound motivator for influencing human behavior – in both helpful and harmful ways. We may need to understand and discuss such experiences so that we can consider how to wisely balance their influence when the very human emotions of pride, fear, and subsequent inequity flourish among us.

[From Susan Smalley: How Mystical, Metaphysical Or Intuitive Experiences Fit In A Rational World - Living on The Huffington Post]

I added the bold part there, as I think that’s likely a flawed way of looking at it. I don’t know that we get to choose how we evolve. I think this is a strange amalgam of evolutionary theory with the “let’s make utopia” mentality.

I know Carl Sagan speaks in his book “The Varieties of Scientific Experience” to how most of the mystic experiences can be explained by brain chemistry and are hence not the most compelling “evidence” for God. I’ve not made up my mind one way or the other on this. I don’t discount that people have these experiences, and I don’t discount that they are at least related to an internal brain function/interaction with chemicals/etc. However, while I’m not willing to discount that there may be a “God” involved, it’s also a scientific non-starter (can’t prove it, can’t disprove it, can’t let that determine any of your methodology for study and experimentation).

I suspect mystic/metaphysical/intuitive experiences are amongst those things, like parent-hood, that you can intellectualize all you want, but until you’ve experienced it yourself you can’t really “relate” based on empirical knowledge.

For what it is worth, I think the authors goal (as I understand it), of “be careful how much weight you give your acid trip” (or religious experience), is a good one.

This laboratory in a leafy part of Hampshire is where defence and security firm Qinetiq develops and tests its ion engines – a technology that will take spacecraft to the planets, powered by the Sun.
Ion engines are an “electric propulsion system”. They make use of the fact that a current flowing across a magnetic field creates an electric field directed sideways to the current.
This is used to accelerate a beam of ions (charged atoms) of xenon away from the spacecraft, thereby providing thrust.

…

“You spend 10 years working on a mission, treating the components and equipment like a newborn baby. You never take it out of the clean room, and then you put in on the top of 100 tonnes of high explosive and set light to it,” he says, laughing nervously.

[From BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | 'Cruise control' for spacecraft]

Boring jobs turn our mind to autopilot, say scientists – and it means we can seriously mess up some simple tasks.
Monotonous duties switch our brain to “rest mode”, whether we like it or not, the researchers report in Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences.
They found mistakes can be predicted up to 30 seconds before we make them, by patterns in our brain activity.
The team hopes to design an early-warning brain monitor for pilots and others in “critical situations”.

[From BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Dull jobs really do numb the mind]

I’m not so sure about the “early warning” monitors, that reeks of sci-fi movie plot.

In a speech honouring Nasa’s 50th anniversary, the 66-year-old astrophysicist said the situation we face “is like Europe before 1492″.
“People might well have argued it was a waste of money to send Columbus on a wild goose chase,” he mused.
“Yet the discovery of the new world made profound difference to the old.”
And then he quipped: “Just think, we would not have a Big Mac or KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken).
“Spreading out into space will have an even greater effect,” he told an audience assembled at George Washington University, Washington DC.
“It will completely change the future of the human race and maybe determine whether we have any future at all.”

[From BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Nasa 'should follow Columbus']

Downer said he came up with the idea three years ago when his team started filming the tigers.

He noticed how gently the forest elephants carried firewood to their camp and wondered if they’d be as delicate with a camera.

“And they were,” he enthused. “Elephants do not see tigers as a threat, and tigers are comfortable with elephants. So we had the perfect team.”

The langur monkeys in the reserve provide fascinating pictures as they became transfixed by their reflections in the log-c

[From Smile you're on ele-vision: How a camera attached to an elephant's trunk captured amazing jungle views | the Daily Mail]

Looking at the pictures chosen for the article none of them appear to be from the one camera that was attached to the elephant. And to me that “tusk-cam” looks downright cruel (couldn’t they have made something WAY smaller and unobtrusive for the elephant to wear?).

Researchers found that the lizards developed cecal valves—muscles between the large and small intestine—that slowed down food digestion in fermenting chambers, which allowed their bodies to process the vegetation’s cellulose into volatile fatty acids.

“They evolved an expanded gut to allow them to process these leaves,” Irschick said, adding it was something that had not been documented before. “This was a brand-new structure.”

Along with the ability to digest plants came the ability to bite harder, powered by a head that had grown longer and wider.

[From Lizards Rapidly Evolve After Introduction to Island]

This would seem to explain an evolutionary “explosion” under new/suddenly altered environmental conditions. I believe this matches the fossil records (long periods of relative stasis punctuated by changes on otherwise short timelines). To me the most interesting adaptation is the intestinal one. A bigger head seems to be an “easy” adaptation (big guys thrive, big heads become more common), but developing internal valves that allowed for fermenting and digesting plant matter is, I believe, a much more complex adaptation.

In periods of relatively intense particle activity, some areas of the Earth’s surface in both the Arctic and Antarctic are warmer while others become colder, showing differences of up to 2C or 3C compared to the long-term averages.
In periods of unusually low particle activity, the patterns are reversed.
The mechanism appears to be redistributing heat across the polar regions; there is no evidence for any overall warming or cooling, Dr Seppala added, nor that the scale of the effect has changed over time.

[From BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | More doubt on cosmic climate link]

Which would indicate that while it doesn’t account for global temperature variation, it may account for a portion of the rapidity of polar melting. If that’s the case, and we’re using that melt-rate as a barometer of how screwed up we are, we’re not using a good thermometer (similar to how sticking a thermometer under your arm as a kid isn’t as accurate, but is more pleasant, than sticking it in a bodily orifice).

Scientists had believed the world’s oldest trees were 4,000-year-old pine trees found in North America.
The oldest, a bristlecone pine named Methuselah located in California’s White Mountains, is aged 4,768, according to the Guinness Book of World Records.

The new record contender, which would have taken root just after the last ice age, was found among a cluster of around 20 spruces believed to be more than 8,000 years old at an altitude of 910m (2,985ft) on Fulu Mountain.
The visible portion of the spruce was comparatively new, but analysis of four “generations” of remains – cones and wood – found underneath its crown showed its root system had been growing for 9,550 years, Umeaa University said.

Umeaa’s professor of physical geography, Leif Kullmann, said the spruce’s stems or trunks had a lifespan of around 600 years, but as soon as one died, a cloned stem could emerge from the root system.

[From BBC NEWS | Europe | Swedes find 'world's oldest tree']

We started with a Table-Top Biosphere, or as MAKE called it, a “Tabletop Shrimp Support Module” or TSSM. The whole idea is to create an entirely self-sustaining aquatic ecosystem within a completely sealed jam jar. If you do it right, your freshwater shrimp “aquanaut” will be able to survive for months without your ever needing to feed it or even open the jar. The ecological balance you create supplies all the air, filtering and food for all the creatures within the jar to survive in perfect harmony. If only the real world was this easy.

[From Producer's Notes - MAKE it at Home: Table-Top Biosphere | QUEST Community Science Blog - KQED]

High levels of pollution may have contributed to the deaths of thousands of people in England from pneumonia in recent years, a study suggests.

[From BBC NEWS | Health | Pneumonia 'linked' to pollution]

China has already passed the US for pollution. Now this might be news. This is a flaw in the Kyoto agreement, and one that makes it very difficult to garner any worldwide pollution progress. “Non-industrialized” nations like China and India (and numerous others) feel they should get the chance to have the economic and standard-of-living benefits of the industrial revolution (a fair argument to make). But if we give them a pass on pollution then we may be “leveling the playing field”, but not actually helping the environment.

China has already overtaken the US as the world’s “biggest polluter”, a report to be published next month says.
The research suggests the country’s greenhouse gas emissions have been underestimated, and probably passed those of the US in 2006-2007.

They warn that unchecked future growth will dwarf any emissions cuts made by rich nations under the Kyoto Protocol.

[From BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | China 'now top carbon polluter']

I think some of the “climate change culture” overstates the problems (or at least uses propaganda style rhetoric to try and make their point), but I think there is a legit problem with human impact on the planet. Not that the planet (and life on it) won’t survive, but that we may decimate ourselves inadvertently, and set “us” (people) back several hundred years (or at least decades).

Which leads us to:

The head of the World Trade Organization, Pascal Lamy, has called for aid policies to be refocused to improve agriculture.

[From BBC NEWS | Europe | WTO chief calls for aid rethink]

This is, in my useless opinion, an important philosophical leap. To some end it’s tough to say “let’s put money into infrastructure” when people are dying of starvation now. But the flip-side may be that if we “let” a million people die in the next 5 years by building infrastructure that will then save five million people over the five years following then you’re serving a greater number of people. As a libertarian I don’t think there should be a state enforced imperative to help the starving people of the world, but as an ethical human I think there is a case to be made for a moral imperative to do so.

A UN-sponsored report has called for urgent changes to the way food is produced, as soaring food prices risk driving millions of people to poverty.
The Unesco study recommends better safeguards to protect resources and more sustainable farming practices, such as producing food locally.
More natural and ecological farming techniques should be used, it says.

[From BBC NEWS | Europe | UN calls for farming revolution]

Here’s where we tie the pollution and the planet with the feeding of the people. If we continue to pollute at current levels we’re likely dooming millions of people to slow painful deaths due to pollution influenced diseases and decreased farming yield. If we, in an agriculturally sound country like the US, turn many of our farming resources to “natural alternatives” to oil based energy we’re likewise dooming millions of people to starvation due to increased food prices cause by limited resources.
I don’t have a solution. I realize that my first world lifestyle is largely supported by work done in the third-world to make it possible for me to work in a knowledge based job that affords me money to spend on technology an entertainment instead of eking out an existence largely concerned with feeding my family. This situation is not a sustainable one over too many more generations and I’d like to be a part of a generation that makes some tough decisions so the “interest” on our “debt” isn’t compounded onto our children (or their children).

I’ll finish up with this bit from Boing Boing:

Today’s New York Times has a scary article about food shortages around the world, including heart-breaking slide shows and videos of people digging in dumps for morsels of anything with digestible calories.

In Haiti, vendors are selling flavored mud to starving people.

In Haiti, where three-quarters of the population earns less than $2 a day and one in five children is chronically malnourished, the one business booming amid all the gloom is the selling of patties made of mud, oil and sugar, typically consumed only by the most destitute.
“It’s salty and it has butter and you don’t know you’re eating dirt,” said Olwich Louis Jeune, 24, who has taken to eating them more often in recent months. “It makes your stomach quiet down.

[From Starving people in Haiti eating mud - Boing Boing]

I don’t think CFLs and recycled grocery bags are the solution, they’re fine for what they are, but I suspect what they are is largely symbolic. What do you think the real solutions are? What do you think the future will inevitably look like because of where we are today?

The US space agency (Nasa) has extended the international Cassini-Huygens mission by two years.
The unmanned Cassini-Huygens spacecraft entered orbit around Saturn in 2004 on a mission that was supposed to come to an end in July this year.
The two-year mission extension will encompass some 60 extra orbits of Saturn and more flybys of its moons.
These will include 26 flybys of Titan – its biggest moon – seven of Enceladus, and one each of Dione, Rhea and Helene.

[From BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Nasa extends Saturn probe mission]

We’re also looking at growing plants in moon rocks…

Scientists with the European Space Agency (Esa) say the day when flowers bloom on the Moon has come closer.
An Esa-linked team has shown that marigolds can grow in crushed rock very like the lunar surface, with no need for plant food.
Some see growing plants on the Moon as a step towards human habitation.

[From BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Plants 'thrive' on Moon rock diet]

And a leading European astronomer thinks they shouldn’t try and send people into space.

Europe should give up on sending men and women into space and concentrate on unmanned projects, according to one of the world’s leading astronomers.
The future lies in using advanced robotics, miniaturisation and fabrication, said Lord Martin Rees, the president of the Royal Society.
Europe “should try and get a world lead in unmanned exploration”, he said.
Spending funds on manned spaceflights “was not a very good use of money”, that should be left to the US, he said.

[From BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Demand for Europe space rethink]

I’m actually inclined to agree and disagree with Mr. Rees. On the one hand un-manned missions are less likely to have a tragedy, and more likely to obtain more information per dollar spent than a manned flight. On the other hand there is nothing so exciting in the space programs of the world, as seeing a countryman go up (and come down). I think the bigger goals of sending people are, the more support the space agencies will get. We’ve spent the last 3 decades sending people up in a shuttle to fly around the planet, which is not nearly as compelling as going to the Moon or Mars. As part of a bigger “cover humanity’s bases” plan I think there is a place for manned flight to the moon and beyond. If we manage to screw up this planet (a not unlikely scenario) it would be nice, as a species, to have some framework for sending us somewhere else in hopes of surviving. That said, our NASA dollars would probably be better spent on unmanned vehicles going to and from the moon and mars than they are sending the shuttle up and down as often.To keep interest in space programs you almost have to send people up occasionally, but to get the information needed for important research the money is better spent on improving the unmanned missions. I think my proposal would be a co-ordinated world-wide effort that included one or two manned missions a year to the ISS and such, a goal of every 5-10 years sending somebody to the moon/mars/beyond, and more frequent launching of extended unmanned missions to the other planets in our solar system (and a few beyond). Of course I’m pulling these figures out of my head, and I’m not making an informed policy plan here, just trying to get the discussion going on how we could better “do space.”

It has been really busy as we have started the distribution of a corn-soya blend for malnourished children.

So mothers have been bringing their children under the age of five for screening: we measure their height, their weight and the circumference of their arm.
If they fall below 80% of the minimum weight for their age, we put them on the feeding programme.

[From BBC NEWS | Africa | Diary: Sierra Leone slum medic]

Having a large hippocampus – a part of the brain involved with memory – seems to provide protection against the symptoms of dementia, a study suggests.
A US team compared the brains of 35 people who had Alzheimer’s “plaques”, some of whom died with sharp minds and others who showed no dementia symptoms

[From BBC NEWS | Health | 'Big brain' keeps dementia at bay]

I’m going to assume hundreds of studies saying “vitamins good” out-weigh this one that says they kill, but it will be interesting to see if this develops into anything else

Research has suggested certain vitamin supplements do not extend life and could even lead to a premature death.
A review of 67 studies found “no convincing evidence” that antioxidant supplements cut the risk of dying.
Scientists at Copenhagen University said vitamins A and E could interfere with the body’s natural defences.

[From BBC NEWS | Health | Vitamins 'may shorten your life']

A) Tigers are my favorite animals. B) Nice to know the zoos may help save the species.

Many tigers held in captivity have “pure-bred ancestry” and could play a key role in the survival of diminishing wild populations, a study suggests.
A team using a new method for assessing the genetic ancestry of tigers found that a number of “generic” animals were actually pure-bred subspecies.

[From BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Captive tigers 'may save species']

Glad they’ve landed safely. There are some interesting stats on Peggy Whitson in a sidebar (she’s been up for 192 days).

A Russian Soyuz spacecraft has returned to Earth, but came down more than 400km (250 miles) away from its planned touchdown point, say Russian officials.
The crew are safe, but were subjected to severe G-forces during re-entry, said a spokesman for mission control.

[From BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Soyuz spacecraft lands off-target]

Hormone’s driving the market? does this mean sex really does sell? Are the markets driven by machismo?

A Cambridge University team found testosterone levels were directly linked to the profit they made.
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study also found levels of the stress hormone cortisol could affect the risks they took.
A psychologist who works with investment bankers said it may help explain seemingly irrational behaviour.

[From BBC NEWS | Health | Hormones 'may fuel market crises']

We think of our brains as the ultimate private sanctuary, a zone where other people can’t intrude without our knowledge or permission. But its boundaries are gradually eroding. Hypersonic sound is just a portent of what’s coming, one of a host of emerging technologies aimed at tapping into our heads. These tools raise a fascinating, and queasy, new ethical question: Do we have a right to “mental privacy”?

“We’re going to be facing this question more and more, and nobody is really ready for it,” says Paul Root Wolpe, a bioethicist and board member of the nonprofit Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics. “If the skull is not an absolute domain of privacy, there are no privacy domains left.” He argues that the big personal liberty issues of the 21st century will all be in our heads — the “civil rights of the mind,” he calls it.
…
The good news is that scholars are holding conferences to hash out legal positions. But we’ll need a broad public debate about it, too. Civil liberties thrive only when the public demands them — and understands they’re at risk. That means we need to stop seeing this stuff as science fiction and start thinking about how we’ll react to it. Otherwise, we could all lose our minds.

[From Clive Thompson on Why the Next Civil Rights Battle Will Be Over the Mind ]

This is one of those technologies that I almost have a hard time finding non-nefarious uses for outside of the research/medical sector. Though law-enforcement could use this to help them, the level of abuse this would invite is nearly off the charts. This is a “minority report” waiting to happen. This is a set of technologies that will open up further the debate on how much privacy and liberty are “we” willing to give up for security? and even if “we” are willing to give it up… should we?

What I discovered en route is a treasure trove of car accident data, which can be sliced and diced any way you want it–click the Query tab for an array of very specific variables. (Want to know how many people died in car accidents in Tompkins County, New York, on Martin Luther King Day in 2004 while riding in the back seat on the right-hand side of a vehicle traveling at 23 miles an hour driven by a female living in zip code 60656? No problem. And that barely scratches the surface of the possibilities.) I answered my initial question, then played with the thing for hours.”

[From Knowing the risk of fatality, to the finest nicety - Boing Boing]

Clark, in his post today about heat pumps and hot water, wondered aloud about other energy-saving techniques:

Why doesn’t my fridge connect to the outside world? In wintertime, there’s plenty of cold air for free, just outside my window. In summertime, the hot air from the fridge’s air pump gets recirculated into my already-overheated house. Seems like a problem looking for a solution. Any takers?

This, in turn, reminded me of the Freeaire Refrigeration System, which as Blaine wrote, is

“…designed to provide such free cooling for walk-in coolers, freezers and cold storage warehouses. The system utilizes an electronic controller to finely tune the operation of standard refrigeration equipment, and this controller simply monitors the outdoor temperature and desired temperature settings and stops refrigerator evaporator fans when not needed, which also reduces the compressor’s refrigeration load. Proper airflow is maintained when the evaporator fans switch off by operating one or more energy-efficient circulating fans.

[From WorldChanging: FreeAire and Free Lunches]

In much the same way that outsourcing to India is less attractive to large corporations now that cost of living and salaries have gone up for IT people who live there, the cost of other goods and services from China will go up as their workforce starts to garner better pay. When that happens it will then become more profitable (and hence for likely) for companies to device energy efficient solutions to problems of limited energy resources.

A fossil animal locked in Lebanese limestone has been shown to be an extremely precious discovery – a snake with two legs.
Scientists have only a handful of specimens that illustrate the evolutionary narrative that goes from ancient lizard to limbless modern serpent.

[From BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Ancient serpent shows its leg]

Satellite provider OnSat recently shut off internet service to the Navajo nation, leaving the entire reservation without access vital to education, government, and other services. OnSat claims it did so because the federal government failed to pay about $2 million it owed, which OnSat in turn pays to a subcontractor for satellite time.

[From Internet goes dark at Navajo reservation - Boing Boing]

*Oh, and Adzou, or however you spell it, supposedly means B.S. in Navajo (we asked somebody this while we were there because several of our my friends and I enjoyed playing the card game of the same name).

They have identified a type of stem cell which can be transformed into cartilage cells known as chondrocytes.
In theory, it should be possible to create new chondrocytes in sufficient numbers to achieve a real therapeutic effect for osteoarthritis patients

[From BBC NEWS | Health | Stem cell hope for osteoarthritis]