Fitness for Thought: Study of Weight Watchers VS Fitness Centers found Weight Watchers people lost about 9 pounds, but it was mostly lean tissue, not fat, while Fitness Center people lost very little weight, but lost a lot of abdominal fat. Unfortunately, this makes Fitness people give up because they don’t see results, despite getting them.
The Berkeley Pit in Montana is an acidic environmental disaster left over from the Anaconda Mining Company, one of the deadliest places on Earth. Now researchers have found an extremophile algae living on its surface, producing oxygen that neutralizes the acid.
100 AUs away in space lies the Heliopause, where the solar wind from our Sun hits the rest of the Galaxy, where our solar system officially ends, and the two Voyager probes are mapping it.
Hot ions in the heliosheath
Credit: University of California, Berkeley; L. Wang
Men, to lower your chances of getting erectile dysfunction, have sex more often. Get a prescription and take it to the bar with you, might make a good pickup line.
The article refers to it as a flat atom, but its more of virtual atom that comes into existence when an electrical current is applied… still, it’s very cool and holds great promise for quantum computing.
Har! Har! Har! Those silly dittoheads are at it again, this time demanding a researcher publish his data for a paper that demonstrated the evolution of bacteria. If they had only bothered to read the paper, they would have found the data published in it!!! Silly Dittoheads! No science for you! Thpppt!!!
Eigenfactor let’s you map scientific notations in journals. Nifty!
Eigenfactor
Science Rockstar: David Pritchard has an hypothesis that hookworms suppress the immune system, causing those infected with them to have fewer allergies. To test this he’s infected himself.
An awesome spectacular incredibly good-looking judge in Georgia, who probably has an enormous phallus, has denied a Coal Plant Permit because it did not set limits on Carbon Dioxide emissions.
For just $10, you can adopt a star for the Kepler satellite to investigate, and get personal notification if a planet is discovered in orbit around it. I’m signed up and will get to select a star in August with all the other cool kids. Don’t you want to be part of the club?
Discovery Channel’s The World is Just Awesome Commercial:
I want a gun that shoots these. Using laser beams and electric fields, Rice physicists pushed an electron to orbit far from the nucleus of a potassium atom, creating a millimeter-sized “Bohr Atom.”
Millimeter-Sized Atom
Credit: Jeff Mestayer/Rice University
Perspective please. Fear of flying after 9/11 killed 1600 people who chose to make the much more dangerous choice of driving.
MIT Students have built a 12X12 foot parabolic mirror that can focus sunlight well enough to melt steel… theoretically.
The International Whaling Commission got nowhere, and Japan is considering quitting it so they can eat all the whales they want like a fat little piggy nation.
Wal-Mart and Costco are adopting redesigned milk jugs that are cheaper to ship and better for the environment. People hate them, but they’re gonna have to suck it up because it’s here to stay.
Using embryo selection, a couple will have a baby free of the breast cancer gene, removing the disease from their lineage. Now consider the truth in Clint’s prediction concerning humans evolving themselves.
Somebody please find me an audio sample of the Aztec Death Whistle, played by those about to be sacrificed.
Happy Meteor Day!!! It is the 100th anniversary of the Tunguska Event, when a meteor exploded over Russia with a force 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, leveling 80 million trees over 2,150 square kilometers. GrrlScientist has a great write-up of the incident and what we know about it.
Louisiana has enacted legislation allowing teachers to question evolution and other scientific theories in the interest of promoting “critical thinking skills.”
A middle school creationist science teacher, who teaches his students that “science is wrong” for disagreeing with the bible, has burned a cross into a student’s arm (HT Carolyn).
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has come up with a plug-in hybrid that gets 100 MPG.
Gas is more dense at cooler temperatures and measured by volume at the pump, so purchasing at night is most economic and 20 other facts about Oil.
Check out NASA’s Climate Time Machine to learn about sea levels, CO2 emissions, and global average temperatures. Then go tell an AGW Skeptic to suck it.
Suprise! Martian soil is much more alkaline than expected, meaning it’s much more like Earth’s soil, and holds a much greater potential for supporting life.
Uh oh. We appear to have a chicken and egg issue here. Humans can laugh at humor because our brains have evolved to recognize pattern, and our brains have evolved to recognize patterns because we reward them with laughter.
90 percent of 150 people studied can carry a tune, and 100 percent of them can keep timing.
With 130 proposals for Solar Powered energy plants that could power 20 million US homes, the Bureau of Land Management has decided its a good time to put a moratorium on new solar projects on public land. As outrageous as this sounds, I agree it’s a good idea until the environmental impacts can be assessed.
Mike Huckabee and John McCain keep claiming “not one drop of oil was spilled” during Huricane Katrina, which ignores the 17,700 barrels of oil from 124 spills that occured.
Yesterday I linked to a Wired article declaring the death of the scientific method, arguing we no longer need to know why things work so long as our algorithms do the job, this rebuttal calls out the article for ignoring the fact that, without the why, we would not have the algorithms in the first place, and who doesn’t want to know the why anyway?
Porpida porpida
Credit: Islands in the Stream Expedition 2002.
NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration
The White House’s new strategy for dealing with pesky e-mails from the EPA about global warming? Refuse to even open such e-mails, unless they are stripped of inconvenient truths.
An assessment by U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Climate change threatens our security by destabilizing world governments, creating humanitarian disasters, and adding to terrorism. The White House responded by sticking their fingers in their ears and going “LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA!!!”
CORRECTION CORRECTION CORRECTION: No one ever said the Amazon Tribe was “Undiscovered,” “Unknown,” or “Lost,” the term used was “Uncontacted,” and the tribe remains Uncontacted; therefore, the photograph is not a hoax. My apologies to Survival International for yesterday’s links.
Dumb Dumb Bill O’Reilly mocked Al Gore for the false story about him using more energy in 2007, commenting that he’d like to hear Gore’s side of things, which ignores the fact that Gore has given his side of the story.
Yay! Home Depot is now offering CFL Recycling! Keep mercury out of our landfills, give it to Home Depot!
The Indoxacarb Insecticide kills the cockroaches that eat it, the cockroach nymphs that come into contact with the dead cockroach excrement, and the cockroaches that eat the dead nymphs, making that three generations of dead cockroaches for one application.
The Clay Mathematics Institute is offering a million dollars to whoever can find an efficient algorithm to solve Minesweeper; although never proved, such an algorithm should not exist. Lots of fascinating figures and concepts in this article that are beyond me.
Minesweeper: “The AND Gate”
Credit: Clay Mathematics Institute
This NPR story on the mysteries of itching includes a creepy anecdote about a woman who scratched through her skull into her brain.
Please take a moment to type “about:robots” in your Firefox address bar. Klaatu Barada Nickto!
The modern data deluge is rendering scientific modeling obsolete, and the NSF’s Cluster Exploratory will expand scientific knowledge in new ways.
Unprecedented lightning storms in California spark 840 wildfires.
The Great Planet Debate in Maryland this summer will explore science as a process and why the IAU has their collective heads up their butts concerning Pluto.
I’m down with McCain’s call for a $300 Million Dollar government prize for anyone who develops a new vehicle battery “at 30 percent of current costs.” This is good incentive, but we still need to revoke the oil company tax breaks.
CORRECTION: According to the Brazilian government, the unknown tribe photographed from the air, was discovered in 1910.
Summer is bringing out the Noctilucent Clouds, so high in the atmosphere they continue reflecting sunlight after Twilight (HT Carolyn).
Northrop Grumman has been tasked with developing “Brain-Wave Binoculars,” a helmet which will monitor the wearer’s electrical brain activity and alert them to targets their subconscious recognizes but their consciousness misses.
Check out Eye of Science for some absolutely unreal microscopic photography that I can’t post samples of here for being copyrighted.
Oh great! First I’m going nuts trying to decide between a Prius or a Smartcar, and now the Technical University of Berlin comes up with the TRON-cycle-looking CLEVER.
Compact Low Emissions Vehicle for Urban Transport (CLEVER)
An incredibly fascinating molecular engine propels the flagellum in swimming bacteria (creationists use it as an example of irreducible complexity), now scientists have found the protein “clutch” bacteria use to make it stop spinning.
Protein “clutch” for Bacteria Flagellum
Credit: Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation
If cars improved their efficiency at the same pace as computers, a liter of fuel would power the UK for a year.
Floods, droughts, tornadoes, monsoons… Seem like there’s a lot of extreme weather going on? It’s just what Global Warming Theorists predicted.
Not only is Al Gore not using 10-percent more power this year as the dittoheads are mind-numbingly asserting, the power he is using is 100 percent green. A fact you won’t see on Faux Noise.
Speedo’s LZR swimsuits streamlines Olympic swimmers and improves performance by as much as 2 percent (it also costs $600 and takes 20 minutes to get into), which is stirring controversy.
Not only have Uzbekistan’s unsustainable farming practices caused half the Aral Sea to vanish, but they have corrupted their farmland with salt as well.
When astronauts go back to the moon in 2020, they’ll be sporting sleek new duds.
New Spacesuit Designs
Credit: NASA
Yowza! Researchers predict we’ll be having sex with robots in 40 years! I can’t wait to get a piece of firmware! Yay Robosexuality!
Possible discovery of homosexuality in the brain. Men and women who are into women have larger right-brain hemispheres, while men and women into men have more symmetrical brains.
I recently linked to Vannevar Bush’s As We May Think as an example of a “steampunk internet,” but it turns out WWW was dreamt of even before this with Paul Otlet’s 1934 Mundaneum, a global network of “electric telescopes.”
Our ability to read is a happy side-effect of many parts of our brains evolutionarily intended for other purposes.
Medical Science may be on the verge of doubling our lifespans, if this occurs then our cultural understandings of concepts like love and mortality will change significantly.
California is taking an extremely undemocratic stand against home DNA testing by requiring you get permission from your doctor first. I just sent DNA samples to the Bone Marrow Donor program, would that make me a criminal in California?
Human Chromosomes
Credit: Stefan Müller,
Department Biologie II der
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Dittoheads are digging the #$%@ out of this TCPR report claiming Al Gore’s “personal electricity consumption up 10%,” and cites his home using 213,219 kWh in 2007, but the same website cites his home using 221,000 kWh in 2006. No wonder dittoheads don’t believe in Global Warming, THEY CAN’T DO BASIC #@$%ING MATH!!! Ha! Ha! What dips!!! Thpppt!!! (HT Deltoid)
Freedom Tower Construction Jan 21, 2008
Credit: Michaelkemp
Female chimps have loud sex when males are around to stir up competition among them, but are quiet when other females are about to avoid competing with them.
Models suggest that, considered in the wider scope of the species, male homosexuality in humans may benefit female fecundity, but there are no specifics on the cause and effect. So I’m just posting this link as dull but sincere filler.
