milhayser | February 28, 2014Warm weather at the Winter Olympics played a major part in the $51 billion extravaganza. Greg Laden calls the Sochi games more of a "Fall Olympics" as competitors bit the slush on the slopes and the half pipe. At the Extreme Park, casualties among women outnumbered casualties among men by nearly 3 to 1. Why the gender imbalance? Greg wonders if the men's and women's courses are not suitably dimorphic, or if better training would make a difference. On The Pump Handle, Celeste Monforton takes the panoptic view with the official Olympic injury and illness surveillance system. During the last…
milhayser | February 23, 2014Researchers observed tiny voids forming in silicon used for solar panels; these voids provide physical evidence of the Staebler-Wronski effect, "which reduces the solar cell efficiency by up to 15 percent within the first 1000 hours."
Using an online avatar with a skin color other than your own makes you less racist in real life; playing a hero makes you less cruel, and playing a villain less benevolent.
Old mouse muscles exhibit "elevated levels of activity in a biological cascade called the p38 MAP kinase pathway" which prevents stem cells from dividing and repairing muscle damage. By…
milhayser | February 21, 2014The story starts off predictably enough for a grandiose adventure: a wizard, a prophecy, an unwitting hero. Emmet is just a model construction worker, living his city life to the tee by following every rule in the book. He is manically happy just to be doing it right: greeting his alarm clock with a smile, doing some calisthenics, watching his favorite sitcom before heading out for an overpriced coffee and a fulfilling day on the job. He feels like he has friends, that he's part of something. Then a mysterious woman who's obviously not playing by the rules leads him to fall down an…
milhayser | February 13, 2014As an alternative to biblical creationism, Intelligent Design infers a less obtrusive God to explain life on Earth. This deity doesn't hurl bolts of lightning, unless it's with the express purpose of sparking abiogenesis in the primordial soup. On EvolutionBlog, Jason Rosenhouse dismisses probabilistic arguments against the likelihood of complex organisms, explaining that even the most improbable-seeming outcome of natural selection is more or less inevitable. As a flawed analogy, he imagines flipping a coin 500 times. This will always manifest a sequence of heads and tails that only had a…
milhayser | February 4, 2014The price of human genome sequencing has fallen spectacularly since the turn of the century; what then cost $100,000,000 is now promised for only $1000. This race toward zero makes even Moore's Law look like a snail's pace, but the $1000 price tag does come with a couple asterisks. For one, providers will need high demand to pay off the multi-million dollar sequencing array that makes it possible, and low demand should result in higher prices. For two, $1000 will only buy you a rough draft of your genome. On Discovering Biology in a Digital World, Todd Smith writes "While some sequencing…
milhayser | January 30, 2014Ethan Siegel calls Mars "the obvious first step in our journey to the stars" and "part of our dreams for reaching out into the Universe." Last year thousands of people applied to join Mars One, a proposed colonization effort slash reality show that plans to put humans on the red planet in 2023. But unless Mars One wants to achieve ratings by broadcasting the death of its crew, it may want to cool its jets. Ethan says that without some heretofore unknown, top secret-technology, there's no hope for safely landing a capsule-full of "sensitive meatbags" (aka bachelors 1 through 3) on the surface…
milhayser | January 20, 2014The anti-scientific M.O. of some political conservatives was in full swing during the 'polar vortex,' as frigid weather brought south from the Arctic led many commentators to scoff, "look how cold it is, can you believe anyone thinks the Earth is getting warmer?" Coby Beck adds some perspective from climate historian Christopher C. Burt on A Few Things Ill-Considered, writing "cold snaps like this past week’s used to occur every couple of years in the 1800′s," and more like every 5-10 years in the 1900's. Meanwhile the last time it got so cold in the U.S. was twenty years ago. Coby says "what…
milhayser | January 10, 2014Aristotle thought that there could be no lasting void in the natural order, that any emptiness would be instantaneously filled. Of course Aristotle was full of batty ideas. But this one came to be rephrased by philosophers and Vulcans alike as "nature abhors a vacuum," enduring as a powerful metaphor if not a precisely factual truth. In terms of critical thinking, scientists too abhor a vacuum, and are usually eager to fill in the blanks. On Pharyngula, PZ Myers criticizes a review of long-established brain anatomy, freshened with primary colors and a hypothesis that makes no sense.…
milhayser | January 2, 2014This is a story with a happy ending, or at least a happy middle, because it isn’t over yet. Right after it began I found myself floating face down in the water, drifting very slowly with the current, trying to stand but hardly able to move my legs. Trying to swim, but unable to move my arms. One Mississippi two Mississippi three Mississippi four. I waited for my dad, standing a few feet away, to notice something was wrong. But as a younger person I had often played dead in the water, daring someone to be alarmed. Finally I turned my head to the side, my lips above the surface for a split-…
milhayser | December 27, 2013Coldness can manifest where you least expect it: on a planet rapidly warmed by the combustion of fossil fuel, or in the heart of a star 250 times as massive as our own. On Greg Laden's Blog, Greg explains that an apparent "recovery" of Arctic sea ice from its historic low in 2012 does not invalidate the long-term trend. Greg also explains this year's legacy of extreme weather, such as snow in Cairo, writing that when there is less difference in temperature between equatorial and polar regions, "the jet streams get all wiggly and cause northerly air to reach far to the south in some places and…
milhayser | December 16, 2013Katie Couric riled up the internet last week with her uncritical promotion of anti-vaccine viewpoints on her talk show. It was certainly a twist in the professional narrative of a woman who has undergone televised colonoscopy and mammography to promote cancer awareness. That awareness should have been front-and-center in her discussion of HPV vaccines as well, since HPV infection can lead to cancers of anywhere people put their genitals. Instead, Couric featured two mothers convinced that HPV vaccines had caused death and injury, respectively, to their daughters. On Respectful Insolence, Orac…
milhayser | December 13, 2013You may be too young to know the truth about Santa Claus, but dear old Saint Nick is not the affable Anglo-Saxon philanthropist he appears to be. In fact, evidence suggests that he is an unholy creature of the night, an ancient vampire who would suck your blood if you didn't placate him with milk and cookies.
Saint Nicholas was born in Turkey in the third century AD, more than 1700 years ago. Although rumored to have perished at the age of 73, he must have been trans-substantiated by some forgotten fiend. Turned into a being that would burn in the light of day, old Saint Nick was gradually…
milhayser | December 11, 2013On EvolutionBlog, Jason Rosenhouse confronts the challenge of basic math education: “we need to find a balance between hammering the basic skills, while also making it clear that there is so much more to mathematics than arithmetic.” Rosenhouse rejects the approach of New Math, “teaching grade-schoolers about set theory and the axiomatic method,” instituted briefly in the U.S. after the Soviets launched a giant ball bearing named Sputnik into orbit. Rosenhouse goes on to question whether teachers should emphasize experimental mathematics, wherein the brute force of computation is used to…
milhayser | December 5, 2013Not too long ago, when the media became excited about a study saying genetically modified corn causes tumor growth in rats, ScienceBloggers were quick to point out that the study featured some of the worst science ever. Now the paper has been officially retracted by its publisher, but to what end? On Pharyngula, PZ Myers speculates that the study authors avoided statistical analysis of their small, cancer-prone rat packs precisely because there was no statistically significant effect of being force-fed GMO corn. PZ also says "journalists who got the paper in advance had to sign…
milhayser | December 2, 2013Gratefulness is an important part of a happy life, but are we right to be thankful for an ill-gotten bounty? In a country of 300 million people, a turkey on every table (or a chicken in every pot) means that many birds live hard and die fast. They are also plucked, gutted, inspected, and packaged as quickly as possible, leaving human workers to pay the price. On the Pump Handle, Celeste Monforton debunks the National Chicken Council's claim that working in a poultry processing plant is as safe as making omelets at a country club. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, poultry…
milhayser | November 25, 2013Typhoon Haiyan, which made landfall in the Philippines on Nov. 7, is another sobering reminder of the severe weather we are provoking through climate change. It is unofficially the strongest recorded cyclone to ever make landfall, with wind speeds up to 195 mph, 70% stronger than Hurricane Sandy. Villages are flattened, and more than 5,000 people are confirmed dead (as of 11/22). Greg Laden says that tropical cyclones feed on heat energy from the sea’s surface, from seas we know are getting warmer. Haiyan was a storm that blew past the most dire classification, Category 5, which tops out at a…
milhayser | November 20, 2013The wait is over, and we have a green light on posting and commenting for the foreseeable future.
milhayser | November 12, 2013On Aetiology, Tara C. Smith continues her series on the science of The Walking Dead, explaining how diseases spread and how they might cause zombiism. One thing that would be observed in any real contagion would be an incubation period— the time between when a virus (for example) enters your body and you start showing symptoms of infection. For a virus like the flu, this could be about two days during which you don’t feel sick but could still be infecting people around you—even if you don’t bite them. Tara also expresses nerd rage at the show's "doctors" pursuing antibiotics to treat the flu…
milhayser | November 10, 2013This movie was already spoiled for me because I read the book many years ago. But the movie can't help but spoil itself. It's a great film and one of the best adaptations of a novel to ever appear onscreen, but if you really know nothing about Ender's Game, and can read at a 9th grade level, honestly go read the book first. If you have time.
The problem is that by the time of Ender's "final exam," it's hard to imagine anyone in the audience sympathizing with Ender's shock that he hasn't really been playing a video game; he and his tween friends have been controlling actual spaceships…
milhayser | October 21, 2013As anti-vaccinationists, global-warming denialists, and young-earth creationists know, it’s not too hard to fool the public with bogus science. But a new exercise by John Bohannon of Science suggests it’s not too hard too fool professionals either. Bohannon used a computer program to generate unique iterations of a purposely flawed paper, playing Mad Libs with the formula “Molecule X from lichen species Y inhibits the growth of cancer cell Z.” He sent his fake papers to 304 open-access journals, and it was accepted by more than half. Some of these journals are admittedly sketchy, but others…