A comet to enjoy in the New Year: C/2014 Q2 Lovejoy


There’ll be plenty of fireworks to mark the New Year in a few hours … and one new light in the sky is a recently discovered comet.


… and if you miss it this month, you’ve got another 8,000 years to get ready to see it again.



Here’s what NASA said about the latest Lovejoy comet:



Comet Lovejoy, C/2014 Q2, … Its lovely coma is tinted green by diatomic C2 gas fluorescing in sunlight. Discovered in August of this year, this Comet Lovejoy is currently sweeping north through the constellation Columba, heading for Lepus south of Orion and bright enough to offer good binocular views. Not its first time through the inner Solar System, this Comet Lovejoy will pass closest to planet Earth on January 7, while its perihelion (closest point to the Sun) will be on January 30. Of course, planet Earth’s own 2015 perihelion passage is scheduled for January 4. A long period comet, this Comet Lovejoy should return again … in about 8,000 years.



Bad Astronomy has this advice for viewing:



As a bonus, it’s passing near the constellation of Orion, making it easier to find, and it’ll also glide past Taurus and the Pleiades, providing for what should be some pretty photogenic scenes. It’s moving roughly north, so it gets higher all the time for Northern Hemisphere observers. …


If you want to see this comet for yourself—and you do—it rises a couple of hours after sunset. For now, I suggest waiting until about 9-ish or so to look, since it will be high off the horizon then, but your kilometerage may vary. It rises earlier every day, and by early January it’ll be high up by the time it gets dark (though the nearly full Moon will make things tougher; after about Jan. 7 or so the Moon will rise late enough that it won’t be as big a problem).



Sky and Telescope provided this background on the one who discovered it:



This is Australian amateur Terry Lovejoy’s fifth comet discovery. He found it last August at 15th magnitude in Puppis, in the comet-search images that he takes with a wide-field 8-inch scope. His previous discovery, C/2013 R1, put on quite a show in late 2013 for observers in the Southern Hemisphere.







from The Big Science Blog http://ift.tt/1rBTgJv

There’ll be plenty of fireworks to mark the New Year in a few hours … and one new light in the sky is a recently discovered comet.


… and if you miss it this month, you’ve got another 8,000 years to get ready to see it again.



Here’s what NASA said about the latest Lovejoy comet:



Comet Lovejoy, C/2014 Q2, … Its lovely coma is tinted green by diatomic C2 gas fluorescing in sunlight. Discovered in August of this year, this Comet Lovejoy is currently sweeping north through the constellation Columba, heading for Lepus south of Orion and bright enough to offer good binocular views. Not its first time through the inner Solar System, this Comet Lovejoy will pass closest to planet Earth on January 7, while its perihelion (closest point to the Sun) will be on January 30. Of course, planet Earth’s own 2015 perihelion passage is scheduled for January 4. A long period comet, this Comet Lovejoy should return again … in about 8,000 years.



Bad Astronomy has this advice for viewing:



As a bonus, it’s passing near the constellation of Orion, making it easier to find, and it’ll also glide past Taurus and the Pleiades, providing for what should be some pretty photogenic scenes. It’s moving roughly north, so it gets higher all the time for Northern Hemisphere observers. …


If you want to see this comet for yourself—and you do—it rises a couple of hours after sunset. For now, I suggest waiting until about 9-ish or so to look, since it will be high off the horizon then, but your kilometerage may vary. It rises earlier every day, and by early January it’ll be high up by the time it gets dark (though the nearly full Moon will make things tougher; after about Jan. 7 or so the Moon will rise late enough that it won’t be as big a problem).



Sky and Telescope provided this background on the one who discovered it:



This is Australian amateur Terry Lovejoy’s fifth comet discovery. He found it last August at 15th magnitude in Puppis, in the comet-search images that he takes with a wide-field 8-inch scope. His previous discovery, C/2013 R1, put on quite a show in late 2013 for observers in the Southern Hemisphere.







from The Big Science Blog http://ift.tt/1rBTgJv

Oh, no! GMOs are going to make everyone autistic! [Respectful Insolence]

She’s baa-aack.


Remember Stephanie Seneff? When last Orac discussed her, she had been caught dumpster diving into the VAERS database in order to torture the data to make it confess a “link” between aluminum adjuvants in vaccines and acetaminophen and—you guessed it!—autism. It was a bad paper in a bad journal known as Entropy that I deconstructed in detail around two years ago. As I said at the time, I hadn’t seen a “review” article that long and that badly done since the even more horrible article by Helen Ratajczak entitled Theoretical aspects of autism: Causes–A review (which, not surprisingly, was cited approvingly by Seneff et al). Seneff, it turns out, is an MIT scientist, but she is not a scientist with any expertise in autism, epidemiology, or, for that matter, any relevant scientific discipline that would give her the background knowledge and skill set to take on analyzing the epidemiological literature regarding autism. Indeed, she is in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, and her web page there describes her thusly:



Stephanie Seneff is a Senior Research Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. She received the B.S. degree in Biophysics in 1968, the M.S. and E.E. degrees in Electrical Engineering in 1980, and the Ph.D degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1985, all from MIT. For over three decades, her research interests have always been at the intersection of biology and computation: developing a computational model for the human auditory system, understanding human language so as to develop algorithms and systems for human computer interactions, as well as applying natural language processing (NLP) techniques to gene predictions. She has published over 170 refereed articles on these subjects, and has been invited to give keynote speeches at several international conferences. She has also supervised numerous Master’s and PhD theses at MIT. In 2012, Dr. Seneff was elected Fellow of the International Speech and Communication Association (ISCA).


In recent years, Dr. Seneff has focused her research interests back towards biology. She is concentrating mainly on the relationship between nutrition and health. Since 2011, she has written over a dozen papers (7 as first author) in various medical and health-related journals on topics such as modern day diseases (e.g., Alzheimer, autism, cardiovascular diseases), analysis and search of databases of drug side effects using NLP techniques, and the impact of nutritional deficiencies and environmental toxins on human health.



So what we have here is a computer scientist interested in artificial intelligence who thinks she can switch her expertise to medicine, biology, and epidemiology. Let’s just put it this way. An undergraduate degree in biophysics in 1968 does not qualify one to do this sort of research, and, as I discussed in her foray into autism and vaccine epidemiology, it really does show. Badly. The paper was so embarrassingly incompetent that I’m surprised any journal was willing to publish it.


Just before Christmas, a bunch of articles started making the rounds in the usual places citing a senior MIT scientist as proclaiming mind-numbingly ridiculous things like,

>Half of All Children Will Be Autistic by 2025, Warns Senior Research Scientist at MIT
and, just the other day, MIT scientist links autism to Monsanto’s Roundup and predicts HALF of U.S. children will be autistic by 2025. Here’s how it’s been reported:



At a conference last Thursday, in a special panel discussion about GMOs, she took the audience by surprise when she declared, “At today’s rate, by 2025, one in two children will be autistic.” She noted that the side effects of autism closely mimic those of glyphosate toxicity, and presented data showing a remarkably consistent correlation between the use of Roundup on crops (and the creation of Roundup-ready GMO crop seeds) with rising rates of autism. Children with autism have biomarkers indicative of excessive glyphosate, including zinc and iron deficiency, low serum sulfate, seizures, and mitochondrial disorder.


A fellow panelist reported that after Dr. Seneff’s presentation, “All of the 70 or so people in attendance were squirming, likely because they now had serious misgivings about serving their kids, or themselves, anything with corn or soy, which are nearly all genetically modified and thus tainted with Roundup and its glyphosate.”



I must admit, when I clicked on the link to the “correlation,” I couldn’t stop laughing. It was one of the most hilarious examples of confusing correlation with causation that I’ve ever seen. Take a look:



As I’ve pointed out time and time again, if you look at two different variables that have shown an increase with time, you can almost always make it look as though there’s a correlation. Only occasionally does that correlation equal causation. It was that claim that the “autism epidemic” began (i.e., autism prevalence started increasing dramatically) beginning in the early to mid-1990s and that that correlated with an expansion of the vaccines in the vaccine schedule or, in the US, that it correlated with the addition of mercury-containing vaccines to the vaccine schedule. From these observations, it was claimed, that it had to be the vaccines, or the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal used at the time in some childhood vaccines, that was causing autism. Lots and lots of epidemiology since then has confirmed that there is no detectable link, epidemiology that I’ve written about time and time again, but that hasn’t stopped the antivaccine movement. What the increase in autism prevalence corresponds to is really the expansion of diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorders that occurred in the early 1990s as well as increased screening for the condition, which, as I’ve pointed out, will always increase the prevalence of any condition.


One thing I like to do to demonstrate how correlation usually does not equal causation, particularly for looking at things like vaccines and autism, is to point out other things that have increased dramatically since the early 1990s or before. For example, in 1990 cell phone use was generally reserved for the few who could afford it, given the expense, who lived in cities where cell phone networks were available. In the 25 years since then, cell phone use has gone from uncommon to ubiquitous, where almost everyone has a cell phone, over half of which are smart phones. Why don’t cell phones cause autism? Obviously, it’s because babies don’t use cell phones, but there is a strong correlation between cell phone use in the population and autism. What about Internet use? Back in 1990, you accessed the online services using Compuserve or AOL. In the early 1990s, particularly after 1994 when Netscape was introduced, more and more people used the Internet. Why doesn’t Internet use cause autism?


Or, better yet, why doesn’t organic food cause autism:



Obviously, this evidence is just as strong that organic food must be responsible for the autism “epidemic” as Seneff’s “evidence” that GMOs.


Actually, it’s not the GMOs per se that Seneff seems to be blaming here, but rather the glyphosate, which is the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup:



Dr. Seneff noted the ubiquity of glyphosate’s use. Because it is used on corn and soy, all soft drinks and candies sweetened with corn syrup and all chips and cereals that contain soy fillers have small amounts of glyphosate in them, as do our beef and poultry since cattle and chicken are fed GMO corn or soy. Wheat is often sprayed with Roundup just prior to being harvested, which means that all non-organic bread and wheat products would also be sources of glyphosate toxicity. The amount of glyphosate in each product may not be large, but the cumulative effect (especially with as much processed food as Americans eat) could be devastating. A recent study shows that pregnant women living near farms where pesticides are applied have a 60% increased risk of children having an autism spectrum disorder.



Note that I discussed that study before. It’s total crap.


In any case, glyphosate’s been widely used for decades and inhibits the enzyme 5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phosphate synthase (EPSPS), which catalyzes the reaction of shikimate-3-phosphate (S3P) and phosphoenolpyruvate to form 5-enolpyruvyl-shikimate-3-phosphate (ESP).


Because EPSPS is found only in plants and microorganisms, theoretically glyphosate shouldn’t have any major effects in humans. However, because there are frequently what we refer to in the biz as “off-target effects” (i.e., effects of a drug or chemical that do not depend on its primary target), it’s important to look at the safety of this pesticide in humans, which has, of course, been done. As I discovered this morning, Steve Novella notes several reviews that have failed to find associations between glyphosate and adverse health outcomes or cancer. Keith Kloor has also pointed out the shoddy science and incoherent arguments Seneff has been making, as has Layla Katiraee at the Genetic Literacy Project. Similarly, Derek Lowe pointed out that Seneff’s 2013 paper, upon which most of this fear mongering was based, has no original research, cherry picks studies, and manages not even to consider disconfirming publications. As he put it, “Far more is known about glyphosate toxicology and pharmacokinetics than you could ever imagine by reading it [Seneff’s review article].”


In fact, if you look at the slides for Seneff’s talks (e.g., this one, available at her MIT web page), you’ll find a tour de force of confusing correlation with causation, complete with a version of the first graph above, plus similar graphs purporting to correlate glyphosate use with deaths from senile dementia (gee, you don’t think that deaths from senile dementia might be rising because the population is aging and dementia is usually a disease of the elderly, do you?), obesity, celiac disease, deaths due to intestinal infection, and kidney disease death rate. She even cites the horribly done “pig stomach” GMO study that I deconstructed a while ago.


But what about Seneff’s prediction that half of all children will be autistic by 2025, which is only ten years away? Well, take a look at this graph in her talk:



Yes, she just extrapolates from current trends, assuming they’ll continue indefinitely! It’s almost as stupid as Julian Whitaker’s mind-blowingly idiotic extrapolation that predicted that 100% of boys will be autistic by 2031, with 100% of all girls autistic by 2041. Almost. It’s pretty close, though.


The bottom line is that the crank magnetism is strong in Dr. Seneff. She’s antivaccine and anti-GMO. She is full of Dunning-Kruger, thinking that she can transfer her computer science and artificial intelligence knowledge to knowledge of epidemiology, biochemistry, and medicine. She can’t. Happy New Years.






from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/14cjxE7

She’s baa-aack.


Remember Stephanie Seneff? When last Orac discussed her, she had been caught dumpster diving into the VAERS database in order to torture the data to make it confess a “link” between aluminum adjuvants in vaccines and acetaminophen and—you guessed it!—autism. It was a bad paper in a bad journal known as Entropy that I deconstructed in detail around two years ago. As I said at the time, I hadn’t seen a “review” article that long and that badly done since the even more horrible article by Helen Ratajczak entitled Theoretical aspects of autism: Causes–A review (which, not surprisingly, was cited approvingly by Seneff et al). Seneff, it turns out, is an MIT scientist, but she is not a scientist with any expertise in autism, epidemiology, or, for that matter, any relevant scientific discipline that would give her the background knowledge and skill set to take on analyzing the epidemiological literature regarding autism. Indeed, she is in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, and her web page there describes her thusly:



Stephanie Seneff is a Senior Research Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. She received the B.S. degree in Biophysics in 1968, the M.S. and E.E. degrees in Electrical Engineering in 1980, and the Ph.D degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1985, all from MIT. For over three decades, her research interests have always been at the intersection of biology and computation: developing a computational model for the human auditory system, understanding human language so as to develop algorithms and systems for human computer interactions, as well as applying natural language processing (NLP) techniques to gene predictions. She has published over 170 refereed articles on these subjects, and has been invited to give keynote speeches at several international conferences. She has also supervised numerous Master’s and PhD theses at MIT. In 2012, Dr. Seneff was elected Fellow of the International Speech and Communication Association (ISCA).


In recent years, Dr. Seneff has focused her research interests back towards biology. She is concentrating mainly on the relationship between nutrition and health. Since 2011, she has written over a dozen papers (7 as first author) in various medical and health-related journals on topics such as modern day diseases (e.g., Alzheimer, autism, cardiovascular diseases), analysis and search of databases of drug side effects using NLP techniques, and the impact of nutritional deficiencies and environmental toxins on human health.



So what we have here is a computer scientist interested in artificial intelligence who thinks she can switch her expertise to medicine, biology, and epidemiology. Let’s just put it this way. An undergraduate degree in biophysics in 1968 does not qualify one to do this sort of research, and, as I discussed in her foray into autism and vaccine epidemiology, it really does show. Badly. The paper was so embarrassingly incompetent that I’m surprised any journal was willing to publish it.


Just before Christmas, a bunch of articles started making the rounds in the usual places citing a senior MIT scientist as proclaiming mind-numbingly ridiculous things like,

>Half of All Children Will Be Autistic by 2025, Warns Senior Research Scientist at MIT
and, just the other day, MIT scientist links autism to Monsanto’s Roundup and predicts HALF of U.S. children will be autistic by 2025. Here’s how it’s been reported:



At a conference last Thursday, in a special panel discussion about GMOs, she took the audience by surprise when she declared, “At today’s rate, by 2025, one in two children will be autistic.” She noted that the side effects of autism closely mimic those of glyphosate toxicity, and presented data showing a remarkably consistent correlation between the use of Roundup on crops (and the creation of Roundup-ready GMO crop seeds) with rising rates of autism. Children with autism have biomarkers indicative of excessive glyphosate, including zinc and iron deficiency, low serum sulfate, seizures, and mitochondrial disorder.


A fellow panelist reported that after Dr. Seneff’s presentation, “All of the 70 or so people in attendance were squirming, likely because they now had serious misgivings about serving their kids, or themselves, anything with corn or soy, which are nearly all genetically modified and thus tainted with Roundup and its glyphosate.”



I must admit, when I clicked on the link to the “correlation,” I couldn’t stop laughing. It was one of the most hilarious examples of confusing correlation with causation that I’ve ever seen. Take a look:



As I’ve pointed out time and time again, if you look at two different variables that have shown an increase with time, you can almost always make it look as though there’s a correlation. Only occasionally does that correlation equal causation. It was that claim that the “autism epidemic” began (i.e., autism prevalence started increasing dramatically) beginning in the early to mid-1990s and that that correlated with an expansion of the vaccines in the vaccine schedule or, in the US, that it correlated with the addition of mercury-containing vaccines to the vaccine schedule. From these observations, it was claimed, that it had to be the vaccines, or the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal used at the time in some childhood vaccines, that was causing autism. Lots and lots of epidemiology since then has confirmed that there is no detectable link, epidemiology that I’ve written about time and time again, but that hasn’t stopped the antivaccine movement. What the increase in autism prevalence corresponds to is really the expansion of diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorders that occurred in the early 1990s as well as increased screening for the condition, which, as I’ve pointed out, will always increase the prevalence of any condition.


One thing I like to do to demonstrate how correlation usually does not equal causation, particularly for looking at things like vaccines and autism, is to point out other things that have increased dramatically since the early 1990s or before. For example, in 1990 cell phone use was generally reserved for the few who could afford it, given the expense, who lived in cities where cell phone networks were available. In the 25 years since then, cell phone use has gone from uncommon to ubiquitous, where almost everyone has a cell phone, over half of which are smart phones. Why don’t cell phones cause autism? Obviously, it’s because babies don’t use cell phones, but there is a strong correlation between cell phone use in the population and autism. What about Internet use? Back in 1990, you accessed the online services using Compuserve or AOL. In the early 1990s, particularly after 1994 when Netscape was introduced, more and more people used the Internet. Why doesn’t Internet use cause autism?


Or, better yet, why doesn’t organic food cause autism:



Obviously, this evidence is just as strong that organic food must be responsible for the autism “epidemic” as Seneff’s “evidence” that GMOs.


Actually, it’s not the GMOs per se that Seneff seems to be blaming here, but rather the glyphosate, which is the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup:



Dr. Seneff noted the ubiquity of glyphosate’s use. Because it is used on corn and soy, all soft drinks and candies sweetened with corn syrup and all chips and cereals that contain soy fillers have small amounts of glyphosate in them, as do our beef and poultry since cattle and chicken are fed GMO corn or soy. Wheat is often sprayed with Roundup just prior to being harvested, which means that all non-organic bread and wheat products would also be sources of glyphosate toxicity. The amount of glyphosate in each product may not be large, but the cumulative effect (especially with as much processed food as Americans eat) could be devastating. A recent study shows that pregnant women living near farms where pesticides are applied have a 60% increased risk of children having an autism spectrum disorder.



Note that I discussed that study before. It’s total crap.


In any case, glyphosate’s been widely used for decades and inhibits the enzyme 5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phosphate synthase (EPSPS), which catalyzes the reaction of shikimate-3-phosphate (S3P) and phosphoenolpyruvate to form 5-enolpyruvyl-shikimate-3-phosphate (ESP).


Because EPSPS is found only in plants and microorganisms, theoretically glyphosate shouldn’t have any major effects in humans. However, because there are frequently what we refer to in the biz as “off-target effects” (i.e., effects of a drug or chemical that do not depend on its primary target), it’s important to look at the safety of this pesticide in humans, which has, of course, been done. As I discovered this morning, Steve Novella notes several reviews that have failed to find associations between glyphosate and adverse health outcomes or cancer. Keith Kloor has also pointed out the shoddy science and incoherent arguments Seneff has been making, as has Layla Katiraee at the Genetic Literacy Project. Similarly, Derek Lowe pointed out that Seneff’s 2013 paper, upon which most of this fear mongering was based, has no original research, cherry picks studies, and manages not even to consider disconfirming publications. As he put it, “Far more is known about glyphosate toxicology and pharmacokinetics than you could ever imagine by reading it [Seneff’s review article].”


In fact, if you look at the slides for Seneff’s talks (e.g., this one, available at her MIT web page), you’ll find a tour de force of confusing correlation with causation, complete with a version of the first graph above, plus similar graphs purporting to correlate glyphosate use with deaths from senile dementia (gee, you don’t think that deaths from senile dementia might be rising because the population is aging and dementia is usually a disease of the elderly, do you?), obesity, celiac disease, deaths due to intestinal infection, and kidney disease death rate. She even cites the horribly done “pig stomach” GMO study that I deconstructed a while ago.


But what about Seneff’s prediction that half of all children will be autistic by 2025, which is only ten years away? Well, take a look at this graph in her talk:



Yes, she just extrapolates from current trends, assuming they’ll continue indefinitely! It’s almost as stupid as Julian Whitaker’s mind-blowingly idiotic extrapolation that predicted that 100% of boys will be autistic by 2031, with 100% of all girls autistic by 2041. Almost. It’s pretty close, though.


The bottom line is that the crank magnetism is strong in Dr. Seneff. She’s antivaccine and anti-GMO. She is full of Dunning-Kruger, thinking that she can transfer her computer science and artificial intelligence knowledge to knowledge of epidemiology, biochemistry, and medicine. She can’t. Happy New Years.






from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/14cjxE7

Why are some foods considered lucky for New Year’s?



Black-eyed peas form the base of the New Year’s Day triumvirate for many U.S. southerners. Recipe via foodnetwork.com.




Collard greens. You might think you don’t like them, but try them with cornbread and black-eyed peas. Recipe via foodnetwork.com




Like many U.S. southerners, I always make cornbread in an iron skillet. Heat oil in the skillet on your stovetop, and pour the batter into a very hot skillet before you bake. Image via Wikimedia Commons. Recipe via foodnetwork.com



I’ve invited the kids for black-eyed peas, greens and cornbread on New Year’s Day. As a born-and-raised U.S. southerner, I wouldn’t dream of passing a New Year’s Day without eating at least a few black-eyed peas. At some point, it occurred to me to wonder why this food – plus the greens and the cornbread – are considered lucky for New Year’s. I found out that this deep tradition of the U.S. South dates back to the Civil War, when William Tecumseh Sherman made his march to the sea in the fall of 1864.


Sherman’s soldiers lived off the land. They stripped the countryside of crops, robbed food stores and killed or carried away livestock. But they apparently passed over the “field peas” – black-eyed peas to us – a food whose first domestication probably occurred in West Africa and came to the U.S. during the slave trade of the early U.S. colonial period. The soldiers must have thought these legumes were useful only for animal feed. Southerners left with black-eyed peas were said to feel lucky and to survive the winter.


The list below has a few more “lucky” New Year’s foods, both in the U.S. and around the world.


Greens. Go ahead. Cook up a big pot of collards, kale or chard on New Year’s Day. These foods are eaten in many parts of the world on New Year’s because they’re green and are said to resemble money.


Grains and noodles. Grains (corn, rice, quinoa, barley) are symbols of long life and abundance. By the way, cornbread, greens and black-eyed peas are all considered soul food, popular in African American culture for centuries. Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation – freeing the South’s slaves – as the U.S. entered its third year of civil war on January 1, 1863.



These are chiacchiere, a traditional Italian pastry. Ring-shaped cakes and pastries are considered lucky at New Year’s because they symbolize coming full circle. Image via Wikimedia Commons.



Ring shaped cakes and pastries. In many parts of the world, around the New Year, ring-shaped cakes are eaten as a beautiful symbol of coming full circle. Sometimes the cakes have trinkets baked inside, like the baby inside a New Orleans king cake (popular from Christmas Eve to Epiphany). In a story for KQED.org, Anna Mindess wrote that:



Denmark is the place to go for New Year’s Eve, where marzipan is the key ingredient in a dramatically tall, ringed cake called Kransekage. The cone-shaped pastry is constructed of ever smaller concentric circles and is the classic dessert for weddings, birthdays and New Years.



Meanwhile, Italy has a ring-shaped ripastry called chiacchiere at New Year’s, pictured above. In Poland, Hungary, and the Netherlands, people eat donuts for New Year’s.



Eating pork is said to be lucky at New Year’s, except for the pig. Photo by Neal Foley on Flickr.



Pork. Pigs are considered a lucky New Year’s food because they root in the ground while moving forward. They’re fat, a worldwide symbol of prosperity. I don’t know about all pigs, but the pig kept as a pet by one of my neighbors also has the kind of face that always looks as if it’s smiling. You can’t go wrong with combining pork, beans and greens in a dish called Hoppin’ John for New Year’s Eve. Recipe here.


By the way, using the same logic, lobsters and chickens are supposed to be unlucky foods at New Year’s. Lobsters crawl backwards. Chickens, when they scratch, also move backwards.



For luck in the coming year, eat 12 grapes as the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s Eve. Each grape represents a month. If one is sour, that month might be less fortunate, or so the story goes. Photo via austinevan on Flickr



Fruit, especially grapes. In Spain, Portugal and many Latin American countries, New Year’s revelers eat 12 grapes at midnight on New Year’s Eve — one grape for each stroke of the clock. Epicurious.com says this tradition dates back to 1909, when Spanish grape farmers had a grape surplus. Each grape is said to represent a different month. If one grape is sour, that month might not be so fortunate. By the way, grapes aren’t the only lucky New Year’s fruit. A pomegranate’s many seeds are said to symbolize prosperity. Figs are said to be a symbol of fertility.


Bottom line: In the U.S. South and around the world, some foods are considered lucky for New Year’s. Eat them! I always do. This post talks about lucky New Year’s foods and why they carry the association of good fortune.






from EarthSky http://earthsky.org/human-world/why-are-some-foods-considered-lucky-for-new-years


Black-eyed peas form the base of the New Year’s Day triumvirate for many U.S. southerners. Recipe via foodnetwork.com.




Collard greens. You might think you don’t like them, but try them with cornbread and black-eyed peas. Recipe via foodnetwork.com




Like many U.S. southerners, I always make cornbread in an iron skillet. Heat oil in the skillet on your stovetop, and pour the batter into a very hot skillet before you bake. Image via Wikimedia Commons. Recipe via foodnetwork.com



I’ve invited the kids for black-eyed peas, greens and cornbread on New Year’s Day. As a born-and-raised U.S. southerner, I wouldn’t dream of passing a New Year’s Day without eating at least a few black-eyed peas. At some point, it occurred to me to wonder why this food – plus the greens and the cornbread – are considered lucky for New Year’s. I found out that this deep tradition of the U.S. South dates back to the Civil War, when William Tecumseh Sherman made his march to the sea in the fall of 1864.


Sherman’s soldiers lived off the land. They stripped the countryside of crops, robbed food stores and killed or carried away livestock. But they apparently passed over the “field peas” – black-eyed peas to us – a food whose first domestication probably occurred in West Africa and came to the U.S. during the slave trade of the early U.S. colonial period. The soldiers must have thought these legumes were useful only for animal feed. Southerners left with black-eyed peas were said to feel lucky and to survive the winter.


The list below has a few more “lucky” New Year’s foods, both in the U.S. and around the world.


Greens. Go ahead. Cook up a big pot of collards, kale or chard on New Year’s Day. These foods are eaten in many parts of the world on New Year’s because they’re green and are said to resemble money.


Grains and noodles. Grains (corn, rice, quinoa, barley) are symbols of long life and abundance. By the way, cornbread, greens and black-eyed peas are all considered soul food, popular in African American culture for centuries. Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation – freeing the South’s slaves – as the U.S. entered its third year of civil war on January 1, 1863.



These are chiacchiere, a traditional Italian pastry. Ring-shaped cakes and pastries are considered lucky at New Year’s because they symbolize coming full circle. Image via Wikimedia Commons.



Ring shaped cakes and pastries. In many parts of the world, around the New Year, ring-shaped cakes are eaten as a beautiful symbol of coming full circle. Sometimes the cakes have trinkets baked inside, like the baby inside a New Orleans king cake (popular from Christmas Eve to Epiphany). In a story for KQED.org, Anna Mindess wrote that:



Denmark is the place to go for New Year’s Eve, where marzipan is the key ingredient in a dramatically tall, ringed cake called Kransekage. The cone-shaped pastry is constructed of ever smaller concentric circles and is the classic dessert for weddings, birthdays and New Years.



Meanwhile, Italy has a ring-shaped ripastry called chiacchiere at New Year’s, pictured above. In Poland, Hungary, and the Netherlands, people eat donuts for New Year’s.



Eating pork is said to be lucky at New Year’s, except for the pig. Photo by Neal Foley on Flickr.



Pork. Pigs are considered a lucky New Year’s food because they root in the ground while moving forward. They’re fat, a worldwide symbol of prosperity. I don’t know about all pigs, but the pig kept as a pet by one of my neighbors also has the kind of face that always looks as if it’s smiling. You can’t go wrong with combining pork, beans and greens in a dish called Hoppin’ John for New Year’s Eve. Recipe here.


By the way, using the same logic, lobsters and chickens are supposed to be unlucky foods at New Year’s. Lobsters crawl backwards. Chickens, when they scratch, also move backwards.



For luck in the coming year, eat 12 grapes as the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s Eve. Each grape represents a month. If one is sour, that month might be less fortunate, or so the story goes. Photo via austinevan on Flickr



Fruit, especially grapes. In Spain, Portugal and many Latin American countries, New Year’s revelers eat 12 grapes at midnight on New Year’s Eve — one grape for each stroke of the clock. Epicurious.com says this tradition dates back to 1909, when Spanish grape farmers had a grape surplus. Each grape is said to represent a different month. If one grape is sour, that month might not be so fortunate. By the way, grapes aren’t the only lucky New Year’s fruit. A pomegranate’s many seeds are said to symbolize prosperity. Figs are said to be a symbol of fertility.


Bottom line: In the U.S. South and around the world, some foods are considered lucky for New Year’s. Eat them! I always do. This post talks about lucky New Year’s foods and why they carry the association of good fortune.






from EarthSky http://earthsky.org/human-world/why-are-some-foods-considered-lucky-for-new-years

Cool animation shows Venus in evening sky in 2015



Venus in the evening sky 45 minutes after sunset from December 2014 through August 2015 from LarryKoehn on Vimeo.


Larry Koehn of the wonderful website shadowandsubstance.com dropped us a note about a super cool astronomy animation. It shows the much-anticipated apparition of the sky’s brightest planet – Venus – in the evening sky in 2015. He wrote:



I have animation up of Venus in the evening sky at exactly 45 minutes after sunset from December 10 through August 3rd. The animation is at a frame rate of one-day-per-frame for 238 days. You can also see Mercury, Mars and Jupiter entering the scene at various points. Mercury is interesting for showing up twice, since it too is an inferior planer like Venus. I inserted a small graphic showing Venus near the bottom of the screen showing what Venus will look like through a small telescope at the same frame rate.


To me, it’s like watching a celestial roller-coaster in the sky.



If you watch the skies, you know Venus was visible before dawn for much of 2014. It was a morning object until around early September, when it disappeared in the glare of sunrise. Venus was most nearly behind the sun – as seen from our earthly perspective – on October 25.


Beginning in early December, Venus has made a steady climb back into the evening sky visible from around the globe. Now many are beginning to see it – and captured its photo. Its evening appearance in our sky will peak in northern summer 2015. Larry wrote on his Vimeo page:



From now through August, Venus will come closer and closer to the Earth with it reaching inferior conjunction on August 15, 2015. But before reaching that point, Venus will reach greatest elongation east on June 6. Around May 10, Venus will be the furthest from the horizon.Venus will be in conjunction with Mercury on January 11, then Mars on February 22, and finally with Jupiter on July 1.



Thank you for sharing your great animation, Larry Koehn!


Visit Larry Koehn’s website, shadowandsubstance.com


Bottom line: A new animation shows 238 days of the sky’s brightest planet, Venus, coming back to your evening sky in late 2014 and 2015. You can also see the planets Mercury, Mars and Jupiter enter the scene at various points.






from EarthSky http://earthsky.org/space/animation-shows-venus-in-evening-sky-late-2014-and-2015


Venus in the evening sky 45 minutes after sunset from December 2014 through August 2015 from LarryKoehn on Vimeo.


Larry Koehn of the wonderful website shadowandsubstance.com dropped us a note about a super cool astronomy animation. It shows the much-anticipated apparition of the sky’s brightest planet – Venus – in the evening sky in 2015. He wrote:



I have animation up of Venus in the evening sky at exactly 45 minutes after sunset from December 10 through August 3rd. The animation is at a frame rate of one-day-per-frame for 238 days. You can also see Mercury, Mars and Jupiter entering the scene at various points. Mercury is interesting for showing up twice, since it too is an inferior planer like Venus. I inserted a small graphic showing Venus near the bottom of the screen showing what Venus will look like through a small telescope at the same frame rate.


To me, it’s like watching a celestial roller-coaster in the sky.



If you watch the skies, you know Venus was visible before dawn for much of 2014. It was a morning object until around early September, when it disappeared in the glare of sunrise. Venus was most nearly behind the sun – as seen from our earthly perspective – on October 25.


Beginning in early December, Venus has made a steady climb back into the evening sky visible from around the globe. Now many are beginning to see it – and captured its photo. Its evening appearance in our sky will peak in northern summer 2015. Larry wrote on his Vimeo page:



From now through August, Venus will come closer and closer to the Earth with it reaching inferior conjunction on August 15, 2015. But before reaching that point, Venus will reach greatest elongation east on June 6. Around May 10, Venus will be the furthest from the horizon.Venus will be in conjunction with Mercury on January 11, then Mars on February 22, and finally with Jupiter on July 1.



Thank you for sharing your great animation, Larry Koehn!


Visit Larry Koehn’s website, shadowandsubstance.com


Bottom line: A new animation shows 238 days of the sky’s brightest planet, Venus, coming back to your evening sky in late 2014 and 2015. You can also see the planets Mercury, Mars and Jupiter enter the scene at various points.






from EarthSky http://earthsky.org/space/animation-shows-venus-in-evening-sky-late-2014-and-2015

Amazing 44-second meteor might be space debris reentry



Report from Eddie Irizarry of the Sociedad de Astronomía del Caribe


An impressive and slow meteor was visible from Puerto Rico on the early hours of Sunday, December 28, 2014. The biggest astronomical society on the island, Sociedad de Astronomía del Caribe (SAC), had reports confirming several witnesses of the event. A video from their meteor cameras shows the object crossed the whole sky from SW to ENE and lasted 44 seconds.


Due to the meteor’s long duration, some suggest it may be a rocket stage or other space debris reentry. A direction from SW to ENE suggests a possible orbital trajectory.


Dr. Roger Thompson from Aerospace’s Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies said:



There was a Falcon 9 rocket body that was predicted to reenter on 28 December, but…reentry predictions can change dramatically as the orbit decays because the variations in drag are difficult to predict. Puerto Rico is near the northern limit of the orbit track and the direction of the fireball would match your reports. Also, the length of the track ‘crossing all the sky’ is consistent with a large space debris object reentering.


Unfortunately, without better orbit data the best we can say is ‘it is possible.’



SAC said there are reports of a similar event on the same date which indicate possible space debris reentry was also seen over Brazil. The reports also indicate that a small rocket tank was found at a farm very near from the sightings area in Santa Rita do Pardo, Brazil.


Some suggest that reentry of parts of the Falcon 9 rocket may have ocurred over Brazil on the previous orbit before finally entering over the Caribbean. However, what was seen in Puerto Rico may have just been another space debris object unrelated to the event in Brazil.


Peter Jenniskens, a meteor expert from NASA Ames Research Center said “looks like a reentry” (space debris), after seeing the video captured by SAC in Puerto Rico.


Meteor or space debris, a sighting like this is amazing, especially one lasting 44 seconds!






from EarthSky http://earthsky.org/space/amazing-44-second-meteor-might-be-space-debris-reentry


Report from Eddie Irizarry of the Sociedad de Astronomía del Caribe


An impressive and slow meteor was visible from Puerto Rico on the early hours of Sunday, December 28, 2014. The biggest astronomical society on the island, Sociedad de Astronomía del Caribe (SAC), had reports confirming several witnesses of the event. A video from their meteor cameras shows the object crossed the whole sky from SW to ENE and lasted 44 seconds.


Due to the meteor’s long duration, some suggest it may be a rocket stage or other space debris reentry. A direction from SW to ENE suggests a possible orbital trajectory.


Dr. Roger Thompson from Aerospace’s Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies said:



There was a Falcon 9 rocket body that was predicted to reenter on 28 December, but…reentry predictions can change dramatically as the orbit decays because the variations in drag are difficult to predict. Puerto Rico is near the northern limit of the orbit track and the direction of the fireball would match your reports. Also, the length of the track ‘crossing all the sky’ is consistent with a large space debris object reentering.


Unfortunately, without better orbit data the best we can say is ‘it is possible.’



SAC said there are reports of a similar event on the same date which indicate possible space debris reentry was also seen over Brazil. The reports also indicate that a small rocket tank was found at a farm very near from the sightings area in Santa Rita do Pardo, Brazil.


Some suggest that reentry of parts of the Falcon 9 rocket may have ocurred over Brazil on the previous orbit before finally entering over the Caribbean. However, what was seen in Puerto Rico may have just been another space debris object unrelated to the event in Brazil.


Peter Jenniskens, a meteor expert from NASA Ames Research Center said “looks like a reentry” (space debris), after seeing the video captured by SAC in Puerto Rico.


Meteor or space debris, a sighting like this is amazing, especially one lasting 44 seconds!






from EarthSky http://earthsky.org/space/amazing-44-second-meteor-might-be-space-debris-reentry

New Year’s Comet Lovejoy


Comet Lovejoy on December 29, 2014 by Justin Ng from Singapore. Visit Justin Ng's website.

View larger. | Comet Lovejoy on December 29, 2014 by Justin Ng from Singapore. Visit Justin Ng’s website.



Have you seen Comet Lovejoy yet? Although telescopes and binoculars are still the best way to find and view the comet, it’s now barely within the limit for visibility with the unaided eye under exceptional viewing conditions. Justin Ng of Singapore took this fine photo. He wrote:



I would like to suggest an image of Comet Lovejoy that I’ve just taken on 29 December 2014 at around 12.30 AM SGT. This is a LRGB image with a total exposure time of 12 minutes. A spiral galaxy, NGC1886, is also visible in the image, located on the left of the comet’s coma.



Thank you, Justin!


How to see Comet Lovejoy, plus best photos!






from EarthSky http://earthsky.org/todays-image/new-years-comet-lovejoy

Comet Lovejoy on December 29, 2014 by Justin Ng from Singapore. Visit Justin Ng's website.

View larger. | Comet Lovejoy on December 29, 2014 by Justin Ng from Singapore. Visit Justin Ng’s website.



Have you seen Comet Lovejoy yet? Although telescopes and binoculars are still the best way to find and view the comet, it’s now barely within the limit for visibility with the unaided eye under exceptional viewing conditions. Justin Ng of Singapore took this fine photo. He wrote:



I would like to suggest an image of Comet Lovejoy that I’ve just taken on 29 December 2014 at around 12.30 AM SGT. This is a LRGB image with a total exposure time of 12 minutes. A spiral galaxy, NGC1886, is also visible in the image, located on the left of the comet’s coma.



Thank you, Justin!


How to see Comet Lovejoy, plus best photos!






from EarthSky http://earthsky.org/todays-image/new-years-comet-lovejoy

Sirius midnight culmination New Year’s Eve


Tonight – New Year’s Eve – look up for the brightest star in the sky, Sirius, in the constellation Canis Major.


This star is up in the evening every winter, and it’s always easy to identify. Although a few planets might be brighter, Sirius outshines every other star in the night sky.


If you go outside late this evening and look toward the south, you’ll easily notice Sirius shining there. This star is so bright that you notice it twinkling fiercely. You might even see it flashing different colors – just hints of colors from red to blue – like the celestial counterpart to an earthly diamond.


How to see Comet Lovejoy, plus best photos!



The three stars of Orion’s Belt always point to the sky’s brightest star, Sirius. This photo comes from EarthSky Facebook friend Susan Jensen in Odessa, Washington. Thank you, Susan!



December 31 is a special night, the end of a calendar year. And it’s a special night for Sirius, too. This glittering star reaches its highest point on the sky’s dome in the course of many nights of the year. But its official midnight culmination – when it’s highest in the sky at midnight – comes only once every year. And tonight’s the night, as the New Year begins with Sirius’ culmination at the midnight hour. By midnight, we mean the middle of the night, midway between sunset and sunrise. The midnight culmination of Sirius by the clock may be off by as much as one-half hour or so, depending on how far east or west you live from the meridian that governs your time zone.


Transit (midnight culmination) times for Sirius in your sky


Bottom line: If you’re celebrating the New Year tonight, and you happen to gaze up at the sky, look southward for Sirius – and take a moment to celebrate the sky’s brightest star.


Donate: Your support means the world to us


Live by the moon with your 2015 EarthSky lunar calendar!






from EarthSky http://earthsky.org/tonight/brightest-stars-midnight-culmination-new-years-eve

Tonight – New Year’s Eve – look up for the brightest star in the sky, Sirius, in the constellation Canis Major.


This star is up in the evening every winter, and it’s always easy to identify. Although a few planets might be brighter, Sirius outshines every other star in the night sky.


If you go outside late this evening and look toward the south, you’ll easily notice Sirius shining there. This star is so bright that you notice it twinkling fiercely. You might even see it flashing different colors – just hints of colors from red to blue – like the celestial counterpart to an earthly diamond.


How to see Comet Lovejoy, plus best photos!



The three stars of Orion’s Belt always point to the sky’s brightest star, Sirius. This photo comes from EarthSky Facebook friend Susan Jensen in Odessa, Washington. Thank you, Susan!



December 31 is a special night, the end of a calendar year. And it’s a special night for Sirius, too. This glittering star reaches its highest point on the sky’s dome in the course of many nights of the year. But its official midnight culmination – when it’s highest in the sky at midnight – comes only once every year. And tonight’s the night, as the New Year begins with Sirius’ culmination at the midnight hour. By midnight, we mean the middle of the night, midway between sunset and sunrise. The midnight culmination of Sirius by the clock may be off by as much as one-half hour or so, depending on how far east or west you live from the meridian that governs your time zone.


Transit (midnight culmination) times for Sirius in your sky


Bottom line: If you’re celebrating the New Year tonight, and you happen to gaze up at the sky, look southward for Sirius – and take a moment to celebrate the sky’s brightest star.


Donate: Your support means the world to us


Live by the moon with your 2015 EarthSky lunar calendar!






from EarthSky http://earthsky.org/tonight/brightest-stars-midnight-culmination-new-years-eve

Occupational Health News Roundup [The Pump Handle]

With the new year just around the corner, it’s the perfect time to celebrate worker victories of 2014. At In These Times, reporter Amien Essif gathered a list of the nine most important victories of 2014, writing:



Much has been made of the incredibly hostile climate for labor over the past few decades. Yet this past year, workers still organized on shop floors, went out on strike, marched in the street and shuffled into courthouses to hold their employers accountable, and campaigned hard for those who earned (or, often enough, didn’t earn) their vote. Legislators, meanwhile, tarried on with their anti-worker “right-to-work” laws, and union busters busted up unions. But if state legislatures and the U.S. Supreme Court were harsh on workers, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was refreshingly helpful, passing down several rulings that made organizing easier and wage-theft harder.



Among Essif’s top nine were the nationwide protests organized by fast food workers, which “have brought international attention to the plight of low-wage workers in this country and around the world.” Other victories highlighted include the more than 18,000 workers with American, Virgin and JetBlue airlines who voted to join unions; the passage of San Francisco’s Retail Workers Bill of Rights; court rulings that found that FedEx misclassified employees as independent contractors; and the historic union drive among college athletes at Northwestern University in Illinois.


To read the full list and get inspired to kick off a new year of worker victories, visit In These Times.


In other news:


Charleston Gazette : The nation’s coal mines are on track to report record lows in work-related deaths, writes reporter Dylan Lovan. According to Lovan, federal mine safety officials attribute the good news to changes made in the wake of the 2010 Upper Big Branch disaster in West Virginia, in which 29 miners were killed in an explosion. (Don Blankenship, former CEO of Massey Energy, which owned the mine, was recently indicted on charges that he conspired to violate safety and health standards.) As of about a week ago, 15 coal mining-related deaths happened in 2014; the previous low mark was 18 deaths in 2009. However, Lovan writes that the “improved record has coincided with a plummet in coal production in Appalachia, leaving far fewer mines operating in a region where many of the worst violators have historically been found. Eight of the coal deaths this year have been in Appalachian mines.”


Los Angeles Times : Reporter Amy Hubbard writes that police deaths surged in 2014, with 126 officers killed nationwide while on duty. The number represents a 24 percent increase over 2013. California leads the country in law enforcement deaths, with Texas coming in second, Hubbard writes. However, the article notes that the 2014 toll is less than the average for the last decade, which comes to about 151 deaths per year.


Huffington Post: Fast food company Shake Shack released financial numbers showing that the industry can make money even while paying employees livable wages. Reporter Jillian Berman writes that the company is going public and recently filed the necessary paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission showing that Shake Shack is experiencing “blockbuster growth in recent years, even as it pledged to keep paying its workers better than the industry standard.” Shake Shack employees start off at $10 an hour, which is nearly $3 more than the federal minimum wage of $7.25. However, the company is still reporting a mighty profit, Berman reports, with sales growing from $21 million in 2010 to $140 million in 2013. In related Huffington Post news, minimum wage workers in 20 states will get raises in the new year.


Miami Herald : Publix, a major grocery store chain throughout the South, has announced that same-sex couples who are legally married will be eligible for spousal insurance benefits regardless of whether they work in a state where gay marriage has yet to be legalized. Reporter Steve Rothaus writes that the “grocer said that there will be a special 30-day enrollment period for same-sex married employees beginning Jan. 1. Thirty days later, same-sex spouses will receive the same insurance benefits as opposite-sex spouses.” The Florida-based grocery chain owns nearly 2,000 stores in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee.


The Atlantic : The publication’s business editors break down the 17 top lessons Americans learned about income inequality in 2014. Among the list: High income inequality is associated with stunted overall economic growth; the middle class is shrinking, with American households becoming more concentrated at the top and bottom of the earnings spectrum; and while service sector jobs are leading the recession recovery, low pay and erratic scheduling practices mean workers are still struggling to meet their most basic needs.


Kim Krisberg is a freelance public health writer living in Austin, Texas, and has been writing about public health for more than a decade.






from ScienceBlogs http://scienceblogs.com/thepumphandle/2014/12/30/occupational-health-news-roundup-187/

With the new year just around the corner, it’s the perfect time to celebrate worker victories of 2014. At In These Times, reporter Amien Essif gathered a list of the nine most important victories of 2014, writing:



Much has been made of the incredibly hostile climate for labor over the past few decades. Yet this past year, workers still organized on shop floors, went out on strike, marched in the street and shuffled into courthouses to hold their employers accountable, and campaigned hard for those who earned (or, often enough, didn’t earn) their vote. Legislators, meanwhile, tarried on with their anti-worker “right-to-work” laws, and union busters busted up unions. But if state legislatures and the U.S. Supreme Court were harsh on workers, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was refreshingly helpful, passing down several rulings that made organizing easier and wage-theft harder.



Among Essif’s top nine were the nationwide protests organized by fast food workers, which “have brought international attention to the plight of low-wage workers in this country and around the world.” Other victories highlighted include the more than 18,000 workers with American, Virgin and JetBlue airlines who voted to join unions; the passage of San Francisco’s Retail Workers Bill of Rights; court rulings that found that FedEx misclassified employees as independent contractors; and the historic union drive among college athletes at Northwestern University in Illinois.


To read the full list and get inspired to kick off a new year of worker victories, visit In These Times.


In other news:


Charleston Gazette : The nation’s coal mines are on track to report record lows in work-related deaths, writes reporter Dylan Lovan. According to Lovan, federal mine safety officials attribute the good news to changes made in the wake of the 2010 Upper Big Branch disaster in West Virginia, in which 29 miners were killed in an explosion. (Don Blankenship, former CEO of Massey Energy, which owned the mine, was recently indicted on charges that he conspired to violate safety and health standards.) As of about a week ago, 15 coal mining-related deaths happened in 2014; the previous low mark was 18 deaths in 2009. However, Lovan writes that the “improved record has coincided with a plummet in coal production in Appalachia, leaving far fewer mines operating in a region where many of the worst violators have historically been found. Eight of the coal deaths this year have been in Appalachian mines.”


Los Angeles Times : Reporter Amy Hubbard writes that police deaths surged in 2014, with 126 officers killed nationwide while on duty. The number represents a 24 percent increase over 2013. California leads the country in law enforcement deaths, with Texas coming in second, Hubbard writes. However, the article notes that the 2014 toll is less than the average for the last decade, which comes to about 151 deaths per year.


Huffington Post: Fast food company Shake Shack released financial numbers showing that the industry can make money even while paying employees livable wages. Reporter Jillian Berman writes that the company is going public and recently filed the necessary paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission showing that Shake Shack is experiencing “blockbuster growth in recent years, even as it pledged to keep paying its workers better than the industry standard.” Shake Shack employees start off at $10 an hour, which is nearly $3 more than the federal minimum wage of $7.25. However, the company is still reporting a mighty profit, Berman reports, with sales growing from $21 million in 2010 to $140 million in 2013. In related Huffington Post news, minimum wage workers in 20 states will get raises in the new year.


Miami Herald : Publix, a major grocery store chain throughout the South, has announced that same-sex couples who are legally married will be eligible for spousal insurance benefits regardless of whether they work in a state where gay marriage has yet to be legalized. Reporter Steve Rothaus writes that the “grocer said that there will be a special 30-day enrollment period for same-sex married employees beginning Jan. 1. Thirty days later, same-sex spouses will receive the same insurance benefits as opposite-sex spouses.” The Florida-based grocery chain owns nearly 2,000 stores in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee.


The Atlantic : The publication’s business editors break down the 17 top lessons Americans learned about income inequality in 2014. Among the list: High income inequality is associated with stunted overall economic growth; the middle class is shrinking, with American households becoming more concentrated at the top and bottom of the earnings spectrum; and while service sector jobs are leading the recession recovery, low pay and erratic scheduling practices mean workers are still struggling to meet their most basic needs.


Kim Krisberg is a freelance public health writer living in Austin, Texas, and has been writing about public health for more than a decade.






from ScienceBlogs http://scienceblogs.com/thepumphandle/2014/12/30/occupational-health-news-roundup-187/

Ruderhofspitze: fail [Stoat]

Prev: September 9th: Dresdener to Neue Regensburger


Another in the line of mountain climbing posts; I need to get them all out before next year. This one contains few decent photos because I failed due at least in part due to cloud; but its still quite instructive I think. Here’s a portion of the GPS trace for orientation:


ruder-fail


The green dot on the left is the summit, 3474 m. We’ll be going back there in a future post. My high point this day was 3230 ish, say 250 m short, but more than just distance I had very little clue where to go. The green dot on the right is the col, with the Neue Regensburger hut much further right. I got up, pre-packed, for breakfast at 6:30; and gave myself 7 hours, because we wanted to go off to the Franz Senn in the afternoon. That’s a bit tight, but not much, as the most likely fail was what happened, viz, not being able to find the route.


Summitpost waxes quite lyrical about the Ruderhofspitze: Of the 7 summits of the Stubai range over 3400m, Ruderhofspitze is the most central, the 3rd highest, and probably the most remote. This combined makes it a really great mountain and a noble aim. Which is quite Germanic, but also true.


The day started well, with a beautiful cloud sea below the hut:


DSC_4650


However, the clouds somewhat unsportingly chased me up the valley. By the time I’d got to the col (see end of prev for views up to the col) and looked up, I saw this:


DSC_4663


The central spire is the beginning of the Grawawand, clear enough as the long spine just north of my route. At that point – though I didn’t really notice it at the time, and have only just realised it – the cloud is thin enough that the snow couloir leading up into the ?first? snow bowl is visible in the distance. Its more clearly visible in this Summitpost pic and looks somewhat intimidating in that picture. Quite what I’d have done if I’d managed to get that far in decent viz I don’t know.


However, the cloud got worse. Here’s me, a bit further up, sitting on the rocks for 15 mins or so thinking “I wonder if there’ll be a bit enough tear in the cloud to give me some hint of where to go”:


DSC_4670


And here, roughly, is my high point, with me thinking: I really don’t know where I am:


DSC_4675


But judging from the GPS trace, I needed to be off left beyond the rockfall, probably going up the only-vaguely-visible snowpath leading upwards.


And, here’s the hut:


DSC_4694






from ScienceBlogs http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2014/12/30/ruderhofspitze-fail/

Prev: September 9th: Dresdener to Neue Regensburger


Another in the line of mountain climbing posts; I need to get them all out before next year. This one contains few decent photos because I failed due at least in part due to cloud; but its still quite instructive I think. Here’s a portion of the GPS trace for orientation:


ruder-fail


The green dot on the left is the summit, 3474 m. We’ll be going back there in a future post. My high point this day was 3230 ish, say 250 m short, but more than just distance I had very little clue where to go. The green dot on the right is the col, with the Neue Regensburger hut much further right. I got up, pre-packed, for breakfast at 6:30; and gave myself 7 hours, because we wanted to go off to the Franz Senn in the afternoon. That’s a bit tight, but not much, as the most likely fail was what happened, viz, not being able to find the route.


Summitpost waxes quite lyrical about the Ruderhofspitze: Of the 7 summits of the Stubai range over 3400m, Ruderhofspitze is the most central, the 3rd highest, and probably the most remote. This combined makes it a really great mountain and a noble aim. Which is quite Germanic, but also true.


The day started well, with a beautiful cloud sea below the hut:


DSC_4650


However, the clouds somewhat unsportingly chased me up the valley. By the time I’d got to the col (see end of prev for views up to the col) and looked up, I saw this:


DSC_4663


The central spire is the beginning of the Grawawand, clear enough as the long spine just north of my route. At that point – though I didn’t really notice it at the time, and have only just realised it – the cloud is thin enough that the snow couloir leading up into the ?first? snow bowl is visible in the distance. Its more clearly visible in this Summitpost pic and looks somewhat intimidating in that picture. Quite what I’d have done if I’d managed to get that far in decent viz I don’t know.


However, the cloud got worse. Here’s me, a bit further up, sitting on the rocks for 15 mins or so thinking “I wonder if there’ll be a bit enough tear in the cloud to give me some hint of where to go”:


DSC_4670


And here, roughly, is my high point, with me thinking: I really don’t know where I am:


DSC_4675


But judging from the GPS trace, I needed to be off left beyond the rockfall, probably going up the only-vaguely-visible snowpath leading upwards.


And, here’s the hut:


DSC_4694






from ScienceBlogs http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2014/12/30/ruderhofspitze-fail/

Dawn spacecraft starts approach toward Ceres


This artist's concept shows NASA's Dawn spacecraft heading toward the dwarf planet Ceres. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

This artist’s concept shows NASA’s Dawn spacecraft heading toward the dwarf planet Ceres. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech



NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has entered an approach phase in which it will continue to close in on Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt between planets Mars and Jupiter. Dawn launched in 2007 and is scheduled to enter Ceres orbit in March 2015.


Dawn recently emerged from solar conjunction, in which the spacecraft is on the opposite side of the sun, limiting communication with antennas on Earth. Now that Dawn can reliably communicate with Earth again, mission controllers have programmed the maneuvers necessary for the next stage of the rendezvous. Dawn is currently 400,000 miles (640,000 kilometers) from Ceres, approaching it at around 450 miles per hour (725 kilometers per hour).


The spacecraft’s arrival at Ceres will mark the first time that a spacecraft has ever orbited two solar system targets. Dawn previously explored the protoplanet Vesta for 14 months, from 2011 to 2012, capturing detailed images and data about that body.


Christopher Russell is principal investigator for the Dawn mission. He said:



Ceres is almost a complete mystery to us. Ceres, unlike Vesta, has no meteorites linked to it to help reveal its secrets. All we can predict with confidence is that we will be surprised.



The two planetary bodies are thought to be different in a few important ways. Ceres may have formed later than Vesta, and with a cooler interior. Current evidence suggests that Vesta only retained a small amount of water because it formed earlier, when radioactive material was more abundant, which would have produced more heat. Ceres, in contrast, has a thick ice mantle and may even have an ocean beneath its icy crust.


Ceres, with an average diameter of 590 miles (950 kilometers), is also the largest body in the asteroid belt, the strip of solar system real estate between Mars and Jupiter. By comparison, Vesta has an average diameter of 326 miles (525 kilometers), and is the second most massive body in the belt.


The next couple of months promise continually improving views of Ceres, prior to Dawn’s arrival. By the end of January, the spacecraft’s images and other data will be the best ever taken of the dwarf planet.


Read more from NASA/JPL






from EarthSky http://earthsky.org/space/dawn-spacecraft-starts-approach-toward-ceres

This artist's concept shows NASA's Dawn spacecraft heading toward the dwarf planet Ceres. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

This artist’s concept shows NASA’s Dawn spacecraft heading toward the dwarf planet Ceres. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech



NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has entered an approach phase in which it will continue to close in on Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt between planets Mars and Jupiter. Dawn launched in 2007 and is scheduled to enter Ceres orbit in March 2015.


Dawn recently emerged from solar conjunction, in which the spacecraft is on the opposite side of the sun, limiting communication with antennas on Earth. Now that Dawn can reliably communicate with Earth again, mission controllers have programmed the maneuvers necessary for the next stage of the rendezvous. Dawn is currently 400,000 miles (640,000 kilometers) from Ceres, approaching it at around 450 miles per hour (725 kilometers per hour).


The spacecraft’s arrival at Ceres will mark the first time that a spacecraft has ever orbited two solar system targets. Dawn previously explored the protoplanet Vesta for 14 months, from 2011 to 2012, capturing detailed images and data about that body.


Christopher Russell is principal investigator for the Dawn mission. He said:



Ceres is almost a complete mystery to us. Ceres, unlike Vesta, has no meteorites linked to it to help reveal its secrets. All we can predict with confidence is that we will be surprised.



The two planetary bodies are thought to be different in a few important ways. Ceres may have formed later than Vesta, and with a cooler interior. Current evidence suggests that Vesta only retained a small amount of water because it formed earlier, when radioactive material was more abundant, which would have produced more heat. Ceres, in contrast, has a thick ice mantle and may even have an ocean beneath its icy crust.


Ceres, with an average diameter of 590 miles (950 kilometers), is also the largest body in the asteroid belt, the strip of solar system real estate between Mars and Jupiter. By comparison, Vesta has an average diameter of 326 miles (525 kilometers), and is the second most massive body in the belt.


The next couple of months promise continually improving views of Ceres, prior to Dawn’s arrival. By the end of January, the spacecraft’s images and other data will be the best ever taken of the dwarf planet.


Read more from NASA/JPL






from EarthSky http://earthsky.org/space/dawn-spacecraft-starts-approach-toward-ceres

2014 Was the Year We Finally Started to Do Something About Climate Change

A year of extreme weather, climate denial, and some hope.



2014 was a big year for climate news, good and bad. In June, the Obama administration took its biggest step yet in the fight against global warming by introducing regulations to limit greenhouse gases from existing power plants. And while there was plenty of anti-science rhetoric and opposition to climate action (no, the polar vortex does not disprove climate change), the year came to a dramatic end with at least three landmark climate-related stories: In September, hundreds of thousands of protesters around the world marched to demand climate action. November’s historic deal between the US and China to curb greenhouse emissions breathed new life into international climate negotiations. And finally, after a series of last-minute compromises, leaders from nearly 200 countries produced the Lima Accord, which, for the first time, calls on all nations to develop plans to limit their emissions. All eyes are now on Paris, where next year world leaders will meet in an attempt to work out a major global warming deal.






from Climate Desk http://climatedesk.org/2014/12/2014-was-the-year-we-finally-started-to-do-something-about-climate-change/

A year of extreme weather, climate denial, and some hope.



2014 was a big year for climate news, good and bad. In June, the Obama administration took its biggest step yet in the fight against global warming by introducing regulations to limit greenhouse gases from existing power plants. And while there was plenty of anti-science rhetoric and opposition to climate action (no, the polar vortex does not disprove climate change), the year came to a dramatic end with at least three landmark climate-related stories: In September, hundreds of thousands of protesters around the world marched to demand climate action. November’s historic deal between the US and China to curb greenhouse emissions breathed new life into international climate negotiations. And finally, after a series of last-minute compromises, leaders from nearly 200 countries produced the Lima Accord, which, for the first time, calls on all nations to develop plans to limit their emissions. All eyes are now on Paris, where next year world leaders will meet in an attempt to work out a major global warming deal.






from Climate Desk http://climatedesk.org/2014/12/2014-was-the-year-we-finally-started-to-do-something-about-climate-change/

Let’s slap ENCODE around some more [Pharyngula]

Since we still have someone arguing poorly for the virtues of the ENCODE project, I thought it might be worthwhile to go straight to the source and and cite an ENCODE project paper, Defining functional DNA elements in the human genome. It is a bizarre thing that actually makes the case for rejecting the idea of high degrees of functionality, which is a good approach, since it demonstrates that they’ve at least seen the arguments against them. But then it sails blithely past those objections to basically declare that we should just ignore the evolutionary evidence.


Here’s the paragraph where they discuss the idea that most of the genome is non-functional.



Case for Abundant Junk DNA. The possibility that much of a complex genome could be nonfunctional was raised decades ago. The C-value paradox refers to the observation that genome size does not correlate with perceived organismal complexity and that even closely related species can have vastly different genome sizes. The estimated mutation rate in protein-coding genes suggested that only up to ∼20% of the nucleotides in the human genome can be selectively maintained, as the mutational burden would be otherwise too large. The term “junk DNA” was coined to refer to the majority of the rest of the genome, which represent segments of neutrally evolving DNA. More recent work in population genetics has further developed this idea by emphasizing how the low effective population size of large-bodied eukaryotes leads to less efficient natural selection, permitting proliferation of transposable elements and other neutrally evolving DNA. If repetitive DNA elements could be equated with nonfunctional DNA, then one would surmise that the human genome contains vast nonfunctional regions because nearly 50% of nucleotides in the human genome are readily recognizable as repeat elements, often of high degeneracy. Moreover, comparative genomics studies have found that only 5% of mammalian genomes are under strong evolutionary constraint across multiple species (e.g., human, mouse, and dog).



Yes, that’s part of it: it is theoretically extremely difficult to justify high levels of function in the genome — the genetic load would be simply too high. We also see that much of the genome is not conserved, suggesting that it isn’t maintained by selection. Not mentioned, though, are other observations, such as the extreme variability in genome size between closely related species that does not seem to be correlated with complexity or function at all, or that much “junk” DNA can be deleted without any apparent phenotypic effect. It’s very clear to anyone with any appreciation of evolutionary constraints at all that the genome is largely non-functional, both on theoretical and empirical grounds.


Their next paragraph summarizes their argument for nearly universal function. It’s strange because it is so orthogonal to the previous paragraph: I’d expect at least some token effort would be made to address the constraints imposed by the evolutionary perspective, but no…the authors make no effort at all to reconcile what evolutionary biologists have said with what they claim to have discovered.


That’s just weird.


Here’s their argument: most of the genome gets biochemically modified to some degree and for some of the time.



Case for Abundant Functional Genomic Elements. Genome-wide biochemical studies, including recent reports from ENCODE, have revealed pervasive activity over an unexpectedly large fraction of the genome, including noncoding and nonconserved regions and repeat elements. Such results greatly increase upper bound estimates of candidate functional sequences. Many human genomic regions previously assumed to be nonfunctional have recently been found to be teeming with biochemical activity, including portions of repeat elements, which can be bound by transcription factors and transcribed, and are thought to sometimes be exapted into novel regulatory regions. Outside the 1.5% of the genome covered by protein-coding sequence, 11% of the genome is associated with motifs in transcription factor-bound regions or high-resolution DNase footprints in one or more cell types, indicative of direct contact by regulatory proteins. Transcription factor occupancy and nucleosome-resolution DNase hypersensitivity maps overlap greatly and each cover approximately 15% of the genome. In aggregate, histone modifications associated with promoters or enhancers mark ∼20% of the genome, whereas a third of the genome is marked by modifications associated with transcriptional elongation. Over half of the genome has at least one repressive histone mark. In agreement with prior findings of pervasive transcription, ENCODE maps of polyadenylated and total RNA cover in total more than 75% of the genome. These already large fractions may be underestimates, as only a subset of cell states have been assayed. However, for multiple reasons discussed below, it remains unclear what proportion of these biochemically annotated regions serve specific functions.



That’s fine. Chunks of DNA get shut down to transcription by enzymatic modification; we’ve known that for a long time, but it’s generally regarded as evidence that that bit of DNA does not have a useful function. But to ENCODE, DNA that is silenced counts as a function. Footprint studies find that lots of bits of DNA get weakly or transiently bound by transcription factors; no surprise, it’s what you’d expect of the stochastic processes of biochemistry. Basically they’re describing behavior as functional that which is more reasonably described as noise in the system, and declaring that it trumps all the evolutionary and genetic and developmental and phylogenetic observations of the genome.


No, I’m being too charitable. They aren’t even trying to explain how that counters all the other evidence — they’re just plopping out their observations and hoping we don’t notice that they are failing to account for everything else.


I rather like Dan Graur’s dismissal of their logic.



Actually, ENCODE should have included “DNA replication” in its list of “functions,” and turn the human genome into a perfect 100% functional machine. Then, any functional element would have had a 100% of being in the ENCODE list.







from ScienceBlogs http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/12/30/lets-slap-encode-around-some-more/

Since we still have someone arguing poorly for the virtues of the ENCODE project, I thought it might be worthwhile to go straight to the source and and cite an ENCODE project paper, Defining functional DNA elements in the human genome. It is a bizarre thing that actually makes the case for rejecting the idea of high degrees of functionality, which is a good approach, since it demonstrates that they’ve at least seen the arguments against them. But then it sails blithely past those objections to basically declare that we should just ignore the evolutionary evidence.


Here’s the paragraph where they discuss the idea that most of the genome is non-functional.



Case for Abundant Junk DNA. The possibility that much of a complex genome could be nonfunctional was raised decades ago. The C-value paradox refers to the observation that genome size does not correlate with perceived organismal complexity and that even closely related species can have vastly different genome sizes. The estimated mutation rate in protein-coding genes suggested that only up to ∼20% of the nucleotides in the human genome can be selectively maintained, as the mutational burden would be otherwise too large. The term “junk DNA” was coined to refer to the majority of the rest of the genome, which represent segments of neutrally evolving DNA. More recent work in population genetics has further developed this idea by emphasizing how the low effective population size of large-bodied eukaryotes leads to less efficient natural selection, permitting proliferation of transposable elements and other neutrally evolving DNA. If repetitive DNA elements could be equated with nonfunctional DNA, then one would surmise that the human genome contains vast nonfunctional regions because nearly 50% of nucleotides in the human genome are readily recognizable as repeat elements, often of high degeneracy. Moreover, comparative genomics studies have found that only 5% of mammalian genomes are under strong evolutionary constraint across multiple species (e.g., human, mouse, and dog).



Yes, that’s part of it: it is theoretically extremely difficult to justify high levels of function in the genome — the genetic load would be simply too high. We also see that much of the genome is not conserved, suggesting that it isn’t maintained by selection. Not mentioned, though, are other observations, such as the extreme variability in genome size between closely related species that does not seem to be correlated with complexity or function at all, or that much “junk” DNA can be deleted without any apparent phenotypic effect. It’s very clear to anyone with any appreciation of evolutionary constraints at all that the genome is largely non-functional, both on theoretical and empirical grounds.


Their next paragraph summarizes their argument for nearly universal function. It’s strange because it is so orthogonal to the previous paragraph: I’d expect at least some token effort would be made to address the constraints imposed by the evolutionary perspective, but no…the authors make no effort at all to reconcile what evolutionary biologists have said with what they claim to have discovered.


That’s just weird.


Here’s their argument: most of the genome gets biochemically modified to some degree and for some of the time.



Case for Abundant Functional Genomic Elements. Genome-wide biochemical studies, including recent reports from ENCODE, have revealed pervasive activity over an unexpectedly large fraction of the genome, including noncoding and nonconserved regions and repeat elements. Such results greatly increase upper bound estimates of candidate functional sequences. Many human genomic regions previously assumed to be nonfunctional have recently been found to be teeming with biochemical activity, including portions of repeat elements, which can be bound by transcription factors and transcribed, and are thought to sometimes be exapted into novel regulatory regions. Outside the 1.5% of the genome covered by protein-coding sequence, 11% of the genome is associated with motifs in transcription factor-bound regions or high-resolution DNase footprints in one or more cell types, indicative of direct contact by regulatory proteins. Transcription factor occupancy and nucleosome-resolution DNase hypersensitivity maps overlap greatly and each cover approximately 15% of the genome. In aggregate, histone modifications associated with promoters or enhancers mark ∼20% of the genome, whereas a third of the genome is marked by modifications associated with transcriptional elongation. Over half of the genome has at least one repressive histone mark. In agreement with prior findings of pervasive transcription, ENCODE maps of polyadenylated and total RNA cover in total more than 75% of the genome. These already large fractions may be underestimates, as only a subset of cell states have been assayed. However, for multiple reasons discussed below, it remains unclear what proportion of these biochemically annotated regions serve specific functions.



That’s fine. Chunks of DNA get shut down to transcription by enzymatic modification; we’ve known that for a long time, but it’s generally regarded as evidence that that bit of DNA does not have a useful function. But to ENCODE, DNA that is silenced counts as a function. Footprint studies find that lots of bits of DNA get weakly or transiently bound by transcription factors; no surprise, it’s what you’d expect of the stochastic processes of biochemistry. Basically they’re describing behavior as functional that which is more reasonably described as noise in the system, and declaring that it trumps all the evolutionary and genetic and developmental and phylogenetic observations of the genome.


No, I’m being too charitable. They aren’t even trying to explain how that counters all the other evidence — they’re just plopping out their observations and hoping we don’t notice that they are failing to account for everything else.


I rather like Dan Graur’s dismissal of their logic.



Actually, ENCODE should have included “DNA replication” in its list of “functions,” and turn the human genome into a perfect 100% functional machine. Then, any functional element would have had a 100% of being in the ENCODE list.







from ScienceBlogs http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/12/30/lets-slap-encode-around-some-more/

Where are they now? [Stoat]





I wander thro’ each charter’d street,

Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,

In every Infants cry of fear,

In every voice: in every ban,

The mind-forg’d manacles I hear



Over the year a number of things have seemed dead exciting, or at least a bit important as viewed from this tiny corner of the blogosphere, but have then faded as duds. Let’s pull them back from obscurity and poke them a bit, pull their strings, and make it look as though they’re alive and laugh at them, before tossing them back on the heap of tossed things.


First off the block, and a worthy example of the genre, is Pattern Recognition in Physics. Killed by Copernicus for being wank, it was re-started by Morner so he could fill it with wank. It seems to be having a thin time: there’s a paper from July, which actually references a WUWT blog post presumably so that even the most dim-witted can tell that its nonsense; and one from November featuring a pentagram.


Rather duller, in April AW proposed some kind of “septic.org” but I think even he realised is was a dumb idea; AFAIK it was still-born; similarly the NIPCC. The long-awaited AW et al. “paper” remains at the concept stage and so forgotten that only I seem to bother mock it.


Perhaps the best WATN was l’affaire Lennart Bengtsson in May (for those who forget easily: LB had a paper rejected for being unoriginal; got miffed, and joined the GWPF in a fit of madness; left when all his friends told him the GWPF were nutters; and then blamed everyone but himself for his poor judgement). Its all gone quiet now; spies report that LB has gone back to writing right-wing non-climate politics on climate blogs. But since he has had the decency to do this in Swedish, no one has been reading what he has written; I’ll assume that’s deliberate on his part, and respect his privacy. You can read an analysis of it here (well, actually you probably can’t cos its in foreign, but you can try google translate; or Eli has some earlier stuff, it all looks very similar).


Does the battle of the graphs qualify? In it, Monkers threatened to sue the pants off almost everyone, and then quietly didn’t. But that’s hardly news.


Not-Prof Salby was so 2013 (some took a while to catch up; post to the antipodes can take a while), but questioning the idea that the CO2 rise is anthro seems to be flypaper that every wacko gets stuck to eventually as they buzz around aimlessly. AW hit it, several times but the slightly-surprise victim was “Dr” Roy Spencer who you’d have thought would know better.


Sea ice in 2014 was dull, like 2013. There are still a few – Wadhams springs to mind – who predict collapse-within-a-few-years but I don’t think anyone is listening. The denialists wouldn’t bet on the future though others will. Its still all to play for in the coming years.


Oh, and not-really-fitting but close enough for government work is Spirit of Mawson which returns in the Graun.


Did I miss any?


Refs


* London, by Blake






from ScienceBlogs http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2014/12/30/where-are-they-now/




I wander thro’ each charter’d street,

Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,

In every Infants cry of fear,

In every voice: in every ban,

The mind-forg’d manacles I hear



Over the year a number of things have seemed dead exciting, or at least a bit important as viewed from this tiny corner of the blogosphere, but have then faded as duds. Let’s pull them back from obscurity and poke them a bit, pull their strings, and make it look as though they’re alive and laugh at them, before tossing them back on the heap of tossed things.


First off the block, and a worthy example of the genre, is Pattern Recognition in Physics. Killed by Copernicus for being wank, it was re-started by Morner so he could fill it with wank. It seems to be having a thin time: there’s a paper from July, which actually references a WUWT blog post presumably so that even the most dim-witted can tell that its nonsense; and one from November featuring a pentagram.


Rather duller, in April AW proposed some kind of “septic.org” but I think even he realised is was a dumb idea; AFAIK it was still-born; similarly the NIPCC. The long-awaited AW et al. “paper” remains at the concept stage and so forgotten that only I seem to bother mock it.


Perhaps the best WATN was l’affaire Lennart Bengtsson in May (for those who forget easily: LB had a paper rejected for being unoriginal; got miffed, and joined the GWPF in a fit of madness; left when all his friends told him the GWPF were nutters; and then blamed everyone but himself for his poor judgement). Its all gone quiet now; spies report that LB has gone back to writing right-wing non-climate politics on climate blogs. But since he has had the decency to do this in Swedish, no one has been reading what he has written; I’ll assume that’s deliberate on his part, and respect his privacy. You can read an analysis of it here (well, actually you probably can’t cos its in foreign, but you can try google translate; or Eli has some earlier stuff, it all looks very similar).


Does the battle of the graphs qualify? In it, Monkers threatened to sue the pants off almost everyone, and then quietly didn’t. But that’s hardly news.


Not-Prof Salby was so 2013 (some took a while to catch up; post to the antipodes can take a while), but questioning the idea that the CO2 rise is anthro seems to be flypaper that every wacko gets stuck to eventually as they buzz around aimlessly. AW hit it, several times but the slightly-surprise victim was “Dr” Roy Spencer who you’d have thought would know better.


Sea ice in 2014 was dull, like 2013. There are still a few – Wadhams springs to mind – who predict collapse-within-a-few-years but I don’t think anyone is listening. The denialists wouldn’t bet on the future though others will. Its still all to play for in the coming years.


Oh, and not-really-fitting but close enough for government work is Spirit of Mawson which returns in the Graun.


Did I miss any?


Refs


* London, by Blake






from ScienceBlogs http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2014/12/30/where-are-they-now/

Why I Do Science: Kandis Elliot



Plant Modifications poster by Kandis Elliot. Click on the image for a larger size.



Kandis Elliot didn’t think she’d make art her profession. “When I was in high school and thinking of a career, we were told back then that you can't make a living as an artist and if you're smart enough you go into the sciences,” said Elliot. She was smart enough- and interested enough- in the sciences to graduate from the University of Wisconsin with a BA in biology and Masters in zoology. “In all these courses I drew like crazy without letting too many people see these drawings,” she recalls.


But art drew her back and after her advanced degree Elliot returned to school, this time in a technical college program in commercial art. Shortly after that, the perfect opportunity came knocking. “I was out about a month when four people, four or five people called me up the same day and said, ‘The botany artist is leaving, go apply for a position,’" Elliot says. The position was as staff artist for the University of Wisconsin’s Botany department, one of the best in the country.


Elliot was strong on science and gifted in art, but she also had another card up her sleeve, “I knew back in 1988 there was this new thing called Apple Computer where you could draw a perfect square. You didn't need a right angle. You could draw a perfect circle, you didn't need a compass. And I said, ‘Surely you want to do this kind of work on a computer.’ And they said, ‘Alright, let's try it.’"


fungi poster

Kandis Elliot's poster "Introduction to Fungi". Click on the image for a larger size.



The idea of using computers appealed to the scientists, but Elliot had never actually used one. So she went to the campus computer center, held up a hundred dollar bill, offering it to anyone who could teach her how to use an Apple. That investment paid off in a position she held for over two decades. As the botany artist, she created charts and graphs for countless scientific publications and perfected the art of digital painting. Starting with less-than-perfect images taken by scientists in the field, or dried, pressed plant samples, Elliot’s job was to transform them into striking, painterly objects that could hold a student’s attention.


“It makes your eye dwell on the picture a little bit longer,” says Elliot, “I guess the only way I can describe it is that the paintings say, ‘Look at me.’”


After years spent shining the spotlight on nature’s botanical beauty, Kandis Elliot retired from the University of Wisconsin in 2011. But not before receiving one of the highest honors in her profession. A poster titled “Introduction to Fungi” won the 2010 prize for information graphics in the National Science Foundation’s International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge. Mushrooms capped a brilliant career.


This video was updated from the original by producer Eleanor Nelson.




Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,





from QUEST http://science.kqed.org/quest/video/why-i-do-science-kandis-elliot/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=why-i-do-science-kandis-elliot


Plant Modifications poster by Kandis Elliot. Click on the image for a larger size.



Kandis Elliot didn’t think she’d make art her profession. “When I was in high school and thinking of a career, we were told back then that you can't make a living as an artist and if you're smart enough you go into the sciences,” said Elliot. She was smart enough- and interested enough- in the sciences to graduate from the University of Wisconsin with a BA in biology and Masters in zoology. “In all these courses I drew like crazy without letting too many people see these drawings,” she recalls.


But art drew her back and after her advanced degree Elliot returned to school, this time in a technical college program in commercial art. Shortly after that, the perfect opportunity came knocking. “I was out about a month when four people, four or five people called me up the same day and said, ‘The botany artist is leaving, go apply for a position,’" Elliot says. The position was as staff artist for the University of Wisconsin’s Botany department, one of the best in the country.


Elliot was strong on science and gifted in art, but she also had another card up her sleeve, “I knew back in 1988 there was this new thing called Apple Computer where you could draw a perfect square. You didn't need a right angle. You could draw a perfect circle, you didn't need a compass. And I said, ‘Surely you want to do this kind of work on a computer.’ And they said, ‘Alright, let's try it.’"


fungi poster

Kandis Elliot's poster "Introduction to Fungi". Click on the image for a larger size.



The idea of using computers appealed to the scientists, but Elliot had never actually used one. So she went to the campus computer center, held up a hundred dollar bill, offering it to anyone who could teach her how to use an Apple. That investment paid off in a position she held for over two decades. As the botany artist, she created charts and graphs for countless scientific publications and perfected the art of digital painting. Starting with less-than-perfect images taken by scientists in the field, or dried, pressed plant samples, Elliot’s job was to transform them into striking, painterly objects that could hold a student’s attention.


“It makes your eye dwell on the picture a little bit longer,” says Elliot, “I guess the only way I can describe it is that the paintings say, ‘Look at me.’”


After years spent shining the spotlight on nature’s botanical beauty, Kandis Elliot retired from the University of Wisconsin in 2011. But not before receiving one of the highest honors in her profession. A poster titled “Introduction to Fungi” won the 2010 prize for information graphics in the National Science Foundation’s International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge. Mushrooms capped a brilliant career.


This video was updated from the original by producer Eleanor Nelson.




Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,





from QUEST http://science.kqed.org/quest/video/why-i-do-science-kandis-elliot/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=why-i-do-science-kandis-elliot

Adventures in bad veterinary medicine reported by the local media, year end edition [Respectful Insolence]


Ever since moving back to the Detroit area nearly seven years ago, one thing I’ve noticed is a propensity for our local news outlets to go full pseudoscience from time to time. I’m not sure why, other than perhaps that it attracts eyeballs to the screen, but, in reality, most of these plunges into pseudoscience and quackery are so poorly done that I find it hard to believe that even believers find them interesting. For example, back in 2008, I discussed a particularly dumb story aired by our local NBC affiliate WDIV entitled Orbs: Myth or Real?, which, not having started my new job yet, I gleefully deconstructed at the time. For those of you who aren’t familiar with “spirit orbs,” which are claimed to be the spirits of the dead but almost always represent photography artifacts, such as lens flare, dust on the lens catching light, or similar things that can lead to light blobs showing up on photos.


Also at the time, an investigative reporter named Steve Wilson was still spreading antivaccine mercury militia pseudoscience through the local ABC affiliate WXYZ, leading me to wonder whether he was a a legitimate investigative reporter or an antivaccine propagandist. Indeed, his antivaccine propaganda dressed up as news reports was spreading to a national audience, thanks to Age of Autism and other antivaccine groups. Actually, he was both. When it came to politics and corruption, he was a decent investigative reporter; indeed, his exposes of our utterly corrupt former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s were, in retrospect, prescient, and provoked Kilpatrick to take his revenge. When it came to vaccines, he had completely swallowed the Kool Aid that claims that mercury in vaccines caused an autism epidemic. I’m not sure if it was the antivaccine reporting or other issues, but Wilson’s contract was, fortunately, not renewed in in 2010.



In any case, given the record of local news stations when it comes to credulously reporting medical pseudoscience (and pseudoscience in general), I would normally not be surprised to see a report on a local station in which quackery is presented as real medicine. (Heck, I deconstructed just such a story a year and a half ago.) I was more surprised (but probably shouldn’t have been) to see such a report in our local newspaper, the Detroit Free Press complete with a video for the online story. The story is by Jennifer Dixon and is entitled Veterinarian offers alternative approach to healing. The story is even showing up in statewide media. Ms. Dixon is an investigative reporter, but in this case hers was a massive fail to do even the most basic investigation, so much so that one wonders if we have another Steve Wilson in the making.


Basically, it’s so credulous that it might as well be an advertisement for a veterinarian named Dr. Loren Weaver, who subjects animals to a variety of nonsensical treatments:











The video is painful to watch, so steeped in mystical woo is it. It’s hard to believe that this sort of rot made it even on the air even from a local news station, but it did. The text begins:



Dr. Loren Weaver practices “energy medicine” on dogs, horses and the occasional cat.


“There’s a big transfer of energy from me to the dogs, from the dogs to me, me to the horses and the horses back to me. That’s what makes this work is that transfer of energy,” the veterinarian said. “That’s what I pass through with my hands.”


He said that energy, or Chi, is carried through 12 meridians, or channels, in the body.


“I don’t ask someone to believe it exists,” he said. “If you let me work on your animal, I can show you how it works.”


His patients’ owners are believers.



Let’s get one thing straight right here, right now. “Energy medicine” is quackery. It’s mystical mumbo-jumbo with no basis in science. Reiki, for instance, the most common form of “energy medicine” is basically faith healing in which Eastern mystical beliefs replace Christian beliefs as the religious basis for belief that laying on hands can heal. It’s “The Secret“-level wishful thinking, and, unfortunately, reiki for Fido is becoming more common.


Of course, what Weaver describes as his “energy medicine” doesn’t sound like reiki. He doesn’t invoke the “universal source” as the source of the healing energy but rather seems to be claiming that he can manipulate animals’ “energy fields.” That sounds a lot more like “healing touch” (HT) or “therapeutic touch” (TT) another pseudoscientific mystical modality that is, unfortunately, all too commonly practiced in hospitals and is equally ridiculous as reiki. I like to say that it’s so ridiculous that even an 11-year-old girl could design a controlled study that demonstrated that TT practitioners cannot even sense a human “energy field,” much less manipulate one. This is not surprising, given that what TT practitioners mean by “energy” and what scientists mean by “energy” (to put it simply, the capacity of a physical system to perform work) are not even related by coincidence. Even with the most sophisticated and sensitive instruments, science has never been able to find anything like these “energy fields” around humans or animals that can be manipulated in the way that people like Dr. Weaver claim. Basically, energy medicine is prescientific vitalism infused with a heavy dose of religion. That is why I consider it quackery.


In any case, it turns out that Dr. Weaver is a veterinarian and a chiropractor. As I and others have pointed out before, basically any form of alternative medicine to which humans are subjected is also used in animals because, well, I guess we humans can’t help ourselves. We have to subject our furry, feathered, and scaly friends to the same sort of prescientific and pseudoscientific nonsense that we subject ourselves to. Hence, we see travesties, such as turtles and owls getting needles stuck into them and ducks and Basset hounds having their spines adjusted. Not surprisingly, Dr. Weaver is heavily into both chiropractic (being a chiropractic veterinarian) and acupuncture, both of which are on full display in this story.


Weaver even goes full Palmer on us and talks about the “innate intelligence” (although he doesn’t call it that) flowing from the brain through the nervous system and how anything impeding that flow will cause problems. Meanwhile, we are treated to images of Weaver doing spine adjustments on dogs, who most definitely do not appear to be enjoying it, as at least one of them has to be held and jerks as if in pain when Weaver does a lower spinal adjustment. One dog, a Dachsund named Rocky, is shown trying to bite Weaver as he adjusts his spine, all while his owner exults about how fantastic Rocky is doing for his slipped disc ever since Dr. Weaver started treating him. Of course, in the case of actual pathology, such as a disc problem, it is possible that spinal manipulation might be of some benefit, or, as is the case in humans, the course could be resolution in many cases. After all, from what I’ve observed we apear not to operate on herniated discs nearly as often as we used to.


Later in the video, Weaver is shown sticking needles into dogs, most of whom most definitely appear not to be liking it at all, as they all flinched as the needles were placed and had to be held to keep from biting at them. Meanwhile, he pontificates on traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and how TCM teaches that disease is due to “blockages” of qi that can be resolved using acupuncture. Doesn’t Weaver know that TCM is a retconning of the actual history of Chinese folk medicine perpetrated by Chairman Mao Zedong back in the 1950s? Apparently not:



Weaver has been a veterinarian for 34 years and has been practicing acupuncture and chiropractic medicine for the last 26 years. He was first exposed to acupuncture while living in Kenya and saw how it helped horses in pain.


“It worked, and the horses relaxed and felt better,” Weaver said. When he returned to the U.S., he began studying acupuncture, which he uses for pain relief and back problems. He then immersed himself in chiropractic medicine. The son of a farmer who saw a chiropractor for his back, Weaver said he was exposed to chiropractic medicine as a child.


“When I started, no one was doing chiropractic,” Weaver said.



How does he know it helped? Proponents of alternative medicine will claim that quackery like acupuncture “works” in animals because it couldn’t possibly be due to placebo effects, but they are only sort of correct. The reason is that the only way we can know what animals are feeling is through the observations of humans, who interpret those observations as the animal either being in pain or getting better. Thus, placebo-like effects can occur in animals, but in reality they are a result of a change in perception of the animal’s condition by the owners, who expect results and, after treatment, look for results. If they believe acupuncture will work, often they report results. It’s difficult enough to quantify pain reliably in humans; in animals, it’s even harder. Add to that the tendency of most conditions to regress to the mean or to slowly improve, and, if the acupuncture or chiropractic adjustment is performed as improvement is beginning or around the time when the symptoms are at their worst (which is often the time when treatment will be sought), then it can appear that the treatment “worked.” There appears to be a phenomenon in veterinary medicine known as caregiver placebo effects, which appears to be a real phenomenon. Indeed, frequently, there is little or no correlation between owner-reported observations of animal pain and objective measures.


All of this explains why Dr. Weaver can have so many glowing testimonials about the efficacy of his methods, some of which are presented in this story. Unfortunately, our intrepid “investigative reporter” didn’t actually investigate. Instead, she produced an advertisement for Dr. Weaver, chiropractic veterinary medicine, and the use of TCM in animals. I realize that local reporters are often assigned human interest stories like this. People love their pets, and the story of an appealing, warm and cuddly vet who seems to be “working miracles” is a very tempting story to do. Everybody loves a story like this, particularly animal lovers, except, of course, “nasty” buzzkill skeptics like myself who, upon seeing a story like this, can’t help but look deeper.






from ScienceBlogs http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2014/12/30/adventures-in-bad-veterinary-medicine-reported-by-the-local-media-year-end-edition/

Ever since moving back to the Detroit area nearly seven years ago, one thing I’ve noticed is a propensity for our local news outlets to go full pseudoscience from time to time. I’m not sure why, other than perhaps that it attracts eyeballs to the screen, but, in reality, most of these plunges into pseudoscience and quackery are so poorly done that I find it hard to believe that even believers find them interesting. For example, back in 2008, I discussed a particularly dumb story aired by our local NBC affiliate WDIV entitled Orbs: Myth or Real?, which, not having started my new job yet, I gleefully deconstructed at the time. For those of you who aren’t familiar with “spirit orbs,” which are claimed to be the spirits of the dead but almost always represent photography artifacts, such as lens flare, dust on the lens catching light, or similar things that can lead to light blobs showing up on photos.


Also at the time, an investigative reporter named Steve Wilson was still spreading antivaccine mercury militia pseudoscience through the local ABC affiliate WXYZ, leading me to wonder whether he was a a legitimate investigative reporter or an antivaccine propagandist. Indeed, his antivaccine propaganda dressed up as news reports was spreading to a national audience, thanks to Age of Autism and other antivaccine groups. Actually, he was both. When it came to politics and corruption, he was a decent investigative reporter; indeed, his exposes of our utterly corrupt former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s were, in retrospect, prescient, and provoked Kilpatrick to take his revenge. When it came to vaccines, he had completely swallowed the Kool Aid that claims that mercury in vaccines caused an autism epidemic. I’m not sure if it was the antivaccine reporting or other issues, but Wilson’s contract was, fortunately, not renewed in in 2010.



In any case, given the record of local news stations when it comes to credulously reporting medical pseudoscience (and pseudoscience in general), I would normally not be surprised to see a report on a local station in which quackery is presented as real medicine. (Heck, I deconstructed just such a story a year and a half ago.) I was more surprised (but probably shouldn’t have been) to see such a report in our local newspaper, the Detroit Free Press complete with a video for the online story. The story is by Jennifer Dixon and is entitled Veterinarian offers alternative approach to healing. The story is even showing up in statewide media. Ms. Dixon is an investigative reporter, but in this case hers was a massive fail to do even the most basic investigation, so much so that one wonders if we have another Steve Wilson in the making.


Basically, it’s so credulous that it might as well be an advertisement for a veterinarian named Dr. Loren Weaver, who subjects animals to a variety of nonsensical treatments:











The video is painful to watch, so steeped in mystical woo is it. It’s hard to believe that this sort of rot made it even on the air even from a local news station, but it did. The text begins:



Dr. Loren Weaver practices “energy medicine” on dogs, horses and the occasional cat.


“There’s a big transfer of energy from me to the dogs, from the dogs to me, me to the horses and the horses back to me. That’s what makes this work is that transfer of energy,” the veterinarian said. “That’s what I pass through with my hands.”


He said that energy, or Chi, is carried through 12 meridians, or channels, in the body.


“I don’t ask someone to believe it exists,” he said. “If you let me work on your animal, I can show you how it works.”


His patients’ owners are believers.



Let’s get one thing straight right here, right now. “Energy medicine” is quackery. It’s mystical mumbo-jumbo with no basis in science. Reiki, for instance, the most common form of “energy medicine” is basically faith healing in which Eastern mystical beliefs replace Christian beliefs as the religious basis for belief that laying on hands can heal. It’s “The Secret“-level wishful thinking, and, unfortunately, reiki for Fido is becoming more common.


Of course, what Weaver describes as his “energy medicine” doesn’t sound like reiki. He doesn’t invoke the “universal source” as the source of the healing energy but rather seems to be claiming that he can manipulate animals’ “energy fields.” That sounds a lot more like “healing touch” (HT) or “therapeutic touch” (TT) another pseudoscientific mystical modality that is, unfortunately, all too commonly practiced in hospitals and is equally ridiculous as reiki. I like to say that it’s so ridiculous that even an 11-year-old girl could design a controlled study that demonstrated that TT practitioners cannot even sense a human “energy field,” much less manipulate one. This is not surprising, given that what TT practitioners mean by “energy” and what scientists mean by “energy” (to put it simply, the capacity of a physical system to perform work) are not even related by coincidence. Even with the most sophisticated and sensitive instruments, science has never been able to find anything like these “energy fields” around humans or animals that can be manipulated in the way that people like Dr. Weaver claim. Basically, energy medicine is prescientific vitalism infused with a heavy dose of religion. That is why I consider it quackery.


In any case, it turns out that Dr. Weaver is a veterinarian and a chiropractor. As I and others have pointed out before, basically any form of alternative medicine to which humans are subjected is also used in animals because, well, I guess we humans can’t help ourselves. We have to subject our furry, feathered, and scaly friends to the same sort of prescientific and pseudoscientific nonsense that we subject ourselves to. Hence, we see travesties, such as turtles and owls getting needles stuck into them and ducks and Basset hounds having their spines adjusted. Not surprisingly, Dr. Weaver is heavily into both chiropractic (being a chiropractic veterinarian) and acupuncture, both of which are on full display in this story.


Weaver even goes full Palmer on us and talks about the “innate intelligence” (although he doesn’t call it that) flowing from the brain through the nervous system and how anything impeding that flow will cause problems. Meanwhile, we are treated to images of Weaver doing spine adjustments on dogs, who most definitely do not appear to be enjoying it, as at least one of them has to be held and jerks as if in pain when Weaver does a lower spinal adjustment. One dog, a Dachsund named Rocky, is shown trying to bite Weaver as he adjusts his spine, all while his owner exults about how fantastic Rocky is doing for his slipped disc ever since Dr. Weaver started treating him. Of course, in the case of actual pathology, such as a disc problem, it is possible that spinal manipulation might be of some benefit, or, as is the case in humans, the course could be resolution in many cases. After all, from what I’ve observed we apear not to operate on herniated discs nearly as often as we used to.


Later in the video, Weaver is shown sticking needles into dogs, most of whom most definitely appear not to be liking it at all, as they all flinched as the needles were placed and had to be held to keep from biting at them. Meanwhile, he pontificates on traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and how TCM teaches that disease is due to “blockages” of qi that can be resolved using acupuncture. Doesn’t Weaver know that TCM is a retconning of the actual history of Chinese folk medicine perpetrated by Chairman Mao Zedong back in the 1950s? Apparently not:



Weaver has been a veterinarian for 34 years and has been practicing acupuncture and chiropractic medicine for the last 26 years. He was first exposed to acupuncture while living in Kenya and saw how it helped horses in pain.


“It worked, and the horses relaxed and felt better,” Weaver said. When he returned to the U.S., he began studying acupuncture, which he uses for pain relief and back problems. He then immersed himself in chiropractic medicine. The son of a farmer who saw a chiropractor for his back, Weaver said he was exposed to chiropractic medicine as a child.


“When I started, no one was doing chiropractic,” Weaver said.



How does he know it helped? Proponents of alternative medicine will claim that quackery like acupuncture “works” in animals because it couldn’t possibly be due to placebo effects, but they are only sort of correct. The reason is that the only way we can know what animals are feeling is through the observations of humans, who interpret those observations as the animal either being in pain or getting better. Thus, placebo-like effects can occur in animals, but in reality they are a result of a change in perception of the animal’s condition by the owners, who expect results and, after treatment, look for results. If they believe acupuncture will work, often they report results. It’s difficult enough to quantify pain reliably in humans; in animals, it’s even harder. Add to that the tendency of most conditions to regress to the mean or to slowly improve, and, if the acupuncture or chiropractic adjustment is performed as improvement is beginning or around the time when the symptoms are at their worst (which is often the time when treatment will be sought), then it can appear that the treatment “worked.” There appears to be a phenomenon in veterinary medicine known as caregiver placebo effects, which appears to be a real phenomenon. Indeed, frequently, there is little or no correlation between owner-reported observations of animal pain and objective measures.


All of this explains why Dr. Weaver can have so many glowing testimonials about the efficacy of his methods, some of which are presented in this story. Unfortunately, our intrepid “investigative reporter” didn’t actually investigate. Instead, she produced an advertisement for Dr. Weaver, chiropractic veterinary medicine, and the use of TCM in animals. I realize that local reporters are often assigned human interest stories like this. People love their pets, and the story of an appealing, warm and cuddly vet who seems to be “working miracles” is a very tempting story to do. Everybody loves a story like this, particularly animal lovers, except, of course, “nasty” buzzkill skeptics like myself who, upon seeing a story like this, can’t help but look deeper.






from ScienceBlogs http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2014/12/30/adventures-in-bad-veterinary-medicine-reported-by-the-local-media-year-end-edition/

New video shows life in the deepest ocean



The deepest part of the ocean is in the Mariana Trench (sometimes called the Marianas Trench), located in the western Pacific Ocean. At its deepest part, it’s just under 7 miles (6.831 miles / 10.994 km / 10,994 meters) deep. Using the UK’s deepest diving vehicle – the Hadal-Lander – an international team of marine biologists, geologists, microbiologists and geneticists recently probed this area, captured video of the world’s deepest ocean life, discovered some new species and set a new record for the world’s deepest known fish.


Just before Christmas (December 19, 2014), the University of Aberdeen released information and the video above, based on these scientists’ recent 30-day journey to this cavernous part of the ocean floor.


Mysterious supergiant amphipod, filmed alive for the first time. This extremely large crustacean was first recovered by traps off New Zealand in 2012.

Mysterious supergiant amphipod, filmed alive for the first time. This extremely large crustacean was first recovered by traps off New Zealand in 2012.



Deepest known fish is now a snailfish, the fragile creature to the left of center in this image, at a depth of 8,145 meters in the Mariana Trench.

Deepest known fish is now a snailfish, the fragile creature to the left of center in this image, at a depth of 8,145 meters in the Mariana Trench.



Among other things, they captured the first footage of a live and very mysterious supergiant amphipod. This creature, an extremely large crustacean, was first recovered by traps off New Zealand in 2012. The new footage shows the supergiants swimming, feeding and fending off would-be predators with its large body size and protective tail. Alan Jamieson from the University of Aberdeen was part of the expedition. He said:



Knowing these creatures exist is one thing, but to watch them alive in their natural habitat and interacting with other species is truly amazing.



The video footage also shows a type of snailfish at depths of 8,145 meters – 500 meters further down than the greatest depth that fish had been observed prior to this expedition. Jamison said:



This really deep fish did not look like anything we had seen before, nor does it look like anything we know of. It is unbelievably fragile, with large wing-like fins and a head resembling a cartoon dog.



In all, the scientists completed 92 deployments of deep-sampling equipment across the entire depth range of the trench (5000 meters to 10,600 meters deep). That’s the greatest number deployed to the Mariana Trench so far, they say.


The scientists and their diving vehicle traveled aboard Schmidt Ocean Institute’s Research Vessel Falkor.


Mariana Trench in the western Pacific. The trench is some 1,580 miles long (about 2,550 km), with an average width of only 43 miles (69 km). Image via Wallace at Wikimedia Commons.

Mariana Trench in the western Pacific. The trench is some 1,580 miles long (about 2,550 km), with an average width of only 43 miles (69 km). Image via Wallace at Wikimedia Commons.



Bottom line: An international team of scientists has set a new record for the deepest known ocean fish. They were filming in the Mariana Trench – the deepest part of the ocean.


Via University of Aberdeen






from EarthSky http://earthsky.org/earth/new-video-shows-life-in-the-deepest-ocean


The deepest part of the ocean is in the Mariana Trench (sometimes called the Marianas Trench), located in the western Pacific Ocean. At its deepest part, it’s just under 7 miles (6.831 miles / 10.994 km / 10,994 meters) deep. Using the UK’s deepest diving vehicle – the Hadal-Lander – an international team of marine biologists, geologists, microbiologists and geneticists recently probed this area, captured video of the world’s deepest ocean life, discovered some new species and set a new record for the world’s deepest known fish.


Just before Christmas (December 19, 2014), the University of Aberdeen released information and the video above, based on these scientists’ recent 30-day journey to this cavernous part of the ocean floor.


Mysterious supergiant amphipod, filmed alive for the first time. This extremely large crustacean was first recovered by traps off New Zealand in 2012.

Mysterious supergiant amphipod, filmed alive for the first time. This extremely large crustacean was first recovered by traps off New Zealand in 2012.



Deepest known fish is now a snailfish, the fragile creature to the left of center in this image, at a depth of 8,145 meters in the Mariana Trench.

Deepest known fish is now a snailfish, the fragile creature to the left of center in this image, at a depth of 8,145 meters in the Mariana Trench.



Among other things, they captured the first footage of a live and very mysterious supergiant amphipod. This creature, an extremely large crustacean, was first recovered by traps off New Zealand in 2012. The new footage shows the supergiants swimming, feeding and fending off would-be predators with its large body size and protective tail. Alan Jamieson from the University of Aberdeen was part of the expedition. He said:



Knowing these creatures exist is one thing, but to watch them alive in their natural habitat and interacting with other species is truly amazing.



The video footage also shows a type of snailfish at depths of 8,145 meters – 500 meters further down than the greatest depth that fish had been observed prior to this expedition. Jamison said:



This really deep fish did not look like anything we had seen before, nor does it look like anything we know of. It is unbelievably fragile, with large wing-like fins and a head resembling a cartoon dog.



In all, the scientists completed 92 deployments of deep-sampling equipment across the entire depth range of the trench (5000 meters to 10,600 meters deep). That’s the greatest number deployed to the Mariana Trench so far, they say.


The scientists and their diving vehicle traveled aboard Schmidt Ocean Institute’s Research Vessel Falkor.


Mariana Trench in the western Pacific. The trench is some 1,580 miles long (about 2,550 km), with an average width of only 43 miles (69 km). Image via Wallace at Wikimedia Commons.

Mariana Trench in the western Pacific. The trench is some 1,580 miles long (about 2,550 km), with an average width of only 43 miles (69 km). Image via Wallace at Wikimedia Commons.



Bottom line: An international team of scientists has set a new record for the deepest known ocean fish. They were filming in the Mariana Trench – the deepest part of the ocean.


Via University of Aberdeen






from EarthSky http://earthsky.org/earth/new-video-shows-life-in-the-deepest-ocean

Video: Does being cold make you sick?



Wintertime is here and baby it’s cold outside!


But when you say “Hey being cold doesn’t give you a cold,” … are you right?






from EarthSky http://earthsky.org/human-world/does-being-cold-make-you-sick


Wintertime is here and baby it’s cold outside!


But when you say “Hey being cold doesn’t give you a cold,” … are you right?






from EarthSky http://earthsky.org/human-world/does-being-cold-make-you-sick

2014 Castle Excavation Reports [Aardvarchaeology]

Things are coming together with the post-excavation work for last summer’s castle investigations so I’m putting some stuff on-line here.



  • I’ve submitted a paper detailing the main results to a proceedings volume for the Castella Maris Baltici symposium in Lodz back in May. There are no illustrations in the file, but you’ll find all you need here on the blog in various entries tagged ”Castles”.

  • Osteologist Rudolf Gustavsson has completed his reports on the bones from the two sites (LandsjöStensö).


For the Dear Reader who doesn’t read Swedish, a short summary of Rudolf’s results is in order. As expected, there are no human bones: this is food waste. The material from both sites is dominated by youngish pigs followed by sheep/goat and cattle in roughly equal fragment numbers. Pig parts represented at Landsjö suggest slaughter on site. Chicken was also eaten at both sites. Both sites have fish species that would have been available in the body of water overlooked by the castle. Landsjö’s trench D has large parts of a fox whose femur shows a healed break. It’s from the top layer that probably represents post-Medieval, post-castle slope erosion, and thus doesn’t seem to have anything to do with courtly hunting.


Questions and comments on the documents are most appreciated!






from ScienceBlogs http://scienceblogs.com/aardvarchaeology/2014/12/30/2014-castle-excavation-reports/

Things are coming together with the post-excavation work for last summer’s castle investigations so I’m putting some stuff on-line here.



  • I’ve submitted a paper detailing the main results to a proceedings volume for the Castella Maris Baltici symposium in Lodz back in May. There are no illustrations in the file, but you’ll find all you need here on the blog in various entries tagged ”Castles”.

  • Osteologist Rudolf Gustavsson has completed his reports on the bones from the two sites (LandsjöStensö).


For the Dear Reader who doesn’t read Swedish, a short summary of Rudolf’s results is in order. As expected, there are no human bones: this is food waste. The material from both sites is dominated by youngish pigs followed by sheep/goat and cattle in roughly equal fragment numbers. Pig parts represented at Landsjö suggest slaughter on site. Chicken was also eaten at both sites. Both sites have fish species that would have been available in the body of water overlooked by the castle. Landsjö’s trench D has large parts of a fox whose femur shows a healed break. It’s from the top layer that probably represents post-Medieval, post-castle slope erosion, and thus doesn’t seem to have anything to do with courtly hunting.


Questions and comments on the documents are most appreciated!






from ScienceBlogs http://scienceblogs.com/aardvarchaeology/2014/12/30/2014-castle-excavation-reports/

Year’s end at Achill Island, Ireland


Photo credit: Conor Ledwith

Photo credit: Conor Ledwith Photography



Conor Ledwith took this photo. He wrote:



Hi folks, a selfie taken last night at Achill Island, Mayo. Slievemore is the mountain in front of me.



Achill Island in County Mayo is the largest island off the coast of Ireland. It’s situated off Ireland’s west coast. The mountain Slievemore is at the north end of the island.


Thanks for sharing, Conor! See more photos by Conor Ledwith Photography






from EarthSky http://earthsky.org/todays-image/years-end-at-achill-island-ireland

Photo credit: Conor Ledwith

Photo credit: Conor Ledwith Photography



Conor Ledwith took this photo. He wrote:



Hi folks, a selfie taken last night at Achill Island, Mayo. Slievemore is the mountain in front of me.



Achill Island in County Mayo is the largest island off the coast of Ireland. It’s situated off Ireland’s west coast. The mountain Slievemore is at the north end of the island.


Thanks for sharing, Conor! See more photos by Conor Ledwith Photography






from EarthSky http://earthsky.org/todays-image/years-end-at-achill-island-ireland

Find the bright Dog Stars on December evenings


Tonight, look for the two Dog Stars. The brighter of the two is Sirius, which makes up the neck of the constellation Canis Major, the Greater Dog. Sirius is easy to spot, because it also happens to be the brightest of all the stars we see in our night sky. The other Dog Star is Procyon in the constellation Canis Minor the Lesser Dog. Procyon means “before the Dog” because this star’s rising signals that Sirius, the Dog star, is soon to follow Procyon into the sky.


There’s a comet in the sky now that you can see with binoculars. In fact, if the moon weren’t so bright now, you might be able to see this comet with your eye, under exceptionally good sky conditions. Doesn’t matter. Dust off the binoculars and try to see Comet Lovejoy! At the moment, it’s not far in the sky from the stars Sirius and Procyon. Click here to see photos and get more info about Comet Lovejoy.


Donate: Your support means the world to us


View larger. | Chart via Virtual Telescope Project. Join its live comet viewing on January 6 and 11.

View larger. | Chart via Virtual Telescope Project. Join its live comet viewing on January 6 and 11.



Also bright in the sky, although less so than Sirius, is the star Adhara, which makes up the Larger Dog’s bottom right foot. Although it’s true that Sirius has the brightest apparent magnitude of all the visible stars, Adhara actually has a brighter absolute magnitude than Sirius. In other words, Sirius looks bright to us because it’s closer. But if the two stars were observed at an equal distance from Earth, Adhara would appear brighter than Sirius.


Apparent magnitude is the measure of brightness of a star as seen from Earth at the star’s natural distance. Absolute magnitude is the measure of the brightness of a star as seen from Earth if the star were placed at a distance of 32.6 light-years from the Earth. So, while Sirius may be the brighter star, this is not because it is intrinsically more luminous. It is because Sirius is much closer to the Earth than Adhara.


Sky chart of the constellation Canis Major the larger Dog


View Larger Orion's Belt, the compact line of three stars at the upper right, points to the star Sirius, the Dog star.

View Larger Orion’s Belt, the compact line of three stars at the upper right, points to the star Sirius, the Dog star.



Bottom line: If you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, and you look towards the southeast tonight in late evening, you’ll find Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. Sirius is also the brighter of the two Dog Stars. It is said to represent the neck of the constellation Canis Major, the Greater Dog. The other Dog Star is nearby Procyon, in the constellation Canis Minor the Lesser Dog. Also in this part of the sky … Comet Lovejoy. Click here to find out more about the comet.


Live by the moon with your 2015 EarthSky lunar calendar!


Rising times of Procyon and Sirius into your sky






from EarthSky http://earthsky.org/tonight/find-dog-stars-on-december-late-evenings

Tonight, look for the two Dog Stars. The brighter of the two is Sirius, which makes up the neck of the constellation Canis Major, the Greater Dog. Sirius is easy to spot, because it also happens to be the brightest of all the stars we see in our night sky. The other Dog Star is Procyon in the constellation Canis Minor the Lesser Dog. Procyon means “before the Dog” because this star’s rising signals that Sirius, the Dog star, is soon to follow Procyon into the sky.


There’s a comet in the sky now that you can see with binoculars. In fact, if the moon weren’t so bright now, you might be able to see this comet with your eye, under exceptionally good sky conditions. Doesn’t matter. Dust off the binoculars and try to see Comet Lovejoy! At the moment, it’s not far in the sky from the stars Sirius and Procyon. Click here to see photos and get more info about Comet Lovejoy.


Donate: Your support means the world to us


View larger. | Chart via Virtual Telescope Project. Join its live comet viewing on January 6 and 11.

View larger. | Chart via Virtual Telescope Project. Join its live comet viewing on January 6 and 11.



Also bright in the sky, although less so than Sirius, is the star Adhara, which makes up the Larger Dog’s bottom right foot. Although it’s true that Sirius has the brightest apparent magnitude of all the visible stars, Adhara actually has a brighter absolute magnitude than Sirius. In other words, Sirius looks bright to us because it’s closer. But if the two stars were observed at an equal distance from Earth, Adhara would appear brighter than Sirius.


Apparent magnitude is the measure of brightness of a star as seen from Earth at the star’s natural distance. Absolute magnitude is the measure of the brightness of a star as seen from Earth if the star were placed at a distance of 32.6 light-years from the Earth. So, while Sirius may be the brighter star, this is not because it is intrinsically more luminous. It is because Sirius is much closer to the Earth than Adhara.


Sky chart of the constellation Canis Major the larger Dog


View Larger Orion's Belt, the compact line of three stars at the upper right, points to the star Sirius, the Dog star.

View Larger Orion’s Belt, the compact line of three stars at the upper right, points to the star Sirius, the Dog star.



Bottom line: If you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, and you look towards the southeast tonight in late evening, you’ll find Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. Sirius is also the brighter of the two Dog Stars. It is said to represent the neck of the constellation Canis Major, the Greater Dog. The other Dog Star is nearby Procyon, in the constellation Canis Minor the Lesser Dog. Also in this part of the sky … Comet Lovejoy. Click here to find out more about the comet.


Live by the moon with your 2015 EarthSky lunar calendar!


Rising times of Procyon and Sirius into your sky






from EarthSky http://earthsky.org/tonight/find-dog-stars-on-december-late-evenings

Read the message your dog sends with his tail



Tail-wagging in dogs is the classic signal for happiness. But researchers have found that tail-wagging can mean that your dog is either happy or stressed.


Activation of the left-brain causes a dog’s tail to wag to the right. Activation of the right-brain causes a wag to the left. That’s not new knowledge. Scientists detected that difference seven years ago.


What is new is that, not surprisingly, other dogs can easily read the message your dog is sending with his tail. And so can you.


Researchers at the University of Trento in Italy tested 43 dogs of various breeds for their ability to distinguish between tail wags. They showed the dogs videos of other dogs wagging their tails (much like the one above) and monitored the dogs’ heart rates and reactions. How could they be sure that the dogs weren’t watching their canine buddies’ facial or body cues? The researchers also showed the dogs only a silhouetted version of a tail-wagging dog.


As it turned out, every dog responded the same way. Dogs watching other dogs wag their tails to the left looked anxious, and their heart rates increased. In other words, they, too, became stressed. But dogs watching others swing their tails to the right stayed calm and relaxed — an indication that right wags are an expression of companionship and confidence, according to these scientists.


Why study tail wags in dogs? The team said in the summary to their study, which was published in Current Biology last year:



The finding that dogs are sensitive to the asymmetric tail expressions of other dogs supports the hypothesis of a link between brain asymmetry and social behavior and may prove useful to canine animal welfare theory and practice.



Bottom line: A dog wagging his tail to the right is happy, but a dog wagging to the left is stressed, say researchers.






from EarthSky http://earthsky.org/earth/read-the-message-your-dog-sends-with-his-tail


Tail-wagging in dogs is the classic signal for happiness. But researchers have found that tail-wagging can mean that your dog is either happy or stressed.


Activation of the left-brain causes a dog’s tail to wag to the right. Activation of the right-brain causes a wag to the left. That’s not new knowledge. Scientists detected that difference seven years ago.


What is new is that, not surprisingly, other dogs can easily read the message your dog is sending with his tail. And so can you.


Researchers at the University of Trento in Italy tested 43 dogs of various breeds for their ability to distinguish between tail wags. They showed the dogs videos of other dogs wagging their tails (much like the one above) and monitored the dogs’ heart rates and reactions. How could they be sure that the dogs weren’t watching their canine buddies’ facial or body cues? The researchers also showed the dogs only a silhouetted version of a tail-wagging dog.


As it turned out, every dog responded the same way. Dogs watching other dogs wag their tails to the left looked anxious, and their heart rates increased. In other words, they, too, became stressed. But dogs watching others swing their tails to the right stayed calm and relaxed — an indication that right wags are an expression of companionship and confidence, according to these scientists.


Why study tail wags in dogs? The team said in the summary to their study, which was published in Current Biology last year:



The finding that dogs are sensitive to the asymmetric tail expressions of other dogs supports the hypothesis of a link between brain asymmetry and social behavior and may prove useful to canine animal welfare theory and practice.



Bottom line: A dog wagging his tail to the right is happy, but a dog wagging to the left is stressed, say researchers.






from EarthSky http://earthsky.org/earth/read-the-message-your-dog-sends-with-his-tail