Jonathan Marks has written a terribly wrong-headed article — it’s embarrassingly bad, especially for someone who claims to be writing popular anthropology articles. He’s adamant that humans aren’t apes. He’s not denying evolutionary descent from a common ancestor, he just seems to fail to understand the nature of taxonomic categories.
What are we? We are human. Apes are hairy, sleep in trees, and fling their poo. I should make it clear: Nobody likes apes more than I do; I support their preservation in the wild and their sensitive treatment in captivity. I also don’t think I’m better than them. I’m smarter than they are, and they are stronger than I am. I’m just not one of them, regardless of my ancestry. I am different from them. And so are you. You and I have 46 chromosomes in our cells; chimpanzees have 48. They are indeed very similar, but if you know what to look for, you can tell their cells apart quite readily.
Wow. So wrong.
He’s confusing species with higher levels of the taxonomic hierarchy, that is, the leaves for the branches. If he’s going to take that attitude, there are no apes anywhere — there is no single species we’d call “apes”. Chimpanzees could similarly protest that they aren’t apes, they have a set of characteristics that distinguish them from those other apes, gorillas, humans, and orangutans. Gorillas could announce that they are Gorilla gorilla gorillia, not some damn dirty ape like chimps or humans or orangutans. And so on.
Of course we’re apes. We’re members of a broad group of related animals, and we call that taxonomic group the apes. What he’s doing is similar to if I declared that I’m not human, I’m an American — rejecting affiliation with a general category to claim exclusive membership to a subcategory.
And he goes on and on about it. Sorry, but I detest that definition by chromosome number. Are Down syndrome people not human? Minor rearrangements of chromosomes are fairly common — do they break some membership rule, so that you’re kicked out of the human club if you don’t have your genes in the right order?
He also has a cartoonish definition of apes. They live in trees and are hairy and throw poo. Again, it’s using the circumstantial to displace the general. “Ape” is a statement of relationship, not an individual — so to deny your apishness is to deny your history.
He almost sort of gets it.
And indeed we–that is, Homo sapiens–fall phylogenetically within the group that we call “apes.” Shouldn’t that make us apes?
Yes.
On the other hand, we also fall phylogenetically within the group that we call “fish.” That is to say, a coelacanth is more closely related to us than it is to a trout. So we fall within the category that encompasses both coelacanths and trout, namely, fish.
Yes! He almost has it!
Then, failure.
Yet we are not fish. There are certainly things to be understood by confronting our fish ancestry (such as our gestation in a saline, aqueous environment), but fish can’t read, so if you are reading this, then you are not a fish.
Jonathan Marks: go back to school and learn some cladistics. You don’t identify a clade by autapomorphies, or traits that are novel to a species, like reading. It’s like declaring that zebrafish have horizontal stripes, and fish don’t have stripes, therefore they are not fish. It’s stupid on multiple levels.
Until you’ve mastered the basic concepts, I’d appreciate it if you stopped miseducating the public, too.
from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1LLKorw
Jonathan Marks has written a terribly wrong-headed article — it’s embarrassingly bad, especially for someone who claims to be writing popular anthropology articles. He’s adamant that humans aren’t apes. He’s not denying evolutionary descent from a common ancestor, he just seems to fail to understand the nature of taxonomic categories.
What are we? We are human. Apes are hairy, sleep in trees, and fling their poo. I should make it clear: Nobody likes apes more than I do; I support their preservation in the wild and their sensitive treatment in captivity. I also don’t think I’m better than them. I’m smarter than they are, and they are stronger than I am. I’m just not one of them, regardless of my ancestry. I am different from them. And so are you. You and I have 46 chromosomes in our cells; chimpanzees have 48. They are indeed very similar, but if you know what to look for, you can tell their cells apart quite readily.
Wow. So wrong.
He’s confusing species with higher levels of the taxonomic hierarchy, that is, the leaves for the branches. If he’s going to take that attitude, there are no apes anywhere — there is no single species we’d call “apes”. Chimpanzees could similarly protest that they aren’t apes, they have a set of characteristics that distinguish them from those other apes, gorillas, humans, and orangutans. Gorillas could announce that they are Gorilla gorilla gorillia, not some damn dirty ape like chimps or humans or orangutans. And so on.
Of course we’re apes. We’re members of a broad group of related animals, and we call that taxonomic group the apes. What he’s doing is similar to if I declared that I’m not human, I’m an American — rejecting affiliation with a general category to claim exclusive membership to a subcategory.
And he goes on and on about it. Sorry, but I detest that definition by chromosome number. Are Down syndrome people not human? Minor rearrangements of chromosomes are fairly common — do they break some membership rule, so that you’re kicked out of the human club if you don’t have your genes in the right order?
He also has a cartoonish definition of apes. They live in trees and are hairy and throw poo. Again, it’s using the circumstantial to displace the general. “Ape” is a statement of relationship, not an individual — so to deny your apishness is to deny your history.
He almost sort of gets it.
And indeed we–that is, Homo sapiens–fall phylogenetically within the group that we call “apes.” Shouldn’t that make us apes?
Yes.
On the other hand, we also fall phylogenetically within the group that we call “fish.” That is to say, a coelacanth is more closely related to us than it is to a trout. So we fall within the category that encompasses both coelacanths and trout, namely, fish.
Yes! He almost has it!
Then, failure.
Yet we are not fish. There are certainly things to be understood by confronting our fish ancestry (such as our gestation in a saline, aqueous environment), but fish can’t read, so if you are reading this, then you are not a fish.
Jonathan Marks: go back to school and learn some cladistics. You don’t identify a clade by autapomorphies, or traits that are novel to a species, like reading. It’s like declaring that zebrafish have horizontal stripes, and fish don’t have stripes, therefore they are not fish. It’s stupid on multiple levels.
Until you’ve mastered the basic concepts, I’d appreciate it if you stopped miseducating the public, too.
In 1993, the NIH Revitalization Act put into law the requirement for women’s inclusion in NIH-funded clinical research. In 2010, the Institute of Medicine reported, “women’s health research has contributed to significant progress over the past 20 years in lessening the burden of disease and reducing deaths from some conditions, while other conditions have seen only moderate change or even little or no change.” A new report from the Government Accountability Office on women’s inclusion in research comes to a similar conclusion: NIH has made progress, but still must do more to ensure that federally funded research can be used to improve care for both women and men.
At the request of several members of Congress, the GAO examined women’s enrollment in NIH-funded clinical trials as well as NIH efforts to monitor trials’ design and implementation for their ability to address potential sex differences. The GAO found that when considering all NIH clinical research as a whole, more women than men have been enrolled every year since 2005. However, GAO found that it was harder to assess the sex breakdown of research participants for research on a specific medical condition, such as obesity, to see if women might be underrepresented in certain studies. The GAO report also notes that although NIH collects enrollment data by sex from each of its institutes and centers, it doesn’t share that data with the public.
Researchers who apply to NIH for funding of phase III clinical trials (the stage that typically involves hundreds of participants) must “assess whether an analysis of potential sex differences is merited, and if so, develop a plan to analyze study results accordingly.” NIH relies on the peer reviewers who evaluate funding applications to consider this aspect of proposals; after awards are made, NIH program officers monitor the researchers’ progress. The program officers’ knowledge about individual studies’ analysis of sex differences isn’t sufficiently aggregated, though — and, the GAO investigation found, that may be due to outdated reporting systems:
Currently, program officers review awardees’ progress reports—including any information reported regarding the analysis of potential sex differences—but do not have means, such as a written checklist or a required field in an electronic reporting system, for recording the information obtained through this monitoring, as they do for monitoring enrollment. NIH’s awardee data system includes information on whether individual awards include phase III trials. However, the data system does not have a data element that denotes whether an awardee’s study should include or has plans for an analysis of potential sex differences.
It sounds like a fix is in progress, though:
NIH officials also told us that they plan to add a question for this type of monitoring to the existing electronic checklist used by program officers in the fall of this year, to be implemented for awards funded in fiscal year 2016.
Another proposed NIH policy in the works is to require all NIH-funded clinical trials to register and submit summary results, including the sex of participants, to the ClinicalTrials.gov database. (Registration is currently only required for trials of FDA-regulated drugs and devices.) Sex-specific results would only have to be reported if these were among the pre-specified primary and secondary outcome measures, though. In other words, researchers would have to report the number of women and men enrolled in a trial, but would only have to report if an intervention was more or less effective in women if that was one of the main questions they had planned to investigate.
Overall, it seems that NIH is making progress on assuring that taxpayer-funded clinical research addresses potential sex differences that were ignored for too long. But clinical research is only one piece of a larger picture. As a report published last year by the Mary Horrigan Connors Center for Women’s Health at Brigham and Women’s Hospital explains, sex needs to be considered at every stage of research – from early lab research, to clinical trials, to translating research results into clinical practice and, finally, understanding health outcomes in both women and men.
Twenty-five years ago, women did not have much to celebrate when it came to scientific advances – we weren’t even at the table. Now researchers look at disease in a gender-specific way, and we’ve made great strides in breast cancer and cervical cancer research, AIDS research, and mapping the human genome. We must continue to raise awareness, raise consciousness and raise hell so that women are not left behind when it comes to their health.
Senator Mikulski has announced that she will leave the Senate next year after five terms. I hope her successor will be as strong a champion for women’s health as she has been.
In 1993, the NIH Revitalization Act put into law the requirement for women’s inclusion in NIH-funded clinical research. In 2010, the Institute of Medicine reported, “women’s health research has contributed to significant progress over the past 20 years in lessening the burden of disease and reducing deaths from some conditions, while other conditions have seen only moderate change or even little or no change.” A new report from the Government Accountability Office on women’s inclusion in research comes to a similar conclusion: NIH has made progress, but still must do more to ensure that federally funded research can be used to improve care for both women and men.
At the request of several members of Congress, the GAO examined women’s enrollment in NIH-funded clinical trials as well as NIH efforts to monitor trials’ design and implementation for their ability to address potential sex differences. The GAO found that when considering all NIH clinical research as a whole, more women than men have been enrolled every year since 2005. However, GAO found that it was harder to assess the sex breakdown of research participants for research on a specific medical condition, such as obesity, to see if women might be underrepresented in certain studies. The GAO report also notes that although NIH collects enrollment data by sex from each of its institutes and centers, it doesn’t share that data with the public.
Researchers who apply to NIH for funding of phase III clinical trials (the stage that typically involves hundreds of participants) must “assess whether an analysis of potential sex differences is merited, and if so, develop a plan to analyze study results accordingly.” NIH relies on the peer reviewers who evaluate funding applications to consider this aspect of proposals; after awards are made, NIH program officers monitor the researchers’ progress. The program officers’ knowledge about individual studies’ analysis of sex differences isn’t sufficiently aggregated, though — and, the GAO investigation found, that may be due to outdated reporting systems:
Currently, program officers review awardees’ progress reports—including any information reported regarding the analysis of potential sex differences—but do not have means, such as a written checklist or a required field in an electronic reporting system, for recording the information obtained through this monitoring, as they do for monitoring enrollment. NIH’s awardee data system includes information on whether individual awards include phase III trials. However, the data system does not have a data element that denotes whether an awardee’s study should include or has plans for an analysis of potential sex differences.
It sounds like a fix is in progress, though:
NIH officials also told us that they plan to add a question for this type of monitoring to the existing electronic checklist used by program officers in the fall of this year, to be implemented for awards funded in fiscal year 2016.
Another proposed NIH policy in the works is to require all NIH-funded clinical trials to register and submit summary results, including the sex of participants, to the ClinicalTrials.gov database. (Registration is currently only required for trials of FDA-regulated drugs and devices.) Sex-specific results would only have to be reported if these were among the pre-specified primary and secondary outcome measures, though. In other words, researchers would have to report the number of women and men enrolled in a trial, but would only have to report if an intervention was more or less effective in women if that was one of the main questions they had planned to investigate.
Overall, it seems that NIH is making progress on assuring that taxpayer-funded clinical research addresses potential sex differences that were ignored for too long. But clinical research is only one piece of a larger picture. As a report published last year by the Mary Horrigan Connors Center for Women’s Health at Brigham and Women’s Hospital explains, sex needs to be considered at every stage of research – from early lab research, to clinical trials, to translating research results into clinical practice and, finally, understanding health outcomes in both women and men.
Twenty-five years ago, women did not have much to celebrate when it came to scientific advances – we weren’t even at the table. Now researchers look at disease in a gender-specific way, and we’ve made great strides in breast cancer and cervical cancer research, AIDS research, and mapping the human genome. We must continue to raise awareness, raise consciousness and raise hell so that women are not left behind when it comes to their health.
Senator Mikulski has announced that she will leave the Senate next year after five terms. I hope her successor will be as strong a champion for women’s health as she has been.
There was an interesting announcement this weekend (October 30, 2015) about a new project called UFO Detection and TrAcking, aka UFODATA. The project’s team says it wants to make the study of UFO phenomena “a systematic, rigorous science” and to design, build and deploy a global network of automated surveillance stations that will monitor the skies for UFOs full-time.
Although it’s organized as a separate, all-volunteer, nonprofit organization, UFODATA appears to be an offshoot of the Center for UFO Studies. That center was founded in the 1970s by J. Allen Hynek, the professional astronomer who coined the phrase close encounters. Hynek had earlier been drafted to serve as a consultant to a U.S. Air Force study, begun in 1952, to investigate unidentified flying objects. This was the famous Project Blue Book. Hynek’s bio at the Center for UFO studies says he was at first skeptical about the UFO phenomenon, but later, it seems, he became profoundly curious. When he established the Center for UFO Studies in 1973, Hynek wanted to bring together scientists and other highly-trained technical experts, who would work to solve what he saw as the UFO enigma.
Now, 42 years later, UFODATA wants to do exactly the same thing, with the help of a big new idea.
Dr. Mark Rodeghier – whose PhD is in sociology, and who makes his living as a consultant in statistical analysis and survey research – is head of the all-volunteer Center for UFO Studies. He is helping to drive the push to making UFO studies a more rigorous science. Image via University of Illinois Alumni Association.
Mark Rodeghier, UFODATA board member and scientific director and president of the Center for UFO Studies, a position he’s held since Hynek’s death in 1986, said in an October 30 statement:
It has become clear that any breakthrough in our understanding of the UFO phenomenon will require a break from the past. Witness testimony, photos and videos, and government documents have taken us only so far; instead, we need to record and study UFOs directly, as other sciences do with their own specific objects.
Of course, this is a daunting task, but it is made conceivable by advances in technology, software, communication capabilities, and power sources.
Another prominent board member is Leslie Kean, an investigative journalist and author of the New York Times bestseller UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record. In October, Leslie Kean made a couple of pre-announcements in print leading up to this weekend’s official announcement from the UFODATA project itself. One – published October 14, 2015 – was huffingtonpost.com on what she called the launch of a new UFO science. Also in October, 2015, Kean wrote at pyschologytomorrowmagazine.com on the UFO taboo, saying:
The subject of UFOs is not a simple issue to address. It is one of the most misunderstood scientific problems we face today – so much so, that many scientists do not even consider it to be in the category of a problem worth studying. There is a great deal of misinformation and prejudice against it, confusion about what a UFO actually is (and isn’t), and attitudes of ridicule have permeated the culture for decades.
In fact, taking UFOs seriously has become taboo.
I felt that taboo, too, before deciding to write this post.
The great majority of UFO reports can be easily identified as misperceived stars and planets, balloons, other atmospheric phenomena, or birds or insects in cell phone photos, among many terrestrial sources. The UFODATA project instead is interested in the small, but potentially significant, remainder of reports that cannot be so easily explained.
Importantly, the project does not assume that these unexplained reports are caused by extraterrestrial intelligence; the project has the goal of simply learning more about the characteristics of truly puzzling sightings and following the science, wherever it leads.
Here’s the big new idea. UFODATA wants to deploy a crowd-funded global network of automated surveillance stations that would monitor the skies continuously for UFOs. They would place them in known UFO hotspots such as those in the western United States and in Hessdalen, Norway. As unidentified objects are spotted, the team then will collect as much physical data about them as possible. They want to know, for example, the type and intensity of radiation being emitted by the UFO and its surroundings, and how that light might change over the time it’s being observed. They speak of the simultaneous use of:
… photometric, spectroscopic, magnetometric and radio-spectrometric (VLF-ELF and UHF) instrumentation.
An interesting aspect of this project is the scale. The UFODATA team is talking about:
… taking advantage of the internet and new surveillance technologies to build an entire network of stations that can take multiple sophisticated measurements simultaneously.
On its website, UFODATA says the cost of developing a prototype station, including not just the equipment, camera, and sensors, but also software, construction and testing, will be “several tens of thousands of dollars.” Subsequent stations will cost less.
The team says its first goal is to raise enough money to design and construct one prototype station, and they hope that prototype phase will last one year. After that, the team wants to deploy the first station and begin construction of as many additional stations as funding permits.
The project, at this time, is not funded. But the team hopes it can use crowd-funding to solve that problem. UFODATA’s FAQ page says:
Regrettably, because of the authoritative taboo on taking UFOs seriously, official funding for the systematic study of UAP is essentially non-existent, in both the USA and Europe. This was true in the past and is still true today. So even if the scientific community was open and willing to examine scientific evidence for UFOs – and we know that some scientists are – it takes resources to do the research to provide that evidence.
Crowd-funding has proven to be an invaluable tool to raise money for projects that, for whatever reason, are not deemed worthy of research grants from the authorities. We know millions of people worldwide are very interested in UFOs, and would like to find out what they are, just as we would.
The team says it plans to launch its first crowd-funding campaign in a few months, but in the meantime you can donate.
Potentially habitable exoplanets. Image posted October 14, 2015 by the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo. Read more about these exoplanets.
Bottom line: UFODATA wants to make UFO studies a science. It wants to design, build and deploy a global network of automated surveillance stations to watch for UFOs full-time.
There was an interesting announcement this weekend (October 30, 2015) about a new project called UFO Detection and TrAcking, aka UFODATA. The project’s team says it wants to make the study of UFO phenomena “a systematic, rigorous science” and to design, build and deploy a global network of automated surveillance stations that will monitor the skies for UFOs full-time.
Although it’s organized as a separate, all-volunteer, nonprofit organization, UFODATA appears to be an offshoot of the Center for UFO Studies. That center was founded in the 1970s by J. Allen Hynek, the professional astronomer who coined the phrase close encounters. Hynek had earlier been drafted to serve as a consultant to a U.S. Air Force study, begun in 1952, to investigate unidentified flying objects. This was the famous Project Blue Book. Hynek’s bio at the Center for UFO studies says he was at first skeptical about the UFO phenomenon, but later, it seems, he became profoundly curious. When he established the Center for UFO Studies in 1973, Hynek wanted to bring together scientists and other highly-trained technical experts, who would work to solve what he saw as the UFO enigma.
Now, 42 years later, UFODATA wants to do exactly the same thing, with the help of a big new idea.
Dr. Mark Rodeghier – whose PhD is in sociology, and who makes his living as a consultant in statistical analysis and survey research – is head of the all-volunteer Center for UFO Studies. He is helping to drive the push to making UFO studies a more rigorous science. Image via University of Illinois Alumni Association.
Mark Rodeghier, UFODATA board member and scientific director and president of the Center for UFO Studies, a position he’s held since Hynek’s death in 1986, said in an October 30 statement:
It has become clear that any breakthrough in our understanding of the UFO phenomenon will require a break from the past. Witness testimony, photos and videos, and government documents have taken us only so far; instead, we need to record and study UFOs directly, as other sciences do with their own specific objects.
Of course, this is a daunting task, but it is made conceivable by advances in technology, software, communication capabilities, and power sources.
Another prominent board member is Leslie Kean, an investigative journalist and author of the New York Times bestseller UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record. In October, Leslie Kean made a couple of pre-announcements in print leading up to this weekend’s official announcement from the UFODATA project itself. One – published October 14, 2015 – was huffingtonpost.com on what she called the launch of a new UFO science. Also in October, 2015, Kean wrote at pyschologytomorrowmagazine.com on the UFO taboo, saying:
The subject of UFOs is not a simple issue to address. It is one of the most misunderstood scientific problems we face today – so much so, that many scientists do not even consider it to be in the category of a problem worth studying. There is a great deal of misinformation and prejudice against it, confusion about what a UFO actually is (and isn’t), and attitudes of ridicule have permeated the culture for decades.
In fact, taking UFOs seriously has become taboo.
I felt that taboo, too, before deciding to write this post.
The great majority of UFO reports can be easily identified as misperceived stars and planets, balloons, other atmospheric phenomena, or birds or insects in cell phone photos, among many terrestrial sources. The UFODATA project instead is interested in the small, but potentially significant, remainder of reports that cannot be so easily explained.
Importantly, the project does not assume that these unexplained reports are caused by extraterrestrial intelligence; the project has the goal of simply learning more about the characteristics of truly puzzling sightings and following the science, wherever it leads.
Here’s the big new idea. UFODATA wants to deploy a crowd-funded global network of automated surveillance stations that would monitor the skies continuously for UFOs. They would place them in known UFO hotspots such as those in the western United States and in Hessdalen, Norway. As unidentified objects are spotted, the team then will collect as much physical data about them as possible. They want to know, for example, the type and intensity of radiation being emitted by the UFO and its surroundings, and how that light might change over the time it’s being observed. They speak of the simultaneous use of:
… photometric, spectroscopic, magnetometric and radio-spectrometric (VLF-ELF and UHF) instrumentation.
An interesting aspect of this project is the scale. The UFODATA team is talking about:
… taking advantage of the internet and new surveillance technologies to build an entire network of stations that can take multiple sophisticated measurements simultaneously.
On its website, UFODATA says the cost of developing a prototype station, including not just the equipment, camera, and sensors, but also software, construction and testing, will be “several tens of thousands of dollars.” Subsequent stations will cost less.
The team says its first goal is to raise enough money to design and construct one prototype station, and they hope that prototype phase will last one year. After that, the team wants to deploy the first station and begin construction of as many additional stations as funding permits.
The project, at this time, is not funded. But the team hopes it can use crowd-funding to solve that problem. UFODATA’s FAQ page says:
Regrettably, because of the authoritative taboo on taking UFOs seriously, official funding for the systematic study of UAP is essentially non-existent, in both the USA and Europe. This was true in the past and is still true today. So even if the scientific community was open and willing to examine scientific evidence for UFOs – and we know that some scientists are – it takes resources to do the research to provide that evidence.
Crowd-funding has proven to be an invaluable tool to raise money for projects that, for whatever reason, are not deemed worthy of research grants from the authorities. We know millions of people worldwide are very interested in UFOs, and would like to find out what they are, just as we would.
The team says it plans to launch its first crowd-funding campaign in a few months, but in the meantime you can donate.
Potentially habitable exoplanets. Image posted October 14, 2015 by the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo. Read more about these exoplanets.
Bottom line: UFODATA wants to make UFO studies a science. It wants to design, build and deploy a global network of automated surveillance stations to watch for UFOs full-time.
Within this century, parts of the Persian Gulf region could be hit with unprecedented events of deadly heat as a result of climate change, according to a recent climate study. The researchers conclude that conditions in the Persian Gulf region make it, according to the researchers:
… a specific regional hotspot where climate change, in absence of significant mitigation, is likely to severely impact human habitability in the future.
The Persian Gulf region is especially vulnerable, the researchers say, because of a combination of low elevations, clear sky, water body that increases heat absorption, and the shallowness of the Persian Gulf itself, which produces high water temperatures that lead to strong evaporation and very high humidity.
Elfatih Eltahir, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT, and Jeremy Pal of Loyola Marymount University conducted the study, which was published on October 26, 2015 in the journal Nature Climate Change.
The researchers ran high-resolution versions of standard climate models to learn that many major cities in the region – even in shaded and well-ventilated spaces – could begin routinely to exceed a tipping point for human survival.
Cities such as Doha, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, and Bandar Abbas in Iran, were among those mentioned in the study.
Rub’ al Khali desert in the Arabian Peninsula
That tipping point involves a measurement called the wet-bulb temperature that combines temperature and humidity, reflecting conditions the human body could maintain without artificial cooling. That threshold for survival for more than six unprotected hours is 35 degrees Celsius, or about 95 degrees Fahrenheit, according to recently published research. (The equivalent number in the National Weather Service’s more commonly used “heat index” would be about 165 Fahrenheit, or 73 degrees Celsius).
This limit was almost reached this summer, at the end of a week-long heat wave in the Persian Gulf region. On July 31, the wet-bulb temperature in Bandahr Mashrahr, Iran, hit 34.6 C — just a fraction below the threshold, for an hour or less.
But the severe danger to human health and life occurs when such temperatures are sustained for several hours, Eltahir says. The models show that by the latter part of this century, major cities such as Doha, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, and Bandar Abbas, Iran, could exceed the 35 C threshold several times over a 30-year period. What’s more, Eltahir said:
Hot summer conditions that now occur once every 20 days or so will characterize the usual summer day in the future.
The research reveals details of a business-as-usual scenario for greenhouse gas emissions, but also shows that curbing emissions could forestall the deadly temperature extremes forecast by these scientists.
While the other side of the Arabian Peninsula, adjacent to the Red Sea, would see less extreme heat, the projections show that dangerous extremes are also likely there, reaching wet-bulb temperatures of 32 to 34 C. This could be a particular concern, the authors note, because the annual Hajj, or annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca — when as many as 2 million pilgrims take part in rituals that include standing outdoors for a full day of prayer — sometimes occurs during these hot months.
While many in the Persian Gulf’s wealthier states might be able to adapt to new climate extremes, poorer areas, such as Yemen, might be less able to cope with such extremes, the authors say.
Bottom line: An MIT study published October 26, 2015 in Nature Climate Change suggests that within this century, parts of the Persian Gulf region could be hit with unprecedented events of deadly heat as a result of climate change.
Within this century, parts of the Persian Gulf region could be hit with unprecedented events of deadly heat as a result of climate change, according to a recent climate study. The researchers conclude that conditions in the Persian Gulf region make it, according to the researchers:
… a specific regional hotspot where climate change, in absence of significant mitigation, is likely to severely impact human habitability in the future.
The Persian Gulf region is especially vulnerable, the researchers say, because of a combination of low elevations, clear sky, water body that increases heat absorption, and the shallowness of the Persian Gulf itself, which produces high water temperatures that lead to strong evaporation and very high humidity.
Elfatih Eltahir, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT, and Jeremy Pal of Loyola Marymount University conducted the study, which was published on October 26, 2015 in the journal Nature Climate Change.
The researchers ran high-resolution versions of standard climate models to learn that many major cities in the region – even in shaded and well-ventilated spaces – could begin routinely to exceed a tipping point for human survival.
Cities such as Doha, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, and Bandar Abbas in Iran, were among those mentioned in the study.
Rub’ al Khali desert in the Arabian Peninsula
That tipping point involves a measurement called the wet-bulb temperature that combines temperature and humidity, reflecting conditions the human body could maintain without artificial cooling. That threshold for survival for more than six unprotected hours is 35 degrees Celsius, or about 95 degrees Fahrenheit, according to recently published research. (The equivalent number in the National Weather Service’s more commonly used “heat index” would be about 165 Fahrenheit, or 73 degrees Celsius).
This limit was almost reached this summer, at the end of a week-long heat wave in the Persian Gulf region. On July 31, the wet-bulb temperature in Bandahr Mashrahr, Iran, hit 34.6 C — just a fraction below the threshold, for an hour or less.
But the severe danger to human health and life occurs when such temperatures are sustained for several hours, Eltahir says. The models show that by the latter part of this century, major cities such as Doha, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, and Bandar Abbas, Iran, could exceed the 35 C threshold several times over a 30-year period. What’s more, Eltahir said:
Hot summer conditions that now occur once every 20 days or so will characterize the usual summer day in the future.
The research reveals details of a business-as-usual scenario for greenhouse gas emissions, but also shows that curbing emissions could forestall the deadly temperature extremes forecast by these scientists.
While the other side of the Arabian Peninsula, adjacent to the Red Sea, would see less extreme heat, the projections show that dangerous extremes are also likely there, reaching wet-bulb temperatures of 32 to 34 C. This could be a particular concern, the authors note, because the annual Hajj, or annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca — when as many as 2 million pilgrims take part in rituals that include standing outdoors for a full day of prayer — sometimes occurs during these hot months.
While many in the Persian Gulf’s wealthier states might be able to adapt to new climate extremes, poorer areas, such as Yemen, might be less able to cope with such extremes, the authors say.
Bottom line: An MIT study published October 26, 2015 in Nature Climate Change suggests that within this century, parts of the Persian Gulf region could be hit with unprecedented events of deadly heat as a result of climate change.
Before yesterday, I had never heard of Ben Swann. Apparently he is the new anchor for the early evening news broadcast of the local Atlanta CBS affiliate, having joined the station in June. Apparently he is also prone to antivaccine conspiracy theories, which is a very bad thing to be prone to as a reporter or anyone working in the news media. I came to learn of Swann because of an article that looks on the verge of going viral (given that relatives have e-mailed me asking me about it) entitled CBS Reporter Ben Swann Tells the Truth About CDC Vaccine Cover-Up. Of course, I can’t help but interjecting here that if Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. thinks you’re telling the truth about vaccines, you really should reassess your reporting skills. Judging from the video from what appears to be the WGCL-CBS46 newscast from Friday night, I don’t think that Swann will be doing that any time soon, given that he calls the story Reality Check: CDC Scientist Admits Data of Vaccines and Autism Was Trashed:
Yes, it’s a news report about the “#CDCtruth” rally protesting the “#CDCwhistleblower” allegations of scientific fraud in a major vaccine-autism study from 2004. It’s also a story rife with antivaccine talking points, an incredibly credulous acceptance of claims made by the antivaccine movement about William Thompson, and outright misinformation, as you will see.
Before we get to Swann’s incompetent story, Thompson, just to remind you, is the CDC scientist who, beginning in November 2013, somehow became chummy with Brian Hooker, a biochemical engineer turned incompetent antivaccine epidemiologist. Why he did it, no one but Thompson knows. Whatever the reason, not realizing that his conversations were being recorded, Thompson spoke to Hooker in several telephone calls in which, apparently racked with guilt over a 2004 study on which he was co-author with Frank DeStefano examining MMR vaccine uptake as a risk factor for autism, he unburdened himself, kvetched about his CDC colleagues, and basically accused the CDC of covering up a finding that earlier MMR vaccination correlated with autism in African American boys. Even if one were to take that finding at face value, it actually was a study that showed that Andrew Wakefield was basically wrong in that no such correlation was found in Caucasians, male or female, African American girls, or any other racial group. That right away should have suggested to Thompson that it’s a spurious finding due to small numbers in the subgroup. It was, of course, a finding that disappeared when proper statistical correction was made for confounders.
As a result of these conversations, Brian Hooker did an epically incompetent “reanalysis” of the paper and managed to get it published in a relatively new journal. What this reanalysis claimed to find was that DeStefano et al. had done some statistical prestidigitation to eliminate a statistically significant difference in African American males correlating with age of MMR vaccination. Of course, as I discussed at the time (as did many others), Hooker, in his love of “simplicity,” had neglected to control for important confounders and imputed way too much significance to a spurious correlation that disappeared when proper correction for confounders was made. As I’ve put it many times, simplicity in statistical analyses of epidemiological data is not a virtue. In any case, so incredibly incompetent was Hooker’s analysis that the journal actually retracted the paper.
Thus was born the “CDC whistleblower.” More of the details can be found in my post about the CDC rally and my review of a book by Kevin Barry that published transcripts of four of telephone calls between Hooker and Thompson. In any case, because Thompson’s allegations appeared to confirm the central conspiracy theory of the antivaccine movement (that the CDC knew vaccines cause autism but were hiding it from the public), the antivaccine movement has been beating this dead horse of a scandal for over a year now, ultimately leading to what even Swann says was only “over a hundred people” showing up to protest by the CDC headquarters in Atlanta.
Finally, courageous Atlanta CBS reporter Ben Swann tells the truth about the Center for Disease Control (CDC) whistleblower, the most censored story of the millennium. CDC’s senior vaccine safety scientist, Dr. William Thompson, has confessed that the CDC vaccine division has been concealing the link between certain vaccines and brain injuries including tics and autism, particularly in African-American children.
Over 100 people gathered outside the CDC in Atlanta demanding transparency when it comes to vaccines. Is there anything to what these people are saying? How about the facts that no one else will share? This is a Reality Check you won’t see anywhere else.
Did it ever occur to Swann that the reason you won’t see this “reality check” anywhere else is because there’s nothing to all the allegations of conspiracy? Sometimes the reason the mainstream press ignores a story is because reporters tend to recognize cranks when they see them. Sure, sometimes it’s because you’re the first reporter to have stumbled on the story, but lack of coverage from the mainstream media does not necessarily (or even often) mean that there’s some sort of conspiracy of silence.
Right off the bat, Swann interviews one of the protesters, who rattles off the usual litany of alleged CDC transgressions in the mind of an antivaccinationist. We see a shot of the crowd (such as it is) with a sign that says “Subpoena Dr. Thompson!” This, of course, makes me wonder what Thompson’s colleagues working for the CDC think of this. After all, in Kevin Barry’s book, the transcripts of his phone conversations with Brian Hooker portray him saying some fairly nasty things about some of them. Then, of course, there is the whole bit about his accusations that Frank DeStefano and the other co-authors on the 2004 MMR paper committed scientific fraud by destroying evidence, a charge he repeated to Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL), who got up on the House floor to demand an investigation into the “scandal” and then again when the announcement was made that the book would soon be published, claiming that Thompson had told him that his coinvestigators had “intentionally withheld controversial findings from the final draft of the Pediatrics paper” and had discarded a lot of the primary data in a big garbage can. At the time, my skeptical antennae started twitching furiously, because the story just didn’t sound credible. The federal government has very specific regulations on data retention and woe be to any federal investigator who doesn’t adhere to them.
In any case, Swann claims that what the protesters are saying, namely that the CDC hasn’t been truthful in its vaccine messaging and science, and that these claims hinge on one man “whom you’ve probably never heard of before,” namely William Thompson. He quotes liberally from a statement issued by William Thompson’s lawyer on August 27, 2014, specifically the parts about Thompson “regretting that my coauthors and I omitted statistically significant information” and claiming that the data suggested that “African American males who received the MMR vaccine before age 36 months were at an increased risk for autism.” Yes, that was his statement, but as I discussed at the time he’s never really shown scientific fraud, only a disagreement over how to analyze and present the data.
Swann reveals that he asked Dr. Thompson for an interview. Not surprisingly, Thompson declined, no doubt at the instruction of his attorney. Swann also didn’t speak to Rep. Posey, although apparently he did speak to someone in his office, who claims that thousands of documents were handed over, although “sources” (unnamed, of course) claim that there were over 100,000 documents. Personally, I wonder where one gets 100,000 documents over a single study. I doubt that the sum total of the documents for every study I’ve ever done comes anywhere near that. On the other hand, I don’t do epidemiology research. Even so, there were less than 2,500 children in the DeStefano et al study; I suppose it’s possible to reach 100,000 documents, depending on how you define “documents.”
Be that as it may, as I related when it happened, the reason Rep. Posey didn’t get much attention when he made these allegations is because he brought it up during what the House calls “Morning Hour” debates, which are usually held on Mondays and Tuesdays and are dedicated to members speaking about whatever they like. It was also the last week the House was in session before its August recess. As I asked at the time: Why give this speech in a Morning Debate a couple of days before everyone in Congress heads back to his district for five weeks? My guess was that Posey was doing a favor for his paying supporters in the antivaccine movement, but doing it in such a way that he’s on C-Span giving a speech asking for an investigation of Thompson’s allegations, but at a time when no one in Congress is paying attention to anything but getting major work done in time to be able to blow out of town. Cynical? If I’m right, yes it’s cynical. But, hey, this is Congress.
I also wondered about the claims, dutifully regurgitated by Swann, that Thompson’s co-investigators destroyed evidence. For one thing, there were data retention policies, as I mentioned above. For another thing, the data for an epidemiological study would be not just be on paper. Much of the data would also reside on computer files, in particular SPSS files used to do the statistical analysis and perhaps spreadsheets and databases storing all the data on the subjects. These would be stored on CDC servers, which are backed up every day, with backups kept for a long time, if not indefinitely. In other words, it’s not that easy to do what Thompson is accusing his co-investigators of doing, Posey is repeating, and Swann is regurgitating mindlessly. There would be both an electronic and paper trail that would be difficult to erase. One notes that Posey quotes Thompson as saying that he retained all the computer files. If he did so, where? The federal government has very strict regulations about where computer data can be stored; my colleagues at the VA, for instance, tell me that you can’t even copy files onto a jump drive without permission. Did our CDC whistleblower violate government data policies? Inquiring minds want to know!
I said that Ben Swann was antivaccine. Near the end is where he proves it by rhetorically asking:
Why is it that you have to be all for vaccines, given in all quantities to all people, or you’re antivaccination? You know, vaccines have probably saved more lives on this planet than any other single medical advancement. Know that. But what you might not know is that all vaccines in all quantities in all people are not safe. Every year, hundreds of children are injured by vaccines here in the United States. Since 1986, the United States government, they have paid out $3 billion to the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. But raise even one question—just one—about why that is, and you get shouted down.
Hoo boy. This guy would be at home on the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism.
No, Mr. Swann. You’re not antivaccination if you question the vaccine schedule. Scientists who are very pro-vaccine question the schedule and argue about which vaccines should be on it and when every year as the schedule is reevaluated. As for the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, the reason the program even exists is because the federal government was fearful that a wave of spurious lawsuits would lead vaccine manufacturers to stop making vaccines for the U.S. market. The VICP is also unusual in that, win or lose, complainants have their court costs and lawyer fees reimbursed. Swann sounds like Rob Schneider ranting about the vaccine court, which actually has a pretty lenient standard for awarding compensation, which likely means a significant number of awards were to patients who were not vaccine injured and whose medical problems derived from some other cause. In any case, you can see the statistics right here if you’re interested.
Swann is actually pretty disingenuous, too. “Raise even one question” and you’re “shouted down”? Nonsense! It’s more like: Try to defend vaccines, and the antivaccine movement not only shouts you down but makes death threats (as its members have for Paul Offit) or try to get you fired (as it did with me five years ago). And, hey, Mr. Swann: You’re an anchor on a CBS affiliate in a major city, and you were allowed to do this story, even though it’s chock full of antivaccine conspiracy mongering. Truly, your producers failed miserably in vetting your story; either that, or they share your antivaccine beliefs.
At this point, I wondered whether Ben Swann had any history of this sort of thing. It turns out that all I had to do was to look at his YouTube channel to see that he does. For instance, he clearly is sympathetic for the claims of 9/11 Truthers and “cannabis cures cancer” pseudoscience and doing Google searches I’ve come across several of his videos on the conspiracy site Infowars.com. In fairness, Ben Swann also does some good work, too as he did reporting on government funding of stadiums, work that got him noticed by John Oliver, but scratch the journalist a little and underneath you find a tendency to believe conspiracy theories and pseudoscience.
What I want to know is why an affiliate of a major network in a major American city hired this guy in the first place.wg
from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1PfHvl3
Before yesterday, I had never heard of Ben Swann. Apparently he is the new anchor for the early evening news broadcast of the local Atlanta CBS affiliate, having joined the station in June. Apparently he is also prone to antivaccine conspiracy theories, which is a very bad thing to be prone to as a reporter or anyone working in the news media. I came to learn of Swann because of an article that looks on the verge of going viral (given that relatives have e-mailed me asking me about it) entitled CBS Reporter Ben Swann Tells the Truth About CDC Vaccine Cover-Up. Of course, I can’t help but interjecting here that if Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. thinks you’re telling the truth about vaccines, you really should reassess your reporting skills. Judging from the video from what appears to be the WGCL-CBS46 newscast from Friday night, I don’t think that Swann will be doing that any time soon, given that he calls the story Reality Check: CDC Scientist Admits Data of Vaccines and Autism Was Trashed:
Yes, it’s a news report about the “#CDCtruth” rally protesting the “#CDCwhistleblower” allegations of scientific fraud in a major vaccine-autism study from 2004. It’s also a story rife with antivaccine talking points, an incredibly credulous acceptance of claims made by the antivaccine movement about William Thompson, and outright misinformation, as you will see.
Before we get to Swann’s incompetent story, Thompson, just to remind you, is the CDC scientist who, beginning in November 2013, somehow became chummy with Brian Hooker, a biochemical engineer turned incompetent antivaccine epidemiologist. Why he did it, no one but Thompson knows. Whatever the reason, not realizing that his conversations were being recorded, Thompson spoke to Hooker in several telephone calls in which, apparently racked with guilt over a 2004 study on which he was co-author with Frank DeStefano examining MMR vaccine uptake as a risk factor for autism, he unburdened himself, kvetched about his CDC colleagues, and basically accused the CDC of covering up a finding that earlier MMR vaccination correlated with autism in African American boys. Even if one were to take that finding at face value, it actually was a study that showed that Andrew Wakefield was basically wrong in that no such correlation was found in Caucasians, male or female, African American girls, or any other racial group. That right away should have suggested to Thompson that it’s a spurious finding due to small numbers in the subgroup. It was, of course, a finding that disappeared when proper statistical correction was made for confounders.
As a result of these conversations, Brian Hooker did an epically incompetent “reanalysis” of the paper and managed to get it published in a relatively new journal. What this reanalysis claimed to find was that DeStefano et al. had done some statistical prestidigitation to eliminate a statistically significant difference in African American males correlating with age of MMR vaccination. Of course, as I discussed at the time (as did many others), Hooker, in his love of “simplicity,” had neglected to control for important confounders and imputed way too much significance to a spurious correlation that disappeared when proper correction for confounders was made. As I’ve put it many times, simplicity in statistical analyses of epidemiological data is not a virtue. In any case, so incredibly incompetent was Hooker’s analysis that the journal actually retracted the paper.
Thus was born the “CDC whistleblower.” More of the details can be found in my post about the CDC rally and my review of a book by Kevin Barry that published transcripts of four of telephone calls between Hooker and Thompson. In any case, because Thompson’s allegations appeared to confirm the central conspiracy theory of the antivaccine movement (that the CDC knew vaccines cause autism but were hiding it from the public), the antivaccine movement has been beating this dead horse of a scandal for over a year now, ultimately leading to what even Swann says was only “over a hundred people” showing up to protest by the CDC headquarters in Atlanta.
Finally, courageous Atlanta CBS reporter Ben Swann tells the truth about the Center for Disease Control (CDC) whistleblower, the most censored story of the millennium. CDC’s senior vaccine safety scientist, Dr. William Thompson, has confessed that the CDC vaccine division has been concealing the link between certain vaccines and brain injuries including tics and autism, particularly in African-American children.
Over 100 people gathered outside the CDC in Atlanta demanding transparency when it comes to vaccines. Is there anything to what these people are saying? How about the facts that no one else will share? This is a Reality Check you won’t see anywhere else.
Did it ever occur to Swann that the reason you won’t see this “reality check” anywhere else is because there’s nothing to all the allegations of conspiracy? Sometimes the reason the mainstream press ignores a story is because reporters tend to recognize cranks when they see them. Sure, sometimes it’s because you’re the first reporter to have stumbled on the story, but lack of coverage from the mainstream media does not necessarily (or even often) mean that there’s some sort of conspiracy of silence.
Right off the bat, Swann interviews one of the protesters, who rattles off the usual litany of alleged CDC transgressions in the mind of an antivaccinationist. We see a shot of the crowd (such as it is) with a sign that says “Subpoena Dr. Thompson!” This, of course, makes me wonder what Thompson’s colleagues working for the CDC think of this. After all, in Kevin Barry’s book, the transcripts of his phone conversations with Brian Hooker portray him saying some fairly nasty things about some of them. Then, of course, there is the whole bit about his accusations that Frank DeStefano and the other co-authors on the 2004 MMR paper committed scientific fraud by destroying evidence, a charge he repeated to Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL), who got up on the House floor to demand an investigation into the “scandal” and then again when the announcement was made that the book would soon be published, claiming that Thompson had told him that his coinvestigators had “intentionally withheld controversial findings from the final draft of the Pediatrics paper” and had discarded a lot of the primary data in a big garbage can. At the time, my skeptical antennae started twitching furiously, because the story just didn’t sound credible. The federal government has very specific regulations on data retention and woe be to any federal investigator who doesn’t adhere to them.
In any case, Swann claims that what the protesters are saying, namely that the CDC hasn’t been truthful in its vaccine messaging and science, and that these claims hinge on one man “whom you’ve probably never heard of before,” namely William Thompson. He quotes liberally from a statement issued by William Thompson’s lawyer on August 27, 2014, specifically the parts about Thompson “regretting that my coauthors and I omitted statistically significant information” and claiming that the data suggested that “African American males who received the MMR vaccine before age 36 months were at an increased risk for autism.” Yes, that was his statement, but as I discussed at the time he’s never really shown scientific fraud, only a disagreement over how to analyze and present the data.
Swann reveals that he asked Dr. Thompson for an interview. Not surprisingly, Thompson declined, no doubt at the instruction of his attorney. Swann also didn’t speak to Rep. Posey, although apparently he did speak to someone in his office, who claims that thousands of documents were handed over, although “sources” (unnamed, of course) claim that there were over 100,000 documents. Personally, I wonder where one gets 100,000 documents over a single study. I doubt that the sum total of the documents for every study I’ve ever done comes anywhere near that. On the other hand, I don’t do epidemiology research. Even so, there were less than 2,500 children in the DeStefano et al study; I suppose it’s possible to reach 100,000 documents, depending on how you define “documents.”
Be that as it may, as I related when it happened, the reason Rep. Posey didn’t get much attention when he made these allegations is because he brought it up during what the House calls “Morning Hour” debates, which are usually held on Mondays and Tuesdays and are dedicated to members speaking about whatever they like. It was also the last week the House was in session before its August recess. As I asked at the time: Why give this speech in a Morning Debate a couple of days before everyone in Congress heads back to his district for five weeks? My guess was that Posey was doing a favor for his paying supporters in the antivaccine movement, but doing it in such a way that he’s on C-Span giving a speech asking for an investigation of Thompson’s allegations, but at a time when no one in Congress is paying attention to anything but getting major work done in time to be able to blow out of town. Cynical? If I’m right, yes it’s cynical. But, hey, this is Congress.
I also wondered about the claims, dutifully regurgitated by Swann, that Thompson’s co-investigators destroyed evidence. For one thing, there were data retention policies, as I mentioned above. For another thing, the data for an epidemiological study would be not just be on paper. Much of the data would also reside on computer files, in particular SPSS files used to do the statistical analysis and perhaps spreadsheets and databases storing all the data on the subjects. These would be stored on CDC servers, which are backed up every day, with backups kept for a long time, if not indefinitely. In other words, it’s not that easy to do what Thompson is accusing his co-investigators of doing, Posey is repeating, and Swann is regurgitating mindlessly. There would be both an electronic and paper trail that would be difficult to erase. One notes that Posey quotes Thompson as saying that he retained all the computer files. If he did so, where? The federal government has very strict regulations about where computer data can be stored; my colleagues at the VA, for instance, tell me that you can’t even copy files onto a jump drive without permission. Did our CDC whistleblower violate government data policies? Inquiring minds want to know!
I said that Ben Swann was antivaccine. Near the end is where he proves it by rhetorically asking:
Why is it that you have to be all for vaccines, given in all quantities to all people, or you’re antivaccination? You know, vaccines have probably saved more lives on this planet than any other single medical advancement. Know that. But what you might not know is that all vaccines in all quantities in all people are not safe. Every year, hundreds of children are injured by vaccines here in the United States. Since 1986, the United States government, they have paid out $3 billion to the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. But raise even one question—just one—about why that is, and you get shouted down.
Hoo boy. This guy would be at home on the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism.
No, Mr. Swann. You’re not antivaccination if you question the vaccine schedule. Scientists who are very pro-vaccine question the schedule and argue about which vaccines should be on it and when every year as the schedule is reevaluated. As for the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, the reason the program even exists is because the federal government was fearful that a wave of spurious lawsuits would lead vaccine manufacturers to stop making vaccines for the U.S. market. The VICP is also unusual in that, win or lose, complainants have their court costs and lawyer fees reimbursed. Swann sounds like Rob Schneider ranting about the vaccine court, which actually has a pretty lenient standard for awarding compensation, which likely means a significant number of awards were to patients who were not vaccine injured and whose medical problems derived from some other cause. In any case, you can see the statistics right here if you’re interested.
Swann is actually pretty disingenuous, too. “Raise even one question” and you’re “shouted down”? Nonsense! It’s more like: Try to defend vaccines, and the antivaccine movement not only shouts you down but makes death threats (as its members have for Paul Offit) or try to get you fired (as it did with me five years ago). And, hey, Mr. Swann: You’re an anchor on a CBS affiliate in a major city, and you were allowed to do this story, even though it’s chock full of antivaccine conspiracy mongering. Truly, your producers failed miserably in vetting your story; either that, or they share your antivaccine beliefs.
At this point, I wondered whether Ben Swann had any history of this sort of thing. It turns out that all I had to do was to look at his YouTube channel to see that he does. For instance, he clearly is sympathetic for the claims of 9/11 Truthers and “cannabis cures cancer” pseudoscience and doing Google searches I’ve come across several of his videos on the conspiracy site Infowars.com. In fairness, Ben Swann also does some good work, too as he did reporting on government funding of stadiums, work that got him noticed by John Oliver, but scratch the journalist a little and underneath you find a tendency to believe conspiracy theories and pseudoscience.
What I want to know is why an affiliate of a major network in a major American city hired this guy in the first place.wg
Tomorrow morning – November 3, 2015 – greet the last quarter moon. Plus, see the conjunction of the brightest planet Venus and fainter, redder Mars. Those two are only a short hop beneath the largest planet Jupiter. It’ll be the closest Venus-Mars conjunction on the sky’s dome until October 5, 2017!
Jack Webb in Wapiti, Wyoming submitted this photo of Venus, Jupiter and Mars on October 27, 2015. He said: “Awesome view of the 3 planets this morning, rising over an area known locally as the Holy City, illuminated by a setting full moon.”
Now Jupiter has swept up above Venus and Mars in the east before dawn. And Mars has edged up slowly in the east before dawn, as Venus has begun its slow creep back into the sunrise. And so it was inevitable that Mars and Venus would meet on our sky’s dome.
The Venus-Mars conjunction comes at about 16 UTC on November 3. In other words, that when Venus and Mars have the same right ascension (similar to celestial longitude) on the dome of Earth’s sky.
We’ve had many questions about where these worlds lie, in the space of our solar system. Venus passed between the Earth and sun on August 15 and is now fleeing ahead of Earth in its smaller, faster orbit. Jupiter and Mars, meanwhile, are both on the far side of the solar system from us. The chart below – from Heavens Above – shows the view on November 3.
Early risers will enjoy a superb view of the moon and planets throughout the first week of November, 2015. The green line depicts the ecliptic – approximate path of the sun, moon and planets across our sky.
Last quarter moon of November 3. The precise moment of the last quarter moon is November 3 at 12:24 UTC. Although the last quarter moon happens at the same instant worldwide, the time by the clock varies by time zone. At U.S. time zones, the November 3rd last quarter moon takes place at 7:24 a.m. EST, 6:24 a.m. CST, 5:24 a.m. MST and 4:24 a.m. PST.
At last quarter, the moon’s disk is half-illuminated in sunlight and half-engulfed in the moon’s own shadow. The lunar terminator – shadow line – shows you where it’s sunset on the waning moon. The quarter moon’s illuminated limb outlines the moon’s noontime meridian whereas the dark limb outlines the moon’s midnight meridian.
If you could see the back side of the waning moon, the lunar terminator would you where it’s sunrise. As always, the terminator on the near side of the waning moon shows you where it’s sunset; and the terminator on the near side of the waxing moon shows you where it’s sunrise.
The last quarter moon in Tuesday morning’s sky will look like half a pie …
The first quarter Earth as seen from the last quarter moon (2015 November 3 at 12:24 Universal Time). The terminator on the waxing Earth depicts sunrise. Image credit: Earth and Moon Viewer
Bottom line: The conjunction of Venus and Mars takes place on the morning of November 3, 2015. It’s their closest conjunction until October 5, 2017. There’s also a last quarter moon in the sky that morning. Keep your eyes glued to the predawn sky in early November as the waning crescent moon sweeps by the star Regulus and then the three morning planets: Venus, Mars and Jupiter.
Tomorrow morning – November 3, 2015 – greet the last quarter moon. Plus, see the conjunction of the brightest planet Venus and fainter, redder Mars. Those two are only a short hop beneath the largest planet Jupiter. It’ll be the closest Venus-Mars conjunction on the sky’s dome until October 5, 2017!
Jack Webb in Wapiti, Wyoming submitted this photo of Venus, Jupiter and Mars on October 27, 2015. He said: “Awesome view of the 3 planets this morning, rising over an area known locally as the Holy City, illuminated by a setting full moon.”
Now Jupiter has swept up above Venus and Mars in the east before dawn. And Mars has edged up slowly in the east before dawn, as Venus has begun its slow creep back into the sunrise. And so it was inevitable that Mars and Venus would meet on our sky’s dome.
The Venus-Mars conjunction comes at about 16 UTC on November 3. In other words, that when Venus and Mars have the same right ascension (similar to celestial longitude) on the dome of Earth’s sky.
We’ve had many questions about where these worlds lie, in the space of our solar system. Venus passed between the Earth and sun on August 15 and is now fleeing ahead of Earth in its smaller, faster orbit. Jupiter and Mars, meanwhile, are both on the far side of the solar system from us. The chart below – from Heavens Above – shows the view on November 3.
Early risers will enjoy a superb view of the moon and planets throughout the first week of November, 2015. The green line depicts the ecliptic – approximate path of the sun, moon and planets across our sky.
Last quarter moon of November 3. The precise moment of the last quarter moon is November 3 at 12:24 UTC. Although the last quarter moon happens at the same instant worldwide, the time by the clock varies by time zone. At U.S. time zones, the November 3rd last quarter moon takes place at 7:24 a.m. EST, 6:24 a.m. CST, 5:24 a.m. MST and 4:24 a.m. PST.
At last quarter, the moon’s disk is half-illuminated in sunlight and half-engulfed in the moon’s own shadow. The lunar terminator – shadow line – shows you where it’s sunset on the waning moon. The quarter moon’s illuminated limb outlines the moon’s noontime meridian whereas the dark limb outlines the moon’s midnight meridian.
If you could see the back side of the waning moon, the lunar terminator would you where it’s sunrise. As always, the terminator on the near side of the waning moon shows you where it’s sunset; and the terminator on the near side of the waxing moon shows you where it’s sunrise.
The last quarter moon in Tuesday morning’s sky will look like half a pie …
The first quarter Earth as seen from the last quarter moon (2015 November 3 at 12:24 Universal Time). The terminator on the waxing Earth depicts sunrise. Image credit: Earth and Moon Viewer
Bottom line: The conjunction of Venus and Mars takes place on the morning of November 3, 2015. It’s their closest conjunction until October 5, 2017. There’s also a last quarter moon in the sky that morning. Keep your eyes glued to the predawn sky in early November as the waning crescent moon sweeps by the star Regulus and then the three morning planets: Venus, Mars and Jupiter.
Another busy day, so you get another kind of lazy shot. But, hey, everybody wants to know how the kids did trick-or-treating, right? So here’s The Pip’s share of the Halloween haul:
The Pip’s Halloween candy.
I weighed both his plastic pumpkin full of candy and the Tupperware container that SteelyKid’s stuff is in, and they each came out between 1.1 and 1.2 kg. So, a bit over 1kg each (after taking out the weight of the containers)– not bad for an hour’s work.
The funny part is that The Pip has turned into an exceptionally picky eater, and won’t eat… any of this, really. He was super excited to get it, but has eaten bits of about three candy bars, and declared that he doesn’t like them. He prefers the Dove dark chocolate we keep on hand in Chateau Steelypips, so Kate and I will be eating a good deal of this…
from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1Pfgo9L
Another busy day, so you get another kind of lazy shot. But, hey, everybody wants to know how the kids did trick-or-treating, right? So here’s The Pip’s share of the Halloween haul:
The Pip’s Halloween candy.
I weighed both his plastic pumpkin full of candy and the Tupperware container that SteelyKid’s stuff is in, and they each came out between 1.1 and 1.2 kg. So, a bit over 1kg each (after taking out the weight of the containers)– not bad for an hour’s work.
The funny part is that The Pip has turned into an exceptionally picky eater, and won’t eat… any of this, really. He was super excited to get it, but has eaten bits of about three candy bars, and declared that he doesn’t like them. He prefers the Dove dark chocolate we keep on hand in Chateau Steelypips, so Kate and I will be eating a good deal of this…
