Hmm, almost like they’re self-aware.

I’m glad people get paid to do this.

File with ethanol under ’seemed like a good idea at the time.’

Hey, Dick Cheney thought it was a good idea.

(Plus, there was nowhere to put the waste 50 years ago, there’s still no place to put it, and now there’s 50 years more of it worldwide. Thanks Big Science!)

Vaya Con Dios, Amigo.

Our take on the Texas pedophile cult that’s been all up in the news lately, generously referred to as a “polygamist sect”.

Ruh roh. This time it’s the orangutangs.

One of the more interesting projects to come out the lab where I currently work has to do with tracking the spread of the mountain pine beetle infestation in British Columbia, Canada.

It is well known that warming conditions in Canada due to anthropogenic climate change have stimulated massive infestations of the tree-eating insects. For example, our own Allan Carroll was quoted in the Washington Post
as saying:

It’s pretty gut-wrenching,” said Allan Carroll, a research scientist at the Pacific Forestry Centre in Victoria, whose studies tracked a lock step between warmer winters and the spread of the beetle. “People say climate change is something for our kids to worry about. No. It’s now.”

Scientists fear the beetle will cross the Rocky Mountains and sweep across the northern continent into areas where it used to be killed by severe cold but where winters now are comparatively mild.

The news today — released in a landmark study in the journal, Nature, is that the carbon released from the trees killed by the mountain pine beetle “equates to 990 million tonnes of carbon dioxide — more than the entire annual emissions reported by Canada in 2005.”

More.

Link here. This is a good example of military technology that will inevitably spin off into society at large. In this case, it sounds like every geek will be wanting one before too long:

…a sensor-embedded glove that allows the soldier to easily view and navigate digital maps, activate radio communications, and send commands without having to take his hand off his weapon. … engineers have designed their glove so that soldiers can grip other objects, such as their weapons or a steering wheel, and still be able to use their electronic systems. The glove has four custom-built push-button sensors sewn into the fingers near the tips. Sensors on the lower portion of the index finger and the tip of the fourth activate radio communications, a different channel for each finger. Another sensor on the tip of the index finger changes modes… In map mode, the fourth sensor … is used to zoom in on and out of the map; in mouse mode, it serves as a mouse-click button.

Also sewn into the pad of the middle fingertip of the glove is an “anywhere mouse” that uses force sensors and acts as a track pad. “When a soldier presses down against the side of his weapon, a wall, or any hard surface and rolls his finger around, he can manipulate things on the screen,” says Liau.

Three accelerometers are built into the back of the glove to sense the orientation and position of the hand, so that conventional hand-arm signals … can be used to send text commands to other soldiers’ screens.

Crazy Europeans - don’t they know that if it’s sugar-free, it’s healthy?

For all your earthquake-tracking needs. For instance, earthquakes and seismic stresses may be associated with anomalous lights that trigger UFO flaps. Or, you may wish to avoid placing your nuclear powerplants in earthquake-prone areas, although that hasn’t stopped anyone yet.

Cheeky robots reassemble after being kicked. I for one welcome our new robot overlords.

Unflattering tale of patent enforcement gone wild in mainstream press

Early September 2001: Unusually High Volume Trade of US Treasury Note Purchases

After 9/11, both the SEC and the Secret Service announce probes into an unusually high volume trade of five-year US Treasury note purchases around this time. These transactions include a single $5 billion trade. The Wall Street Journal explains: “Five-year Treasury notes are among the best investments in the event of a world crisis, especially one that hits the US. The notes are prized for their safety and their backing by the US government, and usually rally when investors flee riskier investments, such as stocks.” The value of these notes has risen sharply since the events of September 11. The article also points out that with these notes, “tracks would be hard to spot.”

You can find out more about how our government let it happen than you could ever want to know, including a hobby-in-itself timeline of ALL events leading up to it here.

Giant Monster Round-Up

Forced religiosity fucking enrages me.

Update: More

Updated Again: Long Live The Pastafarians

There’s been a lot of talk about sex lately on this blog, and there’s a lot of sex science in the news lately. New Scientist has the scoop:

…Working for New Scientist I probably get more nourishment on the sex education front than most??? just recently I learnt that monkeys eavesdrop on each other’s orgasmic cries, that love stops partners from sleeping around, that spiders play dead to get laid, that there might be a G spot after all, that a radio-controlled contraceptive implant is being developed that could control the flow of sperm from a man’s testicles, that long legs really are more sexy, that one day we might choose to have sex with robots over people (and I don’t mean physically on top!), that getting married saps your testosterone, that lap dancers “in heat” get the biggest tips and how primate porn reveals what we really want.

I’ve also changed the new “zoophilia” category tag to the more general ”Sex” tag - no offense princelumber but I want to have a catchall tag applicable to all species. Good one though. I also put a bunch of previous sex-related posts into the new “Sex” category. Here they all are, you perverts.

by Dragon-wolfe Dolphinn

Many animals can sense the Earth’s magnetic field, so why not people, asks Oleg Shumilov of the Institute of North Industrial Ecology Problems in Russia.

Shumilov looked at activity in the Earth’s geomagnetic field from 1948 to 1997 and found that it grouped into three seasonal peaks every year: one from March to May, another in July and the last in October.

Surprisingly, he also found that the geomagnetism peaks matched up with peaks in the number of suicides in the northern Russian city of Kirovsk over the same period.

Shumilov acknowledges that a correlation like this does not necessarily mean there is a causal link, but he points out that there have been several other studies suggesting a link between human health and geomagnetism.

A real find, as fabric (and all soft technology) doesn’t survive long.

Some of the fabrics found within her tomb have thread counts of over 80 weft yarns per inch, said Margaret Ordonez, a textile expert at the University of Rhode Island who studied the cloth.

“This is in the range of the clothing that we wear,” she said. “This is a higher thread count than your jeans.”

Link here. Amazing footage.

I must say the National Geographic site is one of the best science sites on the web.

How fast CAN evolution happen? Here we have a lizard that maybe has evolved pretty darn fast:

Italian wall lizards introduced to a tiny island off the coast of Croatia are evolving in ways that would normally take millions of years to play out, new research shows.

In just a few decades the 5-inch-long (13-centimeter-long) lizards have developed a completely new gut structure, larger heads, and a harder bite, researchers say.

….(The island) had an abundance of plants for the primarily insect-eating lizards to munch on. Physically, however, the lizards were not built to digest a vegetarian diet.

Researchers found that the lizards developed cecal valves—muscles between the large and small intestine—that slowed down food digestion in fermenting chambers, which allowed their bodies to process the vegetation’s cellulose … ”This was a brand-new structure.”

…Such physical transformation in just 30 lizard generations takes evolution to a whole new level, Irschick said.

It would be akin to humans evolving and growing a new appendix in several hundred years, he said.

“That’s unparalleled.” … What could be debated, however, is how those changes are interpreted—whether or not they had a genetic basis and not a “plastic response to the environment,” said Hendry, who was not associated with the study.

So, how much can an organism’s structure change as just a “plastic response to the environment”? Is this guy saying our physical forms could completely morph into something alien without any genetic changes even taking place, just as a speedy plastic response to the environment? Just how much change can be crammed into this plastic response, and how fast can the change occur? It seems to implicitly uncouple genes from morphology. But more importantly, it paints a picture for me of the potential of organisms to quickly evolve around sudden catastrophic changes to their environment - which is largely what the fossil record shows: species equilibrium -> catastrophe -> new species on the other side. How fast could we evolve in a catastrophe? These lizards developed completely new stomach structures in like 30 years. According to this, could humans evolve gills in just a few hundred years, or less? In geological timescales that’s pretty much an instantaneous transformation, difficult to capture in the fossil record. I’m holding out for wings or optic blasts.

This article is also relevant:

In the June 2003 is­sue of the re­search jour­nal Cur­rent An­thro­po­l­ogy, Hel­en Leach of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ota­go, New Zea­land wrote that skele­tons from some pop­u­la­tions in the hu­man line­age have un­der­gone a pro­gres­sive shrink­age and weak­en­ing, and re­duc­tion in tooth size, si­m­i­lar to changes seen in do­mes­ti­cat­ed an­i­mals. Hu­mans seem to have do­mes­ti­cat­ed them­selves, she ar­gued, caus­ing phys­i­cal as well as men­tal changes.

…What­ever the imp­li­ca­tions of the recent findings, McKee added, they high­light a ubiq­ui­tous point about ev­o­lu­tion: “every spe­cies is a tran­si­tion­al spe­cies.”

12-17 foot great white shark fatally bites the shit out of swimmer 150 yards offshore. Note to self: ankle-deep wading only, please.

…adding, yes, I know the odds. But I have the suspicion that irony is a force of nature, and that as soon as a sharkophobe like me steps into the water, the odds of an attack skyrocket.

This Daily Kos post infers that housing developments with shorter commutes are faring better in the foreclosure epidemic than those with longer drives between work and home. Can this be the beginning of the great social contraction brought about by the end of cheap oil envisioned by James Kunstler?

Solar System Could Go Haywire Before Sun Dies

Apparently they jumpstart their parthenogenetic machinery by flirting with males of other species though. But their offspring are clones of the mamas. Nature’s majesty.

I can only assume you’ve seen this, but Al, this is for you.

The most comprehensive statement I’ve heard yet.

Mysterious red lights over Phoenix

Some guy claims responsibility

Oh, snap!

Actual quote from todays news. That’s all I got.