That’s right - the lowly fish can count. Not much further down the evolutionary ladder one can go - what’s next, amoebas?

UPDATE: Here’s what’s next - baby chicks.

The electric motorcycle.

It’s motorcycle day here at Gonzo Science. This airbag suit for motorcyclists has real possibilities…

Design for a wearable motorcycle.

Earlier this month, the controversial Indian-German Lohafex expedition fertilised 300 square kilometres of the Southern Atlantic with six tonnes of dissolved iron. The iron triggered a bloom of phytoplankton, which doubled their biomass within two weeks by taking in carbon dioxide from the seawater. Dead bloom particles were then expected to sink to the ocean bed, dragging carbon along with them.

Instead, the bloom attracted a swarm of hungry copepods. The tiny crustaceans graze on phytoplankton, which keeps the carbon in the food chain and prevents it from being stored in the ocean sink. Researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research reported that the copepods were in turn eaten by larger crustaceans called amphipods, which serve as food for squid and fin whales.

I deem this hilarious. So much for ‘engineering’ our way to climate change solutions.

Update: More.

Monsanto’s presence on the Web has evolved during the last few years. But only last year did the company decide to delve into social media as it witnessed the upheaval of traditional media and realized that its existing outreach vehicle - news releases - wasn’t enough.

“We asked ourselves, ‘Is this a space we should be participating in?’ The answer was ‘yes,’”

Ack.

[More from Jim - here’s another quote from the story:

Earlier this month, a blogger named Brad fired a virtual salvo at Jeffrey Smith, the author of “Seeds of Deception” and one of the most vocal crusaders against genetically modified foods.

In a 600-word post, Brad questioned the credibility of an online petition on Smith’s website, urging the administration of President Barack Obama to require labeling of biotech foods. He called the petition “sheer political theater” and prodded the activist for purportedly being a yogic flying instructor.

That’s right - Monsanto is paying bloggers to make ad hominem attacks on biotech critics. Rather than address Smith’s comprehensive documented risks of GMOs, point by point, they make fun of him for doing yoga, which is irrelevant to his case against GMOs, and Monsanto’s paid blogger-harrassers know it.]

According to the good Dr. Mercola.

Eat shit, torture fans. Your security state sucked.

Creationists 1

Evolution 0

Not to get all brainiac, but any scientists who doubted this result have not progressed past Descartes. The point being: ideas that developed a long time ago continue to box us in conceptually today. Point 2: animals feel pain, even those with different body plans. From this moment on let us assume this fact. From the article:

“Millions of crustaceans are caught or reared in aquaculture for the food industry.

“There is no protection for these animals - with the possible exception of certain states in Australia - as the presumption is that they cannot experience pain.”

Another widespread presumption down the drain.

…UPDATE: Lobster ambassador resigns.

I didn’t need the CIA to tell me this, but oddly I guess it helps.

Sunscreen: 1

Coral Reefs: 0

I know, let’s put nanoparticles in sunscreen, that’d be so scientific!!

Volcano: 1

Republican War on Science: 0

Extreme Sheep Art courtesy of Scanner.

Much ado about Twitter. The scoop from Dkos.

Soft robots. Clearly there is a marital aid application for this technology.

NEW YORK - The drug MDMA — better known as the illegal recreational drug “Ecstasy” — may help people with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) recover, a Norwegian research team suggests.

Armed face-eaters.

Is all this tool use something science has missed, or is it coming out of nowhere…?

“Fuzzy dinosaurs”

Relic of a political bloodbath.Photo by Kokes.

“I remember people’s numbers. [I] lost my cell phone Sept. 24, 2006. A lot of people, if they lost their cell phone, they would panic because they have all these numbers. I didn’t have any numbers in my cell phone because I know everybody’s numbers up here [in my head].”

“It’s like a hard drive,” he said. “You want to throw some of these dates in the trash and put more, maybe some creative things on — because they are some inane things, a lot of things. Sometimes that’s a bad thing, because when I am going through … a bad situation or a bad circumstance. And then I go back and I go, ‘boy, this is how I felt on, say, May 3, 1986.”

At the same time, Petrella has the kind of forgetfulness anyone can have. He’ll walk into another room and forget why he entered. Or he’ll forget that he left his car in a tow zone.Petrella is most astounding at sports events. If shown a freeze frame from a game 35 years ago, he’ll recall details of the sporting event.

Well some dance to remember and some dance to forget.

This is the theory: Morgellons are a communicable syndrome that afflicts the entire human body in the form of self-assembling, self-replicating, visible colored fibers, wires-like items, tiny black specks and ‘antennae’. And doctors say it’s imaginary. The sufferers - found in clusters along USA coastlines — describe them as ‘fiber ‘machines’ which thrive in the human body and apparently use the host body’s bio-electric energy, its minerals and other elements for power and to physically replicate themselves.

Collective intelligence…It is also reported by many Morgellons victims that the fibers and other Morgellons items exhibit a kind of collective intelligence within the bodies they have parasitized. The fibers are motile and can be easily observed to move and to reach out for nearby objects with a 10x to 30x scope. They are not bacterial or viral and can withstand blowtorch temperatures of 1400 F under laboratory conditions, researchers have already established.

The symptoms of Morgellons vary widely from easily recognized skin lesions which can appear over wide areas on the body - and sometimes over the entire body - which do not scab normally.

Strangely, Morgellons lesions have not been reported to become bacterially-infected. These lesions heal extremely slowly and leave white, pigment-free scars.

The mental and neurological effects of the Morgellons syndrome include brain fog, serious personality changes, fear, depression, suicidal thoughts, and physical coordination issues. Morgellons victims also suffer rapid spikes in body heat levels, severe malaise, and chronic fatigue.

When scientists get baffled there’s a Scooby-Doo mystery afoot. Courtesy of The Anomalist.

200,000 years older than previously believed.

Is there anything in archaeology or paleontology that is younger than previously believed? The only headlines I ever see in the science media in this regard indicate that science has been on a bender for about fifty years a hundred years of ascribing way-too-young dates to things.

 Forwarded from Mike Van Flandern (Tom’s son and the current director of Meta Research):

Minor Planets Circulars regularly publishes names given to asteroids. Asteroid 52266 has been named “Van Flandern” with the following citation:

(52266) Van Flandern = 1986 AD

     Tom Van Flandern (1940-2009) predicted and comprehensively analyzed lunar occultations at the U.S. Naval Observatory in the 1970s.  In 1979 he published pioneering papers on the dynamics of binary minor planets.  He helped improve GPS accuracies and established Meta Research to support alternative cosmological ideas.

What this shows is that there are Tom Van Flandern sympathizers among working astronomers. Tom’s radical rethink of astronomy lives! 

This is really going to bother 6324xxx, the asshole who hijacked Tom’s Wikipedia bio.

Having found the Tom Van Flandern article at Wikipedia to be unsatisfactory, and not being wikipedians as such, we here present a much, much better one of our very own. We tried to make it sound like a wikipedia article, borrowing a couple lines even to make it seem like the wikipedia article of a parallel universe. It may not follow all of wikipedia’s rules, but it bloody well addresses the substance of Why Tom Van Flandern Is Important about 1000x better than the current travesty. To specifically address the controversy surrounding his wikipedia article, let us not only say that Tom Van Flandern should have a wikipedia article, but that it should look more like ours than it does now. (And like the Wikipedia article, our alternate may be considered a work in progress - a few more references to track down etc…)

The Gonzo Science Alternate Wikipedia Article for Tom Van Flandern

The actual Wikipedia article

Discussion page of the Wikipedia article where you can really get a sense of how contentious the history of the article is.

Terence on a good riff.

Female monkeys in Thailand have been observed showing their young how to floss their teeth - using human hair.

Researchers from Japan said they watched seven long-tailed macaques cleaning the spaces between their teeth in the same manner as humans. They spent double the amount of time flossing when they were being watched by their infants, the team said.

With video. I really want to add some poignant commentary here but all I can do is stare out the window and wistfully say  “Monkeys…”

If one were to ask if Wellstone was murdered by an apparatus of state, these are the guys who make viable candidates for whodunnit. Just sayin’.

UPDATE: …and here’s a viable candidate for how it could have been done.

Such as this playful little number available in stores by Christmas 2010.