“…it is possible that the strength of faults and earthquake risk is affected by seismic events on the other side of the world.”
Possibly supports Persinger’s Tectonic Strain Theory of the paranormal, which has been dinged by some, including anomalist William Corliss, for connecting luminous phenomena with distant tectonic events. Now that objection seems somewhat blunted.
Wanted to make sure everybody saw this from Scientific American:
In the 1990s scientists such as himself, he explains, were too caught up in the promise of gene therapy to realize that they did not know enough about it to warrant human testing. “We were drawn into the simplicity of the concept. You just put the gene in,” Wilson says.
He may as well be talking about GM crops, and it’s still going on. Short version: The very premise of genetic engineering is a simplistic, reductionist, mechanistic model of genetics that is now known to be incorrect and is the source of biotech’s mounting problems.
More on that here in our definitive takedown of New Scientist writer/biotech booster Michael Le Page.
Scientists can’t yet make theory match observation in this case:
Dr Lefevre says the chemistry of the Martian atmosphere is still a mystery.
…”We put the dynamics and chemistry as we know it in the model and tried to match the measurements….The problem is if we just take into account the photochemistry as we know it on Earth and if we put it in the model, then we cannot reproduce the model and that was a surprise.”
“The current chemistry as we know it is not consistent with the measurements of methane on Mars.”
Later the guy makes a big caveat saying the measurements are limited, so they’re trying to confirm it. And so…
Dr Lefevre says that if the variations are confirmed it would mean the Martian surface is very hostile for organics. But this would not necessarily exclude the possibility that life or the remnants of past life persist below ground, where conditions could be more benign.
I wonder if he’d have more luck using an alternative model of evolution where life evolves underground first.
Anglo-saxon treasure found by some guy with a metal detector.
The above gizmo can be seen in use by Honduran coup forces harassing the Brazilian embassy where their exiled President is holed up.
Update: Also on display against American G20 protestors.
The find of an older, smaller version of T-Rex has got paleontologists in a lather. The story also sheds light on the exciting world of international fossil smuggling.
[Not displaying the entire screen in IE - sorry fans I gotta learn how to fix that]
Two points about this article.
1. This shark has a sex organ on its head
and 2:
Since the 1960s experts have been finding specimens of the strange, 3-foot-long (0.9-meter-long) fish, which ended up nameless in museum collections around the world.
It wasn’t until after a team recently searched through shelves of “dead pickled fish” that the Eastern Pacific black ghostshark was recognized as its own new species
Excavate the museums!
Captured! by Robots homepage
Coming to Pizza Luce, Duluth, Tuesday, October 13th
presented by Gonzo Science and the Transistor
UPDATE: It was epic - maybe back in the spring.
SAN FRANCISCO - September 22 -In a case brought by Center for Food Safety and Earthjustice representing a coalition of farmers and consumers, a Federal Court ruled yesterday that the Bush USDA’s approval of genetically engineered (GE) “RoundUp Ready” sugar beets was unlawful. The Court ordered the USDA to conduct a rigorous assessment of the environmental and economic impacts of the crop on farmers and the environment.
Newer experiments with the bees’ “waggle dance” show that it has limited value in natural conditions, namely because
…bees often seem unable to follow the instructions.
This one small point, simply made in this video excerpt, is part of a rich tapestry of Big Bang anomalies. Astronomer Halton Arp made and lost his career cataloging these, making a strong case that an object’s redshift is not the final arbiter of its position in space. If so, it appears to falsify the Big Bang. Basically, the map of the sky could be all wrong, and the temporal corollary is that there was no “beginning”.
In October of 2000, naturalist, writer, and environmental educator Andrew Slade left his position as Education Director of the Great Lakes Aquarium in Duluth, Minnesota. Although bound by a severence agreement not to discuss the matter, Slade’s resignation was publicly understood as him being forced out by the Aquarium’s corporate sponsors, namely Allete/Minnesota Power. One of the two board members who resigned in protest said Allete had “infringed on the academic freedom of an educator.” Always riveted by such tales, we asked Slade a couple questions about this gonzo science matter, with the perspective of nine years later.
[Slade’s North Shore blog is here; his North Shore guidebooks may be found here and here.]
Gonzo Science: Hi Andrew. The questions we would ask you for gonzoscience.com, close to the 9-year anniversary of the “Slade controversy” at GLA, would include: How does it feel to be a local symbol of corporate interference with science? Is that phrased too strongly, or inaccurately?
Andrew Slade: Since I’m not a scientist, I didn’t see my departure from Great Lakes Aquarium as a blow against science.It was a blow against public participation. Science is the process by which facts are revealed from nature…it’s not the facts themselves. Minnesota Power didn’t agree with the opinions I expressed in a column about the Arrowhead-Weston powerline. They disagreed with some of the few “facts” I used in my column. Their hotheaded CEO did use an accusation of “bad science” to try to discredit me, but never backed that up with facts or “science” of their own. He happened to be in a position to influence my employer and he used that position to his advantage.
Gonzo Science: Do you have any advice for people in the position you were in 9 years ago?
Andrew Slade: The loss of public support for Great Lakes Aquarium after my incident was really unfortunate. In my resignation and their response to it, GLA and its corporate supporters undermined eight years of hard work in the community developing support for the project and the mission. It seemed clear that the Aquarium was not for Duluthians. That’s a tragedy from which they have not recovered. If I had known that this incident would have contributed to the loss of what we had worked so hard for, I might have taken a different path in expressing my personal opinions.
Gonzo Science: Care to speculate on the existence of Bigfoot in the Northland?
Andrew Slade: Never seen one myself. But I love the idea that there are mysteries out there yet to be discovered.
Excellent excellent excellent documentary about a highly controversial project from my recent backyard.
H.A.A.R.P. is the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, a project being funded by the USAF, US Navy, U of Alaska and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). It is located in remote Alaska wilderness a few hundred miles Northeast of Valdez, AK in an area called Gakona. Most simply be labeled as an advanced Tesla technology.
The critics claim that underlying its stated goals lies the potential for advanced space warfare offense and defense capabilities, weather control, terrestrial geomagnetic control (earthquakes/eruptions), biophysical interference, and worst of all mind control through synched bioelectric frequencies.
The instated public relations tool and head of the project play stupid when it comes to accusations, respond in denial and ignorance, and claim that notions of these accusations are completely unfounded. No surprises there.
Critics range far and wide, and interviewed in this short 50 minute piece are the original head of the project, plasma physicists, biophysicists, electromagnetic specialists and Nick Begich, Jr. Brother of US Senator Mark Begich.
Watch and think and decide, but I for one have never wanted a tinfoil…no, make that iridium foil hat more in my life.
Favorite line in this nauseating puff piece- “there is no rational basis for drawing an absolute distinction between conventional breeding and genetic modification.”
Well, that’s a relief given that the consumption of engineered food has become compulsory. We’ll be taking this one apart piece by piece as well.
UPDATE: Here is our open letter to New Scientist on the same topic.
UPDATE 2: And here is our demolition of said puff piece.
I would call causing earthquakes a wee setback.
Andrew Vachss, the One-Man-War-on-Child-Exploitation, annotates the AP article about the arrest of religious whackjob sex predator Phillip Garrido.
The upshot? Our laws are not strong enough to stop menaces like Garrido. Paraphrasing Vachss, predators can not be rehabilitated because that means returning to a state that doesn’t exist. They are not crazy but evil since evil is behavior and behavior is volitional. GPS ankle bracelets that track every movement, like Garrido wore, will not stop them, especially since their wives are 100% complicit.
A link to Vachss’ essays and articles here.
I haven’t posted anything in a while, so I thought I’d throw something out there. This kept me up WAY past my bedtime last night and I thought you might enjoy it too. Let the discussion begin.
Although the researchers could levitate mice with or without the cage, “it’s easier to house a mouse in a cage when you bring it to the levitation zone,” Liu explained.
I’ll bet it is.
We’re going to have fun taking this story about GMOs apart piece by piece. Stay tuned for updates.
UPDATE: Story now behind paywall. It explores the question of whether biotech boosters play fair or not. Click through though and read the three comments there; they may be freely viewed. Two are by very grumpy biotech boosters who trash the BAD SCIENCE of the biotech detractors, and then this very thoughtful comment offering the scientific pushback against the boosters:
The critics’ claim that EU regulation on GMOs is “fuelled by bad science and ideological opposition” betrays the critics’ own ideological position and scientific hubris. Quite a few peer-reviewed papers have been publiched in peer-reviewed journals, based on rigorous methodlogy and long-term field data, which unamiguously show adverse impacts of GM crops on biodiversity (for example, Bohan et al. 2005, Proc. Royal Soc. B 272, 463–474). Critics who are so earnest about “good science” are surprisingly silent about such publications. They never write letters to policy makers suggesting immediate ban of herbicide tolerant GM crops in all countries.
Similarly, Saxena’s work on the significant larvicidal effect of Bt-root exudates from Bt corn hybrids, representing three transformation events (Bt11, MON810, and 176) and evaluated in both in vitro and field studies (Saxena D., S. Flores, and G. Stotzky 2002, Soil Biology & Biochemistry 34, 133-137) is neither cited nor noticed by these self-righteous critiques. A number of excellent studies (cited in Séralini et al. (2009, Int. J. Biol. Sci. 5: 438-443) are fated to disappear from the view of policy makers and the public through the “conspiracy of silence”.
Contrariwise, when a truly bad paper, reporting absurd findings, was published in a reputed journal like Science, the responsibility and righteosuness of these same critiques, like the Pharaoh’s horses behind Moses, sank into the deep sea. This particular study (Qaim, M., & Zilberman, D. 2003, Science 299, 900-902) found up to 83% yield increase in Bt cotton, based on farmer interviews and “trial records” supplied by Mahyco-Monsanto – the company who conducted those putative trials, and obviously had stake in such publications. Moreover, the study did not consider the confounding effects of late (by 2 months) sowing of the crop, and of better water supply to the Bt-cotton fields compared to the non-Bt varieties. When GM crops are promoted at the expense of scientific rigor and sensibility, the whistle blowers cannot find their whistles, or else are out of their breath to blow the whistles.
What surprises me most is the critics’ evasion of the fact that Bt toxin is a known insecticide, and biotechnologists have chosen this toxin for incorporation into crop plant precisely for that purpose. However, whenever a study shows a toxic effect on non-target insects, it is immediately branded as “bad science”. It requires little understanding of insect physiology to surmise that continuous flux of the insecticidal toxin from a Bt-plant source into the soil and run-off water is likely to eliminate at least some non-target insects. One may argue about the exact extent of mortality of this or that species, but the lethal effect of Bt toxin on non-target insects is well established (see Hilbeck, A. and J.E.U. Schmidt 2006, Biopestic. Int. 2 (1): 1-50). The effect is certain when insect predators and parasitoids consume “Bt-susceptible and sublethally-damaged herbivores” (J., M. Meissle & F. Bigler 2006, Nature Biotechnology 24: 63 – 71). Do the critics perceive any policy implication of these findings?
Debal Deb
Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies, Barrackpore, India. (Current address: Energy & Resources Group, Uinviersity of California- Berkeley)
Take that!
nice astronomy blog forwarded to us via email: http://niteskygirl.blogspot.com/
Alcohol researchers from the University of Florida and San Diego State University decided to gauge how drink specials influence the quantity of alcohol consumed. The findings will be published in the November issue of Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.
Bar owners claim bargain drinks simply attract customers to the establishment, but that the low prices don’t spur patrons to drink more. But alcohol researchers believe many drinkers, particularly young drinkers, are sensitive to price. If they have $10 to spend they will buy two, $5-dollar drinks or five, $2-dollar drinks, depending on what the drink special is.
Read the shocking findings here.
Lenses hooked to the internet that can form images in front of the eye are in the pipeline. Some minor roadblocks however, including:
Why not do what the GMO companies do and get their products declared “functionally equivalent” to the human eye?
Our service is plain and simple; our fee structure is reasonable.
For $110.00 we will guarantee that should the Rapture occur within ten (10) years of receipt of payment, one pet per residence will be saved. Each additional pet at your residence will be saved for an additional $15.00 fee. A small price to pay for your peace of mind and the health and safety of your four legged friends.
Next up: figure out how they could fly since they were so goddamn big. This is a genuinely controversial area and the expanding earthers suggest that gravity used to be weaker and that’s the only way you could do it. But even within the establishment there has been a shitstorm of controversy with some ideas that the bigger ones couldn’t fly at all, and yet with some maintaining they could. The bare facts are that the largest pterosaurs were pretty goddamned big.
What to believe when scientists disagree? Answer: Be agnostic about everything, and consider that the conservative ideas are as likely to be wrong as the outsider ones.
