Les Jones

“I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs”

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 | Science | Permalink | 4 Comments |

The journeyman career path of a scientist:

As examples, consider two of the leading candidates for a recent Assistant Professorship in my department. One was 37, ten years out of graduate school (he didn’t get the job). The leading candidate, whom everyone thinks is brilliant, was 35, seven years out of graduate school. Only then was he offered his first permanent job (that’s not tenure, just the possibility of it six years later, and a step off the treadmill of looking for a new job every two years). The latest example is a 39 year old candidate for another Assistant Professorship; he has published 35 papers. In contrast, a doctor typically enters private practice at 29, a lawyer at 25 and makes partner at 31, and a computer scientist with a Ph.D. has a very good job at 27 (computer science and engineering are the few fields in which industrial demand makes it sensible to get a Ph.D.). Anyone with the intelligence, ambition and willingness to work hard to succeed in science can also succeed in any of these other professions.

Typical postdoctoral salaries begin at $27,000 annually in the biological sciences and about $35,000 in the physical sciences (graduate student stipends are less than half these figures). Can you support a family on that income? It suffices for a young couple in a small apartment, though I know of one physicist whose wife left him because she was tired of repeatedly moving with little prospect of settling down. When you are in your thirties you will need more: a house in a good school district and all the other necessities of ordinary middle class life. Science is a profession, not a religious vocation, and does not justify an oath of poverty or celibacy.

If you are in a position of leadership in science then you should try to persuade the funding agencies to train fewer Ph.D.s. The glut of scientists is entirely the consequence of funding policies (almost all graduate education is paid for by federal grants). The funding agencies are bemoaning the scarcity of young people interested in science when they themselves caused this scarcity by destroying science as a career. They could reverse this situation by matching the number trained to the demand, but they refuse to do so, or even to discuss the problem seriously (for many years the NSF propagated a dishonest prediction of a coming shortage of scientists, and most funding agencies still act as if this were true). The result is that the best young people, who should go into science, sensibly refuse to do so, and the graduate schools are filled with weak American students and with foreigners lured by the American student visa.

When science is conducted in secret by monks it isn’t science

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 | Science | Permalink | No Comments |

Dr. Helen on the new DSM:

But my main concern is the secrecy of the DSM-V–only a group of psychiatrists and one psychologist are allowed to oversee the revision and they have been asked to sign confidentiality agreements. Psychologists are up in arms about being excluded from the process but a more pressing concern is that a small group of psychiatrists is making decisions about what is normal vs. abnormal behavior.

Shouldn’t there be more oversight than this? Why the need to be so secret about what is being put in this manual? Why not have a more diverse group of mental health experts and others involved? I remember when we talked with APA past president Nicholas Cummings about how diagnoses were chosen for the DSM–apparently some are just reached by consensus. Huh, no research, just a decision based on a group of potentially PC or biased individuals without the research to back it up? What kind of science is that? I am started to think Szasz has a point.

This was the issue with the Catholic church. They kept secret texts. They conducted affairs in Latin to keep their affairs inaccessible to the laity. They believed that only the clergy could communicate with God.

The ideal is for the scientific process to be conducted in the open, but some parts are cloistered, conducted in secret. The most egregious example is researchers not sharing their original data, even when that data is the basis of a published paper and was collected using taxpayer grant money.

Word of the Day: Parasitoid (Biology)

Sunday, May 17th, 2009 | Science, Word of the Day | Permalink | No Comments |

Slashdot - Texas Makes Zombie Fire Ants:

What do you do when a foreign species has been introduced to your land from another continent? Bring over the natural predator from the other continent. Scientists in Texas have introduced four kinds of phorid flies from South America to fight fire ants. These USDA approved flies dive bomb ants and lay an egg inside the ant. The maggot hatches and eats away juicy tender delicious ant brain until the ant is nothing more than a zombie that wanders around for two weeks before the head falls off and the ant dies. A couple of these flies will cause the ants to modify their behavior and this will be a very slow acting solution to curb the $1 billion in damage these ants do to Texas cattle ranches and–oddly enough–electrical equipment like circuit breakers. You may remember zombifying parasites hitting insects like cockroaches.

“Zombifying” is a great word, but the scientific term for an insect pupa that eats its host is parasitoid:

A parasitoid is an organism that spends a significant portion of its life history attached to or within a single host organism which it ultimately kills (and often consumes) in the process. Thus they are similar to typical parasites except in the certain fate of the host. In a typical parasitic relationship, the parasite and host live side by side without lethal damage to the host. Typically, the parasite takes enough nutrients to thrive without preventing the host from reproducing. In a parasitoid relationship, the host is killed, normally before it can produce offspring. When treated as a form of parasitism, the term necrotroph is sometimes (though rarely) used.

This type of relationship seems to occur only in organisms that have fast reproduction rates, such as insects or (rarely) mites. Parasitoids are also often closely coevolved with their hosts. Most biologists use the term parasitoid to refer only to insects with this type of life history, but some argue the term should be used more embrasively to include parasitic nematodes, seed weevils, and certain bacteria and viruses (e.g., bacteriophages), all of which obligately destroy their host.

Most of the common parasitoids I’m familiar with are wasps that prey on other insects or spiders: tarantula hawks, cicada killers, and dirt daubers. The first two bury the paralyzed host underground. The last carries away its much smaller spider victims and entombs them inside mud tubes the female dirt dauber creates by mixing earth and water in her mouth.

Interestingly, the Wikipedia article says that 10% of insects are parasitoid. I’ve have never guessed it was that many.

Aren’t you glad I spent six and half years getting a biology degree so I can explain this stuff?

Previous WOTD - South Pointing Chariot (Inventions)

Democrats ain’t the party of science, either

Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 | Science | Permalink | No Comments |

Bill Clinton doesn’t know what an embryo is, thinks you can have an “unfertilized embryo.”

Charles Kauthhammer:

Obama’s address was morally unserious in the extreme. It was populated, as his didactic discourses always are, with a forest of straw men. Such as his admonition that we must resist the “false choice between sound science and moral values.” Yet, exactly 2 minutes and 12 seconds later he went on to declare that he would never open the door to the “use of cloning for human reproduction.”

Does he not think that a cloned human would be of extraordinary scientific interest? And yet he banned it.

Is he so obtuse as not to see that he had just made a choice of ethics over science? . . . Obama did not even pretend to make the case why some practices are morally permissible and others not. . .

And from the WSJ’s Best of the Web:

The characterization of the stem-cell restrictions as a bow to “ideology” over science is inaccurate. The objections to the use of embryonic stem cells–agree with them or not–are ethical, not ideological, in character.

In any case, today, in an editorial on Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, the Times shows just how seriously it takes the commitment to science over ideology. The Times urges Salazar “not to forget the wolf”:

The Interior Department’s scientists say that wolf populations are healthy enough, and state protections strong enough, to take the animal off the endangered species list in Montana and Idaho. We do not share their confidence in the states. De-listing allows for some hunting, and hunters in both places are itching to start firing away. Mr. Salazar should be ready to restore protections the instant the long-term survival of the species seems at risk.

The Times’s view, then, is that science should trump ideology when the Times disagrees with the ideology, but ideology should trump science when the Times agrees with the ideology.

Tags: obama

Hurricane activity at 30 year low

Sunday, March 15th, 2009 | Science | Permalink | No Comments |

2009 Global Tropical Cyclone Activity Update:

As previously reported here and here at Climate Audit, and chronicled at my Florida State Global Hurricane Update page, both Northern Hemisphere and overall Global hurricane activity has continued to sink to levels not seen since the 1970s. Even more astounding, when the Southern Hemisphere hurricane data is analyzed to create a global value, we see that Global Hurricane Energy has sunk to 30-year lows, at the least. Since hurricane intensity and detection data is problematic as one goes back in time, when reporting and observing practices were different than today, it is possible that we underestimated global hurricane energy during the 1970s. See notes at bottom to avoid terminology discombobulation.

Faking forensic evidence in Mississippi

Thursday, February 19th, 2009 | Science, True Crime | Permalink | 3 Comments |

Radley Balko looks at evidence, now including videotape, that doctors Steven Hayne and Michael West faked forensic evidence used to send people to prison, in some cases for life sentences.

I believe the moral foundations for capital punishment in some cases are sound, given a perfect legal system. For instance, in the case of capital murder, in which someone planned malice aforethought in killing a specific invidual in cold blood, it seems to me that only capital punishment or life in prison are acceptable punishments. Anything else values the criminal’s life at less than the victim’s life.

However, given the legal system we actually have and the inevitability of having flawed people running it (and we’re all of us flawed), I can’t condone capital punishment absent stringent standards of evidence. Eyewitness testimony is obviously not reliable enough, and given a case like the above even supposedly scientific evidence may not always clear the hurdle. If a person doesn’t belive in capital punishment because of standards of evidence, what should those standards be?

Original researchers retract claimed vaccine-autism link

Sunday, February 8th, 2009 | Science | Permalink | 2 Comments |

The New York Times - Researchers Retract a Study Linking Autism To Vaccination :

Ten of the 13 scientists who produced a 1998 study linking a childhood vaccine to several cases of autism retracted their conclusion yesterday.

In a statement to be published in the March 6 issue of The Lancet, a British medical journal, the researchers conceded that they did not have enough evidence at the time to tie the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, known as MMR, to the autism cases. The study has been blamed for a sharp drop in the number of British children being vaccinated and for outbreaks of measles.

”We wish to make it clear that in this paper no causal link was established between MMR vaccine and autism as the data were insufficient,” the researchers said in the retraction. ”However, the possibility of such a link was raised and consequent events have had major implications.”

The study came under fierce criticism last month when the editor of the Lancet said that the lead author of the report, Dr. Andrew Wakefield had failed to reveal that he had a conflict of interest when he conducted the research. At the time, the journal editors said, Dr. Wakefield was also gathering information for lawyers representing parents who suspected their children had developed autism because of the vaccine.

Here’s the Telegraph story on fraudulent data in the original autism study. Via Instapundit.

This is enormous. Faked data and financial conflict of interest. And the Lancet is at the heart of another controversial study that looks more and more bogus as we learn more. The other one under fire is the Iraq civilian deaths study, in which the scientist refuses to disclose his data or methods.

In the big picture, science discovered its mistakes. Or at least, acknowledged the mistakes when someone else discovered them. The system more or less worked. It just took time.

However, in the time science took to correct itself there was already a toll on human life:

Despite involving just a dozen children, the 1998 paper’s impact was extraordinary. After its publication, rates of inoculation fell from 92% to below 80%. Populations acquire “herd immunity” from measles when more than 95% of people have been vaccinated.

Last week official figures showed that 1,348 confirmed cases of measles in England and Wales were reported last year, compared with 56 in 1998. Two children have died of the disease.

This argues strongly against using leading edge science to decide timely public policy issues, particularly when that science hinges on one or two studies. By the time the science is corrected a decade or two later the damage to the public will already have been done. For this reason science will usually fail at providing us the answers we need when we need them most.

Previously

• New Study: No Link Between Fat and Cancer, Heart Disease
• Ian Murray on Science and Politics
• Where Science Meets Policy
• CDC blew it on obesity numbers
• More Evidence that Thimerasol Not Linked to Autism
• UN Estimates Number of Iraqi Deaths at 24,000
• That “100,000 Iraqis Killed Since War Started” Story

Boron molecules are doin’ it for themselves

Thursday, February 5th, 2009 | Science | Permalink | 2 Comments |

Wicked:

“An international team of researchers including scientists at the Carnegie Institution has discovered a new chemical compound that consists of a single element: boron. Chemical compounds are conventionally defined as substances consist of two or more elements, but the researchers found that at high pressure and temperature pure boron can assume two distinct forms that bond together to create a novel ‘compound’ called boron boride.”

These days everyone’s all about the genetic engineering and nanotechnology, but chemistry and materials science are still super cool.

James Hansen’s 1988 global warming predictions vs. reality

Thursday, January 15th, 2009 | Environment, Science | Permalink | No Comments |

From Climate Skeptic:

Hansen had some less alarmist scenarios, but they haven’t panned out well, either. This is data from mid-2008 (actual data in black and grey); it would look worse for Hansen now, with temperatures nearly the same as in 1988:

More recently amateur anthropogenic global warming skeptic Steve McKintyre found flaws in Hansen’s supposed actual climate numbers that Hansen later had to correct. That Wikipedia entry is far too kind to Hansen and bends over backwards to make him look as good as possible in a bad situation. Not mentioned is that McKintyre asked for Hansen’s algorithm, but Hansen - a NASA employee seemingly unfamiliar with the idea of open scientific inquiry - refused. McIntyre had to reverse-engineer the algorithm.

A few months ago Hansen beclowned himself again when the NASA department he’s in charge of, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), claimed increased global temperatures in October despite record-shattering low temperatures. The change was caused by a seeming 10 degree year over year increase in the Russian October temperatures. In reality, the dramatic increase was a mistake. Someone had repeated Russia’s September data in October.

One day I expect historians of science will use Hansen as an example of what happens when scientists becomes politicized.

Obama’s science advisor was loser of a famous bet

Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008 | Environment, Science | Permalink | 1 Comment |

John Tierney - Flawed Science Advice for Obama?:

Dr. Holdren, now a physicist at Harvard, was one of the experts in natural resources whom Paul Ehrlich enlisted in his famous bet against the economist Julian Simon during the “energy crisis” of the 1980s. Dr. Simon, who disagreed with environmentalists’ predictions of a new “age of scarcity” of natural resources, offered to bet that any natural resource would be cheaper at any date in the future. Dr. Ehrlich accepted the challenge and asked Dr. Holdren, then the co-director of the graduate program in energy and resources at the University of California, Berkeley, and another Berkeley professor, John Harte, for help in choosing which resources would become scarce.

In 1980 Dr. Holdren helped select five metals — chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten — and joined Dr. Ehrlich and Dr. Harte in betting $1,000 that those metals would be more expensive ten years later. They turned out to be wrong on all five metals, and had to pay up when the bet came due in 1990.

And Holdren is a global warming true believer, natch.

“Odorless” and “tasteless”

Tuesday, December 9th, 2008 | Science | Permalink | 4 Comments |

If you read anything science related you’ll see the terms odorless and tasteless used to describe certain liquids or gases. It just occurred to me the reason many things are odorless or tasteless to humans is that we don’t need to smell or taste them.

If we desperately needed to find nitrogen gas it’s a safe bet we would have evolved an olfactory system to detect it. As it is the Earth’s atmosphere is mostly made of nitrogen, so it’s probably best that we can’t smell it. Else we’d be able to smell almost nothing else. If water had a strong taste it would drown out every other flavor, pardon the pun. We only need to smell and taste things that are unusual, life-sustaining, dangerous, or difficult to identify with our other senses.

Michael Crichton on Science

Thursday, November 6th, 2008 | Quotes, Science | Permalink | No Comments |

“Once you abandon strict adherence to what science tells us, once you start arranging the truth in a press conference, then anything is possible. In one context, maybe you will get some mobilization against nuclear war. But in another context, you get Lysenkoism. In another, you get Nazi euthanasia. The danger is always there, if you subvert science to political ends. That is why it is so important for the future of science that the line between what science can say with certainty, and what it cannot, be drawn clearly-and defended.”
 – Michael Crichton, 1942-2008

This story is worthless without video

Saturday, October 18th, 2008 | Science | Permalink | 1 Comment |

Slashdot - “Stayin Alive” Helps You Stay Alive:

In a small study conducted at the University of Illinois medical school, doctors and students maintained close to the ideal number of chest compressions doing CPR while listening to the Bee Gees hit, “Stayin’ Alive.” At 103 beats per minute, the old disco song has almost the perfect rhythm to help keep accurate time while doing chest compressions. The study showed the song helped people who already know how to do CPR, and the results were promising enough to warrant larger, more definitive studies with real patients or untrained people. I wonder what intrinsic power is contained in “How Can You Mend A Broken Heart?”

People are Noticing: Hurricane Predictions Useless

Saturday, May 31st, 2008 | Science | Permalink | No Comments |

AP - Hurricane season outlooks of little use:

But most years, they have published his forecasts with little or no commentary on his overall record - or even analysis of how he’d fared the season before. That is, until 2005.

That spring, Gray and Klotzbach forecast 15 named storms, eight of them hurricanes. Instead, there were a record 28 named storms in 2005, including 15 hurricanes - most notably Katrina. The following year, the team overestimated the storm activity. Instead of the predicted 17 storms and nine hurricanes, the final numbers that season were 10 and five.

Coincidentally, 2005 was also the year Xie and his students published a groundbreaking paper in the journal “Geophysical Research Letters.” In it, they suggested that the interplay of sea surface temperatures in the tropical North and South Atlantic, and not El Nino, was responsible for Florida’s disastrous 2004 season.

The following year, NC State felt confident enough to issue its forecast publicly. In a release, the university’s PR department would later crow that its “was the only national model to accurately forecast Atlantic hurricane activity” in 2006.

Unfortunately, NC State’s 2007 forecast was as off as anyone’s.

Things I Didn’t Know About Lyme Disease

Monday, February 11th, 2008 | Science | Permalink | 5 Comments |

A friend from Camp Montvale days writes:

Most of you are familiar with my husband Michael’s experience of the past few years with having an initial diagnosis ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease), followed by three years of a very rapid decline. He was confined to a wheelchair, almost unable to feed himself, barely able to speak, and showing the beginning stages of respiratory difficulties. Through it all, Michael maintained to numerous doctors that he had been bitten by a tick shortly before becoming ill, and believed that he had an infection resulting from the bite. He was told by these doctors that he was in denial about ALS diagnosis and sent on his merry way to get on with the business of dying. Those of you who know Michael also know that bit of advice didn’t sit too well with him. So we continued to search for answers, and we finally found them with the help of a doctor in Philadelphia who diagnosed and treated Michael for Lyme Disease. Within a year of intensive IV antibiotic therapy he was breathing normally and having no trouble feeding himself. Within a year and a half he was walking with a cane. Within 2 years he was walking normally and to all outside observers appears completely normal (though he was left with a great deal of chronic pain as a souvenir).

She writes to tell her friends about a new documentary on Lyme disease and its mis-diagnosis:

While the popular perception of Lyme disease is of a trivial joint-related problem easily cured with a few weeks of antibiotics, our characters tell a radically different story. They are forced to live with confounding and debilitating symptoms for months to years, while searching for a diagnosis and effective treatment. As they visit specialist after specialist, so many are told that their problems are stress related or “all in their heads.” Most are misdiagnosed for years with incurable conditions such as chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, lupus, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s or ALS. And when these patients finally receive a Lyme diagnosis, they ask, What is going on? Why are front-line physicians so ignorant of classic Lyme symptoms and the true size of the epidemic? Why does it take the average Lyme patient more than 3 years and $60,000 to be diagnosed? Once diagnosed, why are many physicians and insurers refusing to provide sufferers with lifesaving treatment? And why are many of the physicians who do treat Lyme coming under fire with the threat of losing their medical licenses?

More Evidence that Thimerasol Not Linked to Autism

Friday, February 8th, 2008 | Science | Permalink | 2 Comments |

AP via WBIR - Doctors: Climb in autism cases adds to evidence against vaccine link:

A new study finds that autism cases in California have continued to climb.This, even after a vaccine preservative containing mercury — blamed by some for the neurological disorder — was removed from routine childhood shots.

State health department researchers found that the autism rate in children rose continuously from 1995 to 2007. The preservative hasn’t been used in childhood vaccines since 2001, though it is used in some flu shots.

Doctors say the study adds to existing evidence against a link between exposure to the preservative (thimerosal) and the risk of autism. And they say the study should reassure parents that autism isn’t caused by vaccinations.

Ape or Monkey?

Saturday, December 8th, 2007 | Science | Permalink | No Comments |

Last night at dinner someone noted something that had totally escaped me. If it looks like a monkey/gorilla/ape and it has a tail, it’s a monkey. If it looks like a monkey/gorilla/ape and it doesn’t have a tail, it’s an ape (and that includes orangutans).

Wikipedia notes some edge cases like the Barbary Ape that isn’t a true ape, but the general rule seems pretty good: all monkeys have tails, though some tailless uh, dudes, aren’t necessarily apes.

Hurricane Forecasts Wrong Again

Tuesday, November 27th, 2007 | Science | Permalink | No Comments |

Forecasters underpredicted in 2005 (the year of Katrina) and overcompensated by overpredicting for two years in a row.

Anyone Watch “The Unit” Tuesday Night?

Thursday, November 1st, 2007 | Science | Permalink | 4 Comments |

Man, that guest star special agent had a hella bad case of cauliflower ear. The director tried to keep it out of the frame, with limited sucess.

Comparing his ear to other actors ears on the show made me realize something, though. Even regular ears look pretty weird. If they were any stranger looking we’d start having sex with them.

Until I looked up the Wikipedia entry for cauliflower ear I didn’t realize it came from injuries. I always thought it was genetic.

UPDATE: In comments people are telling me the guest star was pro fighter Randy Couture. I’m impressed. I thought the guy was a professional actor. I would never have guessed he was an athlete doing a turn as an actor.

Mistaken Scientific Consensus

Thursday, October 11th, 2007 | Science | Permalink | No Comments |

New York Times - Diet and Fat: A Severe Case of Mistaken Consensus:

Meanwhile, there still wasn’t good evidence to warrant recommending a low-fat diet for all Americans, as the National Academy of Sciences noted in a report shortly after the U.S.D.A. guidelines were issued. But the report’s authors were promptly excoriated on Capitol Hill and in the news media for denying a danger that had already been proclaimed by the American Heart Association, the McGovern committee and the U.S.D.A.

The scientists, despite their impressive credentials, were accused of bias because some of them had done research financed by the food industry. And so the informational cascade morphed into what the economist Timur Kuran calls a reputational cascade, in which it becomes a career risk for dissidents to question the popular wisdom.

With skeptical scientists ostracized, the public debate and research agenda became dominated by the fat-is-bad school. Later the National Institutes of Health would hold a “consensus conference” that concluded there was “no doubt” that low-fat diets “will afford significant protection against coronary heart disease” for every American over the age of 2. The American Cancer Society and the surgeon general recommended a low-fat diet to prevent cancer.

But when the theories were tested in clinical trials, the evidence kept turning up negative. As Mr. Taubes notes, the most rigorous meta-analysis of the clinical trials of low-fat diets, published in 2001 by the Cochrane Collaboration, concluded that they had no significant effect on mortality.

Sounds similar to the climate change debate, doesn’t it? Except that right now temperatures are increasing, so the trend is supporting the consensus view. I know it’s beyond some people’s comprehension to think the trend won’t continue indefinitely, but it might not. Or it might continue indefinitely. I don’t know. If the temperatures dostart going back down, some people are going to have some fast talking to do.

Vaseline Glass Contains Uranium

Saturday, September 8th, 2007 | Science | Permalink | No Comments |

I’ve seen many vaseline glass pieces in antique stores, typically arranged in a display case with a blacklight that makes them glow green. I just discovered that vaseline glass glows because it contains uranium oxide, and is also known as uranium glass.

At the end of the 19th century, it was discovered that uranium glass with certain additional minerals could be tempered at high temperature to partially crystallise, changing from its normal transparent yellow or yellow-green with increasing opacity to, ultimately, opaque white. This material, technically a glass-ceramic, inspired the name “vaseline glass” due to its similar appearance to petroleum jelly. Today, this term is the preferred term for all varieties of uranium glass, especially in the United States.

Uranium glass was originally used widely in the production of tableware and other decorative household items, but has long since fallen out of general use, and is most likely to be found as marbles for use as novelties or in science experiments. Most other objects made with this glass are considered antiques or retro-era collectibles, although there has been a minor revival in art glassware.

Regular uranium glass fluoresces bright green under ultraviolet light due to the uranium content. Certain other varieties will glow other colors. Uranium glass is scarcely radioactive, although a great enough quantity will register on a sufficiently sensitive geiger counter above background radiation. The radioactivity of the glass is widely considered to be negligible and not harmful.

Hat tip to Scribal Terror, which has lots of unusual links. More vaseline glass information at Southern Belle.

The red Fiestaware produced from 1936 to 1943 also contained uranium oxide. The manufacturer stopped using uranium oxide, not because of safety concerns, but because the U.S. government commandeered all uranium supplies for use with the Manhattan Project. Production resumed in 1959, but was discontinued again in 1969 due to safety concerns.

Courtship Ritual of the Waved Albatross

Thursday, July 26th, 2007 | Science | Permalink | No Comments |

David from Ironic Sans and his new bride just got back from their honeymoon on the Galapagos Islands. You’ve got to see his video of a waved albatross courtship ritual.

Why have I never thought of going to the Galapagos? I’d love to go there.

Monster Pig

Saturday, May 26th, 2007 | Science | Permalink | 4 Comments |

Via email from Mark O’Dell: Boy Bags Wild Hog Bigger Than ‘Hogzilla’.

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) - Hogzilla is being made into a horror movie. But the sequel may be even bigger: Meet Monster Pig. An 11-year-old Alabama boy used a pistol to kill a wild hog his father says weighed a staggering 1,051 pounds and measured 9-feet-4 from the tip of its snout to the base of its tail. Think hams as big as car tires.

If the claims are accurate, Jamison Stone’s trophy boar would be bigger than Hogzilla, the famed wild hog that grew to seemingly mythical proportions after being killed in south Georgia in 2004.

It’s amazing to me that new animals of record size are still being found in an area as settled as the lower 48. It sort of gives me hope.

For gun folks, the two-tone “pinto” look of that gun - with its black receiver and barrel and silver cylinder and recoil compensator - immediately signalled that the revolver is almost certainly a Smith & Wesson, which has a long history of producing limited runs of pinto guns. From the size and the fact that it killed a half ton hog it has to be one of Smith & Wesson’s X frame revolvers, which would mean it’s chambered in either .500 Magnum or .460 Magnum. It may very well be the Performance Center 460XVR, which has the same silver recoil compensator on the end of the barrel.

That’s a limited run of 500 guns. After news of this gets out I have the feeling they’ll all get snapped up pretty quickly as “the gun that killed MonsterPig™.” Ya gotta love a revolver that’s so big it comes with swivels for a rifle sling. “Go ahead, pig. Make my day.”

- MonsterPig.com
- Snopes entry on Hogzilla

UPDATE: A commenter points to this Sports Illustrated article that says the gun was a “.50″ which would mean it’s the .500 Magnum.

Plant Those Easter Lilies

Wednesday, April 4th, 2007 | Science | Permalink | No Comments |

We bought an Easter Lily for my mom tonight. While I was checking out the cashier mentioned that he always planted his, and they kept coming back. I didn’t know that you could plant Easter Lilies. Did you know that?

Here’s info on how to plant Easter Lilies from Hortchat.com. (And is it just me, or does Hortchat sound vaguely dirty?) They’re not hardy in all parts of the country, but Tennessee is apparently warm enough for them to overwinter.

Study: Delaying Umbilical Cord Cut Helps Babies

Monday, March 26th, 2007 | Science | Permalink | 1 Comment |

From Canada.com:

About 25 to 60 per cent of fetal blood is in the cord and placenta. Earlier research shows clamping the cord within the first five to 10 seconds of birth compared to waiting to clamp “results in a decrease to the neonate (newborn) of 20 to 40 ml of blood per kilogram of body weight, which would provide the equivalent of 30 to 35 mg of iron,” Hutton and her research partner Eman Hassan, at the University of B.C., write today in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Delaying clamping could boost blood volumes in newborns by up to 30 per cent, bringing with it more iron.

Hat tip to Katie Allison-Granju.