ISSN 1534-0236
Technology and ideology alike are exercises in applied imagination.
The word "quagmire" seems more appropriate by the day. We have the first report
of an American soldier
deliberately
injuring himself to avoid going to Iraq. In a slight variation on the past, rather than
shooting himself in the foot, Marquise Roberts is accused of having a friend shoot him, and
claiming the shooting was part of an attempted robbery.
Meanwhile, the Army National Guard is falling short of its recruitment goals, largely because soldiers finishing their active duty aren't enlisting. Simultaneously, civilians who might have been willing to give one weekend a month plus two weeks a year training in the United States, expecting to be called up for flood control or in case of a national emergency, don't want to drive a truck in Iraq. If they did, they'd go ahead and join the Army.
General Blum's remarks come just a few days after the chief of the Army Reserve, Lt. Gen. James R. Helmly, told The Dallas Morning News that the Army Reserve recruiting was in a "precipitous decline" that if unchecked could inspire renewed debate over the draft. General Helmly told the newspaper that he personally opposed reviving the draft.
Never mind bad[ly written] sex, the Guardian presents the
2004
Bad Science Awards: where the Ig
Nobel prizes commemorate achievements that should not be repeated, the Bad Science
list is achievements that never were, from fraudulent credentials to studies too small
to be remotely meaningful:
The British tradition of not giving journal references for science-based stories made all of these categories difficult to judge. In May, our first candidate, the Sunday Times, described reishi mushrooms (Ganoderma lucidum) as having "performed well in trials to reduce the pain of postherpetic neuralgia". The only paper we could find relating to this subject on Pubmed referred to a trial of four people in 1998. It had no control group.
Alas, in a moment of good taste the names of the winner and runners-up for "most unlikely death sustained while credulously being treated by a transparently fraudulent alternative therapist" have been withheld.
Modern brain scanning methods have confirmed a 1960s hypothesis that there are
two distinct
pathways between the language areas of the human brain. The newly imaged
connection, Geschwind's territory, is in the temporal lobe, and matures around
age 5-7; this timing suggests that it may be connected to reading and writing.
The latest
published genome
sequence is that of Gallus gallus, the red jungle fowl, ancestor
of all domestic chickens. Working with those data, an international team
has produced a map of the genetic variation between three different strains of
domestic chicken.
In addition to its value for agriculture, this is the first bird genome sequenced.
The BBC News story notes that only 2.5 percent of the genes found in chickens can be matched to human DNA. I'm not clear on whether this means that we don't share the other 97.5 percent, or simply that they aren't matchable because, say, the genes are in a different order. The researchers also found that chickens--and, I would guess, many other birds--have a good sense of smell.
Elizabeth Demaray is building
homes for hermit crabs.
Her article begins by describing the current shortage of suitable shells for hermit crabs,
and what makes a good hermit crab home. As a bonus, Demaray describes what happens when
several hermit crabs locate an appealing new shell at the same time: they don't fight, they
sort it out so everyone gets an upgrade.
[via BoingBoing]
Better measurements of albedo, using the new Spitzer
Space Telescope, suggest that
Kuiper Belt objects
are much smaller than astronomers had thought. The previous size/mass estimates
were based on an assumed albedo of .04, because that's the best measured value for a
comet: direct measurements show an average albedo of .12. (The same amount of light from
a more reflective surface translates to a smaller, less massive object.)
There's a new
member of the human
family tree: a meter tall, Indonesian, and making sophisticated stone tools
as recently as 12,000 years ago.
The remains of the partial skeleton were found at a depth of 5.9m. At first, the researchers thought it was the body of a child. But further investigation revealed otherwise. Wear on the teeth and growth lines on the skull confirm it was an adult, features of the pelvis identify it as female and a leg bone confirms that it walked upright like we do. "When we got the dates back from the skeleton and we found out how young it was, one anthropologist working with us said it must be wrong because it had so many archaic [primitive] traits," said co-discoverer Mike Morwood, associate professor of archaeology at the University of New England, Australia.Homo floresiensis--after Flores Island, in Indonesia, where the fossils were found--seems to have been doing the classic island thing, where large animals get smaller and small ones larger: the local fauna included pony-sized elephants.
The BBC article speculates that H. floresiensis may have evolved in isolation on Flores for a million years, from ancestral H. erectus, which are known to have lived on Java.
What is surprising about this is that this species must have made it to Flores by boat. Yet building craft for travel on open water is traditionally thought to have been beyond the intellectual abilities of Homo erectus.This takes the Australian problem--how did the Aborigines get there 50,000+ years ago, and if (which seems the simplest hypothesis, however unlikely) they had ocean-going boats, what happened to the boat-building technology once they landed?--and adds an order of magnitude more unlikelihood.
Think blue, count two:
25,000 rat neurons in a Petri dish can learn to control a flight simulator.
[via BoingBoing]
Square bacteria.
Also hyper-halophilic, so it's taken 24 years to successfully grow them in the lab:
the successful culture medium is 18% salt. In a more typical lab medium, other
life-forms outcompete the slow-growing squares.
If you recently registered, or re-registered, to vote in Nevada or Oregon,
check to make
sure you're really registered. The company that was doing a lot of the voter
registrations in Nevada was deliberately destroying forms from people who signed up as
Democrats. They moved to Oregon after their Nevada landlord evicted them, and there's
no reason to think they'll be any more honest there.
If you registered as a Republican or independent, it still can't hurt to check. And you might want to think twice about voting for a party that would hire such a company.
Are you taking your vitamins? No? You may be doing
yourself a favor.
A review of the published medical research shows that antioxidant vitamins not only
don't
prevent gastrointestinal cancer, they appear to increase the cancer
death rate. The researchers note that while vitamins A, C, and E, and β-carotene "seem to
increase overall [gastrointestinal cancer] mortality, the potential preventive effect of selenium
should be studied in adequate randomised trials."
Note that researchers who find a protective effect--for any substance or technique--are
more likely to publish than those who don't. Note also that if you're taking specific
vitamins for other reasons--especially if your doctor has diagnosed a deficiency--this is
not a reason to stop. I am not a medical professional, and cannot provide medical advice.
I am not thrilled that the Newsday article I read yesterday mentioned only
that there was no protective effect from vitamins, but might be from selenium; I found that
in a New Scientist pointer to
The
Independent.
If you live in a place that has elections, please vote when
you have the opportunity: it may not change things, but not voting certainly won't.
In particular, if you're an American citizen, please vote on 2 November, both for President and for Congress and
(if relevant this time around) Senate. And any local races that you care about (if they're asking you to
choose between three people you know nothing about for Third Assistant Dog-catcher, I'm not going to try to
convince you that it matters).
Some friendly people are running a sweepstakes to encourage people to vote. If you click on
this link, you get a chance to enter (you need to be a US resident
as well as a citizen), and I get an entry for the referrer prize. They also have a link to Rock the Vote's voter registration Web page, if you're eligible (if
you're a US citizen, age 18 as of election day, and not a convicted felon, you can vote; felons can vote in some states but not others).
Yes, I'm supporting John Kerry (largely because I believe it's very important to re-defeat Bush), but I am doing so in part because I believe that democracy matters, so please register and vote, whether you agree with me, or think Dubya is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
It turns out that
Mira variable
stars are much smaller than observers had thought: what we'd thought was
the stellar surfaces is actually the top of a vapor shell that includes water
vapor in large quantities, and titanium oxide.
This is an instance where the facts did not agree with the theory, and the facts turned out to have been wrong.
It doesn't
just make people happier: cannabis extracts
reduce spasticity in
people with multiple sclerosis and may reduce or prevent the death of nerve
cells.
[Yes, I'm back. No, I haven't gotten new software. No, I don't know how long I'll be back.]
Copyright 2004 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@redbird.org.
If you like this, you might also like my home page or my online journal.