When I think about mirages, I think of two things: Vegas and the scorching hot desert (I guess that's one thing?). I never think about the cold, though. Hell, I never even knew mirages happened in the cold! More »
Keith's note: Right now a featured video on NASA Buzzroom is "Bowling For Soup US Tour". (original on YouTube). Is this appropriate? No mention of outer space. So ... what do you do? If you go to NASA Buzzroom, and scroll to the bottom of the page you will see this notice: "This site collects community content about NASA. We invite you to join the conversation! If you find something you don't think belongs, please let us know! Page Last Updated: March 6th, 2011; Page Editor: JESS3; NASA Official: Beth Beck" One small problem: they do not provide a link or an email address. So ... how does one "let them know"?
If true–and not a case of contamination or mistaken identity–this could be big:
Dr. Richard B. Hoover, an astrobiologist with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, has traveled to remote areas in Antarctica, Siberia, and Alaska, amongst others, for over ten years now, collecting and studying meteorites. He gave FoxNews.com early access to the out-of-this-world research, published late Friday evening in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology. In it, Hoover describes the latest findings in his study of an extremely rare class of meteorites, called CI1 carbonaceous chondrites — only nine such meteorites are known to exist on Earth.
Though it may be hard to swallow, Hoover is convinced that his findings reveal fossil evidence of bacterial life within such meteorites, the remains of living organisms from their parent bodies — comets, moons and other astral bodies. By extension, the findings suggest we are not alone in the universe, he said.
For now I’ll say I’m intrigued, but also somewhat skeptical–at least until we learn more. What do readers think?
[Update: Phil's got a great post up on the possibility of fossilized microscopic life forms.]
Please visit my idea on GE Ecomagination website. I think it is a new approach in combining these technologies. All comments and support is welcome.
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Top twelve picks
“Dead world at sunset.” I’m not going to spoil the topic but just read this, okay? This is beautiful, lyrical and amazingly tight writing, of the kind that makes me want to be a better writer. Hats off to Jessa Gamble. My favourite thing in a week of top stuff.
“Forming, finding or defending a vacuum-sealed echo-chamber online is extremely difficult, if at all possible.” Bora Zivkovic destroys the “internet is an echo chamber” meme
“Cognitive science is full of crap – except when it’s not. Which makes it like most science, only more so” – a cogent analysis and defence by David Dobbs
“Does school science still divide people into “pure scientists, applied scientists & failures”? By Alice Bell
A beautiful ode to the photon, by Lily Asquith
“The mere existence of whales suggests that is possible to suppress cancer many-fold better than is done in humans.” Carl Zimmer on Peto’s Paradox
“Followers of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Churches believe they should maintain a home for all of God’s creatures around their places of worship. The result? Forests ringing churches.” An amazing post by Delene Beeland on the “church forests” of Ethiopia
“In the 1970s, he transplanted an entire monkey head onto another monkey’s body. And, for a short time, the severed head lived.” By Hannah Waters
In a medical detective tale worthy of House, a top plague scientist dies of… the plague. It’s more surprising than you think.
“The aim is so simple that the complexity and magnitude of the undertaking is easy to miss. Starting from scratch, with new computer tools and more data than has ever been used, they will arrive at an independent assessment of global warming.” Great Ian Sample feature on Richard Muller, the Berkeley Earth project, climate science & open data
No one puts baby in a cohort! Mark Henderson on a new study that’s recruiting 100,000 UK babies (paywall). Meanwhile, Helen Pearson writes about the “study of a lifetime” – a group of thousands of Brits whose health has been tracked since 1946.
What made scientist/murderer Amy Bishop snap? Amy Wallance has the story.
Science/news/writing
Lab to red carpet: an NYT piece on famous actors with science backgrounds, including Natalie Portman (here she is on Pubmed – she’s the fifth author). And from Wikipedia: “Due to her sci pubs, Portman is among small number of actors w/ a finite Erdos-Bacon number”
Oscar science: based on movie-star faces, we now prefer younger, more feminine women… and men
“Comment Is Free… sometimes what they publish is worth every penny of that.” ZING! Language Log destroys a piece which claims that languages with good spelling systems have no word for dyslexia.
The strange history of tropical neurasthenia, a “relatively short-lived colonial affliction”.
The hairy beast with seven fuzzy sexes
Terrorist taunts may tell attack timing. “”It is very possible we may be identifying the linguistic predictors of bin Laden himself.”
Obama orders investigations into 1940s experiments that deliberately infected Guatemalans with syphilis and gonorrhoea
“A large crowd of bystanders & a tired operator led to a mistaken direction of exploration.” Early neurosurgery failures, by Emily Anthes (the piece, not the failures).
“I’d always dreamed of walking into a room stacked ceiling to floor w/hippo skulls.” Hannah Waters on museum collections.
An orchid parasitising a fungus, by Lucas Brouwers
Here’s a great idea: let’s save practically no money by cutting 100% of the government’s poison control centers.
Are 10,000 buttons safer than one fancy screen? At this Russian nuke plant, yes. By John Pavlus
It’s not your imagination, that guy really IS taking a long time to buckle his %&$@ seatbelt. By SciCurious
China’s “heavenly horse“. And by “heavenly”, I mean “parasite-riddled”.
“Infested by the Wizard of Oz” – Vaughan Bell on delusional parasitosis
The “greenhouse effect” that’s actually cooling the world.
Mo Costandi on the increasingly shaky ‘broken mirror neurons‘ theory of autism
Visions of Africa shaped eye evolution.
Give postdocs a career, not empty promises, urges Jenny Rohn
Blum on Boom – why explosions in science class can be excellent
How many clocks of life are there?
By our powers combined, we are Global Virus Response Network
What was disgraced cloner Woo Suk Hwang doing in Libya? This story just keeps on giving.
They “superglued the [mantis shrimps] to Plexiglass & dropped stainless steel balls on them” by Matt Soniak
Even ideas – such as swimming strokes – conjure up colours for some synaesthetes
Costa Rica announces 2.47 million acre marine reserve
Heh/wow/huh
If we told you what this press release was about, we’d have to shoot you.
Hipster science (“My data don’t need to fit to your ‘model’.”)
You can order flesh-eating beetles through the post! Comes w/ free frog to start the skeletonising fun
XKCD on cladistics
Man draws perfect circle in less than a second. Man is nerd Jedi
C3P0 reminds “parents of earth” to make sure their children are “fully immunized” in awesome ’70s PSA
Golden-haired spider that looks like an ant. Nature! Hell yeah!
Psychologists – they’re all just screwing with each other.
A poster for Brian Cox’s next series?
Physics troll (not Internet kind) explains how physics ought to work
Heh. Scientists – all you do is stick PINS in stuff.
Gummi bear vs oxidation. Gummi bear loses.
DRAAAAAAAAINAGE. Awesome geo-art
James Delingpole, the gift that keeps on giving
“The success of MORDOR will open up the majority of the bone specimens previously not available for sampling”
Arnie, in calling for fossil fuel termination, quotes Conan: “Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women.”
Blogging/journalism/internet/society
Gladwell, proven spectacularly wrong on social media, dismisses critics as pajama-wearing bloggers in Brooklyn. Really, Malcolm? You are critiquing us on sartorial grounds?
And the misleading headline of the week goes to the Independent. Based on this, the Knight Science Journalism Tracker says “Many Brit outlets do seem markedly fond of starting readers off with caution- and irony-free hyperbole, and then as a story proceeds titrating its consumers back to reality.” Great. Just great. England f**king expects, okay?
The Battle for Control – what people who worry about the internet are really worried about
A hive for long-form journalism on the Internet.
Fox News kept out of Canada by law saying that you can’t lie on broadcast news
I’m in the middle of a chain retraction
It’s the Inequality, Stupid. A great infographic.
When manning up involves pushing women out
Wow. German defense minister Guttenberg resigns after losing his PhD for a plagiarized thesis. Ivan Oransky has the story.
This fire resistant suit is being burned at 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit for about 12 seconds. If you were wearing this suit with that kind of fire attacking you, there's still a possibility you might suffer some second degree burns. But if you were wearing traditional fire retardent material, well, you'd be dead. More »
Is there any units to calculate hardness, and what factors effect this?
I never knew those plastic clips that hold a bag of bread together actually had a purpose. The most commonly used system is the one above, where Blue, Green, Red, White, Yellow (alphabetical order) tell you which day it was actually baked, Monday through Saturday. Not every bread company does this, but next time you see it, you'll know which loaf is the fresh prince. [Wise Bread via Consumerist] More »
Jean Vanier (in a book edited by Carolyn Whitney-Brown) on the principles underlying forgiveness.
Spiders and penises are two things most people want to keep far, far apart. Until now. New research suggests that the venom of one aggressive arachnid could be used in future treatments for erectile dysfunction (that is, if it doesn’t kill you first).
Say hello to the Brazilian wandering spider (Phoneutria nigriventer), also known as the armed spider, or as the banana spider. With an over four-inch leg span, this South and Central American native normally creeps around banana plantations, although some have wound up in American supermarkets and Canadian grocery stores. Flaccid fellows beware: On top of severe pain, a single bite from this eight-legged foe can cause you to lose control of your muscles—and if it’s not treated, the bite can screw up your ability to breathe so much so that you slowly die of oxygen deprivation.With a sip of the anti-venom, though, you’d recover in a week. And truth be told, only 10 people out of 7,000 are known to have actually died from a bite. Survivors tell of experiencing painful erections that last for more than four hours—a medical ailment known as priapism.
It’s this ...
Can I use #6 stranded (as opposed to #6 solid) for a lightning drain off my Hamm antenna? I have the stranded but a friend thought it had to be solid. (southern Oregon). Thanks, sb
Forget stomach stapling and lap band surgery. The next big thing in weight loss surgery may be the stomach pacemaker. More »
We are an energy management company and are looking for ECA/NICEE installers for voltage optimisation see http://www.streamline-power.com/voltage_optimisation.html Ideally a SAP person(s) to work within HV zone would be suitable
It’s Caturday! What better day for a nap?
Despite any folk tales, Leo did not steal any of Mrs. BA’s breath. But you can still tell she’s planning something evil. I know what she’s capable of.
Related posts:
- Caturday night’s all right for fighting 2 (may be my fave Caturday post ever)
- Big Caturday
- I toad you it’s Caturday
- Owl be seeing you
There is No, repeat No scientific evidence that oogling women's breasts promotes male longevity
From Cliff Thies:
MyFoxBoston is the latest to fall for the internet hoax that a study of 500 men in Germany provides scientific proof that starring at women's breats promotes longevilty (as in life expectancy). Judy Walker and Quynh Le of the University of Tasmania, at the 6th Annual Rural Health Conference in Canberra, stated conclusively that there was no such study, that the report was never published in the New England
Journal of Medicine, and that Karen Weatherby, the purported author of the report, does even not exist. They then went on and on about something called "Critical Discourse Analysis." I suppose this reflects that, in their theory of male longevity, boring them is more effective than exciting them.
From Fox5:
Five-hundred men participated in the German study. Half were told to refrain from looking at breasts for five years, the other half were told to ogle them daily.
The study found the men who stared at breasts more often showed lower rates of heart problems, a lower resting heart rate and lower blood pressure.
The authors of the study recommend that men stare at breasts for 10 minutes a day.
Editor's note - Apologies, of course, to the more socially conservative readers of LR.
"Staunch Conservative" with an obvious libertarian streak
From Eric Dondero:
Libertarian-conservative New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has a very mixed record on marijuana decriminalization. But his latest move may send a wave of cheers among the libertarian wing of the GOP.
From NJ.com "Christie nominates N.J. Assemblyman Carroll to be superior court judge":
Gov. Chris Christie has nominated Assemblyman Michael Patrick Carroll, a Morris County Republican and one of the most conservative lawmakers in New Jersey, to be a judge on the state Superior Court.
Christie spokesman Kevin Roberts said today the nomination had been approved, but that it would not be official until Thursday.
"The governor feels he’s qualified and will be a great judge for the Superior Court," Roberts said.
Carroll has a long history with the Republican Party that dates back to President Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign in 1972. He’s known as a staunch conservative, but has also pushed for medical-marijuana legislation and tax incentives for electric cars.
In a great irony, Carroll actually defeated Christie a few years ago, in the Republican primary for the Assembly seat that he holds. They have since become friends.
From Eric Dondero:
According to the Baltimore Sun, the overwhelmingly Democrat-controlled House passed the so-called "Dream Act," opening the floodgates for illegal aliens to win taxpayer-subsidized tuitions at state universities and colleges.
The small Republican contingent in the Legislature is fighting back.
Advocates have long wanted to grant the children of illegal immigrants in-state tuition at Maryland's university system. Opponents say widening the pool of applicants will only make admission more difficult for those who've played by the rules.
Senators will have the chance to weigh-in on the issue during next week's debate and the GOP caucus signaled that they will offer multiple amendments to the bill.
Sen. E.J. Pipkin, an Eastern Shore Republican, called the idea an "unfunded mandate" to the state's community colleges, which he said would have to absorb costs associated with a slew of new students.
From Eric Dondero:
Muir Boda is Vice-Chairman of the Libertarian Party of Maryland. He's a candidate for Salisbury City Council (Eastern Shore).
He is a staunch supporter of the local "Safe Streets" initiative.
From Salisbury News Feb. 27:
We need to take a three pronged approach to addressing the root causes of crime, which must be approached as a regional problem.
Short term requires us to develop strong, multi-jurisdictional partnerships on targeting gangs, organized crime and our most violent offenders. After all, criminals know no boundaries and neither should our approach in dealing with them.
From LP.org:
Libertarian candidate Muir Boda, running for the Salisbury City Council in Maryland, placed fourth in the March 1 primary. He will advance to the general election on April 5.
Boda is vice-chair of the Maryland LP.
See related LR article on Boda's campaign, Dec. 25.
