Americans Starting to Drive Less

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Check out this graph published by The New York Times which charts the average miles driven per year vs. the average price of gasoline adjusted for inflation.

As the Times reports, "Until recently, Americans have driven more each year than the previous one, with a few brief exc

Upcoming Talk: Why Do We Make Bad Health Care Decisions?

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For SBM readers in the Toronto area, I’ll be speaking on Friday, May 28, at the Centre for Inquiry on how science advocates can help support better health decisions:

Despite the dramatic improvements in the extent and quality of our lives, largely owing to modern medicine, our current health care system has fostered a backlash, manifested in part by the emergence of non-science-based “alternative” health care practices. This trend has driven a need for dialogue on how best we should balance evidence-based decisions against demands for consumer choice – regardless of the science. In this presentation, Scott Gavura will discuss how health care decision-making differs from other goods and services, and how this impacts on the choices we make, both as individuals, and in aggregate. Through an interactive discussion, he will facilitate a dialogue on the opportunities for science advocates to effect positive change in health at the patient- and population-level.

Science advocates have the evidence to support their positions. How do we translate this evidence to support effective decision making? On May 28, join the conversation.

Get the event details, and you can RSVP on Facebook. The talk is great value-for-money: $5, $4 for students, and free for CFI members.


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We Repeat, the Warmest April on Record

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NOAA: Warmest April Global Temperature on Record

Last month was the warmest April on record.  This finding was already published here, but we need to highlight it because the deniers are still repeating the ridiculous claim that the oceans are not warming and neither is the climate.   That misinformation is still popping up everywhere, recently by a man who calls himself Lord Monckton in his testimony to Congress.   Last weekend there was another fake-science conference, sponsored by the Heartland Foundation (a right-wing fringe organization), advertised as being about the “reality” of global warming.   But like Congresswoman Michele Bachmann’s fake forum on global warming last spring (that I attended), it was actually just a big meeting for the purpose of trying to disprove climate change and encourage the U.S. government and business to do nothing about it. This is the official plan of the Republicans. Do Nothing About It. You can shorten that to “do nothing” which is the ongoing mantra of the Republican Party for every issue.

That is why every bit of proof and data of climate change is important.  The conservatives, at their little right-wing conference, presented misleading charts and graphs, creatively using dates and numbers that fit their anti-science arguments, so that the public will be more likely to believe them. Most people know and understand that the oceans are warming and global warming is continuing, but planting doubt, as conservatives do, prevents action on this crisis.   Lack of action will ensure that companies like British Petroleum and Exxon and Massey Energy won’t have to change their ways and that protects shareholders and people invested in these multi-billion-dollar companies. But most people with a functioning mind and BS radar know the drill, there is no need to go into all that in detail.  With conservatives, it’s all about protecting their bank accounts, not the planet.

Below are more global warming facts from Dotearth.  This is more help in being armed with global warming facts, are because the deniers are ramping up their efforts. There is a slight possibility that an energy bill might pass this year, and they are going to do everything they can to stop it.  So, they will lie, and make things up, which is the general MO for the Republicans opposing legislation on energy and climate change. NOAA doesn’t make things up.

NOAA: Warmest April Global Temperature on Record

Also Warmest January-April

May 17, 2010 — The combined global land and ocean surface temperature was the warmest on record for both April and for the period from January-April, according to NOAA. Additionally, last month’s average ocean surface temperature was the warmest on record for any April, and the global land surface temperature was the third warmest on record.

The monthly analysis from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, which is based on records going back to 1880, is part of the suite of [...]

NCBI ROFL: Sorry Pedobear, science proves drinking is no excuse. | Discoblog

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Barely legal: is attraction and estimated age of young female faces disrupted by alcohol use, make up, and the sex of the observer? "One 'reasonable ground' for unlawful sex with a minor is mistaken age. Alcohol consumption and make-up are often deemed further influences on impaired perception. Two hundred and forty persons in bars and cafes rated the attractiveness of composite faces of immature and mature females with and without additional makeup, alcohol users having their concurrent blood-alcohol level measured using a breathalyser. A non-sex-specific preference for immature faces over sexually mature faces was found. Alcohol and make-up did not inflate attractiveness ratings in immature faces. While alcohol consumption significantly inflated attractiveness ratings for participants viewing made-up sexually mature faces, greater alcohol consumption itself did not lead to overestimation of age. Although alcohol limited the processing of maturity cues in female observers, it had no effect on the age perceptions of males viewing female faces, suggesting male mate preferences are not easily disrupted. Participants consistently overestimated the age of sexually immature- and sexually mature-faces by an average of 3.5 years. Our study suggests that even heavy alcohol consumption does not interfere with age-perception tasks in men, so is not of itself ...


Did Craig Venter Just Create Synthetic Life? The Jury Is Decidedly Out | 80beats

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synthetic-cellsIn another step forward in the quest to create artificial life in a test tube, a team of genetic engineers led by Craig Venter has built a synthetic genome and proved that it can power up when placed inside an existing cell.

Dr. Venter calls the result a “synthetic cell” and is presenting the research as a landmark achievement that will open the way to creating useful microbes from scratch to make products like vaccines and biofuels. At a press conference Thursday, Dr. Venter described the converted cell as “the first self-replicating species we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer.” [The New York Times]

The technical achievement is worth crowing about. The researchers built on Venter’s trick from last year, in which he took the genome from one bacterium, transferred it the hollowed-out shell of a different bacterial species, and watched as the new cell “booted up” successfully. In this new step, the researchers built a genome from scratch, copying the genetic code from a bacterium that infects goats and introducing just a few changes as a “watermark”; then they transferred that synthetic genome to a cell. As the researchers report in Science, the cell functioned and replicated, creating more copies of the slightly altered goat-infecting bacterium–now nicknamed Synthia.

But the reactions to Venter’s accomplishment have been mixed–while some celebratory headlines trumpeted the creation of artificial life, many scientists said the reaction was overblown, and took issue with Venter’s claim of having created a truly synthetic cell. Here, we round up a selection of responses from all corners of the science world.

Bioethicist Arthur Caplan finds the philosophical ramifications of the work fascinating:

“Their achievement undermines a fundamental belief about the nature of life that is likely to prove as momentous to our view of ourselves and our place in the Universe as the discoveries of Galileo, Copernicus, Darwin and Einstein.” [Nature News]

But many experts say that since Venter copied a pre-existing genome, he didn’t really create a new life form.

“To my mind Craig has somewhat overplayed the importance of this,” said David Baltimore, a leading geneticist at Caltech. Dr. Baltimore described the result as “a technical tour de force” but not breakthrough science, but just a matter of scale…. “He has not created life, only mimicked it,” Dr. Baltimore said [The New York Times].

In addition, many experts note that the experimenters got a big boost by placing the synthetic genome in a preexisting cell, which was naturally inclined to make sense of the transplanted DNA and to turn genes on and off. Thus, they say, it’s not accurate to label the experiment’s product a true “synthetic cell.”

Meanwhile, physicist Freeman Dyson backed his way into paying the researchers a compliment in his own inimitable way:

This experiment, putting together a living bacterium from synthetic components, is clumsy, tedious, unoriginal. From the point of view of aesthetic and intellectual elegance, it is a bad experiment. But it is nevertheless a big discovery. It opens the way to the new world of synthetic biology. It proves that sequencing and synthesizing DNA give us all the tools we need to create new forms of life. After this, the tools will be improved and simplified, and synthesis of new creatures will become quicker and cheaper. Nobody can predict the new discoveries and surprises that the new technology will bring [The Edge].

And while some horrified environmentalists called for an immediate halt to such experiments, arguing that unnatural life forms could cause unknown disasters if released into the wild, Paul Keim of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity was quick to reassure the public.

Keim said there is no new hazard because the Venter team manufactured a genome whose structure and function were already understood. The researchers didn’t create a novel life form. “We have a long way to go before we see a totally synthetic organism that does something important or dangerous,” he said. [Washington Post]

Related Content:
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Scientists Create First Ever Synthetic Bacterium That Looks Like Craig Venter
80beats:Synthetic Life By the Year’s End? Yes, Proclaims Craig Venter.
80beats: On the Quest for Synthetic Life, Scientists Build Their Own Cellular Protein Factory
80beats: Researcher’s Artificial DNA Works Almost Like the Real Thing
DISCOVER: DISCOVER Dialogue: Geneticist Craig Venter


Genetic Hijacking Termed "Creating Life"

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Once again, the press are running "life creation" claims on genetic research that hijacks a living cell to run their own DNA code. True, they have managed to run a completely synthetic genome and make it self-replicating, using the "life" of another organism to do so. Story here.

I don't thi

Sunlight Reflects Oily Environmental Disaster | Visual Science

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An image from the MODIS on NASA’s Aqua satellite on Tuesday afternoon, May 11, shows that the damaged Deepwater Horizon oil well continued to leak significant amounts of oil in the Gulf of Mexico.

Oil slicks become most visible in satellite images when they appear in a swath of the image called the sunlit region—where the mirror-like reflection of the sun is blurred by ocean waves into an area of brightness. In the bright zone of reflection, the difference between the oil-smoothed water and rougher surface of the clean water is enhanced. The slick appears as a silvery-gray patch in the center of the image. The tip of the Mississippi Delta is at upper left. Wispy clouds make it hard to determine whether any of the streamers or smaller patches of oil extend northeast of the main slick.

Image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA, GSFC

Mixed-Up, Adopted Ducks Try to Mate With the Wrong Species | Discoblog

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There’s that old saying about the futility of a bird and a fish falling in love. Apparently, two birds might not fair any better: Unlucky ducks from two different species are falling for the wrong women. Actually, matchmaker Michael D. Sorenson of Boston University set them up at birth. In a foreign exchange program of sorts, his team took sixteen young male redheads (Aythya Americana) and sixteen young male canvasbacks (Aythya valisineria) and switched their homes, allowing canvasbacks to raise redhead ducklings and vice versa. Sorenson wanted to study imprinting—when a young bird sees its caretaker and recognizes her as its mother. Determining what Mom looks like turns out to be important later in a bird’s life, as the duck uses its mother’s image to pick out mates. But, as anyone who knows the origins of the word “cuckold” can attest, even when scientists aren't mucking about in the nests some birds don’t raise their own offspring. Some deadbeat ducks--including the redheads--sneak their eggs into another species’ nest, a way to shove off parenting responsibilities. Sorenson wanted to find out if such an abandoned bird could imprint the wrong mother, and later pick the wrong mates. The resulting romantic comedy, published online today in ...