What we're talking about Wednesday, April 13, 2016

Well-Manicured Wastelands

The Roaming Ecologist has a few words about lawns. Lawns – those myopically obsessive (and evil) urban, suburban, and increasingly rural monoculture eyesores that displace native ecosystems at a rate between 5,000 and 385,000 acres per day* in favor of sterile, chemically-filled, artificial environments bloated with a tremendous European influence that provide no benefits over…

Guest Post: Matthew Heberger Pacific Institute, Oakland, California New monthly water use data for California water utilities shows that residential water use varies widely around the state, and that the response to the drought has been uneven. Moreover, in some areas, residential use averages more than 500 gallons per person per day, indicating that we…

by Peter Gleick and Heather Cooley Debates about water in California, the western U.S., and indeed, worldwide, have traditionally focused on the question of how best to further expand water supply to meet some hypothetical future increase in water demand. And the solution frequently offered is to build massive new infrastructure in the form of…

On Pharyngula, PZ Myers doesn't just want cut your grass—he want to tear it out by the roots and leave it to rot in the sun. He quotes J. Crumpler on The Roaming Ecologist, who calls lawns "sterile, chemically-filled, artificial environments [...] that provide no benefits over the long term; no food, no clean water, no wildlife habitat, and no foundation for preserving our once rich natural heritage." To make matters worse, lawnmower use adds carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, while beautiful bermuda grass requires a lot of H₂O in a world that is increasingly insecure about water. During the depths of California's drought—which has seen some relief from El Niño this year—many residents took a hard look at their lawns. On Significant Figures, Mathew Heberger writes, "many Californians could reduce their outdoor water use by 70% or more by landscaping with low water-use plants." It's not as if the alternative is a dirt patch in front of your house; there are a wide variety of plants you can grow with nutritional, ecological, and aesthetic value, that will be less of a middle finger to the planet.

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Life Science

We had a job candidate pass through today. They were from New Orleans. The phrase “crawfish boil” came through on the interview. Now guess what I can’t get out of my head?

As the nation’s largest federal employer of scientists and engineers, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has always been at the forefront of innovative and groundbreaking science and technology. DoD scientists and engineers have played a leading role in some of the world’s most advanced and life-changing technological breakthroughs, including the Internet, the Global Positioning…

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Physical Science

“That’s all regular matter, just five percent. A quarter is “dark matter,” which is invisible and detectable only by gravitational pull, and a whopping 70 percent of the universe is made up of “dark energy,” described as a cosmic antigravity, as yet totally unknowable. It’s basically all mystery out there – all of it, with…

My trip to New York was a lot of fun. Some friends from Kentucky were visiting me this weekend, and that was fun too. But in all the chaos Sunday Chess Problem ended up taking the week off. Sorry about that! It will return next week. POTW, on the other hand, is not taking the…

“This then, I thought, as I looked round about me, is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was.” -W.G. Sebald In the 1600s, the earliest telescopes saw that Saturn had “ears,” while…

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Environment

The important thing first. I predicted who would win the Wisconsin primary, although my prediction suggested that Sanders would do better than he did. (He underperformed.) I predicted the outcome of the Wyoming primary exactly. These are the most recent two in a long series of mostly correct predictions of which Democratic candidate will win…

Disentangling greenhouse warming and aerosol cooling to reveal Earth’s climate sensitivity (T. Storelvmo, T. Leirvik, U. Lohmann, P. C. B. Phillips & M. Wild; Nature Geoscience 9, 286–289 (2016) doi:10.1038/ngeo2670) doesn’t seem to have garnered much attention. I glanced at it, I think, thought “that told me what I thought I knew already”, and thought…

Calling U.S. K-12 Science Education Professionals! GHF Online science instructor Madeline Goodwin is doing her Master’s thesis research on climate science in the classroom, and she needs your help! She is doing a survey of science education professionals to find the answer to the following question: What are the most important climate science concepts for…

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Humanities

Reveal investigates fraud in California’s workers’ comp system; workers face unnecessary hazards in the recycling industry; anger over union exemptions in Los Angeles’ new minimum wage law; and two miners win their retaliation case against Murray Energy.

Fornvännen 2015:3 is now on-line on Open Access. Lars Larsson on an unusual Late Neolithic burial monument at the record-breaking 1st millennium site of Uppåkra. Christina Fredengren on deposition of human and animal bodies in the waters of inland Uppland. Lars Liedgren and Ingela Bergman on a previously unpublished 1921 excavation of a Late Medieval…

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Education

What if adversity weren’t the enemy? Join blind adventurer Erik Weihenmayer on his quest to harness adversity, redefine expectations, and live a life without barriers. In this session, find out why you don’t need perfect sight to have a powerful vision. Erik Weihenmayer is one of the most celebrated and accomplished athletes in the world.…

They Might Be Giants will take the stage on Saturday, April 16th at the USA Science & Engineering Festival for two incredible rockin’ shows! This amazing alternative and tech-inspired group — widely known for its theme song for TV’s Malcolm in the Middle and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and other works — will…

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Politics

There is some discussion about Bernie Sanders’ strategy for winning the nomination despite being significantly behind in the pledged delegate count. Most of this discussion is nearly worthless because those engaged in it (talking and listening) are, or seem, poorly informed about how the system actually works. So I thought this would be a good…

As summer approaches, mosquito bites will become common, and the Zika virus could start spreading in parts of the continental US. Although public health officials are working hard to address this threat, the response from many lawmakers has been disappointing and, in some cases, erected barriers to successful research.

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Medicine

Over the last two decades, quackery has been slowly but steadily infiltrating conventional scientific medicine. It began in earnest back in the 1990s, but the groundwork had been laid for at least a couple of decades before, going back to when traditional Chinese medicine made its first foray into the “West.” Unfortunately, over the last…

It’s no secret that I’m not particularly fond of the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH). Formerly known as the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) and before that the Office of Alternative Medicine, NCCIH has been the foremost government agency funding research into quackery and the “integration” of quackery into…

Nearly two weeks ago, a story that I had been blogging about almost nonstop for a week reached its conclusion when Robert De Niro decided to pull the antivaccine movie Vaxxed: From Cover-up to Catastrophe from the Tribeca Film Festival, of which he was one of the co-founders. Before that, he had revealed that it…

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Brain & Behavior

Today was the final day of the meeting. Dr. Joe Thompson (Franklin and Marshall College) spoke about oblique striated muscles, which get their name from the diagonal pattern formed by the location of the Z-lines. This type of muscle is common among cephalopods, nematodes, tunicates, molluscs, etc. Dr. John Whiteman (University of Wyoming) gave a…

This year’s August Krogh Distinguished lecture, the highest award given to an accomplished Comparative Physiologist from the Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology section of the American Physiological Society was awarded to Dr. Jon Harrison, Arizona State University. Dr. Harrison gave an outstanding seminar in which he reviewed some of his major research discoveries. His work has…

Still going strong…here are the highlights from several sessions held on Day 4: John Eme (California State University, San Marcos) presented data testing the effects of varying temperatures mimicking overwintering conditions on embryonic development of Lake whitefish. He found that indeed exposure to variable incubation temperatures between 2-8 deg C resulted in increased mortality. Moreover, the embryos hatched…

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Technology

I just got my new Semogue 1305 Superior Boar Bristle Shaving Brush. It is the one on the left. I like it. I prefer boar because I don’t want to kill badgers and because the bristles are stiff and it basically works better. I got the old one decades ago, and it was decades old…

For the chess fans, the big candidates tournament begins in Moscow tomorrow. Eight of the top players in the world will be competing for the chance to face Magnus Carlsen in a match for the title. As it happens, the US has two representatives: Fabiano Caruana and Hikaru Nakamura. Going strictly by ratings, they are…

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Information Science

Reader Beware: Please note the date of publication of this post. It’s been really gratifying over the last year to see how my DSCaM scholarly communications empire has grown. From it’s small beginnings, Dupuis Science Computing & Medicine has craved out a small but important niche in the discount APC publishing community. And I really…

In another example of the value of investing in public health, a recent study finds that PulseNet, a national foodborne illness outbreak network, prevents about 276,000 illnesses every year, which translates into savings of $507 million in medical costs and lost productivity. That’s a pretty big return on investment for a system that costs just $7.3 million annually to operate.

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Jobs

It’s been six years and one day since 29 men were killed by a coal-dust explosion at former Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch mine. Today, U.S. District Judge Irene Berger sentenced the company’s former CEO Don Blankenship for his practices that contributed to the disaster.

You know how opponents of paid sick leave and raising the minimum wage always cite resistance in the business community? Well, in turns out that such resistance might be closer to a marketing gimmick rather than a genuine reflection of employer sentiment.

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What we're talking about Wednesday, April 13, 2016

Well-Manicured Wastelands

Pharyngula March 28, 2016

Significant Figures by Peter Gleick November 19, 2014

Significant Figures by Peter Gleick July 9, 2015

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