What we're talking about Tuesday, June 26, 2018
Trading Our Future for Fossil Fuels
Why fossil fuel corporations killed us
Greg Laden's Blog March 28, 2017
Sometimes, when I look at the things the Republicans and their leader, Donald Trump, are doing, I think of that poignant line in so many actual and fictional moments: “You have killed me.” Someone says that because the killing is done, but they are not yet dead. The knife is driven deep, the car is…
Purported Metal Casting Mould Identified As Fossil Cast
Aardvarchaeology November 13, 2015
A little archaeological conundrum found its solution this morning. At an excavation in Motala in the early 00s, colleagues of mine found a cupped piece of hard, greyish brown material with a distinctly patterned inside. They interpreted it as a piece of a lost-wax casting mould and suggested in a 2004 publication that it was for…
Channel Surfing
Life Science
Sometime in the next day or two, Scienceblogs will shut down. We’ve enjoyed the opportunity to blog here for the past 10+ years. Not to worry, @digitalbio and @finchtalk will continue blogging, but more so from their own site at Digital World Biology. The Scienceblogs posts have been reposted at Digital World Biology’s scienceblog archive,…
You may be wondering why I have been so sentimental even though the year is not over yet. I am happy to inform you that it is not because I am retiring. On the contrary, I am packing up my virtual bags and moving this blog to a new site! Pardon the dust while we get…
Who could forget the second most popular blog post so far this year. Seeing an octopus walk never gets old! ——- I came across this amazing video on YouTube showing a species of octopus found in Northern Australia that is adapted to walk on land:
Physical Science
ScienceBlogs is coming to an end. I don’t know that there was ever a really official announcement of this, but the bloggers got email a while back letting us know that the site will be closing down. I’ve been absolutely getting crushed between work and the book-in-progress and getting Charlie the pupper, but I did…
What better way to say farewell than with a slew of costume pictures from this year’s (coming) Halloween? Goodbye, Scienceblogs, it’s been an incredible almost-decade. Hope to see you all in all our other endeavors!
Starts With A Bang
Ask Ethan: Why Did Light Arrive 1.7 Seconds After Gravitational Waves In The Neutron Star Merger? (Synopsis)
“Delay is the deadliest form of denial.” -C. Northcote Parkinson Every massless particle and wave travels at the speed of light when it moves through a vacuum. Over a distance of 130 million light years, the gamma rays and gravitational waves emitted by merging neutron stars arrived offset by a mere 1.7 seconds, an incredible…
Environment
Sometime in the next day or two, Scienceblogs will shut down. We’ve enjoyed the opportunity to blog here for the past 10+ years. Not to worry, @digitalbio and @finchtalk will continue blogging, but more so from their own site at Digital World Biology. The Scienceblogs posts have been reposted at Digital World Biology’s scienceblog archive,…
You may be wondering why I have been so sentimental even though the year is not over yet. I am happy to inform you that it is not because I am retiring. On the contrary, I am packing up my virtual bags and moving this blog to a new site! Pardon the dust while we get…
This is my last post at Scienceblogs.com. In the future I will be blogging at Greg Laden’s blog, located at its original home at gregladen.com. I have a feeling that Scienceblogs will not last long without me. What do you think? 🙂 But seriously, I’ll be talking about the story of the current status and…
Humanities
It’s been a couple of years since we lost the Queen of Niskayuna, and we’ve held off getting a dog until now because we were planning a big home renovation– adding on to the mud room, creating a new bedroom on the second floor, and gutting and replacing the kitchen. This was quite the undertaking,…
You may be wondering why I have been so sentimental even though the year is not over yet. I am happy to inform you that it is not because I am retiring. On the contrary, I am packing up my virtual bags and moving this blog to a new site! Pardon the dust while we get…
Recent pieces address school segregation, sexual harassment, the abrupt removal of EPA scientists from a conference program, and more.
Education
Sometime in the next day or two, Scienceblogs will shut down. We’ve enjoyed the opportunity to blog here for the past 10+ years. Not to worry, @digitalbio and @finchtalk will continue blogging, but more so from their own site at Digital World Biology. The Scienceblogs posts have been reposted at Digital World Biology’s scienceblog archive,…
You may be wondering why I have been so sentimental even though the year is not over yet. I am happy to inform you that it is not because I am retiring. On the contrary, I am packing up my virtual bags and moving this blog to a new site! Pardon the dust while we get…
And the #1 blog entry published thus far in 2017 discussed whether there was an evolutionary advantage to being stupid: —- As I was looking through the scientific literature the other day, I came across an article published in 1973, “The Evolutionary Advantages of Being Stupid.” With a title like that, how could I not…
Politics
Well, scienceblogs is shutting down at the end of the month. I don’t want all the old posts and comments to disappear, so I’m going to move them all to deltoidblog.blogspot.com.
In more encouraging public health news, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that vaccination rates among kindergarteners have remained stable, with the median vaccine exemption rate at 2 percent. Some states even reported an increase in immunization rates.
“Right is right even if no one is doing it; wrong is wrong even if everyone is doing it.” -Augustine of Hippo Science isn’t the easiest endeavor you can undertake. Sure, the rewards are tremendous: you can wind up understanding any phenomenon in the Universe as well (or better) than any human has ever understood…
Medicine
Respectful Insolence
Turning out the lights and moving on: Goodbye, old ScienceBlogs blog, hello new blog
Today is the last day that ScienceBlogs will exist. Sometime today the site will go into read-only mode. A few days later, it will disappear completely from the Internet. It’s a sad thing to contemplate after all these years. Whatever happened later, I will always be grateful for the start in blogging I got there.…
Thank you to all the writers and commentators who contributed to this network. Happy trails. An archive of my work for ScienceBlogs exists here: 314vault.wordpress.com. If I post anything else on the internet it will be at medium.com/@k4lk1/ or twitter.com/k4lk1. In the meantime I’m getting out my ink and quill. Happy Halloween!
You may be wondering why I have been so sentimental even though the year is not over yet. I am happy to inform you that it is not because I am retiring. On the contrary, I am packing up my virtual bags and moving this blog to a new site! Pardon the dust while we get…
Brain & Behavior
You may be wondering why I have been so sentimental even though the year is not over yet. I am happy to inform you that it is not because I am retiring. On the contrary, I am packing up my virtual bags and moving this blog to a new site! Pardon the dust while we get…
And the #1 blog entry published thus far in 2017 discussed whether there was an evolutionary advantage to being stupid: —- As I was looking through the scientific literature the other day, I came across an article published in 1973, “The Evolutionary Advantages of Being Stupid.” With a title like that, how could I not…
Who could forget the second most popular blog post so far this year. Seeing an octopus walk never gets old! ——- I came across this amazing video on YouTube showing a species of octopus found in Northern Australia that is adapted to walk on land:
Technology
As several others have already noted, after almost 12 years, Scienceblogs is shutting down at month’s end. Though I’ve done most of my writing elsewhere over the last few years, I’d certainly like to keep the archives of this blog up somewhere, and maintain it as a place to post random musings that don’t fit…
@synbiobeta concluded it’s #sbbsf17 annual meeting on synthetic biology Oct 5, 2017. The progress companies are making in harnessing biology as a platform for manufacturing and problem solving is world changing. What is Synthetic Biology? Synthetic biology is a term that is used to describe the convergence of biotechnology and engineering. The dramatic cost decreases…
In every area of life, but especially in the overlapping realms of technology, science, and health, misunderstanding how things work can be widespread, and that misunderstanding can lead to problems. In the area of voting, the main problem seems to be the expenditure of great amounts of outrage and concern over things that are not…
Information Science
Confessions of a Science Librarian
ScienceBlogs is no more: Confessions of a Science Librarian is moving
As of November 1st, 2017, ScienceBlogs is shutting down, necessitating relocation of this blog. It’s been over eight years and 1279 posts. It’s been predatory open access publishers, April Fool’s posts and multiple wars on science. A long and wonderful trip, career-transforming, network building and an awful lot of fun. Over that period of time,…
This post is now located in the Upside Down World, WHICH IS HERE.
In Tooth and Claw, Season 2 Episode 2 of Doctor Who 2.0, we see the formation of The Torchwood Institute and the banishing of The Doctor (and Rose) from the United Kingdom. Fat lot that does. Anyway, we also see Queen Victoria make mention of the multiple attempts at her assassination. I suppose it is…
Jobs
A celebrity chef has joined Harvey Weinstein in news headlines about sexual harassment in the workplace. A work environment that tolerates sexual harassment makes workers ill. It’s worker safety issue in need of much more attention.
As several others have already noted, after almost 12 years, Scienceblogs is shutting down at month’s end. Though I’ve done most of my writing elsewhere over the last few years, I’d certainly like to keep the archives of this blog up somewhere, and maintain it as a place to post random musings that don’t fit…
The Pump Handle
“A gift to the construction industry”: catchy quotes from Court of Appeals argument on OSHA’s silica standard
Appeals Court judges Merrick Garland and David Tatel probed and cajoled a courtroom filled with attorneys who were either challenging or defending OSHA’s 2016 silica standard. I share some of my favorite quotes from the September 26 proceeding.
