Slashdot Mirror

Equally fascinating and cool... a wasp that paralyzes a caterpillar only to lay larvae in it. The larvae attack the brain and control it forcing the caterpillar to protect them as they grow and eventually cocoon itself in a safe location so they can consume the host's body inside out.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/02/13/parasitic-wasps-got-their-poison-from-an-ancient-virus/

there are no peanut allergies in developing countries.

Not yet. Wait until they introduce it on a massive scale.

What the GP means is that food allergies are the inevitable consequence of living in a highly sterilized society. The human body actually requires a whole host of organisms to function properly. The gut in particular is an ecosystem all to itself; something like 50-75 percent of the efficiency of your digestive system comes from various bacteria and other organisms living in your stomach, mouth and intestines. Food allergies mostly stem from the immune system becoming too aggressive and attacking the body due to the presence of certain foods: dairy, peanuts, wheat gluten, pollen, etc.

There is a growing body of medical evidence suggesting that certain parasites common to third world nations can prevent such allergic reactions from occurring, possibly because the remind the body what a "real" threat is. These sorts of parasites are of course missing from societies that partake heavily of antibacterial soap and are keenly aware of the germ theory of disease. Even today there are people (crazy, IMO, as the science is still up in the air) who deliberately infect themselves with hookworms to cure asthma and other allergies. Someday in the future it may not be unusual to see people deliberately infecting themselves with custom-designed parasites to cure these sorts of diseases.

Mod parent up, please (I'd do it if I had mod points).

People talk about "transforming mass into energy" in nuclear reactions, but they almost never say that it's actually much more mundane than that. You don't need nuclear reactions (or even chemical reactions): a sinning top, for example, has more mass than one that's standing still. Here is a somewhat known physicist talking about that, if you don't want to believe a random person on Slashdot.

The problem with this is that Apple was so innovative that they can infringe patents for ideas that other large companies came up with years later.

http://discovermagazine.com/2010/apr/01-back-from-the-future/article_print

Diabolical...

Why don't they find the serial killer gene instead

It makes more sense to me to find the gene that produces serial killers and cure it while it's in the fetus stage rather than wait until the serial killers become adults and genetically profile and scan everyone.

We have figured out at least some of the genes responsible for violent tendencies. Why not figure out if it's possible to shut these genes off in mice and work from there?

Sources:
http://discovermagazine.com/2006/apr/violence psychiatric genetics

Carl Zimmer has a more detailed breakdown of what happened with a list of what bloggers are moving- http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2010/07/07/oh-pepsi-what-hath-thou-wrought/. Major bloggers leaving include Mark Chu-Carroll of Good Math/Bad Math, and Rebecca Skloot (who may be known to many more for her excellent book on HeLa cells and their namesake than for blogging). This wasn't a single isolated instance that is causing these people to leave, but for many the final straw in what they saw as very problematic and difficult to work with people at Seed Magazine (which runs Scienceblogs). Mike Dunford of The Questionable Authority discusses some of these issues here- http://scienceblogs.com/authority/2010/07/pepsico_scienceblogs_and_the_f.php (he's uncertain if he is leaving or not and so may be a moderate voice). Meanwhile Abbie Smith of ERV thinks that much of the reaction is hysterics and hypocrisy http://scienceblogs.com/erv/2010/07/sciblogs_caves_to_hysterics.php.

what about superweeds that are now glyphosate resistant and mirid bug plagues in Northern China because they haven't been using pesticides on their bollworm killing GM-Cotton from Monsanto. Nothing is as simple as Monsanto wants you to believe. We are only now seeing the effects of decades of use of this stuff.

The author of this article should watch out that he doesn't start to be classed with, e.g., Randy Thornhill. Thornhill just loves publishing sensational stuff about various correlations.

Oh, yeah, and before I forget... there's an xkcd for that....

...Is this from the same group of scientist that claim parasites are responsible for EVERYTHING?

Oh, and for future articles, Bad Astronomer, using cute otter lolcats to fire back at your opponents isn't exactly the hallmark of a logically sound debate. It's little more than an ad hominem attack.

OMG that's so cute!

Wait, what were we arguing about?

Climategate's Final Days

Bullshit. If you think this means it's over, you're not familiar with the debate.

Immediately following Climategate Nature released an editorial saying no controversy found in the e-mails. That didn't seem to matter at all.

The more respected global warming papers have been published and accepted in peer reviewed journals. Point out any global warming denialist papers that have done the same. I think the most you'll find are papers that suggest global change could result in positive things in some areas. I don't know of any saying that climate change is not happening.

Your fundamental problem in arguing with a person who denies global warming is that they use erroneous logic. They find one uncertainty or minor flaw in a study and suddenly volumes of studies -- even those unrelated -- can be thrown out and dismissed. If it isn't in Mann's research, if it isn't in the East Anglian e-mails, it's somewhere else. You just have to face that logic and move on past them. Oh, and for future articles, Bad Astronomer, using cute otter lolcats to fire back at your opponents isn't exactly the hallmark of a logically sound debate. It's little more than an ad hominem attack.

If you think this is the 'final days' of this mess, you are sadly mistaken. Not until first world countries find it hard to get by will the majority of them step up and realize it. The election of Virginia State Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli shows you got a whole state who would like to sweep this inconvenience under the rug and want you to stop trying to hinder their economy with your "research and science."

Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory

You have a very novel definition for "proven".

In 2005, a planet was directly imaged orbiting a brown dwarf. That's not a sun-like star, but it was the first direct image of an exoplanet.

In 2008, it was announced that Hubble spotted a planet orbiting Fomalhaut. That's a star hotter and more massive than the Sun, but still sun-like. The images were taken in 2004 and 2006 and it took a while to make sure they were right.

However, those were taken from space. Also in 2008 images were taken of planets orbiting the sun-like star HR8799 using the ground-based Gemini telescope in Hawaii.

With me so far? The news today is from observations also taken in 2008, also taken by the Gemini 'scope (and a few months before the ones I just mentioned of HR8799). At the time, the planet was not confirmed. New observations indicate it is, in fact, a planet.

So to be completely accurate: the image from 2008 of a now-confirmed planet was the first direct image of a planet orbiting a sun-like star taken using a ground-based telescope. This is still very cool, but has been reported inaccurately (the space.com headline, for example, is wrong or at best incomplete).

Also, going back to the submitted text here to slashdot, planets have been found by three methods: the gravitation tug-of-war Doppler method, the transit method, and by gravitational lensing. I'll leave it up to you to look all that up; I'm exhausted. :)

GR fully recovers SR *locally* when you choose a coordinate system in which the system under study is in a "slice" of Minkowski spacetime.

QED assumes Minkowski spacetime; relativized QFTs generally aim for a uniform and small spacetime curvature.

This is reasonable at almost all practical scales because spacetime curvature is very slight in reality. Awkward curvature arises near extremely dense objects such as black holes or the early universe (in particular where curvature is non-negligible across, say, the order of the de Broglie wavelength of an object under study). Awkward curvature also appears on cosmological timescales because of the metric expansion of space, since it affects the energy balance of the universe (as the vacuum energy is probably constant even in the newly created deep space). In those situations, we cannot usefully recover Minkowski spacetime and so cannot rely upon correspondence with SR.

When considering the contribution of neutrino oscillation in the mass-energy budget of the universe, we must use GR, and be suspicious of conservation laws that do not take gravitational energy into account. When we use GR we can see an energy-momentum conservation law (\nabla_\mu T^(\mu \nu)) = 0.

Sean Carroll describes this better at http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2010/02/22/energy-is-not-conserved/

If we set up a static (non-expanding) universe in which there is an observer with a highly sensitive clock and "neutrino rangefinder" at a great distance but moving in parallel with a neutrino, the observer will observe a constant range for the neutrino; if the latter oscillates with some frequency, how does one account for the mass-energy change? The answer is that there must be a change in momentum of the neutrino. If the neutrino gains mass-energy compared to the initial conditions, gravitation will increase between it and the observer, and thus the neutrino will lose momentum. The observer will interpret this as a gravitational blueshift, i.e., that the neutrino has gained mass and lost distance. (Yes, "blue" is totally inappropriate for a nonradiating neutrino. Oh well.).

If we make one change to the starting conditions and introduce a metric expansion of space, an oscillation into a more massive state will be against the background of a Hubble redshift, and can be intrepreted either in the same way as a previous paragraph, or as a retardation of the metric expansion of space. Retarding the metric expansion of space reduces the overall energy of space (as vacuum energy != 0), and the change in the overall energy of space should exactly equal the increase in the energy of the neutrino. The metric expansion of space serves not only as a source of energy, but also of momentum.

Fortunately we appear to be in an expanding universe.

Revisiting the static universe, we can deal with the apparent anomaly by resorting to Einstein's insight with respect to the Hole Argument namely that space and time follow from matter (in the most general sense), i.e., that coordinate transformations themselves are not meaningful, and that actions and interactions of matter are invariant under GCTs. Carroll's argument that we can consider the energy of the whole universe at once is awkward because it appears in the static universe case that the whole universe's energy has just increased when the neutrino oscillates into its higher mass unless we also consider the energy in the gravitational field permeating the universe. The interpretation of gravitational blueshift is useful, because the gravitational field has just done "work" in giving the neutrino momentum in the direction of the observer.

Guth likes to talk about attaching ropes to the surface of a nonrotating spherical undergoing uniform gravitational collapse. Inside the shell, an observer does not experience a net gravitational attraction, so the gravitational potential energy i

Ask and ye shall receive:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/science-tattoo-emporium/?nggpage=22&pid=127

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/files/2008/07/five-kingdoms.jpg

Saw it first in R.Dawkins book. Considering how well evolution is received in our "modern society" I say this tattoo is pretty strong statement of sanity, no? Pardon, I meant neediness, not sanity. Silly me...

It's near impossible to wade through all the things that have already been posted, but in case you're looking for a visual library of inspiration, I recommend checking out evolutionary biologist/science writer Carl Zimmer's Science Tattoo Emporium: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/category/science-tattoo-emporium/

Geeky tattoos aren't even rare. Check out this site. Some of them are really clever/impressive.

There's also the site "geekytattoos.com", but it seems more focused on gaming and geek culture.

See Discovery Magazine's 25 photographs/photos. slideshow.

With explanations too:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/category/science-tattoo-emporium/

Nice try Slashdot.

You obviously got the story from
Tatoos For Lamerz.

You may now return to listening to commercial radio, a.k.a. N.P.R..

Yours In Krasnovarsk,
Kilgore Trout, Esq.

Ah, found the link I was looking for earlier where Razib Khan crunches the numbers for belief in Biblical literalism and IQ: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2008/05/biblical-literalism-or-low-iq-which-came-first/.

For starters, you might be interested to read this:

http://discovermagazine.com/2009/oct/06-brain-like-chip-may-solve-computers-big-problem-energy/article_print

There are numerous other writings discussing brain noise and learning and the connection between the two. The point there is that the brain works the way it does because we are animals. If we hope to achieve the computing capacity of the human brain in a machine, we will either need to perform massive parallel processing absorbing awesome amounts of power, or we will use lower power and allow more errors to come into play... and let that work for us.

Happy reading. This particular article above was one that really lit some neurons and things started making a LOT more sense.

No kidding! All blogs are worthless. AMIRITE??

I recall that as well, quick Google search turned up these two hits, none that I had read at the time, but same story, different vendor: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/04/06/seismologist-was-forced-to-remove-italy-earthquake-warning-from-the-internet/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/04/06/scientist-smackdown-did-a-seismologist-accurately-predict-the-italian-quake/

FWIW, mass isn't the story here; we know of hundreds of planets in that mass range. I would say the story is that two images taken a few years apart show the planet's motion, and that Beta Pic, the parent star, was the first to have a disk seen around it back in the 1980s. This planet explains the warp and other features in the disk, too, that have been known for years! I wrote about this on my Bad Astronomy blog.

Here you go: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/06/05/oh-those-falcon-ufos/ Knowledge is power.

FWIW, I have a substantial blog post with details, including a rant against the ABC story. :) This was definitely the Falcon 9 second stage, despite the UFO guy's protestations: the timing, position, and appearance all match.

Here are some links (provided to you via Arts and Letters Daily):

The Associated Press
Sci Am
Discover
James Randy
Roger Kimball

The Man's last essay. It's titeled Oprah Winfrey: Bright (but Gullible) Billionaire.

Phil Plait has a writeup as well.

In fairness, the problem with these textbooks isn't limited to religious bullshit, but rather to conservative bullshit in general. Most conservative nonsense is not unconstitutional, but the bits that skew the facts in favor of religious nonsense certainly are. From Phil Plait's blog:

The new history standards downplays and questions the separation of Church and State. And this was no accident by the religious zealots on the Board; when a more moderate Democrat tried to insert language about why the Establishment Clause was put in the Constitution, it was voted down by the Republicans.

See also Think Progress' description of the new standards, where we learn:

- The Board removed Thomas Jefferson from the Texas curriculum, "replacing him with religious right icon John Calvin."

- The Board refused to require that "students learn that the Constitution prevents the U.S. government from promoting one religion over all others."

Try this: http://discovermagazine.com/2010/mar/07-dr-drank-broth-gave-ulcer-solved-medical-mystery

I'm no astrophysicist but shouldn't a galactic anchor supermassive black hole tearing ass through it's soon-to-be former host galaxy be dragging a fair amount of material with it and creating a bow shock, much as this runaway star is doing?

What do you think is generating the x-rays they're using to spot the black hole?

I believe the X-Ray source may be a foreground or background object not associated with the galaxy, and possibly stationary as well. I would expect a super-massive black hole capable of anchoring an entire galaxy that is so off-center would cause some serious deformation to the host galaxy, which is a feature that clearly is not present in the provided image. I also believe the lack of an X-Ray source at the galactic nucleus is not due to the super-massive black hole being removed, but rather simply that the super-massive black hole that is there is not currently "eating" anything and thus is not producing prodigious amounts of X-Rays.

I'm no astrophysicist but shouldn't a galactic anchor supermassive black hole tearing ass through it's soon-to-be former host galaxy be dragging a fair amount of material with it and creating a bow shock, much as this runaway star is doing?

Me, either. But... maybe that's how they know it's leaving at "high speed" - the faster it goes (beyond a certain point) the less material it would be dragging behind it, as the gravity waves are passing by too fast to overcome the existing inertia of the nearby material.

I'm no astrophysicist but shouldn't a galactic anchor supermassive black hole tearing ass through it's soon-to-be former host galaxy be dragging a fair amount of material with it and creating a bow shock, much as this runaway star is doing?

What do you think is generating the x-rays they're using to spot the black hole?

I'm no astrophysicist but shouldn't a galactic anchor supermassive black hole tearing ass through it's soon-to-be former host galaxy be dragging a fair amount of material with it and creating a bow shock, much as this runaway star is doing?

The paper in this article is pretty interesting, but I don't think it explains the newest features seen in these gullies; the way they terminate in the sand looks more like a liquid flow than solid. I suspect that the authors can explain many gullies on Mars, but not all the gullies. There may be more than one mechanism at work here!

Old news. It launched two weeks ago and disappeared going Mach 20 (ish). The atmosphere apparently has a sweet tooth. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2010/04/27/darpa-loses-contact-with-mach-20-hypersonic-glider-during-test-flight/

Chlorophyll eye drops help night vision: Article here.

There are more and more dangerous germs in your keyboard than outside. [citation needed]

I don't think this is on my keyboard.
or these 11 deadly pathogens

Interesting. I didn't even mention evolution. Nor did I mention the dinosaur/bird hypothesis. However, Feduccia did indeed say that lots of Chinese fossil finds are fakes, in the February 2003 issue of Discover magazine. http://discovermagazine.com/2003/feb/breakdialogue

Take from it what you will.

And for those who aren't interested in that highbrow space stuff, go take a look at these pics of Natalie Portman, naked, petrified and covered in hot grits!

Phil Plait offers his comments on Obama's new space policy: Obama lays out bold and visionary revised space policy.

People also might want to read these comments about Obama's bold, new space policy.

Phil Plait offers his comments on Obama's new space policy: Obama lays out bold and visionary revised space policy.

People also might want to read these comments about Obama's bold, new space policy.

Phil Plait offers his comments on Obama's new space policy: Obama lays out bold and visionary revised space policy.

Seriously, am I the only one sitting here thinking, "Thanks, Obama for your generous budget slashing our manned space program"?

No, you're not the only one who incorrectly thinks he slashed the budget when he actually increased it. Lots of people wrongly think that canceling Constellation means abandoning manned space programs, when in reality there will be more need for manned space travel because of extending the ISS' life.

All it means is abandoning a stupid program that would have tried -- and failed -- to re-do Apollo. Why talk about the future if all we care about is recreating the past? The future is in the basic technological R&D that will make future things like landing on the moon seem easy in comparison to how Constellation was going to do it.

For now, it's not clear how long these marine genes have been living inside the bowels of the Japanese. People might only gain the genes after eating lots and lots of sushi but Hehemann has some evidence that they could be passed down from parent to child. One of the people he studied was an unweaned baby girl, who had clearly never eaten a mouthful of sushi in her life. And yet, her gut bacteria had a porphyranase gene, just as her mother's did. We already known that mums can pass on their microbiomes to their children, so if mummy's gut bacteria can break down seaweed carbs, then baby's bugs should also be able to.

FWIW, I posted on my blog about this amazing pic from Soichi, explaining it a bit and giving my thoughts.

Shameless blog promotion forgiven because I 3 Phil.

And his post is, unsurprisingly, worth reading. Mod BA up!

FWIW, I posted on my blog about this amazing pic from Soichi, explaining it a bit and giving my thoughts.

I think you might like this (somewhat dated) article about subcutaneous ("hunter") fat vs. visceral ("gatherer") fat:
http://discovermagazine.com/2007/feb/visceral-fat