Triclosan, an antibacterial chemical widely used in hand soaps and other personal-care products, may impair muscle function. It hinders muscle contractions at a cellular level, slows swimming in fish and reduces muscular strength in mice, according to research from the University of California, Davis, and the University of Colorado. 

The BBC (cue: Land of Hope and Glory!) has just started yet another series on Chinese food.  In Exploring China: A Culinary Adventure, two famous chefs, the illustrious Ken Hom OBE and the rising star Ching-He Huang (黃瀞億) (neither of whom has an entry in Chinese Wikipedia) are travelling around China, and so far have been travelling around the region of Beijing, encountering a Grandmaster of Peking Duck.  Crisp skin and moist meat are essential, but the Chinese are becoming increasingly health-conscious, and over half of the ducks they eat are now of a reduced-fat v

I will tell you a secret. The loudest partisan progressives, some even in the science community, can find a way to hate anything if a Republican is involved.  So George Bush doubled NIH funding?  He still hated biology, we were told. No Child Left Behind improved scores for minorities every year it was in effect and girls achieved math parity with boys for the first time in history.  Who gets credit for that achievement?  Well, the bill was bipartisan, both Ted Kennedy And John Boehner signed off on it, but Bush was president so it sucked, according to partisans.

One renewable energy source is easily available as waste from from construction, agriculture, landscaping, logging and sawmills. And it's already used in domestic and district-level heating systems.

It is the main solid biomass fuel source used for combined heat and power production, known as co-generation, a definite advantage as an energy source.

It's wood chips, but you don't hear much about them.

The Higgs boson, whose discovery was confirmed by CERN on July 4th to the exacting 5-sigma level required in particle physics (meaning that the probability that the bulge in the data indicating a particle with mass-energy in the range of ~125 GeV is a random fluke is less than 1 in 3.5 million), is the first and only boson to be predicted to be a very bad ballerina--it can't twirl around! 

Recently several posts have played the "race" card and elicited all manner of responses, but at its root, the fundamental premise had not actually been examined.  Is "race" a valid concept?

I know that many people will immediately experience a knee-jerk reaction to the idea of discussing "race" as pseudo-scientific, because they either have a vested interest in advancing their own "race", or because they wish to use it as a lever against other "races".

Led by 100-meter world record holder Usain Bolt, Jamaican men swept the sprinting events at the London Olympics. It was a stunning feat for the small Caribbean nation. But as part of a broader trend, it’s hardly surprising. Runners of West African descent are the fastest humans on earth.

For decades, a bushel of developing countries—Jamaica, Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, Saint Kitts, Barbados, Grenada, Netherlands Antilles and the Bahamas in the Caribbean and Nigeria, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Namibia in western Africa, as single countries, have each produced more elite male sprinters than all of white Europe and Asia combined. Yet West African descended runners are laggards at the longer races.

Living Forever - Boring?

A recent article ["Would it be boring to live forever"] raised the question that if science could resolve the problem of dying and prolong human life indefinitely, in a healthy state, would we become bored with such an existence and look at death more favorably.  

The two perspectives are essentially expressed in the following quotes.

Ekso Bionics has begun shipping an upgraded version of their Ekso bionic suit that powers up patients with spinal cord injuries and pathologies to get them standing and walking again. Each Ekso now comes equipped with three new walking modes for progressive rehabilitation options, and EksoPulse, a wireless networked usage monitor. Patients will have new challenges as they master each level and more control of the suit as they become more adept. 

Most people claim they don't make judgments about people based on appearance, and most people who say that are lying. 

'First impressions' became a term for a reason. Everyone knows appearance counts in first impressions, and first impressions count overall, that is why it is better to wear a tie to a job interview than pajamas but how much are people really able to tell about someone else based on physical aspects, aside from whether or not they are wearing pajamas instead of a tie or if they look like George Clooney?