Update: For the latest bulletins, please see my new article:
Japan's Nuclear Emergency - The Straight Goods - Update

original post begins here:
Japan's Nuclear Emergency - The Straight Goods

There is much speculative and inaccurate reporting in the world's media regarding the problems caused to nuclear power facilities in Japan by the recent earthquake.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company - TEPCO - is releasing frequent updates on the emergency situation which followed the earthquake.

Dr. Paynter of the MD Dept of Ed noted that "all students have gifts, but there are some students who are ready, right now, to play varsity."  In America, we easily accept that some kids are just more athletic than others, and we support that.  In fact, we're pretty happy accepting that some kids are just naturals at art, math, acting, being charismatic, being beautiful, or doing sports.

But suggest some kids are more gifted at learning, and you get the retort "but all children are gifted."  Ask for better learners to get special teaching and now, you're elitist.

There are expensive gambles we can make and none are in the forefront of cultural thought more than penalizing current businesses and subsidizing 'green' ones to protect the environment.   California, with a deficit that can basically never be repaid and $100 billion in unfunded pension liabilities, still subsidizes hundreds of millions in green tech companies with no benefit to-date.

Pres. Obama thinks we should subsidize green companies also, to the tune of $2.3 billion in Recovery Act tax credits for green manufacturers. 

Astrologers are feeling pretty good today.   Because it's made up and not science, anything happening anywhere near a date they predict can be attribution, so talk of a 'supermoon' - a new or full moon at 90% of its closest perigee - followed by an earthquake in Japan makes them seem prescient.

Well, are they?   The supermoon which will occur March 19 will be at its closest to Earth in elliptical orbit (lunar perigee) and closer to Earth than it has been in 18 years.    How close is that?  Only about 2 degrees so unless astrologers have the kind of measurement instruments no one outside NASA has, they can't detect it.   Which means it isn't causing huge waves or earthquakes.

More and more, policy decisions and what medications doctors prescribe for their patients are being driven by large 'studies of studies' called meta-analyses, which statistically combine results from many individual drug trials.

There's a problem, though.   A group analyzing meta-analyses writes in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that important declarations of financial conflicts-of-interest in individual drug trials disappeared when those studies were combined in meta-analyses.

In other words, the information was right there, it wasn't hidden in the studies themselves.

If you have a chance to win a basketball game but need to make a shot from 10 feet away on the right side of the court, do you try a direct shot or use the backboard to bank home the winning basket?

New research by engineers at North Carolina State University, done by simulating one million shots with a computer, has them declaring you have a better chance of scoring that particular game-winning bucket with a bank shot than with a direct shot.

A new composite image  from NASA shows the central region of the spiral galaxy NGC 4151...and, well...if you have seen the film versions of "The Lord of the Rings" you know what it looks like.

So do astronomers and, so, "Eye of Sauron" it is.

Despite the culture war on smokers, the idea that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer or lung disease is largely a myth.   Anti-smoking groups are a multi-billion dollar industry on their own and continued marketing is a key part of maintaining the revenue stream but only 10% of smokers get lung cancer and 50% of lung cancer victims never smoked.

However, cigarette smoking is obviously not good for you so you shouldn't do it, and work continues to determine how smoking impacts risk factors for diseases.

Readers of this blog know that I often discuss here the latest results of searches of Supersymmetric (SUSY) particles -nowadays furthered by the CDF and DZERO experiments at the Fermilab Tevatron collider, and by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the CERN LHC.

Recently, another blogger reviewed Vaccine Epidemic. The blogger's emphasis was on this quote taken from Allen Tate's chapter, "The Greater Good": "It is indisputable that the vaccination schedule has never been tested for safety in its entirety, or in the way that it is administered. In other words, while the government reviews, licenses, and compels individual vaccines, it does not test--or require vaccine makers to test--the safety and efficacy of vaccines given simultaneously or the cumulative effects of multiple vaccines" (83).