Mus musculus, the common mouse, can happily live wherever there are humans. When populations of humans migrate the mice often travel with them and apparently that has long been the case. New research used evolutionary techniques on modern day and ancestral mouse mitochondrial DNA to show that the timeline of mouse colonization even matches that of the Viking invasions.
During the Viking age (late 8th to mid 10th century) Vikings from Norway established colonies across Scotland, the Scottish islands, Ireland, and Isle of Man. They also explored the north Atlantic, settling in the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Newfoundland and Greenland. They intentionally brought horses, sheep, goats and chickens but also unknowingly carried pest species, including mice.
Food stamps are not food stamps now, they are the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits - and record numbers of Americans are receiving them.
Rice and wheat take a lot of water to grow and no one eats more than China. That also means no one contributes more to global warming from irrigation than China - a whopping 30 million tons of CO2 per year just from the pumping systems China uses.
Like everywhere, water usage has gone up in China with the surge in population. Groundwater used for crop irrigation in China has grown from 10 billion cubic meters in 1950 to more than 100 billion today. The pumping systems which support this immense irrigation network annually produce 33.1 MtCO2e (33.1 mega tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent), claims a new study.
Yesterday, I
wrote a post about how facebook is a rapid, easy way to spread misinformation and pseudoscience, and the difficulties in figuring out how to respond to pseudoscience when you see it. I wasn't specific about what triggered it, but I reached out to a few who shared the link and provided additional information, I placed a comment where I was invited to do so, and I flooded my facebook wall with information about facilitated communication.
We engage in wishful thinking all the time. Infomercials continue to exist because people continue to buy the products. Diet pills fly off the shelves because we want an easy fix. The HCG diet is popular because, of course, the weight falls off when you restrict your calories to 500 a day--drops be damned.
“There exists no gold standard for the measurement of snoring.”
The ICARUS collaboration - operating a neutrino detector sitting not far from the OPERA experiment in the underground Laboratori del Gran Sasso in Italy - produced a
refutation of the superluminality of neutrinos a while ago. That refutation was based on studying the energy spectrum of the neutrinos in the CNGS beam, coming from CERN through a trip of 700 km under the Earth's crust: superluminal neutrinos should have lost some energy due to electroweak radiation, which was not borne out by the data.
In our modern culture, we have both the politicization of science and the scientization of politics. They sound similar but the goals are different - the first obviously seeks to inject political agendas into science while the second seeks to make a political objective seem more rational by mapping it to a science topology.
Quasars, powered by supermassive black holes, are among the brightest objects in the universe, outshining the total starlight of their host galaxies.
Quasar host galaxies are hard or even impossible to see because the central quasar far outshines the galaxy. Therefore, it is difficult to estimate the mass of a host galaxy based on the collective brightness of its stars. However, gravitational lensing candidates are invaluable for estimating the mass of a quasar's host galaxy because the amount of distortion in the lens can be used to estimate a galaxy's mass.
