Premature infants suffer a life-threatening destruction of intestinal tissue called necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) have gotten a new data point for researchers to examine: Preemies with the AB blood type who develop NEC are nearly three times as likely to die from it as preemies with other blood types.
Jerry Coyne is a goose.
There, I've said it.
I mean it in the nicest possible way of course, but it had to be said.
And the reason for this unseemly outburst?
Well, if you want to see something really unseemly, check out Jerry's column of 8th February 2011 titled "Vernon + Midgley + evolution=Fail", where he referred to the British philosopher Mary Midgley thus;
Mary Midgley, famous for completely misunderstanding modern evolutionary biology and for attacking Richard Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene on completely ludicrous grounds. (See Dawkins' response here) In a prime case of the bland leading the blind..." and indulged in other cheap shots at Midgley's expense.
This was foolish for two reasons.
Energy harvested from insects may take the utility of miniature cyborgs to the next level.
Researchers say they can now harvest the insect's biological energy from either its body heat or movements, and the device converts the kinetic energy from wing movements of the insect into electricity, thus prolonging the battery life. The battery can be used to power small sensors implanted on the insect, such as a small camera, a microphone or a gas sensor in order to gather vital information from hazardous environments.
As my last few blogs have been a bit heavy on the science, I thought I'd write something a bit lighter. So here are some pretty pictures of the fieldwork for master's project, when I went to
Pantelleria to measure the CO
2 degassing that was occurring there.
Favare Grande, a fumarole on Pantelleria.
Amir K. just wants to be prepared:
Assuming this is a 6 foot 100 lbs humboldt squid, it goes red, all of its arms point together and it's about to shoot straight at you with it's 2 long feeding arms. What do you do if you are in the water? What is the best way of repelling an attack or destroying it? What are it's weaknesses?
Oh Amir! The first two "its" were perfect. Why'd you have to go and ruin my good opinion of your grammar by adding apostrophes to your second two "its"? But you know what--I'll answer the question anyway.
Do you remember the
multi-muon anomaly in CDF ? The matter was discussed with quite some detail in a
series of posts in this blog (back then at wordpress). In a nutshell, CDF could not explain their sample of events containing two muons, when these particles had a very large impact parameter (the impact parameter is the minimum distance of a trajectory from the interaction point: a large value indicates that the particle was produced elsewhere).
Once when I was a little kid, a peaceful fall evening at our house was shattered by loud and insistent banging, as if someone was trying to break down our side door. My dad, who was the head coach of the high school football team, opened it to greet a man who was screaming with fury. Despite the fact that he was a friend of my father's, this man was now beside himself with rage, drunk, practically incomprehensible, spitting foam and bellowing invective. My dad’s friendship-destroying crime? He had switched the man’s son from first string to second string on the team.
Iceland is always referred to as an oceanic island on an oceanic ridge protruded above the Atlantic sea level. Under the aegis of Plate Tectonic Concepts(PTC), this island is considered as the real time evidence of lithospheric spreading. In the wake of new geophysical data, apprehensions are more about the spreading concepts of lithosphere and related geodynamics. This paper looks into a few important facts, which negate the PTC on Iceland.
Researchers have discovered how Golden orb web spiders (Nephila antipodiana) add a chemical to their web silk to repel invading ants, which means spider silk is even more awesome than it was before; it was already strong, elastic and adhesive, and now it can improve pesticide design.
Supernovas are by far the most violent phenomena in the universe. Would the full energy released in a supernova explosion be directed to earth, the result would be the ultimate carpet bombing. Carpet bombing in full 3D that is. Every single gram of earth, down to its very core, would receive the destructive power of more than a hundred Hiroshima bombs. Apophis, Elinin, Nibiru, any other possible, highly improbable, or impossible cosmic doomsday scenario pales into insignificance compared to a supernova armageddon.
