As a kid, there were few things more satisfying to me that being given a helium balloon... and then almost immediately letting it go for the pure enjoyment of seeing it float out of sight into the sky. For some reason, seeing a small balloon set against a vast blue background gave me a small sense of power simply from knowing that I was the one that put it up there. A silly grin would spread across my face as I stared at the small dot in the sky, knowing that only a minute earlier I held that very same balloon in my own little hand. I felt like a small part of me was launched along with it, and had just started off on a grand adventure. Since I was never able to actually go along for the ride, it was up to the limits of my imagination to envision where the balloon would land.

In Was Michael Jackson A Pedophile? we dismissed the idea that Michael Jackson was gay and the unlikeliness of his being a clinical pedophile along with being an autogynephile.  So what was he?

The predictably massive postmortem analysis of Michael Jackson has focused on both his enormous talent and his spectacular strangeness. Although there is lively debate whether Jackson or Elvis Presley is the all time King of Pop, there is no question which of them is the King of Weird.

Elvis Presley had his quirks—secret meetings with Nixon, shooting at television sets, and of course, drug abuse. But these did not compare with Michael Jackson's bizarre physical appearance, abetted by untold plastic surgeries; child-like speech; enjoyment in sleeping with (and perhaps "sleeping with") boys; obsession with Peter Pan; and of course, drug abuse. 

On television, police technicians zoom in on a security camera video to read a license plate or capture the face of a hold-up artist but, in real life, enhancing this low-quality video to focus in on important clues hasn't been an easy task.

It just got a little easier.   Prof. Leonid Yaroslavsky of Tel Aviv University and colleagues have developed a new video "perfection tool" to help investigators enhance raw video images. Commissioned by a defense-related company to improve what the naked eye cannot see, the tool can be used with live video or with recordings, in color or black-and-white. 

The rain band near the equator that determines the supply of freshwater to nearly a billion people throughout the tropics and subtropics has been creeping north for more than 300 years,  according to research published in Nature Geoscience. 

If the band continues to migrate at just less than a mile (1.4 kilometers) a year, which is the average for all the years it has been moving north, then some Pacific islands near the equator – even those that currently enjoy abundant rainfall – may be drier within decades and starved of freshwater by midcentury or sooner.

Global warming?  Maybe.  But if it is, the arid event could happen even sooner than current projections.  

Astronomers using ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray observatory have discovered a black hole they labeled HLX-1 (Hyper-Luminous X-ray source 1), which lies towards the outskirts of the galaxy ESO 243-49, approximately 290 million light-years from Earth and weighs more than 500 solar masses, making it a 'missing link' between lighter stellar-mass and heavier supermassive black holes. This discovery is the best detection to date of a new class that has long been searched for: intermediate mass black holes.
 
The discovery has been made by an international team of researchers working with XMM-Newton data, led by Sean Farrell from the Centre d’Etude Spatiale des Rayonnements, now based at the University of Leicester. 

The biomedical community has become too risk-averse, according to a recent NY Times piece. I agree, although I don't agree with the dramatic presentation (it's not some dirty scientific secret - it's not hard to find scientists, and the leaders of the funding agencies themselves talking about it). Here are the basic issue:

Yet the fight against cancer is going slower than most had hoped, with only small changes in the death rate in the almost 40 years since it began.

I spent last week in Boston, attending the Open Mobile Alliance meeting. Whenever one goes to meetings, one does the dance of the business card exchange. Because it was my first OMA meeting, I had more of it going on than usual, as I met a lot of people for the first time. So I’ve collected a batch of 2-inch × 3.5-inch cards, which I then have to copy information from and put it into my address book. And there’s no hope of reading these things without my reading glasses.

They’re inconvenient, to be sure, but they do work, and we’re used to them. Everyone has them.

The evidence is in. The scientific community has reached a clear consensus that vaccines don’t cause autism. There is no controversy.” So begins an in-depth discussion of the vaccines-cause-autism nonsense penned by “SkepDoc” Harriet Hall in a recent issue of eSkeptic. It is a must read for any thinking person who has been baffled by the likes of Jenny McCarthy and her unconscionable sponsors, boyfriend Jim Carrey (who bankrolls McCarthy’s dangerous ignorance) and Oprah Winfrey (who provides McCarthy with television time so that she can endanger the lives of even more children).