Progressive kooks in San Francisco want to ban Happy Meals but they can't have a beef with vegan burgers, right?    Just down the road from 'Frisco, at Stanford, biochem professor (and founding co-director of PLoS - yayy, open access!) Pat Brown is trying to make vegan burgers that will appeal to humans and maybe keep McDonald's in business in the bay area.

Brown wants to make a vegan cheeseburger to replace what you get at fast-food franchises like McDonald's, his goal being to decrease the global impact of animal farming.   

History Mystery #3 - Land, Law and Science

"Words are to the Anthropologist what rolled pebbles are to the Geologist — battered relics of past ages often containing within them indelible records capable of intelligent interpretation..."
John Herschel

Global warming is a complex matter, with many effects interacting. This, of course, makes modeling it accurately a great challenge. Now, a new feedback mechanism has been identified. The quantity of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is rising. But how does this affect our world?

Recently, a research team has been looking into how higher carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere affect the soil and its ability to take up methane and nitrous oxide, or release these potent greenhouse gases. By gathering data from 49 experiments across the globe, the team went looking for general patterns. They found two strongly emerging patterns:

Pesky animal rights activists may complain if you eat veal but they can't complain if you eat larvae, right?    Those are bugs and people sitting in trees have to eat something while they keep the forest commission from clearing brush or removing dead trees to prevent wildfires.

The California State Fair is coming up in a few weeks.   It is earlier the last few years, because the old August dates were darn hot and with that sumbitch global warming it was only going to get hotter so they moved it back to July and, today, it is a balmy 70 degrees.   For residents of the once-hot Sacramento area, climate change has been a real boon, though drought in the South shows that they are not so lucky.

I’ve got to be honest.  Graduate student life comes with awesome perks: flexible schedules, fun-loving coworkers, and amazing travel opportunities.  But the green-eyed monster occasionally peers over my shoulder.

Check out this photo, taken a few weeks ago in La Jolla, Southern California. What do you think is most striking about it?



Some people might be surprised by the sheer number of squid in the photo--but rest assured, that's quite normal. This is the California market squid, a gregarious creature that often travels in large shoals. (Or should I say schools? They certainly seem to be swimming in a coordinated manner.)

I just finished watching the Women's World Cup semifinal football match, USA versus France, and am currently preparing to watch Japan versus Sweden and an important difference is immediately noticeable about womens' matches compared to men's.

A lot less flopping.

If you are not up on complex technical sports jargon, flopping is when, after a minor collision, you fall down and grasp a body part with a look of excruciating pain on your face, milk the drama to see if it draws a penalty and then look indignantly at the opposing team while you bravely resume as if nothing was wrong.   If you don't watch soccer, think NBA.

Arctic Ice July 2011

For much of the written history of the Arctic, exceptional extents of open water were reported in terms of what the explorer, fisherman, whaler or sealer had previously experienced.  That would make such events likely every 20 to 30 years.  However, for each report of open ice in a specific area there is likely to be found in the archives a report from 180 degrees opposite across the pole of a greater than usual ice extent.

Recently, all species of scombrids and billfish have been assessed by the IUCN to determine their ranking on the Red List of Threatened Species. And for tuna specifically, the results weren't good at all. Five of eight species aren't doing well.

Critically endangered: Southern Bluefin (Thunnus maccoyii).
Endangered: Atlantic Bluefin (T. thynnus).
Vulnerable: Bigeye (T. obesus)
Near threatened: Yellowfin (T. albacares), Albacore (T. alalunga).

I was waiting for the announcement in the Fermilab seminar of next Friday, but apparently despite I am still a member I am not well enough informed of what happens inside CDF, the experiment at the Tevatron proton-antiproton collider of Fermilab. So the paper is now public, and you can read the news in the Cornell arxiv: CDF sees an excess of muon pairs which is compatible with originating from the decay of B_s mesons.