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Ecoterrorists Plan Attack On Research Institute And Advertise The Date

Ecoterrorists Plan Attack On Research Institute And Advertise The Date

May 03 2012 | comment(s)

Anti-science hippies are getting bolder; not only will they announce what they plan to do, they will issue the time and date to meet to carry out their next attack. And ask for help from the public.

Take The Flour Back is planning a "mass action against genetically modified wheat" at Rothamsted Research in Harpenden, Hertfordshire, on May 27th. This attack is over genetically modified food - and England in the birthplace of genetically modified anti-science hysteria so no surprise, but their boldness is.  Imagine if BP announced plans to attack a climate research group. It just wouldn't happen.
Is Our Time In Outer Space Finally At-Hand?

Is Our Time In Outer Space Finally At-Hand?

May 03 2012 | comment(s)

Last week it was asteroid mining, as Peter Diamandis and his partners showed us their bold new venture, Planetary Resources, aiming eventually to start harvesting trillions of dollars worth of materials that would then no longer have to be ripped out of Mother Earth.

Teaching Climate In The Classroom

Teaching Climate In The Classroom

May 02 2012 | comment(s)

The National Academies Press will roll out some new national science standards for K-12 educators and for the first time, those standards will include guidelines on teaching climate change.

Good luck with that.  As No Child Left Behind showed, positive results and the welfare of kids will not matter in a political fight - any attempts to create an education standard and accountability are going to flop unless education unions buy into it and any attempts to create a science standard for climate education will flop unless teachers do.  And a lot of them don't.
Activists Greenmail The People Of Malibu

Activists Greenmail The People Of Malibu

May 02 2012 | comment(s)

Did an environmental issue disappear because activist groups got a check?  It would seem so.  The Natural Resources Defenses Council and Santa Monica Baykeeper sued the city of Malibu in 2008 for 'groundwater' pollution.

The settlement they reached?  Malibu has to 'fix' 17 drains, easy enough to rationalize since water can pick up garbage as it falls due to that nature thing that happens  - but then they also have to donate $750,000 to the two groups that filed the lawsuit.  How is that helping the environment?  It isn't, but it keeps those environmental corporations in business so they can hire more lawyers to raise more money.
A Personal Victory

A Personal Victory

May 02 2012 | comment(s)

Chess is a game, a sport, and a very radical way to test one's concentration and discipline in pure thought. Besides liking it as a game (a precondition to enjoy the other benefits), I also enjoy immensely the demands that a chess game puts on your brain's functioning; and this is brought to the extreme during a chess tournament, where you are also subject to pressure from competition factors extraneous to the 64 squares where the battles develop.
Fluoride Safe? Don't Swallow, says fluoride expert

Fluoride Safe? Don't Swallow, says fluoride expert

May 02 2012 | comment(s)

“What really determines whether fluoride is safe, is the amount that is swallowed,” says Amid I. Ismail, BDS, MPH, MBA, DrPH, and Dean, Temple University, School of Dentistry in Dear Doctor Magazine. (1)
 
Poison In Ground Water Posing Health Threats

Poison In Ground Water Posing Health Threats

May 02 2012 | comment(s)

I wrote some time back of bad quality water causing soil damage. Hinduatan Times (02.05.2012 confirms the same with findings placed at highest level.

Ground water pockets in 158 out of 639 districts have gone saline. I may add at this point that as we go deeper in drilling in soil crusts we encounter exposed rocks which add salinity and heavy metals to ground water. Moreover, in Nagaur district of Rajasthan two wells dug at close distances of 100 m can show good or bad quality water.

In 267 districts, ground water contains excess of fluoride, in 385 nitrates. 53 districts show arsenic and 63 districts contain heavy metals such as lead , chromium and cadmium. East Delhi water contains chromium.
Lincoln Was An Atheist

Lincoln Was An Atheist

May 02 2012 | comment(s)

Unless he gets hit by a bus, Mitt Romney is going to be the Republican nominee and be given the opportunity to lose in the election this fall.
Should Science Subsidize Basket Weaving?

Should Science Subsidize Basket Weaving?

May 01 2012 | comment(s)

Two decades after colleges got politicians to declare a college education a 'right' (fuzzy correlation/causation statistics showing a college education meant higher lifetime earnings made that part easy), schools that have put up lots of new buildings and had the culture turn on them due to bits of high-profile chicanery like charging $89,000 for a two-year program in "environmental journalism", are fighting back the same way government fights back when they overspend and the public doesn't want to pay more in taxes to cover it; they start trotting out high-profile sacrificial lambs.
NDRC Hydrologist Comments On Pavillion, Wyoming Well Contamination

NDRC Hydrologist Comments On Pavillion, Wyoming Well Contamination

May 01 2012 | comment(s)

The Natural Resources Defense Council, the Wyoming Outdoor Council, Sierra Club and the Oil and Gas Accountability Project commissioned hydrologist Dr. Tom Myers to review the EPA’s draft statement on well contamination in Pavillion, Wyoming, and are submitting his work to the EPA as technical comments. 

The EPA draft is available for public comment through October 2012 and then the data and conclusions will undergo the peer-review process with a panel of independent scientists.
Astronomer Sir Patrick Moore:

Astronomer Sir Patrick Moore: "The only good Kraut is a dead Kraut"

May 01 2012 | comment(s)

Are there any Nazis still left living? If so, British astronomer Sir Patrick Moore is not a fan.

To mark the 55th anniversary of his astronomy TV show "The Sky At Night", Moore let an interviewer know what he really thinks about Britain's old enemy (and, ironically, the heritage of their current monarch), decades after his fiancée was killed by a Nazi bomb.
Samarium-146 Half-Life 30 Percent Shorter So How Long Did It Take Our Solar System To Form?

Samarium-146 Half-Life 30 Percent Shorter So How Long Did It Take Our Solar System To Form?

May 01 2012 | comment(s)

Our solar system is believed to be around 4.5 billion years old, but it's difficult to know how long it actually took to form.  

The reason is, basically, our 'clocks'.  

Establishing chronologies of past events or determining ages of objects require having clocks that 'tick' at different paces - nuclear clocks used for dating are based on the rate of decay of an atomic nucleus expressed by a half-life, which is the time it takes for half of a number of nuclei to decay, a property of each nuclear species. Radiocarbon dating is the most famous. It was invented in Chicago in the late 1940s and can date artifacts back to prehistoric times because the half-life of radiocarbon (carbon-14) is a few thousand years. 
RETRACTED: It's a bug of general relativity

RETRACTED: It's a bug of general relativity

May 01 2012 | comment(s)

[Retracted: In this blog I hope to get to a well known issue in general relativity, namely that gravitational energy needs to be defined for a spacetime volume instead of at a point.]  The [new] goal is to sketch the Riemann curvature tensor...

Chasing Venus - The Race To Measure The Heavens In The 18th Century

Chasing Venus - The Race To Measure The Heavens In The 18th Century

May 01 2012 | comment(s)

On June 5th and 6th, you will be able to witness a true once-in-a-lifetime event. Venus will pass across the face of the Sun - for about six hours, it will appear as a small black dot on the Sun's surface. It won't happen again until 2117.

Transits of Venus occur only when Venus and the Earth are in a line with the Sun. At other times Venus passes below or above the Sun because the two orbits are at a slight angle to each other. Transits occur in pairs separated by eight years (the last transit was in 2004) with the gap between pairs of transits alternating between 105.5 and 121.5 years.
Hazel Dormice Wonder When To Have Kids Also

Hazel Dormice Wonder When To Have Kids Also

May 01 2012 | comment(s)

If a species´ reproductive strategy is evolutionarily adapted to the environmental constraints encountered by that species in its natural habitat, such as availability of food resources and predictability of the environment, and the aim generally is to produce the largest possible number of surviving offspring under particular conditions, then common dormice are defying that just a little.
Idiothetic Memory - This Spatial Learning Does Not Seem To Worsen With Age

Idiothetic Memory - This Spatial Learning Does Not Seem To Worsen With Age

May 01 2012 | comment(s)

In western countries there are 20 times more people aged 65 years andr older than one hundred years ago. With those demographic changes have come changes in brain research.  Understanding the mechanisms responsible for aging-related changes in cognitive processes, including spatial orientation, has become especially important for people’s everyday lives.
April's Autism Awareness Month Ends: We Return You to Your Regularly Scheduled Programming

April's Autism Awareness Month Ends: We Return You to Your Regularly Scheduled Programming

Apr 30 2012 | comment(s)

April 30. The last day of Autism Awareness Month. The last hurrah, although let's be honest, the wider world didn't really notice all that much and probably didn't learn all that much, either.

The truth is that autism awareness happens at the individual level every time we, as parents, take our autistic children out and have them interact with the world. For autistic people, it happens every time they are out in public and self-disclose, but also when they don't, when the people they interact with don't know they have autism, or as they get to be known by others, when that label fades into the background, and they are just seen as uniquely themselves, perfect as they are.
Texas Fracking Crucifixion: Can The EPA Fairly Regulate The Shale Gas Revolution?

Texas Fracking Crucifixion: Can The EPA Fairly Regulate The Shale Gas Revolution?

Apr 30 2012 | comment(s)

Al Armendariz, the top Environmental Protection Agency official in the oil-rich Southwest region, resigned from his post, effective today. It's the latest twist in the never-ending and increasingly ugly fracking fracas.

Al Armendariz, EPA Official Claiming Its Goal Was To 'Crucify' Fossil Fuel Companies, Resigns

Al Armendariz, EPA Official Claiming Its Goal Was To 'Crucify' Fossil Fuel Companies, Resigns

Apr 30 2012 | comment(s)

Al Armendariz,  head of the EPA's South and Southwest region in Dallas, has resigned.  He has been criticized for using an unelected position at the EPA (he was appointed by Pres.
Where Are All The ITaxes

Where Are All The ITaxes

Apr 30 2012 | comment(s)

If we had a prize for Most Celebrated Business Hero in America, it would have to be Steve Jobs, the late founder of Apple.

The agile doge of Silicon Valley had a “death stare” you couldn’t escape.
He had a up-from-orphan back story you couldn’t resist.
And he had the vision of ten of his fellow technology executives.

That’s why--we’re told--Apple was so good at making the things we love. All things “I”, that is--from iPads and iPhones, to iPods and iTunes.

Lately, it also seems that Jobs and the company he left behind were also awfully good at all things Me.