Author: Discover Main Feed

I wasn’t feeling well today (flu), so I decided to see what was in Netflix. I ended up watching Luc Besson’s District 13. It’s an action film without the typical special effects, rather, it hinges on the main actors’ mastery of parkour. Here’s a YouTube clip of a sequence which illustrates the parkour techniques:

Much more like an Asian martial arts flick than a Western action movie. Highly recommended for these sorts of sequences.

The Space Shuttle Discovery is ready to blast into space at 06:21 Eastern time (10:21 UT) Monday morning. The ground track for this launch will make it visible well up the East Coast of the US, so if you’re awake at that time, you may see Discovery to your southeast as a bright light moving rapidly across the sky.

You can follow the launch on the NASA Launch Blog, or watch it live on NASA TV.

He asks: Has Technorati suddenly gotten useful again? I’m tempted to take a look at Technorati again, though since I switched domains I’ll probably wait up until the shift from ScienceBlogs percolates through the web. One thing to note, John probably relies a bit more on reciprocal linking as the lubricant for discussion because he has no comments on this weblog.

My previous post was a bit somber. So, to lighten the mood, I thought I’d bring up another Easter-related thread: how to properly decapitate a bunny. It’s for a good cause: peepshi. Directions include: “Execute six Peeps of your color choice by decapitation. Cut off more neck than you think is appropriate.”

(H/T to Don Lubach, via Kathleen Scott.)

The Best Jobs Report In a Long Time:

Less than a high school diploma: 14.5%
High school with no college: 10.8%
Some college or associates degree: 8.2%
Bachelor’s or higher: 4.9% (this is near full employment from an economic perspective).

If you read the media sometimes it seems like the past recession was total hell in the white-collar sector, but really it isn’t (comparatively). For what it’s worth, 84% of readers of my weblogs have university degrees or higher….

(Yes, I know the issues in regards to underemployment, part-time employment and those who have dropped out of the labor force, but all the issues seem more relevant to those with less education from what I’ve seen. Correction with data welcome)

Well this is a blast from the past. Almos three months after ScienceOnline 2010 finished, the videos from my session with John Timmer, David Dobbs and Carl Zimmer are finally online. They’re all embedded below. The audio’s a bit fuzzy in places, and there’s the rhythmic sound of tapping on top of everything, like the film Atonement, but with less Keira Knightley and more duck sex.

Only one thought, actually: why don’t I have one? Don’t they know I’m a highly influential blogger?

Via Tom Levenson:

I just noticed that last Wednesday’s piece on the movies of the dividing cells was my 700th proper post for Not Exactly Rocket Science! That includes opinion pieces, Not Exactly Pocket Science and the usual lengthy articles, but excludes reposts, photo posts or random missives. At the current pace, I’m averaging a respectable rate of around 100 posts every 5 months or so (the full list is here).

I always like to mark these moments as little milestones for myself. But enough from me. Over to you. This is an open thread. Say or ask whatever you like.

With the premier of Series 5 of Doctor Who, you might feel a little confused over time travel in movies and TV shows. Fear not! The wonderful website Information is Beautiful has you covered:

Click to see the whole wonderful thing; a timeline of time travel from quite a few scifi stories.

Now what we need is for this to be open-source so we can add in others. But then again, adding in the good Doctor’s travels would mean turning this lovely graphic into a solid red rectangle.

Matt Yglesias points to an OKCupid survey which shows that in the United States there tends to be a rather coherent block of social & economic conservatives within the Republican party, while the Democrats are a coalition between those who emphasize social issues and those who emphasize economic issues. Social liberals are often found in the upper socioeconomic strata and look positively upon globalization and free trade. Economic liberals, in the American sense, are not necessarily social liberals, as is well known in the case of black Americans who tend to support government programs but are more socially moderate-to-conservative. Combined with the consistent pattern of conservatives outnumbering liberals it would naturally lead one to believe that this is a nation where the Right is eternally ascendant.

And it is certainly true that compared to European nations the United States is conservative on many social and economic metrics.* But is the arc of American history toward a conservative or liberal direction? In other words, what is the probability that there would be a blanket ban on abortion in the United States in one generation? What about the maintenance of federal laws which ban recognition of same sex marriages? Which the proportion of national GDP which consists of government spending?

For all the talk about American exceptionalism the arc of history seems to be moving to the Left, broadly speaking. Despite the reality that the American Left seems weaker in numbers and less coherent a movement than the Right, conservatives have been waging a rearguard battle by and large. The macrohistorical trends are simply not born out by the strength of numbers that conservatives have at any given moment. One might infer from this that there are strong sociocultural dynamics and institutional biases which nudge Western liberal democracies in a Left direction, with the rate of change modulated by contemporary political configurations. And yet perhaps we are too Whiggish, human history has been characterized by secular trends being nested within broader cyclical patterns.

* This has been to be qualified, as many European governments have more restrictive abortion rights regimes, and racial nationalist parties gain more traction in most of Europe than they ever would in the United States.

Given that it’s Easter Sunday, I thought it would be particularly appropriate to mention survivors of the Holocaust. Sean has been arguing (here and here) that science does not give us morality. And, as the Pope and the Catholic Church have resoundingly demonstrated, God doesn’t seem to provide us with morality either. None of this means that we shouldn’t strive to make the world a better place. Nor that we can’t say that the Holocaust was evil.

Maciek Nabrdalik has been photographing survivors of the Nazi concentration camps. Nabrdalik is quoted in a New York Times blog: “I believe that by looking into their eyes, a sharper perspective will appear and perhaps help us understand the nature of the enormity of this atrocity a little bit better,” Mr. Nabrdalik said. “Understand it on a human scale, that is.”

The photographs show only shining faces, surrounded by an encroaching blackness. Perhaps the blackness represents the horrors they have experienced. Perhaps the blackness represents the fact that the number of survivors is dwindling, and soon there’ll be no one left to remind us of one of the worst examples of man’s inhumanity to man. All that will be left is darkness.

Shema
by Primo Levi

You who live secure
In your warm houses
Who return at evening to find
Hot food and friendly faces:

Consider whether this is a man,
Who labours in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a crust of bread
Who dies at a yes or a no.
Consider whether this is a woman,
Without hair or name
With no more strength to remember
Eyes empty and womb cold
As a frog in winter.

Consider that this has been:
I commend these words to you.
Engrave them on your hearts
When you are in your house, when you walk on your way,
When you go to bed, when you rise.
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your house crumble,
Disease render you powerless,
Your offspring avert their faces from you.

The giraffe was the first species we saw on our South African safari last year (actually the second but, seriously, impala don’t count). Like many of Africa’s large mammals, it moves with remarkable grace for something so large and it disappears behind shrubbery with remarkable ease for something so tall.

These two are youngsters, left behind at a feeding creche. The one of the left is probably a female, given the tufts of hair on the top of her horns.

When I brought my iPhone in for repair at the Barton Creek Apple store in Texas on Wednesday night, the nice folks at the Genius Bar were kind enough to take a look at my MacBook Air, which had gotten bumped around during our move to Austin. They offered to fix it immediately through AppleCare, so I left my computer with a friendly fellow named Rej. This morning–the same day as the highly anticipated iPad release–they delivered my laptop looking shiny and new. I’m very appreciative of the help and service I received and the good folks at the Barton Creek store. Thanks Apple!

Hi folks,

So Google Reader tells me that only around 1 in 8 people who are subscribing to my feed have switched across to the new one (http://feeds.feedburner.com/notrocketscience/) from the old one (http://feeds.feedburner.com/scienceblogs/Ruxi).

To clarify again, Discover have redirected the old feed to the new one, but this will only work for a couple more weeks. You’ll need to manually update your feed readers with the new URL.

This also applies to those of you with the fancy Blogger blogrolls that automatically update with latest posts from different blogs – you’re going to need to manually update that too.

Thanks all. I’ll be posting reminders of this from time to time so bear with me – just don’t want to lose any valuable readers.

Ed

I was able to get home for a day from The Sooper Sekrit Project to blow off some steam and reacquaint myself with the family. It happened to be a nice day in Boulder, one of the first of the season, so we hit the trails. It was fantastic, but I don’t think it was the humans having the most fun.

Canis Minor doesn’t usually chase sticks, but if they go in the creek…

What a fun day! But now it’s back to work…

Greg Laden posted the Wikio science blogs rankings for this month. Here they are:

First, where’s Pharyngula? Like him or hate him P. Z. Myers has to be high on this list. Where’s Cosmic Variance? Not Exactly Rocket Science? Perhaps some of these weblogs opted out of the rankings, I don’t know. But whatever is going on, something doesn’t pass the smell test here. For what it’s worth, my own weblog is ranked highly, but at the old URL, so I assume I’ll slowly start journeying south on the rankings as people start switching links.

Interesting article in Slate. This shocked me:

Out of all the big schools, NBA teams likely fall harder for Dukies because of their NCAA tournament success. In Stumbling on Wins, economists David J. Berri and Martin B. Schmidt find that players who appear in the Final Four the year they’re drafted get a boost of 12 draft positions. Berri and Schmidt believe that this boost is unwarranted. One of the “statistically significant factors … that lead to less productivity in the NBA,” they write, is “playing for an NCAA champion the year drafted.”

I’ll have to look at the model itself, but this is somewhat surprising if plausible. It makes intuitive sense, but NBA teams don’t normally take the draft lightly and do prep work. On the other hand, as the years go by I’ve become more skeptical about the ability of institutions to squeeze all efficiencies out of any given process (I suspect there’s a principal-agent problem; those who are making the final call are less likely to get fired if they select a “can’t miss” who they think is overrated if that prospect flops than if they get someone who they believe is underrated, and it turns out their assessment was in error).

Personally, I think the similarities between Duke and Indiana during the Bobby Knight years are telling, and Knight was a mentor of Mike Krzyzewski. Both schools seem to produce fewer stars on the professional level in relation to the success of their teams; but I think the group vs. individual dynamic is key. There are differences between the pro and collegiate level, and Duke and Knight’s Indiana teams were able to leverage group level efficiency and precision in collective action to make up for shortfalls in relative individual talent. When a team manages to win many games individual players are perceived to be better than they are. Take individuals out of that context and their more modest talent endowments become obvious. A college team which routinely makes it far in the NCAA tournament can regularly field what might be “role players” at best in the NBA.

The receptivity of women to courtship solicitation across the menstrual cycle: a field experiment.

“Research has demonstrated that women’s behaviors toward men or sexual interest are different across the menstrual cycle. However, this effect was only found on verbal interest and the receptivity of women to a courtship solicitation had never been tested before. In a field experiment, 455 (200 with normal cycles and 255 pill-users) 18-25-year-old women were approached by 20-year-old male-confederates who solicited them for their phone number. A survey was administered to the women solicited 1 min later in order to obtain information about the number of days since the onset of their last menses. It was found that women in their fertile phase, but not pill-users, agreed more favorably to the request than women in their luteal phase or in their menstrual phase.”

Thanks to John for today’s ROFL!

Photo: flickr/Beau B

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Bust size and hitchhiking: a field study.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Does this outfit make me look like I want to get laid?
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Women’s bust size and men’s courtship solicitation.

It’s been a busy week for President Obama and energy. Two days ago his administration rolled out plans to expand millions of new acres of ocean off the U.S. coastline for oil and gas drilling; after we posted on it, many DISCOVER fans expressed their disdain for Obama’s move on our Facebook page. Today, though, there’s good news for the environmentalists: Obama’s EPA said today it will put stricter restrictions on mountaintop removal coal mining.

At “mountaintop removal” mines, which are unique to Appalachian states, miners blast the peaks off mountains to reach coal seams inside and then pile vast quantities of rubble in surrounding valleys [Washington Post]. The chemicals that result from decapitating a mountain and mining coal tend to run off into the the valleys and pollute rivers and streams, however. So when 80beats last left mountaintop removal, a group of scientists had taken a public stance in the journal Science calling for a complete end to this kind of mining.

The new EPA rules don’t go that far. But the mining regulations will be difficult for mountaintop removal projects to meet. Basically, the EPA will set a standard level for permissible mining runoff allowed to reach waterways, and if a mining project is expected to exceed five times that number, it won’t go forward. Agency head Lisa Jackson says, “You are talking about either no or very few valley fills that are going to be able to meet standards like this. What the science is telling us is that it would be untrue to say you can have any more than minimal valley fill and not see irreversible damage to stream health” [The Guardian]. Between 2000 and 2008, the government had granted more than 500 permits for valley fills.

While the new rules are focused on new mines, it’s possible that established mines may not be simply grandfathered in. Ms. Jackson cited Arch Coal Inc.’s Spruce No. 1 mine, the biggest surface mine in West Virginia, as an example of a project that didn’t meet the new standard and would “degrade water quality in streams adjacent to the mine” [Wall Street Journal]. Last week the EPA proposed revoking Arch Coal’s permit, which unsurprisingly made the mining industry balk at what it calls an unprecedented move.

Related Content:
80beats: Obama Proposes Oil & Gas Drilling in Vast Swaths of U.S. Waters
80beats: Scientists Demand End to Mountaintop Decapitation; Mining Projects Advance Anyway
80beats: After Massive Tennessee Ash Spill, Authorities Try to Assess the Damage
80beats: Isn’t It Ironic: Green Tech Relies on Dirty Mining in China
80beats: Obama Admin. Rolls Back Bush-Era Rules on Mining & Forests

Image: Wikimedia Commons / JW Randolph

Canada has approved for limited production a genetically engineered, environmentally friendly pig.

The “Enviropig” has been genetically modified in such a manner that its urine and feces contain almost 65 percent less phosphorus than usual. That could be good news for lakes, rivers, and ocean deltas, where phosphorous from animal waste can play a role in causing algal blooms. These outbursts of algae rapidly deplete the water’s oxygen, creating vast dead zones for fish and other aquatic life [National Geographic].

All living creatures need phosphorus, as the element plays an important role in many cellular and organ functions. Domesticated pigs get their daily dose from corn or cereal grains, but not without a struggle. These foods contain a type of phosphorus that is indigestible to the pigs, so farmers also feed their pigs an enzyme called phytase to allow the animals to break down and digest the phosphorus. But ingested phytase isn’t as effective at breaking down phosphorus as phytase created inside the pig would be, so a fair amount of the element gets flushed out in pig waste. That waste, in turn, can make its way into the water supply [National Geographic].

To fix this problem, the scientists tinkered with the swine’s genes to make the pig produce its own phytase in its salivary glands. When the cereal grains are consumed, they mix with the phytase in the saliva, and throughout the pig’s digestive tract the enzyme works to break down the phosphorous in the food. With more phosphorus retained within the body, the amount excreted in waste is reduced by almost 65 percent, say researchers.

The researchers who created the Enviropig say it’s not just eco-friendly, but it also cut farmers’ feed-supplement costs. If the pigs eventually become common, they could also help U.S. farmers comply with “zero discharge” rules that forbid pork producers from releasing nitrogen or phosphorus runoff.

The Enviropigs will be raised only in controlled research settings in Canada for now, and experts say transgenic pork won’t be landing on your plate anytime soon; the new biotech pig will face years of safety trials to see if it should be approved for commercial production and consumption in the United States and Canada. No transgenic animal has been approved for consumption as of yet. But in 2008 the FDA announced approval of the first human health product made from a genetically engineered animal. The goat-derived anticoagulant, ATryn, is used for the prevention of blood clots in patients with a rare disease-causing protein deficiency [National Geographic].

Related Content:
80beats: Likely to Be FDA Approved: Transgenic Goats With Pharmaceutical Milk
80beats: Coming Soon to a Grocery Near You: Genetically Engineered Meat
80beats: Your Quarter-Pounder Just Might Have Come From a Cloned Cow (Indirectly)
80beats: Largest “Dead Zone” Yet Predicted for the Gulf of Mexico
DISCOVER: “Frankenfoods” That Could Feed the World (photo gallery)

Image: Enviropig/University of Guelph