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Night Of The Johnstown Flood

Night Of The Johnstown Flood

May 05 2014 | comment(s)

The Johnstown Flood was such a monumental, yet often forgotten, event that when Bruce Springsteen referenced the song "Night of the Johnstown Flood" in a song on his 1982 "Nebraska" album, fans scrambled to find out what the song was. It didn't exist, but Springsteen felt like it should.

In 1968, David McCullough, soon on his way to two Pulitzer Prizes and a place as America's foremost modern historian, wrote a book about it.

In 1966, Murray Leinster's "The Time Tunnel" left his adventurers unable to convince the Johnstown population of the coming disaster in 1889. The deaths from the flood were at September 11th 2001 Twin Towers levels, yet Alex Berezow at Real Clear Science found it isn't in many history books today at all.
Doggerland: Was This The Atlantis That Disappeared Thousands Of Years Ago?

Doggerland: Was This The Atlantis That Disappeared Thousands Of Years Ago?

May 03 2014 | comment(s)

Doggerland, a low-lying landmass in the North Sea, could have been Atlantis just as easily as anything else might have been, and it may have been abandoned after being hit by a 15 foot high tsunami generated by a subsea landslide off the coast of Norway 8,200 years ago. 

During the last Ice Age, sea levels were much lower; at its maximum extent Doggerland connected Britain to mainland Europe. It was possible for human hunters to walk from what is now northern Germany across to East Anglia. But from 20,000 years ago, sea levels began to rise, gradually flooding the vast landscape.

Whole Foods Is Not Just Selling Quackery, It's Putting You In Danger

Whole Foods Is Not Just Selling Quackery, It's Putting You In Danger

May 02 2014 | comment(s)

If you are venturing into a Whole Foods, it lends to a broad stereotype. Epidemiological data has shown that if you want to find an anti-vaccine, anti-science hotbed, take a protractor and draw a circle around a While Foods. Political pundits say if you want to find rich liberals, do the same thing.

Clearly some people are not going there for those reasons, they are going because they think that organic food has never been genetically modified or that it uses no pesticides. That's due to smart marketing. Really, really smart.  “Great brands impose a view on you,” a Whole Foods advisor says. And they impose. Don't buy organic food? Some mothers will insist you are a bad parent. 
Filthy Rich: The Microbial Jungle In Your Pocket

Filthy Rich: The Microbial Jungle In Your Pocket

Apr 30 2014 | comment(s)

You've heard that dollar bills can harbor trace amounts of drugs. If only that were the worst of it.

But those greenbacks in your wallet are also teeming with life. Each dollar bill carries about 3,000 types of bacteria on its surface. Most are harmless. But cash also has DNA from drug-resistant microbes. And your wad of dough may even have a smudge of anthrax and diphtheria.

In other words, your wallet is making you a walking petri dish. And currency may be one way antibiotic-resistant genes move around cities, says biologist Jane Carlton, who's leading the Dirty Money Project at the New York University.
Chipotle Rennet: Microbial, Calf Parts Or Genetically Modified?

Chipotle Rennet: Microbial, Calf Parts Or Genetically Modified?

Apr 30 2014 | comment(s)

Oh Chipotle, you will a hard time not looking silly when you step into science.

No one is believing your cheese is more ethical than anyone else's cheese.
100 People Get Food Poisoning At Food Safety Summit

100 People Get Food Poisoning At Food Safety Summit

Apr 30 2014 | comment(s)

Is La Cosa Nostra running food safety summits? 'If you don't pay us, you will have an "accident"' messages were sent and the administrators forgot to grease the wheels?

Or a secret conspiracy, poisoning themselves so they would have casus belli to declare war on gastroenteritis?

We may never know but it's certainly funny - an almost 'flying all over the Eastern seaboard for a week to raise Earth Day awareness' the way the head of the EPA did level of hilarity.
The Gospel Of Jesus' Wife

The Gospel Of Jesus' Wife

Apr 29 2014 | comment(s)

Real, fake, real, fake, a little scrap of papyrus written in Coptic has Jesus Christ, who made bachelorhood cool long before George Clooney, referring to “my wife”. That's a big deal.

In 2012, a respected Harvard professor, Karen King, brought the papyrus to worldwide attention.

It is certainly old, and written badly enough that it seems authentic, but that doesn't make it authentic. Lots of texts written outside canon make for all kinds of conclusions. But a lack of lineage is a bad sign in archeology and history.

And other documents also supposedly found along with it have turned out to be forgeries. 
Postmodernism Is Dead - Is Psychology Next?

Postmodernism Is Dead - Is Psychology Next?

Apr 29 2014 | comment(s)

Almost two decades ago, the Sokal affair occurred. A physicist tired of philosophical pseudoscientific gibberish and set out to write a paper of barely comprehensible jargon and get it in a peer-reviewed journal. It dutifully espoused philosophy as superior to science and then used science terminology for legitimacy. It was, in short, the perfect example of what was wrong.

Paul Feyerabend is dead and so is postmodernism, now you can just generate rubbish in an automated postmodernism generator and dispense with being creative, but its techniques are still with us. In psychology, Feyerabend's belief that any crazy thing is possible is being shown true. 
Like Cartography? Thank A Pirate

Like Cartography? Thank A Pirate

Apr 28 2014 | comment(s)

What was the line between being a Buccaneer and a Pirate?

It was fuzzy, but it mostly seemed to involve having a royal charter from some seafaring nation or other, and an agreement not to sack their ships - everyone else was fair game.

But just like modern online video technology was spurred by porn and our efforts to improve online privacy have been spurred by the Obama administration, in order to stay one step ahead of a well-armed navy, swashbucklers had to use the latest advances.

And they did. From current, wind, and reef patch information to new species size, coloration, behavioral patterns, and most importantly, edibility, pirates did a lot
E-Cigarettes: A Win for Public Health?

E-Cigarettes: A Win for Public Health?

Apr 24 2014 | comment(s)

Smoking cigarettes is bad because of, you know, smoke. Right?

So why are e-cigarettes, which are not smoking, facing the kind of social authoritarian ban hammer usually reserved for Happy Meals and golf and Big Gulps while those same people are gushing all over marijuana, which is smoking?

After all, it's not third-hand cigarettes epidemiological woo that is the latest front in the health war, it is third-hand smoke.

While any mention of the health detriments of smoking marijuana gets hippies with pitchforks out in force, they are happy to let Democrats (naturally) promote made-up stories like that e-cigarettes cause cancer, nicotine addiction and don't help smokers quit. 
Keystone XL Delay Is Not Just Denying The Government's Own Science - It's Absurd

Keystone XL Delay Is Not Just Denying The Government's Own Science - It's Absurd

Apr 24 2014 | comment(s)

Imagine what the reaction would be if it were 2006 and President George W. Bush had an environmental report on his desk from government scientists and chose to ignore the data and stall in order to placate his entrenched constituencies.

Well, we do know, because that's exactly what happened. What is different in 2014 is the reaction from all of the people who insisted Bush - and all Republicans - must hate science. It is an ethical ghost town when President Obama does that same thing, just like there was scant reaction when President Obama edited science reports to match his agenda, about Deepwater Horizon.
Why Biotechnology Saves Lives

Why Biotechnology Saves Lives

Apr 21 2014 | comment(s)

Recently, President Obama made a clear endorsement of biotechnology.

That's good, right?

Maybe. He has also made clear endorsements of nuclear science and vaccines, yet his actions in five years have been anything but clear. His administration consistently opposes inconvenient science that disagrees with the beliefs of his base - and nothing offends a giant swath of Democrats like nuclear energy, GMOs and vaccines. 
Vani Hari - The Jenny McCarthy Of Food

Vani Hari - The Jenny McCarthy Of Food

Apr 19 2014 | comment(s)

Vani Hari, the Foodbabe, promises that if you follow her diet you will look pretty like she does - and to bolster her case she trots out the naturalistic fallacy and a healthy dose of chemical illiteracy, the most famous of which is 'if she can't pronounce it, you shouldn't eat it'.

As Josh Bloom has noted on Science 2.0, she is missing out on delicious chemical-laced treats like Tris-(9-octadecenoyl) trigyceryl mixed esters and  (2E)-3-phenylprop-2-enal. And no science at all would get done without 3,7-Dihydro-1,3,7-trimethyl-1H-purine-2,6-dion. 
Airplane Food: In A Pressurized Cabin 35,000 Feet Up, Your Sense Of Taste Is First To Go

Airplane Food: In A Pressurized Cabin 35,000 Feet Up, Your Sense Of Taste Is First To Go

Apr 18 2014 | comment(s)

Airplane food tastes bad, right?

It depends. Before our somewhat dopey security efforts turned flying into a third-world experience, I have had some pretty good meals. 

But efforts to create gourmet meals fall pretty flat - and there is a science reason why.

The Fraunhofer Institute did a study on why delicious food on the ground tastes dull in the air. In a mock aircraft cabin, researchers tried out ingredients at both sea level and in a pressurized condition—and the differences in taste were startling.
So Dinosaurs Can Climb Walls Now?

So Dinosaurs Can Climb Walls Now?

Apr 17 2014 | comment(s)

Take a look at this 300 foot high wall in Bolivia, which has over 5,000 dinosaur footprints.

3 miles from downtown Sucre, Bolivia is Cal Orko, a limestone slab 0.9 miles long and over 328 feet high. On this steep 73 degree face can see tracks from 68 million years ago. 

Cal Orko has 462 distinct dinosaur tracks from at least 8 different species - 5,055 individual dinosaur footprints. So how do thousands of dinosaur footprints end up on a vertical rock face hundreds of feet high? 

Viagra Ice Cream - Lick Me, I'm Delicious

Viagra Ice Cream - Lick Me, I'm Delicious

Apr 16 2014 | comment(s)

Let's give it up for Livescience. Their article on an arousing Champagne ice cream, the brainchild of Welsh food inventor Charlie Harry Francis, is sold with a clever graphic. 

They didn't even have to create it.  Lick Me I'm Delicious, the name for this brainchild of Francis, did. It has 25 mg of Viagra.

Get it? Lick me? Viagra?

Maybe their photo will help.


Link: Pinterest
Why Young Earth Creationists Hate Tiktaalik

Why Young Earth Creationists Hate Tiktaalik

Apr 14 2014 | comment(s)

A litany on Science 2.0 is that when something comes up that might be about fish, call Neil Shubin - because he can make anything about fish.

That's because we can make almost anything about fish. He has told the story before, and recounts in his new television show, that students in an anatomy class he taught likely wanted a refund when he explained he was a fish biologist, until he showed them what we all had in common.

Tiktaalik roseae, a 375-million-year-old Devonian period specimen, is one of the great examples of multi-disciplinary science collaboration; biology predicted it, geology predicted how to find it and paleontology predicted where to look. Then they found it. 
Obama Administration Mandates Will Dump Grain Into Landfills

Obama Administration Mandates Will Dump Grain Into Landfills

Apr 04 2014 | comment(s)

Like with a perfectly safe genetically modified salmon, Keystone XL, Yucca Mountain and most other inconvenient science, if the government doesn't want to go on record overturning scientists, it just ignores them.

It's a safe move. Scientists rely on politicians for funding, so they are not going to become a voting bloc. Sometimes they aren't ignored, they are just never asked.
Cell Phone Radiation Implicated In Erectile Dysfunction And Bat Boys In West Virginia

Cell Phone Radiation Implicated In Erectile Dysfunction And Bat Boys In West Virginia

Apr 03 2014 | comment(s)

A non-peer reviewed claim published in something called the Central European Journal of Urology is all that's needed for American environmentalists to declare that cell phones are causing men to be unable to get it up.

What was the evidence? Surveys they matched to the International Index of Erectile Function (IIEF) and then answering questions about cell phone habits.

This goofiness is being perpetuated by Natural News, which is basically the Weekly World News of health coverage.  Look for them to claim pesticides are creating Bat Boys next:
FBI Investigates FEMA Over Flood Map Price-Fixing

FBI Investigates FEMA Over Flood Map Price-Fixing

Apr 01 2014 | comment(s)

In a modern government culture where Freedom of Information Act requests are ignored when they are made by political opposition, some political groups can't get 501C status if they are a different party than people at the IRS and the NSA is spying on everyone, it is no surprise sometimes favoritism also happens.