Cool Links

Unless you have culturally been living under a rock, you have heard of Area 51 - Roswell, New Mexico.   Supposedly an alien spacecraft came down there in 1947 and a vast government conspiracy sprung up to build the thing and keep it secret for nearly 70 years.

Annie Jacobsen, journalist and contributing editor at the LA Times (they are thrilled about that plug) says the UFO was just a Soviet spy plane that came down due to weather.    But that isn't the end of it.    The Soviets, no strangers to eugenics, had staffed it with genetically engineered pilots, 'alien-like' children aged 12 or 13 and Stalin hoped to cause some panic in the U.S., a la the Orson Welles radio broadcast of "War of the Worlds" in 1939.
Evan Longoria is giving an interview to a reporter when a foul ball flies his way.  Because his Spider Sense tingles when a ball is in play, Longoria snatches it out of the air bare-handed.  

In my title, I used 'grab' and then 'catch' but catch, in the second instance of course, means a gimmick or trick, so I was being clever.  

LED bulbs will finally be bright enough to replace 100-watt incandescent light bulbs but there is a problem - they will cost $50 each.  And won't be available until after the ban.  And they produce almost as much heat as incandescent bulbs, making them ridiculously inefficient.

Advocates always believe in legislating perfectly healthy businesses out of existence because they contend 'the miracle of capitalism' will make the replacement they just subsidized and mandated through government fiat cheaper.   Well, why should they get cheaper when the government created a monopoly market?    If capitalism works, and $50 is a good price to pay for a light bulb, it doesn't need government bans on regular light bulbs.
Is going through one of the TSA porno-scanners (now at selected airports near you!) really safer than eating a banana?  

Let's hope so.   If you object, you are going to get groped, even if your child is a pre-school girl.   But White House science adviser John Holdren recently received a letter signed by five physics and medical professors professors noting that the scanners actually don't work all that well and the ion chamber used to test the scanners can get overwhelmed by the levels of radiation the backscatter deposits and might not have provided accurate readings in testing.
When the woman asks what this biologist would choose if he could have anything, product placement hilarity ensues:

Nothing is convenient to criticize like the food industry.   Environmental mullahs blame farmers for nitrogen and pesticides and greenhouse gases, though farming has actually "dematerialized" in the last 30 years and is producing the more food with only 60 percent of the land used in 1980.    Meanwhile, cultural fundamentalists decry the Utopian ideal every culture in history always sought to attain - cheap food.  So cheap people can eat a lot and choose to get fat.
Facebook has been caught engaging in a secret smear campaign against industry rival Google.  Smear campaigns happen all of the time, of course, but you aren't supposed to get caught or you look extra stupid.

The Daily Beast wrote Wednesday night that Facebook hired P.R. firm Burson-Marsteller to “pitch anti-Google stories to newspapers, urging them to investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy.”
Io's global "ocean" of molten rock beneath the surface feeds its prolific volcanism, a new study finds.

Unlike Earth's magma, which tends to cluster in pockets around the edges of tectonic plates, Io's magma is found in a global reservoir at least 30 miles (48 kilometers) deep, the study suggests. This huge reserve of subsurface molten rock helps explain why Io is the most volcanically active object in the solar system, spewing out 100 times more lava than all of Earth's volcanoes combined.

NASA's Galileo reveals magma 'ocean' beneath surface of Jupiter's moon - Kids Science Zone
Are managers at the Australian Synchrotronpanicking given the news that neither the federal government nor the Victoria state government has addressed in their just-released budget proposals how the facility will be funded beyond June 2012, when its original 5-year financial plan ends?

At least publicly, those running the synchrotron are thinking not about how to save the young facility but how to grow it.   
Obi-Wan Kenobi, the mastermind of some of the most devastating attacks on the Galactic Empire and the most hunted man in the galaxy, was killed in a firefight with Imperial forces near Alderaan, Darth Vader announced on Sunday.

In a late-night appearance in the East Room of the Imperial Palace, Lord Vader declared that “justice has been done” as he disclosed that agents of the Imperial Army and stormtroopers of the 501st Legion had finally cornered Kenobi, one of the leaders of the Jedi rebellion, who had eluded the Empire for nearly two decades. Imperial officials said Kenobi resisted and was cut down by Lord Vader's own lightsaber. He was later dumped out of an airlock.
A winged ant queen fossilized in 49.5-million-year-old Wyoming rock ranks as the first body of a giant ant from the Western Hemisphere.

Its new moniker?   Titanomyrma lubei.

And they didn't even have to get all sweaty to find it.   The new fossil caught paleoentomologist Bruce Archibald of Simon Fraser University’s eye as he and coauthor Kirk Johnson poked around storage drawers at the Denver Museum of Nature&Science, where Johnson works. 


Since 1988, students at the University of Arizona were given a questionnaire in order to determine their attitudes toward science and pseudoscience, as well as examine their basic scientific knowledge.   Hadas Shema, Information Science PhD student, tackles those results and compares them to similar NSF studies.   The results show a large amount of pseudo-scientific acceptance.

Should it be surprising?   Perhaps not.  Students are supposed to be open to knowledge and learning early in their college days and a lot of those students will be in the humanities and unfamiliar with what makes science into science.
"Within human culture, the hymen has great significance for its perceived correlation to female sexual status. For many cultures, the presence of an intact hymen before marriage suggests purity and cleanliness. Outside of weddings and marriage, hymens have also had cultural relevance as the word “hysteria” is derived from womb-fury, which was associated with the hymen."

Really, if that hasn't grabbed your attention, I don't know what will.  Enjoy the fun aquatic ape reference also.
 
The Curious Case of the Present Hymen
Science 2.0 fave Darlene Cavalier, the Science Cheerleader, has big news.   

The “Science of NFL Football”series, produced by NBC Learn, NBC Sports and the National Science Foundation in partnership with Science Cheerleader and the NFL, won a Sports Emmy from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for Outstanding New Approaches Sports Programming.

Gooooooo, Darlene!  Gooooooooo science!
Everyone issues forth platitudes about how science should be more 'open' and, in a world of social media, it will certainly stay harder to remain closed.

A few weeks ago, a leak about a possible new discovery (for the comprehensive explanation from a member of the collaboration, see Tommaso Dorigo) set the media aflame.    A preliminary document seemed to show γ-rays from a decaying Higgs particle with a mass of 115 gigaelectronvolts and the details about what it really or really was are best left to experts like Tommaso but the issue here is, will open science, part of the Science 2.0 vision, make any headway or not?  
From BathMums, a brewing controversy over a baby friendly cafe for new mothers that has suddenly started charging a 'corkage' fee (if you are unfamiliar with the term, it is a fee a restaurant charges if you bring your own wine to go with your meal rather than buying it from the restaurant) to mothers who bring their own baby food.

Jika Jika, means "twist" in Zulu so it's no surprise.   The obvious question is, what's next?   Will mothers get charged for breast feeding too?



Ethan Siegel is not the most popular writer on Scienceblogs.com but he may consistently be the most enlightening.    

He writers that the future of particle physics is commonly believed to be either going from the Large Hadron Collider to a Very Large Hadron Collider for protons, or going back to electrons and building a huge Linear Collider. 

There is another option, he says. What if we could find a particle that had the best of both worlds? 
You know times are hard when thieves are stealing research bees.  It may make sense, though, since in the modern world stealing money is hard - no one carries money - and you'd have to be an elite computer hacker to get anything from a bank.
About women and lesbian sex, 'an experimental phase in college' is a litany in humor circles.  When it comes to casual sex among women, everyone seems to have an opinion, a statistic, and evidence, be it anecdotal or scientific. And no one is sure how "lesbians" and "lesbian sex" are qualified and quantified in any of these research missions. 

Writing in The Edge, Stephanie Schroeder says that as lesbian sex and homosexuality become more accepted, the popular perception of young lesbians as experimental consumers of casual sex is going away.