A calico lobster, a mix of orange and yellow spots, is a 1 in 30 million specimen according to researchers, and thus has been spared from being delicious.It was caught off Winter Harbor, Maine and saved from the cooking pot by Chef Jasper White at Jasper White's Summer Shack restaurant in Cambridge, Mass. after they noticed the coloration. They contacted the New England Aquarium, which then made plans to get the lobster, now named Calvin, and it will eventually take up residence at the Biomes Marine Biology Center in Rhode Island.
It's always a little irksome to see or hear 'X causes Y% of cancer' because, really, it is the kind of culturally partisan gibberish that has made it possible for disreputable genetics testing companies to make all kinds of ridiculous claims. Yes, you are more likely to get lung cancer if you smoke than if you don't, but lots of people get lung cancer who do not smoke and were never asbestos workers.Writing on Discover, science journalist Ed Yong makes sense of those population attributable fractions (PAFs) - like what percentage of cases of a disease would be avoided if a risk factor was avoided.
While the value of antibiotics in treating illness has always been clear, the impact of overuse on farms has been debated for some time.The U.S. Food And Drug Administration has issued guidelines (voluntary) for the use of antibiotics in the agricultural industry;"judiciously" - for treating and preventing sickness. The spike in overuse of antibiotics has led to increases of drug-resistant bacteria - 'superbugs' in animals and humans.The rules are voluntary for now - I know, in an age where goldfish, Happy Meals and trans fats are regulated by government, something is still voluntary - but the FDA will pick up the issue again in three years.
Smug supposedly 'pro-science' people who seem to embrace science primarily to ridicule religious people don't have all that much science understanding. Instead, they believe science, including evolution. Most of them know very little about adaptive radiation or any mechanism of evolution.Fundamentalism does not just happen among religious types. But most people are not fundamentalists for or against anything, we accept science because a world made up of natural laws makes more sense than one made up of arbitrary (and conflicting) supernatural ones.
For most of the past 50 years, archaeologists thought they knew how humans arrived in the New World. At the end of the last ice age, sea levels dropped and big-game hunters living in eastern Siberia followed their prey across the Bering land bridge and into Alaska. Then they swept across the unpopulated continent. Archaeologists called these presumed pioneers the Clovis culture, after distinctive stone tools were found at sites near Clovis, New Mexico, in the 1920s and 1930s.Any evidence of humans in the New World before the Clovis time was dismissed, sometimes harshly. That was the case with a Washington-state mastodon kill first described around 30 years ago but then largely ignored.
A surprising number of scientists defy the 'liberal' stereotype and are more libertarian than they are given credit for (including by conservatives and liberals) - no surprise there, liberal and libertarian derive from the same root word for freedom and freedom is essential to quality science.Writing on PolicyMic.com, Cameron English interviews RealClearScience editor Dr. Alex Berezow, who argues that scientists and Ron Paul have a lot in common. Not a shock, Paul had a good showing among academics.
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.
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.
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.
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.
