When I was quite young, someone told me that all the fuel that exists in the form of oil and coal came from long dead dinosaurs. What amazes me is that I never questioned this preposterous piece of information for a long time. I think the fact that they were referred to as ‘fossil fuels’ confirmed in my mind that dead animals were the source and dinosaurs, being the largest dead animals, seemed to fit the bill.
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Journals frequently send out pre-publication copies of what they think are important papers to science journalists under an embargo, where they are free to research the topic and gather material to write articles, but not publish them until the release date that the journal specifies. This enables journalists to write articles that put the research in context and provide alternative and critical views on the research in a timely manner. In the hands of good science journalists, this practice enables the general public to get a reasonable sense of what new research reveals.
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Many of us have heard of the ‘blue moon’. This is when a full moon appears twice in one calendar month. This is a perfectly predictable astronomical phenomenon that occurs once every two or three years, infrequent enough to serve as a metaphor for rarity, as in the phrase ‘once in a blue moon’.
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Jonah Lehrer, the writer for the New Yorker who lost his job when it was discovered that he was recycling content and manufacturing quotes, had an interesting article before his disgrace where he discussed how hard it was for people, when subjected to double-blind tests, to discriminate between wines, not being able to tell the difference between high-priced reputedly quality wines with much cheaper varieties. There have been studies that show that when subjected to blindfold testing, even people who are considered expert wine tasters cannot even tell the difference between red and white wine, let alone the fine distinctions such as year, vineyard, grape type, etc. between different grades of wine
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Frances Chan is a history major at Yale University who has been involved in a struggle with that university’s health services because they kept telling her that at 92 lbs, she was too thin and that her Body Mass Index was too low. Her height is 5’2″, which gives her a BMI score of 16.8 while the ‘normal’ is in the range 18.5-25.
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Prostate cancer generally affects older men and since that group is a powerful and influential one, a lot of attention is paid to the diagnosis and treatment of that condition. Now there is a new study that provides promise of a better early detection system than the PSA blood test in which elevated levels leads to biopsies to see if there really is a tumor. The PSA test is not a very good one and the biopsies that are often triggered by it have problems.
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Now that the search is on for the missing plane in order to retrieve the black box and find out what happened, the focus has shifted to the difficulty of finding it in the vast expanse of the Indian Ocean.
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The stripes on a zebra are quite striking and cry out for an explanation. The popular one is that it helps camouflage them against predators by mimicking long grass or trees. But a new study suggests that stripes came about because they help to repel flies. Yes, really.
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Three years ago I wrote an apology for not being a vegetarian or a vegan. There are three reasons given for favoring such a diet. One is moral. To eat meat is to use another sentient being for one’s own ends and to be part of the cruel factory farming system that exists in the US. The second is ecological, since using plants to feed animals results in roughly 90% of the energy used to produce plants being lost in the conversion to animal protein, which is a waste of resources. The third is for health since vegetables and fruits reportedly led to better health outcomes.
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You may recall Sam Wang, the Princeton neuroscientist whose statistical analyses I referred to frequently during the 2012 election. He now has an article in the New York Times where he analyzes the actual risks for causing autism versus the frequency of news coverage. As he says, “by far the largest risk is genetic. In comparison, the measured impact of environmental risks ranges from nonexistent to small, unless you work directly with chemicals in a factory.”
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