Science nerd alert!
Yes, now YOU can enjoy deadly disease microbes in the privacy of your own home!
From the commonality of the Cold virus or the season delights of the Flu to the exotic pleasures of Rabies, Syphilis, or even that sensational destroyer, Flesh Eating Disease, these pettable petri dish poxes will bring hours of eww! to you and your friends.
And they’re on sale.
Where else? ThinkGeek.
This Christmas, I’m giving someone Hepatitis.
Google’s “Project Glass.”
Don’t know if the reality will live up to the hype in this video, but … I’ve had dreams about something like this. I’m so getting a set of these when they come out.
Also: Won’t it be fun to virtually tag churches with atheist comments? So when you — or your friends subscribed to your comments — walk around town, you all get these friendly little warnings.
It doesn’t get much play in the publicly-available cultural anthropology literature, but there’s an island in the Pacific where an interesting conflict has played out over generations.
The island, which has an untranslatable name – generally rendered in English as “Ryeezahn” – is occupied by two tribes, the Kritsi and the Syenz, which have been at war for generations, a war temporarily restrained in an uneasy peace.
The root of the conflict, as visiting anthropologists have documented, is unequal resource distribution brought on by a drastic inequality in living space. The size of the Syenz territory is more than 20 times that of the Kritsi. Continue reading “A Study in Conflict Between Island Cultures”
Paging Bobby Drake! Pretty cool video:
But still.
Google’s self-driving car has been demoed a number of times over the past few years — “Good Morning America” even took it for a spin in 2010. But the pedal’s about to be really put to the metal in Nevada.
Nevada’s Legislative Commission has approved regulations that would allow self-driving vehicles on the state’s roadways.
Sweet, huh? Near as I can tell from the story, it’s a bit of bracing open-mindedness on the part of Nevada state legislators. They’re willing, basically, to serve as the proving grounds for the concept of a self-driving car. Continue reading “Okay, So It’s Not Flying Cars …”
Carl Buell, Carl Zimmer. Do you know the names? Buell is the renowned natural history illustrator, Zimmer is the well-known science writer.
Buell’s name just popped up all over the world in relation to Darwin Day, Zimmer’s makes a splash this week on the cover of Time Magazine.
I hope Darwin enthusiast Colin Purrington will forgive me for quoting pretty much an entire page on his website, but he explains the Buell-Darwin connection so well I just couldn’t do it better: Continue reading “St. Valentine and Darwin: A Tale of Two Carls”
Just wanted to follow up on my post of a few days ago. I still feel a little bit bad about the headline, “Hurrah! Cure for Alzheimer’s Discovered!”
I intended it to be funny, sort of a reflection of common practice in science reporting. This does it better:
Yes, I’m doing that “sensationalist headline” thing the popular news media is so famous for.
But … I hope this is true. It would be damned cool if it was. At the same time, I’ve learned — not as a scientist, because I’m not one, but as a reader of news and onetime newspaper editor — that what you read in headlines is often misleading. And you can’t even trust the stories that follow.
But here it is: Breaking News from the Case Western Reserve School of Medicine
Neil deGrasse Tyson asks for help on Facebook:
I hardly ever ask questions on this wall, but I feel compelled: Tuesday I’ll be at the White House. If you had one sentence for the President, what would it be?
My response was:
Mr. President, let’s amp up U.S. science education by devoting ourselves as a nation to an Apollo-type program in medicine: Launch “ABCD by 2023” to discover even more effective treatments – or cures! – for Alzheimer’s, Birth defects, Cancer, and Diabetes.
Such a visionary national project would appeal, for obvious reasons, to seniors, parents, children, and anybody who has ever lost a loved one, or feared losing a loved one, to any of these killers of body and mind.
Not only would it save millions of our loved ones …
It would give education a shot in the arm. It would provide huge numbers of jobs. It would get America investing in itself again through advanced research. It would underscore the value of attracting and retaining bright young minds from all over the planet. And it would provide the major spin-off of a fantastic body of new knowledge.
So yes, Neil, tell him THIS.
Probably more than you wanted to know about intestinal bacteria and toilet flushing, but here are two Jan. 2 articles that coincidentally both spotlight the pathogen Clostridium difficile.
Your Appendix Could Save Your Life
Flushing Can Spread Diarrhea Disease
That second one … Man! Makes me want to use public toilets even less.
