Author Archives: curiouscat

Scientists Denounce Global Warming Report ‘Edits’

Scientists Denounce Global Warming Report ‘Edits’:

The original, unedited testimony presented to Congress by Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and obtained by ABC News was 14 pages long, but the White House Office of Management and Budget edited the final version down to a mere six pages.

Scientists and public health organizations called the move “frustrating,” “terrible” and “appalling.” The edits essentially deleted all sections that referred to climate change as a public health concern — including the risks of increased food-borne and waterborne diseases, worsening extreme weather events, worsening air pollution and the effect of heat stress on humans.

“Dr. Gerberding is the lead of the premiere public health agency in the U.S.,” said Kim Knowlton, a science fellow on global warming and health at the National Resources Defense Council in New York. “It’s shocking that she was not allowed to say in a public discussion some of these vital details.

Political reasons for modifying testimony are not amazing. But when political edits to science testimony are too large you can really open up some questions about what is driving testimony. And those questions should be asked. Lets not allow science to be hidden and not allow the public to hear what the scientists working for us have to say – let the debate be open and public.

Innovation Academy for High School Students

Innovation Academy students get their feet wet

“They teach us about ocean life and animals — I like that kind of stuff,” she said. “It’s something different.”

Moody High School Innovation Academy students will make three more trips to the field station this semester and another five in the spring. Then they’ll gather up statistics and try to determine environmental trends for the station.

The trips are possible through an agreement made late this summer between the 2-year-old institute and Corpus Christi Independent School District. The Innovation Academy — one of seven academies at Moody — is in its first year and enrolls 75 Moody ninth-grade students and 105 Cunningham Middle School sixth-graders.

“Our kids are becoming very involved in the makeup of Laguna Madre plants and animals, as well as how to document their existence,” said Tina Dellinger, Texas Science Technology Engineering and Math district coordinator. The Innovation Academy is in its second year of a two-year, $750,000 Texas Science Technology Engineering and Math Initiative grant that last year funded academy planning and training and this year is funding its first activities.

Computational Science and Engineering by Gilbert Strang

New book, Computational Science and Engineering by Gilbert Strang, is available. The website includes some sections of the book. Video Lectures of Gilbert Strang on Linear Algebra, Spring 2005.

China Reaches for the Moon

China’s Long March to the Moon

The missions by China and Japan are part of a broader resurgence of interest in the moon by space agencies around the world. The U.S. and India also are planning unmanned lunar-exploration missions next year. It is the biggest burst of such work since the 1970s. The last humans to stand on the moon were American astronauts from the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.
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For China, the aim is explicitly political, as well as scientific. “Lunar exploration reflects a country’s comprehensive national power,” said Ouyang Ziyuan, the chief scientist for China’s moon program, in an interview with the official Communist Party newspaper, People’s Daily. It will “raise our international prestige and strengthen the cohesion of our people.”

China aims to have a unmanned mission to the moon in 2012 and a manned mission to the moon by 2020.

More Dinosaurs Fighting Against Open Science

Controversy at the American Chemical Society by John Dupuis

So, what’s my take on this? First of all, I’m not surprised. Unfortunately there are some scholarly societies that operate more like for-profits when it comes to their publishing arms and ACS is certainly one of the most notable for that sort of thing. While it should be shocking that ACS is acting more like Elsevier than Elsevier at times, sadly it isn’t.

Secondly, what should we, as librarians do about it? Mostly we need to advocate. We need to push our vendors towards business models that favour open access, we need to reassure them that we’re interested in a sustainable model for scholarly publishing

I agree. It is sad that so many organizations distort behavior though poor management structures but that is the world we live in. My management improvement blog focused on how to manage better. And I have posted several times about the need to shift our support to open access science and away from those who want continue outdated strategies that restrict the advancement of scientific ideas.

Killing Germs May Be Hazardous to Your Health

Caution: Killing Germs May Be Hazardous to Your Health

Relman is a leader in rethinking our relationship to bacteria, which for most of the last century was dominated by the paradigm of Total Warfare. “It’s awful the way we treat our microbes,” he says, not intending a joke; “people still think the only good microbe is a dead one.” We try to kill them off with antibiotics and hand sanitizers. But bacteria never surrender; if there were one salmonella left in the world, doubling every 30 minutes, it would take less than a week to give everyone alive diarrhea. In the early years of antibiotics, doctors dreamed of eliminating infectious disease. Instead, a new paper in The Journal of the American Medical Association reports on the prevalence of Methicillinresistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), which was responsible for almost 19,000 deaths in the United States in 2005—about twice as many as previously thought, and more than AIDS. Elizabeth Bancroft, a leading epidemiologist, called this finding “astounding.”

As antibiotics lose their effectiveness, researchers are returning to an idea that dates back to Pasteur, that the body’s natural microbial flora aren’t just an incidental fact of our biology, but crucial components of our health, intimate companions on an evolutionary journey that began millions of years ago.

Why Planes Fly: What They Taught You In School Was Wrong

So we all know how planes fly, right? The top of the wing is rounded and the bottom of the wing is more straight. Air takes longer to travel over the top of the wing than the bottom, which results in more pressure on the bottom, hence the lift. Right? As it turns out, no.

This is what I was taught, and it’s what I’ve always believed (it’s even in most lower-level text books), but it’s simply not true. The concept is called the Bernoulli Principle, and it accounts for very little of the lift that makes flight possible. The main reason planes fly is far simpler: wings force air downward, which in turn pushes the wings upward.

The primary actor here is the the Coanda Effect, with the Bernoulli Principle taking a supporting role. It all starts with the air wrapping downward along the back of the wing (Coanda).

Nanoengineers Use Tiny Diamonds for Drug Delivery

Nanoengineers Mine Tiny Diamonds for Drug Delivery

Northwestern University researchers have shown that nanodiamonds — much like the carbon structure as that of a sparkling 14 karat diamond but on a much smaller scale — are very effective at delivering chemotherapy drugs to cells without the negative effects associated with current drug delivery agents.
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To make the material effective, Ho and his colleagues manipulated single nanodiamonds, each only two nanometers in diameter, to form aggregated clusters of nanodiamonds, ranging from 50 to 100 nanometers in diameter. The drug, loaded onto the surface of the individual diamonds, is not active when the nanodiamonds are aggregated; it only becomes active when the cluster reaches its target, breaks apart and slowly releases the drug. (With a diameter of two to eight nanometers, hundreds of thousands of diamonds could fit onto the head of a pin.)

“The nanodiamond cluster provides a powerful release in a localized place — an effective but less toxic delivery method,” said co-author Eric Pierstorff, a molecular biologist and post-doctoral fellow in Ho’s research group. Because of the large amount of available surface area, the clusters can carry a large amount of drug, nearly five times the amount of drug carried by conventional materials.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin Interview Webcast

This interview and audience question and answer took place last week at the end of the Google Zeitgeist conference. Some interesting notes from Sergey:

I like to see us not focus on maintaining Google’s culture but to improve it – continuous improvement (he specifically mentions how the infrastructure they have in place now allows them to experiment in ways that were not possible before – a reminder of Google’s focus on the scientific method and Experimenting Quickly and Often).
Google still follows their model of focusing 70% of the effort on core business (search) and 20% on related activities and 10% on “anything goes” (new business areas).

While not directly related to Google he is very interested in the innovation in nanotechnology and carbon nanotubes and the present time.
on moving toward universal power supplies – we are talking to some companies about solutions “but I gotta be honest with you it is a harder problem than I thought”

Larry:

focus on Google’s mission – to organize the world’s information
believes there is great potential in solar power and would love to see successful companies in that industry
improve power supply efficiency on servers

Both:

discussed poor web usability practices based on sites that adopt flashy technology that make it slower and more difficult for users – flash, excessive Ajax… Larry also mentioned doing testing on the user experience – no surprise for Google and no surprise that most poorly overly fancy sites care more about what a pointy haired boss might think on seeing the flash than on users experiences and testing.

Deer Rescued 1.5 miles Offshore

Bambi Caught 1.5 miles OFFSHORE

They saw what appeared to be a seal with its snout out of the water, but they didn’t think any seals were around their fishing grounds and they kept watching. Soon they realized it was a deer trying desperately to keep afloat – and obviously losing the battle. Fearing the whitetail would get snagged in their lines they cranked in their rigs. Then the deer headed straight for the boat possibly thinking it was a spit of land.

But as it got closer and saw the two fishermen aboard, it had second thoughts. With its nose barely out of the water, it appeared to have been swimming all night, said Campbell. “Since the fish weren’t biting, we thought we’d give it a hand. Bo grew up around cows, was really handy with a bow line and lasooed the deer on the first attempt.”
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to the closest beach, Kent Point, where I beached the boat and we carefully unloaded our catch on the sand. We untied him and jumped back.

“Too weak to stand, he just sat there quivering. We picked him up again and put his feet underneath him, but he still couldn’t walk or stand. We left him sitting there looking at us. Before we left, I looked him in the eye and said ‘See you on opening day; payback time.’

See link for photos. Related:The Cat and a Black Bear – Polar Bear Playing with Wolves – Water Buffaloes, Lions and Crocodiles Oh My – The Engineer That Made Your Cat a Photographer