The Mono

mactavish was the first of my friends to put these on her LJ, and after hopeforyou sent me the site link for Science Scouts last night, I felt I should pick my own badges.

I have to say -- I find this far more satisfying than Girl Scouts ever was. :)



(Someone needs to make a little app to output the HTML for LJ -- I had to do this by hand.)

Edit: added the "Talking science" badge, as required. :)

Thanks to lily, I was introduced to this little gem:

The Solution to the Big Dinosaur Paradox

Putting aside for a moment the fact that I was unaware of the presence of a Big Dinosaur Paradox, this site is wonderful. It seeks to use logical deduction and scientific evidence (no, real physics formulas and numbers) to find answers to the great puzzles of life, or at least what this author thinks are the great puzzles. It discards some of the weirder theories out in creationist-land because they don't hold up scientifically. And finally, at the end, the stream of logic and scientific thought comes to an irrefutable conclusion. (No, I won't tell you what it is. Though you might want to look up which materials have a density of 670 kg/m³.)

It is, without a doubt, one of the most entertaining sites I've seen in a while.

I now know so much about the mechanism behind making transgenic (GMO) food crops that I can no longer engage in public discussion about it. Sigh.

Let it be noted, however, that after all this education, my only objection to crops modified to resist pests and diseases is the public reaction... there is no scientific basis I can determine for blocking such transgenic-resistance plants. Ditto for making plants used in pharm-acology. I'm not so sanguine about Roundup-Ready crops, which seem largely like a bid by Monsanto to lock in their Roundup market without a huge impact in effectiveness... but that's the minority of modifications looking for approval. Most of them are either used solely in lab research (for genomics and such), modified to make a foreign substance (such as a medicine), or given a gene conferring resistance to a disease or insect. And in almost all cases, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks (many of which exist even with normal crops).

That doesn't mean they should be forced down people's throats, so to speak. Public resistance is a very good reason to hold back on introducing such things to the food supply, and I think a lot of the pro-GMO folks have been ignoring that. I just wish they'd wake up and start working with the public on education and assuaging public fears, rather than screaming that the objectors are simply stupid Luddites. Until the public can have its fears rationally addressed, there's going to be backlash, and quite rightly so.

I decided to read up on ricin, to refresh my memory, and found more details on its mechanisms than I had known before. Read on, boys and girls, to discover a toxin that is so efficient it's almost like it was engineered to be the world's most potent poison...

( A little explanation of how it works, for the layman. )

So we have a toxin which moves freely into (and somehow out of) cells, using their own transportation machinery, resists all the cell's degradation pathways, gets put exactly where it needs to be without effort, hits a universal spot on quite possibly the most important protein in the cell and disables it immediately, and can do so thousands of times a minute for many minutes. I can't think of any way I'd engineer a better poison, except to make it possible to absorb it in some way other than ingestion or injection. (DMSO, anyone?)

The more I learn about it, the scarier it gets.

Scotch tape gives off bursts of X-rays.

I kid you not. When these researchers pulled some tape off the roll, they recorded bursts of X-rays strong enough to get a proper X-ray image of a finger.

Granted, they had to do it in a vacuum... apparently there's something about air that prevents it from happening normally. That said, the article does mention in passing that you can get flashes of normal-light illumination by pulling tape off the roll in a dark closet. Eat your heart out, Certs.

They don't know why the X-rays are produced, since the Scotch tape adhesive is a closely kept secret, but they can get similar effects on different wavelengths with other types of clear tape. Duct tape, alas, is not that cool.

This definitely comes under the header of "Reality is weird".

Edit: If you don't have a NYTimes login, I recommend BugMeNot, and the corresponding Bugmenot plugin for Firefox.

Making decisions tires your brain.

When CFS gives me brainfog and it's hard to focus, it gets much, much harder to make even small decisions (like what I want to eat). This links the lack of concentration issue with the difficulty in making even brief, simple decisions.

Hell, I should contemplate how this affects me even when I'm not crashy.

British researchers uncover DNA variations in seven common ailments

The seven common diseases are bipolar disorder, coronary artery disease, Crohn's disease, hypertension, rheumatoid arthritis, and Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes.

It doesn't give us a straight out-of-the-box solution, not by far... but it does provide a lot more information about the diseases in question, and about the roles of these genes. It's exactly what people were hoping for when the human genome was sequenced.

Edit: joedecker linked to a post at In The Pipeline, reminding us that media reports that this is "a locked chest full of the secret keys to health" are way off the mark. I had generally tried to avoid giving that impression with this LJ post, but it's a good thing to really bring attention to. This is a significant piece to the puzzle, but we aren't much further than pulling the pieces out of the box and putting them on the table yet. Getting the full picture is a long way off.

My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nachos.

If there is a single piece of technology that I can point to and say "This is the future I've been waiting for," it's thermal conversion.

The new Discover magazine article

The prototype plant has gone through serious growing pains and come out stronger than ever... and Ireland hopes to have one next year. We need to push our lawmakers into making the US more attractive, via subsidies, additional rules on feedstocks (we need to cut out poultry cannibalism anyway) and grants. Let's get us some of these to chew up our landfills, agricultural wastes, raw sewage, tire piles, electronic and hazardous wastes, and anything else we can think of.

Oil doesn't just come from the land of the dinosaurs anymore.

"-oyl" is indeed the suffix for an acyl halide. Good to know I remembered correctly.

1,10-decanedioyl chloride:

Oh, and Lexan? Made out of bisphenol A and phosgene. You know, phosgene-the-chemical-warfare-agent. Hoy.

Two forwarded email messages in as many days.

Theobromine is the ingredient that is used to make all chocolate

and

[H]e was told it's a compound which is one molecule away from antifreeze



I'm waiting for the trifecta.
Oh, my brain.



Edit: It does occur to me that "one molecule away" from antifreeze (ethylene glycol) might be an attempt to describe ethylene glycol monobutyl ether. Maybe I should look at the Swiffer Wetjet and see whether they really are putting Formula 409 in there -- that would add another thing to my list of hazardous household products. Sigh.

Swiffer WetJets contain propylene glycol monobutyl ether. It's a little less toxic than EGBE, but so similar that I don't want to be near it regardless. One more thing to mention when rattling off my list of "problem chemicals"...

Hey hybrid owners! Your car is putting your health at risk.

Fortunately, ATTI has the solution to your woes. If you think $65 x 4 is too steep a price, think about all the health care costs you're avoiding, not to mention the improvement in quality of life!






I have a few physics textbooks I'd like to throw at these guys.

And maybe a fraud suit.




(I don't think that EMF sensitivity is total bunk -- look at how I'm not supposed to be able to detect certain chemicals at such incredibly low concentrations as I do. But high-voltage AC lines are a totally different animal compared to DC battery current. I just wish more EMF-sensitive people knew that.)

I usually take information from the Pesticide Action Network with a grain of salt; even though I've been chemically injured and deal poorly with many of the pesticides they campaign against, their tone has always struck me as overly hysterical. That said, they sometimes do a good job of aggregating other news reports and summarizing studies, and this one seems like a good read.

Carbaryl: One Poison for Another in Urban Creeks

( Read more... )

This caught my eye, mainly because it has to do with plant pathology. It is, however, also a tale of the same sort of corruption that pervades the current White House. Which makes sense, given who Katherine Harris is.

Pressure was put on Florida officials to test "Celestial Water" as a cure for citrus canker

I haven't researched citrus canker specifically, but I remember hearing that it's been a real scourge in Florida over the last four years or so. It's a bacterial disease, and the combination of wet weather (which helps it spread from tree to tree) and hurricanes (which injured the trees, making wounds where disease could enter) has made a serious impact on the citrus orchards. The only treatment for most cankers is to cut off the affected parts, which in many cases in Florida has meant taking out trees entirely. Everyone's looking for some other way, but I don't know of any.

When Katherine Harris, who knows absolutely zip about plant disease, hooks up with a New York Rabbi and a cardiologist to suggest a cure, it makes me angry that scientists have to comply with ignorant superstitious beliefs just because of who she is. Other quacks are brushed off with a quiet "do the research and let us know". Yet this Kabbalist dreck gets tested by the state, because a U.S. Representative is breathing down people's necks.

Gah. I get irritated by politicians messing with climate change data, but I guess when they mess with my profession, it gets personal.