Orac of the blog Respectful Insolence takes us out of esoteric physics and into flat-out New Age quackery with a nifty breakdown of Woo-ese in Neo-Homeopathic Magneto Geometric boners. Here is the maximum amount of Woo anyone has yet been able to cram into a sub-microscopic dose of homeopathic ‘medicine’ for sale to Woo-ites everywhere who suffer that most ubiquitous of modern televised complaints, Erectile Dysfunction.

After linking us to sites selling such goodies as the Ultra Advanced Psychotronic Money Magnet Professional Version 1.0 [TM] and the Tesla Purple Energy Shield, Orac cites some impressive Woo-ese for the ED cure…

…The proprietary Neo-Homeopathic synthesis utilises aspects of traditional homeopathy, Malcolm Rae’s Magneto Geometric methods and Scalar Neo-Radonic Cloning. Vir-X is in effect a super potentised Neo-Homeopathic preparation which contains a potent energetic signal which stimulates the human vital force. It is the strength of the vital force that ultimately determines a man’s sexual potency. Vir-X stimulates the overall vital force of the organism.

Well, that’s enough Woo for a whole lifetime right there! Not a single active ingredient, so this stuff turns out to be your basic 13th century witch’s love potion. I’d guess it’s about as effective, too, so maybe this is something that would work to get some really disgusting representatives of the male sex (like Rush Limbaugh) off the dating circuit long enough to eat themselves all the way to 500 pounds! At that point they couldn’t even find the organ, much less worry about how well it’s performing. The female world will be thankful, I’m sure.

And while we’re on the subject of obesity, Jake Young of Pure Pedantry asks, How genetic is obesity? Citing an article from the NYT about a book titled Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss…, Young take firm aim at the framing of the entire issue. On the matter of either-or for whether genes or environment causes bad behaviors, I too think the spinmeisters of slant tend to overplay their hands way, way too often.

Behaviors – including the bad ones we used to call “sins” (this one would be gluttony) are neither all-genetic or all-environmental. And one could question – as Young does – the sample populations. The conclusions were in the all-genetic vein, and Young correctly calls the author on her interpretations of the data. We should know that there are things we can do environmentally to control our weight. I’m all for not forgetting this in favor of blaming heredity and doing nothing but living fat.

More on the genetic disease front comes from GrrlScientist at Living the Scientific Life, with Genetic Roots of Bipolar Disorder. Here we get an honest overview of the complexities involved in assigning a disease to genetic influences, as in bipolar disorder there are so darned many genes involved. Yet researchers seeking a molecular target for developing treatments were able to identify a single enzyme that strongly affects the severity of this condition. The description is interesting and the possible new applications exciting.

On to life in the real world, with Mark Hoofnagle’s post on the denialism blog, Myths about Divorce. While we all know divorce is common, Mark believes it’s a total urban legend that 50% of marriages end in divorce. This is something useful I can use for counseling my daughters if they ever decide to get married. There is also data showing that college educated atheists have fewer divorces than Baptists and Evangelical Christians, though Muslims and Catholics still tend to marry for life. All in all, a worthy taste of Cosmo-style lite reading during a leisurely evening of net-surfing.

Environmental issues get some traction in this Earth Month with contributions from Enrique Gili of commonground blog and FCD at Afarensis. Gili’s take on biofuels examines the shortcomings of putting huge tracts of agricultural land out of food service with Is Putting a Plant in Your Tank the Answer? Grrl offers linky goodness with Trashing Tara, about plans to put a highway right through the Irish archeological site of ancient Tara. She even includes a link for donations to stop this from happening, so being certifiably Irish by way of ancestry, I dutifully sent my ten bucks in.

Finally, for your dose of psychological researches that seem dumb but turn out not to be, try Does Ceiling Height Affect the Way You Think? by Chris over at Mixing Memory. I guessed the correct answer on this question before I started reading, since I live in a house where low, dark wood ceilings were raised a couple of decades ago to lofty cathedral height and painted white, and the difference between the way the library ‘feels’ with its still-low overhead and the living room ‘feels’ with its full 12 feet is very dramatic. Seems us high-ceiling lovers also value freedom more than low-ceiling cave-dwellers. Not surprising, of course, but if you like higher ceilings you should read the post anyway, just to get your deserved scientific pat on the back for being so cool.

That’s all for this installment, but I’ll be back in a couple of weeks with a whole new collection of interesting science talk from those ever-intrepid science bloggers hoping to make the world a smarter place. Stay cool!

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As you can probably tell from this installment’s title, there is humor, fear, factoids and stranger-than-comic book discoveries out there to delight the seeker. Starting with stranger-than-comic book discoveries, Chris Rowan at Highly Allochthonous blog informs us that Scientists have discovered ‘Kryptonite’ !

Yes, analysis of an unusual mineral sample from a mine in Serbia has established for us why it is that Superman was MIA during the whole Balkans mess back in the ’90s. Oddly enough, the powers that be named the mineral “Jadarite” instead of going with the already familiar “Kryptonite,” since the molecular structure is missing a little bit of fluorine to complete its Kryptonic formula. Lex Luthor could of course add a splash of fluoride mouth rinse to a vial of powdered Jadarite, so Clark Kent isn’t out of trouble if he ever has to cover a story in Serbia. Where, I hear, Luthor has relocated his entire mad scientist laboratory in an abandoned mine…

Speaking of Lex the evil genius, Mike the Mad Biologist has posted a photograph of a young Lex in his driftglass Hath Profaned Against the Evil Baby! That’s a kid I sure wouldn’t want to mess with, and I imagine he got much worse as soon as his teeth came in!

On to the fun and interesting category, where we find a breakdown by Jonah Lehrer of The Frontal Cortex of a scientific study of Wagging the Dog. It’s all about how to read doggie-wags for the purpose of reading doggie intentions. This skill could be very useful for joggers, mailmen and meter-readers, whose notorious run-ins with neighborhood dogs are the stuff of legend (and doggie-tasers). Asymmetry purportedly reflects which brain hemisphere is guiding the action, and the scientists make an admirable attempt to psychoanalyze which hemispheres are concerned about what. Which will be very useful to all you dog-whisperers and doggie-shrinks out there.

The examination of bodily symmetry in human beings has some excellent applications too, as Chris Chatham of Developing Intelligence tells us in his post Palm Reading and Sexual Advertising: Bodily Symmetry and Intelligence. Chris claims that your body’s bilateral symmetry can predict the state of your health, whether or not you’re schizophrenic or depressed, the number of sexual partners you’ve had, and your resting metabolic rate. Worse, researchers have decided it also predicts your intelligence.

So if a man is a fan of speed-dating or on-line hookups and wants to impress potential bed-partners with his cleverness and intellectual sophistication, beware when the lady asks for measurements of the length and width of your feet, ankles, wrists, elbows, ears and fingers. She’s sizing you up for “reproductive fitness,” NOT just a sexual tryst and one-night stand!

Under the general heading of Very Scary Science, there are a couple of things to be concerned about in the recent science round-up. First, revere at Effect Measure blog informs us about a Lab accident at bioweapons facility. Just the sort of thing we DON’T want to hear about! Seems there’s a bioweapons facility on the campus of Texas A&M University (no, they didn’t make this illegal after revelations in the ’70s), where a researcher managed to infect herself with brucella by climbing into the “foolproof” hot chamber to clean it after a test run.

Now, this all happened back in February of 2006, but A&M conveniently ‘forgot’ to report the incident as required by Texas Sunshine law. Luckily there is an international organization called The Sunshine Project that keeps track of bioweapons facilities and compliance with laws. This requires some digging for information these days, so we can all be glad somebody’s on the job.

Then there’s the dramatic disappearance of honeybee colonies happening all over the world, which could portend serious food production problems for our future. GrrlScientist from Living the Scientific Life offers an interesting hypothesis from a German researcher, asking Are Cell Phones Killing Bees? Seems the bees aren’t just dying in and around their hives (as would be found if the issue were mites or other pathogens), but are simply disappearing without a trace. As if they go out to find flowers and pollen, and can’t find their way home again.

This doesn’t explain why parasites, animals and other bees that would normally raid the stores of honey and pollen left behind won’t go near these abandoned hives. So other researchers are suggesting other causes for bee colony collapse. Lots of people are working to discover what’s wrong, because without pollenators a good chunk of our fruit, nuts and vegetables will no longer be available.

Finally, just in case you weren’t worried enough about bioweapons and bioethics (who those bioweapons are to be aimed at), Jake Young at Pure Pedantry gives us his take on Neurological “Personhood”. This is apparently an ongoing in-house debate by various neuroscientists and bioethicists about whether or not there is such a thing as basic “equality” of personhood, or if that’s just some pie-in-the-sky sociopolitical concept with no real application in a world of persons and non-persons.

I probably flunk the supposedly objective test for personhood by one deficit or another, so this debate certainly makes me uncomfortable! At any rate, here’s to hoping my interest in science never leads me down the dark path of judging my fellow humans to be “non-persons” just so I can treat them like bugs. It also gives me ample reinforcement for my long-ago decision to avoid reductionist philosophers like the Churchlands as if they *ARE* the plague.

Oops… that was sort of a de-personalizing thing to say, wasn’t it? Unless of course “social context is all”, as Young quotes Patricia Churchland as saying. In which case she most certainly can be a plague, which is the same thing as being a bug. In a meme-ish sort of way…

Happy sci-blog surfing, intrepid seekers of knowledge! Until next time, this is me – over and out.

The post Superman’s Evil Baby Nemesis Wagging Dogs and Reading Palms appeared first on The Blog Herald.

This was followed by an NPR On the Media segment and another article by Nisbet and Mooney in Sunday’s Washington Post titled Thanks for the Facts. Now Sell Them., and it seems like everyone who is anyone has weighed in on the topic.

From his own blog ‘Framing Science’, Nisbet wrote that Framing Science sparks a seismic blog debate, listing some of the blogs talking about the issue, whose support might come in handy for jacket endorsements if he ever writes a book about it. He includes Randy Olsen’s strong endorsement as detailed on Mooney’s blog in Of intertia, Ostriches, and Science Duds – Randy Olsen’s Take on “Framing Science”, UWisc professor Dietram Scheufele’s praise on the blog ‘nanopublic’ with Standing on the shoulders of disciplinary dwarves? , and some irony from Chad Orzel of ‘Uncertain Principles’ with Framing and Arrogance. There are many more blog reactions linked in Nisbet’s post, so if the subject interests you, do some clicking and reading!

Chris Mooney links a few blog reactions as well in his blog ‘The Intersection’ in a post entitled Framing Science: Blog Overload. One of the most interesting comes from Gavin Schmidt of ‘RealClimate’ in A Tale of Three Interviews. Schmidt is a climate scientist. Most of us science groupies are aware that climate scientists are in the news a lot, trying to frame the global warming issues so the public and politicians can know what’s going on. Obviously not the easiest job on the planet, though we’ve all got a stake.

Of course, our stake in such issues doesn’t necessarily come couched in the terminology of civil unrest and nasty rhetoric, as the framing debate has managed to descend to on the blogs of some of the most notorious culture warriors. Mooney responds in “Framing Science”, Round II to PZ Myers’ self-defensive rhetoric in his response to the WaPo article, Nisbet and Mooney in the WaPo: snake oil for the snake oil salesmen.

Or, as Coturnix of A Blog Around The Clock said in a response in PZ’s thread – “In the meantime, we’ll try to work on their kids so in 20 years this entire discussion becomes unnecessary.”

It’s all the usual atheism vs. theism rants using threaty rhetoric, along with some very revealing strategic and tactical outlines that should interest people no matter what side of that divide they stand. A little bit of framing on the issues is offered by Mike the Mad Biologist in his post, Actually, Biologists Have Done That. who takes Pope Benedict to task for his recent statements about evolution and the limits on useful experimentation in those fields.

Dave Munger wrote a piece on ‘Cognitive Daily’ that should have been read by more of the culture warriors before they decided to make this bruhaha overtly public. It’s called Casual readers read more closely than you think, and comes with a nice graph showing how much attention the reader actually does pay when he’s taken the trouble to load the page.

Meanwhile, a few science bloggers did write about science. Jeremy Bruno of ‘The Voltage Gate’ offered The Earth Day Issue with a link to the web page the Sierra Student Coalition at FSU has put up to outline their Earth Day themes and events. Chad Orzel at ‘Uncertain Principles’ tells us Newton: Still Right. He cites some recent experiments in Physical Review Letters that have confirmed Newton’s Second Law of Motion [F=ma], reminding us that Relativity didn’t supersede ol’ Isaac completely.

Finally, Jennifer Jacquet of ‘Shifting Baselines’ answers the whole framing issue by pointing out how comedian Stephen Colbert managed to get around public apathy with his namesake sea turtle, promoting the Great Turtle Race from Costa Rica to the Galapagos. Turtle Tactics: From Stephanie Colburtle to Entourage, How to Meet the Mainstream (Likeably) is short and sweet, and contains a link to Randy Olson’s similar take on helping mainstream America to pay attention.

Have fun perusing the science blogs’ religious and political meltdown, but don’t take any of it more seriously than it deserves. They’re not really coming after you and your children in jackboots and black leather. At this point, they’re only at the strategy phase for converting you and your children to their exclusive ideology (and the signs are that no one’s agreeing on the proper strategy!).

The post All Hell Breaks Loose In Sci-Blog Land! appeared first on The Blog Herald.

First on the list is Water: More Precious Than Oil by GrrlScientist on her blog Living the Scientific Life. She cites some scary statistics about the hundreds of millions of people in the world living with water scarcity. And that’s before getting on the supply and demand statistics suggesting even worse scarcity in the future, to which pollution issues just add one more layer of concern.

In this rich nation where people advertise their hipness about ecological concerns by purchasing filtered tap water in half-liter plastic bottles (produced with petroleum and used to take up space in landfills) that really is more expensive than gasoline, greater water awareness couldn’t hurt. Think about children in the third world dying of choera, typhoid, malaria and dengue before buying your next bottle of tap water. In fact, save those plastic canteens and fill ’em up at your own tap! That would be a pretty good first step.

The second item on the Armageddon list might make expensive tap water pale a bit in comparison, though. Seems we are in the midst of a worldwide mass die-off of honeybees, and that could wipe humans off the planet a lot quicker. John Lynch over at Stranger Fruit introduces us to Colony Collapse Disorder with a link to the New York Times, which is reporting disappearing bees in 24 states. Katherine Sharpe of Page 3.14 tells us to Bee Very Worried about the situation, given that agriculture depends upon honeybees for pollination.

A broader Google search on the situation returns reports coming in from all over the world – Europe, Britain, all of North, Central and South America, Australia, Africa and Asia. So it’s not like we can just import a few queens from someplace else to bail out our food crops. Albert Einstein once predicted humans had only four years of life left if the bees die, so this situation is definitely worthy of more attention from biologists than the ever-popular “Culture Wars” between atheists and religious folks about who’s smarter and who has the best interests of the world at heart than anybody else.

That’s a hint for all you science watchers and science bloggers out there – get off your high horses (and lazy duffs) and DO something for a change! Our time is running short.

Of course, there may already be enough pressure on young scientists, as Chad Orzel tells us in When Grad Students Snap. We may have to start changing our cultural perspective a little bit, so that when someone blows a mental gasket we say they’ve “gone grad” as opposed to “going postal.”

Luckily, musings about things cognitive have been popular over the last couple of weeks, so there’s plenty of good sci-blog material out there to help us re-shape our perspectives. Chad leads off with a pertinent question, How Many Philosophers to Change a Light Bulb?, which is funny even though it doesn’t offer much hope for getting real answers.

A better bet comes from Michael at Peripersonal Space, hosting Encephalon 19: Emotion and Reason Match Postponed Due to Flares on the Pitch, Hooliganism! Here we are offered links about scientists arguing, rat metacognition, the top 10 psychology studies and PTSD in women (among many other juicy tidbits).

While we’re on the subject of thoughts, Josh Rosenau at Thoughts from Kansas blog offers some thoughts on Equality in the American perspective, and where we stand on the road to making it real for everyone. This is excellent historical and theoretical analysis any student of culture should find useful in shaping their own thoughts on the subjects.

Chris Chatham at Developing Intelligence blog lists and explains for us 10 Important Differences Between Brains and Computers. These ten distinctions are well articulated, and should prove to be excellent material in any zombie encounters, anywhere, any time!

Finally, if encounters with the “more cerebral than thou” crowd – or just unmanly zombies – gets you tied up in knots, Suzanne Franks from Thus Spake Zuska offers “Just Say Know”: Musings on Measuring Brains. That oft-cited male ego claim that men are better than women because their brains take up more room? Utterly passe (meaning we ladies can go ahead and bring up the subject of pit bulls who turn bad because their skulls are too small). I say “Right On, Sista’ Girl!”

The post The Most Silent Spring, ‘Going Grad’ and Neuronal Equality appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Better yet, they switched to Daylight Savings three weeks early too. Now if we can just convince them to leave it alone we might find that human beings actually CAN handle the seasonal shortening and lengthening of daylight hours without induced economic productivity losses or suicidal tendencies.

To celebrate, the first blog I’m recommending sets the mood: Scientists of Comedy? by Benjamin Cohen at The World’s Fair. We get links and posters for performances by the Galileo Players , “…a professional sketch comedy and improv troupe that writes and performs original comedic theater focusing on scientific, philosophical and intellectual themes.”

There’s A Comedic Tour of the Universe (an intergalactic sketch comedy), An Element Never Forgets, and some assorted other productions I’d pay to see. And if I get to catch a live performance this year, I’m probably going to want to look into some of the new Smart Drugs, which Albert at ScientificBlogging tells us will soon take over for caffeine and the addictive drugs used to treat ADD/ADHD. Perhaps if we had pills to make us smarter, there wouldn’t be so much complaining about the state of science education in schools.

Speaking of which, David Ng over at The World’s Fair talks about Things that are effective but dangerous (in our quest for scientific literacy). David reports on some workshop ideas and issues on how to promote sound science to the public without causing skeptical reactions. Coturnix at A Blog Around the Clock offers a great link to an online magazine, Science In School, which offers stories and reviews of various innovative techniques for getting kids excited about science.

Or, if you’re a parent who wants to encourage science in your children but are a little leery of organized PR campaigns in open controversies or using Erin Brokovich to teach environmental chemistry, you could just check out Books for Young Mathgeeks: Rabbits, Rabbits Everywhere, offered by Mark Chu-Carroll at Good Math, Bad Math as an excellent way to introduce 1st graders to the Fibonacci number series. A wizard, some rabbits, a Pied Piper and a very bright little girl who saves a whole town! Chu-Carroll’s review is so positive I may have to order this book twice.

On the neuroscience front, Jonah Lehrer at The Frontal Cortex offers an interesting report on the subject of happiness in Happiness, Wealth and the Amish. He examines research reported in Slate showing that over the 20th century Americans, instead of getting happier and happier with rapidly increasing wealth and material goods, got steadily unhappier with their lot in life. Worse, the decline in this “misery quotient” declined by orders of magnitude from one generation to the next!

Oddly enough, the American model is exactly the opposite from what has been demonstrated in Europe, where generations from 1900 to about 1950 got successively happier and happier. What in the world could account for this?

Lehrer postulates that the misery of American wealth can be attributed to conspicuous consumption and rampant consumerism. Where every status symbol of wealth and position becomes just another expectation of wealth and position, and a whole new set of expectations takes root in our “reward neurons.” He contrasts this tendency with what the Amish [a.k.a. the “plain people”] have accomplished, which is to restrain the insatiable appetite of those dopamine-seeking neurons. By not focusing their lives on the goal of acquisition and consumerism, their end result is a regular “happiness boom!”

The comments predictably take issue with the article’s statement of self-reported facts, arguing that “happiness” must equate to “ignorance” and offering the requisite self-assertions of superiority by a grumpy materialist who obviously can’t be very happy with his life (and who blames his unhappiness on the Amish). Hmmm… what an interesting way to prove a point!

From cognitive psychology, Chris over at Mixing Memory offers the interesting observation that Ghosts Make You Less Likely to Cheat. He describes a ‘bizarre’ experiment where researchers selected 25 of the most difficult mental rotation problems from a common spatial reasoning test, then adding that there was a glitch in the program for taking the test, which would sometimes offer the answer before the test-taker sees the question. Further, participants were told the top scorer would win fifty dollars, which served as a motivational carrot to see what the participants would do about the pre-displayed answers.

Then an additional issue was introduced – an “In Memoriam” statement to a grad student who helped design the test, and who had died unexpectedly during that process. On viewing this notice, the participants were told that the present experimenter had recently seen the ghost of that departed grad student in the room! This psychologically primed them to think about the possible presence of a supernatural agent – a ghost – in the room with them as they took the test.

Results demonstrated that participants who got the ghost story (as opposed to control groups who didn’t) were less likely to cheat during the taking of the test, choosing to space past the pre-displayed answers to more honestly evaluate the questions. Sort of makes one wonder if maybe introducing ghost stories in regular classrooms might serve to curb cheating among students. Only the ghost should be of a particularly strict teacher!

Finally, for a wealth of links to fun and interesting collection of yummy factoids and blogger sociology, check out The View From The Cheap Seats’ Tarheel Tavern 108: According to…, where you’ll find a report on a St. Pat’s Day get-together (drink of choice: Irish Coffee), some cuisine reviews, and links to cartoons about life in middle school. These are less scientific and more just fun and games, which is certainly a good use for tidbits and factoids for those of us who are not scientists but who want to sound smarter than we really are.

Happy Spring!

Feature image source

The post Spring: The Season for Scientific Fun and Games! appeared first on The Blog Herald.

On the subject of food, Berkeley professor of psychology Seth Roberts offers two blog posts about Brain Food, from the Scientific Blogging site. In Part 1, he talks about omega-3 fatty acids taken as supplements to improve sleep. His sources include walnut oil, flax oil capsules and salmon. His informal research on himself and from reports on nutrition forums indicate increased intake of omega-3s also helps symptoms of mood disorders, and in other studies has shown decreased susceptibility to Alzheimer’s. Which looks to be a pretty good reason to put omega-3s into one’s diet even if you sleep like a baby!

In Brain Food (part 2) Roberts examines omega-3s from walnut and flaxseed oils to improve brain function generally. He seems a big fan, and promises to keep us updated on further studies. Now that we know what kind of nourishment brains need to function at their peak, we get into the meat of the matter of what brains are made of over on Omni Brain, with What glial cells do and what Einstein’s brain has to do with it. Steve Higgins tells us that glial brain cells, as opposed to the complicated and multi-connected neurons that overlie them, serve to glue neurons together, dispense the food to those neurons, clean up waste products and such, making them the “nanny cells” of our thinking machines.

So… what does Einstein’s brain have to do with it? Seems that when his brain was found – it was lost for decades after he died – it turned out that the major difference between his brain and other people’s brains is that he had more glial cells. Given that animal brain studies have demonstrated that as intelligence increases so does the ratio of glial cells to neurons, we might well expect one of the most intelligent humans who ever lived to display just this sort of oddity. Presuming that selecting matching socks, maintaining a reasonable hairdo and remembering to eat don’t require intelligence as much as they require attention. Einstein was rather notorious for neglecting such attentional details. Higgins tells us that from these studies, reported in the British newspaper The Guardian, neuroscientists now recognize that glial cells also supply energy to neurons as well as help to establish connections.

Now that we’re clear on the superior intelligence of scientific researchers – at least, some of them – let’s look at some of the fun things that these brilliant people find out by using their brainpower. Neurontic tells us in her blog post Silly Science Sunday that sometimes even scientists get silly. There’s a link to one AP Psychology student’s re-make of a Britney Spears video for YouTube that has her singing a ballad about the brain’s occipital lobe. Who would ever have thought Justin Timberlake’s ex was such an accomplished anatomist? No wonder they didn’t make it!

This blog also informs us about a publicly funded radiologist in Britain who discovered that sword swallowers have a higher risk of injury to themselves when they become “distracted” during their feats of derring-do, and can even be injured just by adding some performance-oriented embellishments to the act! I for one would like to know how much of the public’s money he got for the purpose of this research, because I’ve got a terrific idea for research on the risks of injury to fire jugglers. I have a friend who is somewhat of an inventor, who thought he’d add some oomph to his juggling act with a set of wooden balls, onto which he stapled some lamp wick. Everybody can juggle flaming torches, but who have you seen juggle flaming balls?

I keep the original set on the mantle just for its humor value, for when he tried them out for the first time (none of the other jugglers I know would do it, for good reason) it was one of the funniest performances I’ve ever seen in my life. It only took a few weeks for his hands to heal, so was definitely worth it just for the value to basic brain research on how the heck the obvious consequences managed to be overlooked while he was putting these things together! Perhaps his glial cells needed more omega-3s… Anyway, now he’s a bartender instead. Probably a good career move, all things considered.

While it’s somewhat funny to read about the kind of silly science that gets funding from the public coffers (or not), Higgins also turns us on to another glial glitch in the science racket with Academic Fraud – Screwing it up for the rest of us. Fraud is of course a more serious subject than sword swallowers and fire jugglers. Given academic frauds like cold fusion and some stem cell researches, Higgins tells us about some scientists from the University Laval’s Department of Medicine who claimed to have produced neurons in vitro from adult skin cells. Steve’s not buying it, even though this research is to be published in the Journal of Cellular Physiology. I’m going to wait on the gatekeepers to figure it out, since I’m not a cell biologist or a neuroscientist. So all I’ve got to go on are blog reactions like this to those everyday press releases that automatically get published sans commentary at places like ScienceDaily and Eureka Alert.

Meanwhile, my vowel-less local sci-blogger James Hrynyshyn reports on Witchful thinking: water on the brain, about a dowsing convention in beautiful Asheville, North Carolina, New New Age Capital of the New South (was that redundancy over the top? …I can never tell). Anyway, the dowsers claim they can not only find water with their twirly-sticks, but ancestral graves for the local Cherokee as well! Of course, those graves are on a little island in Fontana Lake, which was created by a hydropower dam built by the TVA in the 1940s. So maybe it makes some sort of woo sense that dowsers could find graves in the middle of the lake.

So much for pseudoscience, weird science and brain food (no, I’m not going to talk about Zombies again…). Since I’m talking about North Carolina attractions, there’s one other story that deserves recognition from scientists. Because it’s truly strange, in a semi-evolutionary sort of way. Our Serbian friend Coturnix reports about the Hairless Grey Foxes in North Carolina. While linking to a report that states these odd critters have been showing up in South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Alaska and Colorado. Is this an evolutionary adaptation to global warming? And how did the very same mutation show up in such widely disparate places? Very, very strange, but you can always trust a fox to outfox scientists. You’ve really got to click on this one, if only for the photo. What the heck IS that thing!

That’s it for brain exercise as we start to see sure signs of spring, intrepid ones! See you next time…

The post Silly Science, Head Cheese, and the Hairless Vulpes of Carolina appeared first on The Blog Herald.

In case you missed it, there was an entire week (Feb. 4-10) of science blogging called “Science Week” – when an entire stable of science bloggers committed to at least one blog a day actually focused on… Science! This may seem a little bit strange to blogophyles who reasonably presume that science blogs must *of course* be about science, but this is unfortunately not always the case. At least, not among the most popular science blogs, which are primarily about politics, ideological posturing, “Culture War” polemics, popular book promotions, pretty pictures of diverse subjects, and (predictably, given the demographics) sex. Normally, one could say that science blogs aren’t all that different from other blogs, except that the bloggers are scientists! But not during “Science Week”!

Some bloggers during Science Week focused on “The Basics,” which any seeker will find most informative, on just about every scientific subject you can think of. A website was established just to list and link to the science coming forth from Science Week. Just Science is still available and plans to keep separating the science from the opinionating, which I have bookmarked because it’s a lot easier than wading through hip-deep mud in less discriminating science blog feed collections. Here you’ll find links to everything from A Primer on Dixon Imaging to … How Science Determined I Will Be The Next Jackie Chan. Yes, there’s also some sex, and quite a bit about the politics of global warming, but even those things can be scientific if they’re approached *as* science. A very useful archive.

I found one of the most satisfying expositions on the philosophy behind Science Week over at Chaotic Utopia, in a blog entitled A Dangerous Knowledge. Karmen’s prose reminds me why I have such a fondness for science, even while knowing that the knowledge is provisional and forever changing. I think she ought to get it published in a little book that all science students could carry around just behind their pocket protectors every day – something that could replace the now obsolete (but fondly missed) slide rules we used to depend upon back before they invented pocket calculators.

And for all those cold February nights (or dismal upcoming March days) when questions without apparent answers nag at our winter-weary minds, there is the Ask A Biologist project reported and linked by Darren Naish at his blog Tetrapod Zoology. Brainchild of Dr. David Hone of Munich’s Bayerische Staatssammlung fur Palaontologie und Geologie, feel free to ask – and get answers! – to questions like “how much of the Jurassic atmosphere consisted of dinosaur farts” or “how far can a flea jump in the space station”? That should keep both you and the kids busy until it’s finally warm enough to go outside again!

And since February does have one thing going for it – Valentine’s Day – I can’t let the month go without covering a little of the sex out there in science blogs. Coturnix at A Blog Around The Clock hits a lover’s home run with his blog Sex On The (Dreaming) Brain. He translates and analyzes a paper written in his native Serbian language for us, examining the erotic dreams of college students, who most of us recall to be a highly-sexed group of people.

For those whose love life is less solidly booked than the average sorority girl or varsity player, there is a predictable surge in sales of love potions right around the middle of February, along with Voodoo dolls around the end of February (go figure…). Chris over at Mixing Memory takes an extended look at magical thinking in the blog Could It Be Magic? Extreme Apparent Mental Causation, examining the psychological tendency to believe in magical powers despite science’s notable rejection of the premise.

An interesting take on the subject of strange ideas people often take away from news reports about medical research was blogged by Robert Roy Britt in Virgos More Likely to Puke During Pregnancy. My mother was a Virgo, but never talked about being particularly sick during any of her pregnancies. I’m a Gemini, and had morning, noon and middle of the night sickness for seven solid months both times – couldn’t even keep water down! A good overview of why we shouldn’t believe everything we read, and a reminder once again of the scientific adage that statistical correlation does not equal causation.

Finally, in view of February’s celebration of love, sex, chocolate, roses, and all things arguably romantic, here’s a photo reproduced on several science blogs in time for Valentine’s Day. I call it “Endless Love” and admit I did shed a tear when I saw it. I hope those notoriously un-romantic science-diggers left these lovers where they lie, because it would seem a terrible shame to pry them loose for no better reason than to grind their bones or display their skulls.

The post Real Science Blogging, Endless Love and Morning Sickness appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Some SEOs got upset with me for appearing to unfairly perpetuate negative perceptions of SEO — but if my post was a mistake, it was an honest one (I posted a correction). The point I’ve been trying to make to the SEO community, not always successfully, is that because they live in a black box, SEO’s PR challenge involves correcting a lot of misperceptions. Many of those misperceptions are unfair, but they are not always intentionally malicious — and they exist among potential SEO clients, like me

UPDATE: Speaking of great search ambassadors, Google’s Matt Cutts showed up on my original post and all but confirmed that my example is likely a problem in Google’s algorithm, although it’s pending investigation. Matt said that if it does turn out to be a problem in the algorithm, it could lead to a larger fix, which would certainly be a happy ending to this tale.

In the PR sphere of blogging, I’ve seen SEOs take two very different approaches:

1. Patiently correct misperceptions in the context of goodwill
2. Take a generally negative tact with anyone who doesn’t “get it,” i.e. anyone who doesn’t live inside the search black box

Understanding the difference is important for anyone trying to practice PR through blogging, so I thought it would be helpful to walk through some examples.

First, on the positive side, there is no better ambassador of the black box of search to those outside the search world than Danny Sullivan, grand master search guru, formerly of Search Engine Watch, now of Search Engine Land, and still (fortunately) of Search Engine Startegies. Danny has shown up on my blog many times to correct misperceptions, exhibiting an almost superhuman degree of patience. No matter how frustrating or maddening the circumstances, Danny is invariably polite, constructive, exceptionally informative, and focused on building goodwill. Danny’s recent rebuttal of Jason Calacanis’ attack on SEO is a case study in how to push back and build bridges at the same time.

Another great SEO ambassador is Aaron Wall, author of the fantastically encyclopedic SEO Book. Aaron invariably leaves insightful, constructive, and generally good-natured comments on my SEO posts. A number of SEOs harangued me for not having done an update correction to my most recent post, which left me defensive, but when Aaron made the same point in his diplomatic way, it suddenly seemed to me like a moral imperative — and I did make the correction.

Bill Slawski, SEO by the SEA, is another a great example of a skilled blog PR practitioner — here’s the comment he left on my post, which is nicely done:

There are a lot of us in the SEO industry who would be happy to answer a quick question when you see something odd like the result you’re pointing out. I’m seeing more than a couple of SEOs who would, in the responses to this post, and showing up in your MyBlogLog widget right now.

I also love this video of Todd Malicoat and Neil Patel — while you can BS people in writing, it’s much harder to do so in video. Neil and Todd come across as very straight shooters (and very smart, of course), and they really seem to understand the PR channel they are working.

My sense is that there are far fewer SEOs on the flip (dark) side, but they are certainly out there. Here’s an excerpt from a comment on my post that really rubbed me the wrong way:

You no-follow your commenters contributions. You suggest that by being sub-optimal, WordPress is actually “dragging down” your rankings. You show little deference to several experienced people who are benevolently offering you free SEO advice, despite your obvious negative bias.

When someone starts talking about “deference” and “benevolence” in a blog PR context, you know they are completely tone deaf. I went to check out this SEO’s blog, and sure enough, found more of the same:

Sorry to throw yet another monkey wrench into your SEO business model, but if you are still working to get your client’s sites fully indexed in Google (or worse, still paying an SEO “firm” to get all of your pages indexed), I’m sorry to hear of your continued inability to get SEO and the web.

Condescension is the kiss of death for blog PR, which is what put me on the fence about another SEO PR practitioner, Natasha Robinson. On the predominately positive side, Natasha devoted a lot of time on my post earnestly trying to clear up my misunderstanding, and I think her goodwill is genuine and her blog PR sense generally quite good. But Natasha really rubbed me the wrong way when she slammed me in an SEO forum. Now I don’t fault Natasha AT ALL for slamming me — it happens all the time, and typically I deserve it. And as slams goes, Natasha’s was pretty mild. But I do fault her for is coming across as a bit two-faced, earnestly helpful in one context and condescending in another. Prospective customers may not read insider forums much, but when they do, they shouldn’t find that your attitude changes when your back is turned. That said, I think Natasha tips clearly over the fence into the camp that is a positive force for SEO PR in the blogosphere.

I can understand and appreciate SEO’s defensiveness, and their frustration with unfairly negative PR. But they do live in, what is for most people, a black box — they make their living helping people navigate the black box of search, so the PR challenge arises when customers become suspicious of what’s going on inside the box. Natasha made an interesting comparison to auto mechanics:

There’s so much I don’t know about fixing a my car, either – and that’s why I hire a mechanic instead of trying to teach myself how to fix my car. But simply because one mechanic may make a mistake or does a bad service, is not going to make me say that all Mechanics are cheats!

But as Dave Pasternack pointed out:

The question is: how do you know whether your mechanic is a crook or a competent journeyman/woman? Well, you do need to know something about the way automobiles work, and also, about the common scams practiced by mechanics.

This is SEO’s PR challenge — how to teach people enough about SEO so that they can respect and trust what SEOs do, but not so much that they’re practically teaching people how to fix their own cars.

Scott Karp’s blog, Publishing 2.0, occasionally appears in search results, and probably would more if he had a good SEO.

The post How SEO Confronts Its PR Challenge In The Blogosphere appeared first on The Blog Herald.

So, I tried several tricks to find the false positives using the search:

• Search for the term “blogherald” or “blog herald”. Most legit trackbacks would mention the name or the URL so that’s a good start to find them.
• Search for author names. Usually, when readers leave a comment, they address the author as well.
• Search for unique keywords in recent post titles. Trackbacks often include the post titles too so that’s another way to find the legit ones.

Despite the above quick tricks, I wasn’t sure I got all the real comments and trackback so I had to check out and scroll all 64 pages in the Akismet admin section. I had better chances sorting them out via PHPMyAdmin. I wish there could be some nicer way to manage the spam box and I was thinking of the ff:

• Ability to delete all spam entries on a “per page” basis. Right now, all you can do is delete ALL spam and that could include the legit ones.
• Categorize all flagged entries as either spam comments or spam trackbacks. The trackbacks will be fewer so you’ll easily spot the real ones from the fake ones.
• Ability to filter spam by the ff. parameters – number of links per entry, type of language/characters used, originating IP addresses, email, or even the length of comments.
• … and maybe even a spam intensity rating filter: smells like spam, spammy, spammier, spammiest.

I know I could be demanding too much from a service that’s practically free but it doesn’t hurt to give suggestions for improvement. :)

The post False Positives and Better Akismet Spam Management appeared first on The Blog Herald.

I’m proud to announce that Tony Hung will be our new Editor here at the Blog Herald. Our regular readers here would agree with me that Tony is more than capable to take charge and be the new face of Blog Herald.

My recent personal issues/problems have slowed me down tremendously. A death in the family, legal troubles and more- all have piled up on me so quickly that I have been barely able to focus on my work. So I am glad that Tony accepted this role willingly and on such short notice. I will still be around, sometimes writing, but more on the back-end of things and I will continue to help Tony run the site. There’s still so much to do around here, as you know. Amongst other things, we’re getting a few more people into the writing team.

Please join me in congratulating Tony as our new Editor.

The post We’re reshuffling and Tony’s taking charge appeared first on The Blog Herald.

The longest month you ask? Why, anyone can tell just by looking at the calendar they got for Christmas that February is the shortest month! Ah, but dear friends, I am here to object! My seed catalogues have all arrived, I’m anxious to get the seedlings started, and I should already have planted peas, spinach and kale! But this whole long-short thing is definitely a plot by our invisible evil overlords to wreak havoc on our sense of cosmic justice.

Punxutawney Phil usually sees his shadow on Groundhog Day, but this year it was cloudy. ‘They’ say that means we will NOT have six more weeks of winter. But in my opinion Groundhog Day is itself just another of those overlord plots, this one in league with whoever figures the tables for the Farmer’s Almanac, which any decent farmer will tell you is highly unreliable. Worse than the 5-day weather forecast on local television. If you divvy the time between February 2 and March 21 – the “official” start of Spring – it’s one day less than seven whole weeks. Besides, Punxutawney Phil lives in Pennsylvania. Has there ever been a winter north of the Mason-Dixon line that didn’t last well into April? I view this sneaky short-February calendar-fixing as equivalent to Daylight Savings Time – just another way to screw with our internal clocks and mess with our heads twice a year. Because they can. …Bastards!

Thus I was delighted to see Coturnix over at A Blog Around The Clock had something to offer from the realm of neurobiology about – you guessed it – Time-Perception. In his blog New Model for Interval Timing our Serbian friend links us to a paper in the journal Neuron about a new computer model of time perception in humans that sounds positively poetic (nice for lite reading on a cold February day).

Like the ripples on a pond when a pebble is dropped, the model suggests that every time our conscious awareness processes a sensory perception, a cascade of reactions occurs in our brain cells and transfers through the connections. These reactions leave a signature – the ripple – that encodes our sense of time. I like this idea because it explains why February is so darned long. A grey-scale world in between black and white isn’t very stimulating. And like the water in the dog’s bowl, the ripples tend to freeze. Gosh, I can’t wait for Spring!

Of course, Spring this year might prove to be a bit disappointing to the organic gardener in me. Coturnix also offers in My Picks from ScienceDaily an article to dampen my expectations. Come Spring, Expect Fewer Blooms tells me that due to that record warm spell it’s going to be a fairly colorless season. Great, JUST what I needed to help me get over Seasonal Affective Disorder and an interminably long February!

And I am apparently not the only person who suffers significant energy-drain. Alex Palazzo over at The Daily Transcript has a theory about how microscopes do the same thing to biologists who spend their days peering through microscopes. According to his blog entry Show me the energy, if you sit in front of a microscope in the dark for more than 4 hours, energy is sucked out of your body through your eyeballs. Now, the energy has to go somewhere (according to conservation laws), but he hasn’t figured that one out yet. Alex gives a few suggestions on that, including the possibility that the energy is transferred to that secret island of lost socks (somewhere off the coast of New Jersey).

Of course, that’s more geographic than biological, so Alex goes ahead and expands on some of the more in-discipline possibilities that sci-watchers will probably find more interesting than Blackbeard’s treasure stash. It was always my theory that energy is directly transferred from parents into young children. They always have too much, and parents always have too little. Thus in this case the energy no doubt goes out the eyeballs, down the scope, and straight into whatever’s on the slide. Seems pretty simple to me…

And while we’re on the subject of microscopes, Orac takes a gander at ScienceBlogs under the microscope. Unfortunately, he’s talking about “someone” over at BlogCritics instead of Moi – complete with an actual name – intrepidly surfing science blogs for the Blog Herald in search of fantastic facts, fascinating findings and fearless fire-walking scientific adventurers who have a knack for asking mind-spinning questions and translating knowledge for the rest of us – a great service to science, education, the blogosphere and die-hard pursuers of trivia.

It’s probably just as well I’ve managed so far to escape Orac’s scrutiny, though. He seems particularly grumpy about some of the reviews, which the anonymous author seems to think require his/her nastiest second-rate B-movie pans. I’m a little surprised that it hasn’t yet occurred to Orac that a second-rate B-movie reviewer is probably just who he’s dealing with, but then again, it’s February. Who can think straight while stuck in the Groundhog Day time warp? For the purpose of breaking out of that spell, I’d highly recommend reading Orac’s series on the Zombie Hitler, particularly It returns: The horror invades Michigan. Wonderfully chilling (and hilarious) stories to read aloud to the kiddies while sitting cross-legged in front of the fireplace on cold winter nights.

Let’s face it. The best way to conquer the February doldrums is to go ahead and fill your mind with Spring things. If you’re a gardener like me, there’s the seed catalogues to get you through. If you’re a city-dweller, there’s dreams of the wide open countryside and deep woods just waiting for your soft post-Easter footfalls. Jake Young offers an interesting blog in Pure Pedantry answering an age-old question the kids are just bound to ask during your planned outings. How Woodpeckers’ heads don’t explode with a link to work that won the [ig]Nobel award (sort of the opposite of the real thing) for explaining why we should all wish we had special cushioning eyelids and low amounts of cerebral spinal fluid. Then we too could beat our heads against immovable objects whenever February gets too depressingly long!

That’s it for this blog about Science Blogging. Hope to keep my head intact and my impatience under control for next time, which will (most unfortunately), still be February. ARGH!

The post The Longest Month appeared first on The Blog Herald.

In case you are among the few humans who haven’t yet become aware of the threat, I was originally alerted to the Zombie Crisis when I enrolled in a course on quantum consciousness at the University of Arizona some years ago. Philosopher David Chalmers was one of the instructors, and he is inordinately fond of zombies. He has published many papers on the subject, and has compiled a collection of Zombies on the Web that any true zombie-phyle will love. Hollywood zombies, Haitian zombies, philosophical zombies, the zombie within, functional zombies… You name it, Chalmers has links to it in his collection.

So when I saw that RPM over at coalesced had written a blog entitled On the Evolution of Zombie Populations, I just had to click on it. He offers the latest on the never-ending debate, noting that fellow sci-blogger Anders Sandberg at Andart has produced a fine analysis of Zombie evolutionary epidemiology complete with supporting graphic simulations of the decline in human populations as zombies become more efficient at brain eating. Not to worry. Just keep your copy of The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks in your purse, in the glovebox of your car, in the toilet reading-basket or handy on the coffee table at all times and you should be fine. Survival of the fittest!

While we’re on the subject of the evolution of odd species and survival of the fittest, Kevin Beck over at Dr. Joan Bushwell’s Chimpanzee Refuge steers us toward sci-oriented web comic Saint Gasoline’s site to learn about Survival of the Asshats in online communities. You know the type – the asshats dominate those blogsites where personal arrogance and pointless combativeness matter ever so much more than scientific fact and rational discourse. Saint Gasoline tells us these asshats are an “evolutionarily stable” population we just have to learn to live with in virtual reality. And since they tend to draw more participation than more sedate blogsites can muster, it couldn’t hurt to learn how to deal with them in their own insulting terms. Besides, expressing the dark side of one’s personality without social inhibition is a pretty good way of letting off enough built-up steam to get through a day of face-to-face meetings with people you’d rather not hang out with, but are too nice (in real life) to avoid.

The blogosphere as psychological playground and group therapy session. Even better, there are a few asshats that actually run sci-blogs of their very own. That way they can’t be banned for bad behavior and can abuse commenters at will. The most infamous of those would have to be PZ Myers, whose blog is Pharyngula. Pharyngula was elected the Science Blog of the Year for two years’ running, using a clever internet voting scheme where you can vote both early AND often!

Professor Myers sometimes intersperses some biology (and pretty pictures of cephalopods) in between his political and anti-religious tirades. He offers us some prurient scientific information about Penis evolution and How to make a vulva, so it’s not all asshattery. But be forewarned… they’re worm vulvas. Yuck!

Now, for all you science geeks out there who never got much benefit from the myriad commercial products offered in your spam folder to enlarge that evolved penis, there’s some bad news from the physics front. Chad Orzel of Uncertain Principles informs us that an experiment reported in Physical Review Letters this month has established a size limit on extra dimensions. According to his blog Extra Dimensions Get Smaller, gravity works in our large dimensions all the way down to less than .045 millimeter. Which is smaller than the “Dark Energy Length Scale.” Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance has some further details about the experiments conducted at the University of Washington.

Speaking of the less-than-tiny, blogger Bee over at Backreaction gives us a rundown on what all this means to experiments planned at the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) at CERN in light of recent experiments on quantum gravity. In Micro Black Day Bee links to previous blogs, articles and papers on the web that discuss the likelihood of actually producing micro holes that some promoters (seeking funding) claim will solve our planet’s energy problems. Bee’s not too gung-ho on the idea, citing some serious objections to the theoretics.

Finally, if your head is aching with the effort of trying to assimilate all this excellent sci-blog information, you may enjoy Steve Higgins’ take on Mind Control and Severed Heads over at Omni Brain. Perhaps a head transplant will help! Does anybody know if insurance pays for this sort of thing, or is it considered elective surgery? I seem to have misplaced my policy book after it gave me a big headache…

Over and out from the intrepid sci-blog watcher. Happy surfing!

The post Science Blogging: On Zombies, Asshats, Sex Organs and the Great Black Hope appeared first on The Blog Herald.

And since aspiring Stepford husbands have certain ideas about just how mindless their robotic wives should be, they may also enjoy the examinations of how neuroscience is eroding the concept of free will offered by Vaughan at MindHacks and Deric Bownds at MindBlog.

Coturnix over at A Blog Around the Clock offers the chosen blog entries for this year’s Science Blogging Anthology, a total of 50 blog entries (with links!) about everything from medicine to hummingbirds, with stops in between for politics, culture wars, the psychology of humility, the technicalities of Erectile Dysfunction and the physics of sex. Nothing there about the psychology of aspiring Stepford husbands or sex with robots, but someone’s just bound to blog about that sooner or later.

For those lonely science geeks out there still looking for a flesh and blood Ms. Right, Steve Higgins over at Omni Brain offers some cool ways to figure out the psychology of a potential mate in a couple of blogs – Sleep positions and personality and Sneezing and personality. Bet you didn’t know you could tell a lot about a person by the way they sleep and sneeze. Steve’s got it down to a …science!

There’s the ‘be right’ sneezer, the ‘get it done’ sneezer, the ‘enthusiastic’ sneezer and the ‘nice’ sneezer. I’d put me in the ‘get it done’ category, for whatever that’s worth. But I like the sleep position titles better. Here you’ve got your ‘Foetus,’ ‘Log,’ ‘Yearner,’ ‘Soldier,’ ‘Freefall,’ ‘Starfish’ and ‘Farting Buffalo’. Steve says he just made that last one up, but I’m not so sure. I think I know that guy…

Chris Rowan of Highly Allochthonous gives us a linky rundown on Some sciblogging New Year’s Resolutions which includes such hot topics as giving silly answers to nonsensical questions and pointless mathematical concepts. Since much of the time spent at desks in offices throughout the world on any given day amounts to pointless exercises and silly answers to nonsense questions, these New Year’s resolutions should be very popular.

The post Everything You’d Ever Want to Know About Science (but didn’t know who to ask) appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Jason reports that Native American prophesy states that the ‘true’ white buffalo is somewhat of a changeling. Where an albino would be white from birth to death, the spiritually significant white buffalo starts out white, then turns black, then red, and ends up yellow. Miracle accomplished all of this color changing, right on cue.

A second white buffalo was born on the farm in 1997, but died a few days later, and Miracle herself died in 2004. Then, incredibly, a third white buffalo was born on the Heider farm this past September! She is ‘Miracle’s Second Chance’ and the pilgrimages were all set to start again.

However, as Jason reported in Lighning Does Strike Twice: The Continuing Story of the Heider White Buffalo something even weirder has happened. Miracle’s Second Chance got struck by lightning!

Hmmm… One might begin to wonder if perhaps the Great Spirit has determined that one Miracle per human generation is enough, and that there just isn’t room for more than that. So the Heiders will be able to plant corn again this season where the parking lot used to be, so long as yet another white buffalo doesn’t show up to test the Great Spirit’s sense of humor (or the Heider’s tolerance for late night drum jams).

In the meantime, I’m definitely going to be keeping track of buffalo calving in rural Wisconsin, and just might start an internet betting pool on the appearance of yet another changeling at the Heider farm. Any takers?

While we’re talking about livestock down on the farm, Mount Sinai medical student Jake Young tells us in his blog Pure Pedantry about an interesting breakthrough in creative cattle breeding. Since the FDA ruled in late December that food from cloned animals is safe to eat, Jake notes that cows can now be cloned without the genes that code for prion proteins involved in Mad Cow disease.

Prion-free cows are viable, develop normally and Jake Young informs us that researchers at the USDA have actually cloned these cattle, and see potential to prevent transmission of the very nasty, 100% fatal human version of Mad Cow disease by simply replacing the herds with genetically engineered clones.

After decades of corporate control of genetic engineering technology geared entirely toward profits for the agriculture and pharmaceutical industries, it’s nice to see an application finally come along that is aimed directly at public health and safety. This is a fast-moving front in the sci/tech policy game, so look for many more discussions among science bloggers as new developments and applications are presented.

Enough of the spiritual significance and creative husbandry of bovines. Let’s talk about human reproductive possibilities in space! Leonard David explores Sex in Space: Getting a Grip on Gravity for us from the perspective of the… um… mechanical issues we’ve all wondered about. He quotes NASA physician James Logan describing the logistics as “a wild fling” unless the adventurers care to choreograph things a bit. And even then a child born in the micro-g atmosphere of a colonization ship, wouldn’t develop the proper skeletal strength to tolerate real gravity, or the neural brain connections to move well in a gravitational field. Thus, he says, we won’t be sending colonists out for extended travels to other planets until we figure out how to simulate gravity on our spaceships.

Still, I don’t think that little issue would stop space tourists or temporary residents on space stations from giving it the good ol’ college try. Why, the value of the first proper report on the necessary choreography is bound to be a hot paper in Science Magazine, and keep science bloggers busy discussing prurient interests as if they were detached academics for months or years!

All this isn’t so sci-fi either. Space.com writer Tariq Malik tells us that Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin Reveals Rocket Launch Details has completed a successful test of its Shepard program reusable launch vehicle at Blue Origin’s west Texas spaceport. They’re hiring engineers right now, and planning to start commercial operations in 2010. So start saving those pennies right now, kiddies! Even us regular folks may yet get the chance to view the earthrise from space, maybe do some research into those… um… mechanical issues.

(image from Miracle’s Website)

The post Miraculous Buffaloes, Non-Mad Cows and Sex in Space appeared first on The Blog Herald.

My interests include science, and there are a host of blogs out there talking about amazing phenomena and fantastic discoveries enough to satisfy the most voracious curiosity. Many of them are written by real, honest-to-goodness scientists, making science blogs one of the most fun ways to keep up with research. Even better, the added attraction of commentary to the blogs allows both direct interaction with the scientist and sometimes a rare glimpse into how conclusions can often be hotly debated within the scientific community itself.

Of the dozens of science blogs, some are science-specific, some are about science education, and most include the author’s political and social policy views as well. Collections can be found on sites like ScienceBlogs and the bloggers at LiveScience are knowledgeable too. The listings come complete with disciplinary groupings and excerpted highlights. The blogs often link directly to other scientists’ blogs who are not yet listed in these collections, indicating that there are many more science blogs by scientists than one could find by doing a web search on the discipline + “blog”.

Be forewarned, though. Blogs are an outlet for thoughts, analysis and beliefs, so It can sometimes be a chore to sort the sociopolitical opinions from the science. And there are blog sites for collections of scientists dedicated exclusively to non-scientific, ideological concerns. Sifting the science from the non-science can be, in itself, a useful exercise in critical thinking skills, but the growing science blogosphere is well worth the effort.

Because there’s so much incoming news in the fields and so many blogs where these things are discussed, I thought I’d offer a few of the most interesting recent topics in my column as nifty new things to learn from brave blogging scientists about our world (or our universe). For instance, a day and a half before the story went mainstream on CNN, et al., I learned from “GrrlScientist” – a molecular evolutionary biologist whose blog is Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted) that Flora the Komodo Dragon is a happy mother-to-be of baby dragons – all male – who have no father.

I learned that the same female Komodo dragon can produce sexually or asexually, no problem. Very weird. I also learned that scientists know of about 70 different species, including snakes and lizards, who have this ability to reproduce either way. Sure, we parents and grandparents of young boys already knew about the EBG Crisis (Evil Baby Godzillas), so it’s not like self-reproducing lizards were totally unheard-of. But now I have it confirmed in dragons and can wreak intellectual havoc with some passably related question in the Trivial Pursuit tourney down at the Town Pump on Thursday nights. Thanks, Grrl! I’ve bookmarked Living the Scientific Life for its unique and interesting take on the science news, pretty pictures, and contagious wonder about our world.

I was informed by Chad Orzel’s blog Uncertain Principles that I could rent or buy a theoretical physicist of my very own! I always wanted one of those. The product is Scott Aaronson, who advertised in his blog Shtetl-Organized that he’s a Mercenary in the String Wars. Just think about how much fun it would be to hire Scott to make some pompous physics geek’s head explode at the next water cooler lecture! I’m still waiting to see what the high bid is after a week so I can beat it by a penny just like on E-Bay…

Finally, because that same grandson was moaning and groaning about the severe lack of snow days so far this season, I went looking for some professional science blog insight into the whole Global Warming thing. I found James Hrynyshyn’s blog The Island of Doubt, and his thought-provoking question, Have we oversold climate change? I’ve always thought that a notable lack of vowels in a scientist’s name adds a bit of extra credibility if you can manage to pronounce it passably while in the process of impressing others with your accumulated store of obscure knowledge.

To my mind, seeing a scientist who can honestly examine issues related to the problem of translating “best guess science” – with all its uncertainties – and turn them into real suggestions for sociopolitical policy is encouraging. A little political savvy wouldn’t hurt the image of scientists one bit, and will probably accomplish much more than an impatient Chicken Little act could.

I am still surfing this rarified corner of the blogosphere, learning new things as I go. I’ll report again soon on more cool science news and views, with the added dimension of scientists themselves telling us blog-watchers what it all means. Stay tuned!

The post The Wonderful World of Science Blogging appeared first on The Blog Herald.