The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.
[Cynthia Dunbar] is one of a clutch of Christian evangelists and social conservatives who have grasped control of the state's education board. This week they are expected to force through a new curriculum that is likely to shift what millions of American schoolchildren far beyond Texas learn about their history.Here's a live blog of the vote of the Texas Education Agency:
The board is to vote on a sweeping purge of alleged liberal bias in Texas school textbooks in favour of what Dunbar says really matters: a belief in America as a nation chosen by God as a beacon to the world, and free enterprise as the cornerstone of liberty and democracy.
...There seems to have been a move away from a patriotic ideology. There seems to be a denial that this was a nation founded under God. We had to go back and make some corrections."
12:15 – ...The Texas State Board of Education has stricken from the standards references to “capitalism” and “free market” because the board’s right-wingers think “capitalism” is a negative term. The only permitted term for such an economic system will be “free enterprise.” We wouldn’t believe this if we hadn’t just watched it happen. This is so stupid it makes our head hurt.I have to believe that while it is relatively easy for a deranged group of lunatics to seize control of state agency for a short time - rational thought will push back with a vengeance.
12:28 – Board member Mavis Knight offers the following amendment: “examine the reasons the Founding Fathers protected religious freedom in America by barring government from promoting or disfavoring any particular religion over all others.” Knight points out that students should understand that the Founders believed religious freedom was so important that they insisted on separation of church and state.
12:32 – Board member Cynthia Dunbar argues that the Founders didn’t intend for separation of church and state in America. And she’s off on a long lecture about why the Founders intended to promote religion. She calls this amendment “not historically accurate.”
12:35 – Knight’s amendment fails on a straight party-line vote, 5-10. Republicans vote no, Democrats vote yes.
12:38 – Let the word go out here: The Texas State Board of Education today refused to require that students learn that the Constitution prevents the U.S. government from promoting one religion over all others. They voted to lie to students by omission.
Here was the amendment again: “examine the reasons the Founding Fathers protected religious freedom in America by barring government from promoting or disfavoring any particular religion over all others.” And this board, on a vote of 10-5, said they don’t want Texas students to learn about this basic protection for the religious freedom of everyone in America.
For their report, Dr. Riedl and his colleagues reviewed all the papers they could find on food allergies published between January 1988 and September 2009 — more than 12,000 articles. In the end, only 72 met their criteria, which included having sufficient data for analysis and using more rigorous tests for allergic responses.Lovely.
“Everyone has a different definition” of a food allergy, said Dr. Jennifer J. Schneider Chafen of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Palo Alto Health Care System in California and Stanford’s Center for Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research, who was the lead author of the new report. People who receive a diagnosis after one of the two tests most often used — pricking the skin and injecting a tiny amount of the suspect food and looking in blood for IgE antibodies, the type associated with allergies — have less than a 50 percent chance of actually having a food allergy, the investigators found.
Authors of the new report — and experts on the guidelines panel — say even accepted dogma, like the idea that breast-fed babies have fewer allergies or that babies should not eat certain foods like eggs for the first year of life, have little evidence behind them.
“If you reduce saturated fat and replace it with high glycemic-index carbohydrates, you may not only not get benefits—you might actually produce harm,” Ludwig argues. The next time you eat a piece of buttered toast, he says, consider that “butter is actually the more healthful component.”Did he really just say that?
I can’t stand diamonds. No, really, they just tick me off, because nearly everything about them is a lie. Diamonds are neither rare nor intrinsically valuable nor uniquely romantic. Those are ideas invented by the diamond industry. And no, despite what the ads tell you, diamonds are not forever.
(H/t Felix Salmon)
For the last four years, media outlets such as The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Fox News have repeatedly cited a United Nations study which found that livestock production is responsible for about 18 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions—a larger share than comes from all planes, trains, and automobiles combined.Okay, so a new study reveals flaws in an old study - so what?
Last week, news outlets revisited those claims, following a talk delivered by Dr. Frank Mitloehner, an animal scientist based at UC Davis, at an American Chemical Society meeting last Monday. Mitloehner criticized the conclusions of a 2006 report from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, “Livestock’s Long Shadow.” The study’s assertion that meat (including eggs, dairy, and other animal protein) production is responsible for more greenhouse-gas emissions globally than the transportation industry is certainly untenable, and likely false, he said.
The problem Mitloehner highlighted is that the FAO performed what’s called a full “lifecycle analysis” for the livestock industry. In other words, it added up emissions from things like fertilizer production and land-use change in addition to those from cow burps and manure. It did not do the same for the transportation industry, however, tabulating the emissions from fossil-fuel combustion, but not from automobile manufacturing or road construction, for instance. Mitloehner has spent the last week explaining to reporters that this led to a classic apples-to-oranges comparison between the two sectors. In one of the first news articles on the subject, the FAO substantiated this criticism, saying that its comparison was indeed flawed.
“I must say honestly that he has a point – we factored in everything for meat emissions, and we didn’t do the same thing with transport, we just used the figure from the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change],” FAO livestock policy officer Pierre Gerber, a co-author of “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” told the BBC.Honestly, would that have been so hard?
An Australian man who has been donating his extremely rare kind of blood for 56 years has saved the lives of more than two million babies.That seriously kicks @ss.
James Harrison, 74, has an antibody in his plasma that stops babies dying from Rhesus disease, a form of severe anemia.
He has enabled countless mothers to give birth to healthy babies, including his own daughter, Tracey, who had a healthy son thanks to her father's blood.
Mr Harrison has been giving blood every few weeks since he was 18 years old and has now racked up a total of 984 donations.
Science Says High-Fructose Corn Syrup Is Pretty Much The Worst Thing Ever
"Some people have claimed that high-fructose corn syrup is no different than other sweeteners when it comes to weight gain and obesity, but our results make it clear that this just isn't true, at least under the conditions of our tests," said psychology professor Bart Hoebel, who specializes in the neuroscience of appetite, weight and sugar addiction. "When rats are drinking high-fructose corn syrup at levels well below those in soda pop, they're becoming obese -- every single one, across the board. Even when rats are fed a high-fat diet, you don't see this; they don't all gain extra weight."
Take a blowtorch (figuratively!) and heat up an iron bar. After a moment it will glow red, then orange, then bluish-white. Then it’ll melt. ...Yes... why indeed?
Why does it glow? Any matter above the temperature of absolute zero (about -273 Celsius) will emit light. The amount of light it gives off, and more importantly the wavelength of that light, depends on the temperature. The warmer the object, the shorter the wavelength.
...
An object that is at 4500 Kelvins (about 4200 Celsius or 7600 F) peaks in the orange part of the spectrum. Warm it up to 6000 Kelvin (about the temperature of the Sun, 5700 C or 10,000 F) and it peaks in the blue-green. Heat it up more, and the peaks moves into the blue, or even toward shorter wavelengths. In fact, the hottest stars put out most of their light in the ultraviolet, at shorter wavelengths than we can see with our eyes.
Now wait a sec (again)… if the Sun peaks in the blue-green, why doesn’t it look blue-green?
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.-Carl Sagan
This enormous wave of fierce energy was so powerful it actually partially ionized the Earth’s upper atmosphere, and it made the Earth’s magnetic field ring like a bell. Several satellites were actually blinded by the event.This thing is almost on the opposite side of the galaxy - and a ripple on its surface can blind our satellites. Dr. Plait goes on to point out that we have magnetars as close as 7,000 light years and that similar events occurring at that distance would turn the bulk of our orbital hardware into potato chips.
Somehow, having planets means a star loses its lithium. How the heck does that happen?
A brief digression. Lithium is a weird element. It’s the third lightest after hydrogen and helium, and unlike every other element after it on the periodic table, we don’t think it’s made inside stars. It’s too fragile; the nuclei get smashed up easily, and so it doesn’t last long in the cores of stars. That means that as far as we can tell, all the lithium in the Universe was created in the Big Bang.
Just because it gets wrecked in the cores of stars does not mean they have no lithium at all. Lithium created in the Big Bang would have been in clouds where stars formed, and if a lithium nucleus can avoid the core of the star by staying nearer the surface, it can survive. The Sun has lithium in it, for example, but at far less abundance (<1%) than what you see out in gas clouds. That means the Sun has destroyed a lot - but not all - of its lithium supply.
When astronomers look at other stars like the Sun, the amount of lithium they possess varies wildly. But now it appears that the amount of lithium in a Sun-like star depends on whether it has planets or not. Stars without planets have, on average, 10 times the lithium as stars with planets in the sample.
Weird.
