Ron Swanson is a croonor

Ark Park sinking, Governor still likes roads of gold.

11 million dollars.

Friend of the blog and Rachel Maddow show stopper, Joe Sonka, wrote an article for the Leo Weekly a few days ago that may answer the final question we had for him during our Ark Encounter Podcast. The article outlines over 280 million dollars in budget short falls for the Bluegrass State, including a $50 million cut in education. Still included in the state budget is an allocation of $11.1 million for revamping an exit off I-75 in Williamstown, KY for the 3,500 people that live there. Why so much you ask? Ky-36 is how you and the rest of the Duggars find your way to the proposed sight of Ken Ham's Ark Encounter --scheduled to open sometime before the second coming.

When we went around the table and answered whether any of us believe the Ark would ever be built, I was the only one who believed it would be. It's a shame, I hate being wrong. Should the state want this fantasy land built, they may have to give those $11 rocks directly to Ken. This morning, the Ark Encounter had only been donated 4.9 million of the 24 million they need to begin construction. I'm no accountant, but four does not equal twenty-four.  

It's unbelievable that those who are in control of the Ark Park Corp. would steal state funds that could go toward education. They've been under-minding Kentucky education for years now anyway. 

There's one on every street corner...

"I will ascend above the tops of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.”  OOHHHH I see where he gets the Devil made dinosaurs out of that.

[h/t Dan Phelps, Joe Sonka]

Drink, Drank, Drunk

The molecular targets of consumed alcohol were recently evaluated in excessive drinkers.  Studies in animals suggests that the release of endogenous opioids by ethanol promotes further consumption.

Ya know, like makes ya happy, and more thirsty.

The study found that drinking alcohol leads to increased endorphin release in both the orbitofrontal cortex and the nucleus accumbens.  Endorphins are proteins produced naturally in the brain and have opiate-like effects.  The more endorphins released in the nucleus accumbens, the greater the feelings of pleasure reported.  There was no difference in the amount of endorphins released in the brains of heavy and light drinkers.  However, for heavy drinkers only, the more endorphins released in the orbiofrontal cortex, which is associated with reward processing, the more intoxicated they reported feeling.  This phenomenon did not occur among non-heavy drinkers.  This may indicate that the brains of heavy drinkers are changed in a way that makes them enjoy alcohol more, which may be a clue as to how problem drinking begins in the first place.  To quote Dr. Jennifer Mitchell, the primary author on the paper, "That greater feeling of reward might cause them to drink too much."

Identifying the exact areas of the brain where endorphins are released could lead to the development of more effective drugs in treating alcohol abuse.

Stop SOPA

With so many websites (wikipedia, reddit, etc) 'blacking out' today in protest of SOPA, take this time to learn what the bill includes and how to contact your local congressman/woman. Just remember to tell them, "You DO NOT want the government censoring your interweb!"

Great Moments in Really, Really Stretching for a Clever Title

Come on. One Shouldn't Try to mUster apPeal usIng riDiculous syntax.

Intel Science Talent Search semifinalist

Here is an inspiring video of Samantha Garvey, a senior from Brentwood High School N.Y. , who is a Intel Science competition semifinalist.  Facing obstacles in order to pursue her passion, SCIENCE.



For educators, this is a story we can all strive towards.  Helping students develop deep personal connections with science, and that learning and mastering science is accessible to anyone and everyone.

Samantha is one of 300 students nationwide competing for the prestigious prize and $100,000 (a nice bit of scrilla).  For two years she has conducted independent research on the effects of the Asian short crab on mussel populations in the Long Island salt marsh.  For more on the story, check out the Washington Post article. Finalists will be announced at the end of January.  As the completion progresses, I will try to post more on the contestants. Stay tuned.

Suck it Friday the 13th!  Inspirational science stories!

Cheers,

[via Pharyngula]

Should the USA Censor Our Science?

There is an interesting topic being covered by AAAS today at 3pm (EST).  This is in regards to publishing the H1N1 genome sequence and other types of research that could be used by bio-terrorists to harm the public.  Should these kinds of studies be censored or could this be just the start of slippery slope to keep science out of the public's hands?  Let us know and join in on the conversation linked below:

Polling Pastors

A poll conducted by LifeWay Christian Resources of the Southern Baptist Convention asked a group of pastors their thoughts about evolution, the age of the earth, and whether or not a literal 'Adam' and 'Eve' ever existed. In what can only be described has a huge shock to me, the pastors responded overwhelmingly that God did not use evolution to create man, and that Adam and Eve were real people. The group was more torn on the age of the Earth, but nearly a third still believes the age is around 6,000 years. Here is a graphic created by Lifeway, because words are hard.

 

Here were the statistically significant differences in the poll, most of which are interesting although not all too surprising. 

• Pastors in the Northeast are more likely than their counterparts in any other region to strongly agree that God used evolution to create people. While 25 percent of Northeastern pastors strongly agree, only 13 percent in the West, 12 percent in the Midwest and 8 percent in the South feel similarly.
• Pastors of larger churches are less likely to believe in evolution than those in smaller congregations. Only 4 percent of pastors in churches with 250 or more in attendance strongly agree that God used evolution to create humans. In comparison, 13 percent in churches with attendance of 0-49, 14 percent with 50-99 and 12 percent with 100-249 feel the same.
• Pastors who consider themselves Mainline are more likely than Evangelicals to believe in evolution. Among those identifying themselves as Mainline, 25 percent strongly agree that God used evolution to create humans. Only 8 percent of Evangelicals strongly agree.
• Pastors who indicate they are Evangelical are more likely than their Mainline colleagues to strongly agree that Adam and Eve were literal people (82 percent vs. 50 percent).
• Pastors with graduate degrees are more likely to strongly disagree that Adam and Eve were literal people than those whose highest level of education is a bachelor's degree (16 percent vs. 2 percent).
• Geographically, pastors in the South are most likely to strongly disagree that most of their congregation believes in evolution. While 69 percent of Southern pastors strongly disagree, 47 percent in the Northeast, 60 percent in the Midwest and 56 percent in the West feel similarly.

[H/T NCSE]

HuffPost talks science!

Last week the Huffington Post launched its new science channel, HuffPost Science, introduced by the editor-in-chief, Arianna Huffington.

For those that aren't aware (I imagine that being a very small number), The Huffington Post is a popular string of sites offering the latest news and opinions both in politics and general news headlines.  Previous coverage of science was rather... meh, to say the least.  Resulting in many #faceplams or mild head contusions.   However, with a staff of full-time editors and well known scientists, science communicators and science journalists contributing to the site that could change for the better.  Over at The Loom, Carl Zimmer writes,

You can also get a sense of what HuffPost Science will be like by inspecting this morning’s batch of blog posts. There’s some good stuff there, including a piece by Harvard physicist Lisa Randall. They even have a piece by science writer Seth Mnookin on the latest developments in the controversies over vaccines–which is quite something given all the real estate HuffPo has given in the past to people trying to make the false claim that vaccines cause autism.

I for one am ready to give the Huffington Post another look. If they can bring real science to their huge readership, that will be a great thing.

I too, look forward to reading the site.  The Seth Mnookin piece, The Autism Vaccine Controversy and the Need for Responsible Science Journalism, is a good one.  I have written about ridiculous and false anti-vaccine bullshit before (I also highly recommend his book, Panic Virus, as a must read).  Mnookin talks about the need for science journalists to step-up and take some accountability and think about what they are writing and the consequences of spreading misinformation, as well as some basic fact checking.
 
I completely agree with this, and hopefully, HuffPost Science will live by that.

Check it out and let us know what you think.

Cheers,

[via The Loom]

Octopodes: Get it right people

This is, in part, a shout out to a great scientist, Dr. Keith Maggert at TAMU.  Thanks for the insight Keith!


In case you were wondering....

The term octopus is from Greek ὀκτάπους (oktapous), "eight-footed", with plural forms: octopuses, octopi, or octopodes. 

A male octopus hollerin' at a female

The plural form octopi is often described as a hypercorrection. The Oxford English Dictionary lists octopuses, octopi and octopodes; it labels octopodes "rare", although it's the correct Greek plural form, and notes that octopi derives from the "apprehension" that octōpūs is a second declension Latin noun, though it is not. It is a Latinization of Greek third-declension masculine oktṓpous (ὀκτώπους, 'eight-foot'), plural oktṓpodes (ὀκτώποδες). If the word were native to Latin, it would be octōpēs, plural octōpedes, after the pattern of pēs ('foot'), plural pedēs, analogous to "centipede".

So there you go.  If you see several octopodes, be sure to use the correct plural form.

Octopodes made the headlines in ScienceNews this past week. If you wanna hear about the eight-legged creatures and RNA editing, hit the jump!

Too legit...

The University of Kentucky Department of Biology homepage looks more dapper than ever.

Spreading Science Like a Virus...a Deadly Virus

Have you seen this Killer?

The following story has been brewing for a couple of months now, and it's nowhere near ready to be served.  But, thanks to the "always-on" nature of the internet, every act in this drama has been published already.  Scientists have, for the past few months, been talking about a couple of studies where the bird flu has been altered genetically to be airborne, and potentially spread from human-to-human, the only two things that have kept it from becoming a pandemic type of disease.  Specifically, the debating sides are to publish the findings in their entirety, or to cut some of the juicier details out in order to stave off a human catastrophe the likes of which we've never seen before.

Rewind:

Smoke in Mirrors: paranormal photos

The streams, I got it.  What are we REALLY shooting at Ray?

I've briefly talked about the supernatural before, and the laughable ghost hunter/ smoke in mirror/ crap shows on cable television.  I stumbled upon a New Scientist piece (Jan. 2, 2012) that provides REAL physical explanations that demystifies images touted by ghost hunters as evidence for ghostly apparitions in photos.  However, New Scientist decided to publish a moderately neutral piece towards the paranormal... they did it for readership, but I can call it what it really is.

The piece succeeds at shedding light on some of the common optic artefacts produced by cameras that can explain these phenomenon.  They specifically talk about digital cameras rather than film, because of the ubiquitous availability of modern digital cameras and camera phones.

A century ago, spirit photography was all the rage, tantalising the public imagination with what purported to be hard evidence of wispy apparitions. However, its resurgence may have less to do with the paranormal than with the increasing use of social media and cameraphones.

Serious ghost hunters might be expected to welcome such technology. Yet, according to Dave Wood from the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena, low-cost cameraphones are making the business of spirit photography even more fraught.

Many mass-produced phones don't use high-quality lens systems and this can lead to optical artefacts that look "spooky" to the untrained eye.

Serious ghost hunters?  I call bullshit sir.  True, cameras are everywhere and they are always with you...  Would you even consider owning a cell phone without a camera?  Probably not.  And the most popular digital cameras are made to fit in your pocket, which has lead to compact lens systems housed within the camera body/ phone lacking the focusing power to match digital or film Single-Lens Reflex (SLR) cameras. There's also the other issue of the shear volume of photos that people take.

Photographers are also shooting more images, raising the likelihood that one or two will feature something extraordinary. "Take a few hundred snaps in a dusty old building at night and you are sure to capture a few odd photos," says Wood.

It's seems easy to forget that back 10 years ago, or when digital cameras were either too expensive or not worth it, you where limited by film and developing.  I remember spending at least $10 per film roll (~25 photos) and developing costs.  You couldn't view it immediately afterwords, so you had to plan and invest time in your shots.  Today I can pay a few bucks for a 4Gb memory card, and take a couple thousand pictures with an common 8 megapixel camera.  So yeah... with availability and TONS of pictures you can get some photo mess-ups that can resurrect the ghostly sightings subculture.

However, this isn't exclusive to digital cameras.  Back 10+ years ago, most popular small film cameras also had weaker lens systems compared to film SLRs that are subject to the same optical artefacts.  So it's not an issue of digital vs 35mm (I won't get into which is better or photo manipulation either).  It has to do with camera lens mechanics and optics, the physics of light and strange behaviors they can elicit in our brains.  We can use science to elucidate these wild claims.

You can check the photos out here complete with short explanations of what is actually observed.  Besides the lack of filters or random shit on/in the lens before the shot was taken, they give examples of specific light illusions that you may have seen before.  My favorite are those out of focus/ pixelated shots where your brain forced to decipher what you have seen.  This phenomenon is called pareidolia.  It is similar to apophenia, or seeing connections in random data.  Since our brains are programed/ wired to recognize facial features we can tend to make something out of nothing, such as the "face" in the Cydonia mesa on Mars.  These shots are also common among the cyrptozoology bullshit photos of Nesse, Bigfoot and other mysterious beasties (cyptids) in folklore.

Pareidolia... Damnit oddly shaped pots.  Why are you screaming at me!

Bottom line, we have the tendency to fool ourselves and pretty easily in some cases.  Our brains try to make sense of the world and deduce patterns.  Some of which may be random noise.  This can be traced back to our savanna ancestry.  The wired reaction of thinking something is lurking in the bushes makes better evolutionary sense then playing a game of predatory chicken with a potential pair of hungry eyes.

I have provided more light illusions after the jump.

Dustin's Dictionary: urticaria

ur·ti·car·ia  (noun)  \ˌər-tə-ˈker-ē-ə\

urticaria : "Say, man, would you mind giving me a lift?" "Nah, you're too heavy. It'd 'urt ti caria."

Occupy Iowa: Mitt Romney

It's all led up to this. 2012 is upon us and with it comes months of media coverage focusing on the Presidential Election. Tuesday is the official starting line with the Iowa Caucus, and with no clear cut front-runner political junkies like myself are watching with great interest. With the coming weeks, I want to use my posts to go over the candidates and how they view science, with particular attention paid to the most politicized topics, evolution and anthropogenic global warming. The first in this series will look at presumed leader of the pack, Mitt Romney.

You may remember Romney from previous election cycles, including the 2002 Massachusetts Governors race and the 2008 Republican Primaries. Mitt has made a vast amount of money in the business world through smart investments including one of his first large investments which opened Staples stores around the country, insuring that white-out and 2'' binders were just a short drive away. Mitt then began running for public office in the mid-90's culminating with becoming the 70th Governor of Massachusetts in 2003. After failing to win the Republican ticket in 08', Mitt has been priming for 12' ever since, and as I stated earlier will probably be challenging Obama barring any major flub.

But what of his views on science? You may remember the famous, "Does anyone on this stage NOT believe in evolution?" question from the 07' Republican debates --three people raised their hands, not among them was Romney. So from that, we are to assume that Mitt 'believes' in evolution, correct?   

  “I believe that God designed the universe and created the universe, and I believe evolution is most likely the process he used to create the human body.”

Those quotes came from an interview Romney gave not long after that 07' debate when asked to clarify his take on evolution. Sounds like Intelligent Design lite to me, and Romney was asked about that:

“I’m not exactly sure what is meant by intelligent design,” he said. “But I believe God is intelligent and I believe he designed the creation. And I believe he used the process of evolution to create the human body.”

Meh. Sounds like the correct political answer for someone on the Right to give if they do accept evolution. I'm sure my fellow bloggers like Myers or Coyne would call it accommodation, but what are we to expect from someone who has to pander to the extreme religious right? Mitt was much more black and white when it came down to should intelligent design, or creationism be taught as a valid theory along side evolution in science classes:

“In my opinion, the science class is where to teach evolution, or if there are other scientific thoughts that need to be discussed,” he said. “If we’re going to talk about more philosophical matters, like why it was created, and was there an intelligent designer behind it, that’s for the religion class or philosophy class or social studies class.”

Seems clear cut to me. Mitt Romney seemly is science friendly when it comes to evolution. What about Global Warming? Well, that my friends is a different beast. Depending on what day, what forum, and how hot it is outside, Mitt's opinion seems to shift on climate change, it's causes and how best to deal with it. In his 2010 book, No Apology (A direct jab at Obama's World Apology tour), Romney lays out in print his take on climate change.

“I believe that climate change is occurring.… I also believe that human activity is a contributing factor. I am uncertain how much of the warming, however, is attributable to man and how much is attributable to factors out of our control.”

This past summer speaking to a New Hampshire town hall: See the video here

"I don't speak for the scientific community, of course, but I believe the world is getting warmer, and I believe that humans have contributed to that," Romney said. "I can't prove that, but I believe based on what I read that the world is getting warmer....I don't know how much our contribution is to that, because I know there's been periods of greater heat and warmth than in the past, but I believe we contribute to that. And so I think it's important for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may well be significant contributors to the climate change and global warming that you're seeing."

Romney was #TeamScience all the way until a handsome gunslinger from Texas pulled up his boot straps and moseyed into the race in August. Gov. Perry's take on science --which I will get to in a later post-- is different than Romney's to say the least. Once Perry enter the race and began racing up the polls with his denialist six-shooter, Romney began to feed denialism seeds to the ignorant chirping birds. In mid-October at a fundraiser in Pittsburgh which took place at the Consol Energy Center, Mitt's opinion shifted:

“My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet. And the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO₂ emissions is not the right course for us....My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet. And the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO₂ emissions is not the right course for us. My view with regards to energy policy is pretty straightforward. I want us to become energy secure and independent of the oil cartels. And that means let’s aggressively develop our oil, our gas, our coal, our nuclear power.”

Play to your crowd, Sir. Play to your crowd. Every politician has flip-flopped on issues here and there, and it should come as no surprise that you play the puppet when speaking to a group of people invested in energy. While I don't find it encouraging that he seems to waver, he has on multiple occasions came out and said that climate change is occurring, which is at odds with a majority of his colleagues. Like most other Republicans, Romney questions how best to deal with it, and what part humans have played in causing it.

So if I had to choose, "Mitt Romney: Friend of Science" or "Mitt Romney: Bully of Science", I would lean towards friend. I just hope that should any science policy question arise in front of him on any particular day he hits correctly on his "My take on this scientific issue" dartboard. 

***UPDATE
I forgot about stem cell research! How could I be so blind! Worst. Science blogger. Ever. Oh well, forgive me. So here are some pulled quotes that should give you some insights into Romney's take on the issue:

"I am in favor of stem cell research. I am not in favor of creating new human embryos through cloning." “Stem cell research does not require the cloning of human embryos. Some stem cells today are obtained from surplus embryos from in-vitro fertilization. I support that research, provided that those embryos are obtained after a rigorous parental consent process that includes adoption as an alternative. Further, the greatest successes in stem cell research to date have come from the use of adult and umbilical cord stem cells. Stanford professor William Hurlbut, a physician and member of the President's Council on Bioethics, has proposed a promising approach. Known as altered nuclear transfer, this method could allow researchers to obtain embryonic stem cells without the moral shortcut of cloning and destroying a human embryo.”

There you go. This is a more moderate position than most in the field and still leaves me to believe Romney is not anti-science nor anti-research. My apologies for leaving out such an important issue. My colleagues have already threatened to fire me, I quickly reminded them the Ad money was in my name. Suckas.