Today’s link dump is all about SCIENCE! For you fundamentalist Christian freaks out there, you might want to look away while I threaten your precariously constructed world view with facts, reason and information.

• The well-known blog Making Light featured an “open post” last week. If you’re not familiar with the idea, the blog author merely declares a post “open” and people carry on a conversation using comments without any particular topic to direct the discussion. This format is popular on a lot of blogs with big audiences, but we could try it here sometime, too. At any rate, it’s apparently their 109th such open post, so to mark the occasion, the post includes an interesting bit about Element 109 in the Periodic Table, which is now known as Meitnerium, after the physicist Lise Meitner.
• You might remember some brief news items last year about a team of Italian astronomers who claim to have found the impact crater left by the meteor that struck the Tunguska region of Siberia in 1908. Now they’ve published some preliminary reports of their findings and claim they may have found a piece of the actual meteor at the bottom of Lake Cheko, which is the body of water that formed in the crater. The team is going back to the region this year to conduct more investigations.
• Remember the media hysteria a month or so ago about Bisphenol A in plastics? Well, I hope you didn’t go and throw out your Nalgene water bottles just yet. While the media and environmentalist groups latched on to this story and whipped up quite the frenzy, this article in the British political magazine Spiked deflates a lot of that hot air. Here’s a relevant pullquote:
  

  Both human beings and rodents metabolise orally ingested BPA in the process of digestion. In human beings, the liver combines BPA with a sugar molecule, transforming it into BPA-glucuronide, BPA’s harmless, water-soluble cousin. Studies in human volunteers show that 100 per cent of BPA ingested is excreted in the urine in about six hours. No BPA at all enters the blood.

  In rodents, BPA is metabolised somewhat differently. It passes from the gut to the liver, then back to the gut again in a process known as enterohepatic recirculation. In the course of this process, some of the BPA is absorbed into the bloodstream, where it appears to have ‘estrogenic or toxic potential’.

  The Canadian study that started all the concern itself concludes that there is only “minimal concern that exposure to bisphenol A in utero causes effects on the prostate or accelerates puberty and negligible concern that it produces birth defects and malformations.” I don’t know about you, but to me the word “negligible” means “insignificant enough to be ignored” not “Aaaaiiiiiiiiieeeeee!!!! Panic!!! Save my baby from evil!!!!”

• Scientists at an archaeological dig site in Denmark say that they have been able to retrieve some authentic DNA samples from the skeletons of the Viking people who lived there more than 1000 years ago. Apparently it is difficult to obtain uncorrupted DNA samples from human remains, but the scientists used protective suits and strictly-controlled procedures on-site to obtain the samples, then used “clean-room” type laboratory setups for their analysis. Recent scholarship into the lives of the Vikings have offered a completely different perspective from the tradition portrayal of them as savage raiders; the findings of these scientists will also help establish genetic markers to trace the spread of the Vikings into the populations of other parts of Europe.
• In its latest issue, Discover Magazine informs us that “everything we know about water conservation is wrong”. Just as people are beginning to grasp the concept of measuring their so-called “carbon footprint” based on their daily use of things that rely on burning petroleum fuel, we should start coming to terms with our “virtual water footprint” to understand how much water is really being used to maintain our modern lifestyle. For example, it takes 155 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of wheat, and 33 gallons of water for a single 8-ounce cup of coffee. So, our enormous waste of food is an even greater waste of water. It may make you feel morally superior to take a shorter shower, the article says, but you are helping to conserve far more water by not wasting food than you are by taking a quick shower.