DAMN that is one tiny-ass frog! But the press release from Conservation.org says it’s the smallest Old World frog, which implies that there is a New World frog even smaller.
This is the Mount Iberia Eleuth or Brazilian Gold Frog, and it is generally recognized as the smallest frog in the world, but if that little frog is really an adult specimen, as the press release says, then I think we have a new champion.
Well this sounds familiar to me: well-known atheist blogger PZ Meyers found himself whisked into the hospital suddenly for heart problems over the weekend, and today he tells us about his angiogram, complete with Jawas and a giant floating head. I gotta tell you that I was a lot more lucid for my procedure six years ago; I’ll never forget the truly creepy sensation of feeling the cath being ratcheted up into my heart and the “skreetch-skreetch-skreetch” noise it made inside me. Best wishes to PZ for his speedy recovery.
Did you know that the third leading cause of mortality in the United States is medical treatment? Nearly a quarter of a million people are killed in this country every year by a combination of medical errors, unnecessary surgery, and hospital-acquired infection. This recent NYT article goes into detail about a particular problem: the difficulty in distinguishing between the many and varied plastic tubes that get used often results in hooking things up incorrectly, thus killing people by giving them lethal drugs, blocking their airways, or even pumping food into their veins.
This Popular Science article reports that researchers have found a way to engineer RNA in such a way that it stops protein production in cells, thus preventing those cells from reproducing, and they have begun testing this technique as a way to stop liver cancer from spreading. Because the technique can be applied to many different types of cells, it may eventually be an effective treatment for a variety of diseases, but they need to develop a more precise method for targeting just the diseased cells.
From the Department of Don’t Worry, Be Happy comes the news that bad thoughts can kill! Cynicism, “lack of meaning”, fretting, lack of self control, anxiety, pessimism, and stress are the seven deadly sins in this article. No wonder I’m headed for an early grave!
Just in case you were too busy stacking the corpses littering the streets to notice: the H1N1 pandemic is officially over. Final death toll in the U.S. is estimated to be between 8000-18000, and it will only ever be an estimate because the CDC stopped officially counting when it became evident that people weren’t dropping like flies. They cite the mid-range figure of just over 12,000 as the probable actual tally. To put this into perspective, about 42,000 people in the U.S. die every year in automobile accidents.
It seems like we can’t get through a single daily news cycle without some amazing breakthrough in the research on Alzheimer’s Disease being reported. Just last week there was this story about how a recent discovery of biological markers in spinal fluid that might help diagnose the disease early on came about due to an unprecedented effort by researchers to more effectively share their data . Yet, this Singularity Hub post explains why it seems like very few therapies actually make their way into clinical use.
At it’s core, science is about developing reliable, repeatable, quantifiable mechanisms for explaining and defining the universe, yet there are some basic things that have either eluded scientific attempts at analysis or have simply been overlooked in favor of better targets. Here’s a Discover article from May of this year that talks about work being done by a researcher in Israel to develop a quantifiable approach to analyzing smells. And here’s a video by a psychologist who has come up with a scale of “evil”:
 |
 |
The news media were quick to grab onto the story yesterday about brain trauma causing problems that resemble the debilitations caused by ALS because of the suggestion that perhaps Lou Gehrig did not actually have ALS, which has come to be known in this country as “Lou Gehrig’s Disease”. This possibility, by the way, is not actually mentioned in the study, and there is absolutely no evidence that Gehrig suffered from the type of brain trauma being studied rather than ALS, but the media LOVES a good headline better than it loves any actual semblance of reporting the real story. Witness the insanity of the “Ground Zero Mosque” story.
Anyway, I wanted to make the humble suggestion that if it is ever determined that Lou Gehrig did not have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis then the term “Lou Gehrig’s Disease” be retired right alongside his #4 in Yankee Stadium and that it henceforth be remembered as “Stephen Hawking’s Disease”. Hawking suffers from a motor neurone disease that is a variant of ALS, which was first diagnosed in 1963, when he was 21. His slow degeneration is very atypical; Tony Judt, who died two weeks ago, had been diagnosed with ALS in 2008, and the usual prognosis for someone with ALS is 3-5 years. But I think it’s worth arguing that Hawking’s perseverance in his groundbreaking theoretical work and his visibility as a user of adaptive technology and role model for others with debilitating diseases have been much longer-lived and widely known than the achievements of Gehrig. That’s not to diminish Gehrig’s legacy as an athlete at all, nor to try to limit Hawking’s deserved recognition to just his illness, but to recognize that as the first man helped to define public understanding of this horrible disease, so has the second one helped the public to see that even the severest limitation can be transcended.
Who is smarter? This common slime mold, or Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann? If you said the slime mold, you’re right!
This Discover science blog post by British science writer Ed Young explains how slime molds use a mesh of input from their component parts as they interact with the surrounding environment. Given a choice between two sources of food, a slime mold plasmodium will opt for the one that appears to be the best “value” for the organism, but if presented with three choices, the mold will opt for the middle-value food source, even if it previously rejected it in the earlier set of two choices. He explains this in terms of human behaviors by using the well-known phenomenon of restaurants putting very expensive wines on their wine lists to encourage people to buy bottles that have higher markups. This decision-making process of “comparative valuation” lets slime molds constantly evaluate and navigate their environment in a complex manner not unlike higher life forms, making decisions based on actual real-world, real-time information. That’s more than you can say for Bachmann and crew.
Ytterby, Sweden is a small town near Stockholm that has the particular distinction of being the namesake of not one, not two, but FOUR chemical elements: ytterbium, yttrium, erbium, and terbium
Posting at Slate, writer Sam Kean has been blogging his way through the elements of the Periodic Table leading up to the publication of his book on the subject, The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements. I especially liked his post about Ytterby’s contribution to the science of chemistry, through it’s unique geology, which offered up a number of rare-earth elements that were new to science in the 19th century.
He’s still working his way through the table. Today’s post is about Bismuth, which you and I know best for its use in the stomach remedy Pepto-Bismol.
Didja see that big wave swoop over the surface of the sun in that clip? That was a coronal mass ejection on the surface of the sun that happened on Sunday, and the resulting solar wave of electromagnetic particles and such is hitting Earth even as we speak.
The solar eruption was unusually large, and the resulting wave is particularly strong. Astronomers say that here on Earth we should expect to see increased visible aurora activity, making the Aurora Borealis visible much farther south than usual. The media, however, have latched on to the buzzwords “solar tsunami” to tart up their headlines, and the London Telegraph breathlessly reports that the “tsunami” could “destroy satellites and wreck power and communications grids around the globe…”
Mm-hmm.
The BBC reports that the British department store Selfridge’s will officially roll out its Christmas shopping season this year on AUGUST 2. But American retail chain Toys R Us has them beat with a “Christmas In July” sale that runs this week. (although, as far as I can tell, that’s just a sale and not [...]
On Friday, I decided to stop having Facebook scrape and post my blog feed. I just don’t feel like blog posts fit the very ephemeral vibe of FB, and, frankly, it irritates the living crap out of me when people post comments about the blog posts on FB instead of posting them here. I am [...]
In my copious spare time, usually whilst sitting in the waiting area at Charlotte’s karate studio, I have been making slow but steady progress toward adding tags to all the posts on this site. As of right now, I have completed tagging all the way back to April 1, 2008. The current archive of this [...]
Just the other day I posted about a young man from Nepal who was trying to get into the Guinness Book of World Records as the shortest man in the world. He’s only 22 inches tall, compared to the 29-inch tall He Pingping of China, who is the current record holder. Well, WAS the current [...]
boobcheese tickle fights child actor suicides Betty White Zombie Farrah Fawcett Canadian pissing habits that milkaholic Lindsay ChatRoulette whatever half-assed thing Google did this week out-of-control Toyotas
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
I recently posted about the use of menhaden in making fish oil dietary supplements and the potential risk that poses to the entire Atlantic Ocean ecosystem. One of the alternatives to using menhaden for omega-3 supplements is algae oil, because algae is the primary diet of the menhaden and is actually the source of all [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
This week Barack Obama committed the United States to at least two more years of war, 30,000 troops in harm’s way for no other reason than saving face, and umpteen billions of dollars wasted FOR NO GOOD REASON WHATSOEVER and we are inundated with: Tiger Woods proving he knows how to put it in the [...]
Archive for On The Side »
All Original Content Copyright © BrianKaneOnline
All Other Content Copyright © Its Original Authors
Built on Notes Blog Core
Powered by WordPress