Science/Technology blog

Snipped from the Union of Concerned Scientists.

What if I told you that the White House is looking for more power over many of our federal agencies? Power that is not supposed to be in the hands of the Administration. Would you be surprised? Would you do something about it? What if it had something to do with our health, our science, our truth? Well, here it is. The White House is looking for another power grab, and it involves agencies that deal with public health and environmental regulation. How do you feel about your health being in the hands of Dubya? Well, then do something about it … Now!

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In the Midwest and Northeast United States, homeowners are anticipating increased fuel oil costs this coming winter. Here in California, we don’t face their kind of extreme weather (in my freshman year at Notre Dame, in South Bend, Indiana, I woke up one morning in January to -25°F weather with the prospect of a one mile walk to a math class–it took me several months to thaw) but heating costs are still a significant part of our budgets, especially for low-income families. And electricity costs are still at an all-time high across the country and are expected to keep rising.

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Posted in Science at 4:00 pm by David Bradley — 1 Comment

The most ludicrous media storm blew up in the UK this week over alleged plans that the government was supposedly to force us to use ultra heat treated, so-called long-life, milk in our tea and on our breakfast cereal rather than the nice fresh pasteurised product we have been used to for decades. Wayne Smallman on the blah blah! technology news site has a detailed analysis of the situation. He quotes from a news story on the subject in which it is claimed that “Officials at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs have made a serious proposal that consumers switch to UHT”.

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Can you imagine what San Francisco Bay looked like 15,000 years ago?

Actually at that time– during the last ice age– San Francisco Bay wasn’t a bay at all. Instead, it was a valley dotted with grazing antelope. Hills jutted up here and there (destined to become the Bay’s islands). The Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers of the Central Valley joined forces in the vast marshy Delta, flowed west through a 300-foot deep gorge in the Coast Range (now the Golden Gate), and across a broad coastal plain to the ocean. California’s coastline was out past the Farallon Islands.

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Are you crying?!

The traditional boot camps for kids are being outlawed and disbanded due to a few reckless trainers who kicked a couple of kids to death. No more boot camps. However, there is a window of opportunity open for a new profession, a new career. The At-Home Boot Camp DI (Discipline Instructor). The visiting DI.

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Immigrants at Ellis Island, 1902.

Sometimes the argument goes like this…Hey! Let the illegal immigrants slide, give them amnesty. Hey! we were all illegal immigrants at one time. Whoa! My parents didn’t come into the country under the fence.

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Here’s another interesting take on climate change — and it doesn’t even require any background in climatology (although around here, you really have no excuse for that):

http://view.break.com/381084

So, what do you think about this approach? It doesn’t have Al Gore, so that should make it easier for some to swallow — and it even has mutant killer hamsters!

Here’s another interesting take on climate change — and it doesn’t even require any background in climatology (although around here, you really have no excuse for that):

http://view.break.com/381084

So, what do you think about this approach? It doesn’t have Al Gore, so that should make it easier for some to swallow — and it even has mutant killer hamsters!

Did we get our backbones from animals like this?Lately I have been reading a book by Jeffrey Schwartz called Sudden Origins. In it Dr. Schwartz talks about the idea that species are not made gradually but instead just suddenly appear (in geological time anyway). Reading the book was a bit like panning for gold. It was hard work and I needed to sift through a lot of silt but every now and then I got a nugget of gold. One such nugget was about where backbones may have come from. Hundreds of millions of years ago, there was a time when no animals had backbones. These animals also weren’t bilaterally symmetrical. This just means that their bodies weren’t set up as two sided (think right and left halves of a human). Instead, they were more like sponges and starfish. So how do you get from a starfish to a regular old fish? Seems like you’d need to make an awful lot of changes. You would– unless you were looking at the larval forms of some of these animals. Some modern creatures that just sit on the bottom of the sea have a larval form that moves around. This is useful in setting up distant colonies. What is interesting is that some of these larvae have bilateral symmetry– they have a right and a left side. And some of them even have the beginnings of a notochord on their back! So all we would need to do is somehow freeze the beast at the larval stage and you’re halfway to something with a backbone. Basically then, we need for the larva to sexually mature before it physically does. This sounds like a toughie but it isn’t as hard as you might think. It is common enough that scientists even have one of their awful names for it– neoteny.

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Blackwater mercenaries in Iraq.

Will you please tell me what’s going on? I want to see if you’re holding out, or what, because maybe I missed it. But, I think this is between the lines of the blogs and the media news stories. A coverup of a coverup. Then a smooth-it-out job.

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