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Genetically modified cows produce 'human' milk

Nano Stuff

T minus 172 years

Stop having kids now. Otherwise, your great-great-great-great-great grandchildren might go kablooey in 2182, when this big ole asteroid has a .054% chance of slamming into Earth. (Although maybe it's not that big? I didn't read closely enough to note a size, but it's labeled "a potentially hazardous asteroid. I imagine that's big enough to make it really annoying.) Anyhoozles, have fun kids!

Fetal Pain

A new study suggests that a fetus cannot feel pain at 24 weeks. I doubt this will do much to change the minds of hardcore abortion foes. For people who struggle with the moral implications of abortion, this might make them more likely to support a woman's right to have an abortion.

Relativity & Climate Change

Apparently, there are some similarities between the anti-relativity camp of Einstein's age and the anti-climate change camp of our own.

Caffeine & Dementia

Drinking moderate amounts of caffeine is associated with lower rates of Alzheimer's and other dementia.

Empathy & Diet

There is preliminary evidence that vegans & vegetarians experience more empathy in the face of human & animal suffering compared to omnivores. At the very least, the areas of the brain implicated in empathy "light up" more when vegan/vegetarians are exposed to suffering. This data will need to be replicated & some sort of causal timeline would have to be established for this to be particularly interesting. It could be, for example, a case of cognitive dissonance. They've chosen a restrictive lifestyle, and there has to be a good reason for that, so they actually sensitize themselves to the suffering of animals. Who knows.

Daydreaming & Moving

Apparently the direction you are moving in influences the direction your mind wanders. People for whom forward motion was simulated (through dots on a screen) were more likely to daydream about future events, whereas people for whom backward motion was simulated were more likely to daydream about past events. I generally daydream about nonsensical things like flying (like a bird, not in a plane) -- I also am a couch potato. Maybe if I start moving around, I'll suddenly start having brilliant thoughts about real things in the future.

Right & Wrong

I guess I'm surprised at the large percentage of people (63%) who think cloning animals is morally wrong. I'd like to hear specific justifications for that view. (Gallup)

Lordy Lordy

This ad is apparently largely funded by the Alabama Education Association through the True Republican PAC. That is just...wow.

CSI & Reality

A new study showed that forensic experts are not that great at estimating the age of a bruise--something forensic experts do to estimate the approximate time a crime (such as child abuse and sexual assault) was committed. The median difference between the estimated age and the actual age of the bruise was 26 hours, which could be a pretty significant difference in practical terms.

I do have a question about the study, though. Bruises were created on Caucasian volunteers by using a suction cup. I would think that most assault bruises would be from rough contact. Do bruises created by these different means differ in important ways?

The Botox Freeze

The facial feedback theory states that facial movements can influence the experience of emotions. Experimentally, this has been shown by forcing people to mimic smiling and frowning. This is typically accomplished by having the participant hold a pencil between the teeth (forced smile) or between the upper lip and nose (forced frown). Forced smile groups find the same video clip more amusing than forced frown groups. Researchers have observed processing and memory differences as well, depending on experimental group.

So what happens when you've frozen your face and you can't smile properly -- fake or otherwise? According to a new study, botox impairs your ability to process emotional language and may flatten emotional experience in general.

String Theory

I know nothing about physics or, really, any of the natural sciences. I haven't taken a science class since my junior year of high school. (I blame my college for not making me take one.) But, I really like reading science theories & findings for lay-people (that is, dummies.) I thought Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe--which could be complete bullshit for all I know--was fascinating. We're just made of a bunch strings vibrating in 10-dimensional space. That's interesting, right? Anyway, here's a little video of string theory for morons, like myself.

Smashing Particles

The Hadron supercollider has broken a record for accelerating protons. The collider won't be up to full power until 2011, but they are searching, among other things, for the Higgs boson, the "God particle" that is thought to give other particles mass.

I just think it's funny that physicists, most of whom are male, spend billions of dollars to smash stuff together. The writer of the above article also seems to enjoy it, describing the process as a collision, crashing, and banging particles together.

Particle physicists at CERN (the group responsible for the Hadron Collider) apparently invented the interwebs. Things like PET scans and MRI machines also arose from physics. The idea is that even if the God particle isn't found, other advances will be made and, likely, the origin of those advances will quickly be forgotten.

10 Science Tricks

10 quick science tricks.

Climate Change Scandal

A nice defense of climate change theory & scientific skepticism.

In fact, most scientists are skeptics, to one extent or another, about climate science and almost everything else. Of course, there are a few who actually believe with complete certainty that they are right, and that anyone who disagrees with them is wrong. These folks can't conceive of the possibility that they could be mistaken; they really are like religious zealots. However, the genuine scientific skeptics greatly outnumber the true believers, and in most scientific debates the skeptics prevail ... after a while.

Hearing Over Sight?

Think you'd rather be deaf than blind? Some scientists argue that our hearing is more impressive than our sight. You can detect 20-beeps-per-second as a discontinuous series of tones. 20-frames-per-second is a moving picture, not stop-motion photography. Also, we are pretty much the only animal that loves music. Even monkeys prefer silence over music, but babies love music and no known human culture has existed without music.

Night Owls > Early Birds?

A new study suggests that late risers (people who, left to their own schedules, get up around noon) outperform early birds (people who naturally get up around 5-6 am) 10 hours after waking (so, around 3-4 pm for early risers, 10 pm for late risers). Unfortunately for them, society is designed better for early risers. So there you go. We early birds are still better.

(Also, it seems like it would be hard to separate time of day from hours since rising. For example, most people's circadian rhythm takes a little dive during the afternoon, but people who have just recently gotten up may be better equipped to handle that.)

What makes a man?

The shriveled mess at the bottom: The y-chromosome. How sad.

"The Y chromosome, however, which is inherited by males in concert with one X chromosome, is a withered version of the X, having lost many genes since it stopped recombining with the X chromosome."

Asteroid!

A big ole asteroid went zooming by us recently. Who knew?