Add beer to barbecue to lower cancer risk? Way ahead of the curve here.

Oh, you have to soak your meat in it, first. Beer marinade lowers production of cancer causing hydrocarbon. I've been self-marinating all this time...

Of course, this presupposes you believe anti-oxidants taking out free radicals is really that big a deal, which studies only show a correlation through statistical analysis of meta-research. But, hey, more beer!

Rotating Moon by compositing images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

From a nice video with terrible music there, to a nice gif rotating here.

Credit NASA / LRO / ASU / Mash Mix: SPACE.com

via NBCNews/Science

The main reason I'm skeptical of life on Mars even in the past: Life is tenacious, in all its forms.

Curiosity rover: NASA finds new evidence life may have existed on Mars

Finding evidence of past riverbeds, which means a component of life as we know it on Earth was present, water, is nice, but not anything to get excited about. If we find evidence of something that was the cause of a planet wide extinction level event, then I'll stop being so skeptical. On our own planet, 99% of species went extinct in less than a million years 250 million years ago, yet here we are still talking about it. Life is tenacious.

Okay, didn't need to see that...

While dissecting alligators to see how they mate, Diane Kelly, an anatomist at the University of Massachusetts, found an always erect penis:

To see how it popped in and out of the alligator's body, she tugged on various tendons and muscles in the cloaca region and found one set of muscles that caused the penis to shoot out. Another set of tendons attaches to the base of the penis like rubber bands, she said.

"As soon as those muscles relax, the penis gets whipped back into its original position."

Go to the link see video of this... operation.

I See a Disturbing Lack of Net Power Calculation

In this story about an interesting idea of making wind energy portable or able to be stored in some fashion, the omission of net power with current turbine engineering belies its conceptual usefulness. The idea of using wind energy to liquify nitrogen, then let it expand again to fill in turbine downtime is novel, but the net power consumption does not even come close to rivaling battery technology right now. Either the turbines need to produce much more power, or the liquification process needs to become much more efficient. Still, lots more basic engineering research needs to be done even to determine if this is a viable solution. Thermodynamics is not a very forgiving branch of physics.

Shenanigans on Shrinkage

According to an Italian study, penises have shrunk 10 percent compared to 50 years ago:

The study doesn’t say how the research was conducted or give numbers. But it does provide several reasons for the shrinkage, including: weight gain, stress, smoking and alcohol.

Now, there are no links to the actual study itself, so shenanigans from the get go, plus methodology is not reported, so more shenanigans. But worst shenanigans: men were drinking and smoking a hell of a lot more 50 years ago than we do these days. Shenanigans all the way around on this "study."

Update: Just occurred to me: what if the researchers are trying to make the point that men need to smoke and drink more? Who sponsored this study? Altria and Inbev?

Private Company Now Handles Space Cargo

Dragon arrives at space station in historic 1st:

Although cargo hauls have become routine, Friday's linkup was significant in that an individual company pulled it off. That chore was previously reserved for a small, elite group of government agencies.

No need for huge government expenditures on glorified space buses.

Yeah, "Scientist"

This Fox News story gave me a couple of chuckles today:

Russian Scientist: UFO Crashed Into Meteorite to Save Earth
Did a UFO deliberately crash into a meteor to save Earth 100 years ago? That's what one Russian scientist is claiming.

My first response, after catching my breath, was to think that I would have put quotation marks around the word "scientist" wherever it appeared in the story. And when I actually read the second paragraph, and at where the "scientist" works, my "crank sensor alert" was confirmed: Tunguska Spatial Phenomenon Foundation. Yes, I'm sure his booth at any of the paranormal society conventions is the same size as all the sasquatch folks. Of course, it is not exactly zero percent that an alien craft did collide with the Tunguska meteor above the earth, but how one leaps to deliberate alien sacrificial intentions based on some quartz rocks, well... sheesh - there goes that crank sensor again!

Electron in Motion

Big news out of Sweden: they've used atto-second light pulses to "photograph" electrons for the first time. Now, you're going to get a lot of uninformed science stories about how these are the first pictures of an electron, but that's a lot of hooie. Pictures of stuff are the collection of photons on a macroscopic scale after they have interacted with a surface. These "pictures" of an electron are actually just the energy distribution of photons after interacting with an electron after having been stripped from an atom. The "new" stuff here, is using these incredibly short light-pulses to interact (or collide, although in quantum mechanics, nothing actually hits anything) with the electron, and then guide those pulses to a detector. Take a look at the atto-second light pulses on the detector:

Each dot of brightness in the picture represents the energy of an individual photon, but at least you can see the quantum nature of the energy levels (there are places that the photons just cannot appear), that a light wave is a three-dimensional object (well, four if you want to be really technical), and that the electron interaction has added patches of cyclical brightness with its own frequency (these atto-second pulses come from a laser, so they should all have the same energy or brightness). Very cool.

Science Marches On in Space!

The following video is exactly why we put people in space: What happens to an alka seltzer tablet when added to a sphere of water?

It's interesting to see that the surface tension of the water sphere can almost totally contain all the carbon dioxide contained in one tablet. (via Science Blog)

MPAA's Flawed File Sharing Study

The Motion Picture Association of America, back in 2005, commissioned a study done by research firm LEK, which attributed 44 percent of its lost revenue from illegal downloads of movie files to college students. Now they've found out that the number is at most 15 percent and attribute the mistake to "human error." What I found a little disturbing about the MPAA's statement about the research audit was their focus on understanding what went wrong:

"We take this error very seriously and have taken strong and immediate action to both investigate the root cause of this problem as well as substantiate the accuracy of the latest report," the group [MPAA] said in a statement. [emph. added]

Well, if they're looking for the "root cause," then it's obviously poverty and lack of education, at least that's what the major media outlets keep telling me are the "root causes" of "human error" the world over. Let's send an aid package and a UN sponsored NGO over to LEK right away to teach them how to do math properly. We'll just have to make sure the peacekeepers don't start a child prostitution ring and introduce white slavery while they're there...

ROUS's Found!

Bruce M. Beehler / Conservation International

I just had to say it: Rodents Of Unusual Size found in Indonesia.

“The giant rat is about five times the size of a typical city rat,” said Kristofer Helgen, a scientist with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. “With no fear of humans, it apparently came into the camp several times during the trip.”

Now, the question comes, was there a fire swamp anywhere nearby?

Another Source of Natural Gas

Here's another reason that Peak Oil worriers should just go back to worrying about the other discredited humanity hating motivation of some environmental movements, the Population Bomb: symbiotic bacteria discovered which can break down heavy crude into methane. Two microbes work together to form methane, where one actually produces hydrogen and carbon dioxide before the other turns those byproducts into methane. There seems to be a lot of potential for new energy sources in those older, used-up oil fields.

IPCC Climate Models Take Another Hit

For those who worry how well climate models can predict the next hundred years, you should be more worried about how well those 22 models used to predict dire consequences of the presence of man-made sources of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere can "predict" the last 30 years. Uh, they can't.

According to the new study by David Douglass, he took the models used by the IPCC, which won the Nobel Peace Prize along with Al Gore, and asked them to predict the temperature trend in the troposphere from 1979 onwards. According to the models, there should be significantly more warming in that part of the atmosphere compared to the surface temperature, and that there should be even more warming in the tropic latitudes. Remember, the models are based on the theory that the carbon based gases are the main forcing for recent warming. Unfortunately, satellite data from the last 30 years shows that the troposphere has been warming at the same rate or less than the surface. That's all 22 models being wrong. An earlier study of 19 of the IPCC models concluded there must be something wrong with the data, but that team used flawed statistics. "Who are you going to believe? Our wonderful little computer programs, or your lying satellites?" I think I'm paraphrasing that...

Eyewitness Accounts Not That Reliable

A new psychological study shows how altering the pictures of events can change our memories of them. This is especially disturbing considering how most people's memories of events are shaped by digital media. But there's a deeper point here too, that personal memories and perceptions are not as solid or reliable as we normally consider them to be. Conspiracy theories run rampant because of the disparate "eyewitness accounts" of historical disasters, and the criminal justice system has always placed a qualifying scale on witnesses' testimony, based on how unshakeable their perceptions are. Some people just make bad witnesses, to crime or history, and we should make note of that.

Babies Like Good Guys

Hmm. Looks like morality, as suggested by the world's deep spritual traditions, may be inherent.

In the first evidence of its kind to date, Yale researchers find that infants prefer individuals who help others to those who either do nothing, or interfere with others’ goals, it is reported today in Nature.

“This supports the view that our ability to evaluate people is a biological adaptation—universal and unlearned,” said the authors of the study.

Let's not tell the deconstructionists and post-modernists, so that they can live in their arbitrary thought environments just a little bit longer. Whoops, the AP asked for a dissenting opinion, and this dude does not like the Yale study's conclusions at all. Of course, why should I believe some guy teaching at a school in Boca Raton over one of the nation's most prestigious universities? Unless, of course, he just happens to be one of the AP's quote machines. So helpful, those quote machines, always ready to support the prevailing narrative.

Quick Reaction to IPCC's SPM

The Nobel Peace Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its Statement for Policy Makers, based on their 4th Assessment Report, late Friday night, making sure the news cycle wouldn't notice some of the items that seem contradictory to the AGW activism narrative.

First, we've injected so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, that even if we stop all industrial and commercial sources right now, as in zero emissions, the earth will keep warming. Second, with this current warming trend, the sea level will rise up to a maximum of 55 inches over the next thousand years. Not one hundred years, but one thousand years. This is assuming we will follow their estimate for increasing carbon dioxide emissions over the next 50 years. Third, they recommend emphasis on the mitigation plans for their predicted climate change: building sea walls, developing drought-resistant crops, and paving dirt roads in all the poorest nations.

Can we now stop with all the carbon-offset scams and carbon-credit trading? But those two schemes were a way for the poor nations to trade their unused carbon-banks (since they have no developed industries anyway), to con the rich countries out of their money to pay, supposedly, for the mitigation projects. Nevermind that those sea-wall projects were usually tied to huge seaside resort proposals. Plus, the anti-GM crop crowd won't like the IPCC's change in tactics either. And paving dirt roads will encourage vehicle use and spur industrial growth, not just keep roads from being washed away in the predicted super-floods, so the emergency response organizations can reach flattened villages. So, will we stop hearing about reducing carbon emissions? I won't be holding my carbon dioxide producing breath.

Computers Make Researchers Lazy

When computers were huge and expensive, stupid research ideas could be dismissed out of hand, not for being stupid, but for being too expensive and time intensive. Nowadays, statistical anomalies are being trotted out as "proof" that something is going on. Nevermind that correlation looks like causation only on first glance. Almost all "good health by doing X" stories follow this pattern, especially concerning food and drink we like so much. Now we have a story that says there's a correlation between the initial of your first name and success. Baseball players with "K" in their names struck out more, and people with "C" or "D" in their names got those grades more often, according to the numbers crunched. The actual experiment to pay attention to, was the anagram test the researchers used, which linked subjects' initials to arbitrary negative outcomes. In a lab setting, the test subjects might easily make the connection between the experimental procedures, and something connected to their identity. But in real world situations, where performance markers, like in baseball or grades, are established way before a person comes in contact with them, it's harder to establish a causative link. And what about other cultures and languages whose alphabets and numbering systems have different relationships to names? A cross-linguistic study needed to be done to make this study more relevent, otherwise it just seems to be a game of weird database queries. Now, if your parents had actually named you Dummy McLoserpants, there might be some correlation between self-worth and performance.

Carbon Dioxide Removal Outpaced By Emissions

A new report that tries to place a real number on CO2 cycle in North America, estimates that carbon sinks, such as forests, and other sources (though what those others are, the AP neglects to add), only absorb about a third of total emissions. Of course, that's a downer, but more bad news needs to be added to that: the new forests from regrowth suck in carbon dioxide faster than old growth, so even the current absorption rate will decline. You know what that means? We're not doing enough of logging! We gotta cut down those big trees and plant little ones to... SAVE THE PLANET! No, no, what am I saying? Obviously we have to reduce our economic output by two-thirds and trigger global poverty. Geez, what was I thinking?

Nano Radio!

A working radio, built from a single nanotube! Even cooler, the first song transmitted was the Star Wars theme.

Small world tidbit: Alex Zettl taught me third semester intro physics at Berkeley, which covered quantum mechanics and particle theory. I'll always remember his practical demonstration of quantum tunnelling. He was complaining about how all these educational catalogs had these expensive mockups to demonstrate an energy wave state propagating across material that it should not be able to, and he said, all of them were wrong anyway. So, he brought in an amp meter and a AA battery. He said, "You want to see quantum tunnelling? There!" He touched the probe to the battery node, and the amp meter beeped. He told us that quantum tunnelling happens all the time, because of the small layer of oxidized metal on top of every common conductor. There was no need to bring in some heavy aquarium to show a wave hit a wall and then continue on the other side of a separator with air in it. The wave went around the air pocket by being transfered by the aquarium glass anyway, so that sucked. But whenever you plug your earphones into your walkman (this was 1995, okay?), quantum tunnelling allows the current to carry across a non-conducting material. Zettl was known as a top dog in solid state physics at the time, so I guess he still is. I wonder if he still has the best mustache in Birge Hall.