One of the hallmarks of the Bush administration has been our abrogation of various treaties like the Geneva Conventions. Well the our advanced weapons research has torn to pieces The Treaty of Algeron:
This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.
Applied mathematician Graeme Milton dreams up new materials, develops mathematical formulas to describe them and leaves it to others to construct and demonstrate their novelties and usefulness in a laboratory.
While many of his theoretical musings are published in peer-reviewed journals, his research on a superlens with the ability to hide or “cloak” an object is too similar to cloaking devices portrayed in Star Trek and Harry Potter to stay buried in the annals of academia.
The concept of a superlens came originally from Sir John Pendry in 2000 - although Milton and his colleagues Nicolae Nicorovici and Ross McPhedran conducted closely related studies back in 1994 - and the concept has been studied extensively. Yet no one had realized the cloaking properties until they were discovered through the research by Milton’s team.
Another treaty breached, adding to our sad legacy.
Jamie posted this at 11:09 AM EDT on Sunday, June 8th, 2008 as Science & Evolution
The research is described in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature by a group of almost 100 scientists led by Wesley C. Warren, a geneticist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The single subject of the study was a female platypus named Glennie, a resident of Glenrock Station in New South Wales, Australia, whose DNA was collected and analyzed.
The platypus, native to Australia, is so odd that when the first specimens were sent to Europe in the 19th century, scientists suspected a hoax. It was classified as a mammal, one of only two monotremes (echidna is the other) living today that are offshoots of the main mammalian lineage. The divergence occurred some 166 million years ago from primitive ancestors combining features of both mammals and reptiles.
“What is unique about the platypus is that it has retained a large overlap between two very different classifications, while later mammals lost the features of reptiles,” Dr. Warren said in an interview.
…
Of particular interest, the researchers reported, the analysis identified families of genes that link the platypus to reptiles (like those for egg-laying, vision and venom production), as well as to mammals (antibacterial proteins and lactation). The platypus lacks nipples; the young nurse through the abdominal skin.
One surprise was finding genes responsible for sensitive odor receptors. As a primarily aquatic animal, the platypus was already known to rely on electrosensory receptors in its bill to detect faint electric fields emitted by underwater prey. So why the considerable ability to sense odors? The scientists speculate that it may involve sexual communication or the use of water-soluble odorants in navigating and hunting underwater.
Richard K. Wilson, director of the Genome Sequencing Center at Washington University, said that the comparison of the platypus genes to those of other mammals was the beginning of an examination of how “genes have been conserved throughout evolution.”
The project, involving scientists from eight countries, was primarily financed by the National Human Genome Research Institute in the United States. Its director, Francis S. Collins, said, “As weird as this animal looks, its genome sequence is priceless for understanding how mammalian biological processes evolved.”
[Title derived from this hilarious (and non-family friendly) South Park sequence.]
If you haven’t seen Ben Steins newest anti-evolution screed “Expelled” please don’t - it will make you a dumber person and we really don’t need any more of those around here. However, Stein recently gave an interview in which he states, and in the best tradition of Dave Barry I am NOT making this up, that science is murder. Derb over at NRO takes exception to this:
In an interview with the Trinity Broadcasting Network, Ben Stein said the following amazing thing in an interview with Paul Crouch, Jr.
Stein: When we just saw that man, I think it was Mr. Myers [i.e. biologist P.Z. Myers], talking about how great scientists were, I was thinking to myself the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do they were telling them to go to the showers to get gassed … that was horrifying beyond words, and that’s where science — in my opinion, this is just an opinion — that’s where science leads you.
Crouch: That’s right.
Stein: …Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place, and science leads you to killing people.
Crouch: Good word, good word.
You can see the whole shameful thing here. It’s a pity Crouch didn’t invite the Rev. Jeremiah Wright into the studio for a three-way conversation. It would have elevated the tone.
What it brought to my mind, when I had calmed down a bit, was Voltaire’s letter to Rousseau, after the latter had sent the former a copy of The Social Contract in which Rousseau argues, to put it in the smallest possible nutshell, that civilization is a crock. Voltaire:
I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was such a cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it. Nor can I embark in search of the savages of Canada, because the maladies to which I am condemned render a European surgeon necessary to me; because war is going on in those regions; and because the example of our actions has made the savages nearly as bad as ourselves.
Meanwhile, the Blood Libel character of what Stein is saying is beginning to dawn on thoughtful Jews. The Anti-Defamation League has issued a statement deploring Stein’s Darwin-inspired-the Holocaust thesis.
And there are NRO readers who are on board with this dreck? I need a drink.
Ugh and people wonder why I am ashamed to admit my conservative philosophy. A drink indeed. Cheers, Derb.
Jamie posted this at 5:33 PM EDT on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 as Science & Evolution
If scientists take this no further than helping the blind to see, I will be terribly disappointed. I want x-ray and infrared visions, and the ability to zoom. Perhaps also the ability to network my eyes with others. Science has already let me down by letting us get to 2008 without flying cars; I hope they don’t now further disappoint by restricting bionic eye research to letting the blind see the visible spectrum.
Yuval Levin has a fascinating — and lengthy — article about the sibling relationship between the political left and the scientific revolution of the 19th Century. It has its problems. Levin acknowledges, but does not truly discuss, the benefits that have come through this shared heritage and presumes the Right has been right to apply the civilizational brakes in every situation (Levin avoids conversation about teaching evolution). Those are worthy arguments, but they’re presented without serious refutation.
But even with these problems, it’s a fascinating read and interesting intellectual history. By far, the best part is its discussion of the contradictions of inherent in Environmentalism:
Modern science is grounded in a particular view of nature, both material and moral. The natural world, thought the fathers of science, is matter in motion; it is best understood by being pulled apart into its constituent forces and pieces, and experimented upon under duress. “The nature of things betrays itself more readily under the vexations of art than in its natural freedom,” Bacon argued, because nature is not a whole but a sum of parts, and is not moved by a purpose, but driven by discrete causes alone. Nature, moreover, is the chief constraint on human power and human comfort, and the extension of the empire of man over nature is a noble and necessary goal. For too long, they thought, human beings had been subject to the whims of nature and chance, but by coming to know the workings of nature, we could master it, both removing natural obstacles and constructing artificial advantages for ourselves. “Nature, to be commanded,” Bacon wrote, “must be obeyed,” so the purpose of the new natural science was to learn nature’s ways so as to overcome them. This desire for knowledge of and power over nature was not power-hunger, it was humanitarianism. Nature, cold and cruel, oppresses man at every turn, and bold human action is needed in response. Science arose to meet that need.
If you had to devise a complete opposite to this scientific view of nature, a mirror image in essentially every respect, you would probably end up with roughly the notion of nature that gives shape to the modern environmentalist ethic. Nature in this view is, to begin with, a complete and ordered system, to be understood in whole and not in part. “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” wrote John Muir, a founder of modern environmentalism. Far from conquering and manipulating nature for his benefit, moreover, man must be careful and humble enough to tread gently upon it, and respect the integrity (and even the beauty) of its wholeness. We are to stand in awe before nature, and never to overestimate our ability to overcome it or underestimate our ability to harm it (and with it ourselves). “We have forgotten how to be good guests, how to walk lightly on the earth as its other creatures do,” wrote the great British environmentalist Barbara Ward in her 1972 book Only One Earth.
Taken to the extreme, this approach turns the scientific view of nature on its head, and looks at man as an oppressor of the natural world instead of the other way around.
I think it’s safe to say there’s a lot more to Environmentalism than just Climatology.
I’m going to avoid saying anything witty because these just aren’t funny.
From the NYT, via Megan McArdle, we learn that the number of parents — generally, well-educated yuppie types — are choosing to not vaccinate their kids:
SAN DIEGO — In a highly unusual outbreak of measles here last month, 12 children fell ill; nine of them had not been inoculated against the virus because their parents objected, The parents who objected to their children being inoculated are among a small but growing number of vaccine skeptics in California and other states who take advantage of exemptions to laws requiring vaccinations for school-age children.
The exemptions have been growing since the early 1990s at a rate that many epidemiologists, public health officials and physicians find disturbing.
Children who are not vaccinated are unnecessarily susceptible to serious illnesses, they say, but also present a danger to children who have had their shots — the measles vaccine, for instance, is only 95 percent effective — and to those children too young to receive certain vaccines.
Measles, almost wholly eradicated in the United States through vaccines, can cause pneumonia and brain swelling, which in rare cases can lead to death. The measles outbreak here alarmed public health officials, sickened babies and sent one child to the hospital.
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In 1991, less than 1 percent of children in the states with personal-belief exemptions went without vaccines based on the exemption; by 2004, the most recent year for which data are available, the percentage had increased to 2.54 percent, said Saad B. Omer, an assistant scientist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
And from ABC, via PZ Myers, we can watch Creationists seriously mess with the mids of their kids: