From the American Association for the Advancement of Science, here are ten areas of notable scientific development for 2014:
For more, see this article from the December 19 issue of Science.
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In honor of tomorrow’s U.S. release of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five CGI Armies, here’s a rerun of something I previously posted a few years ago.
To celebrate the culmination of Peter Jackson’s six-film cycle, Gimli Gloinsson finds a private spot to practice his happy dance, but it turns out Galadriel is watching, something that initially troubles him. But dwarves and elves aren’t always doomed to hate.
And as a bonus, here are Boromir and Sauron, reincarnated from The Lord of the Rings, to add their own bit of celebration:
Think that’s bad? OK, one more, and I promise this is it, Lego Gollum Style:
by Police in the city of Lowell Michigan surprise people pulled over for traffic offenses with something unexpected: What they want for Christmas.
by Over at the Bad Astronomy blog, astronomer and writer Phil Plait has a good post on the subject of climate change that’s worth reading. He particularly recommends this short (6 minutes and 30 seconds) video from PBS Digital Studios’ It’s OK to Be Smart series that quickly goes through two dozen facts on the subject:
Given its brevity it skips over a lot of additional points that could be made.
For example, the most glaring demonstration that more CO2 means a hotter planet is the example of Venus, a planet that’s closer to the Sun than we are (so it gets more intense sunlight) but that’s shrouded in clouds that reflect so much sunlight into space that all else being equal, we’d expect the surface of Venus to be pretty close to that of the Earth. But it isn’t, because Venus as a very dense carbon dioxide atmosphere and consequently a surface temperature in the hundreds of degrees. You can cook a turkey on Venus by setting it outside for half an hour or so.
Also, we know even more directly that burning fossil fuels is responsible for increased CO2 in the air because we have a pretty good idea how much we’re burning and how much CO2 that releases, and by itself fossil fuel use is more than enough to account for all the measured increase in CO2. (The excess is being absorbed by the oceans, rocks, and photosynthetic organisms.)
This even shorter (3′ 40″) video from Hank Green below (also recommended in Plait’s blog post) addresses some popular false claims, such as the notion that back in the 1970s there was a consensus for global cooling. (I know first-hand that one’s nonsense, because I was an undergraduate physics major at the start of the 1970s and that’s when I learned about global warming. Here’s an earlier post from this blog that includes a clip from a 1958 Bell Telephone science special on the weather that covered the subject of human-caused global warming.)
Finally, Plait also recommends this succinct list of myths and corrections from the Skeptical Science website: http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php.
by I don’t always agree with Arizona Senator John McCain, but I certainly agree with what he has to say here. McCain was himself on the receiving end of torture, and he’s aware of something that the naive tend to overlook: Torture can make people talk, but it can’t make them tell the truth. In fact, I guarantee you that if you or I were tortured, we would reveal all manner of diabolical plots, anything we could think of whether made up on the spot or dimly remembered from an episode of Pinky and the Brain, anything to make the suffering stop.
I once read an article by a military officer who had undergone training on how to deal with being interrogated by an enemy, and that training included controlled use of “enhanced interrogation.” He said that very few people in the program revealed anything important and accurate under such pressure. Where they slipped up was in other forms of interrogation not involving torture.
Sen. McCain also makes the point that there’s little or nothing in the report that isn’t already known or suspected by critics of the United States, so its power to inflame anger is limited. I would add two things to that:
First, there have already been horrific revelations, and except for the graphic Abu Ghraib photos none of them has caused much effective harm to the U.S., certainly not a mass of text.
Second, had the Senate not released the summary, that concealment would have itself have been an excuse to impugn the U.S.
If anything, the release of such a damning but honest report makes this country look better to people overseas. They already know we’re not perfect. It impresses them when we have the guts to admit it.
Incidentally, contrary to what we keep hearing, the Senate has technically not actually released the full torture report (which runs thousands of pages), only a lengthy summary, one that was redacted at the request of the administration with input from the CIA.
by In the unlikely event you haven’t already seen this…
The apparently intentional release of chlorine gas a furry convention (see the Chicago Tribune’s news story and Wikipedia’s explanation of furry fandom) led to an evacuation of the con hotel and medical attention for at least 19 participants.
MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” news-and-commentary program attempted to do a brief segment on this, which led to some apparent confusion especially on the part of co-host Mika Brzezinski, who had apparently not previously heard of furry fandom, and who ends up having to leave the set.
Link: http://youtu.be/llmgFZz3Iio
by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie recently vetoed a bill outlawing pig gestation crates in New Jersey. The crates are horrifically cruel, immobilizing pregnant sows for several months (the normal pig gestation period is 114 days). After the piglets are born, sows are moved to slightly larger farrowing crates until the piglets are weaned, after which the sow is impregnated again as soon as possible. A breeding sow spends almost all her life confined, most if it barely able to move. Pigs are at least as intelligent as dogs.
Yes, people also kill and eat pigs, and that’s not nice either, but is it really necessary to make their lives in the meantime so miserable just to shave costs by cramming more pigs into a factory farm?
Polls showed overwhelming public support for the bill in New Jersey, and it passed the legislature with strong bipartisan support. So why did Christie veto it? Apparently to appeal to farmers in Iowa, site of the first-in-the-nation presidential nomination caucuses.
Here’s one pig’s opinion of Governor Christie:
Link: http://youtu.be/O096hJgi27k
And here’s Jon Stewart providing some additional background, including video of just how horrific these crates really are:
by The article under that headline in The Washington Post for 2007 May 3 is about Seoul’s high-wire championships that spring, in which participants among other things individually walked a kilometer-long wire stretched over the Han River.
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