tingilinde

firing naval shells at tissue paper

The CERN Courier has a nice account of Rutherford's journey to the nuclear atom....

happy anniversary sukie!

 

 

Happy Anniversary Sukie!

 

 

                        I am very lucky indeed!  And it does get better with time.

 

 

the shifting medical landscape

What would happen if MDs became less male and fewer owned their own practices ...  perhaps their politics would change.. 

european gasoline and diesel prices

so you don't need to complain about $4 per gallon gasoline and can imagine what it might be like at over $9 per gallon

Current data   prices are in euros per liter - to convert to US$ per US gallon, multiply by 5.407

a few other energy prices are listed too..

 

the evolutionary history of canids

Fascinating stuff

snip

They observed that the Great Lakes wolves exhibited a rather wide range of variation in the extent of their minor coyote component. Some individuals were nearly 100% wolf, while others were nearly 50% coyote. The red wolf seems to be predominantly coyote, while coyotes themselves have wolf and dog ancestry. Time scales of admixture were inferred to be in the range of centuries to nearly 1,000 years, with the assumption that there were earlier admixture events.

This is perhaps problematic. The ESA protects species, so what gets labeled a species is a matter of great contention. The red wolf may be a stabilized hybrid of relatively recent vintage (or perhaps more accurately a back-cross to coyotes from a wolf-coyote hybrid population?). The authors also note that that ironically the red wolf as we know it, on the brink of extinction but brought back through proactive captive breeding, may have been selected for the more wolf-like individuals within the population. So the preconception of the researchers may have changed the nature of the species on a genetic and phenotypic level.

 

The paper referenced is behind a paywall...

 

what if everything ran on gas. ..

cute ad (thanks Sara)

to stay moving you need to stay moving

Extreme inactivity isn't a good thing - you need to move around a bit.  

changes at coney island

Coney Island has always had a reputation for having an edge and being a bit gritty - part of its appeal to some. Over the past several years there has been a lot of worry about the nature of development. Will hotels and condos move in and erase it, will a squeaky clean and vanilla theme park emerge, or ...??

The NY Times has a video report on what is going on as far as the amusement park goes. Hopefully the Wonder Wheel and Cyclone won't go away

human powered machines

An article on human powered machines from Low-Tech Magazine.

It is important to recognize the scale of power required for many of our activities.  Asking a person to produce 100 watts of output from their muscles for an extended period is a big deal.  For reference an average adult's metabolism produces about 100 watts to run your body and muscle based activity tends to be 20 to 25% efficient.  It is an excellent way to lose weight, but running a TV that needs 150 watts would be borderline for most people for more than an hour.  

The article points out when you have so little power to offer, conversion and storage losses can make projects impractical.  

seafood fraud

lots of misdirection in the industry and what to do about it..

snipping from the e360 digest

Seafood products sold in the U.S. are identified fraudulently as much as 25 to 70 percent of the time, with cheaper and more readily available fish often substituted for more desirable species and overfishedspecies identified as species of greater abundance, according to a new report by the nonprofit group Oceana.  The report, “Bait and Switch: How Seafood Fraud Hurts Our Oceans, Our Wallets and Our Health,” says that despite increasing concerns about the origins of fish products, consumers are typically given little information on where the fish they buy is from. And even when fish products are labeled, the report notes, the information is often misleading or fraudulent. Other recent studies using DNA tracing technologies in North America and Europe have consistently found that 20 to 25 percent of seafood products are wrongly identified. Oceana says the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and other agencies should use the latest forensic technologies to more strictly enforce labeling requirements. “Customers buying fish have a right to know what the heck it is and where it’s from,” said Michael Hirshfield, chief scientist for Oceana, “but agencies like the FDA are not taking this as seriously as they should.”

not to mention a great title for a report