nationalpost:

NASA’s Curiosity sends home first high-resolution, colour portrait images from Mars
NASA on Monday showed off the first high-resolution, colour portrait images taken by the Mars rover Curiosity, detailing a mound of layered rock where scientists plan to focus their search for the chemical ingredients of life on the Red Planet.

The stunning images reveal distinct tiers near the base of the 5-km-tall mountain that rises from the floor of the vast, ancient impact basin known as Gale Crater, where Curiosity landed on August 6 to begin its two-year mission.

Scientists estimate it will be a year before the six-wheeled, nuclear-powered rover, about the size of a small car, physically reaches the layers of interest at the foot of the mountain, 9 kilometres away from the landing site. (NASA)

That’s Mars, you guys.

cryingvagina:

if i was a dj my name would be dj enzyme because i’m always breaking it down 

Except that enzymes build shit up, too.

(via thedeviousplot)

jtotheizzoe:

Here are some of the death threats sent to a climate scientist, which the journalist behind the fake controversy “Climategate” joked didn’t exist, and wrote a column about, and then climate scientist Phil Jones of University of East Anglia released these. More at the link, worse than these.

Combined with nanoscientists getting targeted by bombs and animal researchers getting their homes flooded, anti-science movements are getting bloody.

Science is not the enemy. Ignorance and fear is the enemy.

(via Grist)

I don’t understand people. I mean, I don’t care how much I disagree with you … no one deserves to have death wished upon them. No one. Let’s say climate change is fake and he is lying. Is lying a crime worth capital punishment? Do the courts punish people for perjury by giving them the death sentence? Why is it different just because the word “climate” is in the case?

Seriously, people…

hopeisntsilent:

realcleverscience:

Really? Did this actually make sense to its creator? Or to the climate-change-denier on whose blog I found it?

Earth as center of the solar system? As I recall, it was scientists who corrected this idea - and the church which had a problem with it.

Earth as round? The ancient greeks - a highly scientific culture, perhaps the first truly scientific culture - were the ones to argue this. It was average country-bumpkins who, for centuries, didn’t want to accept that their perceptions could be mistaken.

Anthropogenic climate change - There are many, many papers about this, as there are also many papers about climate change in general. Scientists aren’t opposed to debate; they themselves have been debating! The issue is that they’ve found an answer! To complain they’re being dogmatic would be like complaining about the dogmatic views of heliocentrism or a round earth. The reality is that it’s primarily the conservatives who just don’t want to accept the facts, either because of religious or political leanings, or because they’re kinda endorsing the ‘bumpkin>science’ approach.

-sigh-

I guess some people just don’t like answers being found. They want to keep everything a question so as to accommodate any view.

LOL. the person commenting above me… ARE YOU A SCIENTIST? Or did you watch TV enough to tell you what was going on? OR MAYBE you even listend to AL gore’s speech that he used with tons of fabricated detail…………… Did you know the planet has RECORDED phases of intense temperatures or low temperatures, regardless of the state of society, carbon and man-made influences, the planet is reaching a phase of extreme weathers? In addition to this FACT in our solar system, planet temperatures have increased because the temperature of the sun is fluctuating and having periods of higher and lower temperatures because of solar flares and is making other planets irregularly warmer or with more extreme weather… so before you think you know everything and your facts are right, do the world a favor and learn more than what is being streamed through the masses. Weather and planetary temperatures are a lot more complex than what people are being told. You have no idea what you are talking about.

Um, person commenting above me, you’re being a tad hypocritical. Are YOU a climate scientist? How did you come about YOUR facts?

RCS never claimed he was a scientist nor that he knew all the facts. All he was doing was defending the climate scientists. You know, those guys that discovered all those facts that you’re laying out so nicely? RCS never said anything about it being simple, and while yes, he has a strong opinion, no, that does not make him a fool who only watches TV for his facts. All he said is that scientists have generally come to a consensus that AGW is occuring despite all the facts you laid out. And who knows better than the scientists themselves?

The man runs a Tumblr blog. He posted a message about what he believes in. And how do you know for sure he doesn’t already know all of the stuff you posted? Just because he’s not making a long post about all his knowledge doesn’t mean he doesn’t have any. There is no need to personally attack him.

(via hopeisntsilent-deactivated20121)

jtotheizzoe:

BREAKING NEWS: GPS Connector Error May Undo Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Results

ScienceInsider is reporting (from still unconfirmed sources) that last year’s reports of faster-then-light neutrinos from CERN’s OPERA collaborative were due to a mistake. Specifically, a bad connection between a computer and a GPS unit.

Whoops.

Confused? Here’s a handful of my posts on the subject here and here. That will give you the background on the experiment that you need. For the neutrino particle to have traveled faster than the speed of light, as claimed, it would have thrown some wrenches into very hefty assumptions about modern physics. I was pretty skeptical of this, as were many others, so this being true wouldn’t surprise me.

Keep your eyes open for confirmation on the error. In the meantime, always check your connectors.

UPDATE: More on this from Phil Plait.

jtotheizzoe:

The setting is a hotel ballroom, at the Urodynamics Society meeting in Las Vegas, NV, 1983. Dr. G.S. Bridley has just taken the stage for a late-in-the-day lecture on erectile dysfunction:

He began his lecture without aplomb. He had, he indicated, hypothesized that injection with vasoactive agents into the corporal bodies of the penis might induce an erection. Lacking ready access to an appropriate animal model, and cognisant of the long medical tradition of using oneself as a research subject, he began a series of experiments on self-injection of his penis with various vasoactive agents, including papaverine, phentolamine, and several others. (While this is now commonplace, at the time it was unheard of). His slide-based talk consisted of a large series of photographs of his penis in various states of tumescence after injection with a variety of doses of phentolamine and papaverine. After viewing about 30 of these slides, there was no doubt in my mind that, at least in Professor Brindley’s case, the therapy was effective. Of course, one could not exclude the possibility that erotic stimulation had played a role in acquiring these erections, and Professor Brindley acknowledged this.

The Professor wanted to make his case in the most convincing style possible. He indicated that, in his view, no normal person would find the experience of giving a lecture to a large audience to be erotically stimulating or erection-inducing. He had, he said, therefore injected himself with papaverine in his hotel room before coming to give the lecture, and deliberately wore loose clothes (hence the track-suit) to make it possible to exhibit the results. He stepped around the podium, and pulled his loose pants tight up around his genitalia in an attempt to demonstrate his erection.

At this point, I, and I believe everyone else in the room, was agog. I could scarcely believe what was occurring on stage. But Prof. Brindley was not satisfied. He looked down sceptically at his pants and shook his head with dismay. ‘Unfortunately, this doesn’t display the results clearly enough’. He then summarily dropped his trousers and shorts, revealing a long, thin, clearly erect penis.

I don’t think you could do that with PowerPoint.

jtotheizzoe:

rocknrollrach asked:

Hey Joe- What are your thoughts on the proposed Research Works Act that will likely end the NIH’s Public Access Policy? I guess it’s more a politics/policy question but it has major implications for science research

Guys, this is one of those Super-Important Issues That No One Is Paying Attention To™.

You know how publicly-funded research works, essentially:

1. You pay taxes to the gub’mint.
2. Researchers propose ideas to the gub’mint.
3. The gub’mint funds the best ones from a small part of your taxes, and that research gets done.
4. Researchers publish their results in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
5. Rinse, repeat.

The funny business starts around #4. If you aren’t blessed, like me, to have some huge institution paying for access to those research articles en masse, you can’t read most peer-reviewed research. Just try to go read something in Cell or Science without a membership. That will cost you about $40 a pop.

But many (including me) argue that you’ve already paid for it when you dropped that tax money in #1. If the public is funding the research, then why do you get “double-dipped” when trying to access the final product? In the past several years, there was some effort made to reverse, this, stating that publishers had to provide publicly-funded research for free within a generous 12 months of publishing it. None of that “here’s the abstract” shit, we are talking about the full research articles. And it has been working!

There’s even entire open-access journals like PLoS and BioMedCentral. Lo and behold, the publishing industry has not gone bankrupt thanks to the sum of these efforts.

Of course, that didn’t stop them from getting a piece of really frustrating legislation up for a vote: The Research Works Act. As Kevin Zelnio writes (really superbly, you should go read it) at his SciAm blog:

… the American Association of Publishers, has been fighting back and curiously appear to have secured a few members of Congress in their back pocket. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Darrell Issa (R-CA) introduce HR3699, the “Research Works Act“, into Congress just before Christmas. And it not a tenuous link that Maloney and Issa both  received donations from major publishing companies in 2011 and ended year introducing this short, and potentially misleading, bit of text intended “to ensure the continued publication and integrity of peer-reviewed research works by the private sector.”

The problem here being that in the eyes of this bill, anything outside of a gub’mint lab is “private sector”. That means goodbye to open-access research, research that you have already paid for in the form of taxes. This is about accessibility, not availability.

In some strange way, this feels like the record industry’s misguided fight against Napster et al., a colossally misguided attack on a system that could be beneficial for everyone if they just entered the 21st century.

Again, I recommend anyone who performs or cares about public research go read Kevin’s post. As of his writing, no scientists had lodged formal comments regarding the potential law, and the publishing industry was winning by default. No bueno. Get moving.

jtotheizzoe:

paulgarrison:

The internet and I love you Neil.

my other sh*t

So it goes.

jtotheizzoe:

Western black rhino declared extinct

A sad day, as it’s believed that no wild black rhinos remain. We have poachers and bush medicine to thank for this tragedy:

“You’ve got to imagine an animal walking around with a gold horn; that’s what you’re looking at, that’s the value and that’s why you need incredibly high security.”

(via BBC News)

(via jtotheizzoe)

jtotheizzoe:

Welcome to the first day of the rest of your life.

From this day forward you will carry the mantle of science high in the air, proudly displaying it for all to see. Sometimes you may carry it through dark places, where men of ignorant minds and steely hearts threaten your path.

Sometimes you…