science

Every now and then I get a referral from The International Atomic Energy Agency. Sadly, though, I can never find a link on their site to mine. They have articles on radiation leaks in Georgia and upgrading nuclear security, but nothing about the atomic structure of Gagne. I’ll have to assume that one of my readers just happens to be an atomic energy buff, too. At least I found this interesting press release about the tsetse fly there:

A new campaign to control the deadly tsetse fly in Africa, parasitic carrier of sleeping sickness, has been launched by the Organization of African Unity (OAU).
African sleeping sickness affects as many as 500,000 people, 80 percent of whom eventually die, and the bite of the fly causes more than $4 billion in economic losses annually.
The tsetse fly has turned much of the fertile African landscape into an uninhabited “green desert,” spreading sleeping sickness — and killing 3 million livestock animals every year. The fly is the carrier of the single cell parasite, trypanosome, which attacks the blood and nervous system of its victims, causing sleeping sickness in humans and nagana in livestock. The biting tsetse fly transmits it when its seeks a blood meal.

That’s a heck of a lot of dead animals. Sleeping Sickness just can’t be cool. Good luck to you, OAU!

What does gravity smell like? Visit The Smell of Gravity to learn. I first discovered this link back in the 1900s. I can’t believe it’s still on line.

Sleep hogs beware. A new study suggests that individuals who sleep eight hours or more a night actually have an increased death rate compared to those who average fewer hours. Study subjects who slept seven hours a night had the best survival rates. Those sleeping eight hours a night were 12 percent more likely to die over the course of the study than were those sleeping seven hours a night.

“You don’t see the severe acute consequences you get with alcohol or cocaine,” Dr. Budney said. “People don’t embarrass themselves. They don’t wreck the car. They don’t spend all their money on a binge.

“That doesn’t mean it’s not addictive. It can be insidious. It gets into your lifestyle and then you can’t get it out.”

The minuscule size of most nanotubes - hollow cylinders of carbon
measuring only a few billionths of a meter wide - boggles the mind. Even more astounding may be that scientists can conceivably nestle these straws inside one another like Matryoshka dolls, with the inner set of tubes sliding in and out a billion times a second. Such gigahertz oscillators could aid in the creation of nanomechanical devices.

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I think that the best linking weblog on line right now is Follow Me Here. Every time I visit I find a half-dozen or so excellent articles. Eliot must be a voracious reader, and his comments are insightful and thought-provoking. If you have never been to his site, go right now. Here are a few of his more recent links that I found particularly interesting:

· A few months ago - just after Sept. 11 - I wrote a little rant about parallel universes and how I deal with the concept of infinity. I never claimed that it was an original idea, or my own. But I like it. It seems like this theory, which dates back to at least 1957, has sparked some renewed interest. The Economist has a very enlightening and much more scientific explanation of a theory of infinite universes than the one I provided. If you’re as fascinated by the concept of infinity and its implications as I am, you’ll appreciate the Economist’s essay.

· The London-based eZine Spiked published an article on “the Singleton Society” last week. I’ll give you an excerpt here, but I recommend reading the whole thing.

… the age-old tension between the aspiration for self-realisation and commitment is difficult to resolve. In the past this tension could be contained through the widespread influence of the ideology of romantic love - which celebrated the value of self-realisation through an intimate encounter with another person. The synthesis of autonomy and commitment helped diffuse conflicts of interests, at least for a brief period of time.
But the ideology of romantic love could only effectively contain conflicts of interests because women were expected to renounce their desire for autonomy in favour of maintaining the relationship. Since the 1970s, this one-sided arrangement has come unstuck. At a time when women seek to develop themselves no less than men, love ceases to provide the focus for an ideology that can sustain durable commitment.

· The Crackpot Index claims to be, “A simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to physics.” It’s very funny, more so if you often find yourself trying to debunk those with seriously high levels of bunk.

I found a great feature at the New Scientist on alcohol:

Everything you ever wanted to know about the stuff but were too drunk to ask.

From the news desk: Jogging May Make You Smarter

What is a blue moon?

Ever wondered how to make a hologram at home? I think it’s neat that they used Woodstock as a model …

Life began with direct coding on bare, carbon-chemistry hardware, like amino acids and proteins. Higher programming languages, like DNA and RNA, evolved gradually. Computers began in a similar fashion, with programmers coding on to the bare machinery of their circuits. Higher programming languages have followed, each generation more powerful than the last.

There is, of course, one big difference between biological and machine evolution. It took life billions of years to evolve the information-processing skills that lie behind the evolution of the human brain. Computers have made giant strides in half a century.

- more on Artificial intelligence

Every now and then my mom - because she loves me like silly - sends me newspaper clippings from the comics section. I just got a particularly funny one from Frank and Ernest.
Two microbes are reading the latest issue of BioWeek magazine and one says to the other, “There’s a cover story on helium.”
The other microbe says, “Hah! How interesting can an article on helium be?”
The first microbe responds, “They say once you pick it up, you can’t put it down!”

Now that’s comedy, folks. <grin></grin>

I finally joined a gym. I had to do it, you see. I’ve withered away to a mere 165 lbs in the last year. The gym is small, but it has everything I need and is never crowded. It feels great to be lifting weights again.

After my workout this morning I sat for a while and read the latest issue of National Geographic. There was a terrific article on the Evolution of Whales. Sadly the entire story is not on line; you’ll have to subscribe if you want to read the whole thing. But the excerpt at the site has an extraordinary close-up photo of a whale’s eye that I just had to link. Check it out!

I got in a bit of a heated debate recently on the topic of whether there is a genetic link to homosexuality. I remember that there was a flurry of media coverage a few years ago on the discovery of a genetic link, but I also remember hearing shortly afterwards that there wasn’t much support for the theory. Personally I don’t really care, but I was a good bloggerbot and decided to see what I could find on line. I fired searches on Google, AskJeeves, The New England Journal of Medicine, and the Journal of the American Medical Association. Here’s what I could find:

• The Possible Genetics of Homosexuality
• The Hypothetical Genetics of Sexual Orientation
• On the Origins of Homosexuality: Is a Person “Born that Way”?
• The Fading “Gay Gene”
• Is There a “Gay Gene”?
• Is Homosexuality Genetic?
• Transsexualism, Left-Handedness May Share Origins
• Doubt cast on ‘gay gene’
• Study fails to support existence of a ‘gay gene’
• A Gay Gene?
• Search for a Gay Gene
• “Gay gene” debate re-opened
• Do Genes Determine Whether We Are Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, or Straight?
• Genetics: Helping the Media Get It Right
• Is It in the Genes?

If you know of any other relevant links, drop them off here.