Weekend Links

• An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All – Thanks to Jay Lake.
• H1N1: Yes, You Should Vaccinate Your Kids
• Is the swine flu vaccine safe?
• Six diseases you never knew you could catch
• Antidepressants and depression may both harm a fetus
• Stop giving antipsychotics to people with dementia
• Light All Night Not Alright
• Woman's Rape Called “Pre-Existing Condition” by Insurance Companies
• Human Spaceflight Ball in Obama’s Court
• NASA iPhone Application
• Apollo-Era Crawler Carries Test Rocket to Launch Pad – Well, of course, but the crawlers deserve whatever publicity they can get.
• Risk and ingenuity cross paths on Ares 1-X test flight
• Static electricity rule threatens on-time liftoff
• Augustine panel submits final report on spaceflight options
• Bolden Directs MSFC Special Team to evaluate HLV alternatives
• Fudged titanium could threaten next Mars rover – "Everybody thought we were buying a (military) standard titanium that was properly treated for use. It turns out it wasn't worked properly."
• Astronomers find organic molecules around gas planet
• Found: first 'skylight' on the moon – The caverns of the moon.
• $500,000 treasure dug up in lunar soil – NASA's "Regolith Excavation Challenge" has a winner.
• Laser microscope aims to uncover alien life
• Was our oldest ancestor a proton-powered rock?
• Modeling a black hole with a 300 GigaWatt laser
• Huge CCD Could Give Real-Time View of Dark Energy Hunt
• LHC reaches operational temps, collisions start in 5 weeks
• World’s Biggest Digital Brains Think in Teraflops, Model the Universe
• Rethinking relativity: Is time out of joint?
• Seven questions that keep physicists up at night
• Fatal frog fungal disease figured out
• How City Noise Is Reshaping Birdsong
• The year's best wildlife photos – Wonderful wolf photo.
• Shoot new angles with kite photography
• How much are coral ecosystems worth? Try $172 billion--A year
• Counting the hidden ($120 billion) cost of US energy economy
• Does Economics Violate the Laws of Physics?
• Stealthy wind turbines aim to disappear from radar screens
• Hurricane Forcing: Can Tropical Cyclones Be Stopped?
• House Considers Limiting Patriot Act Spy Powers – Thank you, John.
• Judge Refuses to Lift 5-Year-Old Patriot Act Gag Order
• Editing Scientists: Science and Policy at the White House
• Sequoia e-voting code reveals possible FEC rule violations – And if no problems had been detected in the Sequoia code, how would anyone know that the clean code (and no other code) was actually executing in the voting machines, and their support infrastructure? If election integrity matters – if democracy matters – electronic voting machines must go.
• Nation’s First Open Source Election Software Released – No matter how well-intentioned and executed, open-sourcing software—and I say this an author of open-source projects—does not have the magic power to turn bad ideas into good ones. Electronic voting is, and will remain, a bad idea.
• California Investigating Problems With Voting-Machine Audit Logs
• Apple shuts down ZFS open source project – If the author is correct that Apple is abandoning ZFS, that's a bad move on Apple's part. Forget ZFS' ability to pool disk drives, or take snapshots, or its many other great features – the fact that it did error detection and correction to prevent files from being corrupted was something everyone would have benefited from, just as those of us with Mac Pros benefit from error correcting memory. These errors do happen, but most systems can't even detect them, let alone correct them, so they don't receive the attention they deserve. Dear Apple: Do better than this, you're long overdue.
• Time Warner Cable Exposes 65,000 Customer Routers to Remote Hacks
• Super-Sized Memory Could Fit Into Tiny Chips – A 1 terabyte RAM chip, potentially.
• Super Concrete in the U.S. Military, Iran … and the Pyramids?
• Can Google Earth save an indigenous tribe with maps?

Weekend Links

From a book I happen to be reading at the moment:

The prevailing theory as to why, as a species, we left off hunting and gathering is that we had ruined that perfectly good lifestyle by overdoing it, killing off the megafauna on which we depended. Otherwise, it's hard to explain why humans would ever have traded such a healthy and comparatively pleasant way of life for the backbreaking, monotonous work of agriculture. Agriculture brought humans a great many blessings, but it also brought infectious disease (from living in close quarters with one another and our animals) and malnutrition (from eating too much of the same thing when crops were good, and not enough of anything when they weren't). Anthropologists estimate that typical hunter-gatherers worked at feeding themselves no more than seventeen hours a week, and were far more robust and long-lived than agriculturalists, who have only in the last century or two regained the physical stature and longevity of their Paleolithic ancestors.

—The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, pg. 279.

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And Now, The Links

• Orionids Meteor Shower Starts This Weekend
• Fireball Picture: Meteor Explodes Over the Netherlands – A once-in-a-lifetime photo.
• Elusive lunar plume caught on camera after all
• "Rejected" Protons Offer a New View of the Moon
• Opportunity rover finds yet another Mars meteorite
• Robot nuclear windjammer to sail patio-gas oceans of Titan
• What shook up Saturn's rings in 1984?
• IBEX maps edge of Solar System
• Mystery Emissions Spotted at Edge of Solar System
• Astronomers clash with US air force over laser rules
• Ares I-X TVC retesting taking place – Range Safety Waiver overview
• Testing, reviews continue for grounded climate satellite – It may never fly, but so far it has shown an amazing ability to not-quite-die.
• Building a second sun: Take $10 billion, add coconuts – An article on ITER.
• 'Magnetricity' observed for first time
• First black hole for light created on Earth
• Crystal is one-way street for microwaves
• Entanglement on demand – This Scientific American article has ceased to exist, and now forwards would-be readers to an article in Nature, which is not publicly available. Sigh. However, the article is still available from the Google cache, but probably only temporarily.
• Research in a Vacuum: DARPA Tries to Tap Elusive Casimir Effect for Breakthrough Technology
• Solving the crystal maze: The secrets of structure
• Swine flu vaccine shunned despite availability
• Sick American dogs get first shot at cancer drugs
• Labs-on-a-chip that you can shrink to fit
• Placebo effect caught in the act in spinal nerves
• Evolution details revealed through 21-year E. coli experiment
• Plants Recognize Siblings: ID System In Roots
• Conservation targets too low to save at-risk species
• Out of your head: Leaving the body behind
• It's official: Your bullying boss really is an idiot
• Psychopaths are distracted, not cold-blooded
• Secret ACTA treaty can't be shown to public, just 42 lawyers
• White House: Fox News Is 'A Wing Of The Republican Party' – Thanks to Jay Lake.
• Jay Lake: Will the Real Conservatives Please Stand Up?
• Oct. 16, 2002: Second Great Library Opens in Alexandria – If memory serves, the original Library of Alexandria burned not once, but three times. Leaving that historical quibble aside, the idea of replacing it is appealing. Looking at the new building, however, I can't help but wonder: What is the new library's design life? Will the building they've built last 500 years, or even 100? And even if it does, will it still be maintainable? If the answer to any of those questions is "no," did the architects really consider the significance of what they were designing, or was it viewed as just another high-profile win for their firm? Anyway, here's wishing the new library better luck than its predecessor.
• How to Get More Bicyclists on the Road

Weekend Links

From a book I happen to be reading at the moment:

[...S]ince the human desire for sweetness surpases even our desire for intoxication, the cleverest thing to do with a bushel of corn is to refine it into thirty-three pounds of high-fructose corn syrup.
That at least is what we're doing with about 530 million bushels of the annual corn harvest—turning it into 17.5 billion pounds of high-fructose corn syrup. Considering that the human animal did not taste this particular food until 1980, for HFCS to have become the leading source of sweetness in our diet stands as a notable acheivement on the part of the corn-refining industry [...]

—The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, pg. 103.

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And Now, The Links

• Right Stuff, Wrong Sex: NASA’s Lost Female Astronauts – I've read of this before, but it deserves any extra publicity it can get.
• Managers give approval to continue Ares 1-X preps
• Ares 1-X rocket breezes through key readiness test
• Ares I-X on track for rollout – Constellation set lunar summit date
• Constellation reviews Crew Exploration Vehicle Aero-science Project Status
• Rocket company tests world's most powerful ion engine
• Blasted into space from a giant air gun – Routinely proposed. Never executed. (Though HARP was on the verge.) Will this time be different?
• Xombie Qualifies for Lunar Lander Prize
• No plume, but a firehose of data from NASA moon bombing
• Lunar smash produces surprise, disappointment
• Rest easy, Earthlings: Slim impact odds further reduced
• Myths about the U.S. Economic Model
• Telephone Company Is Arm of Government, Feds Admit in Spy Suit
• Senators Vote to Renew Patriot Act Spy Powers
• Neutrinos could encode messages to submarines
• Navy Looks to Stop Enemy Ray Guns
• New Video: Laser Gunship Blowtorches Truck
• Missile Silo Fixer-Upper Now Swanky Bachelor Pad
• Apple abandons U.S. Chamber of Commerce over climate policy
• Why the 'peak oil' debate is irrelevant
• EPA Announces Plan to Review Six Controversial Chemicals
• Melting glaciers bring 1980s pollution revival
• Google Begins Fixing Usenet Archive – It's about time. (In both senses.)
• Google’s Abandoned Library of 700 Million Titles
• Microsoft’s Danger SideKick data loss casts dark on cloud computing
• DRAM study turns assumptions about errors upside down
• Memory-Chip Camera Sensors Are 100 Times Smaller Than CCDs
• Inside the Nobel Prize: How a CCD Works
• Big bang flashgun to snap atomic anatomy
• Wired Explains: How 3-D Television Works
• The Making of a Mind-Blowing Space Photo
• Observations: 17th-century Brueghel paintings trace the early, mysterious history of the telescope
• 35 Years of the World’s Best Microscope Photography
• Weather Geeks Champion New Armageddon-Worthy Cloud
• 7 Glow-in-the-Dark Mushroom Species Discovered
• Bird Cam Captures Albatross, Killer Whale Rendezvous
• Infrared Video: 500,000 Bats Emerge From Cave
• Flu in pregnancy leaves a mean legacy
• Pandemic Payoff from 1918: A Weaker H1N1 Flu Today
• Targeted therapies exploit tiny chinks in cancer's armour
• ‘DNA Transistor’ Could Revolutionize Genetic Testing
• Souped-up stem cells rescue damaged limbs
• Is Life Expectancy Reduced by a Traumatic Childhood?
• How Memories are Maintained Over Time
• Are you asleep? Exploring the mind's twilight zone
• You Snooze, You Lose--Weight
• Look into my eyes: The power of hypnosis
• Bering in Mind: The problem with psychopaths: a fearful face doesn't deter them
• Carrying a gun increases risk of getting shot and killed
• Birth of a Notion: Implicit Social Cognition and the "Birther" Movement
• Has the pill changed the rules of sexual attraction?
• Long-Awaited Research on a 4.4-Million-Year-Old Hominid Sheds New Light on Last Common Ancestor
• Volcanoes Wiped Out All Forests 250 Million Years Ago
• Primeval Villain Looks for a Return to Mayhem in Reborn Series
• Oct. 5, 1895: Cycling’s ‘Race of Truth’

Weekend Links

From a book I happen to be reading at the moment:

[....] McNuggets also contain several completely synthetic ingredients, quasi-edible substances that ultimately come not from a corn or soybean field but from a petroleum refinery or chemical plant. [.... Including] “anti-foaming agents” like dimethylpolysiloxene, added to the cooking oil to keep the starches from binding to air molecules, so as to produce foam during the fry. The problem is evidently grave enough to warrant adding a toxic chemical to the food. According to the Handbook of Food Additives, dimethylpolysiloxene is a suspected carcinogen and an established mutagen, tumorigen, and reproductive effector; it's also flammable. But perhaps the most alarming ingredient in a Chicken McNugget is tertiary butylhydroquinone, or TBHQ, an antioxidant derived from petroleum that is either sprayed directly on the nugget or the inside of the box it comes in to “help preserve freshness.” According to A Consumer's Dictionary of Food Additives, TBHQ is a form of butane (i.e. lighter fluid) the FDA allows processors to use sparingly in our food: It can comprise no more than 0.02 percent of the oil in a nugget. Which is probably just as well, considering that ingesting a single gram of TBHQ can cause “nausea, vomitting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse.” Ingesting five grams of TBHQ can kill.

—The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, pp. 113-114.

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And Now, The Links

• Nathan Bedford Forrest Has Beautiful Eyes – “[...] pre-War Jefferson Davis is arguing that the fight is over slavery and white Supremacy. Post-war he's claiming it was about the sovereignty of states. To this day, 150 years later, you find people parroting this lie.”
• Secret Ops, Domestic Spying OK – “This isn't business; this is spying. But that doesn't mean letting those agencies do whatever they want.”
• Memes strike back: Gerbils, gay blood elves, and Glenn Beck
• Dark Matter Hunters Construct a New Weapon
• Galaxy study hints at cracks in dark matter theories
• Superheavy Element 114 Finally Re-created
• NASA probe set for close encounter with Mercury
• Apollo 11: Second look – So that’s where I left my EASEP!
• New impact site for LCROSS water-hunting mission
• Ares I-X processing for rollout: HLV alternative continuing to make progress
• Stabilizing the electric grid with megawatt-scale storage
• Carbon nanotubes may power ultracapacitor car
• Could a microchip help to diagnose cancer in minutes?
• Treemometers: A new scientific scandal
• Oldest Living Things in The World
• Weird, Rare Clouds and the Physics Behind Them
• Flavor and Aroma Rise in Champagne Bubbles – Thanks to William.
• Champagne’s flavor is right under your nose – Thanks to William.
• Virtual composer makes beautiful music—and stirs controversy – Reminds me of WolframTones, some of which were surprisingly good.