Science News of the Day

[David's Front Door]

I'm sure whatever mod reads this is too scared to put some truth on here but I'll say it anyway. You're all dumb. You're all tricked into thinking Darrel isn't a huge faggot but he is. Hell, most of the "mods" here are. Girolamo Savonarola sent some gay little message like a 10 year old on Youtube taking 3 words from each sentence and trying to tear it apart. He failed even then, which is absolutely sad, but he was trying none the less. And he tried to say he was a real scientist....HAHAHA

Does the science dept force you to take "Being Retarded Online 101" or did that just come naturally? Good luck not being a failure, it's going to be a tough road.

[Dardedar]

I'm sure whatever mod reads this is too scared to put some truth on here but I'll say it anyway.

I am sorry that you very angry, and not too bright. But if you have anything intelligent to say, lets hear that rather than the whiny and going on about your juvenile obsession with homosexuality.

[Dardedar]

NASA Telescope Confirms Alien Planet in Habitable Zone

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — NASA's planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft has confirmed the discovery of its first alien world in its host star's habitable zone — that just-right range of distances that could allow liquid water to exist — and found more than 1,000 new explanet candidates, researchers announced today (Dec. 5).
The new finds bring the Kepler space telescope's total haul to 2,326 potential planets in its first 16 months of operation.These discoveries, if confirmed, would quadruple the current tally of worlds known to exist beyond our solar system, which recently topped 700.
The potentially habitable alien world, a first for Kepler, orbits a star very much like our own sun. The discovery brings scientists one step closer to finding a planet like our own — one which could conceivably harbor life, scientists said.
"We're getting closer and closer to discovering the so-called 'Goldilocks planet,'" Pete Worden, director of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., said during a press conference today.
The newfound planet in the habitable zone is called Kepler-22b. It is located about 600 light-years away, orbiting a sun-like star.
Kepler-22b's radius is 2.4 times that of Earth, and the two planets have roughly similar temperatures. If the greenhouse effect operates there similarly to how it does on Earth, the average surface temperature on Kepler-22b would be 72 degrees Fahrenheit (22 degrees Celsius). "

LINK

Not looking good for Mr. Strauss's "we're the only habitable planet" theory.

[Dardedar]

Anti-abortion advocate gets junk science paper published in peer-reviewed journal.

Bad science in the British Journal of Psychiatry

Pharyngula

[Dardedar]

Cognitive decline begins earlier than previously thought

FHealthDay News -- Cognitive functioning, including memory, reasoning and comprehension skills, may start to deteriorate as early as age 45 and declines even faster among those older than 65 years, according to a large, prospective study published online in BMJ.

Archana Singh-Manoux, PhD, of the University College London, and colleagues observed more than 10,000 British civil servants who participated in the Whitehall II study. This included 5,198 men and 2,192 women aged 45 to 70 years when cognitive testing began in 1997 to 1999. Memory, reasoning, vocabulary and phonemic and semantic fluency were assessed three times during the study period.

On all of these measures except vocabulary, which typically remains unaffected with age, linear trends were observed in decline, with greater changes seen in those who were older at baseline. In men, mental reasoning declined 3.6% among those aged 45 to 49 at baseline and 9.6% in those aged 65 to 70. In women, the corresponding declines were 3.6% and 7.4%, respectively.

These findings have important clinical implications as evidence increases supporting the importance of lifestyle and cardiovascular risk factors such as hypertension, obesity and dyslipidemia, in middle age on later life cognitive function.

"There is emerging consensus that 'what is good for our hearts is also good for our heads,' making aggressive control of behavioral and cardiovascular risk factors as early as possible key targets for clinical practice and public health," Singh-Manoux and colleagues wrote."

LINK

[Dardedar]

Colorized Darwin. From Pharyngula.

[David Franks]

The State of State Science Standards 2012

January 31, 2012

State reviews by Lawrence S. Lerner, Ursula Goodenough, John Lynch, Martha Schwartz, and Richard Schwartz
NAEP review by Paul R. Gross

Foreword by Chester E. Finn, Jr., and Kathleen Porter-Magee

Filed under: Curriculum & Instruction , Standards, Testing, & Accountability

"American science performance is lagging as the economy becomes increasingly high tech, but our current science standards are doing little to solve the problem. Reviewers evaluated science standards for every state for this report and their findings were deeply troubling: The majority of states earned Ds or Fs for their standards in this crucial subject, with only six jurisdictions receiving As. Explore all the state report cards and see how your state performed."

State profiles linked here:
http://www.edexcellence.net/publication ... -2012.html

[Savonarola]

The State of State Science Standards 2012

As a chemistry teacher, I find myself shocked that Arkansas's chemistry standards are scored so well. I suppose that they positive aspects identified in the review are true and are indeed good and useful, but there are other parts that are woefully lacking and even downright wrong. All of chemical equilibrium and chemical thermodynamics gets lumped into a single strand; by contrast, my AP chemistry textbook spends five chapters -- that's 20% of the book -- on these topics; in fact, these two topics make up a huge percentage of the second semester of university chemistry. Another glaring error/omission is that molecular orbital theory is mentioned not with covalent bonding -- a crime in itself -- but instead with metallic bonding, where an entirely different model is used to describe observed phenomena.

[Dardedar]

PZ Meyers tracks down an Intelligent Design corporation with the fancy name: "Department of ProtoBioCybernetics and ProtoBioSemiotics, Origin of Life Science Foundation, Inc." Good stuff:

Link

Maybe when Kent Hovind gets out of prison he can get a degree here to add to his other phony one from "Patriot University."

[Dardedar]

LINK

[Dardedar]

Perspective.

[Dardedar]

In Nov, 2010 I pointed out it would be interesting to watch and see how his claim about psychic ability, supposedly confirmed in the laboratory, held up.

Results are in.

Psychic ability claim doesn't fly in new experiments
Research refutes study published in psychological journal last year

By Stephanie Pappas
3/14/2012 8:04:41 PM ET

Bad news for Miss Cleo and other alleged clairvoyants: A new study has failed to find evidence that psychic ability is real.
Skeptics may scoff at the finding as obvious, but the research is important because it refutes a study published in a psychological journal last year that claimed to find evidence of extrasensory perception. That research, conducted by Daryl Bem of Cornell University, triggered outrage in the psychological community when the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology announced in 2010 that the paper had been accepted for publication. Psychologists immediately leapt on Bem's statistics and methods, finding reasons how he may have come up with the unbelievable results."

MSNBC

Actually, that article is rather mushy and understated. Skeptical Inquirer roasted the living shit out of the guy. The article can be read online here.

[Dardedar]

The Reason Rally ought to have some standards

Pharyngula

"Oh, joy. Senator Tom Harkin will appear in a video message at the Reason Rally. While he may be a lifelong Catholic, as he declares in the announcement, and while he is one of the biggest supporters of acupuncture, chiropracty, herbal and homeopathic 'healing', and all the alt med bullshit he can fling millions of federal funds at, we're apparently supposed to grovel in gratitude that a sitting senator deigns to patronize us atheists.

Why?

This is a man who takes pride in being affiliated with a patriarchal, hierarchical, medieval institution that oppresses women, celebrates poverty, wallows in its own wealth and privilege, and has actively disseminated pedophiles into communities all around the world…and has worked hard to protect and defend these child rapists. This is an organization that is currently fighting for the right to refuse life-saving care to women, that even opposes making contraception available to men and women, that endorses discrimination against gay couples.

This is a man who pushed through the formation of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative 'Medicine', a gigantic boondoggle that sucks federal research dollars out of the hands of qualified scientists studying real phenomena and into the hands of quacks and con artists peddling bogus therapies. This is a man who so poorly understands science that, when his pet quackeries all failed when examined, declared his disappointment because he said NCCAM was supposed to "validate alternative approaches", and instead was "disproving things rather than seeking out and approving things."

Yeah. That Tom Harkin."

[Dardedar]

Deepak Chupacabra reviews Dawkins new book "The Magic of Reality."

PZ Meyers kicks his ass.

***
Deepak Chopra reviews Richard Dawkins

Shorter Deepak: "Richard Dawkins didn't endorse my quantum bullshit, therefore The Magic of Reality sucks!"

Deepak Chopra actually sounds quite upset — his review of the book reads more like the indignant squawk of a charlatan furious that the presence of a skeptic might cut into his take. It's largely an exercise in name-dropping and the profession of bleary, vacuous misinterpretations of science on his part, which he then turns around and uses to accuse Dawkins of error because he doesn't share his inoculation of the ideas with pseudoscience. Like this:

[...big snip...]

I could go on and on about the stupidity of Deepak's review — every paragraph is like the evacuations of an elephant with diarrhea — massively feculent and slimy, of a quality that will not even appeal to the neighborhood dung beetles. But I do have to mention one more sentence that left me laughing.

One doesn't ask for advanced genetics in a primer for young adults, but one does ask that the writer know his field before adopting a tone of authority.

That's rich coming from a quantum quack who is demonstrably deluded about medicine, biology, evolution, physics, chemistry, and the entirety of science, yet manages to pretend to be an authority every day."

The rest HERE

[Dardedar]

Another creationist list of lies

"It's always amusing to see creationists try to explain why Charles Darwin was wrong, especially when they make up lists of reasons "Darwin's theory of evolution does not hold up to scientific scrutiny." These are always people who wouldn't know what scientific scrutiny was if it knocked them immobile with a carefully measured dose of Conus snail toxin, strapped them to an operating table, and pumped high-intensity Science directly into their brains with a laser. As I often wish I could do.

Anyway, some ignorant jebus-lover hacked together a list of 10 "mistakes" that Darwin made. Strangely, they completely miss his actual errors (probably because they've never read anything by Darwin and don't have enough knowledge of biology to recognize where he has been superceded) and babble on about what are actually creationist errors.

1. "Warm little pond" theory: There is no solid evidence of life arising spontaneously from a chemical soup....

The rest at... Pharyngula

[L.Wood]

.

THE 'OLD FACTORY' NEWS. It's a dog's world:


"May 30, 2012 | In the first study of its kind, Alexander “Sandy” Burnett, M.D., at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS), is testing whether local search and rescue dogs can detect ovarian cancer.
....
If dogs can be trained to reliably detect ovarian cancer, it would represent the first effective screening tool for the disease.

Burnett, a gynecologic oncologist who was joined by representatives of the Arkansas Search Dog Association (ASDA), recently provided an update on the study to the Cancer Friends luncheon group at Pulaski Heights United Methodist Church in Little Rock.

Four dogs from the search dog team have been imprinted on the scent and in early tests have shown the ability to distinguish between cancerous and noncancerous ovaries and urine.

“Right away, the dogs hit it every time,” Burnett said. “To me, it was far beyond what my expectations were when we started this.”

The study is in a pilot phase, allowing Burnett and the volunteer ASDA dog handlers to build upon their promising early results and apply for grants necessary to continue the screening study. The pilot portion of the study is expected to be completed in about six months. .....

Researchers around the world have found that dogs can detect cancers such as melanoma, lung cancer, breast cancer, colon and rectal cancer and kidney cancer, but there has been no large-scale study. One of the limiting factors for advancing those studies, Burnett said, is that most have relied upon only one or two dogs, while the UAMS study will use six to eight dogs.
...
Univ of Ark for Medical Sciences

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[Dardedar]

.
THE 'OLD FACTORY' NEWS. It's a dog's world:

Fascinating. And pigs are supposed to be able to smell considerably better than dogs. I wonder of the "You of A" thought of that? How 'bout them hogs....

[Dardedar]

Looks like they have it all...

Index to Creationist Claims

Talk Origins

[Dardedar]

[Dardedar]