sciencethingy

Good option piece about the absurdity of the right-wing's comparisons of Obama to Hitler: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/323722….

I haven't posted an article in a while, but I couldn't resist this one about baby chicks' ability to perform addition and subtraction!

After parking my car in the garage at work around 7:45 this morning, I was heading down the garage stairs and I could hear a lot of loud bird song outside. I came out of the garage and looked around for the source of the noise, and saw a hawk sitting atop a banner stretched across our office's facade, with two female blue jays divebombing it. The jays were who were making all of the noise; apparently they were not pleased at having the hawk sitting there.

The hawk looked quite a bit like this:

( Collapse )

I know red-tailed hawks are common in the area; a nest was removed from Fenway Park this year. Anyway, I think I'm going to take up birdwatching. I need to go the bookstore and look at some of the guidebooks.

Thanks for the alliteration, msnbc.com.

option686 and I were talking about why this illusion appears last month, since the moon looked pretty big then. I didn't explain it very well and I think he didn't believe me.

There's an interesting article on newsweek.com about executive function, which is the ability to control distracting thoughts and focus on the task at hand.

This article explains how E. coli bacteria can be used to perform mathematical calculations.

But who can resist a penguin in a wetsuit?

April 22, 2008—A tiny camera can transmit images to the brain through the optic nerve, offering hope for restored vision to those blinded by disease.

Click the link for a short little video:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com…

© 2008 National Geographic (AP)

There's a neat article in Live Science today about the genetic mutation that causes blue eyes. People with blue eyes all share a single genetic mutation which causes lower melanin production in the eye. Analysis of mitochondrial DNA (inherited from your mother, in case you didn't already know that from watching CSI) showed that it was inherited from a single common ancestor.

That means not only do all blue-eyed people share a common ancestor, but all blue-eyed people's parents share a common ancestor! Ack, I'm inbred!

Here's the paper.

You've probably heard by now that the FDA has declared cloned food to be biologically indistinguishable from non-cloned food.

What I find so interesting about this story is how emotional people get about the subject of food. Despite the lack of any evidence that it is unhealthy, many of the people who spoke to NPR on the subject had a negative view of eating meat from cloned animals. None of them had a concrete reason why; they said things like it made them "uncomfortable".