The Hour of Lead | Speakeasy Science. {*style:<i>This is the Hour of Lead- Remembered, if outlived, As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow- First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go – </i>*} When 19th century poet Emily Dickinson wrote those lines, she was describing the terrible paralysis of grief. A good century later, analysts for the Environmental Defense Fund, would also note that the last line “aptly describes some of the symptoms of lead intoxication.” I’ve always suspected that they also just liked the poem and wanted to use it – certainly that’s partly my motive here.
The chemical symbol for lead is Pb, from the Latin word “plumbum” which referred to a malleable metal. Many scholars have argued, for instance, that the plumbum-loving Roman empire – enthusiastically using lead pipes, bottles, and wine cups, leaded cosmetics and paint – came to its end partly due to lead-poisoning of its upper classes. {*style:<i>The feeble offspring curse their crazy sires, And, tainted from his birth, the youth expires. PLoS Blogs Network | Diverse perspectives on science and medicine. Retort | Distilling knowledge and opinion. Jeffrey Sachs: On climate, more ‘now’ and ‘how’ is needed Hello there! If you enjoy the content on The Gleaming Retort, consider subscribing for future posts via email or RSS feed.
To hear Jeffrey D. Sachs tell it, if humanity manages to avert catastrophic warming from manmade greenhouse gases, it won’t be because of an astonishing technological breakthrough that suddenly saved the day. It will be because policymakers mustered the will to start acting today rather than later, and focused on how to transform global energy systems before squabbling about who should pay for it.
Unfortunately, that has not happened yet. “What we have is mostly a debate about what’s fair and unfair, but very little understanding about what to do,” he says. Jeffrey D. Sachs, renowned as an economist and advocate for sustainable development, is director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and of the U.N. Continue reading Q&A with James Hansen Continue reading Dangerous Climate Change, Reconsidered Updates:
The Niche Blog Network: Lessons From the Past, Visions for the Future | PLoS Blogs. Is the heyday of science blogging networks really over? If so, then people must have been dozing at the wheel for the past six weeks. Although ScienceBlogs has had its problems, new networks are popping up daily, and – starting today – PLoS will be one of the crazies barreling down this dimly lit road. Won’t all of these new networks suffer the same fate as ScienceBlogs, (re-)learning the very hard lesson about the volatility of the blogosphere ecosystem? Perhaps. These networks were successful because they took a great deal of time to define their vision, addressing tough questions like: What is the purpose of this network?
A detailed vision allowed these networks to find the right bloggers – people that heartily embraced the particular approach. When an organization spends this much time upfront figuring out an approach, good things tend to happen. In all seriousness, we’re extremely good at what we do. And it’s a fair question. But, see, PLoS has always had a thing for blogging. Crazy as a Bedbug Researcher | Retort. Hello there! If you enjoy the content on The Gleaming Retort, consider subscribing for future posts via email or RSS feed. Once upon a time, yelling “fire” in a crowded theater was the recipe for a stampede. But as a New Yorker, I can attest that these days you could probably achieve the same result with a shout of “bedbug,” particularly since one highly trafficked Times Square movie theater was briefly closed in August to spray for the pests.
Maybe theaters showing Piranha 3-D or Vampires Suck could spin a bedbug infestation as an enhancement of the cinema experience, but I don’t think any others could. Eh, maybe The Expendables, too, for different reasons. Your friend, Cimex lectularius (Content Providers: CDC/ Harvard University, Dr. Gary Alpert; Dr. The resurgence of bedbugs in U.S. cities has people spooked but, in the New York Times, Donald G. Read on to learn more from McNeil about those subjects. Exhibit A (emphasis added): Oh, those university administrators. No, bug people. Creationist Blarney | Retort.
Hello there! If you enjoy the content on The Gleaming Retort, consider subscribing for future posts via email or RSS feed. Ireland’s economy surged as “the Celtic Tiger” in the 1990s thanks to the nation’s embrace of the biotechnology industry, so it must be deeply gratifying to everyone in my ancestral homeland that Conor Lenihan, Ireland’s junior minister for science, technology, innovation and natural resources, has come out as supportive of creationist loons. I infer that’s the case because of Lenihan’s short-lived announced intention to speak at the launch party for a new creationist screed called The Origin of Specious Nonsense, by John J.
May. ”Short-lived” seems to be an appropriate description because within a day of this news becoming public, Lenihan had canceled his appearance. And of course, there will be undoubtedly be stacks of the book itself, which promises to be enlightening, as in this passage about the seven reasons why May “detests and rejects evolution” (all sic): Daniel Hruschka and the Book of Friendship. Hello there! If you enjoy the content on Neuroanthropology, consider subscribing for future posts via email or RSS feed. Dan Hruschka is an anthropologist who, after three years as a post-doctoral fellow at The Santa Fe Institute, is now an assistant professor at the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. University of California Press has just published his book Friendship: Development, Ecology and Evolution of a Social Relationship. I’m really excited about this book, as it summarizes Dan’s ground-breaking integrative research on friendship over the past ten years.
We had a quick discussion about his book by email. Here’s the interview. Congratulations, Dan, on your book! Human friendship poses a profound evolutionary puzzle. The book, Friendship, tackles this puzzle by imagining the human bond of friendship as a living organism and posing a number of questions that a natural historian might ask.
Friends aren’t the only players in a friendship. Starting a reading list for Goobledygook. All science bloggers do a lot of reading for background information, or write blog posts based on a (newly published) paper, blog post or news item. So I thought that it would be a good idea to collect those references in a single place. Flickr photo by margolove. Reading lists are perfect for this, and they are easy to create and maintain with web-based reference managers. Reading lists are used in teaching, e.g. to provide a list of required reading material for a class. But I can also see a number of benefits for science blogs: they help the blogger to organize his background material for writingthey help the reader find and keep referenced materialthey can provide additional reading not mentioned in the blog post There are several good tools for reading lists.
Technical Lead Article-Level Metrics and Product Manager, PLOS.