The war on vaccinations is a war on science

A great article from Wired magazine about how the anti-vaxxers out there are completely wrong -- and are actually making things much worse.

In May, The New England Journal of Medicine laid the blame for clusters of disease outbreaks throughout the US squarely at the feet of declining vaccination rates, while nonprofit health care provider Kaiser Permanente reported that unvaccinated children were 23 times more likely to get pertussis, a highly contagious bacterial disease that causes violent coughing and is potentially lethal to infants. In the June issue of the journal Pediatrics, Jason Glanz, an epidemiologist at Kaiser’s Institute for Health Research, revealed that the number of reported pertussis cases jumped from 1,000 in 1976 to 26,000 in 2004. A disease that vaccines made rare, in other words, is making a comeback. “This study helps dispel one of the commonly held beliefs among vaccine-refusing parents: that their children are not at risk for vaccine-preventable diseases,” Glanz says.

I still don't know what kind of person would ignore all the scientific evidence and not vaccinate their children because some celebrity like Jenny McCarthy said so.

Global cooling disproven (again)

Statisticians show that people (*cough*Matt Drudge*cough*) who try to claim there is a "global cooling" trend are being disingenuous.

From the Associated Press:

Statisticians who analyzed the data found a distinct decades-long upward trend in the numbers, but could not find a significant drop in the past 10 years in either data set. The ups and downs during the last decade repeat random variability in data as far back as 1880.

Saying there's a downward trend since 1998 is not scientifically legitimate, said David Peterson, a retired Duke University statistics professor and one of those analyzing the numbers.

Identifying a downward trend is a case of "people coming at the data with preconceived notions," said Peterson, author of the book "Why Did They Do That? An Introduction to Forensic Decision Analysis."

Ball's in your court, climate change deniers.

Scientists find "ribbon" surrounding solar system

A very interesting story about the outer edges of our solar system.

In a discovery that took astronomers by surprise, the first full-sky map of the solar system's edge—more than 9 billion miles (15 billion kilometers) away—has revealed a bright "ribbon" of atoms called ENAs.

The solar system is surrounded by a protective "bubble" called the heliosphere.

Scientists have no idea why this is there -- it took them completely by surprise.

I have to say, astronomy is a very interesting science. If I was a lot smarter, maybe I would have went into it.

Ten facts that prove the moon landings were a hoax

Funny stuff from John Moltz:

4. This so-called “moon” that supposedly orbits our planet cannot be real because the teachings of Septon the Inquisitor tell us that life is an illusion and the real waking state does not come until we die and arrive, ironically, on the moon which is where people go when they die. I know it sounds confusing, but it makes a lot more sense after you watch the informational video and relinquish all your wordly possessions.

Tip of the had to Bad Astronomy.

Pink Floyd and the Moon Landing

Pretty damned cool. Via @barbwire55.

So what was David Gilmour doing during the moon landing, 40 years ago today? He was jamming out on the BBC. From The Guardian:

We were in a BBC TV studio jamming to the landing. It was a live broadcast, and there was a panel of scientists on one side of the studio, with us on the other. I was 23.

The programming was a little looser in those days, and if a producer of a late-night programme felt like it, they would do something a bit off the wall. Funnily enough I’ve never really heard it since, but it is on YouTube. They were broadcasting the moon landing and they thought that to provide a bit of a break they would show us jamming. It was only about five minutes long. The song was called Moonhead — it’s a nice, atmospheric, spacey 12-bar blues.

The Big Picture: Apollo 11

The first manned moon exploration, in pictures. Wow.

Forty years ago.

Time lapse of airplane flights around the world...

World Air Traffic Over 24 Hours - More amazing video clips are a click away

More people believe in global warming than in evolution

From the Associated Press, via @ShaunMcKinnon:

_ The public and scientists did not always see eye-to-eye. For example 87 percent of scientists believed that humans and other living things evolved naturally, compared with 32 percent of the general public. And while 84 percent of scientists say the Earth is getting warmer because of human activities, just 49 percent of the public agreed.

Scientists who study this sort of thing for a living and have expertise in the field believe in evolution and global warming by huge margins. But it is the people who are listening to the anti-science propaganda that had the loudest voice in the last eight years under the George W. Bush administration.

Wouldn't it be better policy to listen to people who are experts on that issue?

Time lapse video of volcanic explosion from space

No introduction necessary.

Shrinking a quarter to the size of a dime

No embeddable video, but this is pretty goddamn cool. Via Bad Astronomy.

Picture of volcanic explosion caught from space

NASA recently caught one of the coolest pictures you'll ever see. It's of the Sarychev Peak Eruption, Kuril Islands, and it was the photo of the day yesterday.

This detailed astronaut photograph is exciting to volcanologists because it captures several phenomena that occur during the earliest stages of an explosive volcanic eruption. The main column is one of a series of plumes that rose above Matua Island on June 12. The plume appears to be a combination of brown ash and white steam. The vigorously rising plume gives the steam a bubble-like appearance; the surrounding atmosphere has been shoved up by the shock wave of the eruption. The smooth white cloud on top may be water condensation that resulted from rapid rising and cooling of the air mass above the ash column. This cloud is probably a transient feature: the eruption plume is starting to punch through. The structure also indicates that little to no shearing wind was present at the time to disrupt the plume. (Satellite images acquired 2-3 days after the start of activity illustrate the effect of shearing winds on the spread of the ash plumes across the Pacific Ocean).

Click on the picture for a larger image. It's worth it.

New Mexican wins "Stick Science" contest

Via Bad Astronomer.

The first place entry for the Florida Science Stick Science competition is Richard Korzekwa from Los Alamos, New Mexico.

The contest challenged people to put public misunderstanding of science into an easy-to-understand cartoon -- using only stick figures (kinda like XKCD, except for the "easy to understand" part).

And why?

Public understanding of science, especially biology/evolution, is horribly low. Folks who push antievolution efforts on local, state and national stages prey on that weakness. One such gap in knowledge is the use of the word "theory." When the general public uses the word, it means one thing; when a scientist uses the word, it usually means something completely different. We see this a lot when antievolution folks claim that "evolution is only a theory." The news media mistakenly runs intelligent design and evolution alongside as two competing theories in their stories and accompanying graphics. Lawmakers take advantage of this when proposing antievolution legislation.

Besides the misuse of the word theory, antievolution efforts rely on false arguments such as gaps in the fossil record, the ever changing nature of science, and scientists being afraid of honest critical analysis.

You can see Korzekwa's winning entry -- about evolution, of course -- here.

We are small and insignificant

Watch in HD if possible.



Via Bad Astronomy

In seven years you'll have different friends

Via the Freakonomics blog.

Utrecht University sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst surveyed 604 people about their friends and again seven years later, and found that only 48 percent of people’s original friends were still part of their network after that time period.

However, the size of your friend group will probably stay about the same, if the Dutch study is any indication.

Time lapse videos of change on Earth

A blog at the Wired magazine website has a series of interesting changes in the earth over the past decade, sometimes for good but usually for, well, not good.

For example, take a look at a time lapse of Lake Powell in Utah and the effects of a drought on the lake over the past ten years:

Southern Utah’s Lake Powell was once teeming with boaters, fishers and vacationers. But from 2000 to 2005 its water level dropped from 20 million to 8 million acre-feet, due to severe drought. Water levels have rebounded a bit, but are expected to plummet to levels even lower than those of 2005 during the next serious drought.

The end of Hubble

When the space shuttle Atlantis touched down in California two days ago, it ended a mission to fix the Hubble Space Telescope. Such missions have happened before, and they are always news, but this was especially big news since it was the last mission to repair the world's most famous telescope.

And so when another piece on the Hubble breaks down -- as it inevitably will -- the Hubble will be no more. The telescope that brought us so many incredible images will just be another piece of space junk.

In fact, Discover Magazine (the link above) wrote, "It is likely to be the last time in our lives that human beings go to space to 'fix' an orbiting scientific instrument."

To see some of the great photos taken by the Hubble head over to the Hubble website and search through the amazing pictures taken by the telescope. They are public domain and you can use them as you want -- as long as you credit NASA and the Space Telescope Science Institute.

Miles O'Brien took a look at Hubble from the perspective of someone who "cut [his] teeth on the space beat covering the legendary STS-61 mission in December 1993"

So will there ever be another Hubble? As he unfailingly does, Ed Weiler cut to the chase: “Probably not, because there won’t be a shuttle.”

Indeed, Hubble and Shuttle are inextricably linked - both conceived and gestated with each other in mind in the seventies.

“They are like two kids growing up in the same family,” says Weiler. “They impacted each other’s designs.”

In fact, Hubble’s mirror is 2.4 meters in diameter so that it could fit in the Shuttle cargo bay – and it flies in Shuttle striking distance (low earth orbit) even though that is by no means the ideal place to park a space telescope (half the time, Mother Earth proves to Hubble she would be a better door than a window).

With some luck, the Hubble space telescope will continue sending pictures of distant galaxies back to Earth for another decade or so.

And we can keep using their photos (they are public domain as long as you credit NASA and the Space Telescope Science Institute) to get tiny glimpses into the universe.