inkycircus

Some choice material goods at the Tate Modern

The Tate Modern is THE geek destination in London this November. Why? Well, first off you can enjoy some great G forces while riding its rocking slides in the main hall. Second, the Materials Library is hosting four talks based on the Tate Modern's Rehang each Monday evening. You're guaranteed the chance to poke, prod, and play the art to your heart's content:

Each night will contain different activities and materials conjectures such as the opportunity to play a lead bugle, to stand on a thermochromic Matisse and sit amongst The Surrealists and to do battle on the smallest chess set in the world.

The first night "Materials Gesture", on Nov 6th, seems a case in point. It features "Thermochromic Matisse, The Sound of Rothko, and the chance to encounter non-newtonian fluid" all capped off with drinks and discussion. And the rest follow wacky geektastic suite. What does this all mean? No clue. But aren't you intrigued enough to drop 10 quid to find out? Knowing what Rothko's sound is like is worth the price of admission alone. For sure. (I've always imagined it as the voice of a chainsmoking humpback whale slowed down by a hundred. Let me know if that's close)

(Thanks Alom. You rule)

Periodic showering

A while back we blogged about The Elements, that great periodic table song. But how fabulous is this? If you like singing in the shower, you can sing the song in the privacy of your periodic table shower curtain. DUDE. Or if that's a bit too Bert and Ernie/rubber ducky for your tastes, you can rap to the Chemical Calisthenics song. Does life get more complete and perfect than this? Maybe if you have a pair of periodic table socks waiting to adorn your freshly scrubbed feet.

(Thanks Elizabeth!)

Wherefore Amanda Congdon?

No doubt dorky but babe-a-licious star Amanda Congdon had a huge role in Rocketboom's rise to vlogging fame. Which is why we all held our breath to see where everyone would land after the two parted ways in a bitchy fiasco last June.

Since then Rocketboom's got a slew of less-than-worthy ladies running the show. Yuck yuck and yuck. It used to feel like watching those hilarious skits in friday assembly. Now it's like watching your wanna-be-cool in-law suck at charades.

And wherefore Amanda? She's on the move, recording her roadtrip out west as she goes: www.AmandaAcrossAmerica.com. The result combines google maps, vlogging, flickr, and random peeps from across the nation. Basically, it's web 2.0 incarnate. Content ranges from didactic looks at biodiesel to meeting with local candid color.

Most impressive is the fact that she's gotten big institutions to fund her fun. Ford gave her an Escape Hybrid for her travels. And the Natural Resources Defense Council and Environmental Countdown have tossed her some monies for the gig. Kudos for winning over more mainstream monies to your cause Amanda. 

Want to get better mileage? Lose the spare tire

I've been eating large quantities of Halloween candy for the past couple of days. I make the same mistake every year; buying my supplies too soon, eating them all and then buying more. Anyway. According to a new study on fatness and fuel consumption, I might be paying at the pump for my indulgence. Because, you see, fat people weigh more, which takes more energy/fuel to move around.
Now maybe it's not very much more gas. If your average obese driver (clocking 12,00o miles/year) were to loose 100 pounds, they would save $40 dollars on gas, say the University of Illinois researchers. Considering that around 30% of American adults are obese, and 70% of the country's 300 million residents are adults (over 20), that leaves us with around 63 million obese American adults. If each one lost 100 pounds (though, admittedly not all obese people have that much to lose), then US annual gas consumption would drop by $2.5 billion dollars (at the current average of $2.20/gallon).

That's a lot of gas! And a lot more CO2! Fat people are causing global warming! If only the obese Americans would drop a few, we could stop this terrifying march towards ecological disaster!

Of course one of the best ways to lose weight is to, um, stop driving your car everywhere and walk or bike. Which would, um, lower your fuel consumption, too. But the math on that is far less fun to compute.

Hwang I-suck but this time in a funny way

KIDS, SCIENCE IS SO MUCH FUN. IT MAKES ME SO HAPPY. YOU GET TO WEAR BABY BLUE PIPETTING HOODIES AND DEAL WITH MAFIYA.
So let's say you were outed as being The Worst Scientist of all time for your dodgey ethics that lost you the cheesyass title "Supreme Scientist" - said dodginess coming down to lying in one of the most prestigious scientific journals about cloning human embryonic stem cells. Said lie dashing the hopes of countless long-suffering souls who for once had a hope of a cure for the following diseases that put loved ones through the ringer: Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, heart disease, stroke, arthritis, diabetes, and spinal cord damage. Said crime leading to your indictment last May for fraud, embezzlement, ethical breaches and other charges of eviltude.

Now that's a sharp descent into the more reviled depths of shame. But Woo-Suk just hung himself again. He used private donations to BUY MAMMOTH PARTS FROM THE RUSSIAN MAFIA. You can't make up stuff this good. From All Headline News:

"Some of the money was spent in contacting the Russia Mafia as we tried to clone mammoths," Hwang told the court during a hearing on Tuesday. "But you can't say that (on the expense claim), so we expensed it as money for cows for experiment."

That's right. The black market mammoth bits, from which he wanted to clone the beastie, went down in the books as "cows". While we're visiting the organized crime extinct/endangered animal connection, who's to say he didn't get black rhino tusks from the Hong Kong triads and expense them as "meds"? Or Bison bits from the Hell's Angels being written off as "hogs."

Nice one Arry

THESE GUYS WOULD FIT UNDER THE CHANDELIERS NO PROBLEM. (PHOTO: PAT-SWAN)

There is an exhibition being set up at the moment at Buckingham Palace and I really want to go. It's meant to celebrate and inspire young scientists, but I can't go because I'm not on the exclusive list of  aspiring scientist schoolkids. How unfair is that. Ok, so all this stuff was part of the Royal Society's summer exhibition so I could have gone to see it then, but how often do you get to see a Spitfire-sized Pterosaur (aka Pterodactyl) in a glistening ballroom full of chandeliers? The dinosaur is a Arambourgiania philadelphiae, nicknamed Arry (this will appeal to all Frank Bruno fans out there), and he is being wrestled into place by two scientists. These two scientists are highly educated, intelligent men, but this hasn't stopped the palace staff dubbing them "Pterosaur Bob" and "Pterosaur Dave". How good is that. Makes me want to go even more.

Via The Guardian.

Red river Yellow river?

The Yellow River isn't actually yellow, it's a murky rivery type of colour. Or at least it was until a half-mile stretch of it turned red yesterday. Something unpleasant got dumped in the river (which is a source of drinking water for millions) and turned it red. They think it was either warm water dyed red by central heating companies to stop people stealing and drinking it (yuk), nutrient rich sewage that caused a red algae bloom in the river (double yuk), or industrial toxins (triple yuk). Either way, it's not good. Someone needs to get that fixed.

Via Yahoo! News. PHOTO BORROWED FROM CBS NEWS.

If Ester Williams was a science teacher...

Here it is folks. Mitosis as you've never seen it before. In a pool. With UC San Francisco grad students, pool noodle spindle fibers, and the Blue Danube waltz.

Warning: using cell phones near testicles could endanger sperm

Extensive use of cell phones could jeopardize male fertility, according to a study of 364 men. In a paper to be presented at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine in New Orleans, a team of doctors found that men who talked on their phones more than 4 hours a day had significantly fewer live sperm/ml than those who talked less. There seemed to be a *dose-dependent effect (ie those who talked least had best sperm, medium had medium sperm and blabber mouths had worst), though the overall trend wasn't significant. Almost all men, regardless of cell-time, had sperm counts above the 20 million/ml mark, which is the low mark for normal fertility.

Sperm quality is affected by a number of factors, the best known being heat. Hot balls = bad sperm. That is why extensive use of laptops actually ON LAPS has been linked to poorer sperm quality. But see, you don't use a cell phone anywhere near the sensitive area in question...so what's the mechanism? The radiation/heat does travel, but you wouldn't think it could make it down there with enough intensity to DO anything. Maybe the proximity of the storage location - pockets etc - has something to do with it. Whatever.

*when dealing with these sometimes laughable correlation studies one must be careful. In this instance couldn't it be that men who talk on their cell phones that long often have weird high pressure jobs, travel a lot or some other thing in common that affects sperm quality? We don't know, because this is just a correlation. Showing a dose-dependent affect - ie the more of X results in more/less of Y - can really bolster the claim. It's still not causation, it's still not a controlled study, but it's more than just correlation. Of course in this case the pattern was not significant.

A whale of a time

I tried and failed last week to write a post about Iceland's decision to resume commercial whaling (they've gone and done it now, anyway). After reading this fabulous article from the Guardian, I was too depressed. I had planned to point out that Icelandic seamen killed 39 whales under scientific permits last year, the exact same number they are allowed for commercial hunts this year (9 red-listed fin whales and 30 minke whales). I was going to point out that Japan killed a whopping 1078 minke whales, 50 bryde whales and 10 fin whales in the 2005/06, season. I was going to suggest that, owing to the small increase in numbers (from 39 to 78), it wasn't that big a deal.

And you know, it might be okay to take an extra 30 minke whales from Iceland's waters. The safety of catching fin whales is more dubious, but hey, who knows? We have little rock-solid data on sustainable harvest and viable populations sizes for any whale species. If scientists could say that certain populations of whales were okay to harvest, I'd be ALL FOR IT (nicer killing methods would be a total bonus, though). But the science suggests cautions. The science suggest we know far too little to make these decisions. The science suggests that it will take more than a 21 year moratorium to give whales a chance to rebound after decades of intense over-harvesting.

What depresses me is not that more of these beautiful, endangered creatures are to suffer inhumane deaths on the high seas. What depresses me is that these people are ignoring science. And even simple economics. There is literally no market for whale meat - even in Iceland and Japan. If you believe media reports, both countries have vast freezers stuffed with unsaleable meat. The truth is that Japan and Iceland (and Norway, though they never bothered to join the IWC and have whaled all the while) are not upholding cultural traditions, keeping viable businesses alive or even securing food sources. They are asserting sovereignty over their fishing rights, their waters, their economies, their morals and their politics. No other country is going to tell THEM what to do. Mere "SCIENCE" certainly won't dictate policy. In the end, whales are caught in the crossfire of a political brouhaha that has much more to do with penis size than eating blubber.