Increased CO2 Fuels Poison Ivy Growth: I Guess We Kinda Had This Coming

by Ethan on April 23rd, 2009

So, when I first learned about global warming in 3rd grade or so, I figured it just meant that everywhere on Earth would get a little hotter. That was bad enough, since I grew up in the southeastern US where summers were already hot enough to make the backs of your hands sweat, and snow was a rare treat.

Of course, it’s not that simple–”Global Warming” got renamed ‘Global Climate Change” for a reason. Rising sea levels, coral reef bleaching, droughts, unusually cold winter storms, bizarre urban tornadoes–there’s a whole cornucopia of ripple effects, many of which are obvious in hindsight, but weren’t at the top of the common-sense list of things global climate change might do.

Now we can add healthier, itchier poison ivy to the shit list:

…carbon dioxide is, basically, plant food. I’m told that rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere affect different plants in different ways, but poison ivy is definitely one of the winners of global warming. For this unpleasant little weed, more CO2 seems to mean more growth.

…not only is poison ivy growing fat and happy on the spoils of our carbon emissions, but that plants getting more CO2 also produce more, and stronger, levels of urushiol—the toxin that makes the ivy so darned appealing to begin with.

All I have to add is: That fucking sucks.

When Science meets Drinking

by Ethan on January 12th, 2009

Man, this made me happy. Spagghetilogic got bored over the holidays, and fed a bunch of cocktail recipes into PLYLIP to get a genuine phylogenetic tree, treating each ingredient as a gene or marker. What’s interesting is that there are a couple of cases of convergent evolution, mimicry, and so forth.

To wit:

Note that you can make out several different “kingdoms” of drinks after a close look at the tree. I can make out the Gin kingdom, the Orange Juice kingdom, and the Amaretto kingdom, for starters. Then we have the outliers, like a 110 in the Shade, which nobody in his right mind would drink. These are the platypuses and slime molds of the drink world.

Makes me wan to mix up a bunch of these to study their, err, gross morphology.

AWOL

by Ethan on June 27th, 2008

So, anyone who reads this blog may have noticed that lately there hasn’t been much to read. I’m in the middle of a sooner than expected move. It’s just across town, but it’s still a hassle. I’ll be back next week, once the utilities are transfered and the boxes are stacked somewhere where I can ignore them and blog.

Good PR Indeed

by Ethan on May 29th, 2008

After decades of running of being a terrible magazine, perennial Mad Magazine imitator Cracked has metamorphisized  into a sometimes funny, sometimes annoying web publication. Check out their 6 Most Badass Stunts Ever Pulled in the Name of Science, or at least the first page. No. 5, “Drs. Warren and Barry Marshall Drink Stomach-Eating Germs,” is one of my favorite semi-apocryphal science stories, second only to the laboratory urban legend about the undergrad who inadvertently overfilled an autoclave with still-frozen severed monkey heads.

Newsflash

by Ethan on May 28th, 2008

Making cyborg monkeys that can perform complex tasks via robotic arms wired directly into their brains is NOT OK. Not only are these folks going to have PETA all up on their asses, eventually the monkeys themselves will take their terrible revenge. Consider this your preemptive ‘I told you so.’

Via Boing Boing.

The Right Wing Says Soy Makes You Gay

by Ethan on May 17th, 2008

Thanks to Bria for sending this my way. The article is old, but it’s some pretty amazing fear-mongering from a popular right-wing news blog thing. I’d never heard of ‘em before, but Wikipedia says it’s big. The guy says he’s warning parents about the risks of endocrine disrupters, but he gets it all wrong. For starters, apparently soy foods are the only source of estrogen mimics out there. Not biphenol-a, not DDT, not whatever DES might still be floating around out there. Just soy. Take a look:

Soy is feminizing, and commonly leads to a decrease in the size of the penis, sexual confusion and homosexuality. That’s why most of the medical (not socio-spiritual) blame for today’s rise in homosexuality must fall upon the rise in soy formula and other soy products. (Most babies are bottle-fed during some part of their infancy, and one-fourth of them are getting soy milk!) Homosexuals often argue that their homosexuality is inborn because “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t homosexual.” No, homosexuality is always deviant. But now many of them can truthfully say that they can’t remember a time when excess estrogen wasn’t influencing them.

So, what is all that hippy food doing to our children? He mentions the toll endocrine disruptor can do to one’s fertility, and the sharp uptick in cancer amongst people who have been exposed to synthetic estrogens (not naturally-occurring phytoestrogens, like those in soy) early in life. But all of that pales in comparison to the fear of effeminizing little boys. And, apparently, here’s not difference between beingintersex, being a ‘feminine male’ and being gay. No matter that the assertion that gay men have a testosterone deficiency/estrogen surplus was disproved the moment someone developed a handy way to test hormone levels. Giving gay men extra testosterone just makes them want to have more gay sex, since testosterone tends to up your sex drive.

Honestly, I couldn’t stomach reading all 5 parts. I have a short attention span, and I’d need to artificially extend it to wade through all that psudoscience. Plus I can’t even figure out who this guy’s misinterpreting, because all his citation either lead back to the home page of the site, or to a 404 error. Which I guess says it all.

Wind Power, Part One

by Ethan on May 15th, 2008

Wired Science posted Monday about a new Department of Energy report that suggests the US could get 20% of its on-grid electricity from wind power by 2030. The report suggest that as it stands now, wind power and solar thermal power* are the only zero-emission power sources ready to be scaled up in a major way.

Personally, I’m not convinced the current big-power-plant-supports-a-large-area model is worth switching to new energy sources. Demanding that any new technology be able to produce large amounts of power in one spot overshadows technologies that can provide just enough power on the spot. Wind power may be able to do both.

The problem with wind power, traditionally, has been that any turbine large enough to produce significant amounts of power was too heavy to turn at all unless the wind was very, very strong. Using lighter weigh materials for the blades has helped significantly, but I think these guys have the right idea. Basically, they’ve strung together dozens of small turbines in parallel. Each makes a small amount of power, which adds up to some pretty significant voltage. They claim that, in high wind, their rig can blow out a bank of car headlights like flashbulbs. They’ve patented their design, but the Make blog is calling for someone to come up with a homemade version, since the design is basically a bunch of model airplane propellers strung along a pole.

*as opposed to solar photovoltaic power, made with solar panels. I’ve got an upcoming post planned on those two.

I Want One of These So Badly

by Ethan on May 11th, 2008

Apparently, this isn’t the first commercial attempt at making a wristwatch/cellphone combo, but it is the first I’ve seen. And I want it very, very badly. Dick Tracy watches don’t have quite the same ‘ok, we’re officially living in the future’ cache that flying cars would carry, but they come damn close. And at $300, it’s not even that expensive for a fancy cellphone. I hope other people buy them, so in a few more iterations, there’ll be a knockoff I can afford.

Global Warming Smackdown

by Ethan on May 8th, 2008

From the Wired Science blog, a group of climate scientists recently challenged their competition to a bet. On Realclimate.org, a group of 6 global warming believers offered 2500 Euros to the authors of a recent Nature paper if, by 2010, their global cooling hypothesis pans out. There was some serious smack talking in the offer:

That this cooling would just be a temporary blip and would change nothing about global warming goes without saying and has been amply discussed elsewhere (e.g. here). But another question has been rarely discussed: will this forecast turn out to be correct? We think not – and we are prepared to bet serious money on this. We have double-checked with the authors: they say they really mean this as a serious forecast, not just as a methodological experiment. If the authors of the paper really believe that their forecast has a greater than 50% chance of being correct, then they should accept our offer of a bet; it should be easy money for them. If they do not accept our bet, then we must question how much faith they really have in their own forecast.

I hope they take ‘em up on it. If the future of the Earth isn’t enough to keep your interest, maybe a large-sum professional wager can do it.

Cocktail Party Bibliography: The Homophobia Study

by Ethan on May 8th, 2008

For years now,  the UGA homopobia study has been one of my favorite pieces of social science, but I’ve never bothered looking it up before. A friend of mine’s dad worked on it, so I first got the rundown from her. Now, I’d like to sum it up for you, and give y’all the citation for the original article in case you want to look it up. I think I’ll do this from time to time, post a review/summary of a study I love or hate.

Long story short, this study looked at homopohbia in men, and asked the question we’ve all been thinking: are homophobic guys secretly into men?

The short answer is yes.

The researchers took a number of men (all white; I assume they didn’t want to bother controlling for cultural differences) who described themselves as fully heterosexual in preference and experience. They had the subjects fill out a questionnaire which asked them how they’d feel if they found out various people around them were gay, if a guy were to hit on them, etc. Using the results of that questionnaire, they chose  2  study group:  35  men who  were  homophobic, and a control group of  29  who did not have negative  emotional responses to  homosexuality.

Then, the hooked their volunteers up to a plethysmograph (a loop that fits around the penis and measures changes in its circumfrence, as a proxy for sexual arousal) and showed them porn. Both groups had similar responses to straight porn and lesbian porn, but there was a distinct gap in the way they responded to gay male porn.

The non-homophobic men were pretty bereft of hard-ons, with 66% having ‘insignificant’ arousal. Out of the remaining third, 10% were moderately aroused, and 24% had definite boners.

The homophobic men were much more into it. A mere 20% of them had insignificant changes in their penis metrics, while 26% were moderately aroused and a whopping 54% were definitely turned on. That’s some serious statistical significance.

What’s better, when the participants were asked later which videos had aroused them, all participants gave answers that matched the peter-meter measurements, with one major exception: the homophobic men consistently underestimated their response to the gay porn. Either they were lying, or they were in enough denial to not notice they  were turned on despite having their pants around their ankles and a bonerometer on their dicks. You be the judge.

Now, before the gloating goes too far, there’s a couple of points I want to cover. It’s possible, though less likely, that the homophobic guys got hard-ons because the gay porn made them nervous, or because a bunch of them were exhibitionists. Also, the study tells us noting about homophobic women. And lastly, I’d be interested in seeing a breakdown by religion–I want to know if people who are told by their clergy that gay folks are going to hell really internalize that message all the way to their crotches.

Anyway, I couldn’t find the article anywhere on the open web, so I’ll just give you the citation:

Henry Adams, Lester Wright Jr. & Bethany Lohr. “Is homophobia associated with homosexual arousal?”, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 105 (1996), P. 440-445

Next time you find yourself arguing with a homophobe, you’ll have a handy trump card.
You can thanks me later.