Monarchs in Hawaii--Who Knew?

A reminder that it's all too easy for the media and its audience to become focused on certain undeniable truths, so narrowly focused that the larger truth is completely obscured.  Such is the case with monarch butterflies.  We know they're endangered, put at risk because farmers use herbicides and eliminate the field boundaries where milkweeds used to grow.  We know they're beautiful, and anything beautiful and endangered must be rescued.

But this column by an entomologist in today's Post reveals that monarchs are in Hawaii, Tahiti, Australia and New Zealand. It's the monarchs migrating to and from Mexico which are stressed,  but apparently millions winter in California. 

Sensationalist Headlines

The BBC website has a post on a "alien star" having "buzzed" the sun.  Apparently 70,000 years ago it may have come within 1 light year of the sun.  Now that's real close, after all Pluto is all of 13.5 light hours from the sun.  So it's exactly like this foreign star has buzzed an airfield (from WWII movies I recall buzzing as coming close enough to the control tower to aggravate the officer on duty).

And What's Your Definition of Catastrophic?

This isn't, according to scientists studying the possible effects of an eruption from Yellowstone:

"While a supereruption hasn't occurred at Yellowstone since 640,000 years ago, in the event that one happens again in the next few centuries, sleep soundly knowing that the effects would not be catastrophic. The worst you can expect is reduced traction on roads, shorted-out electrical transformers and respiratory problems, as well as damage to buildings, blocked sewer and water lines, and disruption of livestock and crop production.

3 feet of ash within 300 miles of Yellowstone, only an inch in NYC.

Our Couch Potato Dogs

Modern Farmer reports on research that says "agility dogs" (i.e. farm dogs) do better on tests than do "companion dogs" (i.e., those dogs who spend their lives on the couch alongside their masters).  Must be why Walt Jeffries boasts of his talking dogs.

Pseudo Science and Whole Foods

As a stockholder in Whole Foods (it's done well over the last decade or so) I welcome all positive news for the company.  So I shouldn't promote this article  (Hat tip-kottke.org) which compares the pseudo-science found in the sales pitch for some WF products to creationism and wonders why crunchies get upset about the latter but not the former.

However, I like the article.  It's always good to mock oneself.

On the Importance of Sex

For science.

Josh Marshall's TPM Blog has a message from a reader asserting the importance of "sexy science" to raise the interest level and the dollars for all science. 

A USDA Benefactor of Humanity Dies

Bet you didn't think anyone in USDA ever benefited humanity?  Well, Ruth Benerito was the scientist who's given credit for permanent press.  Link is to her NYTimes obit at age 97.   Wikipedia said she had 55 patents.

I can't resist noting that USDA laboratories are now shutdown, thanks to a certain party.

Did ARS Sponsor This Cutting-Edge Research?

(The answer is "no", but I need a title.)

What's the research?

"The probability prize was awarded to animal scientists at Scotland's Rural College for making two related discoveries. "First, that the longer a cow has been lying down, the more likely that cow will soon stand up," read their citation. "And second, that once a cow stands up, you cannot easily predict how soon that cow will lie down again."

From the Ig Nobel Awards, via University Diary.

The Importance of What's Underneath

MIT's Technology Review reports on research explaining "fairy circles"., at least those in grassland mostly in South Africa.  It seems it's caused by competition among plant roots.

RSS Feeds and GMO Technology

Just trying to get ready for the end of Google Reader, meaning I'm looking at some stuff which has remained unread. 

Predictably some of the food movement have attacked the award of the prize to Monsanto scientist, claiming that the technology doesn't increase food supply or help with nutritious or sustainable food.  Accepting that position for sake of argument, genetic modification will still prove its worth, as in this case of obtaining resistance to wheat rust.

Douthat: Sci-Fi Optimism and Worldly Pessimism

Ross Douthat at the Times passes on Boston and terrorists in favor of musing about extra terrestial worlds.

He finds optimism in the 1950's science fiction--we confidently expected to visit other worlds and other galaxies--which has faded today and hopes that some of that optimism can be refound.

I was a reader of the old-time science fiction: Clarke, Heinlein, Pohl, Asimov, et. al.  I loved it.  And I agree we were optimistic then, at least if we didn't blow ourselves up (see "A Canticle for Leibowitz).  Remembering those times though  I think we were more pessimistic about the fate of the "Third World", as we used to call the recently freed colonies, at least we were by the middle 60's when the first flush of enthusiasm about decolonization had passed.  The feeling led into the gloom and doom of the running out of resources crowd, the fear that we'd never feed the booming population, etc. 

So the passage of 50 years has produced surprises: we've not been to the moon for many years, humans have never visited Mars.  On the other hand the progress made by developing nations is still startling to me. 

Sociophysicist

That's a new specialty on me, but Technology Review explains here.  (People using statistics on social patterns.)

Maybe related to this ( linguisticphysicist)  (applying statistics to language patterns).

[Updated with second paragraph]

Abundance: the Book

Reading Abundance, the Future is Better Than You Think, by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler. It's an easy read, bringing into one place descriptions of a lot of the recent innovations which the authors believe will make the future better than the present.

Unfortunately, from my view, because they cover so much ground, everything from 3-D printing to DIY bioengineering to agriculture, they fall victim to some fads, including Despommiers and his vertical farming.  In the appendices they include references for some of the ideas found in the text: for vertical farming it's a url from www.the-edison-lightbulb.com, a website containing ideas mostly from the young.  The vertical farming bit is a Chicago fifth graders pitch for vertical farming.  Pretty sad.

Having dissed that portion of the book, the bulk of it is a fast overview of all the reasons to be optimistic about everything.  I strongly recommend it if you're depressed about the future, though I wouldn't bet on the accuracy of any specific ino.  (Diamandis offered the "X Prize" for private spaceships.)

Weather Forecasts for the Sun

Seemingly we've progressed to the point where we're doing weather forecasts for the sun, at least that's how I read this MSNBC report.

Lonesome George: RIP

Via NYTimes, the last Galapagos tortoise of his subspecies is dead.

When Women Didn't Do Science and Technology

How short a time that was. A post from the winner of the Google Science Fair--all three winners were female, meeting the President.

Eliminating Earmarks = Eliminating Ag Research?

That's from Farm Policy: "Sen. Stabenow noted that, “And in the current budget situation, the way we fund ag research has been eliminated, a lot of that through direct funding to universities and through community designations and so on, what’s been called earmarks in the past. And that’s fine to change that structure, but it wasn’t replaced with anything. And so we’ve seen huge cuts in the current budget that are very concerning to me."

Surprising Science Fact(?) of the Day

:Some of the scholarly literature suggests that the economic damage resulting from hurricanes is a function of wind speeds raised to the eighth power."

That's from Nathan Silver at the Times blogging about the media coverage of Hurricane Irene. 

History Makes a Difference: Bees and Levy Flight

Once, long ago, I was good at math.  No longer.  But I still have a soft spot for math-like writing.  Here's a Technology Review post on the math describing how bees search for nectar sources.  It's something called "Levy Flight", described as:

The most effective way to comb an area is to search it at random using jumps that vary in length according to a power law.

But new research has shown while that works for cases where you just have nectar sources spread out in space, if you introduce a third variable, a predator, the pattern is changed as the bees adjust their flight patterns to avoid the predator.  In short: history makes a difference.

The World Is Moving Too Fast, I Want to Get Off

Seems only yesterday I was reading about quantum physics, and something called entanglement, and how it might lead to faster computers some time in the future.One of those things you mentally file in the "don't have to worry about this, after my expiration date" folder.

Now comes the Technology Review  which posts this--Lockheed Martin just spent $10 million of its hard-earned dollars (they do some work for DOD so some of those dollars used to be yours and mine) for a "quantum computing system".