SCIENCE: Cayman Vents Are World’s Hottest. “The researchers say the structures are shooting jets of mineral-rich water more than a kilometre into the ocean above. The vents’ features suggest the water is warmer than 450C – hot enough to melt lead. Nevertheless, the springs are teeming with new species including a type of pale shrimp with a light sensing organ on its back.”
Archive for 2012
January 12, 2012
LOVE IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: “How Can I Date While Unemployed?”
AT AMAZON, markdowns on Patio, Lawn & Garden.
EXERCISE NEWS: Exercise Hormone May Fight Obesity and Diabetes. “A newly discovered hormone produced in response to exercise may be turning people’s white fat brown, a groundbreaking new study suggests, and in the process lessening their susceptibility to obesity, diabetes and other health problems. The study, published on Wednesday in Nature and led by researchers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, provides remarkable new insights into how exercise affects the body at a cellular level.”
I hope this pans out, but some people are skeptical. “This study confirms what the experts— and many promoters of the healthy-looking lifestyle — dearly want to believe.”
TOO BAD WE DON’T HAVE, I DUNNO, A PIPELINE FROM CANADA OR SOMETHING: Systematic Shutdown Of (2.4MM Barrels Per Day) Nigerian Oil Ahead.
NEWS FROM SCIENCE: Fathers trying to get tenure face stress.
UPDATE: A reader emails: “About fathers and tenure and stress: Cry me a river and try the private sector. I’m a VP at a fairly widely known venture-backed startup. I work long hours, rarely see my 7 month old daughter, have no job security, high blood pressure, and am directly responsible not just for my own livelihood and family, but the livelihoods and families of 65 other people. If we’re lucky, we’ll turn profitable. If not, we’re all out and starting again. No pressure.”
ON AVERAGE, Every Star Has At Least One Planet, New Analysis Shows. “Each star in the Milky Way shines its light upon at least one companion planet, according to a new analysis that suddenly renders exoplanets commonplace, the rule rather than the exception. This means there are billions of worlds just in our corner of the cosmos. This is a major shift from just a few years ago, when many scientists thought planets were tricky to make, and therefore special things. Now we know they’re more common than stars themselves.”
MORE BLOG/TEA PARTY TRIUMPHALISM: Reuters Discovers “Operation Counterweight.”
FARHAD MANJOO: Google’s disastrous decision to muck up its search results with stuff from your social network.
I’ve noticed more and more unforced errors of the change-for-the-sake-of-change type from Google. They’re not, it seems to me, making changes based on user needs, they’re making changes to keep Google employees busy.
HOW TO DISAPPEAR COMPLETELY from the Internet.
SPENGLER: Recall Notice For The Turkish Model. “Among all the dumb things said about the so-called Arab Spring last year, perhaps the dumbest was the idea that the new democracies of the Arab world might follow the Turkish model. In fact, if you had invested in the Turkish model (that is, in the Turkish stock market) at the outbreak of the Arab revolts, you would have lost about half your money. If you leave your money in Turkey, you probably will lose the rest of it. Turkey is not a model. It is a bubble, and it is bursting, starting with the stock market and national currency. . . . I predict that Turkey’s economic crisis will undermine the stability of the Turkish state as well, leaving the Muslim world without a single enclave of stability from the Libyan-Algerian border to China’s Xinjiang province.”
RED TAILS: The George Lucas project that Hollywood wouldn’t touch. “Hopefully the big studios don’t think that depicting African American men fighting against European fascism in World War II simply makes for something incomprehensible.”
IRAN SEEKS LIFELINE in Latin America: An increasingly desperate regime hunts for friends.
RESVERATROL AND RESEARCH FRAUD: Not sure how much, if at all, this undercuts the basic resveratrol claim but I’m going to see if I can find out more.
UPDATE: Lots of thoughts on what this means from Derek Lowe. “Now for the last big issue: what does this do to the whole resveratrol/sirtuin field? Not as much as you might think. As mentioned above, Das really doesn’t seem to have been that big a figure in it, despite cranking out the publications, and a lot of interesting (although often confusing) work has come from a variety of other labs. The people who did this study in humans, for example, are (to the best of my knowledge) above reproach. But (as that post shows in its various links), there’s a lot of conflicting data about resveratrol in animal models. The whole topic is deeply confusing. But this UConn/Das business does not help clear anything up, not at all – it’s a big bucket of mud and slop dumped into the tank, which is just what we didn’t need.”
IN THE MAIL: The Pillars of Hercules.
#GREENFAIL: Green Tech Plus Red Tape Yields No Hope. “According to the article, the solar panels in Death Valley have been unplugged for at least two-and-a-half years due to the various agencies tripping over one another . . . . And in the meantime, one has to wonder: if the wrangling, process crazed bureaucrats wrestling with the conflicting, nonsensical regulations and requirements issued by various state, local and federal bureaucracies can’t work out reasonable solutions to the relatively simple question involved in a no-brain solar installation in the desert, what chance is there that these same bureaucracies will redesign the American energy grid and take us to the low carbon utopia that always seems just out of reach?”
PROBABLY: Will Bain-Bashing Backfire And Help Romney?
UPDATE: Reader Donald Barnhart writes: “Maybe the Democrats should run on this question: Do you want a guy with experience firing people to go to Washington and… fire some people?” I think they’re smart enough to avoid that approach. . . .
COATS FOR THE COLD: Today Only: Up To 75% Off On Select Outerwear. For men and women.
BLOG TRIUMPHALISM: Volokh Conspiracy Scoops Drudge, The Atlantic, and Reuters by … Two Years.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The Value Gap: Americans Increasingly Question The Cost Of Going To College. “The annual price tag for a college credential has risen about three times as fast as inflation, and there is no sign that it’s slowing down. In the last decade alone, tuition rates at public colleges and universities, which enroll about 80 percent of American students, rose by an average of 5.6 percentage points above inflation every year. . . . College presidents seem tone-deaf to those concerns. In a companion survey conducted with The Chronicle, three-fourths of college leaders said the system was providing a good or excellent value.”
RADLEY BALKO: Death In The Devil’s Chair: Florida Man’s Pepper Spray Death Raises Questions About Jail Abuse. Those responsible should be executed in precisely the same fashion.
#OCCUPYFAIL: Occupy Movement’s Intellectual Founder Won’t Say No To Wall Street Cash. Of course not. The Occupy movement, from the perspective of Democratic pols, is just a bit of pitchfork-rattling to ensure that the contributions keep coming.