Ankh's Mostly Science Stuff

Found this great tag on a portible toilet in Nashville.



Thank you Adult Swim for ATHF.

That whaddyacallit that's growing on Mount St. Helens — what DO you call it? Even Shakespeare himself might have trouble figuring out what's in a name.

It's been called the "blister," "wart," "thing" and "lobe" since it appeared last month in the crater of the reanimated Mount St. Helens volcano. One researcher referred to it as "an uplift," before most everyone in the know agreed it must be a dome.

Maybe they should just name it "Mt. St. Helens Volcano Lava Dome (current)"

From Yahoo Science - AP

Imagine searching the Internet and being able to restrict your results to academic texts. Today Google launched a free search engine that aims to do just that. Google Scholar searches only journal articles, theses, books, preprints, and technical reports across any area of research.

A test version of the search engine is available at http://scholar.google.com, so you can try it out. In a search for the phrase "human genome", for example, a normal Google web search throws back 450,000 or so hits, with genome centres and databases and other websites ranked top.

This is exciting, since there will be less clutter in the search for scientific knowledge now as the top results will be from actual scientific papers/journals/books. As a test, I did a google scholar search for "denver fluid injection earthquake" and came back with only 113 results while a regular google search returned 924 results.

Story from Nature.

In the growing debate about when people first appeared on this continent, a leading archaeologist said Wednesday he has discovered what could be sooty evidence of human occupation in North America tens of thousands of years earlier than is commonly believed.

University of South Carolina archaeologist Al Goodyear said he has uncovered a layer of charcoal from a possible hearth or fire pit at a site near the Savannah River.

Samples from the layer have been laboratory-dated to more than 50,000 years old. Yet Goodyear stopped short of declaring it proof of the continent's earliest human occupation.

And thus the debate on when humans settled in North America continues, but this also could go along with the BBC story about brown bears migrating through Canada at a much earlier date.

Fire Pit story from Yahoo - Science AP.

An earthquake near the Colorado-Utah border Saturday night might have been caused by a government agency injecting brine 14,000 feet into the earth.

“We have a seismic network set up for measuring and recording any events associated with the injection process, and it appears this earthquake was one probably associated with that process,” said Andy Nichols, manager of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation facility that injects 230 gallons of salt per minute into deep wells in the Paradox Valley Area.

This reminds me of some of my undergrad geology classes where we talked about fault reactivation due to fluid injections. I also wonder if Katys parents felt this quake, as they are within the area where the quake happened.

From the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel.

Lawyers for a Georgia school district and a group of parents clashed on Monday over the constitutionality of placing stickers that challenge the theory of evolution on textbooks.

Cobb County's school board, which placed the disclaimers on biology books in 2002 at the behest of hundreds of parents, many of them religious conservatives, rejected suggestions it had promoted religion in its classrooms in violation of the constitutional principle of separation of church and state.

The stickers read: "This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered."

I was stunned when I read this article, to think that religious conservatives (fundamentalists) are trying to bring around the teaching of creationism instead of evolutionism. In my mind, this rings close to the John Scopes vs State of Tennessee trial of the 1920s. For those who are unfimiliar with the Scopes trial, I am including the following information from the UMKC School of Law:

Scopes was convicted of a violation of chapter 27 of the Acts of 1925, for that he did teach in the public schools of Rhea county a certain theory that denied the story of the divine creation of man, as taught in the Bible, and did teach instead thereof that man had descended from a lower order of animals. After a verdict of guilty by the jury, the trial judge imposed a fine of $ 100, and Scopes brought the case to this court by an appeal in the nature of a writ of error.

Story about the Georgia case is from Yahoo - Science Reuters.

Since William Gibson is now blogging again (after a break of over a little more than a year), I have added a link to his blog under the Other Links section.

I had started a great post, but then my computer crashed and I lost it all. Figures, but at least today is Friday and I don't have to work on Monday of next week.

But here were some of the stories I was posting about.

Grímsvötn volcano is erupting in underneath a glacier in Iceland. This is the 4th eruption in 11 years for this volcano which is along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge between the North American Plate and the Eurasian Plate.

Nature has an article about Earth's first experiment with nuclear power. Mind you, this experiment took place 2 billion years ago in the Oklo region of Gabon in Africa. I had read a great article by Dr. Robert Loss of Curtin University in Perth.

According to Bishop Usher, the Earth just turned 6010 years old this past October 23. And in 1925 during the Scopes Trial (State of Tennessee vs John Scopes, 1925) William Jennings Bryan brought this information as fact and evidence before the court. Maybe someone should have whacked Mr. Bryan over the head with a piece of the Ordivician-Cambrian rock (dolomite, limestone, shale chert, siltstone or sandstone) of the Dayton, Tn area.

And now for something that hasn't been in the news, but has always interested me. I also bring this up as Katy and I are debating on heading to this area next year for our honeymoon. Hadrian's Wall in Scotland is a fascinating piece of work by the Roman Empire at its northern extent in the British Isles. What were the Romans trying to keep in, or who were they trying to keep out? I guess we will really never know the answer to this question. Also, this site has some more great information regarding Hadrian's Wall.

And on that note, I will leave you with this for today. I have some more news to post, but this would be of the real non-science type and that will be for a different day and time.

//ankh (summoner of squirrels)

So, it has been a while since I posted, a little over a month actually. Mt. St. Helens has started its new lava dome building process. Information about the lava dome building and updates on other volcanoes in the Cascade Range can be found at the USGS. There is also a great picture of the vent in the glacial ice at Mt. St. Helens.

Pictures of Titan are coming back from Cassini spacecraft and are amazing everyone. I can't wait until we get data back from the Huygens probe that is riding along with Cassini.

I will be following up with more, but work beckons.