Is it about to blow again? At least it’s unlikely to be as big as the event that wiped the Minoans.
Category Archives: Science And Society
Nitrates And Nitrites
…a 2005 study by scientists with the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute with investigators supported by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, found that sodium nitrite infusions led to the production of nitric oxide which increased blood flow and protected the hearts and livers in mice undergoing experimental heart attacks and liver injuries, reducing heart muscle and liver tissue damage.
All of this experimental research is preliminary but does illustrate that in the past 15 years, “we’ve gone from considering all of these things to be toxic and carcinogenic to realizing that [nitrites are] playing a fundamental homeostatic role,” said Dr. Ferric Fang, M.D., professor of laboratory medicine and microbiology at the University of Washington in Seattle. They’re a normal, natural part of a healthy body and not chemicals to fear.
So, hotdogs and processed meats are condemned as junk food because they contain nitrates, which they don’t, while vegetables are declared health food because they’re free from the same chemicals, which they’re not. It may be awhile before people will get to the point of calling bacon and hotdogs health food.
Woody Allen’s notion in Sleeper is looking more and more prophetic.
[Update mid morning]
Some disgusting anti-bacon propaganda.
Angry Birds
Real Climate Science
This is what it looks like:
Although the origin of these YDB markers remains speculative, any viable hypothesis must account for coeval abundance peaks in NDs, magnetic impact spherules, CSps, and charcoal in Lake Cuitzeo, along with apparently synchronous peaks at other sites, spanning a wide area of Earth’s surface. Multiple hypotheses have been proposed to explain these YDB peaks in markers, and all but one can be rejected. For example, the magnetic impact spherules and NDs cannot result from the influx of cosmic material or from any known regular terrestrial mechanism, including wildfires, volcanism, anthropogenesis, or alternatively, misidentification of proxies. Currently, only one known event, a cosmic impact, can explain the diverse, widely distributed assemblage of proxies. In the entire geologic record, there are only two known continent-wide layers with abundance peaks in NDs, impact spherules, CSps, and aciniform soot, and those are the KPg impact boundary at 65 Ma and the YDB boundary at 12.9 ka.
And note, this, like volcanic events, isn’t the sort of thing amenable to modeling.
Global Warming
Does it drive people nuts? What can’t it do?
Not clear, though, what’s cause and what’s effect.
Advice For The Ladies
If you’re concerned about your man’s heart health, give him what he needs (it’s good for you, too).
“Green” And Wasteful
The high cost of “clean” energy.
That’s what happens when you have scientific and economic illiterates making decisions about how to spend other peoples’ money.
More Scientists
Do we really need them? I don’t know, but if so, spending money on NASA isn’t the way to do it, at least not intrinsically.
Vitamin D
Could it prevent Alzheimers? Looks like there are a lot of reasons to be taking it.
Gas Prices
This is going to be fodder for some devastating campaign ads this fall. As I’ve said before, they should end with the tag line: “Obama got what he wanted. Did you?”
Via VDH, who has a lot more thoughts.
[Update a while later]
Sorry, link was missing originally. It’s there now.