text:
Omid Kokabee is a physicist and PhD student who sat in front of me in class. He worked on a project much like mine, in the same field, on the same degree, and we even started at the same time. That was four years ago. I'm still here. He went home to Iran to visit his family in January of 2011 and never came back.
The cruel and evil authoritarian states of the world sometimes seem remote. We read about them in news reports. They murder and ruin the lives of people we never see or know. We know how terrible their crimes are, but it's all at a distance. This situation is as personal as a punch in the face.
Kokabee disappeared into thin air on his way back to Texas. Investigation by his American colleagues revealed that he was arrested at an airport in Iran. He was thrown into a prison in Tehran and left for over a year without charges.
Bewildered letters penned by Kokabee from his cell questioned the regime's coercion of his family and himself. He was not allowed a lawyer and openly threatened by the judge before charges were brought. Time went on and Kokabee kept sharp by teaching English, Spanish and physics to his fellow prisoners.
In the summer of 2012 he was convicted in Iran's kangaroo Revolutionary Court of communicating with a hostile government and receiving illegal earnings. These sham charges were brought by the government hoping to force Omid into collaborating with the regime's floundering physics efforts.
Nature reported that 10-15 other people were tried simultaneously, and all plead guilty to the surely fictional crime of collaborating with Israel's Mossad intelligence agency. Kokabee refused to speak.
For his defiance of the Iranian government's demands, Kokabee was sentenced to rot for a decade or more in jail. An extra sentence was tacked on for teaching those prison classes.
Omid was not a close acquaintance. But, the fact that the man who worked in the lab next door to mine every day disappeared into prison and never came back is jarring and incredible. I work closely with another Iranian. He no longer goes home to see his family.
It's not just this one case. Scientists, students, writers and peaceful protesters are held in prison by Iran and other repressive and authoritarian governments. It's a fate that reminds us that brutal and corrupt rulers still control parts of our world. What can we do? Collective pressure can bring hope: Iran's supreme court may take up an appeal of Kokabee's case.
It may not be popular for scientists to say this, but I will: Evil is real. We must fight to ensure it does not triumph.
(AP photo)
The bakery at most grocery stores is a minefield. Cakes to the left, muffins to the right, pastries dead ahead, and cookies... cookies everywhere. If you escape without making a purchase, congratulations, you have tenacious self-control. Or you were just lucky. But though your wallet and waistline won't take a hit, according to a leading psychological theory, your willpower will.
Originally put forth back in 1998 by Florida State psychologist Roy Baumeister, the notion of ego depletion states that self-control is a limited resource. Like a muscle, it can fatigue with use, and needs time to recharge. According to the theory, saying "no" to sweets in the grocery store will leave you temporarily vulnerable to subsequent temptations.
In the sixteen years since its inception, ego depletion has been tested and validated in a variety of situations. Psychologists emphasize its role in many arenas, such as dieting, athletics, and consumer behavior. Some even propose that willpower can be trained and strengthened via repeated use, again, just like a muscle.
But critics aren't so sure. They note that much of the research has been done on young, WEIRD (Western, Educated, and from Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic countries) college students, and thus may not carry over to the general population. They also suggest that the effect could benefit from publication bias, the tendency to only publish flashy or positive results. It is in this light that a team of psychologists recently attempted to replicate the ego depletion effect using the two most frequently used measures of self-control in scientific research. Their results were just published to PLoS ONE.
Four groups of participants took part in the study: two diverse groups from the general population with an average age in the mid-forties, and two more groups of young adults with an average age around 20. Each group was assigned to one task, either a grip challenge in which subjects had to hold a grip machine at 70% of their maximum grip strength for as long as possible, or a Stroop Test, in which subjects viewed color words on a computer (like 'green', 'yellow,' or 'blue') that appeared one at a time in a mismatched font color (for example, 'red' may be shown in blue font) and have to press the key corresponding to the font color.
The subjects completed each of their respective tasks twice. In between the repetitions, some subjects engaged in an activity meant to diminish their self-control whilst others performed an easy control activity. The researchers then compared the scores of the subjects who performed the control activity with those who performed the experimental one.
The subjects who had performed the task meant to diminish self-control should have performed significantly worse on their assigned tasks compared to the control groups the second time around. But they did not.
"There was no evidence for significant depletion effects in any of these four studies," the researchers found.
The researchers don't believe their results are in error. The tasks they used were identical to those most frequently employed in past research, and they also used similar sample sizes. In fact, the researchers suggest their study design may be stronger, because, unlike many previous studies which found evidence for ego depletion, they used a control group and recruited subjects from a broader population.
Despite the failure to replicate, the researchers don't believe their study is enough to invalidate ego depletion altogether, just that the effect may be more limited than has previously been theorized.
Ego depletion is not the first big idea in psychology to face replication problems. A key theory, priming, took a notable hit last year.
Some social psychologists, like Harvard University's Jason Mitchell, have fired back at detractors, suggesting that they are impugning the integrity of their colleagues, overstating the problems of publication bias, and are likely producing "false negative" results.
(Images: AP, Nevit Dilmen)
Source: Xu X, Demos KE, Leahey TM, Hart CN, Trautvetter J, et al. (2014) Failure to Replicate Depletion of Self-Control. PLoS ONE 9(10): e109950. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0109950
It's actually happened.
After decades of research filled with millions of meals eaten by hundreds of thousands of subjects, the verdict is in. Science is now ready to proclaim the healthiest way to eat: one diet to rule them all.
So which is it? Atkin's, perhaps? Or Paleo? Low-Carb? Low-Fat? South Beach? Raw? Fruitarian? Veganism?
The answer, my friends, is none of the above. But it could also be all of the above. That's because healthiest diet isn't a specific diet at all. It's the absence of a diet.
This is not a sudden, world-changing, mind-altering finding. It is not well suited to a blaring news headline. It is not share fodder on social media. What it is, however, is a realization that surfaced gradually and methodically: Science will never conclusively prove that a single diet is the best diet.
Author Matt Fitzgerald summarized the finding, or rather, the lack thereof, in his new book Diet Cults:
"Science has not identified the healthiest way to eat. In fact, it has come as close as possible (because you can't prove a negative) to confirming that there is no such thing as the healthiest diet. To the contrary, science has established quite definitively that humans are able to thrive equally well on a variety of diets. Adaptability is the hallmark of man as eater. For us, many diets are good while none is perfect."
Further support for this notion comes from a simple glance back at the history of our species. Mankind has populated almost every corner of the earth, and in every diverse situation, humans were able to survive, even thrive, on whatever food their homes had to offer.
Even more convincing evidence has been found by observing those who have lived the longest. The University of California-Irvine's 90+ Study has tracked thousands of Americans who've made it to age 90 and beyond, yielding an unprecedented wealth of information about their lifestyle habits. For lead investigators Claudia Kawas and Maria Corrada, the most surprising finding they made is that most participants didn't seem to be too concerned with their health. Generally, the 90-year-olds said they didn't really keep to a restrictive diet. Nor did they abstain from alcohol, quite the opposite actually! The researchers found that up two drinks a day -- no matter the type -- was associated with a 10-15% reduced risk of death. They also discovered other things that might disturb ardent dieters. Vitamin supplements did not affect lifespan in any way, and being a little overweight starting in middle age positively affected longevity.
But what if you're already overweight and want to shed some pounds? In that case, pick whatever diet works for you, because they all can work. What matters the most for weight loss is finding a solution that you can adhere to. That much was elucidated in a review recently published to the Journal of the American Medical Association. Scientists reviewed a multitude of randomized trials on popular diets and, lo and behold, found that all the diets helped subjects shed pounds, with minimal differences in weight loss between each diet.
Just like there is no one true religion, there is no one true diet. So why do so many dieters believe that there is?
"The short answer is that people believe what they want to believe," Fitzgerald wrote in Diet Cults. "The complete answer is that people want to believe that a certain way of eating is the best way because it gives them a sense of identity and a feeling of belonging. It's the work of that old, no-saying human impulse to eat according to the rules of a special group, which is often much stronger than the reasoning faculties."
"It feels good to believe in something."
(Image: AP)
John Ioannidis is (in)famous in the scientific community. Using straightforward logic and statistics, he convincingly demonstrated that most published research articles are wrong. This is not because scientists are liars and crooks, but because studies often do not have large enough sample sizes or are testing unlikely hypotheses. Ioannidis's revelation sent a shock wave through the biomedical community. Partially in response to his findings, biomedical scientists began to embrace reforms in scientific publishing, such as using more open access journals and publishing replications and negative data.
Now, in a new paper in PLoS Medicine, Dr. Ioannidis proposes additional reforms. Some of the more interesting ones include:
Registration of studies. Clinical trials already do this. (See ClinicalTrials.gov.) This would allow researchers to monitor ongoing studies. Others have proposed that all registered studies should be accepted for publication upon their completion, regardless of the outcome of the experiment. This would eliminate "publication bias," the phenomenon in which only "sexy" results are published and negative (or uninteresting) results are ignored.
Adoption of better statistical methods. It is not a big secret that biologists are bad at math. (Well, except for John Ioannidis.) Papers with a lot of mathematical equations are avoided by biologists. The heavy mathematical lifting required in some biomedical fields, such as epidemiology and genomics, is outsourced to biostatisticans. Dr. Ioannidis suggests more stringent thresholds for statistical significance. That is certainly necessary, but there also should be a requirement for all biomedical PhD students to take courses in biostatistics.
Improvements in peer review. Though Dr. Ioannidis does not offer specific details, one group is strongly advocating post-publication peer review. F1000Research publishes papers along with their expert reviews, which are not allowed to be anonymous.
Consideration of stakeholder interests and modification of incentives. Members of the scientific community place different values on research. For example, professors want research that is publishable, while industry wants research that is profitable. Dr. Ioannidis identifies four interests that need to be considered: publishability, fundability, translatability, and profitability. Furthermore, he proposes a radical change in incentives, such as eliminating academic ranks (e.g., tenure).
Scientific publications are on the cusp of a dramatic shift. Thanks to the efforts of Dr. Ioannidis and others like him, the monolithic biomedical establishment is beginning to embrace change. If only the rest of academia was so reflective and self-critical.
Source: Ioannidis JPA (2014). "How to Make More Published Research True." PLoS Med 11(10): e1001747. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001747
This will be the fifth time we've shared questions like these. For some of the past lists, click here, here, here, or here. But not here.
via Reddit
(Image: Secret Ingredient via Shutterstock)
Often, when explaining how birds are related to dinosaurs, people compare a picture of a Tyrannosaurus rex with that of a chicken. It's an apt juxtaposition, but it would be more elucidating with another animal wedged in between. I nominate Kelenken.
Standing almost 10 feet tall with a beak 18 inches long, Kelenken was a member of the extinct phorusrhacid family, otherwise known as the "terror birds."
By most accounts, the birds earned their ominous nickname. The vast majority of scientists believe that the "terror birds" were carnivores, and brutal ones at that. Kelenken and its stockier brothers Brontornis and Titanis were something like avian jackhammers, likely using their massive, bone-reinforced beaks to peck their prey to death. Since the birds mustered a top speed of around 27 miles per hour, the pummeling could have been preceded by a chase. It seems more likely, however, that the feathered predators ambushed their prey from forest brush or long savannah grass. Though it's enticing to picture Kelenken taking down and devouring animals the size of deer or antelope, its regular fair probably fell in the size range of modern day dogs or cats.
Fortunately for the mental health of our children, these big birds predated appearing on Sesame Street by a couple million years. Living between 62 and 2 million years ago, the "terror birds" primarily populated South America back when it was still an island, though a few fossils have been unearthed in Europe, prompting paleontologists to scratch their heads and draw arrows on maps.
Though dominant on their South American island paradise, the "terror birds" would eventually meet their downfall when faced with competition from hearty North American animal rivals. When the Panama land bridge formed between South and North America some 2.5 million years ago, it was the beginning of the end for the "terror birds." The best explanation for their demise is that competition from prehistoric dogs and saber-tooth cats drove them to eventual extinction.
(Images: Shutterstock, FunkMonk, Degrange et. al.)
Is the National Ignition Facility's goal of generating practical electrical power realistic? How long would it take? Having learned the history lesson on inertial confinement fusion and its many acronyms, we know how we got here. Now we can cover the fun stuff: will we ever get it to work as a power plant?
Two distinct types of challenges face ICF "laser fusion" as a commercial power source. Engineering problems tackle transforming established scientific principles into working machines. First though, science has to know what will work. That is the question of what is possible and, if so, how to attempt it.
When we imagine an Apollo project or a Manhattan project for nuclear fusion, we frame the problem somewhat incorrectly. The basic science of using liquid propellant rocket engines and multi-stage rocket platforms had already been figured out well before Apollo began. American Robert Goddard, in parallel with German and Russian rocket scientists, had worked it out decades before. At the end of WWII the US claimed V2 rockets and their designers from Germany; we already had a working small-scale liquid fueled rocket capable of reaching the edge of space. Improving and supersizing rockets enough to blast people into space was primarily by this point an (admittedly enormous) engineering problem. A huge infusion of money and brilliant mindpower accomplished it in a matter of a decade.
So too with the Manhattan project. We believed our scientific concept that a sufficient mass of fissile material could attain a runaway chain reaction. Einstein had already supplied the matter-to-energy conversion factor. Brilliant physicist Enrico Fermi built the world's first nuclear reactor under the bleachers at the University of Chicago football field. This showed the energy output from a neutron chain reaction in fissile material. Manhattan was all about finding an engineering method to get enough uranium and plutonium to build a handful of bombs and to design a bomb mechanism capable of assembling the necessary critical mass instantly and perfectly. This was a tremendously hard issue on its own, even with most of the science previously resolved.
NIF is in a more difficult position. We don't know the science well enough to reach the engineering phase.
Scientific unknowns abound in laser fusion. First, our models of the appropriate conditions needed for useful extraction of fusion energy are not tested by experiment. Currently, we think that we need about 10 megajoules (MJ) of laser energy (i.e., about 138,000 professional tennis serves or a pickup truck hitting a wall at 223 mph) to get net power out of NIF. The facility's record-breaking laser produces only about 1.8 MJ.
Furthermore, 10 MJ from the pellet is just the energy break-even point. To see practically useful gain instead of eeking out almost no power, we think we need a 10-fold increase in power: a 100 MJ laser. Then figure that most heat is lost when being converted to power. So perhaps we need another factor of 10: a 1000 MJ (1 gigajoule) laser. Most historical predictions of the energy required for energy gain with ICF have been vast underestimates too.
The trouble is that designing entirely new lasers is more of a science question. Entirely new laser gain materials such as specialized doped glass that costs thousands of dollars per inch need to be invented. New concepts for generating bursts of photons and controlling their conversion from one frequency to another must be found. The field of optics needs time to develop and understand ideas of how to make more energetic laser pulses. Perhaps better fuel design could lessen the need for laser advances.
The moment of the pellet implosion is another deep science question. At laser impact, a chaotic ball of x-ray photons, nuclear ions, gamma rays and energy is created, which is extremely hard to analyze. An entire field, hydrodynamics, studies these messy situations. We've been working on hydronamics for centuries, but the models we use don't do a good job of predicting what happens in moments of pressure, temperature, and chaos so high as these. The poor projections of these models are part of why we are so far behind our goals with ICF so far.
Say we invent a laser 1000 times more powerful, design new pellets, and new methods to perfectly crush them. We're still not done. Engineering challenges will be an enormous obstacle. Essentially, we'll need a Manhattan Project for fusion.
Currently, NIF fires at a maximum rate of roughly once per hour. For commercial energy production, blasting a pellet roughly ten times per second is required. This means we'll need to figure out a way to run the entire experiment 36,000 times more often and also 36,000 times more quickly. Engineering and science are at play here. Powering up the laser to fire this quickly is a problem for both scientists and engineers: it needs to charge up with power 600 times faster than the current model.
More traditional engineering challenges are also manifold. A method is needed to collect the heat from the target chamber with reasonable efficiency. The fusion energy is currently not collected at all. Then we need a system capable of feeding in a pellet, triggerering the laser, entering the chamber, removing the remnants of the blasted target, replacing it with a fresh one, and resealing the chamber. This needs to happen in 100 ms or less, while also not leaking significant heat out of the chamber.
The fuel pellet too will take some engineering. Roughly 100,000 pellets will have to be blasted every day for every plant. This means we'll need to produce fuel pellets by the millions and at low enough cost not to ruin the economics of the machine. Large and stable sources of deuterium and tritium will be need to be founded.
These are just the foreseen challenges. Entirely unforeseen complications will almost certainly arise. While it is foolish to say that we will never see consistent electrical production from this method, it will be an enormous struggle. The fight is utterly impossible to win within a decade. A more realistic expectation is probably 100 years for a commercially viable powerplant.
That's a shocking number. However, it says more about the difficulty of the project than the quality of the scientists involved and their work. For fusion powr to be successful, we must plan for the long, long haul.
The author would like to gratefully acknowledge discussion with former NIF director Mike Campbell for insight into NIF and ICF energy projects.
(AP photo)
The expansive mouth of Kenya's Kitum Cave can appear out of nowhere. Mount Elgon National Park's jagged landscape, coupled with a dense cover of lush, green plant life, conceals the cave surprisingly well from human wanderers until they're right on top of it. Animals, however, have no problem finding Kitum. Fruit bats, insects, and especially elephants are frequent loiterers. The large pachyderms shelter within the 700-foot system, and also seek out a surprising snack. Using their hardened ivory tusks, the elephants dislodge stones from the cave wall and grind them to bits with their teeth, sucking up the stores of salt within.
Kitum Cave is, in fact, a petrified rain forest. Seven million years ago, the volcanic Mount Elgon erupted and buried the surrounding rain forest in ash. Kitum is deep within what was once a molten sea. Mineralized logs jut out from the cave walls. So do all sorts of bones, from animals like crocodiles, hippos, and elephants. It's eerily beautiful.
In 1980, a 56-year-old Frenchman living in Kenya entered Kitum cave and may have been entranced by that beauty. After a few hours of exploration, he left spellbound and in awe. But something evil left with him.
Seven days later, the headache started. Fever and nearly nonstop vomiting arrived three days after that. Then the Frenchman's face became droopy and lifeless, and the skin turned yellow. His whole personality changed. Friends helped him board a plane so he could go to a hospital in Nairobi. Onboard, he continued vomiting, now heaving up a black liquid. He filled up a couple of barf bags. His nose started bleeding... and it wouldn't stop.
When the plane landed, he stumbled off in a stupor, finding the nearest taxi and mumbling the words "Nairobi... Hospital" to the driver.
The taxi driver was kind enough to help the Frenchman into the hospital when they arrived, and made it very plain to the attending nurse that this man was in dire need of help. Assurances were made that a doctor would see him promptly.
It was already too late.
While sitting in the waiting room, the Frenchman suddenly leaned over, vomited up an immense quantity of blood, then fell unconscious. Blood began to seep from every orifice and creep along the floor. The evil entity that originated in Kitum Cave had destroyed its host. Now, it was leaving its mangled, corporeal home in search of a fresh one.
The entity that infected the Frenchman was Marburg (seen right). A filovirus like Ebola, Marburg's symptoms are identical to those of its more notorious sibling. Genetic differences distinguish the two viruses. To date, there have been 467 documented cases of Marburg, resulting in 377 deaths. That's a kill rate of 80.7%. (For reference, the mortality rate of the current ebola epidemic is around 50%.)
The death of the Frenchman, who science journalist Richard Preston dubbed "Charles Monet" in his 1994 book The Hot Zone, was a landmark case for the scientific study of Marburg. Not only was it the first time that Marburg had surfaced since 1975, when it infected three people in South Africa, but it also allowed investigators to try and nail down the source of the infection. Since Monet was a bit of a loner, the investigation proved difficult. Seven years later, however, Marburg reared it's gruesome head again, infecting and killing a young Danish boy in Africa. When it was discovered that the boy had visited Kitum Cave with his family 11 days before his death, investigators decided they had to pay the site a visit.
In Spring 1988, a joint U.S. and Kenyan operation led by the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease's Gene Johnson began. Decked out in full biohazard gear, the team members scoured the cave, capturing bats, birds, and insects, sampling bat guano and elephant feces, and scraping slime off walls. At first, Johnson was sure he'd come to the home of one of nature's most ancient and proficient killers. But when all was said and done, he left empty-handed. If Marburg lurked in Kitum Cave, it had vanished without a trace.
"It must have been a bitter disappointment for Gene Johnson," Preston wrote in The Hot Zone, "so disheartening that he was never able to bring himself to publish an account of the expedition and its findings."
Two decades later, a cave in neighboring Uganda would divulge some of Marburg's secrets. In the wake of an outbreak among miners working at Kitaka Cave, scientists detected the virus in local Egyptian fruit bats, the same species of bat that occasionally shacks up in Kitum. The researchers esimated that 5% of the 100,000 animal colony at Kitaka was infected. It was the first time that hard data implicated bats as a major natural reservoir of the virus.
Scientists still aren't sure precisely how the Ebola strain currently terrorizing Western Africa made the leap into humans. Ebola and its sibling Marburg are as mysterious as they are insidious.
(Images: Richard Preston, Wilson Disease)
Last week, on my way back to Seattle, I came across a peculiar sign posted next to Gate 62 at San Francisco Airport. (See photo above.)
I refer not to the maximum occupancy sign, which is itself a bit strange considering there are no well-defined boundaries for Gate 62, but the one next to it: This area contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.
So, I looked around. There was a sandwich shop, a few trash cans, and several tired passengers in the waiting area. No cataclysmic carcinogens there. The carpet looked clean. Was the sign referring to carpet cleaner? Or was it referring to the jet bridge, where you might get a brief whiff of jet fuel? The absurdly ominous and vague sign left the threat entirely to your imagination.
Who put the sign there? The people of the State of California. Back in 1986, they passed Proposition 65, an attempt by environmental do-gooders to create a carcinogen-free utopia. In accordance with the law, the governor must publish a list of "known" carcinogens or chemicals capable of causing birth defects. The 23-page-long list (PDF) includes such terrifying molecules as aspirin, alcohol, ganciclovir (an antiviral), metronidazole (an antibiotic), nickel, rifampin (another antibiotic), testosterone, tetracycline (a very common antibiotic), and wood dust. The fact that testosterone made the list is particularly problematic, since every human being alive produces testosterone. According to California, we're all doomed.
However, properly informed citizens know that the dose makes the poison. Carcinogens are everywhere. Many of them are natural compounds. But the vast majority of them are not at concentrations high enough to worry about.
The foolishness in California is the inevitable consequence of a chemophobic society that wields the evil twins of regulation and litigation as weapons in a fruitless effort to achieve the impossible: a life completely free of any risk whatsoever. And while it's easy to point and laugh at California, the truth is the vast majority of Americans favor another equally absurd policy: The labeling of GMOs.
But, just like Proposition 65, the outcome of any GMO labeling law is entirely predictable: Because most (up to 75% of) food at the grocery store contains at least one genetically modified ingredient, the GMO warning label will appear everywhere. And warning labels that appear everywhere are meaningless and absurd, just like the airport cancer sign.
Yet, there are two other pernicious effects to a proliferation of warning labels: First, people start ignoring them. That is not a good thing. Some products, such as cigarettes and drain cleaners, really are toxic and dangerous. Will people ignore warning labels on all products? Second, warning labels encourage manufacturers to seek alternatives to alleged "carcinogens." Unfortunately, the alternatives are often less studied and potentially more carcinogenic.
The irony, of course, is that in their struggle to make people safer, the world's chemophobes may be achieving the exact opposite.
(Photo: Alex Berezow)
Inventor: "I've just created my most perfect work: a new type of paper airplane."
Funding agency: "Wow great but what does it do?"
Inventor: "Oh, right now it's useless, but soon I'll just scale up the concept and we'll have a cheaper space shuttle!"
Shame on the University of Washington for hyping its research with this exact logic. Touting the "great potential" of a new cheaper-than-coal fusion plant, they see reality and choose to look the other way. Or maybe they're just incredibly naive.
To quote the press release: "Perhaps the biggest roadblock to adopting fusion energy is that the economics haven't been penciled out". BS! Let's talk about the real obstacle to fusion power. The report itself actually leads us to the culprit.
Among many statements ranging from meaningless to wrong, this is the one that dodges the heart of the matter: "They [researchers] have designed a concept for a fusion reactor that, when scaled up to the size of a large electrical power plant, would rival costs for a new coal-fired plant with similar electrical output." (Emphasis added.)
What is keeping fusion energy from reaching market? The fact we don't understand how to do it well yet. It's impossible with current science. Why? Precisely because we don't know how to scale it up. We can make little demonstration fusion reactors like the one in this report, but expanding them to become large enough to produce useful power eludes our grasp. The entire problem of current fusion devices is scaling them up.
The basic idea in this proposal is a magnetically confined plasma device that uses a geometrical plasma configuration called a spheromak. It's a magnetic field bottle built to trap plasma inside. It's a sibling of the tokamak, the best known and best working of the current fusion devices. The idea is quite old, dating to the 1950s. Several of these machines were built in the 1970s and 1980s, notably by the lead investigator of this work.
The press report claims that the spheromak device is simpler than the tokamak. This is only true to a point. There are fewer external magnets in such a device. Enormous electromagnets require very high electrical current, so the spheromak needs less power. However, part of the magnetic field confinement of the plasma is performed by the magnetic field produced within plasma itself. (Travelling charged ions produce magnetic fields calculable with the laws of electrodynamics.) While this idea sounds simpler, it's actually more difficult in many ways: you have fewer magnets for external control, and the internal plasma configuration is actually much more complicated.
This very difficulty is why the world's biggest and best fusion projects are tokamaks and not spheromaks. The extra control magnets and simpler plasma configuration inside the machines have allowed them to be scaled up to larger sizes much more easily.
So, not only is scaling up the entire problem with magenetic fusion, this device is probably much more difficult to scale up even than current tokamaks, which have not yet been economically scaled up and may not be for several decades.
RCS enthusiastically supports fusion research and increased funding for fusion projects. However, we do not tolerate misleading information being reported.
(AP photo)
The tropical karst landscape of Southern Sulawesi in Indonesia is dotted with sinkholes and caves, forming, in many places, a vast, underground world. You can thank soluble rocks like limestone, dolomite, and gypsum for that. The caves afforded our ancient ancestors cover from the torrential rains that define the island chain's climate. The walls inside also granted them easels to express their creativity.
Archaeologists have known about the wondrous rock art in the Maros–Pangkep caves of Southern Sulawesi for over half a century. What they didn't know was how old they were. A team primarily based out of the University of Wollongong in Australia has just found out, and the answer has altered the timeline and geography of human creativity.
Dr. Anthony Dosseto and his colleagues dated the art to roughly 40,000 years ago. Among the dozen drawings analyzed is a hand stencil that -- at a minimum age of 39,900 years old -- is now the oldest known in the world, and a drawing of half-deer, half-pig looking animal called a babirusa, which may be the earliest figurative depiction in the world.
Dating cave art is easier said than done. Often, due to weathering, the pigments in the paintings themselves don't contain enough carbon for typical dating methods. Contamination can also lead to inaccuracies. So instead, scientists may rely on clues in the immediate vicinity. For example, they might date nearby artifacts or remains and apply those ages to the artwork. Occasionally, scientists will bring out their magnifying glasses and attempt to sleuth out a painting's age by examining its depictions. A drawing of a mammoth, for example, would lend a rough estimation because we already know when mammoths existed.
To gauge the paintings' ages in this case, the researchers dated mineral deposits called speleotherms that had grown on top of the drawings. When formed, the crystal-looking objects contain small amounts of uranium which slowly decay to thorium. Since the scientists already knew that rate of decay, they were able to extrapolate and determine the rough age of the paintings.
For a long time, human creativity was thought to have been born in Europe in a sort of prehistoric Renaissance. Only from there, did it truly flourish. A great many cave paintings dating to more than 30,000 years ago have been discovered in France and Spain, including the amazingly preserved and transcendent artwork in Chauvet Cave and the oldest known artwork in the world, a simple red "disk," found in El Castillo Cave. (The latter may actually have been painted by Neanderthals!) The current finding may require anthropologists to rethink that Eurocentric narrative.
"I think this suggests that modern humans had this creativity, this artistic expression, with them when they spread out of Africa," Chris Stringer, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in the United Kingdom told Nature.
"Europeans can't exclusively claim to be the first to develop an abstract mind anymore. They need to share this, at least, with the early inhabitants of Indonesia," Dr. Dosseto said.
The discovery was published October 8th to the journal Nature.
(Images: Kinez Riza)
Source: Dosseto et. al. Pleistocene cave art from Sulawesi, Indonesia. Nature 514, 223–227 (09 October 2014) doi:10.1038/nature13422
Crushing tiny capsules of matter into oblivion...
Turning matter into energy via nuclear fusion with massive lasers is a dramatic and beautiful way to create energy. Problem is, it's not working very well. In fact, it's kind of a mess. What happened, and why is it failing? Will laser inertial confinement fusion ever become a viable energy source?
The Past and Present is NIF
Recently, I called the world's biggest and best laser fusion experiment a failure. There is no doubt that the National Ignition Facility (NIF) failed to meet its stated goal of reaching fusion "ignition." Misleading press releases attempted to breathe life into this stone-cold failure: their best shot produced 100 times less energy than was fired in. Worse, the real efficiency as measured from the electrical input was just one unit of power out for 28,000 in. It's not pretty but there is more depth to the story. Examining the history and current status of NIF as the premiere laser fusion project in the world tells us where.
Simulating the heart of the atom bomb
"Laser fusion" is more properly called inertial confinement fusion (ICF). The 1970s and 80s saw a series of big laser programs run at US national labs. These facilities were essentially miniature, primitive NIFs. They tested the preliminary feasibility of ICF: using a massive laser pulse to crush a pellet made of hydrogen atoms with extra neutrons until the atoms fuse. Most of the fused mass forms a helium atom, but some is directly converted from matter to energy. The NOVA laser at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and other projects hinted at the requirements to perform ICF on an energy efficient scale. It was clear, despite early over optimism, that vastly more powerful and advanced efforts would be needed to come vaguely close to a viable power source.
Still-secret tests, carried out under the Nevada desert the 1980s crushed deuterium (H + neutron) pellets with nuclear explosions to explore how much energy was needed to produce fusion. Whatever the results were, they were so encouraging that laser fusion began to look much more promising. Physicists decided that a laser 25-250 times more energetic than NOVA could achieve success in a lab, without the A-bombs. However, the billion-dollar price tag and as-yet undeveloped technology required to build such a project made it a very hard sell.
Things changed completely in 1992, when the U.S. stopped all live tests of nuclear weapons. Suddenly, the country faced the prospect of designing, building and maintaining weapons that had never been tested, and running weapons programs with personnel who had never conducted any experimental nuclear test work. That's clearly a scary proposition, even with the goal of reducing nuclear proliferation. The entire concept of non-proliferation rests completely upon the expected ability of the weapons to work. Weapons that don't deliver upon their threat upset the balance of power.
It was clear that facilities to test and simulate conditions found in nuclear fission and fusion reactions were necessary if we were going to design and maintain weapons and train future weapons program technicians. A massive laser system like the one proposed for NIF was seen, correctly, as the only facility capable of producing the heat and pressure conditions to simulate a nuclear or thermonuclear blast. Abruptly, NIF became much more feasible.
Something for Everyone
The real trick with getting NIF started was that it was pitched from several angles simultaneously. To the Department of Defense and more conservative politicians, the project was sold as a testing bed for weapons technology and designer training. To the DOE, liberals, the press and the public, the fusion power aspect was highlighted.
Winning funding to build the facility was a brilliant piece of negotiation and bipartisanship: the department of defense and the weapons program supported a facility that would pursue peaceful civilian energy generation and the anti-weapons lobby and the press supported a facility that would at its core be focused on nuclear weapons. NIF weathered changing political and public sentiments and construction setbacks because it won such broad political, scientific, defense and press support.
Unfortunately, several aspects of the fusion program were botched from the beginning. The project leadership lacked experimental experience. The designers placed too much confidence in numerical models extrapolating from previous experiments into unknown parameter space. These turned out to be wildly optimistic in projecting the capabilities of NIF. Management failed to listen to criticism.
The marketing of the facility as a fusion testbed combined with the mistakes made in pursuing that goal laid the groundwork for embarrassment. The majority of public, press and scientific support (and even the name ignition facility) was based on the possibility of producing fusion breakthrough. To the world at large, it is a fusion experiment.
So, when the fusion results came back late and wildly underwhelming it suddenly looked as though the entire project was a bust. But this isn't entirely true.
Is NIF a success despite never approaching fusion ignition?
How is NIF doing as a platform for weapons testing and research? That's classified! Due to the sensitive nature of nuclear weapons data and testing, it's very unclear. It is easy to believe that data gathered at extremely high temperatures and pressures not available anywhere else on the planet is invaluable to nuclear weapon design. Designers must extrapolate out from available data to the unknown conditions they anticipate; having data that is closer to real conditions can only help tremendously.
I have heard from sources familiar with the field that there have been some major weapons results from NIF. Unfortunately, we members of the public aren't privy to them, so we have to take the vague word of those involved.
Another important consequence of NIF: we now know far more about how to build a successful laser fusion facility in the future. In the same way that tests shed light on nuclear explosions, they also illuminate the correct conditions for a laser fusion facility. For instance, it's now clear that a still larger laser is needed to make any realistic simulacrum of a power plant. We are also learning how to design the fuel, the crushing system and the laser pulses experimentally instead of relying upon speculative simulation.
This brings us back to the big question: can we make laser fusion work? NIF is revealing clues about what it will take to reach practical inertial confinement fusion. In part II, I'll explain this in detail.
The author gratefully acknowledges discussion with the former director of the NIF facility, Bruce Campbell, for insight into the NIF facility and ICF research.
On April 28th, 2012, President Barack Obama donned a tuxedo for the annual White House Correspondent's Dinner, and standing in front of a ballroom brimming with journalists, celebrities, and politicians, he made a bold prediction.
"Four years from now, I will look like this," he said, as a photo of the suave, white-haired Morgan Freeman appeared on the screen behind him.
President Obama wasn't, of course, insinuating that he would somehow morph into the Academy Award winning actor, but that his hair, which began dark and vivacious at the beginning of his tenure in the oval office, would be gray and listless by the time he left.
A recent study, however, finds otherwise.
Researchers perused hundreds of photos of President Obama taken indoors with comparable lighting, then used Photoshop to focus in on his hair. What they were left with was a collection of 68 photos of Obama's hair -- one for every month of his presidency. They then measured the median gray value of each.
Though the two researchers found a clear graying trend over the course of Obama's presidency -- on average, his hair color grew roughly 0.452% closer to matching Morgan Freeman's each month -- they noted that his hair almost certainly will not achieve the whiteness of Morgan Freeman's by May 2016, four years after he made his prediction.
"If we extrapolate this trendline to the 89th month of his presidency, we estimate that his hair will only be about 61.7% similar to Morgan Freeman's."
However, the researchers added, there is a coin flip's chance that on at least one day, President Obama's hair color may seem to match Morgan Freeman's. Hair color can vary depending on the time of the year. Sunlight destroys melanin, the pigment in hair follicles, bleaching hair a blondish-white. If Obama spends a lot of time in Hawaii or playing golf during his two lame duck years in office, those odds may go up. Our perception of hair color can also change depending upon how short the hair in question is and the ambient lighting.
One thing that probably won't affect Obama's hair color is anxiety. Contrary to popular belief, it is not proven that stress rapidly grays hair; genes most strongly influence when and how fast that happens. Cells in the skin called melanocytes produce the pigment melanin that colors hair, and there's no direct evidence that stress limits their productivity or reduces their lifespans.
The current study was published in the brand spanking new Proceedings of the Natural Institute of Science (PNIS) an open-access journal that publishes satirical Onion-style articles or genuine research with humorous topics. Other topics tackled in the journal so far include an assessment of how often men think of chicken wings and an analysis of how costly it would be to raise a child like Calvin from the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes.
PNIS editor Matt Michael started the journal because he saw a lack of quality in the cacophony of scientific publishing.
"In 2014, it is estimated that there are now 29,147 active scientific journals, publishing roughly 700,000 papers every year, contributing to the estimated 55 million papers to ever have been published. Yet all of them suck," he joked in the journal's introductory editorial, before predicting that PNIS will crush leading journals Nature and Science in two years.
Michael's actual goals with PNIS are quite worthwhile:
We feel (and we are not alone in this) that science has a problem with effective communication. We believe that part of this problem stems from the view that science is an exclusive club that only a few can participate (and, thus, lacks transparency) and that current scientific studies are beyond the understanding of most people.
To change this view, PNIS uses satire, humor and its open publication policy to demonstrate that: 1) people use scientific concepts (most especially the scientific method) every day, frequently without even realizing it, 2) scientific discoveries are not limited to scientists (much like how playing sports is not limited to professional athletes), 3) most scientific concepts are easy to understand and 4) scientists are all too willing to laugh at themselves.
Source: K. Hernandez and C. Drexler (2014) "Yes We Canities! A quantitative analysis of the graying of Barack Obama's hair." Proceedings of the Natural Institute of Science | Volume 1 | HARD 3
(Images: AP, PNIS)
Flatulence is a fact of life. Americans collectively break wind to the smelly tune of up to 6.3 billion times each day. That's a lot of hot air. For such a ubiquitous activity, it's amazing how taboo it is. Face palms and pinched noses mark the passing of gas in most social settings. Science, however, has no ingrained distaste for flatulence. Here are six facts we've learned about farting.
1. There are three main fart smells. Hydrogen sulfide produces the signature "rotten eggs" note, methanethiol produces hints of "decomposing vegetables," and dimethyl sulfide adds a hint of "sweetness."
2. The average fart is roughly 100 milliliters in volume and lasts approximately two seconds. More interesting than the statistic itself is how it was calculated. Basically, it involved subjects farting into specially designed, airtight, gas-collecting underwear.
3. There's a way to make your farts (mostly) odorless. Marketed as the only "internal deodorant," the over-the-counter drug Devrom, with its active ingredient bismuth subgallate, reduces almost 100% of the odor caused by sulfur gasses, the primary contributors to smelly farts. Bismuth is an interesting metal -- it's extremely dense yet surprisingly nontoxic. The only known side effects of taking bismuth subgallate is a harmless darkening of stools or the tongue, which the user's friends and family undoubtedly describe as "well worth it."
4. Women's farts smell worse. In studies conducted by eminent flatulence researcher Michael Levitt, women's farts consistently sported significantly greater concentrations of hydrogen sulfide. Odor judges have confirmed that -- at similar volumes -- this translates to a noticeably worse odor compared to men's farts.
5. Red meat kicks up a stink. Sulfur compounds contribute the most to flatus malodor, but compounds called thiols also royally reek. Methanethiol is one of the worst. Naturally found in blood, and, in turn, red meat, it can be released via the digestive process and eventually off-gassed via the anus.
6. Holding in your farts won't kill you, but it won't be comfortable either. As Tara from D-News explained, "When we hold farts in, the gas retreats back into our body and gets absorbed into the intestinal walls where it eventually mixes in with our blood. At best, that can cause bloating, abdominal pain, and constipation but if you do it repeatedly it can lead to a distended bowel."
(Image: Shutterstock)
Primary source: Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, Mary Roach, 2013
In 1999, astronomers controlling the Hubble Space Telescope zoomed in on a section of the Carina Nebula, approximately 8,000 light years away, and snapped the picture shown above. The image depicts a dense cloud of gas roughly two light years in length that has broken off the greater nebula. The cloud is "striking," NASA noted in 2003, "because its clear definition stimulates the human imagination."
"It could be perceived as a superhero flying through a cloud, arm up, with a saved person in tow below."
That's not what I see...
While NASA deserves respect for keeping things G-rated, that cloud can only be accurately described as the grandest middle-finger salute in the known universe; a giant, cosmic "%@#$ you."
A perceptive redditor spotted the vulgar resemblance two weeks ago.
The rude stellar object is a molecular cloud of gas and dust, dense enough and large enough to permit molecules to form. In the image above, the bright red specks shining to the left are young stars that grew inside.
What I will term the "%@#$ you" cloud is part of the vastly larger Carina Nebula (seen above), which spans over 300 light years. The nebula was discovered by French astronomer Nicolas Louis de Lacaille in 1751. Larger and brighter than the more famous Orion Nebula, the Carina Nebula is home to Eta Carinae, the best-studied luminous hypergiant star. Eta Carinae is 100-150 times as massive as our sun and four million times brighter! Because the star is so huge, it flirts with the Eddington limit, the point where a star's radiation is powerful enough to overcome the gravity that keeps it together. In other words, the star is precariously walking the line of exploding as a supernova or even a hypernova. Astronomers actually expect this to occur within the next million years.
Should that happen, we here on Earth will, in all likelihood, be just fine. The "%@#$ you" cloud, however, may suffer a brute form of stellar censorship.
(Images: Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), N. Walborn (STScI) & R. Barbß (La Plata Obs.), NASA. & ESO)
With the advent of the Internet and social media, the average person is afforded unprecedented power to consume and spread information. But with great power, comes great responsibilities -- to be skeptical, to seek out facts and evidence, to restrict, or at least not aid, the spread of rumors. Of course, one also has the ability to completely ignore all those responsibilities. When that happens, you may discover that you're a purveyor of misinformation.
And if you're going to spread misinformation, you might as well do it right. To all the devout Natural News readers, anti-vaxxers, and alternative medicine scam artists out there, this guide's for you! If truth and logic is your thing, feel free to read these tips as well, then forget them, or better yet, do the exact opposite.
Embrace your biases. Whatever you're into, chances are you can find an advocacy group, corporation, or political party whose tweets and Facebook posts you can pass on without question! We humans have a tendency to favor information that confirms our beliefs -- give in to it! Seek out sources that share your stances and like-minded individuals to revel with. Turn your life into a sounding board.
Don't stop. Don't think. According to psychologists, assessing the veracity of a piece of information requires both motivation and brain power. You certainly don't want to waste either of those precious resources. Better to stick to your carefully tailored and guarded mindset. Avoid visiting pesky websites like Snopes or TruthOrFiction. Don't bother searching out conflicting sources or reading the entire article. Let the mass media be your guide: if you want to be the most popular, you have to share the information first!
Repeat, repeat, repeat! Your friends, family, and followers need to know that juicy bit of information or controversial discovery! So what if all the "facts" don't line up? Facts don't change minds! Opinions are formed and molded by a barrage of information. Whether that information is true or not doesn't matter.
Ignore the Fallout. Who cares if vaccine-preventable diseases like measles, mumps, and whooping cough are on the rise because you've convinced everyone that vaccines are evil? So what if you blindly shared a fake story that an asteroid was set to wipe out all life on Earth? Who cares if you fueled a fire of false allegations that nearly destroyed somebody's life? If you do start to feel guilty, just take a look at that insane photo that's too unbelievable to be true... then hit "share."
Whatever you do, don't read these: "Digital Wildfires in a Hyperconnected World." World Economic Forum. 2013
Stephan Lewandowsky, Ullrich K. H. Ecker, Colleen M. Seifert, Norbert Schwarz, and John Cook. "Misinformation and Its Correction: Continued Influence and Successful Debiasing." Psychological Science in the Public Interest December 2012 vol. 13 no. 3 106-131
"I Don't Want to Be Right." Maria Konnikova. The New Yorker. May 2014.
Last week, with the help of Mary Roach's fascinating book Gulp, I tackled a question surely on the back of everybody's mind: Can you eat via your anus?
This week, again guided by Gulp, I do the disgusting and flip the question. Ladies and gentlemen, restrain your gag reflexes.
Can you poop via your mouth?
Sketchy websites, questionable YouTube videos, and a hilarious episode of South Park all present evidence pointing to "yes." What's more, the American Heritage Medical Dictionary defines a condition dubbed fecal vomiting: "The vomiting of fecal matter that has been drawn into the stomach from the intestine by spasmodic contractions of the gastric muscles." The term is even used various times in the medical literature.
The answer to the question, however, seems to be a nuanced "no."
Indeed, fecal vomiting is a genuine condition, rarely occurring in cases of severe constipation in which the colon is completely full of feces. The vomit, however, doesn't actually contain what we recognize as poop, which comes from the colon. It contains liquid from the small intestine, ejected in with the help of powerful, reverse contractions of muscles in the small intestine and esophagus.
"A well-formed stool does not exit the upper end of the colon," Roach writes.
To the few unfortunates afflicted with fecal vomiting, the difference may seem borderline semantic. After all, liquid from the small intestine can be darker in color and doesn't exactly smell like roses.
Strangely enough, there are a couple dozen reports of actual feces being expelled from the mouth, however all of them come from the early days of modern medicine and are highly dubious. The reports prompted one skeptical physician, Dr. Gustav Langmann, to put a claimant to the test. In 1889, he undertook the care of a female patient who witnesses reported had passed stools via the mouth. At some point during the woman's hospital stay, nurses discovered "some hard feces, wrapped in paper" under her pillow. Ewwww. Case closed.
Source: Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, Mary Roach, 2013
(Image: South Park Studios)
To a great many ardent nutrition purveyors, the Big Mac is the embodiment of evil: greasy, loaded with hard-to-pronounce chemicals, and entirely unnatural.
Packing in 550 calories, 29 grams of fat, and 65% of your daily value of sodium, it's easy to see why you probably shouldn't eat a Big Mac at every meal. However, with that said, caricaturing the act of eating McDonald's and other fast food as unnatural is completely unwarranted. (It is also, of course, fallacious to assume that what is "natural" is always better.)
Humans are perhaps the ultimate omnivores. We evolved to eat whatever is around, be it plant, animal, or burger. Before the rise of agriculture roughly 10,000 years ago, our ancestors were predominantly hunter-gatherers. Spread far across the globe, their diets matched their surroundings. For examples, we can look to modern hunter-gatherers. 95% of the Inuit's diet is comprised of meat and fish. The !Kung of southern Africa eat mostly seeds, nuts, fruits, and vegetables. Farther north, the Hadza predominantly consume meat, fish, and roots.
There is no specific "natural" human diet, evolutionary biologist Marlene Zuk wrote in 2009. What's "natural" for us is to eat whatever we can. Over time, our bodies may adapt to take advantage.
"Take dairy products, one of the classic modern foods we supposedly aren't meant to eat. Most people who can't tolerate them lack a gene that confers the ability to break down lactose, the sugar in milk, after the age of weaning. Our Stone Age ancestors couldn't digest milk as adults either, but a recent study shows that about 5,000 years ago, mutations that keep that gene switched on spread throughout Northern Europe. That's also when cattle began to be domesticated; being able to drink milk as well as lower-lactose cheese would have been advantageous as a source of nutrition and fluids."
So then what about the epidemic levels of obesity? Our Paleolithic ancestors certainly weren't as voluptuous as we are. That's true, but they also only lived till age forty. Moreover, obesity levels aren't sky high because humans have strayed from our natural dietary path. They're sky high because food is much easier to attain than it used to be. In the developed world, the question now is not "Will we eat?" It's "How much will we eat?" If an "unnatural" McDonald's diet made us fat, then you wouldn't be able to lose weight eating there. But you can!
Writing at Science-Based Medicine, Harriet Hall dismantles the notion of a natural human diet:
Arguments that we should eat what we evolved to eat are undercut by three facts: humans have continued to evolve since the Paleolithic, humans evolved to be adaptable and to thrive on a wide variety of dietary intakes; and we evolved to have the survival advantage of intelligence and inventiveness to develop technology to improve our access to food (for instance, cooking). In other words, technology is "natural" for humans, and eating in a variety of ways is natural for humans too.
Imagine if humans weren't naturally flexible eaters.
"If our ancestors had been less adaptable and if there was a single healthy diet, humans could not have spread to new continents or survived the climate changes of the Ice Age," Hall notes.
Humans' natural ability to thrive on almost any diet is a key to our species' success. So go ahead. Have that Big Mac.
It is easy for journalists to succumb to the notion that we make very little difference in this world. According to Pew, only 28% of Americans believe journalists contribute "a lot" to society, while 27% believe journalists contribute "not very much" or "nothing at all." And a Gallup poll showed that only about 20% of Americans believe that reporters are honest and ethical. On the bright side, at least we beat out car salesmen (9%), Congressmen (8%), and lobbyists (6%). Huzzah!
Many young people go into journalism because they "want to change the world," but by that, they often mean engaging in advocacy journalism. I believe that is the wrong approach. Too much of it, in my opinion, comes across as unobjective and even dishonest, far more akin to propaganda than to journalism. That is because advocacy journalists -- by definition -- are wedded to an ideological worldview and, hence, are not particularly amenable to changing their opinions if the facts change. Instead, they resort to cramming and distorting evidence to fit into their worldview.
We manifestly reject that sort of journalism at RealClearScience. Like most journalists, we also want to change the world, but we do not want to do so by embracing political or social causes. Instead, we just want to tell the truth to the best of our ability. And when the facts change, our opinions change. Those are two of the guiding principles upon which this website is based.
A logical corollary to those principles is that we should hold influential people accountable for their actions and words. When we come across scientific misinformation, we believe it is our duty to correct the record. We believe the traditional "watchdog" role of journalism is important for keeping the public properly informed and maintaining a healthy democracy.
To that end, Todd Myers -- the environmental director of the Washington Policy Center -- recently brought to my attention a curious tweet posted by the "Ecoconsumer," a King County (Seattle and vicinity) employee whose job is to promote various environmental causes. (No, I don't think that's a legitimate use of taxpayer money, but that's a subject for another day.)
His tweet, since removed (but forever memorialized here), advertised a new "documentary" about how cell phones cause cancer. Loyal readers of RealClearScience, as well as most reasonably educated people, know that is complete rubbish. Because cell phones operate using microwaves, it is not physically possible for them to cause cancer. As Michael Shermer explains, microwaves do not have enough energy to break chemical bonds, which is a requirement for something to be carcinogenic. Besides, we are constantly bathed in electromagnetic radiation -- from the sun, wi-fi devices, laptop computers, radio broadcasts, etc. If all electromagnetic radiation caused cancer, none of us would be alive.
Disturbed that a government employee would post such nonsense, I contacted the Ecoconsumer. He sounded rather flustered by my phone call, so I reached out to his superior. Within mere moments following a brief conversation, in which he agreed with me that King County should be disseminating accurate information, the offending tweet was removed.
I must admit that I was pleasantly surprised. Encounters with bureaucrats rarely end so quickly and favorably. I felt that, for the first time, my job as "watchdog" actually paid off. And though removing a single post from Twitter hardly constitutes an Earth-shaking victory, maybe it is quite possible for journalists to make a difference in this world -- albeit, for some of us, just one tweet at a time.
(Photo: Make a Difference via Shutterstock)
This year, three National Football League players -- Adrian Peterson, Ray Rice, and Greg Hardy -- have either admitted to or been convicted of domestic violence. Their stories coalesced into a storm this past week with the release of a damning new video of Ray Rice punching his wife (then fiancée) and the indictment of Adrian Peterson, debatably the NFL's best running back, for child abuse.
The media onslaught of updates, analysis, and opinion on what has been called the National Football League's "worst week ever" leaves a distinct impression: the NFL is a league stocked full of criminals.
Evidence, however, doesn't bear that out.
Back in 1999, leading criminologist Alfred Blumstein teamed up with author Jeff Benedict, who has written five books focused on crime and athletics, to compare rates of criminal violence among NFL players to that of the general population. Controlling for age, they found that the annual rate of assault and domestic violence among NFL players was less than half that of the general population.
But Blumstein and Benedict's analysis is fifteen years dated. Perhaps things have changed in that time?
It doesn't appear they have. Back in July, FiveThirtyEight's Benjamin Morris tallied up the incidents in USA Today's NFL Arrests Database to discern crime rates among NFL players. He then compared those numbers to the national averages among 25-29 year olds, and found the rate of domestic violence in the NFL to be 55.4% that of the general population. And the overall crime rate was a mere 13% of the national average.
So why then do 69% of Americans believe that the NFL suffers a "widespread epidemic of domestic violence problems"? The answer is rooted in how we think. Humans are prone to rely on examples and experiences that can be easily recalled. The idea is that if we can remember it, it must be important. This mental shortcut is termed the availability heuristic. A key drawback of the heuristic is that it leads us to overestimate the prevalence of memorable events. Here, you can legitimately blame popular media. Because plane crashes are widely covered, many erroneously view flying as more dangerous than driving. Thanks to Shark Week, people are wearier of sharks than deer. Because 91% of people have seen, read, or heard something about Ray Rice's domestic violence, they overestimate the problem of domestic violence in the NFL.
That's not to say that domestic violence isn't a problem in the NFL. By type of crime, domestic violence is the closest the NFL comes to the national average. Moreover, Morris noted that NFL players do seem to commit acts of domestic violence at a higher rate than individuals with a similar socioeconomic status, though a direct comparison wasn't available.
As public figures, football players must hold themselves to higher standards, and be punished appropriately when they fail to meet them. But more quintessentially, as human beings, they need to recognize that unprovoked violence against others, particularly those not able to defend themselves, is utterly reprehensible.
(Image: AP)


text:
Listen Up Philip
The terrific cast all delves into the material full-bore, which contributes to its peculiar resonance. Perry may hate everyone and everything, but in making a…
The terrific cast all delves into the material full-bore, which contributes to its peculiar resonance. Perry may hate everyone and everything, but in making a…
A look at the complexity of domestic violence, especially when it comes to the difficulty of prosecuting abusers in a court of law, "Private Violence"…
"The Ballad of Narayama" is a Japanese film of great beauty and elegant artifice, telling a story of startling cruelty. What a space it opens…
Patrice Leconte's "Monsieur Hire" is a tragedy about loneliness and erotomania, told about two solitary people who have nothing else in common. It involves a…
"Life Itself" screens at 8pm Wednesday, October 22nd, at the Chicago International Film Festival.
Chaz Ebert and Steve James will discuss "Life Itself" at the 2014 Chicago Humanities Festival.
An FFC review of "Ramchand Pakistani."
An FFC report on the Indian film "Bhaag Milkha Bhaag."
An FFC review of "Ramchand Pakistani."
An FFC report on the Indian film "Bhaag Milkha Bhaag."
A conversation with "Dear White People" writer/director Justin Simien at the 2014 Chicago International Film Festival.
Owen Wilson and Wes Anderson remember L.M. "Kit" Carson, who helped them get their start in the movie business.
"Ivory Tower" raises a number of fascinating questions and offers numerous facts on the current, deeply flawed state of the American system of higher education but suffers from a lack of focus or even a hint of what we do about the situation. In fact, there are at least three sections of "Ivory Tower" that could be branched out into their own, more satisfying standalone documentaries, including profiles of the UnCollege Movement, the recent events at the Cooper Union, and the lessons learned in the relationship between San Jose State University and the online learning company Udacity. There's enough interesting, raw material in "Ivory Tower" to consider but one wishes it was shaped into something more cohesive and pointed in its attack and approach.
Is college overrated? For so much of American history, college has been sold as the key to the future. More and more, it's a key that's coming with baggage, including thousands of dollars in student loans. Competition for prestige among high-profile universities has led to rampant expansion. More programs means more facilities, means more students, means more attention, and so on. And all of it means more tuition. The cost of an education has increased more quickly in the past few decades than any other good or service. And as federal money has been taken away from our country's education, the loan movement has begun to resemble the subprime housing crisis, giving people debt that their children will have to repay. Worst of all, no one is sufficiently asking what our increasingly in-debt kids are getting for their high-APR loans. Someone should. And "Ivory Tower" serves as a way to start the conversation about why education is seen as a financial privilege instead of a right for all who need it or are willing to work for it. Half of our college-educated people in this country under 25 are underemployed or unemployed, with debt that is increasing at rates that should be illegal. Something has to be done.
It's understandable that "Ivory Tower" director Andrew Rossi isn't certain what that "something" is but his unfocused approach for at least the first half of his documentary is downright jarring. Stats fly across the screen like the fact that 68% of the students who are paying small fortunes for their education at public universities won't graduate within four years. And then we've moved on before that stat or its impact is placed in context. The film jumps from the impact of Harvard on the education system as a whole to the party school atmosphere at Arizona State University to the interesting story of Deep Springs College, without spending enough time on any of these stories to give them resonance.
Until Cooper Union. If you don't know the story, Cooper Union is a Manhattan college that was founded on the radical model of free education and continued to provide tuition-free learning for decades. Until recently. When a new President, Jamshed Bharucha, came to the conclusion that the school could no longer survive without charging students to learn there, chaos ensued. Critics pointed to the debt amassed by the construction of a very expensive new building on campus and the $700k+ salary of their new leader, and students did what so many critics of millennials claim they are incapable of doing: they staged a revolution. They protested in the form of a sit-in in the President's office. This chapter of "Ivory Tower" is easily its strongest, and could have served as the whole documentary, seeing as it is really the culmination of so many issues in our educational crisis today.
I had similar feelings about later chapters on the UnCollege movement—a San Francisco-based community of people who are trying to use so many of the tools now available to young people to learn without academia—and the fascinating story of Udacity, one that reminds us of the value of traditional education.
Perhaps Rossi places the Udacity saga near the final act of "Ivory Tower" to circle back to the beginning. "Well, the Harvard model may not be working, but we haven't found a better one." If the message of "Ivory Tower" is that we have to accept our broken system, it's a hard one to take (especially for this father of three). The crucial question that "Ivory Tower" fails to ask is the most important one of all: What do we do now?
This message came to me from a reader named Peter Svensland. He and a fr...
An appreciation of "1941" and interview with Bob Gale.
A review of Paul Thomas Anderson's "Inherent Vice" from the 2014 New York Film Festival.
An appreciation of filmmaker, writer and actor L.M. "Kit" Carson, a singular talent.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Part Time Jobs in Monroeville, Pennsylvania ( PA )
If you're looking for part time jobs, student jobs or jobs for teens in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, you've come to the right place! Chances are that GrooveJob.com has the right job for you and wants to be your only source for finding part time jobs in Monroeville, Pennsylvania.
We've got plenty of part time and summer jobs in Monroeville, Pennsylvania. Check out the list of employers below who are accepting applications for part time jobs in your town. Remember to check back with Groovejob.com on a regular basis. We add new part time job listings to our database every week, so you'll find new opportunities every time you check back with us.
|Browse by Employer (Click On Logos)
Jobs by Title
Independent Driver
…- more than any ridesharing platform around. What you need to know: FLEXIBLE SCHEDULE : Part - time , full- time . Work on your own...
Pitcairn, PA
Macy's IS Hiring: Seasonal Retail Stock Receiving Part Time , Morning 5am-2pm - Monroeville, PA - Monroeville Mall, Macy's
…Overview : As a Seasonal Retail Stock Receiving Associate, you will be an integral part of bringing the magic of Macy's to life during...
Monroeville, PA
Part - Time Drivers
Part Time Drivers Our part - time drivers work primarily within 100 miles of a facility. The part - time drivers also serve as a...
Monroeville, PA
Macy's IS Hiring: Seasonal Retail Stock Merchandising Part Time , Morning 5am-2pm - Monroeville, PA - Monroeville Mall
…work independently and as part of a team and must have good time management skills. Physical Demands This position requires constant...
Monroeville, PA
Macy's IS Hiring: Seasonal Retail Sales Part Time - Monroeville, PA - Monroeville Mall
…independently and as part of a team and must have good time management skills. Physical Demands: This position involves constant...
Monroeville, PA
Part Time Crew
…Greets guests with a smile, receives orders, processes payments, and responds appropriately to customer issues Operates cash register or...
Monroeville, PA
Commissioned Consultative Sales Associate ( Part - Time )
…The Consultative Sales Associate is responsible for enhancing the experience of customers and driving profitable sales by providing...
Monroeville, PA
Sales Associate ( Part Time ) - Sears Home Appliance Showroom
…success through our financial results, and through our associate's success. This is an exciting time for SHO and we look forward to...
Monroeville, PA
Part Time Merchandiser
Lawrence Merchandising Services (LMS) is currently seeking a Part - time Merchandiser to service products in local retail stores in the...
Monroeville, PA
CDL A Company Truck Driver for OTR and Regional
…are needed in Chicago, IL & Edison, NJ! (Limited number of positions available) Hourly Pay Nightly Home Time Plus Kreilkamp...
Monroeville, PA
Sales Associate, Retail Part Time
The Part Time Retail Sales Associate position at GNC is the most important job in our company. As a Retail Sales Associate, you are...
Monroeville, PA
* Macy's IS Hiring: Seasonal Retail Stock Receiving Part Time , Evening 2pm-11pm - Monroeville, PA - Monroeville Mall
Overview : As aSeasonalRetailStock ReceivingAssociate, you will be an integral part of bringing the magic of Macy's to life during the...
Monroeville, PA
Mandate Retail Service Merchandiser - Part - Time *
…and completion times, record work mileage, record work expenses, record work time and attendance, and complete training activities....
Monroeville, PA
Office Admin- Part Time
We are seeking a Part Time Office Admin for our firm located in Monroeville. Hours would be M-F; 10am-3pm. Duties to include but not...
Monroeville, PA
Part Time Bridal Sales Consultant
…For the past 80 years the Alfred Angelo family has been dressing brides and their bridal parties in the world's most recognized name in...
Monroeville, PA
Part Time Stock
…includes applying sensors to all hanging merchandise (and folded merchandise as time allows). Perform all job duties in compliance...
Monroeville, PA
Teller- Part Time - Royal Oaks
…to lift heavy coin as well as stand on feet for a long period of time Ability to work occasional evenings and weekends, based on...
Monroeville, PA
Seasonal Sales Associate ( Part - Time )-catherines
…We offer a beautiful selection of fashions and intimates, including hard-to-find extended sizes and an exclusive fit customers love. But...
Monroeville, PA
Local Drivers
Local Driver Division Our local fleet consists of hourly and mileage paid drivers working primarily within 200 miles of a terminal...
Monroeville, PA
…s, hi s and help. To ensure each customer has a positive shopping experience and to remember that the customer is the top priority. Job...
Monroeville, PA
|<< First < Previous 1 2 Next > Last >>


text:
3 Calorie Cutting Tricks that Stick
Welcome to week 8 of the Lose a Turkey Challenge. We are over half way through the journey and although I'm not even close to 15 pounds yet, I'm learning Continue Reading →
Welcome to week 8 of the Lose a Turkey Challenge. We are over half way through the journey and although I'm not even close to 15 pounds yet, I'm learning Continue Reading →
What memories does Halloween conjure in your mind? When I think back I remember really loving Halloween. As a creative type, I couldn't wait to make my own costume. Continue Reading →
Whether your a complete newbie to craft fairs or an old pro, organization is the same for everyone. You've got to be sure before you get in that vehicle to Continue Reading →
You know that feeling you get when you know that it's time to break it off but you feel such a sense of security that it's hard to just…let it Continue Reading →
Just like Eric Carle's Very Busy Spider, I've been "very busy spinning my web" or so it seems this Halloween! I asked a few friends if I could help them Continue Reading →
Tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock…..Have you ever been sitting in a room so quiet that you can hear the minutes ticking away on a walk clock? It's seconds and Continue Reading →
I came to one, huge epic conclusion when I lost 3 pounds this week during the Lose a Turkey By Thanksgiving Challenge. Meal planning makes all the difference in the Continue Reading →
For all you other frugal loving people out there, one of our favorite shopping days is quickly approaching. Black Friday will be here before we know it! And while your Continue Reading →
True confessions of Kim Anderson here. I love making really easy, non-bake desserts. As you may know, I'm not a fan of measuring. That's why I love to create desserts Continue Reading →
This week was a crazy blur. Last Friday I headed out-of-town AGAIN except this time I went to pick up my mom from my home town in North Carolina and Continue Reading →


text:
Ready to zipline!! I have no idea what I am getting myself into. By Terri-Lynn B
Ziplining at COP.
Mar 13, 2011
Thrill Seeker, Sports, Must-See Spots
Canada Olympic Park
Like this Photo
Suggested Itineraries
Stampedeview details
Enjoy the Stampede and fit in some other Calgary family experiences besides.
Sports & Adventureview details
Many know Calgary as the gateway to Rocky mountain adventures. You'll find just as much excitement as a participant or spectator within the city limits.
Report this Photo
Is this photo inappropriate? If so, please let us know.Report ImageCancel


text:
The Green Party's mayoral candidate is seeking answers about the design of one of the London mayor's cycle superhighways on which two cyclists have been killed
Simon Hoggart: David Cameron has handbagged the EU, but was less successful in explaining the whereabouts of his missing deputy
Nick Clegg refuses to sit beside David Cameron during PM's statement to parliament
MPs face attacks amid party leader Nick Clegg's no-show for prime minister's Commons statement on EU veto
Isolation in Europe is bad for jobs and growth, said the deputy PM, although he insisted that he and the PM 'don't disagree' on the issue
Aditya Chakrabortty: Is David Cameron's kid-glove treatment of the City remotely justified, when it neither pays its way nor lends effectively?
In a statement to the Commons on the veto, Cameron insisted the 'safeguards' for the financial sector were not just for the UK but for the EU as a whole
Join Andrew Sparrow for rolling coverage of all the day's political news including all the fallout from the PM's decision to wield the UK veto at last week's EU summit
Julius Maada Bio: Democracy is under attack. All those with influence over the government must help ensure a peaceful political process
Mikhail Prokhorov has announced he will run as an independent in the 2012 Russian presidential elections
Alice Oswald: Poetry represents the faint, honest voice in us all. So should it be funded by opaque hedge funds??
Labour leader criticises David Cameron saying move had left Britain isolated and 'without a voice' at Europe's top table
Generals will have to be more hands on. With the washing up...
What might Tony Blair be thinking in this photograph of the former prime minister with his son Leo?
David Cameron refused to sign up to the new EU treaty after his demands for greater protection of the City were rejected. Polling suggests 57% of the public support his decision and the Tory backbenchers are thrilled. But will his veto help protect the City?
Post your question for the Labour MP on environmental issues from pollution and Rio+20 to the green economy and the 'greenest government ever'
Stuart Dredge: 'I wouldn't call it aggregation: it's curation,' says emerging platforms editor Fiona Spruill
Michael White: The coalition will probably endure its current buffeting because too many people have too much to lose – and no obvious alternative exists
In 2008, after years of campaigning and opposition, Iqra opened as one of the first Muslim primary schools in the UK. Film-maker Masood Khan talks to those for and against faith schools
Temporary postal workers accuse in-house employment agency of administrative failures
The deputy prime minister says there is 'nothing bulldog about hovering in the mid-Atlantic' on the Andrew Marr show and promises to rebuild the UK's relationship with Europe
Nicholas Watt: Jonathan Faull, UK's most senior EU official, says Britain will turn into Channel Islands if it stands apart from EU decision making
FSA report into what went wrong at the Royal Bank of Scotland did not find grounds for disciplinary action against Sir Fred Goodwin, although the regulator has complied a dossier for business secretary, Vince Cable
As Labour sets out Eisenhower-style plans for small business growth, TUC research reveals low-paid workers who lose jobs are now the most likely to be out of work for more than six months
The Guardian's
online dating site
Last 24 hours
Last 24 hours
Find the latest jobs in your sector:


text:
The YSR Congress Party (YSRCP) president and Pulivendula MLA Y S Jaganmohan Reddy on Wednesday announced a separate Telangana wing within the party... ...http://www.deccanherald.com/content/434995/jagan-opens-ysrcp-unit-telangana.html
Pulivendula (Kadapa), October 04: Andhra Pradesh Legislative Council Deputy Chairman Satish Reddy today said the State government would come out... ...http://www.siasat.com/english/news/chandrababu-committed-uplift-poor-women-satish-reddy
Comment · print · T T T+· T- The State government will waive loans of about 20 per cent of farmers by depositing Rs. 10,000 crore in... ...http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/andhra-pradesh/20-pc-of-farmers-to-get-loan-waiver-soon/article6471517.ece?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication
On Tuesday Panjagutta Police arrested a Notorious Pocket Picking Gang five members of Telaga Pamula i.e. 1) Kawadi Kumari (35) a Kirana Business... ...http://www.siasat.com/english/news/five-members-telaga-pamula-pick-pocketing-gang-arrested-panjagutta-police
COIMBATORE: Lower power and interest costs and easy availability of quality cotton has pushed Shri Govindaraja Mills to the unlikeliest of... ...http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/Govindaraja-Mills-to-invest-45m-in-US/articleshow/43180375.cms
Indian Jurisdiction
0 Followers


text:
I work at a large company with multiple departments and a call center over seas. Some of the international agents are "technically" smart people, but when you go off of their script, they don't understand and i had to explain simple concepts multiple times.
Even with domestic employees, They act shocked when you do more the minimum requirements of a task. They keep "encouraging" us to put in extra effort, but they we don't get more pay, access to all the systems or all the training we could use.
Even though small bits of this happens at most companies, there was a lot of it this week.
I think i missed a memo.. Apperently it is National be an Incompetent Screw-up week. I had to talk to so many idiots this week.
Thank goodness tomorrow is Friday!
Less morons today. pretty good day. The weather is getting nice and the snow is melting but the water is soaking into the ground instead of collecting in pools.
long afternoon, i had to deal with a idiots today. How these people can even get dressed in the morning without sending 3 emails to get permission and steps to do it first....
it took this guy over 30 minuted to do a 4 minute job. I had to wait for him and the shmuck still did not do it right. it took me about 3 minutes to do the part i needed. he said he did the other part, so i hope it was actually done correctly
I am getting better at eating extra veggies servings. i plan on keeping it up.
Yes, i even at broccoli.


text:
What's the "een" in Halloween?
late 13c., "style or fashion of attire," from Old French guise "manner, fashion, way," from Frankish *wisa or some similar Germanic source (cf. Old High German wisa "manner, wise;" see wise (n.)). Sense of "assumed appearance" is from 1660s, from earlier meaning "mask, disguise" (c.1500).


text:
Win $10,000 in Cash – Plus Two Chances at $1,000 Every Day...
See Weather Forecast for This Weekend in the Mid Columbia
See the Best Halloween Costume of 2014!
5 Halloween Treats to Keep Away From Your Dog!
Know Where Sex Offenders Live Before Trick-Or-Treating!
Quite possibly The Greatest Scary Prank Of All time!! [VIDEO]
Don't Forget Daylight Savings — Fall Back One Hour November 2n...
Best Halloween Prank AND HOW THEY DID IT! [VIDEO]
Best Sticks for Defending Yourself From Wanton Women [PHOTOS]
The World's Smallest Park Is Located in Pacific Northwest! See W...
Throwback Thursday: 10 Unbelievable Facts About 'Put a Spell on You' and 'Monster Mash'
I'm Going as "Bat Dad" for Halloween! [VIDEO]
It Doesn't Have to Be a Potion to Be Deadly on Halloween
Why I Hate Halloween [VIDEO]
More Videos
- ●'Slender Man' Getting Take Out From Taco Bell! [VIDEO]
- ●How to Make Kinetic Sand or Moon Sand [VIDEOS]
- ●'Seize the Deal' Brings Back Fujiyama Gift Cards! [VIDEO]
- ●My Least Popular Opinion [VIDEO]
- ●"Selfies With Strangers Prank" Is Funniest Thing I've Seen All Week [VIDEO]
- ●See Who Jim Carrey SPOOFS In These Odd Commercials! [VIDEO]
- ●My New Favorite Halloween Joke! [VIDEO]
- ●Faith Martin's Interview — 'Beggars Banquet' & Gibson Guitar Guitars Auction! [VIDEO]
- ●"Here Comes Honey Boo Boo" Cancelled Because of Mama June's New Boyfriend [VIDEO]
- ●Watch People React to 'Terror Behind the Screen' [VIDEO]
- ●Experiment on Hugging! This Made Me Cry! [VIDEO]
- ●Faith Martin And Eva Do the Hongi Hug! [VIDEO]
- ●Satire at Its Finest — Wheelbarrow Stunt Rider Mocks Extreme Sports
- ●Ever Wonder What TV Anchors do During a Break? Hahaha [VIDEO]
- ●Man Converts Freezer to Dispense Frozen Candy Instead of Ice [VIDEOS]
More Music News
- ●From Tragedy Comes Camaraderie for Marysville-Pilchuck High and Longtime Rival
- ●Let's Establish Some Communication Etiquette! [POLLS]
- ●Can You Get the Flu From a Flu Shot? [VIDEO]
- ●Luke Bryan, Jason Aldean + More Announced as CMT Artists of the Year for 2014
- ●How to Play the National Anthem with Your .22 Rifle! [VIDEO]
- ●Surfing the Oregon Coast, Short Sands [VIDEO]
- ●Best Way to Settle an Argument — Battle of the Sexes!
- ●Super Cool Fender Guitars Built by Faith Martin's Guitar Player Bobby Nelsen of Nelz Guitars
- ●Rare Nisqually River Water Spout Caught on Video!
- ●Unbelievable Whale Encounter With Hump Whale in Santa Cruz CA
- ●KORD Welcomes Miranda Lambert to the Spokane Arena on February 12, 2015
- ●Richland School Dist. Chili and Cinnamon Roll Recipes!
- ●These Halloween Jokes are GROANERS!
- ●Double Your Spending Power at West Richland Golf Course, Restaurant & Lounge! [VIDEO]
- ●Fall Garden Must Do's! — When and How to Dig Up and Store Perennial Flower Bulbs


text:
Why? Because you can! And pickle, and jam, or otherwise celebrate the resurgence of the domestic arts our forebears held so dear. Put on your best apron and step into our kitchen, won't you?
Charred bits of onion and the last corn of summer are blended with blistered tomatillos for this tangy salsa. I was conservative on the amount of heat -- add more hot chilies "as desired" and you'll do fine.
Tomatillos, housed in tiny husks, make a great salsa verde. Using cumin and spanish paprika, and thai chiles, learn how to can a salsa verde that will be a great accompaniment to any Mexican dish or alone with some tortilla chips!
Roasting tomatillos and chiles adds a smokey flavor to traditional salsa verde. This salsa is great with enchiladas, tostadas, or as a dip with chips. To make more, double the recipe to yield up to six pints.
A small batch of versatile Tomatillo Salsa Verde. A great way to try green salsa before deciding to put some up.
My roasted salsa verde is pretty special, but be warned: mine uses way less onion than the NCHFP recipe for canning, but it uses more tomatillos. It has the same amount of lime juice, though, so I figure it all comes out in the wash.
Grill up a pile of tomatillos for this smokey, tangy salsa. Great on carnitas!
This was like pulling teeth to get an authentic Salsa Verde Recipe from the local's but worth the time and effort...and laughs
An original (but simple) Tomatillo Salsa recipe with jalpeno and cilantro. Great fresh and easy to put up for the darker days of winter when you want a taste of Mexican sunshine
You'll make your friends green with envy when you haul out this spicy taste of summer long after the season is past.
Visit Punk Domestics's profile on Pinterest.


text:
North Light Books
Knitted Toys
From a cute chick and a curly-haired doll to colorful mice and a patchwork tortoise, here you will find 25 unique designs for newborns to teens. Try knitting the colorful Stripy Ball for little ones to play with, or Goldilocks and the Three Bears Finger Puppets for older children to enjoy. The Shiny Robot has real retro charm while the Slithery Snake can even double up as a draught excluder! With toys ranging from quick and easy to more complex designs, there's something for every child and every knitter.


text:
Protect your spare key by using your dog. Of course, your dog has to be an outdoor dog (or you at least need to have a doggy door) for this to work. Just hide a spare house key on the inside of your dog's collar. Then when you need an extra key, you will be able to access this one.
There are more features to a home alarm system besides making sounds when people break in. Modern systems are often capable of detecting any open door or window and announcing that fact. This is great for parents that have small children so that they know when their kids open or close doors. Use motion sensor lights. The lights will be triggered when someone gets too close to the house. These lights will make you aware of, and can also scare off, potential burglars. Get in the habit of checking and replacing the bulbs as necessary to ensure the lights remain effective. A great security system for your home is a dog. They are protective of their home and owner and will alert you if someone is on your property. Keeping a huge and ferocious canine is not necessary. Even a small dog will deter intruders, who do not want a lot of noise when they commit their crimes.
Check with your local law enforcement agency about home protection plans. Your local police department will help you with preventive measures, inspect your home and show you how to mark your valuables so they can easily be found. Get in touch with the department to determine their offerings.
If you've got a garage, make sure to use it for your car rather than extra storage space. Keeping the car inside is a good way to keep criminals from stealing or harming it. Hiding your car away from plain view is a good way to keep intruders from knowing when you are at home or not.
If you lose your house keys often, you might want to install a keyless entry system. Install key-less locks instead. These locks use codes instead of keys. You can install them yourself or you can hire a home security firm.
Inquire with your company if they allow both leases and purchases of equipment. Buying will cost you more initially for the equipment, but will save you a monthly bill. Although leasing is usually cheaper, you may have to fill out contracts and you will have higher monthly costs. Look at what you can afford, as well as what is offered and make an informed choice.
Don't utilize spring latch locks. They give intruders and easy time breaking in, since they can be unlocked with a credit card. A thief only needs to skip the credit card in between the lock to make it open. Add a deadbolt if you do not want to replace your spring latch locks.
Install lights that have motion sensors. These lights will come on if someone walks near your home. This is a good way of knowing who comes near your home and keeps you safe if you ever come home late. Just remember to change out the bulbs every so often so the lights remain in working order. Whenever you purchase some expensive item, don't place the empty boxes right outside your home. This will show that you have expensive equipment in your home. After removing the contents from these boxes, tear or cut them up. If you use a door lock with a numeric keypad, do not use your birthday as the pass code. Your birthday can be found on mail or social media sites, so this means anyone can access your home. Instead, make it a number which you can figure out through a math equation so you remember the equation instead of the number.
When dealing with companies that install home security systems, it's important to trust your gut. If you are hesitant about the company, your gut feeling is especially important. Ask for someone else to come out or switch companies. You want your new system to protect you, not be the way the thief gets into your home.
When choosing a home security firm, trust your instincts. This is especially important when it comes to the company employees who will be installing your system. Make sure that the installer has experience installing your type of security system. The purpose of using the company is to calm your uneasiness, not worsen it.