Dance Magers

Larger investments in public health equal better health, fewer deaths and reduced medical spending — and the effect is especially pronounced in the communities that need it most, according to new research.

The findings are the latest in a series of studies that researcher Glen Mays and his colleagues at the National Coordinating Center for Public Health Services and Systems Research (PHSSR) are conducting on the health and economic value of public health spending. While Mays has authored previous research on the topic — such as this 2011 study that found public health spending is associated with reduced mortality rates from preventable causes of death — this most recent research was the first to examine how those benefits vary across communities. The findings were released last week at the 141^st Annual Meeting of the American Public Health Association in Boston.

Mays found that health gains from public health spending were 21 percent to 44 percent larger in low-income communities than in more affluent communities, and 17 percent to 38 percent larger in communities that invested in a broader range of public health activities. While Mays told me that he and his colleagues had a “strong hunch” that some communities would benefit more from public health investments than others, the “strength of the patterns we saw were quite surprising.”

“The major finding is that spending targeted toward low-income communities has a significantly larger effect than in other types of communities,” he said. “It makes sense because these communities are facing larger socioeconomic burdens, larger socioeconomic threats to health…but the magnitude of the difference was certainly surprising.”

Specifically, the study, which used data from a 17-year period, found that infant mortality and deaths due to cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer and the flu fell by between 0.5 percent and 4.3 percent for each 10 percent increase in public health spending over 17 years, with the larger gains experienced by low-income communities. More public health spending was also tied to decreases in the per-person growth rate in medical care spending. In addition, the study found that the cumulative effects over a 10-year period were nearly twice as large as the short-term effects.

“If we compare that 17 years to the incubation period of many of the chronic diseases that public health is targeting…that’s a reasonable time frame,” said Mays, who is also a public health professor at the University of Kentucky, where the National Coordinating Center for PHSSR is housed. “We know if we’re going to be effective it’s going to take time, so 17 years is not that long to wait for benefits. On the other hand, it’s not instantaneous and that’s important for policymakers and the public to recognize — we have to be wiling to invest over the long term to realize the full benefits.”

To conduct the study, Mays and colleagues linked organizational and financial data from the nation’s thousands of public health agencies to mortality rates and medical care spending estimates over a 17-year period (1993 to 2010). He noted that the study was painstakingly designed so researchers could isolate the health gains associated to public health versus those associated with other factors, such as medical care.

“Prior research looked at the average effects (of public health spending) across the nation, so to really differentiate and detect different levels across communities required quite a lot more statistical analysis to tease those effects out,” Mays told me. “We invested a lot in a very strong research design and analytic technique that helps us control for many different factors…so we’re about as confident as you can be that the effect we’re measuring is purely attributable to investments in public health.”

And while the study can’t shed light on which specific public health activities — direct health services, health promotion, policy, etc. — led to the health benefits, it did find larger health gains in communities that support a more comprehensive array of services as envisioned in the Institute of Medicine’s report on the core functions of public health.

Mays said he hopes policymakers at all levels of government can use the findings when deciding how to allocate often limited and strained funding, and to help target resources where they’ll reap the biggest health returns.

To download findings from “Who Benefits from Public Health Spending and How Long Does It Take: Estimating Community Specific Spending Effects,” visit http://works.bepress.com/glen_mays/119.

Kim Krisberg is a freelance public health writer living in Austin, Texas, and has been writing about public health for more than a decade.

“Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new at all.” -Abraham Lincoln

It might be Veterans Day / Armistice Day all around the world, but it’s still Messier Monday here on Starts With A Bang! We may have been fighting wars for all of human history, but nearly all of the 110 deep sky objects that make up the Messier Catalogue go back long before that.

Today, we take an in-depth look at one of the brightest and closest star clusters in the entire night sky, one that — despite being visible to the naked eye — went unrecorded until Messier himself catalogued it in 1764. Let’s take a tour of Messier 39, starting with how to find it.

Although one of the most prominent collections of stars in the night sky is known as the Summer Triangle — consisting of the dominant stars (in its portion of the sky) Altair, Deneb and Vega — it’s actually visible after sunset well into autumn and even early winter for the Northern Hemisphere! The galactic plane passes through the summer triangle, and most of the open star clusters contained within our galaxy are found in the galactic plane, and Messier 39 is no exception to this rule.

To find it, draw an imaginary line from Vega (the brightest one) to Deneb (on the short side with Vega), and continue to head a little farther in that same direction.

The first thing you’ll run into is the easily visible naked-eye star, the orange supergiant ξ Cygni, which is nearly along the imaginary line extended along the Vega-to-Deneb path. If you think about Deneb as the bottom of a circle and move clockwise towards ξ Cygni, you’ll hit three more (albeit slightly dimmer) naked eye stars as you reach the top of the circle — ρ Cygni, π² Cygni, and Azelfafage (also π¹ Cygni), in order — and Messier 39 lies just inside of them.

Although Messier, discovering it in 1764, gave it the very terse description:

Cluster of stars near the tail of the Swan; one can see them with an ordinary telescope…

this actually turns out to be one of the most remarkable objects in his entire catalogue! Let’s take a look inside.

You might first notice the prominent blue stars, and you should: there are about 30 prominent, blue-colored stars identified in M39, the bluest of which is of spectral type A0, the brightest and bluest of all the A-class stars. But one of the things that makes this cluster particularly interesting is that all of the bright stars are blue!

There are no red, orange or yellow giants, no prominent subgiants, and no stars in general found off of the main sequence!

For those of you who need a reminder, the main sequence is the line on which — if you plot the colors vs. magnitudes of stars — you’ll find all stars burning hydrogen in their core.

This is exceedingly rare! By this point in a star cluster’s life, a star running out of fuel in its core takes some tens of millions of years to go from the main sequence and through the various subgiant and giant stages until it dies in a planetary nebula and white dwarf combination. With hundreds of stars expected in a typical star cluster, finding one without a single evolved star is exceedingly rare!

And yet, here Messier 39 is, doing exactly that.

With the background stars of the galaxy shining in a dim haze behind it, Messier 39 happens to be close, at a distance of just 800 light years, only the Pleiades and Praesepe star clusters are closer objects in the Messier catalogue. And yet, if we take a long exposure to really bring out the background stars, we don’t really find many more that appear to be associated with these bright, blue ones! Even though — based on what we see — there are around 800 solar masses worth of material in there, we’ve only definitively identified around 60 stars in this cluster!

Only six of Messier’s star clusters appear brighter to the eye, and the brightest of the blue stars here are just barely beyond the limit of human naked-eye vision under the darkest possible skies.

With long-exposure photography, the sight is nothing short of spectacular.

Based on the stars that are in there — and assuming that higher mass ones are missing because they’ve evolved and disappeared — we can estimate that this star cluster is around 300 million years old, but there are some uncertainties there.

After all, looking among what appear to be background stars, how many evolved white dwarfs from long-dead O-and-B-class stars are hanging out, invisible because of the incredible density of stars found in the galactic plane?

You’d be very, very smart if you thought to look in the infrared; oftentimes, evolved, cooler stars that are less prominent in the visible will appear bright in the infrared!

Let’s have a look at the best IR image out there of M39, thanks to 2MASS!

This infrared image is what allowed us to go from about 30 (visible) stars up to around 60, but that’s still a tiny number for an open star cluster! (And it’s only seven light-years across; this star cluster would appear tiny if it weren’t so ridiculously close!) Did something happen when this cluster was forming to end star formation early? It wouldn’t be the only cluster like this, but the more of these objects I go through, the more of an appreciation I have for the sheer diversity of populations of stars that form naturally in the Universe!

My favorite of all the images that exist of M39 comes courtesy of NOAO, the National Optical Astronomy Observatories.

This image — originally — comes in an incredibly high resolution; if we take a “slice” through the center, here’s what this incomparable star cluster looks like, silhouetted against the backdrop of the galactic plane!

This would make a lousy target for Hubble due to its incredibly large angular size, but that makes it all the more amazing as a target for amateur skygazers! And with that magnificent tour through one of the closest star clusters to us, that will wrap up another Messier Monday! Including today’s entry, we’ve peered at the following Messier objects:

• M1, The Crab Nebula: October 22, 2012
• M2, Messier’s First Globular Cluster: June 17, 2013
• M5, A Hyper-Smooth Globular Cluster: May 20, 2013
• M7, The Most Southerly Messier Object: July 8, 2013
• M8, The Lagoon Nebula: November 5, 2012
• M11, The Wild Duck Cluster: September 9, 2013
• M12, The Top-Heavy Gumball Globular: August 26, 2013
• M13, The Great Globular Cluster in Hercules: December 31, 2012
• M15, An Ancient Globular Cluster: November 12, 2012
• M18, A Well-Hidden, Young Star Cluster: August 5, 2013
• M20, The Youngest Star-Forming Region, The Trifid Nebula: May 6, 2013
• M21, A Baby Open Cluster in the Galactic Plane: June 24, 2013
• M25, A Dusty Open Cluster for Everyone: April 8, 2013
• M29, A Young Open Cluster in the Summer Triangle: June 3, 2013
• M30, A Straggling Globular Cluster: November 26, 2012
• M31, Andromeda, the Object that Opened Up the Universe: September 2, 2013
• M32, The Smallest Messier Galaxy: November 4, 2013
• M33, The Triangulum Galaxy: February 25, 2013
• M34, A Bright, Close Delight of the Winter Skies: October 14, 2013
• M37, A Rich Open Star Cluster: December 3, 2012
• M38, A Real-Life Pi-in-the-Sky Cluster: April 29, 2013
• M39, The Closest Messier Original: November 11, 2013
• M40, Messier’s Greatest Mistake: April 1, 2013
• M41, The Dog Star’s Secret Neighbor: January 7, 2013
• M44, The Beehive Cluster / Praesepe: December 24, 2012
• M45, The Pleiades: October 29, 2012
• M48, A Lost-and-Found Star Cluster: February 11, 2013
• M51, The Whirlpool Galaxy: April 15th, 2013
• M52, A Star Cluster on the Bubble: March 4, 2013
• M53, The Most Northern Galactic Globular: February 18, 2013
• M56, The Methuselah of Messier Objects: August 12, 2013
• M57, The Ring Nebula: July 1, 2013
• M60, The Gateway Galaxy to Virgo: February 4, 2013
• M65, The First Messier Supernova of 2013: March 25, 2013
• M67, Messier’s Oldest Open Cluster: January 14, 2013
• M71, A Very Unusual Globular Cluster: July 15, 2013
• M72, A Diffuse, Distant Globular at the End-of-the-Marathon: March 18, 2013
• M73, A Four-Star Controversy Resolved: October 21, 2013
• M74, The Phantom Galaxy at the Beginning-of-the-Marathon: March 11, 2013
• M75, The Most Concentrated Messier Globular: September 23, 2013
• M77, A Secretly Active Spiral Galaxy: October 7, 2013
• M78, A Reflection Nebula: December 10, 2012
• M81, Bode’s Galaxy: November 19, 2012
• M82, The Cigar Galaxy: May 13, 2013
• M83, The Southern Pinwheel Galaxy, January 21, 2013
• M86, The Most Blueshifted Messier Object, June 10, 2013
• M92, The Second Greatest Globular in Hercules, April 22, 2013
• M94, A double-ringed mystery galaxy, August 19, 2013
• M97, The Owl Nebula, January 28, 2013
• M99, The Great Pinwheel of Virgo, July 29, 2013
• M101, The Pinwheel Galaxy, October 28, 2013
• M102, A Great Galactic Controversy: December 17, 2012
• M103, The Last ‘Original’ Object: September 16, 2013
• M104, The Sombrero Galaxy: May 27, 2013
• M108, A Galactic Sliver in the Big Dipper: July 22, 2013
• M109, The Farthest Messier Spiral: September 30, 2013

Come back next week, where another deep-sky object — and another unique story about the Universe — awaits you on Messier Monday!

Well, because the only thing that makes him stop crying is the original Star Wars opening theme by John Williams. So unless you walk around screaming all day in misery until you too hear the Star Wars theme — which would be much less socially acceptable from an adult than an infant — then this baby has the edge.

Read more...

This is a small series (only C-3PO, R2-D2 and Stormtrooper varieties) of Star Wars character themed sex toys imagined by Balazs Sarmai (of Avengers themed sex toy fame). They're all based on existing adult products available from LELO, so with enough nontoxic paint you could actually make these. And, coming from a guy who once spraypainted his penis silver for a Halloween costume, I can't stress the nontoxic part enough. Keep going for the other two. Thanks to SaraDevil, who mentioned she's holding out for a Darth Vader model. Me? I want a Han Solo or Lando Calrissian.

This is a Pokemon themed rap (despite not being a rap song at all) created by the folks over at CollegeHumor featuring the names of all 718 pocket monsters. They don't actually incorporate the names of the Pokemon into the lyrics though, they just sing a couple lines then rattle off a bunch of names. I'm not sure I consider that a song. Of course I'm not sure I consider half the shit I hear on the radio music, but what the hell am I doing listening to the radio anyways? I miss my phonograph. Hit the jump for the video. I heard you get a t-shirt or your picture on the wall if you finish the whole thing in one sitting. Thanks to wilmersama and Nick, who prefer their rap with far more sex and drug references than would ever be appropriate for a Pokemon theme.

Good news for everyone who is tired of watching Batman put on varying styles of matte black armor in all of his movies — director and pal of Ben Affleck Kevin Smith says Zack Snyder has shown him the new costume, and that it will be totally different from anything that's come before in the Bat-movies.

Read more...

This is pretty cool stuff to keep in mind the next time you're staggering all over the streets of Helsinki, trying to get some uptight cop to give you back your Vodka (that's what everyone's 'summer vacations' are like, right?)

Read more...

“One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.” -Dale Carnegie

Our new Ask Ethan segment has been really popular, and the questions and suggestions keep pouring in. It’s your Universe too, and if there’s something you want to know about it, you should ask! (So keep it up!) This week’s question is one of the biggest of them all, and it comes courtesy of John L. Ferri, who asks,

I have a difficult time understanding cosmic inflation and the horizon problem. I think you covered it once before, but more detail may help my confusion.

Let’s back up to the beginning, to put this in some context.

This is your Universe. It goes on as far as the most powerful telescopes ever devised can see in all directions, finding tens of thousands of galaxies located tens of billions of light years away everywhere we’ve ever looked. On the largest scales, it’s roughly the same — the same densities, temperatures, star-and-galaxy types, metallicities, etc. — no matter where we attempt to look. The biggest difference we’ve found is that the farther away we look, the younger the things we’re looking at appear to be, and the faster they appear to be receding from us.

This has to do with how the Universe is expanding and evolving. Thanks to three big pieces of evidence in the context of General Relativity (our theory of gravity):

1. The Hubble expansion of the Universe, or the observation that a galaxy’s apparent redshift correlates with its apparent distance from us,
2. The existence and properties of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), or an almost-perfectly-uniform sea of blackbody radiation in all directions just a few degrees above absolute zero, and
3. The abundances of the light elements — hydrogen, deuterium, helium (He-3 and He-4) and lithium — in the earliest recesses of the Universe, before any stars had formed,

we can safely conclude that the Universe evolved and expanded from a hotter, denser state, and that has been around in its current matter-and-radiation-filled form for about 13.8 billion years. A long time, but not an infinite amount of time. This paradigm is known colloquially as the Big Bang.

But there’s an issue here. Over the past 13.8 billion years, the Universe has expanded according to the rules of General Relativity, which means the rate that space has expanded is determined by some set of initial conditions and also on the energy content (normal matter, dark matter, radiation, neutrinos, dark energy, spatial curvature, etc.) of the entire Universe. That part is fine, but the issue is that the Universe appears to have the same rough, average properties everywhere we look.

The densities and clustering properties of galaxies on one side of the Universe are identical to those observables on the other side, no matter what arbitrary “side” you choose. This should strike you as weird. Why?

Consider that since the Big Bang, no information has been able to travel faster than the speed of light. We can “see” 46 billion light years in each direction because that’s how far light has been able to travel in the expanding Universe over the past 13.8 billion years. So if we can look more than 23 billion light years in one direction and more than 23 billion light years in the other direction, we wouldn’t expect these regions to be related.

Still confused? Let’s give you an analogy to help understand this better.

Consider boiling water in a pot on your stove. You heat the water from the bottom, and — as best as you can tell — the water boils at the same time everywhere in the pot. There’s no discernible temperature difference between the top of the water and the bottom. Think about that fact for a second.

Why is that?

You’re heating the pot of water from the bottom, but the water is heating up everywhere. This is because the water molecules are moving around, bumping into other water molecules, and sharing their energy among one another. You may be heating the water from the bottom, but the water from the bottom can interact — and exchange information/energy — with the water in the rest of the pot, and can do it on timescales that are very small compared to the timescale of heating the water to a boil.

This isn’t always the case.

Consider the above photo, where lava flows down from an active volcano and into the ocean. Where the lava — well over 1,000 °C — strikes the water, it boils almost immediately due to the incredible temperature difference. But the ocean is vast, and the rate of heat transfer is finite; you don’t have to go very far away from where the lava enters the water at all to find waters where the temperature is virtually unaffected by the lava heating the water. For all practical purposes, those regions are causally disconnected from one another, because they do not exchange information or share properties with one another.

It would be very surprising if causally disconnected regions — regions that didn’t come in contact with one another or exchange information with one another — had the same temperatures. Yet that’s exactly what the Universe appears to do!

Consider that the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) was emitted when the Universe was just 380,000 years old, and that in that time — even in our rapidly expanding Universe — light could have only traveled around one million light years in any direction. If you filled in the microwave sky with circles a million light-years in radius, it would take more than ten billion independent regions to fill what we can see! And yet, these causally disconnected regions have the same temperatures, spectra, and densities to about 99.99% precision.

That problem — that regions that have never had a chance to exchange information with one another just happen to have identical properties to one another — is known as the horizon problem.

But there is a way to solve it; these regions may not have had time to exchange information with one another since the Big Bang, but what if the Big Bang began with them already having the same properties?

In a nutshell, that’s what inflation is: the thing that happened before the Big Bang that not only sets it up, it sets up the initial conditions that our Universe appears to have! By taking a small, tiny region (possibly even an infinitesimal region) and expanding it exponentially, that tiny region stretches to a size larger than our presently observable Universe, and ensures the following:

1. That any matter, particles, energy or topological defects existing in that region of space prior to inflation will be so reduced in density that — at most — there will be only one such particle left in our Universe (solves the monopole problem),
2. Whatever curvature space had prior to inflation, inflation stretches it so that it will appear to be indistinguishable from flat when we look at it post-inflation (solves the flatness problem),
3. Whatever variations there were in temperature or density across different regions of space prior to inflation, it’s only one tiny region that gave rise to our entire observable Universe, explaining why our Universe appears to have the same temperature-and-density properties everywhere we look (solves the horizon problem), and
4. Quantum fluctuations that take place (according to well-understood laws) during inflation give rise to a very particular set of predictions for temperature-and-density fluctuations (and imperfections) in our observable Universe today. (Some more explanations here, here and here.)

Item number three is how the horizon problem is solved: by taking a tiny region where things once were connected and stretching it to such a large size that everything we see — although they’re not connected since the Big Bang — was once connected before the Big Bang.

If you don’t allow inflation, then you simply have to sweep those three problems (monopole, flatness and horizon) and one prediction (about the now-confirmed spectrum of density-and-temperature fluctuations in the Universe) under the rug, and say, “Those are just the initial conditions the Big Bang started with” to make your model work.

Or, you can embrace inflation as the simple, elegant and straightforward way to solve all of them.

And that’s why the Universe — to the best of our knowledge — is the same everywhere and in all directions.

Have a question or suggestion? Drop me a line in our question/suggestion box, and your idea could get the Ask Ethan treatment next!

I am not a fan of the convergent evolution argument for humanoid aliens. I can well believe that it’s likely that intelligent aliens exist out there in the universe, but I’m not even going to try to predict what they look like: there are too many alternative paths that are possible. But for some reason, many people like to insist that it’s reasonably likely that they’d resemble us in general, if not in detail, and they’ll then go on to extrapolate that behaviorally and culturally they’ll share many properties with us. Usually, as with Simon Conway Morris and now George Dvorsky, this argument relies entirely on the premise of convergent evolution.

It annoys the hell out of me, because it requires waving away or consciously ignoring basic principles of evolution. Here’s how Dvorsky illustrates the concept:

I’ve seen versions of this illustration a thousand times. Gosh, look, dolphins and ichthyosaurs all have paddle-shaped fins and streamlined bodies! Therefore, this is evidence that aquatic forms all converge on similar morphologies. And therefore, intelligent, terrestrial organisms will also converge on an ideal form for their niche, which is ours also, therefore we represent a morphological ideal.

I hate the argument because it isn’t applicable to alien species. In both cases shown above, the organisms involved belong to the same subphylum, the Vertebrata, and the same superclass, the Tetrapoda. They share a common ancestor, and the same starting point. When you start with a terrestrial creature that looks like this, with four limbs and a suite of similar traits…

…and then let it re-adapt to a marine life as a free-swimming, active predator after long detours into mammalian and reptilian forms, is it any surprise that they converge on similar structures? They are both constrained by their ancestry! The four-finned torpedo does not necessarily represent an ideal form that will be recreated on every planet we ever someday visit, but is instead a compromise, a form that can be generated from a four-limbed vertebrate with a minimum of fuss.

But what if we look at organisms with more remote ancestry? A whole different phylum, perhaps? If we start down the evolutionary road with a conchiferan sort of creature, a mollusc…

…which later evolves into a free-swimming, active predator, you get this:

That’s something that looks completely different from a fish-like ichthysaur or dolphin; it’s got a completely different shape, a completely different set of feeding behaviors, a completely different internal organization.

We could ask the same question of other phyla. Where are the sleek torpedo shaped crustaceans sporting a nice dorsal fin and quartet of paddles? Show me a marine annelid that has followed this same path.

Now keep in mind that life on another planet will share no ancestry with anything on Earth. If our history is any example, they will be the product of a few billion years of single-celled tinkering, with a riotous adaptive radiation of multicellular forms that will explore a small fraction of morphospace…and every step will be contingent on prior states.

You can only make this ludicrous convergence argument if you think 1) contingency is relatively unimportant, that 2) adaptation is extremely powerful and will always drive a species towards an optimum, and that 3) the shape of a relatively tiny subset of species on this planet represent that optimum. There is a fourth requirement as well: you must be oblivious to the fact that (2) and (3) contradict each other.

Gawker Woman Wears Hamburger as Sandal After Sex in Waffle House Parking Lot | Jalopnik This Is The Most Despicable Drunk Driver I've Ever Seen | Kotaku The Hunger Games Recreated With Cats That Don't Care | Lifehacker The Reality of Earning Money Online

Read more...

My God that Prince Eric is one lucky guy. Presumably in honor of No-Shave November, this is series of Disney princesses with beards as imagined by Adam Ellis. You are into them. "I am not into them." *swinging pocket watch* You are getting veeeeeery into them. After all, what's a beard if not a potential ponytail for your face? And ponytails are cute right? So these are like ladies with dual ponytails. Try to kiss her in bed and you won't be able to tell if she's coming or going! "I'm not kissing her in bed." Well of course you're not, what the hell would a princess be doing with you? Keep going for the rest. Thanks to T.J. O., who's so manly he tried participating in No-Shave November last year and was tripping over his beard by the 4th.

When alcohol ends up in the blood, and it eventually ends up inthe brain. Does it matter if it goes through the stomach first? And can injecting alcohol be that bad if people used to use it as a medical intervention? Yes. Yes it can.

Read more...

Patience, young padawan. The official release date for Star Wars: Episode VII was just announced, and it's December 18, 2015. That gives J.J. Abrams a bit more time, and gets the film out of the Avengers/Man of Steel 2/Jurassic Park/Terminator/everything else logjam. Of course, as Ursus-Veritas points out, this could get interesting.

Read more...

We know that Mass Effect is one of the most important new science fiction universes — but TV Equals has a great piece arguing that this video game trilogy deserves to be a television show. Could Mass Effect bring space opera back to the small screen?

Read more...

People have been wondering why J.J. Abrams took the Episode VII screenwriting duties from Toy Story 3's Michael Arndt. According to Abrams, there's no insidious conspiracy and Arndt wasn't doing a bad job (at least that they're admitting to) — it's all about the scheduling.

Read more...

The FDA today took steps to dramatically reduce the use of trans fat in processed foods. Which, sure, partially hydrogenated carbon chains are are kind of evil, but they're also kind of super delicious. Then again, they're probably why the average American male looks a little doughy compared to his international peers.

Read more...

Not that you needed any additional reasons to love famed astrophysicst Neil deGrasse Tyson and educator/comedian/TV host extraordinaire Bill Nye, but just in case: Here's Neil calling his buddy Bill while onstage at Florida State University (the sounds gets better at 1:40). Do you think they have sleepovers together? I bet they do, and I bet they're awesome.

Read more...

The vacuous anti-vaccine movement should take notice of what's going on in Syria. After less than three years of civil war, polio is on the rise — a stark reminder of what happens when societies collapse.

Read more...

On Tuesday, we reported on the new comic character Kamala Khan, a teenage Muslim who is taking the moniker of Ms. Marvel in her own self-titled comic due out next February. The Colbert Report's Stephen Colbert recognized this for the attack on America that it is, and reported it accordingly.

Read more...

From a non-autistic point of view, people with autism can seem somewhat disconnected in social and emotional terms. It’d be tempting to attribute this to differences in brain connectivity---wiring that never quite got connected---and in fact, this has been the prevailing hypothesis. But this week, researchers report that the brains of autistic children are actually more connected than the brains of non-autistic children are. Conventional Wisdom For years, studies have appeared to show that

Who ruled the dinosaur dynasty before the king of the dinosaurs? This guy. Lythronax argestes, or "Gore King of the Southwest," was discovered in Utah in 2009 and is formally announced in a journal article this week. The carnivorous beast is the earliest known member of the tyrannosaurid family, which includes the infamous Tyrannosaurus rex. The 24-foot skeleton is thought to be that of a juvenile who in life weighed 2.75 tons---markedly smaller than the 40-foot length of the average T

All you Marvel fans better get a Netflix subscription if you don't have one already! Marvel has announced that Netflix will air four new live-action Marvel superhero TV shows, based on Luke Cage, Iron Fist, Jessica Jones and Daredevil, along with a miniseries event based on the Defenders. The Defenders!

Read more...

Obesity rates among the denizens of Middle-Earth are on the rise. Hobbits, dwarves, orcs and even men are getting fatter, because instead of a sensible diet based on fruits, vegetables and Lembas bread, they're eating at Denny's, thanks to their new The Hobbit: The Desolation of Your Arteries Smaug-themed menu.

Read more...