Is that a lot or a little?

PAX organizers say they have confirmed nearly 100 cases of H1N1 virus infections, or swine flu, in the wake of the Seattle videogame convention, which drew approximately 75,000 gamers to the Washington State Convention and Trade Center between Sept. 4 and 6.

source

So, that’s about one tenth of one percent of the people reporting likely swine flue (H1N1). That would be a very mild flu season, but since its a weekend and not a season, it may be a large number. On the other hand, small samples are highly variable. What you’d need to do is to find ten or twenty conventions of 20 or more thousand people and count the flu cases across that sample, and from that perhaps extrapolate rates. (I’m just estimating these numbers …. my point is that I’m not convinced this is a large number.)

This is, however, the beginning of the season of school and other changes in behavior that enhance flu transmission, and we are hearing reports like this one from Pax as well as various colleges that have started to report large numbers of cases.

Well, wash your hands, get plenty of bed rest, and I’ll see you in the morning.

My friend Virginia Hughes is asking this question on her blog pursuant to a conference she is going to. She has a survey she’d like people to take. The survey takes about 15 seconds so please go and help her out.

For background: Virginia was the blog herder for Scienceblogs.com for a while. She’s quite a good science writer and has a blog you should put on your RSS thingie.

The following video is mercifully missing its sound. Go to 1 minute and start watching there.
Continue reading Deeply Discounted Apple Computers, iPhones, and iTouches (Five to ten if you are caught) →

Fossils of a newly discovered species of dinosaur — a 10-meter-long, elephant-weight predator — were discovered in 1996 along the banks of Argentina’s Rio Colorado, and are now being reported after a long period of careful study. This dinosaur dates to about 85 million years (which falls within the Cretaceous period).

Perhaps the most interesting feature of Aerosteon riocoloradensis is that it demonstrates the evolution of a bird-like respiratory system in an animal that is definitely not bird-like in most other ways. Indeed, the authors of this paper imply that this dinosaur’s respiratory system represents an early phase in the evolution of the bird’s respiratory system. This is a case of an adaptation arising in one context and later being used in an entirely different context.

This is how evolution often works: An adaptation arises for one reason, and then that adaptation is employed in a similar way but for a very different purpose (it is “exapted” as Stephen Gould would say) in a later organism. In this case, we see a lung adapted for a certain kind of efficiency in a terrestrial organism. Later, if the authors are correct, this same efficiency-enhancing adaptation is used in birds as an adaptation related to flight, an entirely different reason.

In order to understand the significance of this find, it may be helpful to first discuss some interesting things about tetrapod lungs, and bird lungs in particular.

Continue reading Aerosteon riocoloradensis: A Very Cool Dinosaur from Argentina →