Features Michael E. Mann, author of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines

Staring tomorrow morning, if you are in the Twin Cities, there is Lynn Fellman’s talk at the Hennepin County Library downtown.

Lynn Fellman creates art that combines genetic data with creative imagery. Fellman will discuss basic genetic concepts, how art can uniquely express science concepts, and why many of us may find Neanderthal genetics in our DNA. Q&A session will follow.

Click here for more details on Lynn’s talk.

Then, on Sunday Morning, listen to Richard Fortey on ATT:

“Living fossil” is a term that might well have been calculated to drive evolutionary biologists insane. Evolution has stopped for no organism on Earth–except those that have gone extinct. However, some plants and animals have proved resilient enough that they still live on our planet in roughly the same forms they wore millions of years ago.

Richard Fortey is a distinguished writer and a BBC presenter. He is also a palaeontologist who is fascinated by the idea of seeing ancient history in our modern world. His latest book, Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms: The Story of the Animals and Plants That Time Has Left Behind (in the UK, Survivors: The Animals and Plants That Time Has Left Behind) details and communicates that fascination, as does the BBC series Survivors: Nature’s Indestructible Creatures, which Fortey presented.

Click here for more details on Fortey’s talk.

One of my favorite people to talk to is Debbie Goddard, and she’s going to be on a call-in radio show later in the day on Sunday. Debbie will be talking about the Freethought Movement:

Debbie Goddard is the campus outreach coordinator at the Center for Inquiry Transnational in Amherst, NY. She is also the director of African Americans for Humanism, a program of the Council for Secular Humanism. Before working for CFI, she participated in local freethought groups in the greater Philadelphia region and helped organize and support campus groups internationally as a student volunteer. She has also been involved with progressive issues and LGBT activism.

Debbie’s first experience with organized freethought was in 2000, when she traveled to Amherst, New York, for a Center for Inquiry Student Leadership Conference. Inspired by the experience, she began attending freethought, humanist, atheist, and skeptic group meetings in the greater Philadelphia region, including in New York City, New Jersey, and central Pennsylvania. She also started a CFI-affiliated campus group at her college.

Click here for more info on Debbie’s radio chat.

Then, believe it or not, later that evening there is going to be a very interesting edition of Skeptically Speaking with Desiree Schell:

#162 The Science of Belief

This week, we’re talking about the perspective of science on the mechanisms of belief. We’re joined by science writer Jesse Bering, to discuss his book The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life. And on the podcast, we’ll dive into the neurology of religious faith with Dr. Andrew Newberg, author of How God Changes Your Brain.

We record live with Jesse Bering on Sunday, April 29 at 6 pm MT. The podcast will be available to download at 9 pm MT on Friday, May 4.

Click here for details on this episode of Skeptically Speaking

That’s a pretty darn interesting weekend coming up!

Staring tomorrow morning, if you are in the Twin Cities, there is Lynn Fellman’s talk at the Hennepin County Library downtown.

Lynn Fellman creates art that combines genetic data with creative imagery. Fellman will discuss basic genetic concepts, how art can uniquely express science concepts, and why many of us may find Neanderthal genetics in our DNA. Q&A session will follow.

Click here for more details on Lynn’s talk.

Then, on Sunday Morning, listen to Richard Fortey on ATT:

“Living fossil” is a term that might well have been calculated to drive evolutionary biologists insane. Evolution has stopped for no organism on Earth–except those that have gone extinct. However, some plants and animals have proved resilient enough that they still live on our planet in roughly the same forms they wore millions of years ago.

Richard Fortey is a distinguished writer and a BBC presenter. He is also a palaeontologist who is fascinated by the idea of seeing ancient history in our modern world. His latest book, Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms: The Story of the Animals and Plants That Time Has Left Behind (in the UK, Survivors: The Animals and Plants That Time Has Left Behind) details and communicates that fascination, as does the BBC series Survivors: Nature’s Indestructible Creatures, which Fortey presented.

Click here for more details on Fortey’s talk.

One of my favorite people to talk to is Debbie Goddard, and she’s going to be on a call-in radio show later in the day on Sunday. Debbie will be talking about the Freethought Movement:

Debbie Goddard is the campus outreach coordinator at the Center for Inquiry Transnational in Amherst, NY. She is also the director of African Americans for Humanism, a program of the Council for Secular Humanism. Before working for CFI, she participated in local freethought groups in the greater Philadelphia region and helped organize and support campus groups internationally as a student volunteer. She has also been involved with progressive issues and LGBT activism.

Debbie’s first experience with organized freethought was in 2000, when she traveled to Amherst, New York, for a Center for Inquiry Student Leadership Conference. Inspired by the experience, she began attending freethought, humanist, atheist, and skeptic group meetings in the greater Philadelphia region, including in New York City, New Jersey, and central Pennsylvania. She also started a CFI-affiliated campus group at her college.

Click here for more info on Debbie’s radio chat.

Then, believe it or not, later that evening there is going to be a very interesting edition of Skeptically Speaking with Desiree Schell:

#162 The Science of Belief

This week, we’re talking about the perspective of science on the mechanisms of belief. We’re joined by science writer Jesse Bering, to discuss his book The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life. And on the podcast, we’ll dive into the neurology of religious faith with Dr. Andrew Newberg, author of How God Changes Your Brain.

We record live with Jesse Bering on Sunday, April 29 at 6 pm MT. The podcast will be available to download at 9 pm MT on Friday, May 4.

Click here for details on this episode of Skeptically Speaking

That’s a pretty darn interesting weekend coming up!

And then Mitt Romney got elected president. bin Laden would have been home free:

Have you been getting bitten by a lot of spiders lately? Are you concerned about Brown Recluse Spiders?
Continue reading Are you worried about spider bites? →

On behalf of Yamileth Coreas-Leiva. Melody Hensley has organized a request for donations to help Yamileth out:

On Tuesday, April 24, 2012, a dear member of the freethought community and the Center for Inquiry-DC, Yamileth Coreas-Leiva, lost three family members in a carbon monoxide poisoning. Please consider donating what you can to help Yamileth with the cost of her family’s funerals and other expenses she may incur. Yamileth is the single mother of one and the financial cost will be great.

Click here to pitch in.

The local news report:

A supermarket bakery employee, her husband and three others were found dead inside a suburban Washington home Tuesday of suspected carbon monoxide poisoning, rattling a close-knit community of immigrant churchgoers who wept, hugged and comforted each other outside.
Fire officials blamed the deaths on a broken exhaust pipe that pumped carbon monoxide back into the home.
Two of the dead were discovered by a relative who went to the home Tuesday morning, concerned for his family’s welfare. The other three were found soon after by firefighters who measured levels of carbon monoxide so high as to lead to death within mere hours, said Mark Brady, a spokesman for the Prince George’s County fire department. A dog also was removed from the home on oxygen support.

Before reading any further, you need to know that the transport and release of trapped animals, such as mice or squirrels, is regulated and may be illegal in your community.

Having said that, there are times when people want to live trap a mouse or squirrel, and this is one of the two times of year when people’s interest in doing so seems to increase, based on google search terms that bring people to my site.

The short version for mice: Mice are granivores, so a wheat germ is to a mouse what bacon is to a human. Yumm. People often think peanut butter is great mouse bait, and it can be, but really, they are going for the grains. So, get some wheat germ and mush it up with some peanut butter for bait.

Then click here to get recommendations as to which traps will work. Also, I’ve heard good things about this “repeater” mouse trap.

For squirrels, go here and heed that advice.

No matter what you do, there are people who will get mad at you so I would keep this to yourself.

I have only one more piece of advice to add to what is in the above noted links. It is worth knowing what species of “mouse” you are having a problem with. House mice are a commensal species in North America that pretty much only lives with humans. If you have a serious infestation of these, you may need a cat or something. Voles are very common “field mice” and are native to many parts of North America (sometimes they are called lemmings … the names are not scientific terms so there is little sense in arguing over them), and would probably not mean a long term infestation but only the occasional invasion. Deer mice are wild field mice that are larger than voles, usually browner, and more differentiated in color from top to bottom often with a stripe along the side and a lighter belly. Depending on your house and where you live you may see very few of these most years, then the occasional boom cycle with a zillion of them everywhere. The best way to deal with the boom cycle is to wait a year!

You may have your own local folklore about these different species, and that folkore may be more or less useful. My point here, really, is just that it is not true that “mice are mice.” There are multiple different kinds and they are biologically different.

Happy trapping!

NOT!!!

Hat Tip: Rachel

For realz.

Skepticism is a cultural phenomenon. I know that many self-declared skeptics prefer to … ah … believe otherwise, or as they would perhaps say, they have deduced from pure principles using sound logic that Skepticism is rational behavior and there is nothing cultural about it. But they are wrong, and that is trivially easy to prove…

I wrote this here.

This is a proof of concept post. Does the following thingie work for you?

The USDA has just confirmed that a dairy cow in California had bovine spungiform encephalopathy (BSE) sometimes known as “Mad Cow Disease,” which causes Creutzfeldt-Jakob, a deadly human disease affecting the brain. The animal was about to be, or was in the process of being, “rendered” … turned into glue or soap, most likely … and none of it entered the food supply. It has not been demonstrated that BSE can be transferred to humans via milk. Even so, cattle futures have dropped sharply in Chicago over the last few hours.

From Reuters:

The carcass of the cow, which the USDA said was infected by an “atypical” form of the disease, would be destroyed. The cow was not believed to have contracted the disease by eating contaminated food, the USDA added.

“There is really no concern for alarm here with regards to this animal. Both human health and animal health are protected with regards to this issue,” Clifford told reporters at a briefing at USDA headquarters.

The total number of knnown cases of cattle with BSE in mainly industrialized countries worldwide is 188,579, the vast majority, 183,841, having been in the United Kingdom during an epidemic starting in 1986. The total number of Creutzfeldt-Jakob in the same set of countries is 280, again with the vast majority (175) having been in the UK. (This does not count similar brain diseases known in some non-industrialized parts of the world.)

In the US there have been a total of 4 cattle with BSE, all between 1993 and 2008, and 4 cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob, the latter possibly associated with prior residence in the UK during the epidemic. In other words, the finding of this “Mad Cow” in California probably does not constitute any real concern, but is (appropriately) being taken seriously by authorities.