Fire and Ice

It's been what some would call "butt-cold" in Chicago lately - we've been getting February-like weather the last few weeks, which means it's in the teens or single digits Farheneheit most of the time. We went for a run Tuesday evening when it was sixteen outside. I remembered why 15 degrees is my cutoff temperature for outdoor running - I commented to DH that my bad knee was getting iced during the run, and my hands didn't warm up for the rest of the night.

This isn't a complaint. I would take this over crazy-making hot and humid weather any day. But part of what I love about the cold is all the ways one can thaw out: hot beverages, blankets, warm sweaters and scarves, fuzzy socks... and videos of solar flares.

Wait, what?

I don't know. But watching this certainly made me feel warm and toasty. And a little awed.

However, if you're somewhere where you're too warm, reading about the newly-discovered ice volcanoes on Titan will perhaps cool you off. Brr. Back to the solar flares for me.

Putting some zzzs in to buzzing

I know I don't function as well without a full night's sleep. Turns out, neither do honeybees.

I'm partial to bees by heredity - my dad is a former beekeeper - so I have to say that I found the methods of this experiment to be a little bit mean. Hopefully the bees involved were allowed to take a nap afterward.

Not enough space

Two galactic news bits of late: One which made me laugh, and one that made me marvel:

First, the marvelous one: Some pictures of our planet that "look like art". Maybe it is art.

Second, the crazy: A Spanish woman has claimed ownership of the sun. I'm kicking myself for this lost revenue opportunity.

... oh, and a bonus: alien bacteria. Holy crap.

Drinkyscope

It's Monday and I had a nice weekend which felt long because it involved "falling back" from daylight savings time. But now it's back to whatever I do during the week.

So I'll just put up this link to pictures of alcoholic beverages under a microscope.

Have a good week!

Today in paleolithic news

The title is incorrect. It's really late Jurassic, mostly.

Anyhow, the folks who maintain both that Catholics aren't real Christians and that dinosaur bones were planted by the devil to confuse creationists can celebrate as much as all the Discovery-channel paleontology geeks about this piece of news: A dinosaur skull was "discovered" in the marble of a church near Milan.

The second picture in that story blew my mind.

Even cooler than that, though, is that the non-fossilized remains of a mammoth were recently unearthed from a peat bog in Colorado. This means that soft tissue is still intact... and scientists are even figuring out how to extract DNA from the skeleton.

This is all making me want to re-watch my favorite cautionary tale: Jurassic Park.

No, seriously, think of the children

I promise there were more pleasant topics about which I was going to post, but when I saw this article about a pertussis outbreak in California that's killed 10 babies so far, I almost threw up. So I'm writing about this.

If you were to meet me in person and we were to talk about vaccines and you were to tell me you weren't going to vaccinate your children, I would consider punching you in the throat. And then I'd probably go through with it. There's zero reason for people not to vaccinate their children - especially against highly lethal, completely preventable diseases - and there are many, many reasons to do so. Sadly, 10 more reasons just manifested themselves in California, and it probably isn't going to change anyone's minds over there.

Wow, schmei, get over yourself. You don't even have kids. Who gives you the right?

Good point. Allow me to explain:

My father was the youngest of 4 children. He had two sisters and a brother. Only, wait, he never met his sisters. They both died, several weeks apart, of pertussis, commonly called whooping cough. The older girl was almost two, and her little sister was only a few weeks old. Some infected asshole decided to stop by and visit my grandmother with her new baby and her toddler at home. Over the next few weeks she watched, completely helpless, as whooping cough killed them both.

The pertussis vaccine came out about 2 years too late for my two aunts.

My grandparents went on to have two more children - two boys - and I can't help but wonder how it affected my grandmother, to lose her baby daughters and then to have two boys instead. Maybe it was better, really, because they were completely different. I don't know. By all accounts she was a loving mother to her sons. Additionally, from what I've heard about her, she never really recovered from her daughters' deaths. She died young, and still heartbroken. Her sons were in their early twenties. They're both in their sixties now, and they don't really talk about it much.

Last year, my graduate program ordered me to get a pertussis booster, which I thought was annoying at the time. But I read more about it, and it turns out that in adults, pertussis vaccination can wear out over time. It's recommended to get a booster every five years or so.

I was very glad I had the booster before I met my newborn niece. And I'm glad my sister is completely reasonable about vaccinating her baby, because the study that claimed a connection between vaccines and autism was terribly flawed and has since been recanted. Sis is a scientist so she gets that... but it's information that really doesn't require a degree in physics.

Sadly, recanting that article hasn't stopped stupid people from refusing to vaccinate their children. What those stupid people don't realize is that it's not their own children they're killing, most likely it's other people's infants.