Steam leak in New York

A broken steam pipe in New York caused momentary panic among the residents, who are naturally shy of another terrorist attack.

Viking hoard found in Yorkshire

A father and son walking with a metal detector have found the largest Viking hoard discovered since 1840. Their find is a large bowl containing more than 600 coins and some jewellery buried by Vikings around 930 CE.

(hat tip to LotStreetWiz for sending me the link)

Rare giant squid washes up in Australia

I missed this a week ago: One of the largest specimens of Architeuthis ever recorded has been found on a beach in Tasmania.

OK, so I’m not really a Pharnygulite

I’m someone who’s interested in science. I found some good explanations of scientific subjects on Pharyngula. And I found a lot of information echoed about, and decrying, the current wave of anti-rational and anti-intellectual fervour in the U.S.

The name Denyse O’Leary popped up. I visited her Web site to see what she was saying about Stuart Pivar’s new book, and found a rant against Pharyngula and “Pharyngulites.” I left a comment, but I don’t know if it will be published since all comments there must be approved by the blog owner. So I’m reproducing it here:

Denyse,
A set of pretty pictures about how something might happen is not a theory. A theory is a well-tested an explanation of a mechanism. A hypothesis is a guess at how something might happen, based on what we know. A hypothesis suggests experiments that we might try. If a hypothesis passes a few experiments and none disprove it, we can start thinking of it as a tentative theory. But, in the case of morphogenesis, we already know that limbs do not form by pinching off from a torus – they bud from the embryonic body. We also know quite a lot about how Hox genes help to guide formation of limbs by providing chemical gradients that informs cells of where they are in the body. (Please forgive any over-generalization as I am not a working scientist.}

However, Mr. Pivar’s self-labelled theory does not take into account what we already know. Instead, he draws some elegant pictures that have no basis in reality. He does not have a theory. He does not have a hypothesis. He has a Wild-assed Guess.

When you get the book, don’t forget to look up the people quoted as reviewing it to find out whether they actually said what was quoted or whether it was taken out of context or fabricated or some combination thereof.

It’s very funny that Mr. Pivar thinks there are too few genes to account for morphology. I just finished reading a 14-year-old science popularization book, recapping the research of the 1970s and 1980s, which explains that each gene has from one to twenty other genes which promote and regulate its activity, telling it when to turn on or off. Mr. Pivar might be interested in reading it — it’s called “The Secret of Life” by Joseph Levine and David Suzuki.

As a fellow Torontonian, I hope that you can inject a little more objectivity and rationalism into your articles.

UPDATE: Here’s what was quoted:

Here’s the other one:

As a fellow Torontonian, I hope that you can inject a little more objectivity and rationalism into your articles.

Well, fellow Torontonian, don’t move to my neighbourhood, there’s a dear. What YOU mean by “objectivity and rationalism” is “behaving like the pharyngulite mob.” Some of us have standards.

Way to miss the point, Denyse!

Dolphin use of tools

A few dolphins in Australia’s Shark Bay have been observed using sponges plucked from the sea bottom to protect their noses while they search for food. In 1997 researchers proposed this as the first known use of tools by dolphins. The behaviour seems to be learned from their mothers:

Working with DNA from dolphins in Shark Bay–1 male sponger, 12 female spongers, and 172 nonspongers–the researchers found that all but 1 of the spongers shared markers in the DNA of their mitochondria, cellular organelles inherited exclusively from mothers. Despite examining 10 scenarios of inheritance, both for mitochondrial DNA and DNA from cell nuclei, the researchers were unable to explain genetically the observed female-biased pattern of sponge carrying.