UK sees warmest April on record
[Via BBC News | Science/Nature | World Edition]
A heatwave brought the warmest UK April since records began, according to Met Office data.
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April was the coldest in recorded history in the Pacific Northwest. England is at a higher latitude than Seattle, yet was warmer. This is why people can not just go by local effects to examine global temperatures.
by the yes man
Can poppy seeds get you high?
[Via Boing Boing]
Thanks to Mythbusters, we know that eating a couple poppy seed-laced bagels really can make you look like a heroin fiend, at least as far as a standard drug test is concerned. That makes sense. Heroin is derived from morphine, which is itself derived from poppies. So there’s a chemical family tree that’s fairly easy to follow.
At the I Can Has Science blog, however, they’ve taken the standard question—”Will poppy seed bagels make me look like a stoner?”—and turned it around. “Can poppy seeds get me stoned?” (From a purely theoretical, chemistry thought-experiment perspective, of course.) The question turns out to be more valid than you might suspect. We’re not talking about dried banana peels, here.
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The upshot is that you’d have to eat 40-120 grams of poppy seeds to get a medically relevant dose of morphine. Sounds like a lot but it could be ingested by eating a single Bundt cake:
However, this delicious looking cake recipe calls for an entire cup of poppy seeds, or approximately equal to 128 grams! Granted, the recipe yields 10 to 12 servings, but one would only have to eat 3 or 4 slices of this Bundt cake to get up to a full prescription dose of morphine! (If the most potent poppy seeds were used.)
Just don’t do any heavy lifting or driving afterwards. And since loss of appetite is a symptom of morphine use, this would be a hard way to really get addicted.
How long does it take to “fingerprint” someone’s DNA?
[Via Boing Boing]
For everybody playing Armchair Conspiracy Theorist (Is there any other kind? I’m not sure.): Molecular biology Ph.D. student, and science blogger, Christie Wilcox confirms that it is, indeed, possible to run a meaningful DNA test in a few hours, or even a few minutes. Depending on the type of test you use, and what that test is looking at. In fact, you’d only need about 5 hours to run three separate DNA tests. So while there seems to be some confusion over where the bin Laden family DNA is coming from, there shouldn’t be any confusion over whether a DNA test was possible.
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If only the world was like TV. They would have had his genome entirely sequenced by now.
Actually, knowing that they would have to do this, I am sure they had Osama-specific tests already set up. It is much easier to use a DNA test if you are looking for a known specific person. They did not just start up figuring out how to do the test after they had the body.
I would not be surprised that there are some classified approaches they used to determine his identity, including some of the actual facial recognition approaches they used.
by sandrodacomo
Anatomy of a phish
[Via O'Reilly Radar]
The inevitable consequence of Sony’s massive security screwup is that I’ve drowning in phish: fraudulent emails purporting to be some vendor or other, saying that my account has been deactivated and asking me to “confirm” credit card numbers and other personal data. The personal information of nearly 100 million Sony users was accessed (75 million announced last week, another 23 million this week). Given all the fraudulent credit card activity that must be generating, it’s a great time to go out collecting even more credit card numbers by sending fake email telling people their accounts have been suspended for suspicious activity.
So it’s time for a really brief review of online safety, at least with respect to phishy email:
- Never trust any email communication asking for your credit card number. If a vendor does business with you, they know your credit card number already. If they need to “confirm” it, they can find some other way to contact you.
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All of these points need to be remembered by anyone, all the time.
As more an more of our identity ends up online, it will become easier for this phishers to mimic real emails. As noted:
In a phone conversation about a year ago, security researcher Jeff Jonas told me that the future of phishing was very scary: phishing mails would come with enough personal information (knowledge of products you’ve bought, people you know) that it would be almost impossible for a victim to detect fraud. The extent of the Sony data breach is so massive that we may be about to fall off that cliff. I don’t know if we’re headed there yet, but it’s clear: Sony has handed Internet criminals a tremendous gift. They’re going to use it. There’s going to be a lot of identity theft and other forms of fraud, and there will be phishers seeking to take further advantage of that situation.
Simply scraping Facebook can provide enough information to make it seem like a legitimate email.
Google Allows Carriers to Selectively Block Tethering Apps From Android Market
[Via Daring Fireball]
Insert your own “open” joke here.
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The more companies try to control their customer’s uses of technology in order to make more money for their partners, the more they will seek companies who concentrate on only servicing the customers.
Google, like many, tries to serve too many masters – users, carriers, handset makers, advertisers. There is bound to be conflicts, mostly ones that hurt the end-user – the customer.
As the article states, this current policy comes very close to violating the law. Even if it is not, it does illustrate how far down the rung the customer is when it comes to fully using the device they paid for.
Geographers Had Calculated 81% Chance That Osama Was in Abbottabad – ScienceInsider
[Via Science]
Could Osama bin Laden have been found faster if the CIA had followed the advice of ecosystem geographers from the University of California, Los Angeles? Probably not, but the predictions of UCLA geographer Thomas Gillespie, who, along with colleague John Agnew and a class of undergraduates, authored a 2009 paper predicting the terrorist’s whereabouts, were none too shabby. According to a probabilistic model they created, there was an 80.9% chance that bin Laden was hiding out in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where he was killed last night. And they correctly predicted that he would be in a large town, not a cave.
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Not bad for an undergraduate project. And the researcher had the most trenchant quote:
Caves are cold, and you can’t see people walking up to them.
Interesting that Osama followed similar principles as an animal under environmental stress – find a place with a low mortality rate. Island species are under a lot of environmental stress simply because they can not easily move elsewhere. The smaller, more isolated the island, the greater the stress.
SpreadingScience
Sustainable Path Foundation Idea Club
