The Rogues Gallery

Don’t Abuse Your Kids, Unless . . .

How would you end that sentence? Is there ever a circumstance in which it is okay to abuse your children? I’m not referring to the debate over spanking—I’m talking about laws that are currently enacted in certain states that allow parents to physically abuse and murder their children because of a specific circumstance: religion.

This AP article explores the challenges that face courts trying cases involving parents who neglect their children’s health and well-being because of religious beliefs. Many states have exemptions for these parents that absolve them of their sins because they once read a book that said thinking really hard in an upward direction would cure their children’s ailments.

Apparently, it was not enough to have Pentecostal and Jehovah’s Witness parents literally getting away with murder. According to the article, religious exemptions are only now being publicly questioned because more people are claiming these exemptions apply to their less-popular belief systems, such as those found online: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in New Age, Religion/Faith, Science and Medicine | 1 Comment » |

Obscured By Clouds

As TAM-7 approaches to within 10 days (sorry for the painful reminder for those of you that can’t make it), it seems that my to-do list is actually growing instead of shrinking, so I apologize for the short posting. But I wanted to share with you some pictures of clouds that, you’ll agree, look pretty amazing.

I showed these pictures of clouds to a few people to get their reaction, and they all pretty much said the same thing, that it looked like The Rapture, or The Apocalypse, or the end of the world was at hand.

Fear not, gentle readers. Nothing so radical is afoot, however, in the world of clouds, something might occur that hasn’t occurred in almost 60 years. These clouds are deserving of a new cloud classification, according to the folks at the Cloud Appreciation Society based out of Somerton, England. They are making a push to have these types of could formations to be officially classified as “asperatus”, which means “rough” in Latin. CAS is reportedly working with the Royal Meteorological Society to have it officially classified by the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva. The WMO has the final say on the matter.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in General Science, Myths and Misconceptions | 6 Comments » | Tags: cloud, photo

The 16 year old 11 Month Old

It is an obvious and tragic aspect of life that people are often injured or suffer genetic abnormalities and modern medicine can do nothing about it.

Many times, however, the injury or disease offers a unique opportunity to gather information that otherwise would not have been possible. For example; stroke victims have been and continue to greatly enrich our knowledge of neuroscience.  Strokes typically disrupt the supply of blood to a part of the brain which then disables that specific part. The disability that then manifests itself offers a unique window into the function of that part of the brain that no experiment could match without risking jail time for the researchers.

The same is true for genetic disorders.

Brooke Greenburg of Baltimore Maryland suffers from a unique disorder. She is 16 years old but appears to be about 11 months old.

Doctors have examined her dna and her condition is unrelated to more common aging diseases like progeria. Her condition isn’t simply that aging has stopped. Various parts of her are aging at different rates. Her mind isn’t far from that of a very young infant but her short bones resemble those of an 10 year old in terms of cell structure.

As you might imagine, she suffers from other unusual problems as well like being unable to swallow. This is because her breathing and digestion are essentially different ages which prevents their careful coordination of effort.

Hopefully we can learn from poor Brooke’s condition to not only potentially help her and others that may be born with this but perhaps to further elucidate the nature of aging itself.

Please read more details about this fascinating case here.

Posted in General Science, Neuroscience/Psychology, Science and Medicine | 2 Comments » |

Shuttle Science Proves Ghostbusters Movie Wrong

101 years after that massive explosion in Siberia, scientists finally feel they know exactly what the culprit was.

Theories have ranged from the most likley…a meteor or comet…all the way to the other side of the spectrum. Regarding this event, a Dr. Ray Stantz was overheard to say:

“You have been a participant in the biggest interdimensional cross-rip since the Tunguska blast of 1909!”

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in General Science, Myths and Misconceptions | 2 Comments » |

On Bostonist: Boobies, Psychics & The Art of Making Up Headlines

Psychic helps police in case of missing Hingham man with dog, or so reads the headline of this article from Norwood’s Daily News Transcript. The only problem? The first two words of the headline are obviously wrong, possibly meant to cap another article entirely.

Here’s the story in a nutshell: a mysterious man with a St. Bernard is seen around Hingham, and one day only the dog appears, soaking wet and staring soulfully at a lake. Suspecting that the man has gone missing, the police investigate. Since no one knows who the man is, they check a local pet-friendly motel. A woman staying there says she had two visions involving the mysterious man’s demise: one in which the cops should check the city of Quincy (near a shamrock!) and one in which they should check the woods near the lake.

The cops do not check Quincy or its shamrocks since the city is 27 square miles and a third of the population is Irish. They do check the woods using cadaver-seeking dogs. They find absolutely nothing.
Continue reading on Bostonist…

Posted in Paranormal, Pseudoscience, Science and the Media | 1 Comment » |

Double-Crossed

I was clearing out a bunch of pictures I took on my old cell phone, and I had forgotten that I snapped these photos last winter …

Now there are some people who believe that things such as crop-circles are the handy work of extra-terrestrials. They are likely to say: “Who or what else could create such perfect patterns?” Some of those severely confused people might look at these pictures and draw similar conclusions. But unless someone can offer up a better explanation, they appear to me to be four separate vapor trails (a.k.a. contrails) that have formed a close-to-geometrically-perfect double cross. Having never seen a convergence of vapor trails like this before, I started wondering what the odds might be of me witnessing such an occurrence. There are several factors to consider, and probably some factors that I’m not even aware of, but I’ll give it my best shot.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Skepticism | 6 Comments » | Tags: contrails, crop circles

To the Moon

This summer will be the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11 - the mission that brought Armstrong and Aldrin to the surface of the moon. Forty years! As a child watching the Apollo missions with rapt attention, I never would have guessed that it would be another half a century before we would return. I rather assumed that the 2001 movie depiction was closer to the truth.

Where’s our moon base and orbiting hotel?

Now, best case scenario, NASA plans to return to the moon by 2020 - 51 years after Apollo 11.

Moon-hoax nutjobs claim that this is because we never really went in the first place. The real answer, I think, is fairly simple. It took a Herculean effort of political will to get to the moon “before this decade is out,” as JFK commanded - political will fueled by the cold war.

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Posted in Astronomy/Space Science | 3 Comments » | Tags: moon, nasa

The Adam Lambert of Volcanic Extinctions

You know, second place finishers are usually forgotten pretty quickly, unless of course you’re Adam Lambert or Susan Boyle.

This also isn’t true for the Second Biggest extinction the earth has ever seen which has been in the news lately. Specifically, a volcanic eruption that had been previously unknown, is apparently responsible for what may be the 2nd biggest global mass extinction that happened over 260 million years ago during the middle of the Permian period.

This story was recently published in the Journal Science by scientists at the University of Leeds. Now this wasn’t the biggest volcanic eruption ever but it was still pretty nasty.

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Posted in General Science, Science Education | 3 Comments » | Tags: Guadalupian, mass extinction, super volcano

Metal Rain

The military gets some of the coolest tech.

I occasionally watch a discovery channel show called Future Weapons. This show displays and demonstrates the latest military tech (or at least what’s been recently de-classified). A year or so ago, I saw a segment about a new projectile firing technology called Metal Storm that just blew my mind.

In a nutshell, it is an electronically initiated stacked projectile system.

Essentially, all bullets are in the barrell at the same time and they can be fired one at a time or all at once. There is no need for a firing pin or for any mechanically moving parts at all. In fact, the only moving parts are the projectiles themselves.

The effect of this advance is multi-fold:

With no moving parts, there’s very little to break down or wear out. Reliability therefore reaches new heights.

With electric ignition, the sheer amount of ordinance that can be brought to bear is almost unbelievable. Imagine a weapon that can fire one million rounds per minute. Metal Storm indeed.

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Posted in General Science, Technology | 3 Comments » |

Pseudo-cide is Painless

X-posted on Skepchick…

Via the excellent Museum of Hoaxes, I discovered two recent articles describing people faking deaths online. This piqued my interest, due in part to my long-established interest in scams and hoaxes, and also because we had a commenter on Skepchick last year who faked his own death.

At the time, we didn’t discuss it here on Skepchick because we weren’t interested in giving an obviously sick person more unhealthy attention. I bring it up now due to the relevancy of this article in Wired, which peers into the weirdness surrounding people who fake their own deaths.

The situation on Skepchick mirrored some of those described in the article. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Skepticism | 2 Comments » |