The most negative element of the Palin coverage involved scrutiny of her record as Alaska governor, with 64 percent of the stories carrying a negative tone and just 7 percent positive. The coverage of her interview with ABC's Charlie Gibson was a wash, but stories about her subsequent sitdown with CBS's Katie Couric were 57 percent negative and 14 percent positive.

Are journalists actually supposed to write one nice story about how totally pretty Governor Palin is for every piece they file on how she's a petty tinpot PTA mom-from-hell who somehow manages to abuse what little power the governor of Alaska actually has? What purpose does this study serve, Project for Excellence in Journalism, except to encourage John McCain to think it's not fair and it's not his fault and everyone was mean to him?

1. Asteroid: Tunguska event

Year: 1908

Proximity to Earth (number of times Earth/Moon distance): Exploded metres above ground in the Russian wilderness

In a nutshell: This asteroid or comet fragment was thought to have burned and flattened trees with a 10-15 megaton explosion just before it would have made landfall. Scientists estimate such an event happens every 300 years or so.

2. Asteroid: 1937 UB

Year: 1937

Proximity to Earth (number of times Earth/Moon distance): Twice the distance from the Earth to the Moon

In a nutshell: Long before this asteroid could have been detected in time—at the time—it passed razor-close to Earth—it's diameter? 1.2 km—more than enough to cause plenty of worldwide damage.

3. Asteroid: 4581 Asclepius (1989 FC)

Year: 1989

Proximity to Earth (number of times Earth/Moon distance): 700,000 km (About twice the distance from the Earth to the Moon)

In a nutshell: Most frighteningly, this 1 km-wide asteroid passed precisely where the Earth had been only six hours before.

4. Asteroid: 2002 MN

Year: 2002

Proximity to Earth (number of times Earth/Moon distance): 0.3 (120,000 km)

In a nutshell: This passed inside the Moon's orbit, missing Earth by a wide margin within the orbit. That's good news, as the 80-metre-wide asteroid would have caused damage over 2,000 square kilometres if it actually made contact with Earth.

5. Asteroid: 2002 FH

Year: 2004

Proximity to Earth (number of times Earth/Moon distance): 0.1 (42,000 km)

In a nutshell: LINEAR, the asteroid tracking robot telescope showed this 30 metre object would pass within the ream of some earth-orbiting satellites - the closest pass ever predicted up to this point.

Well, that's the good news. The bad news? More are on the way!

This won the Illustration category and depicts "the key components of the human circulatory system at 10 different magnifications."

Conservatives Are Scared A Lot

Rice University Political Scientist John Alford published some research in the creatively named journal Science about a possible biological basis to liberalism and conservatism. Basically, "46 mostly white Midwesterners who self-identified as having strong political beliefs" were shown "threatening images" ("a large spider on someone's face, a bloodied person and maggot-filled wound"). The conservatives were more scared, of all of the images. Or, as Newsweek puts it, "illegal immigrants may = spiders = gay marriages = maggot-filled wounds = abortion rights = bloodied faces. " Liberals were not sensitive to the scary images. Which means they're biologically inferior, because they'd die if a gay spider tried to abort their faces to death. Notable problems with this study: small sample, also wtf this doesn't explain anything.

Conservatives Refuse to Believe "Facts"

The most upsetting and alarming research? Probably Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler's backfire effect study. In that, the political scientists took two groups of volunteers and gave them the Bush administration's prewar claims that Iraq was a threat and had weapons of mass destruction.

One group was given a refutation — the comprehensive 2004 Duelfer report that concluded that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction before the United States invaded in 2003. Thirty-four percent of conservatives told only about the Bush administration's claims thought Iraq had hidden or destroyed its weapons before the U.S. invasion, but 64 percent of conservatives who heard both claim and refutation thought that Iraq really did have the weapons. The refutation, in other words, made the misinformation worse.

This "backfire" effect only worked on conservatives. Even when they varied the source of the refutations, it made no difference—corrections from the New York Times and Fox News both caused conservatives to believe the lies even harder. In other words, objective truth is dead, observable reality is a fairy tale, etc.

Conservatives Have An Entirely Different Moral Code

This should bring you down, a little bit. Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist, wrote a lengthy anthropological investigation into why people vote for Republicans. It's not the Thomas Frank "they are distracted by bullshit" explanation, though it is related: they have different cultural standards of ethics and morality! Liberals and college students define morality as "how we treat each other," conservatives attach more significance to "supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way." Liberals recognize fairness and care as important moral virtues, conservatives add to that loyalty, respect for authority, and duty. The educated moral relativism worldview is fundamentally incompatible with the way like 50% of America thinks, and stereotypes about out-of-touch elitist coastal democrats are basically correct. Sigh.

So What Have We Learned?

Conservatives respond instinctually, not rationally, to scary images, "facts," and institutions. Whether this is innate and biological or cultural seems still up in the air. Democrats can't with with logical arguments or even appeals to the innate rightness of concepts like "diversity" and "tolerance," because those aren't considered essentially good and important by the voters they're trying to appeal to. This does suggest that an appeal to old New Deal institutional concepts like the Welfare State might actually be effective, if they're wrapped in the flag and a sense of duty. Also scientists still consider the majority of Americans to be like a fascinating exotic backwards tribe and the fucking country is doomed.

His size 14 feet may not dwarf Ian Thrope's size 17 but Phelps' double-jointed ankles allow him to do a ballerina's 'pointe' standing on the tips of the toes. It allows him to whip his feet as if those are flippers and break loose.

His unique constitution also produces less lactic acid than others which means Phelps takes less time to recover. And if he looks indefatigable at times, it's because of the Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, which he was diagnosed with at the tender age of nine. His daily routine is equally mindboggling.

He consumes 12,000 calorie every day and trains 96 km every week. Naturally it was hardly surprising when Russian swimmer Alexander Sukhorukov went on to describe Phelps as "just a normal person, from a different planet, a planet from a different galaxy." [NDTV.com]

The actual, scientific study found that "ads featuring thin models made women feel worse about themselves but better about the brands featured." They make you despise your own "normal" body, and subconsciously try to correct the situation with therapy consisting of shopping. Oh, the pretty girls have all the pretty brands!

A Villanova professor who ran the study ferreted out just what advertisers bank on: masochism. ""The really interesting result we're seeing across multiple studies is that these thin models make women feel bad, but they like it," he said.

The advertising industry always knew you were a bad, bad girl.

And in the most entertaining twist to this whole thing, the study also found that images of skinny models make women stop eating. Surprise!:

Seeing thin models also made college-age women far more likely to turn down a snack pack of Oreo cookies offered as thanks for their participation in the study, or to opt for a reduced-fat version. Women who had just seen thin models were nearly four times more likely to say no to Oreos than women who hadn't, and 42% more likely to opt for reduced-fat cookies if they did indulge.

No telling what this means for Spanx.

[Ad Age]

Dr. Leon A. Greenberg, Yale professor of physiology, said beer isn’t [intoxicating] – and should be reclassified to the non-intoxicating drinks.

This brought emphatic objection from other scientists. They wanted to know if the man who is “high” or “tight” isn’t also drunk. Beer certainly makes people “high” and “tight,” they said.

That's a good question! It depends on what this "high" or "tight" man is drinking?

For people to show consistently the “abnormal behavior” which goes with intoxication, the alcohol content of their blood must be 0.15 per cent or higher.

THE AVERAGE alcohol content of American beers is 3.7 per cent by weight. In order for the alcohol blood level to be at 0.15 per cent, there would have to be two and one-half quarts of 3.7 beer in the stomach. But the capacity of the human stomach is one and one-half to two quarts.

Therefore, no one can drink enough beer at one time to get intoxicated, according to theory. As for doing it by degrees: beer is destroyed or eliminated in the body at the rate of one-third of a quart an hour. So three quarts would have to be consumed in two or three hours, and this, he said, was “physiologically unnatural.”

See? It's air-tight. Back when 0.15 was considered, like, almost drunk. The good old days. Also it's totally true! We fiddled around with this handy intoxication calculator and we'd need to down 5 beers in one hour to get to like 0.11. And we'd still be legal to drive home to 1955! Thanks, science!

[AP]

1. The Earth Mother awakens. Thomas Pynchon's novel Against the Day had it that a North Pole expedition roused some terrestrial geological entity that, upon being shipped to Siberia, lost its shit and unleashed Gehenna up top as payback for being moved from the Arctic tundra.

2. The zap and whoops. Italian Serbo-Croatian inventor and coil namesake Nikola Tesla fired a death ray that went to eleven and evidently worked a lot better than the still-implausible human Xerox machine David Bowie cobbled together as him in the film The Prestige. Best captured in the book Callahan's Key by Spider Robinson, who could argue anything with that name, as far as I'm concerned.

3. The underground cosmic event. The Jackson-Ryan hypothesis: Tunguska was caused by a teensy subterranean black hole that one day decided to pucker or burp or whatever. See Larry Niven's The Borderland of Sol for how that works.

4. The Ruskies and spacetime. In yet another fiction, Chekhov's Journey, Ian Watson posits that the Soviets invented a time-ship that they lost a handle on. This enables Anton Chekhov, who must have sounded like a patient out of Ward 6, to learn of the impending the cataclysm in 1890, almost two decades before it occurred.

[BBC]

Alexis gets her quarterly does of Botox from Dr. Wexler:

Lasik on a purported celebrity, yuck:

[NYT]

[UPDATE: And don't forget Mary Rambin already did a video for Restylane!]

"In a press release, Cern’s director general Robert Aymar said, “With this report, the Laboratory has fulfilled every safety and environmental evaluation necessary to ensure safe operation of this exciting new research facility.”

"It is full speed ahead, they say, on the new machine, which is designed to accelerate protons, the building blocks of ordinary matter, to energies of 7 trillion electron volts and then bang them together to produce tiny primordial fireballs, miniature versions of the Big Bang. Physicists will comb the detritus from those fireballs in search of forces and particles and even new laws of nature that might have prevailed during the first trillionth of a second of time.

"Some critics have argued, however, that Cern has ignored or downplayed the risk that the collider could produce a black hole that would swallow the Earth, or that it could create some other dangerous particle.

"The safety group, however, pointed out that cosmic rays have produced equivalently energetic collisions with the Earth and other objects in the cosmos over and over again. “This means that Nature has already completed about 10^31 LHC experimental programs since the beginning of the Universe,” they write. But the stars and galaxies endure." [NYT]

Of course if you're a blogger, you won't notice the difference! Hey-oh!

1. Bitching and moaning alleviates stress! "As social creatures, humans have a range of pain-related behaviors, such as complaining, which acts as a 'placebo for getting satisfied.'"

2. It gets you high. "Blogging might trigger dopamine release, similar to stimulants like music, running and looking at art." (Meta-blogger Emily Gould said as much in the NYT Magazine.)

3. If nothing else, there's the placebo effect: "Cancer patients who engaged in expressive writing just before treatment felt markedly better, mentally and physically, as compared with patients who did not."

4. Instant feedback, unlike your diary: "Unlike a bedside journal, blogging offers the added benefit of receptive readers in similar situations." Sharing is caring!

Blogging—It's Good for You! [Scientific American]

The experiment took place in a bathroom with three urinals in a line. They tested both how long it took men to start peeing, and the duration of their peeing under three separate conditions: alone in the bathroom; with another man there, separated by a urinal; or with another man standing right next to them. But they ran into a little problem:

The authors' intentions were to use auditory cues (i.e., splash) to capture the dependent measures, but they quickly realized that this wasn't the most reliable measure since some people were aiming at the ceramic basin and the sounds couldn't be made out. So, what else could they do? Here's what: "The observer [the guy in the stall] used a periscopic prism imbedded in a stack of books lying on the floor of the toilet stall. An 11-inch (28-cm) space between the floor and the wall of the toilet stall provided a view, through the periscope, of the user's lower torso and made possible direct visual sightings of the stream of urine."

Way to put those pervert skills to good use! And what did the scientists find? That Shy Bladder Syndrome really exists!:

As predicted, when urinating next to the confederate, the micturation delay was significantly greater (8.4 sec) than when the participant was separated by one urinal (6.2 sec) or when (ostensibly) alone (4.9). The duration of micturation also supported the authors' hypotheses, with the participants urinating, on average, for a briefer period in the close condition (17.4 sec) than in either the far condition (23.4 sec) or alone condition (24.8 sec).

So rest easy, you paruresis-having readers; it's not all in your mind. Feel free to pee in front of everybody.

[Psychology Today; pic via Corbis]

The guy is Jeff Stier of The American Council on Science and Health. ACSH is a scientific health nonprofit sponsored in large part by the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, and much of their research is dedicated to proving that consumer products, drugs, and chemicals will not kill you. But tobacco companies don't sponsor them, so they tend to be pretty anti-smoking. Also, as de facto "scientific" representatives of big industry, they lean a bit conservative, politically.

Barack Obama is a smoker. Well, maybe a former smoker, but probably still a sometimes smoker. Because christ, no one is strong enough to make it through a presidential campaign without a cigarette here and there. Obama was up to half a pack a day at some point during his 26 years as a smoker. (Lightweight.) Though usually more like a quarter-pack a day. He also says he quit in February of 2007.

Stier would like you to know that while everyone is running around worried about how the 71-year-old cancer survivor might not be able to stand up to the stresses of the Oval Office, the 46-year-old maybe former smoker poses a much greater risk. Because he's smoked 55,000-70,000 cigarettes in his life! Stier never really uses his fancy medical math to say what Obama's precise risk factor is for stroke or heart problems, but it must be pretty bad, because that is a lot of cigarettes.

Kraft's feedback from consumers indicated their food "wasn't easy enough." So they're rolling out a big marketing campaign to unveil fantastic new obesity generators in their product line:

Take, for example, Cool Whip, which comes in a large tub that must be kept in the freezer. Consumers didn't want to have to take that trying trip to the freezer every time they wanted a dollop, so they'd either skip the topping or went with a canned brand. Kraft's solution: a Cool Whip aerosol, so consumers can reach into the fridge and easily squeeze out a topper for their cookie, brownie or piece of fruit.

There's also frozen cheese-filled bagels, a newer, easier way to pull cheese slices out of the package, and "Goldfish Mac N' Cheese crackers, shaped like macaroni noodles but in cracker form." And what about those new single-serving packets of Jell-O powder—just add to milk and stir in. It's educational!

Janet Myers, senior director-Kraft Kitchens, said the product is aimed at moms who want to make after-school snacks for their kids without having to wait for the Jell-O to congeal in the fridge. There is, however, some work involved in the preparation — but, luckily, the kids can do it. "They like the interactivity of the stirring," she said, noting that the individual packs aid in portion control.

[via Ad Age—and a special shout out to reporter Emily Bryson York for achieving a reasonable level of disdain in her tone in this story. Well done.]

"The researchers found that booze completely changed the way the brain reacted to the images. Without alcohol, the amygdala - which is involved in processing emotional reactions - lit up in response to the frightened faces, but with alcohol, it was less active, reacting equally to neutral and fearful faces. This may help explain why drunkenness makes people both more outgoing and more aggressive: it impairs the amygdala's ability to detect threats.

"The researchers also confirmed that alcohol activates reward circuits, such as the nucleus accumbens, just as other drugs of abuse do - resulting in pleasurable feelings."

Now you know. [NewScientist]

"If Shvarts did indeed preserve the blood and freeze it immediately after it was collected, it could be tested for human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), the hormone produced during pregnancy. If she failed to carefully preserve it, however, the hCG could have degenerated over time, making it untraceable.

"Another option would be a DNA analysis of the blood. 'If you could take a sample of her blood and determine her genetic material, then test the [menstrual] blood against it, if there’s any genetic material there that’s not hers, that would indicate a pregnancy,' says Dr. Michael Ross, an obstetrician/gynecologist in Northern Virginia. 'Or you could do a test for Y chromosomes, on the 50/50 chance that [the fetus] was a boy.'

"Still, either test might not be conclusive: 'If the [blood] has more than one genetic program, you could say there’s an overwhelming likelihood that she’s pregnant—or just that she had sex before collecting the blood,' says Ross. Plus, once again preservation remains an issue, since DNA specimens are notoriously easy to contaminate."

Ball's in your court, Yale Monster. Give us her genetic material!

Diseases ranging from Alzheimer's and Parkinson's to schizophrenia and bipolar disorder will be shown to be caused by infectious agents that take advantage of genetic predisposition, says psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey, president of the Treatment Advocacy Center. Researchers will be surprised to find that many of those infectious agents are being transmitted from animals to humans. As a result, it will be uncommon to keep cats, birds or hamsters as pets - but we'll still have dogs around, because they've been "man's best friend" for so long that we've already adjusted to their infectious agents.

International terrorism will be brought under control because governments will realize counterterrorism is primarily a police function rather than a job for the military, says Ronald Noble, the secretary-general of Interpol. Passports and IDs will be linked to a global monitoring system, much as credit cards are today. "People will no longer be able to travel and engage in transactions with anonymity," thanks to surveillance and biometrics, he says. All this will pose "thorny issues" for a post-privacy era.

The outlook for longer life spans is a mixed bag: Kurzweil says the pace of life extension will outrun the passage of years, offering at least the possibility of an indeterminate life span 50 years from now. But trends also point to a decline in average life expectancy, due to the increased incidence of obesity among today's young people, says Wanda Jones, director of the Office on Women's Health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Bosh. Don't fret the fatties. Smoke 'em if you got 'em, people. We're all set. [CosmicLog via Digg]

I believe Gawker owe's ACSH a correction with regard to: http://gawker.com/380338/whole-foods-environmentalists-support-cockroach-invasion

Very much like the Harvard School of Public Health, ACSH is funded by a diverse mix of corporations, foundations and individuals.
We have individual donors around the country who believe that the Ralph Nader inspired activist groups do not have a monopoly on
what is in their best interest.

We are very up-front that we accept no strings attached donations from a wide range of corporations. Our scientific advisory board, nearly 400
strong, serve as volunteers. Together with our board of trustees, http://www.acsh.org/about/pageID.7/default.asp
the advisors http://www.acsh.org/about/pageID.89/default.asp we are led by an impressive group of scientists, physicians, and policy advisors. Our reports go through two peer-reviews: internal (advisors)
and outside- where they are published in independent scientific journals. We have a 30 year history of going where the science takes us- even when that science runs counter to the interest
of our funders.

We are concerned that reporters often ask about funding only when some if it may come from industry. Reporters often fail to ask who funds groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council-
and how those funding sources may introduce biases as well (i.e. from a foundation whose stated mission is to remove more chemicals from the market.)

Interestingly, in the cases when we say something "anti-business" — they never ask who funds us :-)

And we are only called "conservative" when we aren't supporting stem cell research, opposing cigarette smoking, and promoting the use of Gardasil.
Thanks
Jeff

I decided to try the pills for myself. Just before hitting the sack, I took two of the rather horsy pills. Sure enough, about seven hours later, my eyes popped open. With an unusual and almost alarming degree of lucidity, I walked into the kitchen and started my morning coffee ritual, then realized that I didn't need it...

I tried the pill a second time, with even more dramatic results. Deliriously exhausted, I went to bed at midnight, and made the classic mistake of setting the alarm for 7 p.m. instead of 7 a.m. About four hours later, I was awoken by a loud swarm of fighting stray cats in my backyard. They kept me up for about an hour before I could fall back asleep. Despite the interruption, and the fact that my alarm never went off, I still woke up at 7:30, and got out of bed after just a few minutes. This was huge.

So, it has what you might term "testimonial evidence" on its side. But what do the scientists say?

"I don't know of anything that indicates that these ingredients are helpful in improving daytime function when taken at night," warns Dr. Gary Zammit, director of the Sleep Disorder Institute in Manhattan and clinical associate professor at Columbia University.

"To my knowledge," says Zammit, "the best way that we can feel fully refreshed is to ensure that we've had an adequate sleep period. There's no herb or vitamin that can replace that."

Why not spend $30 and buy them here, then let us know how they work? You can always sue if you need to.