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A four foot-long reef worm capable of biting through a 20-pound fishing line.(link via Neatorama)

Dear god.

A 15 meter-long pliosaur with jaws that put T-Rex to shame. Sure, it died out 140-some million years ago, but try telling my imagination that.

Also scary, blue holes. Pathway straight to Cthulhu, if you ask me.

This Saturday we were graced by the lovely Liz and her charming Frank. We provided the pizza (pi for pie day. Sicilian, of course, because pi are square. I’ll keep saying that until its funny.) and they provided the love, in the form of Black Sheep.

After seeing a trailer for it in front another Netflix rental, they immediately thought of us (gross out horror comedy, check! New Zealand, where Aly and I honeymooned, doublecheck!), and that’s why I love Liz. We sat Julia in the other room with pizza and Horton (she had just gotten a plastic lamb at the Elmwood Park zoo that afternoon, and that, plus guts, would have been too much — Responsible Dad!) and watched the hell out of that sucker. I was immediately taken back back 10 years to Liz and Aly’s apartment, watching horrible, horrible movies and being asked never, ever to go out and choose a movie on my own again.

But Black Sheep is everything I wished those other horror movies were. I give it: ♥ ♥ ♥ ∞, which I think means its good. It’s tough to say on this scale.

It was a fun film and you can see early Peter Jackson all over it, which isn’t a surprise considering that it takes place in New Zealand (I once described parts of the North Island as “rolling green hills covered in little white dots”) and because Weta Workshop did the effects (there was one scene where I swear they just replaced orcs with sheep). In fact, the first mutant lamb reminded me of the Sumatran rat monkey of Jackson’s Dead Alive (or Braindead, depending on what market you’re in, I guess).

I consider this movie an exemplar of the genre. Not as funny as, say, Shaun of the Dead, but a lot more disturbing. Fast-paced and scary in its own right, true to its own internal logic and funny without being slapstick-silly at every turn. It was well thought out and nicely put together, despite the low budget, full of nice, light touches and the rare treat of character development. In fact, I found the dialogue, in particular, to be smartly written. It is also a very bloody film, in the most meaty, visceral sense of the term.

As I said, you can see Weta Workshop’s hands all over this film. The special effects were great, especially the were-sheep and other sheepish monsters, but they weren’t above adding a few catapult-launched sheep for cheap, tension-cutting laughs. (Especially one flying lamb followed by a well-executed Wilhelm scream.)

It was also a beautiful movie, full of well-framed shots of the green, rich New Zealand countryside. (As I said, it was a very New Zealand movie — I also took smug delight in being able to explain what Aotearoa meant.) The attention the filmmakers paid to the landscape — not that I really know anything about cinematography — allowed the flick to move beyond the typical standards of the genre to something that was really quite well-crafted and watchable. I don’t know much about the director, Jonathan King, other than this is his first film, but I look forward to seeing his next one.

So, all and all, a proper pizza-and-beer flick, although you might want to hold the sausage.

Stop. Wait, reverse that. OK…

Another neat Eurekalert! feed story, one that offers tips for catching flies:

Caltech scientists discover mechanism for wind detection in fruit flies

Tiny, lightweight fruit flies need to know when it’s windy out so they can steady themselves and avoid being knocked off their feet or blown off course. But how do they figure out that it’s time to hunker down? According to a team led by California Institute of Technology (Caltech) scientists reporting in this week’s issue of the journal Nature, the flies have evolved a specialized population of neurons in their antennae that let them know not only when the wind is blowing, but also the direction from which it is coming.

The behavior of fruit flies in the face of a stiff breeze is remarkable in and of itself, notes David J. Anderson, the Roger W. Sperry Professor of Biology at Caltech, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator. “We discovered that you can stop a fly dead in its tracks by blowing a gentle stream of air over it,” he explains, adding that the flies’ immobility is so complete, you could pick one up with a pair of chopsticks as long as a steady stream of wind was passing over the insect. Once the wind stops blowing, however, the flies immediately start walking around again.

Here’s a link to the video.

While I’m thinking of The Franklin Institute, I’d like to reiterate my plea for a Maker Faire of our own. The Science Museum of Minnesota is having a little one this weekend.

… actually it is advice from Paul Orselli’s ExhibiTricks blog. This might make a nice follow-up to my previous post on unsolicited advice for The Franklin, and it touches on similar themes…

A science museum, indeed every type of museum, is all about stories (human interaction) and stuff (interesting objects and materials.) Working with cool items or seeing interesting objects or devices while having an opportunity to interact with other people is what makes museums special, and incidentally different and more marketable, than on-line experiences or other types of for-profit entertainment centers.

At the end of the day, providing interesting opportunities for visitors and museum staff to interact with “stuff” (and each other) is a sure way for visitors to leave your museum NOT feeling stupid.

And that’s just a smart way to run a museum.

It reminds me of two rules I learned in grad school: 1) if your reader doesn’t understand something, you were probably unclear; and 2) you can please more than one type of reader at a time.

The first is obvious, to me at any rate. Anything that can be said, can be said simply enough to appeal to a person of reasonable intelligence. It really depends on being able to get a concept across without piling on confusing terminology, whether that concept is evolution or celestial physics. I don’t believe you can get someone to completely grok quantum physics in five seconds, but they might get the gist that regular old physics doesn’t work so well in explaining how things atom-sized and smaller behave, which is where quantum mechanics comes in. People tend to understand things when you break them down into digestible chunks (or quanta — ha!) of information.

The second, I think, applies to science museums, in particular. I’m not an exhibit designer — and I know nothing about museum pedagogy — but I would think a good exhibit is like a an old Warner Bros. cartoon: the kids don’t get the dirtier jokes, but the adults do. (Good example here in “An Itch In Time,” at the seven minute mark below. It went over my head as kid.) Likewise, I can see where it would be necessary to design an exhibit — to create an “experience” — that appeals kids, adults and science geeks alike. I think you would do that by engaging people in the process. Like Paul, I was impressed with how interactive the recent Star Wars exhibit was. Even my three year-old got into creating LEGO landspeeders.

For my non-Facebook friends, I present:

25 Random Things About Pat Benatar

Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note of 25 random things. At the end, you choose 25 people to be tagged. You are to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you it is because I want you to know more about Pat Benatar.

1. Born Patrick Andrzejewski, soon after Patricia Mae Andrzejewski following a coin flip.

2. Was accepted to the Julliard school.

3. Wrote “Love is a Battlefield” after she broke up with her Argentinian boyfriend, at the Battle of Goose Green during the Falklands conflict.

4. Her mother was a beautician who once sang opera at the Met.

5. Her father was a sheet metal worker once tossed out of Shea for spitting on a Met.

6. She once recorded jingles for Pepsi, which inspired her chart topping “Hit Me with Your Best Shot,” a stirring anthem for the Cola Wars of the ’80s.

7. Once got with Roy Orbison until he started “Crying.”

8. Got her first break at an open mic night at Catch a Rising Star comedy club.

9. Can be recognized from Olivia Newton John and Juice Newton by her lack of Newton.

10. Reluctantly took on her husband’s last name Benatar after John Cougar reclaimed her first stage name “Mellencamp”

11. Her first hit was 1979′s “Heartbreaker,” which she wrote after disguising herself as a surgeon and intentionally botching John Cougar’s heart valve replacement.

12. Intentionally recorded a crummy cover of “I Need a Lover” to further spite John.

13. “You Better Run” was the second video played on MTV ever. Rocketing her to stardom among the three people who had cable at the time.

14. Turns out she never really wanted her MTV

15. Her live album, “Live from Earth” was ironically recorded on the surface of a large c-type asteroid

16. After divorcing Dennis Benatar, she married her guitarist Neil Giraldo in 1982.

17. In 1989, she appeared in an ABC Afterschool Special “Torn Between Two Fathers” where she played the wise old owl.

18. A 33rd degree Freemason, the subject of her last big hit “We Belong.”

19. Released three albums in the 1990s, for no apparent reason.

20. Spent fifteen years mastering the Hanzo sword bequeathed to her by her sensei.

21. Invented the thin keyboard tie in 1981.

22. Qualified in the biathlon for the Nagano Olympics. She didn’t compete, feigning injury so she could avenge the death of her sensei.

23. Bernie Madoff lost money to HER.

24. Her 2007 song, “Passion,” could be downloaded, for a time, from a Jell-O sponsored website.

25. Never responded to decades of correspondence with Greg Lester, unless you consider a restraining order a “response.”

Last week I took Benny to the doctor’s for his nine month checkup. He’s doing well, thanks, but he needed his HepB jab.  I’ve met Baruch Blumberg — and see him often around work — so I’ll have to thank him personally. Benny was decidedly less enthusiastic about it at the time. But when he doesn’t die of liver cancer, I’ll give him an I-told-you-so.

I’ve been following the vaccine/autism fretfest from a distance, so I chatted the topic up with Ben’s doc, who mentioned how Hib cases, of all things, were on the rise. (One unvaccinated infant in Minnesota recently died. Tragically preventable.)

If you haven’t heard of Hib, that doesn’t surprise me. It causes a form of meningitis. You, and your parents, probably never encountered it. Chances are fairly good that your grandmother, however, might have lost a sibling or a cousin to the disease…or one of the many other illnesses that used to routinely rob us of our children.

As you might know, the current anti-vaccination nonsense that’s spreading through the land began in the UK in ’98 when a Dr. Andrew Wakefield published a study suggesting a link between the MMR vaccine and Autism. (We gave the world Intelligent Design, the UK gave us anti-vacs…as much as I detest ID, at least it doesn’t have a body count.)

I haven’t really followed the career of Wakefield. We have our own anti-vac proponents in the US to worry about. UK Journalist Brian Deer suggests Wakefield might have some ulterior motives, this makes for interesting reading.

Of course many controlled, reputable studies since then has cast that link in doubt. If you don’t believe me, I can’t help you more than to suggest some reading, WebMD has a nice lay-friendly FAQ that spells out the depth of research on the topic. You can also read the take of pro-science skepticsyou can read the take of pro-science skeptics here. At this point you are either merely ignorant or actively in denial.

Like I said, this really began in the UK, so it isn’t surprising that we’re seeing a return of preventable diseases like measles.

Confirmed cases increased from 990 in 2007 to 1,348 last year – the highest figure since the monitoring scheme was introduced in 1995.

Health Protection Agency experts said most of the cases had been in children not fully vaccinated with combined MMR and so could have been prevented.

Immunisation expert Dr Mary Ramsay said the rise was “very worrying”, adding measles “should not be taken lightly”.

More than 600 of the 2008 measles cases occurred in London, where uptake of the vaccine for MMR – measles, mumps and rubella – is particularly low.

We’re not immune (heh!), in the US. As I mentioned, there was a Hib outbreak in Minnesota recently, but also pertussis in Philly and measles in California last January. In the latter case, an unvaccinated seven year-old brought the disease back from vacation in Switzerland and spread it around his private school. The scary part is, as you can see in the Cali case, these kids aren’t from poor families without access to healthcare.

Supposedly educated adults, concerned enough with their children’s welfare to send them to private school, were scared into NOT vaccinating their kids. In the 21st century, they made a choice against the medical technology that created an unprecedented wave of good health in the 20th century.

Likely, they believed the autism fearmongering and figured they’d place a safe bet and let “herd immunity” cover their kids. That only works when everyone else plays along. So, it won’t be surprising to see clusters of outbreaks in some of our wealthiest communities as well as among under-served populations.

That doesn’t take away from the essentially parasitic (Amanda Peet took it back, but I think it is apt) practice. Herd immunity protects kids who can’t get immunized (for a variety of health-related reasons) and a small minority of those who did get vaccinated, but for whom it didn’t take.

While all this is going on, there is a huge kerfluffle involving Bad Science columnist extraordinaire, Ben Goldacre, is boiling over across the interwebs. (Quackometer has a nice round-up.) A radio host is trying to use the UK’s anti-free speech libel laws to silence Goldacre. Toss him a couple of quid, if you can. The first time I ever used paypal in pounds. How global of me.

2/8 UPDATE: Wakefield doctored his results, says Brian Deer in today’s Sunday Times.

2/9 UPDATE: The Bad Astronomer has more on recent outbreaks in Australia and Switzerland, where a 12 year-old girl died of measles-related encephalitis.

That reminds me a bit of my own childhood experience regarding opportunistic infections. I contracted osteomyelitis after a bout of chicken pox when I was about four or five. I really ought to corroborate my memories with my mom, I could be wrong…and a doctor, for that matter, I could totally be wrong on this. Soon after getting over chicken pox, my dad found me on the floor one night, crying hysterically because I couldn’t walk. I spent two months in a wheelchair at Abington Memorial. Again, my memories of early childhood are anything are perfect, but I remember spending my fifth birthday — got a landspeeder — at the hospital.

Anyway, I know people think chicken pox aren’t a Big Deal, but I’m getting my kids vaccinated anyway.

I write press releases for a living, I’m afraid. And, over the last decade, I figure I must have written nearly 1,000 of them (if you count tipsheets, which I am for the purpose of generating a nice round number). So when I saw this up on Eurekalert!, I figured that was a bold bit of headline-smithing. Of course, it also tripped my BS alert…until I read the release.

Cardiff researchers could herald a new era in fundamental physics
Cardiff University researchers who are part of a British-German team searching the depths of space to study gravitational waves, may have stumbled on 1 of the most important discoveries in physics according to an American physicist

Cardiff University researchers who are part of a British-German team searching the depths of space to study gravitational waves, may have stumbled on one of the most important discoveries in physics according to an American physicist.

Craig Hogan, a physicist at Fermilab Centre for Particle Astrophysics in Illinois is convinced that he has found proof in the data of the gravitational wave detector GEO600 of a holographic Universe – and that his ideas could explain mysterious noise in the detector data that has not been explained so far.

The British-German team behind the GEO600, which includes scientists from the School of Physics and Astronomy’s Gravitational Physics Group, will now carry out new experiments in the coming months to yield more evidence about Craig Hogan’s assumptions. If proved correct, it could help in the quest to bring together quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theory of gravity.

I’ve been busy the last few weeks, so I missed the holographic hoopla from Craig Hogan. The idea is — in my likely erroneous inerpretations — that what we know as 3D reality is really 2D information projected from edges of the universe, the cosmological horizon, like a the cover of National Geographic (when we still thought holograms were cool). The Cardiff University is a bit of press release me-too-ism, but that’s largely forgivable (I do it myself sometimes) if a bit tacky (a spade’s a spade).

What I want to know is what are the consequences of living in a holographic universe. Are there any perks? Neat ways to hack reality, for example?

Or will holographic be the new woo word as we get tired of saying “quantum” everything? Only time and Oprah will tell.

OK, one change I don’t want to see is any cuts to the moon plan. (Changes, sure, but I want a moonbase, dammit!) It is a good sign that Obama’s people included the rover in the parade.