This is a very short post to say that I’ve found the best icons ever. See?

For all those science geeks out there who miss the days of staring at beating cilia in high school bio labs, this is for you: Single Celled Icons from Icon Icon available for both Mac and PC. You’ve got your choice of amoeba (nine types) and paramecium type (another nine of these) critters.

For directions on how to welcome these beasts into your life and change your icons, check out these great instructions from Apple. 

In a remarkable feat of investigative reporting that will probably turn the entire next issue of the New Yorker green with envy, the Washington Post has wrapped up a four-part series outing Cheney as the dark force in the White House. The neutrally titled ”ANGLER: THE CHENEY VICE PRESIDENCY” by Barton Gellman and Jo Becker topped 16 broadsheet pages of 20,000 words.

Lucky for those of us who are behind the curve, it’s all available online, with a handy ”cast of characters” index reminiscent of those in the equally criminally bent Perry Mason novels.

All four sections make for fascinating reading that leave one feeling wide-eyed and naive in the face of such manipulative prowess (this man makes the O.C.’s Julie Cooper look like Mrs. Claus).

So what does this have to do with science? Well the fourth section on environmental policy, Leaving No Tracks uncovers some new nuggets in ”The Republican War on Science” - as coined by Chris Mooney in his aptly titled bestseller. 

But from what I’ve read its less of a war and more of a guerrilla ambush. Witness the controversy over the Klamath river basin in Oregon. Precious and scarce river water could not be diverted to water farmer’s fields in order to protect two endangered species of fish, as per the Endangered Species Act.

The thing to do, Cheney told Smith [former Republican congressman from Oregon who represented said drought-suffering farmers] was to get science on the side of the farmers. And the way to do that was to ask the National Academy of Sciences to scrutinize the work of the federal biologists who wanted to protect the fish.

...Cheney got what he wanted when the science academy delivered a preliminary report finding “no substantial scientific foundation” to justify withholding water from the farmers…

When the lead biologist for the National Marine Fisheries Service team critiqued the science academy’s report in a draft opinion objecting to the plan, the critique was edited out by superiors and his objections were overruled, he said. The biologist, Michael Kelly, who has since quit the federal agency, said in a whistle-blower claim that it was clear to him that “someone at a higher level” had ordered his agency to endorse the proposal regardless of the consequences to the fish.

So the farmers got their way. But not long after some 77,000 Coho and Chinook salmon washed up dead on the banks of the trickling river. The commercial fishery on the West Coast crashed in the following years and Congress doled out $60 million to help fishermen recover their losses. Add to that the $15 million which Congress paid the farmers to stop farming and you’ve got a pricey bill.

Remember Christine Todd Whitman, the EPA’s ex-chief who resigned in 2003 for personal reasons? Turns out “it was Cheney’s insistence on easing air pollution controls” that drove her away. She simply couldn’t sign his energy task force’s rule change, which excused the nation’s dirtiest plants from installing costly new pollution controls

A federal appeals court later deemed that the rule change violated the Clean Air Act.  The administration’s legal rationalizations would only hold up in a “Humpty-Dumpty world,” the judges said. This begs the question, if Cheney operates in a Humpty-Dumpty world, where’s his great fall? 

(PHOTO: Jyn Meyer)

I saw this press release from Imperial College London about a new pediatric research clinic opening up in London (at Imperial and St. Mary’s Colleges). Which sounds a little boring. But let me assure you, it’s not.

Why you ask? Because kids suffer when treatments and medications are not tested directly on them. Children are not just scaled-down grown ups. Some examples:

1. Antidepressants: they make adults happier and want to kill themselves less. They make under 18s (and maybe even under 25s) want to kill themselves MORE.
2. Aspirin. The basic, the wonderful, the good and great heart disease, cancer and fever fighter, can kill under 16s via Reye’s Syndrome.

So poke, dope, inject, measure and test away. Kids of the future will be grateful.

(PHOTO: T YOUNG)

Everyone just loves a giant squid. Could be the whole Captain Nemo, mysterious whale-hunter of the deep dark oceans, the tentacles. Or the thought of one NEVER ENDING plate of calamari. Yum.

Anyways. A rather large squid has washed ashore in Australia, measuring some 26 feet long. But what piqued my interest most was the statement that giant squids are filled to the brim with ammonia, which they use as a buoyancy aid.

Nothing like a little Windex cooked right into your fried mollusk appetizer. 

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been reading up on death. Morbid stuff. But I come across some really interesting crap too. Again morbid, but how about this:

In 1986, Clifford Warwick, a vet in the UK, wrote a letter to the editor of the Canadian Veterinary Journal. It was in regards to the appropriate method of euthanasia for snakes a reptiles. He was advocating against decapitation because, it seems, a reptilian head can stay alive and responsive for up to 59 minutes (!!) after being severed.

“One hears of anecdotal accounts where snakes and lizards indicate consciousness following decapitation, as the head may be seen to react to an approach by attempting to defend itself, respond to touch with movement and respond to light with pupil dilation and contraction. Klauber (7) was one of the first to document such reactions as much as 59 minutes after decapitation. However, he made no conclusions regarding the 13 rattlesnakes, used in his experiments, ability to feel pain. “

They manage this extra-ordinary feat because of their extreme tolerance to hypoxia or oxygen deprivation.

Rebecca from Skepchicks tells us of her new contest ”A Moment of Science for Mister Wizard”:

As you may recall, a few weeks ago we lost Mr. Wizard. To keep his spirit alive, I’d like you all to grab your cameras and record a clip of you doing a science experiment in 5 minutes or less demonstrating some scientific concept. Upload it to YouTube as a video response to mine.

The original deadline was today but there’s been an extension. Lucky you! So hurry up and post your eulogy to Mr. Wizard and you could win a free t-shirt from the Skepchick store as well as some shiny Surly-Ramics jewelry.

So far there are 13 entries which range from making a lemon battery (made by Colin, who is ten, and Ethan, who is eight) to extracting DNA from wheat germ. 

The Live Earth extravaganza took place around the world on Saturday, and featured all the big names in music doing their bit for climate change. But while everyone else was swanking it up in their posh trailers at Wembley Stadium and the other venues around the world, one band were perched on the edge of an iceberg in their parkas and cosy gloves, waiting for their big moment. That band was Nunatak. They are a five-piece band who are truly at the sharp end of climate change, as they are made up of the crew of the British Antarctic Survey. There are only 20-odd people out there at any one time, a fifth of whom are in the band. Somehow, word spread about them, and they ended up performing live to the thousands of people watching Live Earth. When asked what they thought of it all, they said that as far as they were concerned they were only performing to a sell-out crowd of 17 so it wasn’t that big of a deal. What a humble bunch. And their music’s not half bad too. 

(PHOTO: Sanja Gjenero)

Health care systems fascinate me. Endlessly. I could read about the policy and practice of socialized or privatized medicine until my eyeballs burst. And with the US presidential campaigns underway, I have ample opportunity. That is, for my eyeballs to burst.

I MEAN SERIOUSLY. I understand the basic tenets of Republicanism: lower taxes, keep the government out of things and when it doubt, let market forces dictate. But it just doesn’t work for health care. It doesn’t. So when I started scrolling down this page from the New York Times, which sums up each of the major players stances on health care reform to this point, my eyes certainly began to get a little twitchy around the edges. Democrats, shocker, are generally pushing for universal health care coverage, with slight variations on the theme - some stress insuring the not insured, or insuring children; some stress bringing costs down for everyone; not everyone thinks it should be mandatory.

But all the freakin’ Republicans are like..market forces, competition, choice BLAH BLAH BLAH. I know they believe what they are saying, that they are not mentally handicapped sociopaths (a special place in hell is reserved for Mitt Romney, however, who signed onto universal health while the governor of Massachusetts and now doesn’t like it so much...). But one look at the World Health Report from 2000 (available in it’s full glory here, press release here) will tell you that that US system is broken and merely tinkering with the tax incentives and opening up insurance choices cross-borders will not do it.

Let me summarize the numbers (remember these are based on late 90’s data) for the rankings and expenditures of 191 countries:

France ranked 1st in its health care system and 4th in population health. Health care consumed 9.8% of the GDP. It spent, on average $2369 per person per year on health, of which about 77% was publicly funded.
The US ranked 37th in its health care system and 72nd in population health. Health care consumed 13.7% of the GDP. It spent, on average $4187 per person per year on health, of which about 44% was publicly funded.

I find this contrast particularly amusing as most conservative Americans would rather die than be French (freedom fries anyone?); most French people would rather die than have to speak with an American, so fair’s fair).  But these statistics show that Americans spent a lot more money and ended up a lot less healthy. While the World Health Report has about a million suggestions, one of the clearest is that healthy countries have universal health care, that everyone should try to insure as many people as possible and that private medicine does come at the cost of public.

But you already knew all that. For more research and news check out this site: Physicians for a National Health Program, particularly the research page. They advocate a single payer system (which basically means federally operated insurance, but not necessarily public hospitals, doctors). I think I might actually quit being a journalist and try to work for them. Handing out fliers or something.

Like I said, these are not new figures or new ideas. What is new is that we have a whole bunch of powerful people campaigning to run the United States of America with the promise of changing the way it does health care. It is an opportunity to do something radical. Something amazing: to do away with HMOs, pre-approved treatments, co-pays, deductibles, the uninsured and the underinsured.

The tragic thing is, even IF a Democrat gets in, judging by their position statements, it’s unlikely that a universal, single-payer system will evolve (the only one really up for it is Dennis Kucinich and who’s he, eh?). Many people who advocate for single-payer universal coverage (which yes! is expensive!) see the only way to finance the system is through healthcare savings from basically stripping the overhead/profit margins of private companies (this study from the New England Journal of Medicine found that around 30% of health care costs are administrative, compared to about 17% in Canada’s single payer system; likewise Medicaid and Medicare operate with much lower overhead costs compared to private insurance companies).

My personal opinion, disregarding the political difficulty of completely killing off for-profit US health care companies, is that the whole enchilada is the only way to go. And as much as I want to give Republicans a swift kick in the hiney (Mr. Romney would get something even better), I have to admit that at my darkest moments, I think that they halfway measures of weeny-assed Democrats might actually be as bad if not worse in the long term.

If you find yourself at a loose end in Germany, you should swing by the Stukenbrock Safaripark and visit new arrival Eclyse - the brand new zorse. Is it just me, or does she look slightly like a conker that wasn’t ready to emerge, like she’s going to turn properly brown pretty soon?  Click on the photo (by AP) to see a few more.

This category was MADE for men like Jonathan Meiburg, Austin Texas band Shearwater‘s front man. For those of you who don’t know, Shearwater produces big landscape driven folk music, akin to Arcade Fire’s lets-all-join-in with-triangles-and-tambourines sound. He’s the only man dubbed a “singer-songwriter-birder” by the New York Times. The only thing that could beat that in my books is if David Attenborough picked up the harmonica and played Beatles covers together with the inimitable and eery duets of Indonesian orangutans.

But what I’m writing to tell you is that just because I missed the band here in Vancouver, doesn’t mean you have to. Why? Because they’re playing for free tomorrow night in Battery Park in NYC. Let me repeat that. They. Are. Playing. For. Free. Tomorrow. In NYC. And it’s bound to be a kickass show. Don’t believe me? Well, believe the NYTimes review instead that raved about their Brooklyn show last year and was especially enamoured with their song White Waves “dedicated to the largest hammerhead shark that was ever caught with a rod and reel.”

Sure, naming your band after a bird (think: A Flock of Seagulls) does not a birder make. But Meiburg is the real mccoy. He spent 2001 in Tierra del Fuego studying the Striated Caracara (ding). And shared his experience with the audience of NPR in the same beautiful prose that peppers his songs (DONGGGggg).

Ear candy via iTunes: White Waves (about aforementioned tragic Hammerhead that was pregnant!)

And their latest album Palo Santo: Expanded Edition features the beautiful and catchy Red Sea, Black Sea.