May 1, 2013

Wednesday Toon Roundup 1- Rights

Voters

May 1, 2013

Don't Touch That Bird! It's Poisonous.

Posted by Ross Pomeroy at Thu, 25 Apr 2013 01:00:56
As a graduate student in the early 1990s, ornithologist Jack Dumbacher performed the almost obligatory trek to New Guinea to study the island's legendary birds-of-paradise. It was there, in the country's lush, dense rainforest that he unwittingly discovered the world's first known poisonous bird.

Dumbacher and his compatriots had placed mist nets up in the forest in order to capture and study the native flying fauna. One day, extracting birds from these nets, he was handling a number of hooded pitohuis, songbirds with black and orange plumage. Frazzled by their temporary captivity, the birds bit and scratched wildly as they were being released from their tethered confines.

"The cuts really stung, but we had so many nets to [deal with] we didn't have time to stop and put band-aids on our cuts," Dumbacher recalled, "so we popped our fingers in our mouth and ran off to the next net."

But the researchers quickly started to feel funny.

"Our mouths began to tingle, burn, and even go numb. The sensation lasted for several hours," Dumbacher remembered.

more

http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2013/04/dont-touch-that-bird-its-poisonous.html

May 1, 2013

Antibiotic Protects Men from Attractive Women

Posted by Alex Berezow at Sun, 28 Apr 2013 19:29:34
Heterosexual men mentally melt in the presence of attractive women. As Tom Jacobs writes in Pacific Standard, even the very thought of possibly interacting with a woman is enough to "temporarily impede men's mental abilities."

Of course, women know this, and some use it to their advantage. (Companies also know this, and they use it to their advantage, too: During my years in graduate school, many of the biotech sales reps were unusually attractive women.) Men feel more trusting toward women who cause them to be sexually aroused, even if there is no good justification for it -- just like when Indiana Jones totally fell for that sexy Nazi chick in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Is there a way for men to avoid these devilish "honey traps"? (It's unknown if the "honey trap" is named after CNBC's anchor formerly known as the "Money Honey.&quot

Yes. They can take an antibiotic.
more
http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2013/04/antibiotic-protects-men-from-attractive-women.html

May 1, 2013

Toon-Every Gun is Sacred

May 1, 2013

The Republican War on Social Science

By David Weigel

The first time anyone outside of Florida’s Space Coast heard of Rep. Bill Posey, he was talking about Barack Obama’s birth certificate. It was March 2009. Posey had been in office for two months, and he was the first to propose a bill requiring presidential nominees to hand over “documentation as may be necessary to establish that the candidate meets the qualifications for eligibility.” He was Internet-famous overnight. Stephen Colbert was asking him to prove that he, Posey, wasn’t part alligator. “There is no reason to say that I'm the illegitimate grandson of an alligator,” said the congressman.

Posey’s been re-elected twice since then, and on April 17, he got the chance to stare down the president’s science czar, John Holdren. Posey and fellow Republicans on the Science, Space, and Technology Committee wanted Holdren to explain why the National Science Foundation was wasting so much money from an asked-for budget of $7.6 billion.

Posey read off titles of NSF-funded research projects. “ ‘Picturing Animals in National Geographic for the years 1988 to 2008’ costing $227,000,” said Posey. “ ‘Kinship, Women's Labor and China's Economic Performance in the 17th to 21st Centuries’ costing $267,000. ‘Regulating Accountability and Transparency in China's Dairy Industry.’ … I mean, it's just hard to conceive how those are important to our national security or our national interest.”

Holdren wasn’t moved, but he’d heard this before—and he’d hear it again. After the hearing, committee chairman Lamar Smith of Texas sent a letter to the NSF asking what the “intellectual merit” of this research was. Shortly thereafter, as first reported by Science magazine, Smith was drafting legislation that would require the NSF to prove that grants wouldn’t embarrass anybody. Was the research “in the interests of the United States to advance the national health, prosperity, or welfare, and to secure the national defense by promoting the progress of science?” Could the NSF say that it was “the finest quality, is groundbreaking, and answers questions or solves problems that are of utmost importance to society at large?”


more

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2013/04/national_science_foundation_and_tom_coburn_the_republican_effort_to_cut.html