West Texas Sustainability Conference

So I got this announcement e-mailed to me today for the West Texas Sustainability Conference being hosted by Texas Tech University on April 21, 2011. You can visit the official website for the conference and sign up if you are going to be in the area. The website says this in the overview:

This conference is focused on practical application, state of the art, and future trends for sustainability. The geographical patina is wilderness, rural, agricultural lands, and small town America, rather than large metropolitan areas. The topics for seminars will be diverse and both for general or professional interests. Major topics considered are: telecommunication, transportation, energy, water, environmental resources, environmental law, land use planning and design. This one-day conference will feature many case studies of actual projects in West Texas and the Southwest

If you are going to be in the area anyway I would suggest trying to go. I would but will be busy with class and other engagements that day. I may, if I can get some free time, go check out the farmer's market on the 22nd. I would be interesting to hear from anyone who goes about how it is. This is an important topic for the area with a decreasing amount of water in the aquifer that supplies most of the area as well as decreasing oil world wide much of which this area used to supply.

Evidence FTW

I don't know how I missed this when it came out but I figured I would post it now that I have seen it. This is an image that compares a lot of the climate change skeptics arguments against what science actually says. You will probably need to click on the image to actually read what it says.

Another Response to McCarthy

In January I wrote a post about an opinion piece by Jenny McCarthy on the problems with vaccines. In that post I explained how several of the comments that she wrote were wrong on several factual layers. Well on Saturday the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) published an article that included some of what I pointed out but also included more as well as more references, and who are we kidding it was much more professional. One of the things I really wanted to point out was something that they said at the end.

As an aside, repeating the words of parents is not how science is done; science uses anecdotes as a starting point to coin hypotheses, and that’s where the relationship ends. Anti-vaxxers cannot have it both ways: either Wakefield was only repeating parent’s words, or he was doing a proper scientific investigation of the parent’s concerns.

Next, McCarthy completes the circle: after the incorrect factual statements, and the hint to conspiracy, comes the irate-mom-who-won’t-take-no-for-an-answer act:

I know children regress after vaccination because it happened to my own son. Why aren't there any tests out there on the safety of how vaccines are administered in the real world, six at a time? Why have only 2 of the 36 shots our kids receive been looked at for their relationship to autism? Why hasn't anyone ever studied completely non-vaccinated children to understand their autism rate?

Please pay special attention to this paragraph. This seems to be the new direction the anti-vaccination movement is moving in, the new position of the goal post. What is so great about this line of thinking however is that it proves what we in the pro-health camp have known for a while: the anti-vaccine proponents know vaccines cause autism. No amount of contradictory evidence will ever be enough, because they will always fantasize something else about vaccines that they can demand to be studied, but that is OK. Our educational efforts are not aimed at the McCarthys, or Meryl Doreys, of the world, but to the parents who are on the fence and about to make a very important decision about their children’s health. We fight for them, and even more importantly for their children, which is why correcting the anti-vaccination misinformation is of paramount importance to the pro-health community

This is exactly how I feel so make sure you read the article over at JREF.

Beauty Around Us!

So where do scientists see beauty? According to xkcd it is in everything around us. This is true!

Carlsbad Caverns National Park

Location: Eddy County in southeastern New Mexico right near the border with Texas, near Carlsbad, NM.

Introduction:
Within about 30 miles of Guadalupe Mountains National Park (Guads), Carlsbad Caverns National Park (Wikipedia page) is the first of the National Park cave systems that I visited. As with the Guads this national park is located in the high desert of the American Southwest. The surface footprint of the National Park is much greater that what would be expected if it was to just be the cave itself and as such there are many other activities to see and do including many great views as well as being able to visit other entrances to the cave system. If you are hitting up one of the two parks in the region you are doing something wrong since they are both so close and both offer many different options to explore.

Geology
As you might expect the geology of Carlsbad Caverns is very similar to that of the Guads so if you have not read my write up on that I suggest you do. A quick summary for those who have but may not remember it all. In the Permian the area that now includes Carlsbad Caverns and the Guadalupe Mountains was covered by a warm, shallow sea that allowed for the growth of organism that secreted calcium carbonate in a primarily sponge-reef. The sea eventually began to dry and covered up much of the reef in evaporites. Overtime these calcium carbonate rich rocks were lithified to form a large primarily limestone deposit. This limestone was eventually uplifted and formed the mountains and ridges in this area.

Now I can expand on something I mentioned in passing when I talked about the Guads is the formation of caves which this post will allow me to expand on. Caves form primarily in limestone rich areas which are typically known as karst areas, why? The answer is simply that limestone breaks down easily in acid rain. All rain has some acidic qualities in it these are picked up as the rain water passes through atmospheric CO2. When the CO2 is present in the atmosphere and gets taken up by water it forms carbonic acid but it is typically pretty weak in the rain water itself. As the rain water can either run off into rivers and lakes and eventually the ocean or it can penetrate the surface and reach the water table. As the water moves underground if it reaches a limestone rich deposit the carbonic acid will react with the limestone, this dissolves away a part of the limestone and releases CO2 back into the atmosphere. This dissolved water is part of the reason why people who have well water will get hard water stains etc a lot of times. Also of some interest this is another reason why scientist worry about excess CO2 in the atmosphere because it causes the oceans to become more acidic making it more difficult for calcite secreting organisms, coral etc, to secrete calcite and can cause them to actually dissolve over time, this is called ocean acidification. Over a long period of time the water can dissolve away large areas of the limestone and form caves and as the water table drops or the area with the cave is uplifted these caves become exposed at the surface where we find them. Another interesting thing that can happen is that the water can get supersaturated in lime at higher subsurface pressures and when this water reaches the surface, or a depressurized cave, it will drop this lime off and form a special kind of limestone called travertine. Travertine is what typically is found on the edges of cave walls as well as in many of the formations in the cave.

Animals have always played a large role in the environment of caves and the most typical animal that people think of with caves is bats. Carlsbad Caverns is no exception to this and during the summer you can watch the bats fly out of the cave at night, I hear this is an awesome sight but one which I have not yet seen. Other animals also use the caves and deep within the cave system it becomes an environment like no other. A karst system can form many openings into the cave system on the surface some of which may be nearly vertical or just impossible for a surface animal to escape from. This leads to the possibility of fossils being found in caves and in fact they have been found in this cave as well as others around the world. If you really wish to learn how these fossils may get preserved I recommend this post over at History of Geology, yes I know I have mentioned it before. I'm sure I am missing some aspects so if you have questions feel free to ask them in the comment section below and I will try to answer them.

More Pictures I have even more in the Carlsbad Caverns portion of my Flickr page.









Further Reading:

National Park Service's web page on the Geology and on the Caves

While only partially related: Bebout, D.G. and Kerans, C. 1993. Guide to the Permian Reef Geology Trail, McKittrick Canyon, Guadalupe Mountains National Park, West Texas. Bureau of Economic Geology, Austin, 48 p. (I really recommend this last one if you are going to do the geology trail (of the Guads) because it includes stops and talks about the geology of the are. A digital copy can be found here but I recommend buying one from the park when you get there [the Guads], support your parks!!!)

National Park Service Series homepage

Textbook Stickers

If Creationist get their "warning" stickers on textbooks soon everyone will be demanding them as SMBC points out below.

Paleo and the LSEA

The Louisiana Science Education Act was a way to sneak creationist propaganda into public schools in the state of Louisiana. It should come as no surprise that the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology released a statement on that act recently. Head over to the Louisiana Coalition for Science post here for more information.

Climate Change and National Security

A lot of hard core climate deniers will not listen to the experts no matter how much evidence they present. At the same time a lot of these same people say that we should listen to our military more. Well in the United States the people who know the most about the world's oceans militarily are in the United States Navy and who would know the most in the entire Navy but the Chief Oceanographer. Below are two videos, posted by Greenman3610, of the Navy's Chief Oceanographer, Admiral David Titley, on the importance in understanding climate change.

Modern Snake Oil

At the end of the 1800s and the start of the 1900s people pushed cure alls that are commonly called snake oils. Eventually as scientific rigor and testing became more important most of these were pushed out of the market by people not believing that these cure alls actually work because they had not been scientifically tested. This did not get rid of them all, however, and new ones pop up from time to time. C0nc0rdance has a great video up about one such snake oil, although he refers to it as Windex Syndrome (you do have to enjoy the My Big Fat Greek Wedding reference), that involves bleach.

Debunking Monckton 4

Part 4 (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 5) of Potholer54's series taking on the lies from Monckton, this time he discusses quotes that haven't just been quote mined but have been completely changed.

Herpetology is Paraphyletic

Another great comic by xkcd this time explaining how the study of Reptiles and Amphibians in one group, known as Herpetology, is in fact an unnatural grouping and so it is paraphyletic. Make sure you visit their site itself so you can see the comment when you mouse over the comic, lets just say that there is a problem that Aves is a Class while Dinosauria is a Superorder (ironically this is something I covered in the labs I taught this week).