Friday, July 23, 2010

1. SAINT GALILEO: HIS RELICS ARE ON DISPLAY IN FLORENCE.

We expect to find macabre relics of saints in centuries-old cathedrals, but some of Galileo's parts, chopped off his remains a century after his death, now reside in a new Galileo Museum in Florence. The relics will no doubt draw an audience that would not normally be interested in Galileo's sort of truth. The Galileo Museum made the front page of the New York Times this morning in an article by Rachel Donadio. Galileo was devout, but in the 16th century, who was not? In his early years Galileo's family had its own pew in the cathedral in Pisa. To occupy his mind on Sunday mornings, young Galileo timed the slow swings of the bronze chandelier that hung from the cathedral Dome, set in motion by the movement of air. Using his pulse as a clock, he found the period to be almost independent of the amplitude. Countless students have since been called on to explain his observation in their first physics exam. Galileo's observations would someday shake the foundations off the Church

2. MAKING WAVES: SOMETIMES EVEN THE VATICAN GETS THE SCIENCE RIGHT.

A huge antenna complex, 25 miles north of Rome, is operated by Vatican Radio. The residents of nearby Cesano have claimed for years that radiation from the antennas increases the number of leukemia and lymphoma cases in children. The Vatican denies it. Science is on the side of the Vatican this time. According to a story in IEEE Spectrum the first epidemiological study of the Vatican radio waves by the local health authority in Rome found eight cases instead of the expected 3.7. Ken Foster at the University of Pennsylvania, who has been studying the effects of EMF for decades, describes epidemiology in a small area dealing with a rare disease as "mission impossible." Moreover, he points out that this tiny study was only done for the purpose of litigation. The advocates pick and choose the data to get any result they want.

3. BIOFUEL: GETTING MILEAGE OUT OF GM POND SCUM.

It's not like harvesting corn once a year; algae gives you a new crop every day. The first step is to find the ideal oil-producing strain. Natural selection doesn't have much to do with making oil, so a lot of work is going into genetic modification. This is not a hard sell in the US, where genetically modified corn has been used for 15 years, and almost all tomatoes are GM. In Europe. however, where a 2001 directive gave EU-wide approval for farmers to cultivate GM crops deemed safe, but frequent claims of new evidence of danger has prevented a single GM food crop from being approved. For algae grown in open ponds, it would be impossible to prevent GM strains from escaping.

4. POPULATION: EARTHS POPULATION IS ALREADY UNSUSTAINABLE.

Global warming, vanishing fisheries, vast ocean garbage patches, peak oil, perpetual warfare, all tell us the same thing. There are just too many of us. Cap-and-trade is not going to solve our problem.

Bob Park can be reached via email at whatsnew@bobpark.org
THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND
Opinions are the author's and are not necessarily shared by the University, but they should be.