“Europe: Proton beams circulate in Big Bang machine ”

1. We have a “big bang machine”
2. It’s circulating “beams” of stuff.
3. PROTON beams.
4. A big. Bang. Machine.

And yet, no flying cars, no food replicators, and no hoverboards. Still.

Also, this:

When I was at the right age, I was lucky to have a mom who explained this stuff to me. It wasn’t until I got a little older and talked to some of my friends did I realize that all parents clearly did not do this. You don’t have to be gross and graphic but if we keep holding on to this puritanism and this mythology of the pure as snow teenager, we’re effectively giving kids uzis without any instruction as to how to use it and what kind of damage it can cause.

American squeamishness about talking about sex has helped keep common sexually transmitted infections far too common, especially among vulnerable teens, U.S. researchers reported Monday.

Latest statistics on chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis show the three highly treatable infections continue to spread in the United States.

‘Chlamydia and gonorrhea are stable at unacceptably high levels and syphilis is resurgent after almost being eliminated,’ said John Douglas, director of the division of sexually transmitted diseases at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

People have sex. It happens. Explain this to your kids, so they don’t die or kill someone.

In May, The New England Journal of Medicine laid the blame for clusters of disease outbreaks throughout the US squarely at the feet of declining vaccination rates, while nonprofit health care provider Kaiser Permanente reported that unvaccinated children were 23 times more likely to get pertussis, a highly contagious bacterial disease that causes violent coughing and is potentially lethal to infants. In the June issue of the journal Pediatrics, Jason Glanz, an epidemiologist at Kaiser’s Institute for Health Research, revealed that the number of reported pertussis cases jumped from 1,000 in 1976 to 26,000 in 2004. A disease that vaccines made rare, in other words, is making a comeback. “This study helps dispel one of the commonly held beliefs among vaccine-refusing parents: that their children are not at risk for vaccine-preventable diseases,” Glanz says.

“I used to say that the tide would turn when children started to die. Well, children have started to die,” Offit says, frowning as he ticks off recent fatal cases of meningitis in unvaccinated children in Pennsylvania and Minnesota. “So now I’ve changed it to ‘when enough children start to die.’ Because obviously, we’re not there yet.”

Politicians and notable figures who pander to the non-science behind vaccine fear (Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for instance) are essentially complicit in these deaths and illnesses people are causing by not vaccinating their kids. People who send their children to school without vaccines should be sued, and they should probably be considered some kind of a child abuser.

Via John Cole comes this obvious data.

Teenage pregnancies and syphilis have risen sharply among a generation of American school girls who were urged to avoid sex before marriage under George Bush’s evangelically-driven education policy, according to a new report by the US’s major public health body.

In a report that will surprise few of Bush’s critics on the issue, the Centres for Disease Control says years of falling rates of teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease infections under previous administrations were reversed or stalled in the Bush years. According to the CDC, birth rates among teenagers aged 15 or older had been in decline since 1991 but are up sharply in more than half of American states since 2005. The study also revealed that the number of teenage females with syphilis has risen by nearly half after a significant decrease while a two-decade fall in the gonorrhea infection rate is being reversed. The number of Aids cases in adolescent boys has nearly doubled.

The CDC says that southern states, where there is often the greatest emphasis on abstinence and religion, tend to have the highest rates of teenage pregnancy and STDs.

Yes, lets hire a creationist to run the state education board. Lord. Then again, this is a decision made by Gov. Rick Perry – previously of Texas secession advocacy and even before that, Lieutenant Governor to… George W. Bush.

So, it makes perfect sense.

Onward, backwards regional southern party, onward!

‘Nearly all scientists (97%) say humans and other living things have evolved over time,’ while only 61% of the public agrees, according to a new report (PDF, p. 37) from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. Asked which comes closer to their view, ‘Humans and other living things have evolved over time’ or ‘Humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time,’ 97% of scientists responding chose the former option, as opposed to only 2% choosing the latter option; 61% of the public responding chose the former option, as opposed to 31% choosing the latter option.

NIH funding seems to have an effect on mortality rates.

In an attempt to inform the debate, the PNAS article tracked mortality rates for cardiovascular disease (CVD), stroke, cancer, and diabetes, along with inflation-adjusted NIH funding. Mortality rates were compared to funding levels at organizations that are specifically tasked with addressing the disease in question, such as the National Cancer Institute. The primary finding was that mortality rates generally decline with increasing funding, but this drop comes at a ten- to fifteen-year lag behind funding cycles.

A new study finds some serious valleys carved by rivers within the last billion years — much sooner than most similar findings. That’s good news for biologists, as water is a key to life as we know it, and the more recently there was liquid water on Mars, the greater the chances for life to have arisen and endured.

Jay Dickson of Brown University and his colleagues found valleys more than 800 feet wide (250 meters) and tens of miles (kilometers) long in new images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The valleys look as though they were carved by running water.

“We believe that these new valleys were formed within the last billion years, which is quite recent when you view it in the geologic history of water on Mars,” Dickson told SPACE.com.

President Obama, please send us to MARS. John Jones is waiting!

This attitude caused a measles outbreak in San Diego and is basically child abuse.

Vaccinate your children. A lot of scientists worked hard on these medicines and as a result our generation is resistant to many ailments that shortened the lives of past generations. This stuff is so irresponsible.

Mount Redoubt, a volcano in southern Alaska, began erupting late Sunday, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The eruption, starting about 11:38 p.m. Sunday local time (2:38 a.m. Monday EDT), was obscured by darkness and snow. But the initial height of the eruption cloud was estimated at less than 20,000 feet above sea level, the USGS said.

Earmarks!
I Can’t Hear You!
Wasteful Government Spending!!!
Earmarks!!!!!!!

Macie Morse was born with optic nerve hypoplasia, meaning her optic nerve didn’t develop all the way. The only way to repair it was to grow more of the nerve using umbilical cord stem cells.

She and her mother traveled all the way to China for an experimental treatment.

For 6 weeks Morse received injections of cord stem cells and acupuncture to stimulate the cells. Gradually, they took hold and began growing the optic nerve Morse was missing.

Watch the video at the link. As the young girl says “why are we in China?”

Maybe now Americans won’t have to travel to freaking China to be cured of these horrible afflictions. Thank you, President Obama.

When President Obama lifts restrictions on funding for human embryonic stem cell research today, he will also issue a presidential memorandum aimed at insulating scientific decisions across the federal government from political influence, officials said yesterday.

‘The president believes that it’s particularly important to sign this memorandum so that we can put science and technology back at the heart of pursuing a broad range of national goals,’ Melody C. Barnes, director of Obama’s Domestic Policy Council, told reporters during a telephone briefing yesterday.

It’s a sign of how far we strayed under Bush that President Obama has to even write this up. It’s like saying that the United States doesn’t torture. Oh, wait…

More:

Although the exact wording of the order has not been revealed, the White House plans an 11 a.m. ceremony to sign the order repealing one of the most controversial steps taken by his predecessor, fulfilling one of Obama’s eagerly anticipated campaign promises.

U.S. President Barack Obama has proposed a funding boost for NASA that provides more support for Earth sciences missions and aviation, while keeping the agency’s three space shuttles on target for a 2010 retirement.

NASA would receive $18.7 billion for the 2010 fiscal year under the budget proposal released by the White House on Thursday. That would be an increase from the $17.2 billion NASA received in 2008 and represents an overall boost of more than $2.4 billion for the space agency when coupled with the additional $1 billion it received in the recent economic stimulus bill.

The budget calls on NASA to complete International Space Station construction, as well as continue its Earth science missions and aviation research. Yet it also remains fixed to former President George W. Bush’s plan to retire the space shuttle fleet by 2010 and replace them with the new Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle, which would fly astronauts to the space station and return them to the moon by 2020.

Now, I ain’t wild about going to the moon, but you take what you can get.

Sexy women in bikinis really do inspire some men to see them as objects, according to a new study of male behavior.

Brain scans revealed that when men are shown pictures of scantily clad women, the region of the brain associated with tool use lights up.

Men were also more likely to associate images of sexualized women with first-person action verbs such as ‘I push, I grasp, I handle,’ said lead researcher Susan Fiske, a psychologist at Princeton University.

And in a ’shocking’ finding, Fiske noted, some of the men studied showed no activity in the part of the brain that usually responds when a person ponders another’s intentions.

This means that these men see women ‘as sexually inviting, but they are not thinking about their minds,’ Fiske said. ‘The lack of activation in this social cognition area is really odd, because it hardly ever happens.’

Check out Gawker trying to figure out why Neil deGrasse Tyson drew a crowd. The guy is a modern era version of Carl Sagan. People are always curious about how the Universe works, and someone who can explain it in entertaining and engaging way will always be popular. Even if the hipster crowd doesn’t know who he is.