New Scientist: Is your pet in pain?

Animals are being misdiagnosed for pain. Don't believe it, well, there's a questionairre to complete so you can see:

Wiseman-Orr and Reid have designed a simple one-page questionnaire that can be used to evaluate whether a dog is in pain, an approach they say can be used to objectively evaluate the welfare of any animal in any setting.

You know, if my pet is in pain then I take it to my vet to be put down. That's the way to handle it. It's cold but it's the right thing to do.

Sex Selection: It's available now (and has been)

More people are choosing to choose the sex of their baby than have before. It's still a small percentage, but the trend is clear. With in-vitro fertilization becoming ever more common, couples can easily choose the gender of their future child, and couples are doing so.

For the most part, couples are screening embryos for the right reasons - to avoid passing on dreadful diseases, said Dr. William Gibbons, who runs a fertility clinic in Baton Rouge, La., and is president of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, which assisted with the survey.

"There are thousands of babies born now that we know are going to be free of lethal and/or devastating genetic diseases. That's a good thing," he said.

However, the survey findings also confirm many ethicists' fears that Americans increasingly are seeking "designer babies" not just free of medical defects but also possessing certain desirable traits.

I don't know how to take this, exactly. On the one hand, the ideal way to conceive a child is nature's intended way (that has evolved over MANY years) with natural sex. On the other hand, if couples must have in-vitro fertilization (and I have no sympathy for those who do it who don't have to) why not pick what you want? Afterall, most of the fertilized embroyos will not be kept, so pick the ones you want. Still, it a terribly slippery slope and one that's being greased everyday.

Sunshine makes me happy

While hard to see in this reduced photograph, the two black spots against the shining sun at the International Space station (on the right) and the shuttle Atlantis (on the left). Atlantis has just undocked and moved approximately 200-meters from the space station. This photo was taken near Mamers, Normandy.

Women in Science Report

This article from the New York Times is so biased as to be unbelievable. It's about a study from the National Academy of Sciences that concludes there's too much bias in the scientific community for women to succeed. Now if that isn't hogwash, I don't know what is.

I won't comment on the fact that all but one person on the 18-member panel (that's 18, mind you) were women. Imagine such a panel of men finding that the scientific community is biased against men, you'd hear howling of prejudice claims from all corners. No, I won't comment about that.

I will comment that while I was in undergraduate school and then graduate school for 6-1/2 years (Master's and Ph. D.) women got special attention. They were held to lower standards than the men, not always, but sometimes. Plus, when it came time to look for a job, colleges heavily recruited every woman but didn't recruit men much at all. If there was bias, it was directly against men and in favor of women.

And here's more, women who go into academia are then gagainst iven special grants and financial support exclusively for women. How is that bias against women?

The truth is that science is difficult. It's difficult work, difficult to find funding, difficult to balance the demands of a job with a family, and difficult to keep at it, year after year. If the Nataional Academy of Sciences wants to know why more women aren't in science, they should look at social demands, not the environment of the scientific community.

Capacitors for Super Batteries

"Nanotube filaments on the battery's electrodes" from the link above.

Researchers at MIT at trying to make batteries that can be very quickly charged and be useful for laptops or cell phones. The key, they believe, is to fabricate capacitors with extremely large surface areas. Capacitors store electricity as an electric field between the plates of the capacitor. In order to increase the energy, the researchers are adding nanoscale fibers to the plates. These fibers increase the surface area and thereby increase the amount of electric charge that a capacitor can store.

That's a clever idea, but I wouldn't throw away the batteries you have just yet. These sorts of ideas seem terrific but in practice something usually (but not always!) happens to make the invention less than stellar. Keep your lithium rechargeables around; they'll still plenty useful.