(Image via Wikipedia)

For those of us who love to get out into the outdoors for some camping, hunting or fishing before winter comes and makes it too cold, the Missouri Department of Conservation has some handy hints for identifying zombies and ensuring your own safety. I’ve highlighted a few of them here:

Zombies do not require air and can stay submerged underwater for extended periods of time. While MDC managed waterfowl areas are believed to be zombie-free, use caution when wading through murky water and always check your blinds before entering. Consider wearing a shark suit or other body armor over your waders to prevent zombie bites from breaking through both your waders and your skin. If you use a boat to retrieve your game, put a spike or hammerhead on one end of your pole to use as a handy defense tool if you encounter the undead.

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Chainsaws, axes and machetes are excellent weapons in quickly “dispatching” zombies.Remember that a severed zombie head can still bite.

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Always practice proper tree-stand safety and wear a safety harness. Falling from a tree stand can injure you or make you dead. Falling from a tree stand into the gaping maw of a zombie can make you undead.

You can check out the rest of the MDC’s advice here. Stay safe out there!

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Map of U.S. geothermal resources (Credit: SMU)

When people talk about alternative energy, they typically discuss the potential of wind and solar projects. Don’t get me wrong – there’s a vast potential in those technologies. But often left out of the discussion is the vast potential for geothermal energy – using the natural heat under the Earth’s surface to produce electricity. Harnessing that energy is one of the cleanest, sustainable ways to produce electricity, and it also has the benefit of being more space efficient than, say, a wind farm.

Of course, like any natural resource, the question becomes – where best to build geothermal plants? To answer that question, researchers at Southern Methodist University, funded by Google.org, compiled data from over 35,000 sites to build a complete picture of geothermal potential in the United States. Their findings? There is a vast potential for geothermal energy that can be tapped with technology existing today.  You can check out the mapping for yourself on Google Earth by going here and downloading the info.

How much energy? you ask. Well, the researchers based their estimates on what current technology is able to extract – not any hypothetical future advances. Even so, it turns out that there is three million megawatts of potential geothermal energy below the surface of the United States. That’s ten times the energy of every coal plant in the United States online today.

That’s an enormous potential for much cleaner energy than what we use today.

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Image by AFP/Getty Images via @daylife

Marc Kuchner, an astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, reports on scientists who have joined the Occupy protests in Baltimore. Among the protesters he talked to, many of them, especially PhD students, were concerned that there weren’t enough scientific jobs available to go around, especially now with recent budget cuts in research and looming cuts to come.

Brandie Cross held the sign. She is in the 5th year of a PhD program in biochemistry at The Johns Hopkins University. Her specialty is breast cancer, a traditionally well-funded specialty. But she’s sure her job prospects are dim. “I’d like to start my own biotech company. I have tons of inventions, and I want to be funded by NIH. But there’s no money.” [...]

As an astrophysicist, I’ve watched funding sources in my field wither and my own students struggle to stay employed. Studies show that only half of U.S. adults can correctly answer the basic question: How long does it take for the Earth to go around the Sun? This statistic disheartens me. And the recently threatened closing of physics departments in Texas and Florida would not help the situation. I’m almost ready to protest too.

The PhD crisis (ie more scientists than jobs) precedes the 2008 financial collapse, but has only gotten worse in the poor economy that’s follow. And that’s, frankly, ridiculous and a waste of potential. I don’t know if the participation of scientists in the Occupy movement will change anything, but I certainly understand the frustration. As I said earlier, we need more minds out there. We need them working, collaborating, arguing, critiquing, and overall improving ideas and accelerating their development. We should have a society where scientists don’t have time to join protest movements because their skills are in too much demand.

(h/t  Maggie Koerth-Baker)

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“We get the iPhone and iPad – they are pretty nifty – but Macs? C’mon kids, wouldn’t you rather have an Origin PC with an overclocked Core i7-2700k processor than a pricey computer with no optical drive and a lack of configuration options?”

- Maximum PC’ s Brad Chacos, responding to a Harris poll showing that youth aged 8-24 preferred Macs as their computer of choice.

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Professor Alan Jacobs posted an excerpt from Michael Nielson’s new book Reinventing Discovery, which is about “the use of online tools to transform the way science is done.” Here’s the excerpt, which refers to mass online collaborations in solving difficult mathematical problems:

Why is mass online collaboration useful in solving mathematical problems? Part of the answer is that even the best mathematicians can learn a great deal from people with complementary knowledge, and be stimulated to consider ideas in directions they wouldn’t have considered on their own. Online tools create a shared space where this can happen, a short-term collective working memory where ideas can be rapidly improved by many minds. These tools enable us to scale up creative conversation, so connections that would ordinarily require fortuitous serendipity instead happen as a matter of course. This speeds up the problem-solving process, and expands the range of problems that can be solved by the human mind.

One of the things that’s fascinating to me about the ability of the internet with respect to science is just this – more conversations, quicker feedback. I think that a perfect case in point is the OPERA group’s announcement that they’d measured neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light. Their preliminary findings led to a slew of criticisms, commentary, and discussions of the implications the truth of the findings would have for physics. That in turn is leading the OPERA group to conduct a new, more refined experiment.

And this all happened in the space of a month!

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