Cochineal Dye Bugs Starbucks Customers

Pink food seems to be raising a lot of eyebrows lately. A few weeks ago, meat product pink slime became embroiled in debate, and now a new crimson challenger has stolen the limelight: Starbucks has come under fire for using the pink dye cochineal (carmine) in their Strawberry Frappuccino drink ( blogs including NPR s The Salt and Bug Girl have also covered this story ).

Credit: wptv.com

Flying Car Debuts At NY Auto Show

It’s the symbol of a future that never happened: a practical flying car has been on inventors’ drawing boards since the 1930s . A few flying cars were produced, but were really glorified small airplanes. 

Ship-Safe Seas: Could the Titanic Disaster Happen Again?

After the Titanic sank on its maiden voyage across the Atlantic, claiming more than 1,500 lives, the international community took swift action to prevent similar catastrophes.

Consciousness Does Not Reside Here

What is the relation between selective attention and consciousness? When you strain to listen to the distant baying of coyotes over the sound of a campsite conversation, you do so by attending to the sound and becoming conscious of their howls. When you attend to your sparring opponent out of the corner of your eye, you become hyperaware of his smallest gestures. Because of the seemingly intimate relation between attention and consciousness, most scholars conflate the two processes.

#SciAmBlogs Tuesday - DNA Patents, Supernova, Power of Mindset, Bat-Killing Fungus, and more.

News tidbit of the day? The #SciAmBlogs make an appearance in an Onion video (around 1:57-2:04).

100 Years Ago: Loss of the Titanic

April 1962

Why 'Uncanny Valley' Human Look-Alikes Put Us on Edge

When Pixar screened a computer-animated short film called "Tin Toy" in 1988, test audiences hated the sight of the pseudo-realistic baby named "Billy" who terrorized the toys. Such a strong reaction persuaded Pixar to avoid making uncannily realistic human characters -- it has since focused its efforts on films about living toys, curious robots and talking cars to win Academy Awards and moviegoers' hearts.

Are DNA Patents Doomed?

DNA is special. Unlike other body parts, it holds information. Even discarding a blood spot or saliva sample doesn t necessarily prevent the telltale DNA sequences from living on in a database.

We guard our DNA data in a way that we don t other test results, such as cholesterol levels. Genes are uniquely ours. They say something about us at some fundamental level, more than a mammogram or a Pap smear or an x-ray, said James Evans, MD PhD, professor of genetics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, at a symposium on DNA patenting at the International Congress of Human Genetics in Montreal in October 2011.

Entrepreneurs Race to Get a Rover on the Moon and Win $30 Million (preview)

On a muddy, rubble-strewn field on the banks of the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh, a five-foot-tall pyra­midal robot with twin camera eyes slowly rotates on four metal wheels, its electric motors emitting a low whine. In a nearby trailer, students from Carnegie Mellon University huddle around a laptop to watch the world through the robot’s eyes. In the low-resolution grayscale images on the laptop’s screen, the rutted landscape looks a lot like the moon, which is the robot’s ultimate destination.

#SciAmBlogs Monday - Craigs List Avenue, Religion and Medical Care, Words With Rocks, Bad doctors, Futuristic Foods and more.

Most important news of the day we have a new blog! Check out Rosetta Stones !

Second, as it is Monday, we have a new Image of the Week .

The Celestial Goldfish

Image of the Week #36, April 2nd, 2012:

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100 Years Ago: Loss of the Titanic

April 1962

How Useful Is Whole Genome Sequencing to Predict Disease?

A $1,000 genome sequence is close to being available. What will your sequence tell you about your actual risk for certain diseases?

World Repository of Human Genetics Will Move to Amazon's Cloud

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Raw Footage From An Alien World

An alien world in the raw (see below)

Have you ever wondered what it would really be like for a person to journey to a truly distant and alien place; another planet, even another planetary system? What kind of things would we first see through our windows, or our cameras? What would our sensory experience be in such a distant realm? Would we sit back and admire glossy high-definition displays, or have to assimilate quick and grainy snapshots the result of serendipitous astronomical cin ma-v rit as we swooped into a system? The Apollo astronauts arguably had only partial sightings and limited views of a true moonscape until the very moment they set foot on the lunar surface. Certainly those of us trapped back on Earth merely caught our first excited glimpses of live human lunar exploration through fuzzy video-feeds.

Christof Koch on Free Will, the Singularity and the Quest to Crack Consciousness

I met Christof Koch in 1994 at the first of series of big conferences on consciousness held in Tucson, Ariz. A professor at Caltech, Koch had helped popularize consciousness as a topic for serious scientific investigation instead of windy philosophical supposition through his collaboration with the great Francis Crick, who had already cracked the genetic code and now wanted to solve the riddle of mind as well.

In Tucson Koch outlined a theory, jointly fashioned by him and Crick, that 40-hertz brain waves might be a key to consciousness. Although I was skeptical of that particular theory, I liked the hard-nosed, materialist, reductionist approach that Koch and Crick took toward consciousness. I also liked the quirky intensity that Koch brought to his scientific work.

Is It Possible to Build an "Unsinkable" Ship?

The claim that the RMS Titanic was "practically unsinkable" may have been more a marketing tactic than a commentary on its engineering, but its prelaunch reputation of being impervious to the perils of the high seas has lingered for the past 100 years. [More]


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Open Laboratory 2013 - submissions so far

It is now expected by the science blogosphere that I post the full updated listing of all the submissions every Monday morning. This serves as a reminder for bloggers to submit their (and other people s) posts, and to some extent prevents duplicate entries. But most importantly, it presents a growing listing of some of the most exciting work on science blogs. This is a weekly post where bloggers can discover each other and discover blogs they were not previously aware of. Thus it is also a promotion for all the bloggers involved.

The submission form for the 2013 edition of Open Lab is now open. Any blog post written since October 1, 2011 is eligible for submission . We will close the form on October 1st, 2012.

Sunday Photoblogging: Locals, Tourists, and Data

Flickr user Eric Fischer has done something very interesting. By accessing the geolocation information in photos uploaded to Flickr and Picasa, he’s been able to map out the locations that tend to be photographed by locals and those that tend to be photographed by tourists.

Blue dots are for locals (people who have taken pictures in a city over a period of a month or more), red are for tourists (people who took pictures in a city for less than a month) and yellow dots represent photos of undetermined origin.