Science Made Cool

Birding Lessons

The people at Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology want to make you a better birder. They want to get you beyond recognizing little more than the robins and cardinals swaggering across your lawn. They want you outside looking for the small, furtive, flashed-across-the-yard-and-now-they’re-hiding-in-the-bushes birds, confident that you can get better at identifying what the heck they are.

Towards that end, they’ve thoroughly revamped their All About Birds website. The old version was already a pretty decent place to go for information about North American birds, but the new version is stunning. The bird guide is still there, but it’s been expanded with photos that let you see different variations of each species’ plumage as well as photos of similar-looking species to help you sort out those LBJs. And there are links to songs and video from the Macaulay Library, as well as maps that display data from the Lab’s citizen science efforts, articles from the past couple of years of Living Bird, and a skill-building section that uses text and video to walk you through basic strategies for identifying birds. Four 10-minute video episodes are up so far, demonstrating how to use shape and size, color pattern, behavior, and habitat to narrow down what you’re seeing.

So, was that a cedar waxwing hiding in my lilac bush or not? Time to find out.

Cedar waxwing photo from the Missouri Conservationist.

To Boldly Go Where We've Already Been

Interesting AP story (via PhysOrg) about a "new plan" from NASA's Space Shuttle program manager to ditch the troubled Ares rocket and go with a vehicle based on existing Shuttle technology as the booster for a return to the Moon. It's not a bad idea. There are several directions I can go with 'blogging about it.

1.  Cheerleading: Hooray! A better rocket! Onward to the Moon! I do think space exploration is valuable and important, and any capability is better than none at all. But see below.

2.  Carping About Sloppy Reporting:  This idea isn't new. The concept of "shuttle-derived" boosters has been around as long as the Shuttle itself. Mr. Shannon certainly didn't come up with it -- he just chose an opportune moment to drop it into the space policy debate. Does everyone at the Associated Press have the historical awareness of mayflies?

3.  Carping About Low Expectations:  Humans have been to the Moon. We did it forty years ago. Shouldn't we be aiming higher? It's as if NASA has fallen victim to the same syndrome that plagues Hollywood: instead of something new they're simply planning a big-budget remake of a past hit. Maybe they should take the advice of a man who's been there and start working seriously on a Mars project instead. 

Eat Healthier, Die Younger

Following a link from the always-intriguing Gene Expression Web log, I found my way to this post on the Low Carb Art & Science 'blog, which asks the simple question: has eating a more nutritious diet made Americans healthier? If their data are to be believed -- and the author certainly makes a good case -- Americans have cut down on our consumption of red meat and dairy products in the past two or three decades, and switched to eating more grains, more chicken and fish, and more vegetables. The result? An "epidemic of obesity" and higher rates of heart disease (even though we're also drinking more wine than ever before). What gives?