Darkoshi

I don't understand how a fabric that is 95% cotton and only 5% spandex can still be so stretchy. At the thread level, how can it be twisted so that the cotton doesn't prevent the stretch? Is the cotton pulverized and somehow only glued to the spandex? But even then how could you glue 19 times of something onto a base strand?

I also don't understand how this particular 95/5 blend can feel so synthetic, like swimsuit material. I have a couple of other cotton/spandex blend shirts which although they are also stretchy, at least feel comfortable like cotton.

Hmm, I wonder if the thread for this fabric is made up of a pulverized cotton core surrounded by a very very thin tube of spandex.

How a light touch can spur severe itching: Aging linked to decline in cells that control itch response
The article states: Itching caused by touch becomes more common as we age

That's new to me. Maybe that is why I'm becoming more sensitive to the tags in my clothing.

This video is so mesmerizing; from the NASA article: Global is the new local: Pollution changes clouds, climate downstream



Video title: GEOS5 aerosols
Posted by: NASA Climate Change


More here: Simulating the Transport of Aerosols with GEOS-5

via artkouros

DNA Double Take - genetic chimerism and mosaicism is much more common that previously thought.

Several times now, when I've been searching for scientific information, I've come across research papers with relevant/interesting sounding abstracts. In many cases, the sites hosting the papers have restricted access to the full text of the papers - one needs an account to view them. In order to get an account, one must be a member of a medical or educational institution, etc. In some cases, the sites in question also offer the ability for other people to buy/download the full paper, for a fee. If the fee were small (under $5), I'd consider it. But the fees I've seen so far are more in the range of $30.

So I end up doing a web search on the paper's title, to see if I can find it elsewhere. On more than one occasion, I've found the full paper freely available on Google Docs.

So I wonder:
1. Why do sites have fees / restrictions for viewing the papers in the first place? Who gets the money - is it used for site maintenance costs, or for what? Do the authors of the papers get any of the money?
2. Why does Google Docs have the papers freely available, when they aren't freely available elsewhere? Are these documents on Google Docs by mistake, or on purpose?

How the inventor of the pill changed the world for women - about Carl Djerassi, one of the inventors of the Pill.

[regarding a male birth control pill] The first question a man would ask is: would it affect my potency? There have been clinical trials – it has no effect on potency. The second question is erection.

I can't figure out what the word "potency" means in that context. A male BC pill would obviously affect fertility, as that is the point of a BC pill. So potency doesn't seem to mean fertility. And it doesn't seem to mean the ability to get an erection, since that is the 2nd question, not the first. What does it mean?

"How many acts of sexual intercourse would you guess occur every 24 hours?" he asks. "I often do this with my students, and they say a billion. I say: 'No, no, no, you're dreaming. There are six billion people. Well, you need two for sexual intercourse, so there are only three billion. And some of them are five years old, so they're out.' So then they say a million. Well, now you're underestimating, because you're sitting here and you're not having sex. It's actually 100m, every 24 hours. And they produce about a million conceptions, about half of which are unexpected. Of the 500,000, half of them are unwanted. As a result, every 24 hours, 150,000 abortions occur; of these, over 50,000 are illegal."

Interview with Carl Djerassi

Some parts of this don't make sense to me. Having a male BC pill doesn't take away a woman's control over her fertility, it rather gives a man more control over his. But the comment about the female BC pill making men less willing to use condoms is intriguing.

Djerassi suggests that in the future we will freeze our sperm and eggs, get sterilised and check out our sperm and eggs from the bank when we want them later. 'Then you might as well forget about contraception'.

Interesting idea. Maybe the actual eggs and sperm won't even need to be stored in the future. Maybe their DNA sequences will be scanned and saved as data, and maybe it will be possible to re-create an egg or sperm using that data. It wouldn't even really be necessary to extract and scan actual eggs and sperm... one could take the person's DNA and have a computer randomly select half the chromosomes to make virtual gametes. It will surely be possible to check the DNA for hereditary diseases, and to make corrections to prevent those diseases.

Once all that is possible, it would theoretically be possible for people to decide that they want to have a child using someone else's DNA (a celebrity, for instance), rather than their own. Or using a combination of multiple people's DNA. I wonder how much legal control people will have over their own DNA... will it be similar to copyright, and after a certain length of time after a person dies, will other people will be able to use that person's DNA? Or will only people directly descended from that person be allowed to use it? Will you be able to sell your DNA sequence for specific uses?


Response - I never blamed the pill for the fall in family size ... I didn't know that the birth control pill wasn't legal in Japan until 1999.

Birth control in Japan - mostly via condoms.

This vegan ice cream line (Wheeler's Black Label) has a lot of flavors. I wonder where it is sold.

The Scientific American website has a lot of interesting articles. I seem to remember reading some of their magazines when I was a kid. I might have had a subscription for a while; I can't quite recall. I do remember the National Geographic subscriptions my dad paid for, as well as a subscription to an astronomy magazine which I believe I signed up for myself. I bought StarLog magazines at bookstores.

I find myself uncomfortable when I read a scientific article and am finding it interesting, and then it mentions animal experiments being done or having been done, as part of the research. I am against animal experimentation when it involves forced confinement, mutilation, induced illness and/or death. If it's not right to do certain kinds of research on humans, I feel it isn't right to do it on animals either. Yet I do find some of the results of such experiments fascinating... or rather they seem fascinating before I realize what was involved in gleaning the information; afterwards it merely seems interesting. I'm not against learning things and improving the human condition, but personally I feel we could be doing research and learning without treating animals as our disposable test subjects. We might not learn as much as quickly, using alternative research methods, but I think we would still continue learning.

It's one of those subjects there is no easy solution to. Some people will always, and perhaps rightly so, give human interests priority over other being's interests. Like, would it be right to deny humans access to certain places such as wildlife habitats, if they require it for their own subsistence, even if it ends up resulting in certain species or groups of animals dying out? In some cases, it is us versus them; there is no way of having every being on the planet thrive without having other beings suffer and die. In fact, even being vegan, much of my current existence - the products I buy, the things I use, the places I go - has probably in some way or other come at the expense of other beings' welfare.