News on The Sunshine Project from New Scientist

Just out, an astounding piece on The Sunshine Project by Peter Aldhous, San Francisco Bureau Chief for New Scientist.

The title is Sunshine snuffed out, but as Aldhous makes abundantly clear, it would be pathetically easy to bring the sun out again.

Butner blogspot has also been following not only the Project's work, but Ed Hammond's Congressional Testimony, so see Butner's hours-old Sunshine Project Needs Our Help

Putting that laughable $53,000 in perspective.

"The NIH total Biodefense budget level is $1,891 million, an increase of $110 million and 6.2 percent over FY 2006."
– (US) National Institutes of Health Summary of the FY 2007 President's Budget

Notaknotbut

The Sunshine Project - not RIP, but mayday

The Sunshine Project dead? Or are the RIP and Sun Sets headlines premature?

The end of their operations would create a vacuum. We'll go back to silence.
- Richard H. Ebright, professor of microbiology at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J

"Citizens Education Project would like to thank Ed Hammond and the Sunshine Project for their amazing contribution in monitoring chemical and biological issues. They will be sorely missed."

...in the past few years the bulk of the Sunshine Project's work focused on biodefense research in the United States, which rapidly expanded after the Sep 11 terrorist attacks. Much of the increase in biodefense research has been funded by Project BioShield, a $5.6 billion program passed in 2004 to speed the development of drugs and vaccines to combat the effects of biological, chemical, nuclear, and radiologic agents. The Sunshine Project had said it supported closer federal oversight of US biodefense labs, including legal reforms, mandatory accident reporting, and increased transparency
– CIDRAP (Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy, University of Minnesota)

A dirge too soon
This is the original headline in The Chronicle of Higher Education

Sun May Set on a Project That Monitored Biological-Weapons Research

and Nature's headline, which is hardly a call to mourn:

Cash crisis puts Sunshine Project in the shade

Ed Hammond is obsessed with Sunshine, not fundraising or a cushy life, but is that any reason to let the Project die when it would be so bloody easy (and cheap) to revive and keep going something so beneficial to us all?

Call mayday for The Sunshine Project

Is that an exoskeleton between your teeth?

Hearty congrats to Spencer Pate for winning an hon mensh in the VanderMeer New Weird Contest where the wonderfully weirdphilic winners are 'semi-anonymous' but their entries are boldly exposed.

And Spencer's entrée?

Read his Night of the Living Crickets with a glass of milk before bed.

Deliciously coloured, but dropped as inedible

One of two beak-mangled Podacanthus typhon wings found together on the ground (they are so light that one flew off on a gust) in a coastal forest weird with scribbly gum, tea tree and bottlebrush.

Alistair Rennie's eye

Picking on Alistair Rennie again, now to his sleighty eye.

His Shed at the end of the world teases unmercifully. Of all human structures, sheds must be the most mysterious. What does this one hold? Are there tool (or other) rituals associated with it? Are the contents held fast, and how? How does it react to the Elements?

And where is the end of the world?

I used to think that Alistair Rennie, man of mountains and -scapes, has the eye of an ungulate.

But that tease! He's got the eye of yet another species I can't identify, and he either stooped (or stumbled?) to write "The Gutter that Sees the Light that Never Shines", his brilliant story in this just-released anthology, The New Weird edited by
Ann and Jeff VanderMeer.

Lichen population(s?)

The study of lichen population biology has been lagging behind that of other groups of organisms, mostly due to technical problems rather than a lack of interest. Basic questions about lichen dispersal, biogeography, speciation and evolution are still largely unanswered because of this lack of population studies.
– "Local population subdivision in the lichen Cladonia subcervicornis as revealed by mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase subunit 1 intron sequences",
by Christian Printzen and Stefan Ekman (Universitetet i Bergen, Botanisk Institutt, Allégaten 41, N-5007 Bergen, Norway), Mycologia, 95(3), 2003, pp. 399-406, published by The Mycological Society of America

Buttermoths anonymous

Alistair Rennie's punningly titled beautiful winged creatures had me smiling healthily but oh-so-quickly thinking correcting thoughts. Look at those club antennae, that bright colour, the way their wings are held open, and . . .

But Hah!

I can't cry that I wrote Lolita
So thank you, Alistair, for liberating my ignorant admiration, my lack of knowledge for proper identification. Now I can post a portrait of a beauty I cannot put a name to.

For lack of an expert, my name is '?'

"How can they say they know me?"

"Whatever happened to the Enlightenment?"

I've railed before about the growth of theocracy in Australia, but what Chris Lawson reports is brimstonic. The pictures he posts are almost unbelievable.

The sad fact remains that the RE (Religious Education) that I experienced in a private high-Anglican grammar school thirty years ago was more open-minded and educational than what is being taught in supposedly secular government schools today.
– Chris Lawson, Religious education in Australia today, Talking Squid

Religious education for all
When it comes to our schools, I am fervently in favour of religious education – a national curriculum, in fact. The curriculum would be, for every student in Australia, a complete education in:

• History of religions
• History of philosophies
  
• Sacred texts
  
• History of religions' involvement and imposition in public life, and of the secular movements to liberate people from them.
  

If students know the history of religions, they will be able to compare gods, goddesses, myths and so-called miracles. They will know, for instance, what happened to Mrs God.

They will know about Galileo's problems, the Scopes trial, and the reforms of Ataturk.

And since they'll also know the history of religions in public life, they will be able to assess what they want their taxes to support when they grow up–but well before that, they'll be able to use their brains for what brains are for–thinking instead of just soaking up dogma.

Rail is a funny word. If one person rails, that's a whinge. But two rails make a road.

Spinerette envy

This lovely female looks the picture of what Ron Atkinson of the University of Queensland, in his excellent online Find-a-Spider Guide, calls a 'melanic female' (what makes them melanic?) of the species Austracantha minax, commonly known as the 'spiny', 'Christmas', or

'jewel' spider.

Although it is written that these spiders live in communal groups, as far as I could see, the populace lives not like that in some paradisiacal Leninville, but like people in modern inner-cities. Each spider is busy on her own web, and just as people don't react the same to evangelists at their doors, there is individualism in each spider's attitude to botherers.

The typical female did nothing when we humans visited till her web was touched, when she ran from the centre of her web to a guy-wire, and waited. But one melanic female surprised us by staying in the centre of her web and vibrating it at the sound of our voices, however quiet. She shook her web till it looked like a waterbed under, say, a dogfight.

Over the past month, this group has been very visible, both the bright and the dark. There were, in early December, about 8 females in a square metre, and then one day in late December there were none. A few days later on an overcast morning there were 8 again (whether they were the same ones as before, I never got to know them well enough to say) just about two metres from their original site, each at the same distance from her neighbour, and each building her new web.

The Austracantha minax does not build a web a day, but every female is keen on doing repairs and has a strong opinion on what thickness each line should be.

This particular group lives just above (human) knee-high heath about 100 metres inland from a sandy ocean beach.

The males are pathetically small, and not only did I not see one moving — the only one I saw looked more an uninviting morsel than a male.