Real Public Education

In general, I try not to talk too much about politics, but today will be one of my few exceptions. I received an email this morning from my mother. Apparently, the US Republican party released a budget proposal which "zeroes out funding for both NPR and PBS" which is the worst funding decrease in more than a decade. I love NPR. Although I do not listen to it every day, I set up my iTunes last year to download NPR podcasts on international news and science and I gain a lot of my current news from these podcasts. Although I do not generally like online petitions, I signed this one on MoveOn.org to save NPR.

I am not the only person who gains their news this way. When I was working last summer, my bookstore colleagues spent their entire shelving shifts listening to different NPR programs through a similar podcast program on other topics. For a number of the college students I know, this and the New York Times online are the only place that people listen to the news. In reality, NPR is real, free public education that only requires people to pick the type of podcast they which they seek and download and listen to it. You can find your shows at the NPR podcast directory.

I read an article recently in the New York Times about the FCC expanding internet access to under-served areas and possibly expand the proposal in future. As the internet provides so many resources for self-education (including NPR podcast directory), I think this will be a great step forward in raising the level od education in these populations. Sugata Mitra's work, which I discussed in previous blogposts, shows that the combination of the internet and curiosity can allow children to educate themselves in anything for learning a new language to concepts in science and technology.

Vocabulary Geek Update

Apparently Servia heard about a similar feature to the one I discusses in yesterday's blogpost: Merriam-Webster's website is introducing called the Word of the Year, which uses the same trends to find the word people looked up most that was applicable to the years events. This year's World of the Year, according to the NPR piece she sent me, is "austerity."

Tuxedoless Penguins

Recently, scientists discovered a gigantic penguin from millions of years ago. According to the NPR piece, this penguin is from the Eocene period and did not have the traditional penguin tuxedo markings that we know today. Scientists believe from little modules on the feathers that they can determine the color patterns on some parts of the penguin including the flipper.

"These giant penguins have quite elongate, prominent beaks. And, of course, their size is striking. Would you immediately recognize something that's twice the size of a living penguin and had a different beak morphology and was differently colored as a giant penguin on first seeing it? I think - I'm not sure we would've. " (NPR)

The story is pretty cool.

Feathered Theropods

Until three days ago, I could not identify a theropod. According to an article about the Dilong paradoxis, theropods are two-legged, meat-eating dinosaurs (see the article). However, listening to an NPR piece, I heard mention of a feathered tyrannosaurus. I decided to investigate. It turns out that the Dilong paradoxis is a tyrannasaurid, who roamed in China about 60 million years before the T-rex (rather than North America, the home of the Tyrannasaurus rex [1]).

This picture is from the slideshow that accompanied this National Geographic article.

According to both the National Geographic article and the American Natural History article, the Dilong paradoxis was covered with protofeathers, which were presumably to keep the dinosaur warm. Unlike the Dilong paradoxis, the Tyrannasaurus rex, because of its large body mass, would have more difficulty expelling heat than generating it, so it is reasonable to suppose that the T-rex did not have feathers. However, according to the American Natural History article, it is plausible that the young Tyrannasaurus rexes might have had protofeathers for warmth which they molted as they matured.

There is a great NPR piece on the Dilong paradoxis. Also, if you were like me and you grew up reading about dinosaurs and watching Walking with Dinosaurs over and over again there is apparently a paleontological blogging community (I love the internet!) that is out there. As I was doing research, I stumbled across the blog of a Marshall student named Nick Gardner, called "Why I Hate Theropods." I immediately decided to find out what a theropod was (see the top of this blogpost). He wrote an blogpost on the subject, which illuminates some of the scientific debate on the subject. Overall, I am sorry to say, that Nick's terminology is too technical for my classicist mind (although I once had some aspirations of becoming a paleontologist, those went by the wayside when I realized that I neither have the patience nor the complexion for the incredible and painstaking art of uncovering dinosaur bones), but his blog is quite fascinating nonetheless and even disregarding the jargon of biological classification his overall points are generally clear.

Endnotes

1. Tyrannasaurus Rex more or less translates as "the tyrant king" which is pretty amusing considering that tyrannos, tyrant, was set in oppositition to basileus (and in Latin rex) because tyrants were considered to be those who did not inherit the thrown, whereas a king came to the position by birth.

Raw Foodism and Evolution

I stumbled upon this NPR piece a little while ago and, being both a cooking and evolutionary biology enthusiast, found it fascinating. Apparently cooking helped make humans smarter (by allowing for larger, more complex brains) because cooked food can be digested more easily and allows a faster extraction of nutrients from the food source.


The piece, which is very well done except for some annoying chewing noises at the beginning, starts at about 5:45 after a short note on companies hiring marine scientists to keep their mouths shut about the oil spill.

When I stumbled across the piece, I immediately sent it to Cynthia, who had tried raw-foodism for a while. She noted that, like the piece described, she felt clean and healthy at first, but began to notice decreasing energy. This is apparently because the human body likes the roughage from a raw food diet, but it requires so much energy to process the calories that ultimately one stops getting enough nutrients and vitamins.