Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Scientists speculate that the world’s worst mass extinction may have been caused by methane.

Here’s the real home of the Mt. St. Helens VolcanoCam: Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument.

Watch her smokin’! Click on the image to see it full size at the VolcanoCam site. The image refreshes every 5 minutes. See the VolcanoCam Terms of Use to use it on your own site.

CTV reports a real eruption is likely at Mt. St. Helens:

“There’s a very good chance there’s going to be an eruption … (and) there’s a good chance it’s going to involve magma at the surface,” Tom Pierson, a U.S. Geological Survey official, told reporters on Saturday.

See her blow her stack almost live at NNAnow.net. Here’s the alert, and SpaceWeather reminds us to be on the lookout for a volcano-induced blue moon.

Check out the harvest moon tomorrow night. Thanks to Space Weather for the link.

If you’ve read The Tipping Point, then you’ve heard that the upper limit to human social networks is about 150 people. The name behind the number is Robin Dunbar, author of Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language. Razib discusses it in a recent GNXP post. The comments on that post led me to this Life with Alacrity post on the Dunbar number.

Disease of the day: Bird flu in swine.

And you thought Scotty was making the whole thing up! Physics Web reports a glass breakthrough:

Scientists in the US have developed a novel technique to make bulk quantities of glass from alumina for the first time. Anatoly Rosenflanz and colleagues at 3M in Minnesota used a “flame-spray” technique to alloy alumina (aluminium oxide) with rare-earth metal oxides to produce strong glass with good optical properties.

Thanks to MarsNews.com for the link. Also via MarsNews: the ESA wants to build pretty Space houses on Earth.

I’m hoping to get a copy of this monkey gene and become a highly-productive fanfic writer again. But I hope to avoid any deadly monkey viruses while I’m at it.

According to the BBC, the mad cow fallout may only be beginning. The group of genetically susceptible humans may be much larger than initially believed, and slower to show symptoms of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

Tomorrow will be a blue moon—time to do those once-in-a-blue-moon things.

It’s a link dump, but it’s a fresh one:

• Bitoogle, the Google of Bittorrent, looks great but is down for the count.
• A List Apart has a cool article on
  preventing bandwidth theft using mod_rewrite and PHP.
• Some fun free fonts from Letterhead Fonts.
• More spam amusement at spamusement—spam-based cartoons by stevenf, now with an RSS feed!

In other net news, yours truly is now a guest blogger at Gene Expression—today I blogged about creationist museums.