I spent the hour or so yesterday when the sun was obscured by the moon trying to keep my kids from looking directly into the apparently astronomical spectacle, possibly blinding themselves forever, so I missed the action, but this YouTube video collected from photos by Cory Poole seems like an adequate substitute for the real thing.

[Laughing Squid]

From a Mother Jones article about the book Golden Holocaust, a compendium of terrible things the tobacco industry has done, by Robert Proctor [bold added]:

By his own estimate, Proctor spent a decade poring over more than 100,000 tobacco industry documents unearthing details such as a primer on how to reach "young starters" and a 1970 Lorillard memo suggesting that "Negroes" smoke menthols to "mask" their "real/mythical odor." The 57-year-old prof is a walking encyclopedia of tobacco arcana, apt to mention things like "beaver," a rodent anal secretion sometimes added to cigarettes, perhaps to enhance "pack aroma." Or that as much as 90 percent of America's licorice supply is used as a cigarette sweetener. (Honey, chocolate, and sugar are also employed to make cigarette smoke more inhalable—and thus more addictive.) Or that around 4 percent of a cigarette's weight is made up of humectants like propylene glycol—basically antifreeze. "You can put things in cigarettes you can't put in dog food," Proctor says.

The last time we asked readers to urge Gov. Jan Brewer to veto a bill, it actually worked: Brewer vetoed HB 2757, which would have allowed electronic billboards along Arizona’s highways.

So we’re once again asking you to reach for your telephone to give Brewer a call and ask her to veto HB 2199, otherwise known as the Polluter Protection Act.

Supporters of the bill—which include all of the Republican lawmakers in our neck of the woods—say the legislation will create an “environmental audit privilege” that will just encourage companies to clean up any toxic messes that they discover in the course of doing business.

But opponents of the legislation—such as the Sierra Club and most of our Democratic lawmakers—argue that it lets polluters off the hook if they discover they’ve been violating environmental regulations, as long as they report the problem to the government. Those reports are hidden behind a veil of secrecy and can’t be used in civil lawsuits if the state or other injured parties decide to sue over violations of the law, with all sorts of restrictions on how the information could be used in future lawsuits, including limits on who could testify—which would go a long way to silencing whistleblowers.

You don't have to be Erin Brockovich to realize that the new law creates an incentive for businesses to ignore the environmental regulations that keep poisons out of Arizona’s air and water. If a company knows that it hide wrongdoing in legal web of secrecy and say it’s sorry after committing violations, it’s gonna be a lot easier for bad actors to commit bad deeds. And that is bad news for companies that do play by the rules, because their competitors will be the ones cutting corners to drive them out of business.

Call Gov. Brewer at 1-800-253-0883 and tell her to veto HB 2199. Arizona doesn’t need a Polluter Protection Act.

• NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

The UA Lunar and Planetary Lab's HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captures an astonishing snapshot of a dust devil that's 12 miles tall on the Martian surface.

The details:

A dust devil the size of a terrestrial tornado towers above the Martian surface in this late springtime afternoon image of Amazonis Planitia.

It's coming up on April and May, two months that generally mean that allergens will be declaring war on my skull and if you happen to cross my path/germ cloud, you'll likely see me sneeze a few times per minute. Thankfully, for people suffering through the same manifestation of God's curse on humanity that I do, the Wall Street Journal has provided a helpful guide to being less sonically obtrusive with your sneezing. One thing you should absolutely not do ever is plug your nose to keep the horrible sound from escaping:

Never, ever do this. It closes the airway, creating internal pressure. Medical journals have recorded incidents of larynx fractures, voice changes, ruptured eardrums, damage to soft tissue in the neck, bulging eyeballs, bladder incontinence and more.

(The relevant bit is around the 5 minute mark, but do yourself a favor and watch the whole thing. Everyone deserves a Carlin break.)

So there may be hope for our groundwater after all!

According to Digital Journal, a team of Yale students found a rather particular variety of fungus during a trip to the Amazon as part of Yale's annual "Rainforest Expedition and Laboratory"...one that eats polyurethane — and on top of that, does so in oxygen-free environments. Like in our landfills.

Now, considering that it takes hundreds of years for plastics to degrade in landfills (some sources say 500 years, some say a thousand — we'll be safe and go with "a long ass time,") this is a potentially huge breakthrough.

All we need to know now is 1.) what does this fungus produce when it consumes plastics?; 2.) is said product potentially toxic?; and 3.) how can we contain this fungus so it doesn't end up consuming everything I hold near and dear to my electronics-loving heart?

Earlier today, The Range noted that I'll be moderating a panel of political writers—Rick Perlstein, Chris Mooney and Tom Zoellner—on Saturday at the Tucson Festival of Books. (You can get details here, but it's from 2:30 to 3:30 in Gallagher Theater and will be carried live on C-SPAN's Book TV.)

Mooney, the author of The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming The Republican Brain, writes about the intersection of politics and science—and how many scientific policy decisions are decided on the basis of politics and not science.

The Republican Brain explores how the way our minds work have a lot to do with how we approach politics. An excerpt from a recent Salon article that Mooney wrote about the book:

The idealistic, liberal, Enlightenment notion that knowledge will save us, or unite us, was even put to a scientific test last year—and it failed badly.

Yale researcher Dan Kahan and his colleagues set out to study the relationship between political views, scientific knowledge or reasoning abilities, and opinions on contested scientific issues like global warming. In their study, more than 1,500 randomly selected Americans were asked about their political worldviews and their opinions about how dangerous global warming and nuclear power are. But that’s not all: They were also asked standard questions to determine their degree of scientific literacy (e.g, “Antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria—true or false?”) as well as their numeracy or capacity for mathematical reasoning (e.g., “If Person A’s chance of getting a disease is 1 in 100 in 10 years, and person B’s risk is double that of A, what is B’s risk?”).

The result was stunning and alarming. The standard view that knowing more science, or being better at mathematical reasoning, ought to make you more accepting of mainstream climate science simply crashed and burned.

Instead, here was the result. If you were already part of a cultural group predisposed to distrust climate science—e.g., a political conservative or “hierarchical-individualist”—then more science knowledge and more skill in mathematical reasoning tended to make you even more dismissive. Precisely the opposite happened with the other group—“egalitarian-communitarians” or liberals—who tended to worry more as they knew more science and math. The result was that, overall, more scientific literacy and mathematical ability led to greater political polarization over climate change—which, of course, is precisely what we see in the polls.

So much for education serving as an antidote to politically biased reasoning.

What accounts for the “smart idiot” effect?

Don't mind me, I'll just be hiding under my desk, caressing my iPhone and calling it "precious" while simultaneously cursing our giant solar enemy:

The Earth has a roughly 12 percent chance of experiencing an enormous megaflare erupting from the sun in the next decade. This event could potentially cause trillions of dollars’ worth of damage and take up to a decade to recover from.

Such an extreme event is considered to be relatively rare. The last gigantic solar storm, known as the Carrington Event, occurred more than 150 years ago and was the most powerful such event in recorded history....

Auroras may be beautiful, but the charged particles can wreak havoc on electrical systems. At the time of the Carrington Event, telegraph stations caught on fire, their networks experienced major outages and magnetic observatories recorded disturbances in the Earth’s field that were literally off the scale....

During a geomagnetic storm in 1989, for instance, Canada’s Hydro-Quebec power grid collapsed within 90 seconds, leaving millions without power for up to nine hours.

The potential collateral damage in the U.S. of a Carrington-type solar storm might be between $1 trillion and $2 trillion in the first year alone, with full recovery taking an estimated four to 10 years, according to a 2008 report from the National Research Council.

[Wired]

Perhaps you find yourself confused by seeing February 29th on the calendar. Personally as a devout Protestant, I don't trust the Gregorian calendar due to its origins as a papal decree, but for the rest of you that care about such things, here is a helpful video explaining the whole extra day escapade.

• ALETRIS NEILS
• Namibian Caracals are being eradicated for lack of awareness.

Aletris Neils, a burgeoning researcher in mammalian conservation and PhD student at the University of Arizona, has been working in southern Namibia, South Africa, for the last several years to raise awareness for the Namibian Caracal. The caracal, a medium-sized predatory cat, are being killed by farmers and ranchers who fear for their livestock.

However, it is a misconception that holds a dire consequence when the cats, apex predators in their ecosystem, are completely eradicated.