Blue Collar Scientist

The Anchorage Daily News is finally running a story about the arctic pliosaur that BCS reported on February 28 - three weeks and a day ago. The ADN piece is a reprint from a Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.

The reporting offers extensive new quotes from Patrick Druckenmiller of the Museum of the North, and Christi Hang, the reporter, even manages to get Jorn Hurum, the PI, to acknowledge Drukenmiller, even though his institution’s press release previously credited only “Norwegian paleontologists” as being on the team.

The Anchorage Daily News reports that Susan Hepburn is giving a number of presentations across the state to parents and teachers on autism. Hepburn is a child psychologist and has an evidence-based view of autism, as does the Alaska Autism Resource Center, based at the SESA offices in Anchorage.

Hepburn could use some media training, to judge by the answers that the ADN printed. But she does point out the CDC and Danish data that refutes a vaccine-autism link, and correctly calls autism “highly genetic.” The delivery is a tad bungled but the message is there.

Should we expect some backlash from the Mercury Militia DAN folks biomedical people vaccines suck lobby? I don’t know. I’m just raising an FYI in case anyone is going to attend these programs. The schedule is prominent at the Alaska Autism Resource Center site.

Some Alaskans - in particular those who have political favor to pass around - are obsessed with killing wolves. One of the old stories about wolf hunting is that the Natives, back in the day, used something called the “blood knife” to do the job. The idea was, you smear a knife with the blood of a prey animal, stick the knife in the ground or freeze it in a big block of ice so that the blade sticks up, and walk away. Eventually, a wolf will come by, lick the knife, cut its tongue, and bleed to death.

Wolves in Alaska, you see, have no clotting factors. Or platelets.¹
The Anchorage Daily News, which isn’t really known for running evidence-based stories, nor for doing any sort of investigative journalism, has run a story skeptical of the myth. Columnist Craig Medred, the long-time outdoor writer, talked to several scientists and then performs the takedown.

Kudos, ADN.

1. Obviously, I am making this up. [↩]