Good morning,

It’s a day of increasingly clear weather forecast for the Whippet City, with a high around twenty-nine.

There’s a regular meeting of Whitewater’s school board tonight, with a closed session beginning at 5:30 p.m., and an opening session beginning at 7 p.m.

For the Lakeview School PTA, it’s Culver’s Night from 4 to 8 p.m.

Over at Ars Technica, there’s a hopeful article entitled, “Mosquito-attacking fungus engineered to block malaria.”  Malaria kills vast numbers of people each year, and stopping the mosquitoes that spread the disease remains an ongoing battle.  (I’m a supporter of Nothing But Nets, a group dedicated to preventing sickness and death from malaria.)

There may be more than one way to skin a mosquito, and prevent over a million child deaths a year.  Ars reports that

….some researchers are reporting some success with a new approach to limiting its spread: engineering a mosquito parasite to attack it before it can reach humans.

The species of mosquitos that transmit malaria are themselves vulnerable to parasites, including some forms of fungus. This has led to interest in using these fungi as a form of biological insecticide. But the fungus doesn’t always kill quickly enough, and if it did, it might end up facing the same sorts of problems that chemical insecticides do: the mosquitos would simply evolve resistance to the fungus as well.

The solution the researchers arrived at is to use a form of fungus that doesn’t kill the mosquitos until late in their lives, after they’ve had a chance to reproduce. This keeps them from evolving resistance….

Here’s hoping.

Good morning,

Here in the Whippet City, we’re in for a slight chance of snow with a high temperature of twenty-nine degrees.

There’s no school today. Play responsibly.

The Wisconsin Historical Society recalls that a famous newspaperman dies on this date, in 1969:

1969 – Dewey D. Dunn Dies
On this date Dewey D. Dunn died. Dunn served as managing editor of the Capital Times newspaper in Madison for nearly 40 years. He arrived in Madison in 1918 to study journalism at the University of Wisconsin. He also worked for the Madison Democrat and the Milwaukee Sentinel before joining the Capital Times in 1920. [Source: Bishops to Bootleggers: A Guide to Madison’s Resurrection Cemetery, pg. 228]

Unlike many bloggers, I don’t dislike the press. On the contrary, a strong press is a healthy press — I would prefer they kept a greater independence of, and scrutiny over, public officials. Many political problems grow worse — far worse, often — when they fail to do so.

Good morning,

Today’s forecast for the Whippet City calls for a cloudy day, with a high temperature of thirty-four degrees.

It’s Spirit Day at Whitewater Middle School, and Market Day at the high school.

Wired has a intriguing video posted about how animals like the sandfish lizard swim through sand.

The team found sine-wave-like movement allows the lizard, and their [model] robot, to push forward in sand, but creating computer models for the experiments proved problematic. Simulating all of the tiny sand grains required a lot of money to purchase time on powerful computers. So, the team performed the same experiments using 3-millimeter-wide glass beads instead of sand.

“We wanted something easy to simulate that had some predictive power. We got lucky, because it turned out [the lizard and robot] swim beautifully in the same way through larger glass beads,” [Georgia Tech’s Daniel] Goldman said.

Via Video: Secrets of Swimming in Sand Revealed | Wired Science | Wired.com. more >>