Science

ScienceBlogs Channel : Life Science

2012-02-01T05:10:00.001-08:00

ScienceBlogs Channel : Life Science

Plant Physiologist Helen Stafford leaves Reed College Biology Dept. $1M [Tomorrow's Table]
Berry Go 'Round [Greg Laden's Blog]
Parallel Evolution [Greg Laden's Blog]

Plant Physiologist Helen Stafford leaves Reed College Biology Dept. $1M [Tomorrow's Table]

Posted: 31 Jan 2012 01:06 PM PST

Applause for Plant Physiologist Helen Stafford who left the Reed College Biology Department $1M. As a woman scientist in the 1950s, Stafford was ineligible for many jobs. Reed College, not deterred by her sex, offered her a position. She went on to establish a successful career and inspired many young scientists. Here is a short story of how she influenced my career.

The windowless room, dank an dark, was not an obvious place for inspiration. I took notes, wondering if I would be able to glean anything meaningful from Professor Helen Stafford's (1922-2011) meandering lecture. I was skeptical. After all, this was the same teacher who, annoyed with our choice of vegetarianism, had told us that "plants have feelings, too".

But what I learned that day, 33 years ago, would trigger a grand curiosity about the natural world and draw me into the greatest scientific puzzle of my career.

Helen informed us that human language is not the only way that species communicate. Plants form intimate associations with fungi and bacteria, which allow them to thrive in stressful environments. Establishment and maintenance of the relationship depends on the passing and receiving of coded information between partners. She also told us that plants can only defend themselves against microbes that they can sense.

This interspecies communication is not restricted to plants and microbes. The human intestine is home to diverse bacteria, allowing us to harvest nutrients that would otherwise be inaccessible. The human immunodeficiency virus chooses for its target only those of us that carry a specific receptor, decorated in a particular way.

All these interactions dramatically affect human health and farm productivity.

I was hooked.

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Berry Go 'Round [Greg Laden's Blog]

Posted: 31 Jan 2012 01:02 PM PST

Jessica M. Budke has the Berry Go Round carnival up at her site. Have you heard about the plants that eat nematodes? Solar powered sea slugs? Have you considered covering your house instead of painting it?

Go here to find out all about these amazing topics and more.

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Parallel Evolution [Greg Laden's Blog]

Posted: 31 Jan 2012 08:36 AM PST

"Parallel Evolution" is not really a kind of evolution, but rather, an observation we make about the pattern of evolution in particular cases. Many species have a "woodpecker adaptation" by which a hard sharp thing is used to get at grubs and other insect (or non insect) meat hidden beneath bark. Some of the sharp things are beaks, one bird uses a cactus spine, and there is a primate with a special elongated finger for doing this, and most or all "woodpeckers" (bird like or otherwise) have related adaptation allowing them to figure out where to poke through the bark to find their prey. This is parallelism. But other cases of parallel evolution involve several different populations (which may or may no be different subspecies or different species) undergoing Natural Selection from a base population with some genetic variability such that the smaller sub populations all have a high incidence of the same genetic allele (variant). The loss of bony plates in various freshwater sticklebacks seems to be a case of (mainly) this sort of evolution.

The case of the sticklebacks is especailly interesting because the genetic variant that causes this trait in most (but not all) of these fish is also associated with a behavioral trait. Intrigued? You should be! As you know, I'm guest blogging for a couple of weeks at Smithsonian.com, and I've just put up a post examining the sticklebacks: What Robot Fish Can Tell Us About Parallel Evolution.

Go have a look and leave nice comments so the Smithsonian likes me!

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ScienceBlogs Channel : Physical Science

2012-02-01T05:09:00.001-08:00

ScienceBlogs Channel : Physical Science

The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars [Greg Laden's Blog]

Posted: 31 Jan 2012 06:20 AM PST

Michael Mann, famous climate scientist, has released a book called The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines (also available as a Kindle edition). I've not read it yet but I thought you'd like to know about it.

Michael Mann is the guy who came up with the Hockey Stick graph and metaphor. Early reviews are positive:

In this meticulous and engaging brief on climate change research and the political backlash to legitimate scientific work, Penn State professor Mann narrates the fight against misinformation from the inside. (Publishers Weekly )
An important and disturbing account of the fossil-fuel industry's well-funded public-relations campaign to sow doubt about the validity of the science of climate change.
Kirkus (STARRED REVIEW)

If you don't believe our climate is changing, read this book. Dr. Mann will change your mind. For us, it's a war of words. Preserve the Earth, and pass the ammunition. (Bill Nye the Science Guy )

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TechGeeze.com: T-Mobile UK Reveals Its Full Monty Plan – UK’s First Truly Unlimited Calls, Texts And Internet

2012-01-31T17:29:00.001-08:00

TechGeeze.com: T-Mobile UK Reveals Its Full Monty Plan – UK’s First Truly Unlimited Calls, Texts And Internet

T-Mobile UK Reveals Its Full Monty Plan – UK’s First Truly Unlimited Calls, Texts And Internet
Star Trek Enterprise NCC 1701-C Landed As A Coffee Table
Intel releases seven new Sandy Bridge CPUs
Megaupload Users Face Data Deletion, Megaupload Founder Face Accusations
What Apple could do with their $100 billion cash
Panasonic rugged Lumix DMC-TS4 and DMC-TS20 cameras unveiled
Canon EOS-1D X with 24-70 f/2.8L II this February
Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS20 and ZS15 compact superzoom cameras announced

T-Mobile UK Reveals Its Full Monty Plan – UK’s First Truly Unlimited Calls, Texts And Internet

Posted: 31 Jan 2012 04:21 AM PST

T-Mobile UK have just revealed its first truly unlimited calls, texts and mobile data internet plans along with some popular handsets making it a breakthrough offerings across UK’s network carriers.... Related posts: Google Launches Nexus One available now on T-Mobile Plan, coming on Verizon...

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Star Trek Enterprise NCC 1701-C Landed As A Coffee Table

Posted: 31 Jan 2012 03:41 AM PST

Star Trek Enterprise NCC 1701-C have just landed on Etsy as one of Barry Shields special creations –this time a trekkie coffee table. Though this coffee table seemed to be... Related posts: Table Connect for iPhone: 58-inch multitouch table demo [Video] The Coffee-Powered Car Multitouch...

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Intel releases seven new Sandy Bridge CPUs

Posted: 31 Jan 2012 03:18 AM PST

Intel has been quiet for several times for few of its new CPUs that was aimed to refresh the current chips on it bloodlines, this time with Sandy Bridge. The... Related posts: Intel Sandy Bridge chipset design flaw, shipments stopped and recalls Intel’s Sandy Bridge CPUs could be dropping...

>> Continue reading by hitting the title link above

Megaupload Users Face Data Deletion, Megaupload Founder Face Accusations

Posted: 31 Jan 2012 03:09 AM PST

Megaupload, one of the most popular file-sharing services in the world could lose all its data, legal or illegal on Thursday, 2nd of February 2012 according to the Associated Press.... Related posts: Facebook draws near 700 million users worldwide Windows Phones also store location data, now...

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What Apple could do with their $100 billion cash

Posted: 31 Jan 2012 02:36 AM PST

Here are some simple suggestions on what Apple could do with their $100 billion cash. Learn more pass through the break. Source: GeekCulture via Gizmocrazed Related posts: Apple Has More... Related posts: Apple Has More Cash Than the U.S. Federal Government Apple dished out Q3 earnings with $28.57...

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Panasonic rugged Lumix DMC-TS4 and DMC-TS20 cameras unveiled

Posted: 31 Jan 2012 02:13 AM PST

Panasonic have just let out of it Traveler Zooms, the Lumix DMC-ZS20 and ZS15 compact superzoom cameras. And also just today, the Japanese-based company added two tough cameras in their... Related posts: Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS20 and ZS15 compact superzoom cameras announced Panasonic debuts FZ35,...

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Canon EOS-1D X with 24-70 f/2.8L II this February

Posted: 30 Jan 2012 11:05 PM PST

According to latest reports, invites have already gone out to Canon Platinum CPS members to prioritize purchases of the new EOS-1D X this will void the earlier rumor that the... Related posts: Canon Could be Prepping Canon 6D an Entry Level Full Frame Camera Canon EF 24-70 f/2.8L II reported still...

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Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS20 and ZS15 compact superzoom cameras announced

Posted: 30 Jan 2012 10:43 PM PST

Panasonic have already thrown its 2012 lineup of rugged and entry-level point-and-shoot cameras but today the company is adding two compact superzoom cameras tagged as “Traveler Zoom” on the lineup,... Related posts: Panasonic Lumix DMC-GX1 Micro Four Thirds camera launched Panasonic...

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ScienceBlogs Channel : Medicine & Health

2012-01-31T05:14:00.003-08:00

ScienceBlogs Channel : Medicine & Health

The annals of "I'm not anti-vaccine," part 9 (The first volley of 2012) [Respectful Insolence]

Posted: 31 Jan 2012 12:09 AM PST

One of the most common retorts that antivaccine activists like to make, usually in the most wounded, self-righteous tone with the most wounded, disgusted expression on their faces that they can manage, is that they are "not antivaccine but rather pro-safe vaccine." There may be a tiny minority of antivaccinationists who really are "pro-safe vaccine," but if they exist I have yet to encounter one yet. In any case, what maes an antivaccinationist and antivaccinationist is an unrelenting hostility to and fear of vaccines, coupled with an even more unrelenting refusal to admit that vaccines do any good and ann amazingly slippery avoidance of answering the question of what, exactly, it would take to convince them that vaccines are safe enough for their children. Periodically, I like to provide examples that help illustrate this difference and why the claims of antivaccine activists that they are not, in fact, anti-vaccine are nearly always bogus. So it was that I came across the website Vactruth.com and this gem of a post Excuse Me Waiter - There's a Fly in My Vaccine Soup!

A more blatant example of the "toxins gambit" with so much idiocy concentrated in one post that it's a veritable black hole of antivaccine information at least as dense as the last black hole of vaccine misinformation I encountered. Maybe the two of them will consume each other. Rationale people and the children endangered by antivaccine rhetoric should be so lucky.

In any case, it's hard not to consider how hilarious the name "VacTruth" is in the context of what is actually on the website in general and this post in particular. To get an idea of the "quality" of this article, just check out the first couple of paragraphs:

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ScienceBlogs Channel : Life Science

2012-01-31T05:14:00.001-08:00

ScienceBlogs Channel : Life Science

Mary's Monday Metazoan: the only angel I believe in [Pharyngula]
Senate Resolution Number 92 [Greg Laden's Blog]
True Science for Boys [Pharyngula]
How do you know when to stop squeezing? [Greg Laden's Blog]
Darwin on the Palouse [Pharyngula]
Tinker and Change the World [USA Science and Engineering Festival: The Blog]

Mary's Monday Metazoan: the only angel I believe in [Pharyngula]

Posted: 30 Jan 2012 06:33 PM PST

Aside from Mary, that is.

(via NatGeo)

(Also on FtB)

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Senate Resolution Number 92 [Greg Laden's Blog]

Posted: 30 Jan 2012 02:17 PM PST

I remember the first time I visited a penguin colony. It was not hard to find. Penguin colonies smell really really bad. Here's why:

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True Science for Boys [Pharyngula]

Posted: 30 Jan 2012 09:14 AM PST

Ah, the 19th century…when mad scientists were really mad, and not only that, they were popular at parties. In 1818, Dr Ure and Professor Jeffray obtained the freshly killed corpse of Matthew Clydesdale, only an hour from the hangman's noose, and proceeded to experiment on it with a battery in the Glasgow University anatomy theater before a crowd of spectators. In my youth, I had to settle for recent roadkill, a 9 volt battery, and a dark basement, all by my lonesome — my jealousy is acute.

Here is a small portion of the account of that day's fun.

The supra-orbital nerve was laid bare in the forehead, as it issues through the supraciliary foramen in the eyebrow: the one conducting rod being applied to it, and the other to the heel, most extraordinary grimaces were exhibited every time that electrical discharges were made, by running the wire in my hand along the edges of the last trough, from the 220th, to the 270th pair of plates: thus fifty shocks, each greater than the preceding one, were given in two seconds. Every muscle in his countenance was simultaneously thrown into fearful action: rage, horror, despair, anguish, and ghastly smile united their hideous expression in the murderer's face; surpassing far the wildest representation of a Fuseli or a Kean. At this period several of the spectators were forced to leave the apartment from terror or sickness, and one gentleman fainted.

The account of galvanic experiments on dead bodies is taken from The Young Man's Book of Amusement, which on the cover promises to teach card tricks and how to make fireworks. You'd think an amusement in which the first step is to obtain a dead body would be listed a little more prominently, but I guess playing with cadavers was just commonplace in the year before Queen Vickie was born.

(Also on FtB)

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How do you know when to stop squeezing? [Greg Laden's Blog]

Posted: 30 Jan 2012 08:51 AM PST

If you are a snake. And, what causes some island dwelling boas to be smaller than the mainland variety?

If you want to know the answer to these two burning questions, click here and visit Smithsonian's Surprising Science where I'll be guest blogging for a couple of weeks. For the first question, there is some new and very cool research. For the second question, some older (but closely related) research.

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Darwin on the Palouse [Pharyngula]

Posted: 30 Jan 2012 08:13 AM PST

Time is whipping by, I can tell — Darwin Day is next week! I'm going to have to whip up a talk for this event real soon, I think: it's Darwin on the Palouse, and I'll be talking at Washington State University in Pullman, WA a week from Thursday. They've paired me up with Dan Dennett that evening…which is daunting, since I know which of us people will be lining up to see. On Friday, it'll be Jen McCreight and Fred Edwords speaking, so even more competition.

It should be a couple of good evenings of diverse and interesting talks, so all you folk in Eastern Washington and Idaho should make the trip.

Oh, and if you can't make the February event, you could always drive a bit farther north in May and take another shot at me at Imagine No Religion 2, in Kamloops, BC. There I'll only be standing in the shadow of Lawrence Krauss and a half dozen other luminaries.

(Also on FtB)

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Tinker and Change the World [USA Science and Engineering Festival: The Blog]

Posted: 30 Jan 2012 07:00 AM PST

By Larry Bock
Founder and organizer, USA Science & Engineering Festival

Tinkering -- that hands-on, garage-based tradition which sparked inventions ranging from the airplane and electric light bulb to the Apple computer -- is making a comeback among average Americans, promising to change our lives for the better on several fronts.

Known by such monikers as DIY (Do It Yourself) and the Maker Movement, its resurrection, fueled by the current economic downturn and the falling cost of high-tech tools and materials, stands not only to boost innovation and change how science is taught in the classroom, but could herald a new industrial revolution, suggest the Economist, the Wall Street Journal and other luminaries.

The potential power of this movement is indeed thought-provoking. It rests on DIYers (who range from young students to everyday adults) believing that the average person has the ability to understand and apply technology in ways like never before, enabling ordinary individuals to build, even invent, meaningful creations of their own that they are passionate about -- from robots and sophisticated LED (light emitting diode) systems for movie film production to energy-smart conveniences for the home.

Through robust support networks that they've developed nationwide, DIYers delight in joining with like-minded friends, mentors and peers (either online or in-person) to tinker, create, hack and re-use materials, while learning to use such tools as computer-controlled table saws, 3-D printers, welding equipment and laser cutters to produce prototypes of their creations.

For me, as founder and chief organizer of the USA Science & Engineering Festival (the nation's largest celebration of science and engineering), the merging of DIY with technology represents a vibrant breath of fresh air across America, particularly what it means for inspiring the next generation of innovators. And I am not alone: Educators are realizing that hands-on experiences represented by such activities as tinkering and building may be one of the most powerful keys to improving STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics education) in this country. That's because students learn best by doing, especially when done in an engaging environment with peers and mentors.

Not surprisingly, engineering schools across the country, for example, report that undergrad students are showing an enthusiasm for hands-on work in DIY technology activities that hasn't been seen in years.

DIY also cannot help but to have a positive impact on the human spirit itself, says Naomi Lamoreaux, an economic historian at the University of California, Los Angeles. "The really dynamic times in our history are times when you have lots of ordinary people who think they have a chance to make a difference," she opines.

Yes, the chance to make a difference is indeed a powerful motivator, especially for young students. That is why the USA Science & Engineering Festival hosted by Lockheed Martin this April is devoting a significant portion of the event to exciting, hands-on DIY encounters -- all designed to inspire budding inventors and entrepreneurs with ideas, tools and resources to help them make their dreams a reality. From robotic technology to amazing desktop manufacturing technology that makes prototype development easy and cost-effective, future innovators will find it all during the Festival's finale Expo (as well as in the Robot Fest and DIY Expo pavilion) in Washington, DC on April 28-29.

The Festival is also a fantastic place for technical experts of all kinds to learn about the amazing advances that have been made in technology to help them make product prototypes find designs online for parts and components, and meet an array of experts to help them bring their product ideas to life.

Participants and activities such as the following will make the Festival an unforgettable one-stop experience in DIY:

--Organizations like MakerBot Industries, Fab Lab DC and Fab@Home by Cornell University and Dassault Systèmes Americas will demonstrate how to develop product prototypes via digital fabrication and 3D printers, while Sparkfun Electronics will show how to develop new product ideas more easily and inexpensively through electronics and microcontroller kits. The Festival will also feature an array of robotic technology ranging from military, manufacturing and surgical robots to more entertaining robots like R2DC's Star Wars droids and other exhibits that allow attendees to build their own robots.

--At the DIY Expo, budding entrepreneurs will be able to network with members of various "hackerspace" groups, such as the Baltimore Node, Unallocated Space and HacDC, who work collaboratively to network, socialize and develop technical solutions and new innovative products in their spare time, simply because they love to tinker with new ideas, create something from nothing, and solve problems!

--In addition, the Festival also features a Book Fair that includes some of the leading authors and experts in the DIY world, including William Gurstelle, author of The Practical Pyromaniac. Gurstelle, a professional engineer, has been researching and building model catapults, ballistic devices and flamethrowers for more than 30 years. Dustyn Roberts, author of Making Things Move: DIY Mechanisms for Inventors, Hobbyists and Artists, will also appear at the Festival. Roberts, also an engineer, started her career at Honeybee Robotics working on a project for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission.

The late Steve Jobs (who was perhaps the ultimate modern-day DIYer), was right when he said individuals who invent, build and make things have the power to change the
world -- or at least a part of it.

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ScienceBlogs Channel : Physical Science

2012-01-31T05:10:00.001-08:00

ScienceBlogs Channel : Physical Science

Another Week of GW News, January 29, 2012 [A Few Things Ill Considered]
Defending Physics Against Cracked.com [Starts With A Bang]
The Arxiv Is Not a Journal [Uncertain Principles]

Another Week of GW News, January 29, 2012 [A Few Things Ill Considered]

Posted: 30 Jan 2012 12:42 PM PST

Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years

This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup

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Defending Physics Against Cracked.com [Starts With A Bang]

Posted: 30 Jan 2012 08:07 AM PST

"In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms." -Stephen Jay Gould

Those of you who follow me on either google+, facebook or twitter know that I sometimes post interesting articles about science from around the world, including this very good article about myths about outer space, from the often-entertaining cracked.com. So, as you can imagine, I was (at first) very excited when I saw this article last week over there.

(Image credit: cracked.com.)

Imagine my disappointment when I read this, and realized that the "6 Scientific Discoveries that Laugh in the Face of Physics" turn out to all be things that physics understands and can explain! Looking at it today, you can see that well over 1,000,000 people have read this, so let's see if we can't get the correct information back out there to as many of them as possible. Without further ado, let's take a look at these six scientific discoveries, and do our best to get it right!

(Image credit: Miloslav Druckmuller / SWNS.)

6.) The Sun Can Make Stuff Hotter Than Itself.

Above is the Sun's Corona, visible only during a total solar eclipse, as shown above. And while the surface of the Sun is very hot, at something around 5800 K, the Corona comes in at temperatures over one million Kelvin. Mysterious, mind-boggling and inexplicable by the laws of physics, right?

Except that temperature is not the same thing as heat! The Sun's surface is much, much denser than the incredibly rarified corona, so that even though the Sun's photosphere is less than 1% of the corona's temperature, it emits energy at a rate that's over 40,000 times the amount required to heat the corona up to it's high temperature. We even think we know why: the wave heating theory, where energy can be transferred over long distances from the solar interior to the corona.

(Image credits: Robert Krampf; stills taken from MetaCafe.)

Remember what temperature is: a measure of the mean speed of the particles. Similar to how two balls -- a tiny one and a very massive one -- dropped one-atop-the-other will lead the tiny ball to rocket upwards at an incredible speed, the problem isn't getting a few particles to have a very large speed. The problem also isn't unique to the Sun; if we take a look at Earth's upper atmosphere, where it gets really rarified (above 80 km), we find that it does the same thing in terms of temperature!

(Image credit: Earth's Atmosphere, from kowoma.de.)

The problem is that we associate temperature with heat in our minds, but the "very high temperature" corona contains almost no heat! But if we look in terms of heat, the Sun's photosphere contains much more than the corona; the corona merely reaches higher temperatures.

5.) When You Look Closely, Gravity Stops Making Sense.

The article laments that gravity is so mind-numbingly weak. How dare you, gravity! And it's true; weaker by something like 38 orders of magnitude than the electromagnetic force, even your puny comb can outdo the gravitational pull of the entire Earth when it comes to lifting certain objects. But this isn't a mystery, it's an empirical fact of nature!

(Image credit: Joan Adler, Technion, Israel.)

The standard model of particles and interactions can do a whole lot, but one of the things it can't do is explain why the fundamental forces are the strength that they are. Neither can general relativity, our theory of gravity. As you can see, gravity is very, mind-numbingly weak, even compared to the weakest other force.

But whether you look close or far, at something as massive as a supermassive black hole or as tiny as a laboratory mass, general relativity still gives the correct answer to everything. The only argument that one could even make that "when you look very close, it stops making sense" would be to go down to the smallest scales we know of.

(Image credits: Ultra-Cold Matter Research at William & Mary.)

Only, with gravity, we can barely make it below the millimeter-scale before it becomes too difficult to measure. And we can measure the effects of gravitation down to these sub-millimeter scales: it obeys general relativity just fine, thank you. Perhaps someday, we'll reach down to quantum mechanical scales and find that our classical theory of gravity, general relativity, is insufficient. But in theory, general relativity is good all the way down to the quantum limit of the Universe, and we have yet to find an experiment or observation that contradicts it.

(Image credit: Pioneer 10 by Don Davis, for NASA.)

4.) Satellites Speed Up for No Reason.

So, get this. In the 1970s, we launched two probes -- Pioneer 10 and 11 -- into the outer Solar System. As we tracked their positions over many decades, we knew exactly what to expect. After all, we know the laws of gravity, we know the masses and positions of the Sun and all the planets, and we should be able to predict the spacecrafts' motions flawlessly. Except we saw a small -- but definitely non-negligible -- acceleration back towards the Sun!

Immediately, a number of spectacular explanations arose. Gravity is wrong! The solar system is full of dark matter! Spaghetti! Except among most astrophysicists (like me), another explanation arose: maybe the asymmetric spacecraft is being heated (and is radiating) asymmetrically.

(Image credit: NASA / Francisco et al., retrieved from Jennifer Ouellette.)

For decades, the debate raged, as much as anything where one side doesn't really give the other side much credibility can rage. And then last year, it was definitively measured that the "anomalous acceleration" is not constant, but decreasing, and hence in total agreement with the theory that it's due to the thermal effects that the astrophysicists pointed out. So yes, cracked, satellites speed up for no reason, but only if you ignore the actual reason.

(Image credit: retrieved from Phantastic Physics / Wikispaces.)

3.) The Law of Conservation of Energy? More of a Suggestion, Really.

Looking at black holes, there are only a few types of hair they can have: mass, angular momentum, and electric charge. (And, if you believe in it, magnetic charge.) All of that stuff is conserved. But what about information? That's something that needs to be conserved. If I throw the Count of Monte Cristo into a black hole, it contains a different amount of information than an equal-mass book of all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. But if energy must truly be conserved, mass, charge, and angular momentum won't take care of it! This conundrum was known as the black hole information paradox.

(Image credit: retrieved from Phantastic Physics / Wikispaces.)

I said "was known" as that. Because the information isn't lost; we know exactly where it goes! When any object falls into a black hole, from its point of view, it simply passes through the event horizon and falls into the singularity, getting torn apart in spectacular fashion. But to an observer outside the event horizon? The object appears to get stretched out, fainter, and reddened, but you'll never see it cross over onto the inside. What we see, instead, is that information gets imprinted, forever and ever, onto the surface of that black hole's event horizon!

So even though you might have amazing difficulty reading it, that information from the Count of Monte Cristo is still there on the surface, even if its mass is the only thing you know from the black hole's insides.

(Image credit: Indira Gandhi Center for Atomic Research.)

2.) The Particle That Knows We're Watching.

Radioactive decay, the process that allows an unstable atomic nucleus to transmute into a different element, is one of the slowest physical processes known to man. Often taking billions of years, radioactivity is built on a foundation of quantum mechanics, where a metastable nucleus must quantum mechanically tunnel into a less energetic, more stable state.

(Image credit: retrieved from Aggeli K at BrightHub.com.)

It isn't easy, as you can imagine, because there's no good way to get up-and-over the proverbial hill; it isn't like those protons and neutrons just spontaneously align into that less energetic configuration! What you need to remember is that each of these particles that make up the nucleus are quantum mechanical in nature: they're not just particles, but they're waves, too. And waves spread out over time, where they can attempt to tunnel into that more stable (post-decay) state. Every once in a while, after enough time has passed, a nucleus will find its way into that state, and when that happens, you get a decay!

(Image credit: Chi LF collaboration, from John von Neumann Institut fur Computing.)

But it takes time to get there. If you're too impatient, and you can't wait, you might be tempted to look right away. Only, you know what happens in quantum mechanics when you make an observation: you collapse the wavefunction into one particular state! So if you can't help yourself from making observations, what you're basically doing is resetting the clock every time you look!

(Image credit: Peter Byrne / Scientific American.)

If you're cracked, you'll lament that this is like the watched teapot that never boils. While if you're a physicist, you know the teapot boils, but the nucleus won't decay unless you stop continually collapsing its wavefunction!

(Image credit: CERN neutrinos to Gran Sasso, retrieved from Universe Today.)

1.) Einstein's Theory: Relatively Full of Crap (Also? Time Travel!).

And finally, the faster-than-light neutrinos thing, again. For those of you who've been living under a rock, the OPERA experiment in a mine under Gran Sasso detected neutrinos sent from CERN, and they detected them 60 nanoseconds sooner than they would have had they moved "only" at the speed of light.

Like many others, I was skeptical, and believed we were fooling ourselves. I still am, and I still do. We have plenty of evidence indicating otherwise.

(Image credit: NASA, ESA, K. France, and P. Challis and R. Kirshner.)

For one, we had a supernova in 1987, which raced photons and neutrinos for over 100,000 light years; were the neutrinos moving at the speed OPERA indicated, they'd have arrived four years earlier; instead, they arrived within hours. There are actually a host of other experiments that have constrained the speed of neutrinos, and if you look at all of them -- across a wide variety of energies -- you find that the new experiment, OPERA, is the one outlier, in conflict with everything else.

(Image credit: Matt Strassler and me.)

The OPERA results are bizarre enough that experiments in the United States and Japan are being set up right now to either verify or refute them. When it comes to this story, I've been doing my best to inform the world, and I'll stay on top of it and keep reporting all the latest developments that come up, too. But for right now, it's going to take some extraordinary evidence before I'm ready to chuck special relativity, even for something as mundane as the neutrino.

And there you have it: six scientific discoveries that might appear to laugh in the face of physics, but only until you learn the physics behind it! Isn't information beautiful?

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The Arxiv Is Not a Journal [Uncertain Principles]

Posted: 30 Jan 2012 06:58 AM PST

There's been a lot written recently about academic publishing, in the kerfuffle over the "Research Works Act"-- John's roundup should keep you in reading material for a good while. This has led some people to decide to boycott Elsevier, including Aram Harrow of the Quantum Vatican. I'm generally in favor of this, but Aram says one thing that bugs me a bit:

Just like the walled gardens of Compuserve and AOL would never grow into the Internet, no commercial publisher will ever be able to match the scope and ease of access of arxiv.org. Nor can they match the price. In 2010, there were about 70,000 new papers added to arxiv.org and there were 30 million articles downloaded, while their annual budget was $420,000. This comes to $6 per article uploaded (or 1.4 cents per download). Publishers talk about how much their business costs and how even “open access” isn’t free, but thanks to arxiv.org, we know how low the costs can go.

This is very nice, but has one major problem: The arxiv is not a journal.

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TechGeeze.com: Top 10 Most Powerful Sportcars

2012-01-30T17:11:00.001-08:00

TechGeeze.com: Top 10 Most Powerful Sportcars

Top 10 Most Powerful Sportcars

Posted: 30 Jan 2012 02:23 AM PST

What power your car hide under the hood? Would a thousand plus of horsepower will bring you the adrenaline rush you’re looking for a sports car? What we got here... Related posts: Top 10 World’s Most Powerful Computers Dell M11x powerful gaming laptop All Powerful Alienware M17x gaming...

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Android’s Tablet Market Share Increased, But Apple Still Dominates The Market

Posted: 30 Jan 2012 01:59 AM PST

A research firm said that Android grabs more tablet market share during the fourth quarter of last year but Apple's iPad still dominates the category. Based on the report, there... Related posts: Apple dished out Q3 earnings with $28.57 billion revenue, $7.31 billion profit and 20 million iPhones...

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ScienceBlogs Channel : Technology

2012-01-30T05:17:00.001-08:00

ScienceBlogs Channel : Technology

"Incentives" for 5 Star Reviews on Ecommerce Sites [denialism blog]

Posted: 29 Jan 2012 03:58 PM PST

In case you missed it, here's a pointer to a recent Times story concerning baked reviews on Amazon and the like. In it, David Streitfeld describes how one company gave rebates to customers in exchange for five star reviews. They even seem to have a claque to address detractors--

Even a few grouches could not spoil the party. "This is an egregious violation of the ratings and review system used by Amazon," a customer named Robert S. Pollock wrote in a review he titled "scam."
He was promptly chastised by another customer. This fellow, himself a seller on Amazon, argued that he had both given and gotten free items in exchange for reviews. "It is not a scam but an incentive," he wrote.

You might recall the hysteria surrounding recent Federal Trade Commission rules on sponsored endorsements by bloggers. The agency had this type of situation in mind--average consumers, without any understanding of the rules or "ethics" of advertising are pimping products to others. It's unfair to competitors and other consumers. And it totally messes up my default shopping strategy of just buying the highest rated [insert product here] on Amazon!

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ScienceBlogs Channel : Life Science

2012-01-30T05:13:00.001-08:00

ScienceBlogs Channel : Life Science

Thanks, CWRU, for forcing me to get the paper bag out again [Respectful Insolence]

Posted: 30 Jan 2012 12:00 AM PST

It's rare that I have much in the way of reluctance to leap into writing about a topic. Any regular reader of this blog should know this to be true, given the topics I regularly take on and how often my writing draws flak my way from various proponents of quackery and pseudoscience, in particular the antivaccine crowd. Still, sometimes a topic gives me pause, although, I must admit, the reason is that blogging about it will bring embarrassment to me. Usually, I can overcome this reluctance, as I have done in discussing, for example, how my alma mater, the university from which I obtained both my undergraduate and graduate degree, has an actual program in magic (i.e., anthroposophic medicine). Then there was the example of how reiki had infiltrated my old stomping grounds at MetroHealth Medical Center, one of the hospitals at Case Western Reserve University where I rotated during my general surgery residency. Then, just last week, there was the most embarrassing fact that I had to acknowledge, namely that the cancer center at Case has gone woo, even going so far as to host the 2011 meeting of the Society of Integrative Oncology.

So what more could embarrass me? One more thing, it would appear, so much so that it's time to get the paper bag out again; you know, the one I routinely used to get out when surgeons and other physicians spouted embarrassing things back in the day.

I had heard about this a couple of days before P.Z. Myers blogged about it, but had decided that I probably wasn't the one to blog about it. Then, P.Z. had to go and rub my face in the embarrassment of it all by writing about a paper published by a faculty member at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine named Erik Andrulis. He was, I have to admit, depressingly spot-on in pointing out that a comparison to jabberwocky is inevitable. I, however, have another comparison that I think more apt, as you will soon see. First, though, I must admit that I found it very surprising that someone like Andrulis would publish a paper like this. If you look at his publication list, with one glaring exception, it looks pretty respectable. Basically, he studies enzymes that metabolize RNA called RNases:

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Islamic science has come to this pitiful end [Pharyngula]

Posted: 29 Jan 2012 01:56 PM PST

The words of the Prophet Muhammad (sallallahu 'aleihi was-sallam) have been tested scientifically, and found hilarious. In work carried out under the direction of Dr. Jamaal Haamid, students at Qassim University examined a saying by the prophet, and have published it in a freely available pdf, The Hadeeth on the Fly, which you can download if you desire. Or you could just read this post, which summarizes entirely the complete content of the short paper, which is pretty much unpublishable and unbelievable anyway.

Here are the holy words.

(Notice that I include the original Arabic so there can be no confusion!)

If a housefly falls in the drink of anyone of you, he should dip it (in the drink), for the one of its wings has a disease and the other has the cure of the disease.

I do find that rather disturbing: so in Arabia, if a fly touches your water, you're supposed to catch it, dunk it in deeper and slosh it around, to prevent disease? Arabian flies buzz around with pathogens segregated to just one wing, while the other one is healthy? How do they do that?

OK, setting aside the sanitary habits of Arabians and the mechanism by which this holy aphorism could be true, our intrepid students do carry out the obvious experiment: they drop a fly in a flask of sterile water, and then they pluck out the fly and immerse it completely in a second flask of sterile water. But then it all goes horribly wrong.

Here is the result of experiment #1.

Plate 2- Cultured water sample taken from a flask containing sterilized water and where a fly fell (without submersion). Growth of pathogenic (disease causing) bacterial colonies of the E. coli type were identified after taking samples from the water in the flask for culture.
Plate 1- Cultured water sample from the same flask following the complete dipping of the fly. An entire disappearance of the bacterial growth seen in Petri-dish 2 is clear. The new bacteria growing in plate 1 was identified as Actinomyces, the one from which useful antibiotics can be extracted. This explains the complete inhibition of growth in plate 2

Plate 2 on the right is the one from water merely touched by a fly. There is no explanation for how the plate was produced, or how the bacteria were identified; the strange brown sludge suggests poor technique, though, and I've cultured E. coli myself — and that hideous thick fecal-colored glop looks nothing like E. coli.

Plate 1 on the left, made from water in which the fly was fully immersed, looks nasty too. It's a poor photograph, but that looks like a thick lawn of colonies everywhere. How do they know it's Actinomyces? I have no idea, they don't say. It's also a mistake to simply declare it beneficial — Actinomyces are opportunistic pathogens.

Experiment #2 was a different fly, two flasks of water, same result.

Experiment #3 was a third fly, two flasks of water, same result.

Having done the experiment to death, our brave students retired at the third repetition, wrote it up with no methods, no discussion, no literature cited (except for their holy book, of course), and no reliable, believable data. They also didn't do the other obvious experiment, of snipping off the wings and examining the bacterial flora living on the left vs. right, but then, maybe they're leaving that for the advanced students.

Any 10 year olds looking for a quick and easy science fair project, there it is. I'm sure you can replicate this experiment trivially -- but please, talk to a real microbiologist first and learn how to streak a plate. You might also learn something about a control plate, which our U of Qassim students didn't bother to do.

Of course, this work wasn't carried out by 10 year olds. It was done by university students in a "Med 497" (a medical course?) in a department of medical microbiology. I strongly urge anyone visiting Saudi Arabia to avoid getting sick. They might try to treat you by swishing a fly around in your coffee.

(Also on FtB)

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ScienceBlogs Channel : Medicine & Health

2012-01-30T05:07:00.001-08:00

ScienceBlogs Channel : Medicine & Health

Thanks, CWRU, for forcing me to get the paper bag out again [Respectful Insolence]

Posted: 30 Jan 2012 12:00 AM PST

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Ritalin's Fallacy [Dean's Corner]

Posted: 29 Jan 2012 07:47 AM PST

Some drugs work well because they are designed to hit a single, well understood target. Consider penicillin.

In a simplified sense, penicillin destroys a single enzyme that bacteria need to divide and to infect you, thereby killing the harmful bacteria. But what about psychiatric drugs? Is there a comparable, single target in the brain to treat depression, anxiety, attention deficit disorder (ADD)? No.

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2012-Jan-29

2012-01-29T18:30:00.001-08:00

ESTATES, PROPERTIES - FLATS 1/2/3 BHK
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TechGeeze.com | Latest Gadgets Email Subcription

2012-01-29T17:10:00.001-08:00

TechGeeze.com | Latest Gadgets Email Subcription

JLab Audio GO MP3 Player Review

Posted: 29 Jan 2012 08:43 AM PST

Has it ever crossed your minds to listen to music underwater? If you haven’t, then so do we, but the people in JLab Audio will make you think otherwise with... Related posts: Listen if you dare on a Kube 2 Player Singbox MP3 Player Flaunt Stylish Portable Boombox Magnavox NB530MGX Blu-ray...

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ScienceBlogs Channel : Physical Science

2012-01-29T05:13:00.001-08:00

ScienceBlogs Channel : Physical Science

Another Review for the BSB! [EvolutionBlog]

Posted: 28 Jan 2012 03:38 PM PST

The Big Sudoku Book has received another review, and in an unexpected venue: The Wall Street Journal! The review is by Keith Devlin, a mathematician at Stanford University and the author of a small library of books of his own. Devlin writes:

The authors show vividly that mathematics is really about the power of abstraction, the push to explain as much as possible in the most compact form possible. Numbers and arithmetic are a part of that enterprise, but there is a lot more besides. “Taking Sudoku Seriously” is an excellent vehicle whereby devotees of the puzzle can come to understand the nature of mathematics.

Score!

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ScienceBlogs Channel : Technology

2012-01-29T05:09:00.001-08:00

ScienceBlogs Channel : Technology

Weekend Diversion: The Best (and Easiest) Charity Ever! [Starts With A Bang]

Posted: 28 Jan 2012 05:55 PM PST

"You cannot hope to build a better world without improving individuals. We all must work for our own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity." -Marie Curie

Most of us remember the importance of being charitable on a few rare occasions throughout the year, most commonly around the year's end. But what about the rest of the year? Obviously, we don't have an unlimited amount of resources, so for most of us, it's not a viable option to do as Magnolia Electric Company suggests, and

Give Something Else Away Every Day.

But what if I told you there was a way to donate to charity, help advance science, and give yourself a chance to win a nice sum of money, at really no cost to you?

May I present to you The Charity Engine, the best supercomputing project I've ever heard of. You might have heard of individual projects like Einstein@Home, which has found 16 pulsars since its inception, or SETI@Home, which sifted through telescope data for signals of extraterrestrial intelligence. Both of these relied on sending unprocessed data to individual computers all across the internet, having users donate their spare processor time to doing these computations, and sending the finished work back to the server. This basic idea -- borne from the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing -- is the core of the Charity Engine.

But the Charity Engine goes far beyond any of these projects. Let's say you've got an enormous computing job and not enough computing power to do it. I don't care whether you're a scientist, a University, or an independent company, where do you go? Enter the Charity Engine!

Charity Engine takes enormous, expensive computing jobs and chops them into 1000s of small pieces, each simple enough for a home PC to work on as a background task. Once each PC has finished its part of the puzzle, it sends back the correct answer and earns some money for charity - and for the prize fund. (It also earns more chances to win.)

Where does the money come from? Science and industry. The grid is rented like a giant supercomputer, then all the profits shared 50-50 between the charities and the lucky prize winners.

Charity Engine typically adds less than 10 cents per day to a PC's energy costs and can generate $10-$20 for charity - and the prize draws - for each $1 of electricity consumed.

It is the most efficient way to donate to charity ever invented.

As you can see, above and below, they've got an impressive array of charity partners, and a strict commitment to only rent the grid to ethical users, and to treat you, the donor, ethically, too.

You can follow them on facebook and twitter, and by joining, you can become part of what they're hoping will become the world's fastest supercomputer within a single year! For each additional dollar (or pound, or euro) you spend on electricity on this application, you generate about twenty times as much for the Charity Engine, which gets split, 50/50, between their charities and their users. (That's you!) And you never have to think about it; it only uses your CPU's idle time, and turns itself back off as soon as you try to use your machine again! (The worst thing it does is make itself your screensaver and require a restart after installation.)

Best of all, you've got a great reason to support them: they come certified by Starts With A Bang! Let's say you want to, I don't know, simulate the formation of a galaxy -- from scratch -- in the Universe?

(Video credit: Fabio Governato et al./U. of Washington/NASA Advanced Supercomputing.)

You and hundreds of other people, right? Who decides whose project is worthy of the Charity Engine's power? They'd need some kind of expert to help them decide, right?

There's an entire science panel, and yours truly sits on it, to help decide which projects get the 5-10% of the grid permanently reserved for pure science! So you're not just supporting charity, you're supporting legitimate science, hand-picked by me and the rest of the science panel! (Plus, their CEO is a huge fan of this blog, so you know there's good taste involved here!)

Read more about them at crunchbase, Fast Company, and one of Charity Engine's charity partners, OxFam. This is a great opportunity for everyone to support science, help charity, and -- for those of you who feel lucky -- maybe win a small fortune while you're at it. How can you not feel good about this; get started and help make something wonderful happen today! Read the comments on this post...

Alterações na Política de Privacidade e nos Termos de Serviço do Google

2012-01-28T13:10:00.001-08:00

		Esta mensagens não está sendo exibida corretamente? Abra-a em seu navegador.
Caro usuário do Google, Estamos substituindo mais de 60 políticas de privacidade diferentes do Google por uma política mais concisa e fácil de ler. A nova política abrange vários produtos e recursos, refletindo nosso objetivo de criar uma experiência extremamente simples e intuitiva em todos os produtos do Google. Isto é importante. Assim, dedique alguns minutos para ler as versões atualizadas da nossa Política de Privacidade e dos nossos Termos de Serviço em http://www.google.com/policies. Estas mudanças entrarão em vigor no dia 1º de março de 2012.
Uma política, uma experiência no Google

Fácil de trabalhar em vários produtos Nossa nova política reflete nosso desejo de criar uma experiência de produto simples, que ofereça o que você precisar, quando você quiser. Seja ao ler um e-mail que o faça lembrar de marcar um encontro familiar ou encontrar um vídeo favorito que você queira compartilhar, queremos que você possa utilizar com facilidade o Gmail, o Google Agenda, a ferramenta de pesquisa, o YouTube ou o que mais você quiser.	Sob medida para você Se você fizer login no Google, podemos sugerir consultas de pesquisa ou adequar os resultados da pesquisa de acordo com os interesses que você expressou no Google+, Gmail e YouTube. Assim, poderemos compreender melhor qual versão do Pink ou Jaguar você está pesquisando e oferecer esses resultados com mais rapidez.	Compartilhar e colaborar é fácil Ao postar ou criar um documento on-line, é provável que você queira que outras pessoas o vejam e contribuam. Ao lembrar as informações de contato das pessoas com quem você deseja compartilhar, facilitamos seu compartilhamento em qualquer produto ou serviço do Google com o mínimo de cliques e erros.

A proteção de sua privacidade não mudou. Nosso objetivo é fornecer a você o máximo de transparência e de escolha possível, por meio de produtos como Google Dashboard e Gerenciador de preferências de anúncios entre outras ferramentas. Nossos princípios de privacidade permanecem os mesmos. Ainda, nunca venderemos nem compartilharemos suas informações profissionais sem sua permissão (a não ser em raras circunstâncias, como solicitações legais legítimas).	Alguma dúvida? Temos a resposta. Visite nossas Perguntas frequentes em http://www.google.com/policies/faq para saber mais sobre estas mudanças. (Imaginamos que nossos usuários podem ter uma pergunta ou vinte e duas.)

Aviso de alteração A nova Política de Privacidade e os novos Termos de Serviço do entrarão em vigor em 1º de março de 2012. Se optar por continuar usando o Google assim que a alteração ocorrer, você fará isso de acordo com a nova Política de Privacidade e os Termos de Serviço. Não responda a este e-mail. Respostas enviadas para este endereço não serão respondidas. Nunca insira sua senha após abrir um link que aponte para um site não confiável. Em vez disso, acesse diretamente o site, como mail.google.com ou www.google.com/accounts. O Google nunca mandará um e-mail pedindo sua senha ou outra informação confidencial.

See attached file

2012-01-28T10:34:00.001-08:00

Open attached file

ScienceBlogs Channel : Life Science

2012-01-28T05:16:00.001-08:00

ScienceBlogs Channel : Life Science

Kicking sand to catch fish [Life Lines]
Friday Cephalopod: Cuteness! [Pharyngula]
Nothing more fun than making discoveries [Tomorrow's Table]
The comparison to jabberwocky is inevitable [Pharyngula]
With Focus on Wowing Elementary and Middle School Students, Life Technologies Returns as Major Sponsor! [USA Science and Engineering Festival: The Blog]

Kicking sand to catch fish [Life Lines]

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 03:06 PM PST

I really love fishing! I can't think of a more relaxing time than sitting by the lake, or a more exciting time than going deep sea fishing. Therefore, I find animals that have come up with unique ways of catching fish pretty interesting. Take for example the humpback whales that we talked about in a previous blog. These animals actually create bubble-barriers around schools of fish to keep their meal in one spot.

It turns out that bottlenose dolphins also have a unique strategy. They use sand. By hitting the ocean floor with their tails, they create clouds of sand that act as barriers around schools of fish. Brilliant.

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Friday Cephalopod: Cuteness! [Pharyngula]

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 11:37 AM PST

The gang at Skepticon are running a poll to design the World's Most Innocuous Atheist Billboard, and they've settled on the message — "Baby Animals Are Cute" — and they've got some choices for you to pick from. I thought I'd help and offer my own suggestion:

See? Far superior to the kittens and puppies they suggest, and it's much more in the spirit of atheism.

DO NOT ARGUE WITH ME. Or Baby Octopus will devour you.

(Also on FtB)

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Nothing more fun than making discoveries [Tomorrow's Table]

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 10:09 AM PST

"Nothing more fun than making discoveries in nature and then seeing them used for the public good "

Listen to the NPR interview with enthusiastic Professor Emeritus Murray Gardener.

He describes recent UCDavis symposium with 2011 Nobel Laureates Bruce Beutler and Jules Hoffman

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The comparison to jabberwocky is inevitable [Pharyngula]

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 09:35 AM PST

Lots of people have been sending me this paper by Erik Andrulis, and most of you have done so with eyebrows raised, pointing out that it's bizarre and unbelievable; some of you wrote asking whether it was believable, at which point my eyebrows went up. Come on people: when you see one grand cosmic explanation that is summarized with cartoons, which the author claims explains everything from the behavior of subatomic particles to the formation of the moon, shouldn't you immediately sense crankery?

It's also getting cited all over the place, from World of Warcraft fan sites to the Discovery Institute (those two have roughly equal credibility in matters of science), so I had to skim through it. I read it with rising concern: Erik Andrulis is a young assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University, and he's published entirely sensible papers on RNA processing. This paper is so weird and out there that it is either an attempt to Sokal the field of origins of life research, or the man is seriously mentally ill. Either way, this is not going to help his career in the slightest.

The paper is titled Theory of the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life, and just the sweeping grandiosity of that title should set off alarm bells. Here is the abstract:

Life is an inordinately complex unsolved puzzle. Despite significant theoretical progress, experimental anomalies, paradoxes, and enigmas have revealed paradigmatic limitations. Thus, the advancement of scientific understanding requires new models that resolve fundamental problems. Here, I present a theoretical framework that economically fits evidence accumulated from examinations of life. This theory is based upon a straightforward and non-mathematical core model and proposes unique yet empirically consistent explanations for major phenomena including, but not limited to, quantum gravity, phase transitions of water, why living systems are predominantly CHNOPS (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur), homochirality of sugars and amino acids, homeoviscous adaptation, triplet code, and DNA mutations. The theoretical framework unifies the macrocosmic and microcosmic realms, validates predicted laws of nature, and solves the puzzle of the origin and evolution of cellular life in the universe.

Having skimmed through all 105 pages of this thing, I can tell you with confidence that it answers none of those questions. Just the fact that it is entirely non-mathematical and non-empirical (there aren't any observations or experiments described at all), and that the entirety of the theory is built around diagrams sketched out by the author, should also tell you that this is not a useful or predictive theory.

It does not have an auspicious beginning. In addition to being constructed around cartoons and being a non-mathematical Theory of Everything, it has to introduce an elaborate collection of neologisms that make the whole paper painful to read.

In the theory proposed herein, I use the heterodox yet simple gyre--a spiral, vortex, whorl, or similar circular pattern--as a core model for understanding life. Because many elements of the gyre model (gyromodel) are alien, I introduce neologisms and important terms in bold italics to identify them; a theoretical lexicon is presented in Table 1. The central idea of this theory is that all physical reality, stretching from the so-called inanimate into the animate realm and from micro- to meso- to macrocosmic scales, can be interpreted and modeled as manifestations of a single geometric entity, the gyre. This entity is attractive because it has life-like characteristics, undergoes morphogenesis, and is responsive to environmental conditions. The gyromodel depicts the spatiotemporal behavior and properties of elementary particles, celestial bodies, atoms, chemicals, molecules, and systems as quantized packets of information, energy, and/or matter that oscillate between excited and ground states around a singularity. The singularity, in turn, modulates these states by alternating attractive and repulsive forces. The singularity itself is modeled as a gyre, thus evincing a thermodynamic, fractal, and nested organization of the gyromodel. In fitting the scientific evidence from quantum gravity to cell division, this theory arrives at an understanding of life that questions traditional beliefs and definitions.

Here's a partial copy of his lexicon. It goes on quite a bit longer than what I've copied here.

Table 1. Gyromodel Lexicon

Alternagyre A gyrosystem whose gyrapex is not triquantal

Dextragyre A right-handed gyre or gyromodel

Focagyre A gyre that is the focal point of analysis or discussion

Gyradaptor The gyre singularity--a quantum--that exerts all forces on the gyrosystem

Gyrapex The relativistically high potential, excited, unstable, learning state of a particle

Gyraxiom A fact, condition, principle, or rule that constrains and defines the theoretical framework
Gyre The spacetime shape or path of a particle or group of particles; a quantum

Gyrequation Shorthand notation for analysis, discussion, and understanding gyromodels

Gyrobase The relativistically low potential, ground, stable, memory state of a particle

Gyrognosis The thermodynamically demanding process of learning and integrating IEM

Gyrolink The mIEM particle that links two gyromodules in a gyronexus

Gyromnemesis The thermodynamically conserving process of remembering and recovering IEM

Gyromodel The core model undergirding the theoretical framework

Gyromodule A dIEM particle in a gyronexus

Gyronexus A polymer of dIEM particles linked by mIEM particles

Gyrostate The potential and/or kinetic state that a particle occupies in its gyratory path

Gyrosystem A gyromodel with specific IEM composition, organization, and purpose

IEM Information, energy, and/or matter

I can't help myself. You knew this was coming.

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Now I know that you are in lexical shock right now, but I'm about to make it worse. Witness the use of these terms in figure 1 of the paper, which will also reveal the kinds of diagrams he's using.

"The levorafocagyre, in turn, is antichiral to the dextrasupragyre" is a nice sentence that about sums up the experience of reading this thing. Don't believe me? Here are more excerpts that illustrate the grand, cosmic, and entirely uninformative nature of gyroexplanatory gyrobabble. Andrulis purports to explain everything from learning and memory (learning and memory by gyres, not the poor people trying to understand his paper):

The ultimate state of gyromnemesis is the stably adapted particle or gyronexus in the gyrobase. A particle thus adapts through learning and memory by completing one full cycle--a revolution-- around the singularity. Taken together, gyrognosis defines IEM integration and assessment whereas gyromnemesis defines IEM storage and recovery. Finally, although a diquantal IEM (X'') undergoes gyrognosis as the gyrobase of a primary majorgyre, it undergoes gyromnemesis as the gyrapex of an alternagyre. Thus, gyre learning and memory are relative to the gyradaptive singularity.

To the formation of Earth's moon:

Lunar Formation. The favored hypothesis for the formation of Earth's Moon is from planetesimal impact on a proto-Earth proceeded by matter ejection, accretion, and gravitational capture [189,190]. However, the question of lunar origin has not been settled since there are competing, albeit antiquated hypotheses [191,192]. I also discovered the stunning admission that, "...shamefacedly, [astronomers] have little idea as to where [the Moon] came from. This is particularly embarrassing... [193]." The oxygyre models the Moon as a macroxyon that has a macroelectron within itself; this simple gyrosystem accounts for the known chemical composition of the Moon surface, oxides [194]. Regarding lunar origin, the macroxyon that is the Moon emerges from the macroelectron that is the Earth, concomitant with the emergence of Earth's macroxyon [195,196].
Several additional points can be derived from this gyrosystem. First, the oxygyre explains water on and in the Moon [197-199]. Second, the gyrating effects of the macroxygyre model the rotation of the Moon on its axis. Third, the path of a less exergic macroxyon (Moon) around more exergic one (Earth) follows an ohiogyre path, or lunar orbit. Fourth, this oxygyre provides insight into how tidal cycling is linked to lunar orbit and axial rotation [200] since the Earth's oceans (macroxymatrix) and Moon itself (a macroxyon) exert complementary attractorepulsive forces. Fifth, this theoretical union also helps clarify short-term chronobiological ([201]; see 3.8) and long-term geophysical [202] relationships. Sixth, the craters that cover planetary, lunar, and satellite surfaces [203-205]--most if not all of which are near-perfect circles--bear the signature of the macroelectron singularity and its strong thermodynamic force on the oxygyre [206].

You know what? That doesn't explain anything!

While the strange terminology and nonsensical claims could be clues that this is an elaborate Poe of some sort, the story I've heard from some other sources is that Andrulis is not getting tenure and will be leaving Case next year, and that he seems to have a history of tuning in and out — so what this most like is is a developing personal tragedy. I hope he gets the care he clearly needs; his other work suggests that this is an intelligent mind that is currently going off the rails.

Setting Andrulis aside, though, there are other problems here. How did this paper get published? It's terrible: unreadable, incoherent, bizarre, and completely lacking in evidence or mathematical support. This is from the very first issue of a new journal, Life, which also contains a perfectly reasonable general summary of origins of life research by Stuart Kauffman alongside Andrulis's ghastly dreck. There seems to be a complete lack of editorial discrimination at the journal; this is not the way to build a reputation. Or rather, it is, but not a desirable one.

And then there is Science Daily, which seems to be the source where most of my correspondents found this paper. Science Daily is an incredibly annoying source: all they do is republish, without any kind of intelligent assessment, press releases. They suck. What good is mindless regurgitation?

And finally, there's Case Western Reserve University, which must bear a share of the blame. Where did the press release come from? Why, from the Media Relations office at CWRU. Somebody wrote the press release that begins like this:

The earth is alive, asserts a revolutionary scientific theory of life emerging from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. The trans-disciplinary theory demonstrates that purportedly inanimate, non-living objects--for example, planets, water, proteins, and DNA--are animate, that is, alive. With its broad explanatory power, applicable to all areas of science and medicine, this novel paradigm aims to catalyze a veritable renaissance.

It's madness stamped with the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine seal of approval. If Andrulis did Sokal the journal, he also Sokal'ed the institution that employs him. Who wrote that bullshit? Do they have anyone competent review their press releases before they mail them out to the whole wide world? Was there anyone thinking in all the steps from crank professor to PR department to journal editor to reviewers? There were so many points where this crackpottery should have been detected and rejected, and it didn't happen.

(Also on FtB)

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With Focus on Wowing Elementary and Middle School Students, Life Technologies Returns as Major Sponsor! [USA Science and Engineering Festival: The Blog]

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 07:00 AM PST

As many educators know, the elementary and middle school years are critical periods in which students' interest in science can "wither on the vine" if efforts are not made early to engage young learners in such subjects in exciting and creative ways.

This is why global biotech leader Life Technologies -- as it prepares to return as a major Sponsor of the USA Science & Engineering Festival next spring.-- will devote a major portion of its outreach exhibits at the finale Expo to wowing elementary and middle school students through a wide range of interactive science activities.

"We know how important it is for kids, especially young girls, to remain engaged and motivated in science at that age," says Heather Virdo, head of Community Relations for Life Technologies." And we know how powerful science outreach can be when it is combined with exciting hands-on interaction with real-life scientists and other professionals.

"That's why," she says, "Life Technologies looks forward to returning as a Sponsor of a major public event like the Science & Engineering Festival as this gathering works to help inspire young students to become leading scientists of tomorrow and to prepare them to play an important role in developing new applications and technologies that will lead our society into the future."

Life Technologies Corporation and its Foundation, with its long history of scientific excellence and community involvement, is also known for its deep commitment to supporting the next generation of scientific leaders through education and outreach in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

At the Life Technologies exhibits during the finale Expo in April, elementary and middle school students and their teachers will get an up-close-and personal look into the
intriguing world of bioscience research, including how Life Technologies scientists are using DNA sequencing techniques to not only better diagnose, treat and investigate disease, but to also save wild cheetahs and other endangered species, in addition to improving farming and agriculture techniques for the food we eat.

And through hands-on interaction with Life Technologies scientists and research technicians, Expo goers will also participate in genetic sequencing and human identification exercises.

"The Festival also offers a great way for our non-scientist employees at Life Technologies to also become involved with outreach," says Heather. "So members of our Human Resources, Finance and other departments will also be present to talk to students about career opportunities in these fields as well at our corporation."

Known worldwide for its innovation and leadership in scientific discovery, Life Technologies is a global biotechnology tools company dedicated to improving the human condition. Its systems, consumables and services enable researchers to accelerate scientific exploration, driving to discoveries and developments that make life even better. Life Technologies was created by the combination of Invitrogen Corporation and Applied Biosystems Inc., and manufactures both in-vitro diagnostic products and research use only-labeled products.

We thank Life Technologies and our other valued Sponsors as they join us in our goal of inspiring the next generation of scientists and engineers!

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ScienceBlogs Channel : Medicine & Health

2012-01-28T05:11:00.001-08:00

ScienceBlogs Channel : Medicine & Health

Nothing more fun than making discoveries [Tomorrow's Table]

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 10:09 AM PST

"Nothing more fun than making discoveries in nature and then seeing them used for the public good "

Listen to the NPR interview with enthusiastic Professor Emeritus Murray Gardener.

He describes recent UCDavis symposium with 2011 Nobel Laureates Bruce Beutler and Jules Hoffman

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ScienceBlogs Channel : Physical Science

2012-01-28T05:10:00.001-08:00

ScienceBlogs Channel : Physical Science

Two incontrovertible things: Anthropogenic Global Warming is Real, and the Wall Street Journal is Political Rag [Greg Laden's Blog]

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 08:40 PM PST

The Wall Street Journal has published one of the most offensive, untruthful, twisted reviews of what scientists think of climate change; the WSJ Lies about the facts and twists the story to accommodate the needs of head-in-the-sand industrialists and 1%ers; The most compelling part of their argument, according to them, is that the editorial has been signed by 16 scientists.

The scientists who signed to WSJ editorial are:

Claude Allegre, former director of the Institute for the Study of the Earth, University of Paris; J. Scott Armstrong, cofounder of the Journal of Forecasting and the International Journal of Forecasting; Jan Breslow, head of the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism, Rockefeller University; Roger Cohen, fellow, American Physical Society; Edward David, member, National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences; William Happer, professor of physics, Princeton; Michael Kelly, professor of technology, University of Cambridge, U.K.; William Kininmonth, former head of climate research at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology; Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric sciences, MIT; James McGrath, professor of chemistry, Virginia Technical University; Rodney Nichols, former president and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences; Burt Rutan, aerospace engineer, designer of Voyager and SpaceShipOne; Harrison H. Schmitt, Apollo 17 astronaut and former U.S. senator; Nir Shaviv, professor of astrophysics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem; Henk Tennekes, former director, Royal Dutch Meteorological Service; Antonio Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists, Geneva.

Emphasis added to underscore the fact that this is a group of older and often retired weathermen, engineers, or otherwise not-climate-scientists. Speaking of lists of scientists, here's another one:

P. H. GLEICK
R. M. ADAMS
R. M. AMASINO
E. ANDERS
D. J. ANDERSON
W. W. ANDERSON
L. E. ANSELIN
M. K. ARROYO
B. ASFAW
F. J. AYALA
A. BAX
A. J. BEBBINGTON
G. BELL
M. V. L. BENNETT
J. L. BENNETZEN
M. R. BERENBAUM
O. B. BERLIN
P. J. BJORKMAN
E. BLACKBURN
J. E. BLAMONT
M. R. BOTCHAN
J. S. BOYER
E. A. BOYLE
D. BRANTON
S. P. BRIGGS
W. R. BRIGGS
W. J. BRILL
R. J. BRITTEN
W. S. BROECKER
J. H. BROWN
P. O. BROWN
A. T. BRUNGER
J. CAIRNS JR.
D. E. CANFIELD
S. R. CARPENTER
J. C. CARRINGTON
A. R. CASHMORE
J. C. CASTILLA
A. CAZENAVE
F. S. CHAPIN III
A. J. CIECHANOVER
D. E. CLAPHAM
W. C. CLARK
R. N. CLAYTON
M. D. COE
E. M. CONWELL
E. B. COWLING
R. M COWLING
C. S. COX
R. B. CROTEAU
D. M. CROTHERS
P. J. CRUTZEN
G. C. DAILY
G. B. DALRYMPLE
J. L. DANGL
S. A. DARST
D. R. DAVIES
M. B. DAVIS
P. V. DE CAMILLI
C. DEAN
R. S. DEFRIES
J. DEISENHOFER
D. P. DELMER
E. F. DELONG
D. J. DEROSIER
T. O.
DIENER
R. DIRZO
J. E. DIXON
M. J. DONOGHUE
R. F. DOOLITTLE
T. DUNNE
P. R. EHRLICH
S. N. EISENSTADT
T. EISNER
K. A. EMANUEL
S. W.
ENGLANDER
W. G. ERNST
P. G. FALKOWSKI
G. FEHER
J. A. FEREJOHN
A. FERSHT
E. H. FISCHER
R. FISCHER
K. V. FLANNERY
J. FRANK
P. A. FREY
I. FRIDOVICH
C. FRIEDEN
D. J. FUTUYMA
W. R. GARDNER
C. J. R. GARRETT
W. GILBERT
R. B. GOLDBERG
W. H. GOODENOUGH
C. S. GOODMAN
M. GOODMAN
P. GREENGARD
S. HAKE
G. HAMMEL
S. HANSON
S. C. HARRISON
S. R. HART
D. L. HARTL
R. HASELKORN
K. HAWKES
J. M. HAYES
B. HILLE
T. HÖKFELT
J. S. HOUSE
M. HOUT
D. M. HUNTEN
I. A. IZQUIERDO
A. T. JAGENDORF
D. H. JANZEN
R. JEANLOZ
C. S. JENCKS
W. A. JURY
H. R. KABACK
T. KAILATH
P. KAY
S. A. KAY
D. KENNEDY
A. KERR
R. C. KESSLER
G. S. KHUSH
S. W. KIEFFER
P. V. KIRCH
K. KIRK
M. G. KIVELSON
J. P. KLINMAN
A. KLUG
L. KNOPOFF
H. KORNBERG
J. E. KUTZBACH
J. C. LAGARIAS
K. LAMBECK
A. LANDY
C. H. LANGMUIR
B. A. LARKINS
X. T. LE PICHON
R. E. LENSKI
E. B. LEOPOLD
S. A. LEVIN
M. LEVITT
G. E. LIKENS
J. LIPPINCOTT-SCHWARTZ
L. LORAND
C. O. LOVEJOY
M. LYNCH
A. L. MABOGUNJE
T. F. MALONE
S. MANABE
J. MARCUS
D. S. MASSEY
J. C. MCWILLIAMS
E. MEDINA
H. J. MELOSH

D. J. MELTZER
C. D. MICHENER
E. L. MILES
H. A. MOONEY
P. B. MOORE
F. M. M. MOREL
E. S. MOSLEY-THOMPSON
B. MOSS
W. H. MUNK
N. MYERS
G. B. NAIR
J. NATHANS
E. W. NESTER
R. A. NICOLL
R. P. NOVICK
J. F. O'CONNELL
P. E. OLSEN
N. D. OPDYKE
G. F. OSTER
E. OSTROM
N. R. PACE
R. T. PAINE
R. D. PALMITER
J. PEDLOSKY
G. A. PETSKO
G. H. PETTENGILL
S. G. PHILANDER
D. R. PIPERNO
T. D. POLLARD
P. B. PRICE JR.
P. A. REICHARD
B. F. RESKIN
R. E. RICKLEFS
R. L. RIVEST
J. D. ROBERTS
A. K. ROMNEY
M. G. ROSSMANN
D. W. RUSSELL
W. J. RUTTER
J. A. SABLOFF
R. Z. SAGDEEV
M. D. SAHLINS
A. SALMOND
J. R. SANES
R. SCHEKMAN
J. SCHELLNHUBER
D. W. SCHINDLER
J. SCHMITT
S. H. SCHNEIDER
V. L. SCHRAMM
R. R. SEDEROFF
C. J. SHATZ
F. SHERMAN
R. L. SIDMAN
K. SIEH
E. L. SIMONS
B. H. SINGER
M. F. SINGER
B. SKYRMS
N. H. SLEEP
B. D. SMITH
S. H. SNYDER
R. R. SOKAL
C. S. SPENCER
T. A. STEITZ
K. B. STRIER
T. C. SÜDHOF
S. S. TAYLOR
J. TERBORGH
D. H. THOMAS
L. G. THOMPSON
R. T. T JIAN
M. G. TURNER
S. UYEDA
J. W. VALENTINE
J. S. VALENTINE
J. L. VAN ETTEN
K. E. VAN HOLDE
M. VAUGHAN
S. VERBA
P. H. VON HIPPEL
D. B. WAKE
A. WALKER
J. E. WALKER
E. B. WATSON
P. J. WATSON
D. WEIGEL
S. R. WESSLER
M. J. WEST-EBERHARD
T. D. WHITE
W. J. WILSON
R. V. WOLFENDEN
J. A. WOOD
G. M. WOODWELL
H. E. WRIGHT JR.
C. WU
C. WUNSCH
M. L. ZOBACK

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It's a Real Book! [Uncertain Principles]

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 08:54 AM PST

I was going to write something about the politics of scientific publishing, but instead, I want to focus on what's really important in modern publishing:

That's right, I got a couple of early copies of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog in the mail this morning. It's a real book, with pages and everything... You can see it above, next to How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, and various clutter on my desk, for scale.

There's not much else to say, other than "Woo-hoo!" They're printing lots more, of course, and it will be available wherever books are sold starting Feb. 28th.

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ScienceBlogs Channel : Humanities & Social Science

2012-01-28T05:09:00.001-08:00

ScienceBlogs Channel : Humanities & Social Science

Recent Archaeomags [Aardvarchaeology]

Posted: 28 Jan 2012 01:52 AM PST

British Archaeology #122 (Jan/Feb) has a good feature on the origins of Roman London, presenting and collating evidence from excavations in the 90s and 00s for a military camp immediately post-dating the AD 43 invasion of Britain. The editors have slapped a silly headline on the thing though, playing up a short passage about human heads deposited in the Walbrook stream as if this were the main issue dealt with in the piece.

The unsigned last page discusses the important work of Raimund Karl (in The Historic Environment: Policy & Practice Oct 2011; read it on-line), who has compared the results of the English/Welsh and the Austrian legal attitude to metal detecting and other situations where members of the public make archaeological finds. In the former case, the Portable Antiquities Scheme encourages the public to report their finds voluntarily. It was instituted in 1997, and reporting immediately exploded in volume. Year after year the PAS is seeing an exponential increase in the number of reported finds, and it's not just metalwork either: fieldwalking flint enthusiasts are also participating very actively. Meanwhile, Austria has put a tight lid on things: if you find anything you're legally obliged to report it within two days, only archaeology graduates can dig, and only archaeology graduates with a licence can metal-detect. The result? Reporting of the finds that are always made went down and stayed down.

"The conclusion must be that when it comes to the practice of public archaeology, openness, co-operation and education trump suppression. The law-breaking, abusive minority of English and Welsh detectorists, however should be exposed and stopped. They poison the atmosphere for everyone."

I'd like to add that law-abiding amateur archaeologists (with or without metal detectors) are not a problem that the discipline (grudgingly) must deal with. They represent an enormous resource in free labour, political clout and local knowledge that should be celebrated and made good use of. Archaeology and heritage management has incomparably better chances of reaching their goals with the public as participants than as spectators.

Archaeology Magazine #65:1 (Jan/Feb) has a great piece on underwater archaeology at the site of the naval Battle of the Egadi Islands off western Sicily in 241 BC. The Roman's beat the Carthaginians here, but there are no shipwrecks to be seen on the sea floor: shipworm has eaten the wood and recent trawling has bulldozed what was left. Still, there is one find category that survives: large cast bronze objects, such as ship rams and helmets. And Florida-based non-profit RPM Nautical Foundation is locating and lifting these things with the aid of remotely operated subs. They have six of the huge rams now! And every one of them pinpoints a spot where either a ship went down or a ram was dropped after a collision. Few naval battles of the 2nd millennium AD are mapped to such precision.

On thing that takes me aback however is the ads. Advertisers are usually pretty savvy about who the target audience of a given media outlet is. You won't see ads for home mortgages or cars on the Disney Channel. And the ads in Archaeology Magazine show clearly who reads the mag: people who might want to buy collectible coins, cruises in the Mediterranean, "The world's simplest computer ... designed for seniors", running shoes that "defy aging", simple-to-use stripped down cell phones, hearing aids, cultured pearl necklaces and staircase lifts. I wonder if the publishers expect the next generation of senior citizens to start subscribing when they retire, or if the mag will fold when the current readership kicks the bucket. It reminds me of when Skeptical Inquirer used to run an ad in every issue inviting readers to provide for CSICOP in their wills (are they still doing that?). Doesn't give a very forward-looking impression.

In issue #263 (Feb) of Current Archaeology, one of my favourite pop-arch mags, is a piece on a great new find from the famous Flag Fen in Cambridgeshire: a silted-up river channel with six well-preserved Bronze Age canoes, a fish-weir and some sacrificed weaponry. The canoes were left in that river from about 1300 to 700 BC, which opens for several possibilities: it's continuity either of everyday boat management, or of boat sacrifice, or (less likely) of where the natural waterflow liked to deposit stuff that floated downstream.

Likewise fascinating is a feature on Irish souterrains, secret underground stone-walled passages dug as refuges at ordinary farmsteads in the Viking Period. An early type allowed people to escape into the open air, but later they decided that it was better to simply crawl into the passage with your kids and a spear and stay there until the Vikings left, as if the passage was just a corridor-shaped cellar. The passages zig-zag and so it was impossible for people on the surface to find the end chambers where people were hiding at short notice. Similar passages occur in Pre-Roman Denmark a thousand years previously.

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It's a Real Book! [Uncertain Principles]

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 08:54 AM PST

I was going to write something about the politics of scientific publishing, but instead, I want to focus on what's really important in modern publishing:

There's not much else to say, other than "Woo-hoo!" They're printing lots more, of course, and it will be available wherever books are sold starting Feb. 28th.

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ScienceBlogs Channel : Technology

2012-01-27T05:22:00.001-08:00

ScienceBlogs Channel : Technology

Fuel from Seaweed [We Beasties]

Posted: 26 Jan 2012 10:00 AM PST

I grew up on the coast of California, and I loved to surf. At my favorite break, Pleasure Point, the best waves were often at low tide, but low tide also meant seaweed. Lots of seaweed.

[Source]

The giant kelp of Monteray Bay is an astonishing organism. It's not actually a plant, it's a brown algae, and it can grow 12 inches per day. This rapid growth makes it an ideal resource, and a bane of surfers that get their fins caught in thick mats.

You can't tell, but it was definitely kelp that made me fall, not the fact that I was too far forward and unable to turn. No, really...

Brown algae like kelp can be harvested as a source of algin, and other types of seaweed are also used as sources for products like agar that we use in labs to make bacterial culture plates.

But there's also been a lot of interest in using different sorts of algae as feedstocks for the production of biofuels. Their rapid growth makes them eminently renewable, they require almost no effort to cultivate, no fertilizer, no fresh water, they would not use up arable land that can be used for food crops. The main draw back is that one of the most abundant sugars present in algae, called alginate, is not digestible by the microorganims currently used for biofuel production at an industrial scale. Until now.

An Engineered Microbial Platform for Direct Biofuel Production from Brown Macroalgae

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ScienceBlogs Channel : Life Science

2012-01-27T05:19:00.001-08:00

ScienceBlogs Channel : Life Science

Fuel from Seaweed [We Beasties]

Posted: 26 Jan 2012 10:00 AM PST

I grew up on the coast of California, and I loved to surf. At my favorite break, Pleasure Point, the best waves were often at low tide, but low tide also meant seaweed. Lots of seaweed.

[Source]

You can't tell, but it was definitely kelp that made me fall, not the fact that I was too far forward and unable to turn. No, really...

Brown algae like kelp can be harvested as a source of algin, and other types of seaweed are also used as sources for products like agar that we use in labs to make bacterial culture plates.

An Engineered Microbial Platform for Direct Biofuel Production from Brown Macroalgae

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Petrels, Albatrosses, and Storm-Petrels of North America [Greg Laden's Blog]

Posted: 26 Jan 2012 08:00 AM PST

Did you know that there is an entire group of birds called "Tube Noses" because they have tubes on their noses? Well, to be more exact, the term is "tubenoses" and the noses are beaks. The tubes are tubular nostril-like thingies that most (all?) birds have which are extra tube-like in the tubenoses. Thus the name.

Albatrosses, petrels, and storm-petrels, which includes shearwaters, make up the tubenoses, and the newly produced book Petrels, Albatrosses, and Storm-Petrels of North America: A Photographic Guide is about the North American species of this order, scientifically known as the Procellariiformes.

I love this book and I now want to become a tubenose watcher. This will be difficult from Minnesota. What makes it difficult is that Procellariiformes are ocean birds, and are truly pelagic, returning to land only to breed, and generally then only to remote islands. But there are exceptions. Some nest in the interior in the Arctic region, and they are occasionally seen on the Salton Sea and in the Sonoran desert (a 1997 report lists 27 records of this, ever).

There are four Families divided among 23 Genera made up of 140+ Species of tubenoses. (Wikipedia says there are only 108 species ... can somebody fix that please?) There are about 70 species in North America at present, or recently known. There are probably more endangered tubenoses than any other Order of bird, or if not, nearly so. They spend a lot of time in the air, a lot of time at sea, and spend so little time on land that many species can't really walk. One group, the fulmar-petrels, converges on skunks: Some of them can project a noxious liquid several feet from their mouths to discourage predators.

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ScienceBlogs Channel : Medicine & Health

2012-01-27T05:16:00.001-08:00

ScienceBlogs Channel : Medicine & Health

Vaccines are "transhumanism"? [Respectful Insolence]

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 03:00 AM PST

In the more than a decade since I first discovered, to my shock, that there are actual people out there who not only don't believe that vaccines are safe despite overwhelming evidence that they are but in fact believe that they don't work and are dangerous, I thought I had seen every antivaccine argument out there. After all, I just wrote about the tactics and the tropes of the antivaccine movement in which I reviewed, well, the tactics and tropes of the antivaccine movement. One of the favorite (and therefore most commonly used) tropes of the anti-vaccine movement is that vaccines are somehow "unnatural." There are many variants of this particular trope, for example the claim that "natural" infection is better than vaccination. This delusion sometimes reaches the point where some antivaccine parents will do something as stupid as to try to send lollipops licked by their children with chickenpox through the mail to other parents, the aim being to allow those parents to expose their children the chickenpox in order to give their children the "benefit" of "natural immunity."

Yes, I thought I had seen every variation of the "unnatural" trope so beloved by antivaccinationists that, I must admit, the following took me rather by surprise. It's on a website whose name GreenMedInfo.com tells you just about all you need to know about it. My brief perusal of the site reveals that it's chock full of "natural" medicine quackery. Consistent with this, it appears to be rabidly antivaccine, as evidenced by a little dittie by someone named Sayer, who appears to be the person responsible for this website, entitled The Vaccination Agenda: An Implicit Transhumanism/Dehumanism. it's a crank trifecta, combining antivaccine tropes, conspiracy mongering, and the natural fallacy in heaping helpings, all topped off with fear mongering implying that vaccines are somehow responsible for making us less "human." At this late date, having been in the trenches for a while, even I don't recall having seen a screed so full of crazy. It's perfect for a Friday, when, even though I rarely do "Your Friday Dose of Woo" anymore, this might have been a good candidate for it. You'll see what I mean right away:

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Vaccines Save Lives [Greg Laden's Blog]

Posted: 26 Jan 2012 11:30 AM PST

I would have used a different script, in part, but the animation is good and it makes the point.

Hat Tip: Deanna Joy Lyons

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ScienceBlogs Channel : Physical Science

2012-01-27T05:13:00.001-08:00

ScienceBlogs Channel : Physical Science

New Planetary Systems Discovered [Greg Laden's Blog]

Posted: 26 Jan 2012 06:16 PM PST

Kepler has discovered 11 new "solar systems" with 26 confirmed planets among them. They:

Range from 1.5 Earths in radius to bigger than Jupiter
15 are between Earth and Neptune in size
They have years ranging from 6 to 143 days.

Their rockiness or gaseousness remains unassessed to date.

This artist's concept shows an overhead view of the orbital position of the planets in systems with multiple transiting planets discovered by NASA's Kepler mission. All the colored planets have been verified. More vivid colors indicate planets that have been confirmed by their gravitational interactions with each other or the star. Several of these systems contain additional planet candidates (shown in grey) that have not yet been verified. Image credit: NASA Ames/UC Santa Cruz

Also of interest is the number of transiting planets. Transiting planets are often how they find these systems to begin with; When a planet passes in front of its star (from our persepctive) we can detect it. There are a number of things that can be measured for these planets which eventually lead to a better understanding of what they are.

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Our Galaxy's Next Supernova [Starts With A Bang]

Posted: 26 Jan 2012 05:29 PM PST

"The diversity of the phenomena of nature is so great, and the treasures hidden in the heavens so rich, precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment." -Johannes Kepler

So said the man who, in 1604, discovered the supernova that was the last to be seen, visually, within our own galaxy. Although it's likely that two others occurred subsequently, they were not visible to human eyes, and only with powerful telescopes were their remnants discovered.

But earlier this week, the first supernova of the year was discovered, in a galaxy 25 million light years away, NGC 3239. The supernova, indicated below, is now known as SN 2012a.

(Image credit: Adam Block/Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/University of Arizona.)

With a typical rate of about one supernova per galaxy per century, one can't help but wonder, as one of our perennial commenters did, what we'd see -- and how quickly we'd manage to see it -- if a supernova went off in our own galaxy.

Remember, now, there are two ways we can have a supernova, but both ways involve a runaway nuclear fusion reaction, giving off a tremendous amount of light and energy. But most of the energy, perhaps surprisingly, isn't in the form of light! Let's take you inside a star that goes supernova during those critical few seconds.

(Image credit: TeraScale Supernova Initiative.)

Although there are shocks and heat that are produced, you'll see that the interior reactions produce neutrinos, nearly all of which do not interact with the outer layers of the star! A few of them do, as do all of the protons, neutrons and electrons produced, and the overall production isn't instantaneous. But while it takes some time -- a couple of hours -- for the shock to reach the outer surface of the dying star, the neutrinos make it out almost immediately!

What this means is that when we have a star go supernova, neutrinos get emitted from it before the light does! We actually discovered this, firsthand, back in 1987.

(Image credit: NASA, ESA, R. Kirshner and P. Challis.)

When supernova 1987a went off just 168,000 light years away, it was close enough -- and we had enough neutrino detectors operating -- that we detected 23 (anti)neutrinos over a timespan of about 13 seconds. The largest detector, Kamiokande-II, contained 3,000 tons of water and detected 11 antineutrinos.

Today, the detector that sits in the same spot, Super Kamiokande-III, contains 50,000 tons of water and contains over 11,000 photomultiplier tubes. (There are many other excellent neutrino detectors around the world, but I'm focusing on this one in particular as an example.)

(Image credit: Kamioka Observatory, ICRR, The University of Tokyo.)

This setup is so amazing because it can not only detect neutrinos, but it can reconstruct the direction, energy, and point-of-interaction of even a single neutrino fortunate enough to interact with any one particle in those 50,000 tons of water!

(Image credit: Kamioka Observatory, ICRR, The University of Tokyo.)

Depending on where a potential supernova goes off in our galaxy, we would expect Super Kamiokande-III to see anywhere from a few thousand antineutrinos (for something on the other side of the galaxy) to over ten million of them, all in the timespan of just 10-15 seconds!

Neutrino detectors from all over the world would see a flood of detections like this, all at the same time, all coming from the same direction. At that point, we'd have something on the order of two-to-three hours to identify the direction of origin of those neutrinos, and point our telescopes towards that direction to try and obtain an optical view of the supernova -- for the very first time -- from its very beginning!

(Image credit: Rose City Astronomers.)

The closest supernova since 1987 was this one from last year, which we managed to catch just half a day after ignition, which is remarkable.

We've gotten very close -- mostly by good fortune -- with a very intense hypernova back in 2002.

(Image credit: P. Ferrero et al., Astronomy & Astrophysics, 457, 857-864 (2006).)

Even so, we didn't get to first observe this one, SN 2002ap, until 3-4 hours after first ignition. If the supernova that eventually comes is a type Ia supernova -- which originates from a white dwarf -- we have no way of predicting where in the galaxy that will occur. White dwarfs are simply too abundant, and the locations of almost all of them are simply unknown, and thought to be distributed all over the galaxy.

But if this originates from a very massive star whose core collapses under its own gravity (i.e., a type II supernova), we have a number of really good candidates, and some outstanding places to look.

(Image credit: Hubble, Chandra, and Spitzer composite image.)

Most obvious is the galactic center, the location of the Milky Way's last known supernova, and also the location of the most massive stars ever discovered within our galaxy. We're certainly going to have many type II supernovae originating here over the next 100,000 years, but we have no way of knowing when we'll see the next one. As you look at the above picture, take a moment to appreciate that it's very likely already happened, and we're just waiting for the neutrinos (and then the light) to get here!

But there are closer candidates than the galactic center.

(Image credit: T. A. Rector & B. A. Wolpa, NOAO, AURA, retrieved here.)

Look inside one of the great, star forming nebulae in our galaxy, and you're going to find some of the hottest, youngest stars you're going to find anywhere in the Universe. This is where the ultra-massive stars live, and in particular, the Eagle Nebula, above, may be home to an extremely recent supernova. The Eagle Nebula, the Orion Nebula, and many other regions filled with new stars are all great places to anticipate the next supernova.

But what about known, individual stars? While there are many good candidates, we have two in particualr that we can't help but talk about.

(Image credit: Nathan Smith (University of California, Berkeley), and NASA.)

Eta Carinae, in the very last stages of its life, could literally go supernova at any second. But it may also live hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands more years before it does so. Still, if we get a flood of antineutrinos originating from anywhere near its position in space, this will be the very first place we point our telescopes!

But unlike all of these candidates that are many thousands of light-years away, we have one good one that's much closer. In fact, it's the closest supernova candidate we have!

(Image credit: A. Dupree, NASA.)

Say hello to Betelgeuse, a red supergiant just 640 light-years distant. Betelgeuse is so gigantic that it literally is the diameter of Saturn's orbit around the Sun! If Betelgeuse went supernova, our neutrino detectors around the globe would detect -- all told -- somewhere in the vicinity of a hundred million (anti)neutrinos, which is more neutrinos of any type than have ever been detected in the history of the world, combined.

But unless it's one of these known candidates that goes supernova, how will we tell whether it's a type Ia or a type II supernova?

(Image credit: Goddard Space Flight Center / NASA / Nick Short.)

We can always wait, I suppose. Supernovae of different types have very distinct light-curves, and how the light dies off after it's reached its peak brightness will tell us what type of supernova we had.

But if something this exciting happens, I'm not going to have that kind of patience. Luckily, I won't need it, because a supernova within our galaxy would likely be the very first detectable observation for the newest type of astronomy: Gravitational-Wave Astronomy!

(Image credit: Fermilab / SLAC / LIGO collaboration.)

Undisturbed by the presence of, well, anything, gravitational waves from a supernova explosion should pass through the intervening star, any gas, dust, or matter completely undisturbed, arriving at the same time the front end of the (anti)neutrino pulse arrives! The wonderful thing is that -- according to our best simulations of general relativity -- type II (core-collapse) and type Ia (inspiraling white dwarfs) should give vast different signals for gravitational waves!

If we have a type Ia supernova, we expect to see three separate regions to our signal.

(Image credit: Marc Favata / Cornell.)

The inspiral phase should give a periodic pulse that increases in frequency and magnitude as the white dwarfs reach their final stage of their separation. As the ignition occurs, there should be a spike in the signal, followed by a "ringdown" phase as the ripples go away. Very distinctive.

But if we have a type II supernova, from a super-massive collapsing star, we're only going to see two interesting things.

(Image credit: Harald Dimmelmeier, José A. Font, Ewald Müller, and Markus Rampp.)

Just a huge spike -- where the supernova itself occurs -- just a tenth of a second after the core collapses, followed by a very rapidly dying (within 0.02 seconds) ringdown. And so if we want to know what we saw, all we need to do is extract the telltale signal from gravitational waves!

And if the galaxy's next supernova were to happen today, this is what we'd see!

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TechGeeze.com: iPhone 5 to sport a 4-inch screen and new design

2012-01-26T17:26:00.001-08:00

TechGeeze.com: iPhone 5 to sport a 4-inch screen and new design

iPhone 5 to sport a 4-inch screen and new design

Posted: 26 Jan 2012 02:03 AM PST

Another string of iPhone 5 related rumors surfaced. Recently, there is a buzz that the 6th generation iPhone will sport a quad-core qualcom processor. Just now, we heard rumors that... Related posts:iPhone 5 to sport a bigger 4-inch displayiPhone 5G Colorful Concept DesigniPhone 5 Concept: Say...

>> Continue reading by hitting the title link above

Apple Has Spent More Than $100M On Android War

Posted: 25 Jan 2012 11:56 PM PST

After Apple has surpassed Samsung as the top smartphone manufacturer in the world, the battle still continues for the operating system running each Galaxy devices, yes against Android where the... Related posts:Apple vs. Samsung Patent War [Infographic]HTC overtakes Apple as Top Smartphone Vendor...

>> Continue reading by hitting the title link above

ScienceBlogs Channel : Humanities & Social Science

2012-01-26T05:20:00.000-08:00

ScienceBlogs Channel : Humanities & Social Science

IQ Varies with Context [Greg Laden's Blog]

Posted: 25 Jan 2012 11:27 AM PST

In a very interesting way.

As a regular reader of this blog, you know that IQ and similar measures are determined by a number of factors, and for most "normal" (modal?) individuals, one's heritage (genes) is rarely important. Putting it another way, variation across individuals in IQ and other measures have been shown again and again to be determined by things like home environment, diet and nutrition, and even immediate social context. Here's another finding supporting this:

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ScienceBlogs Channel : Technology

2012-01-26T05:14:00.001-08:00

ScienceBlogs Channel : Technology

Google's New Privacy Policy Unveiled [Greg Laden's Blog]

Posted: 25 Jan 2012 07:22 PM PST

From Google:

We're getting rid of over 60 different privacy policies across Google and replacing them with one that's a lot shorter and easier to read. Our new policy covers multiple products and features, reflecting our desire to create one beautifully simple and intuitive experience across Google.
This stuff matters, so please take a few minutes to read our updated Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service now. These changes will take effect on March 1, 2012.

The privacy policy is here.

The terms of service statement is here.

Here's a few tidbits from the documents, but you should go look for yourself and report back what you think!

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Inventors, Entrepreneurs, and Makers of All Things Technical and Scientific Will Find Amazing Ideas and Tools to Make Their Dreams Reality at USA Science & Engineering Festival [USA Science and Engineering Festival: The Blog]

Posted: 25 Jan 2012 07:00 AM PST

The USA Science & Engineering Festival hosted by Lockheed Martin offers a special appeal for budding entrepreneurs, inventors, engineers and programmers who will find the ideas, tools and resources to help them make their dreams a reality.

"The Festival is a fantastic place for technical experts of all kinds to learn about the amazing advances that have been made in technology to help them make product prototypes from 3D printers, find designs online for parts and components, and meet an array of experts to help them bring their product ideas to life," said Larry Bock, serial entrepreneur and Executive Director of the USA Science & Engineering Festival-- the nation's largest celebration of science and engineering that will take place April 28-29, 2012 in Washington, D.C. "If you're an inventor or entrepreneur looking for inspiration, the Festival will be a wealth of ideas and the DIY Expo will provide the tools to get your ideas in motion."

See our recent press release to read more.

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ScienceBlogs Channel : Physical Science

2012-01-26T05:13:00.001-08:00

ScienceBlogs Channel : Physical Science

So You Want To Be An Astrophysicist? Part 2.0 - GRE at [Dynamics of Cats]
Little, Big [Dynamics of Cats]
Department of Self-Promotion [EvolutionBlog]
A Toy Model of the Arrow of Time [Uncertain Principles]
There could be H2O ice on Vesta [Greg Laden's Blog]
The National Academy of Sciences Recognizes the Festival at the 149th Annual Meeting! [USA Science and Engineering Festival: The Blog]
Opportunity Mars Rover Still Working After Eight Years [Aardvarchaeology]

So You Want To Be An Astrophysicist? Part 2.0 - GRE at [Dynamics of Cats]

Posted: 25 Jan 2012 08:59 PM PST

So you want to be an astrophysicist?
You've suffered through 3-4 years of undergrad, and you're ready for more.
You picked the places to apply to (or have you...?), and you're ready for the paperwork.

Another lightly retouched blast from the past...

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Little, Big [Dynamics of Cats]

Posted: 25 Jan 2012 08:30 PM PST

interesting pair of stories on black hole discoveries

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Department of Self-Promotion [EvolutionBlog]

Posted: 25 Jan 2012 06:58 PM PST

Well, the BSB (that's the Big Sudoku Book) has now received its first review. It comes from Ed Pegg Jr., who runs an excellent website about mathematical games and puzzles and is very well-known among those interested in recreational mathematics. Did he like the book?

Along with Sudoku Masterpieces and Mutant Sudoku, this is one of the best Sudoku books ever written. And I do mean written/crafted -- too many Sudoku books are computer generated. This book shows a lot of careful craftsmanship.

He did! Go check out the rest of the review. Then go buy multiple copies before they are all gone and you are left feeling silly for not having bought one when you had the chance...

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A Toy Model of the Arrow of Time [Uncertain Principles]

Posted: 25 Jan 2012 01:22 PM PST

The toy model of statistical entropy that I talked about the other day is the sort of thing that, were I a good computational physicist, I would've banged out very quickly. I'm not a good computational physicist, but by cargo-culting my way through some of the VPython examples, I managed to get something that mostly works:

The graph at the bottom of that window is the entropy versus "time" for a lattice of 20 sites with a 25% hopping probability (either left or right). The window with the colored balls at the upper left is a graphical representation-- red dots are "occupied" sites, white "unoccupied." The VPython code to do this is here: entropytestN2.py, from which you can see that I'm not much of a computational physicist, let alone a programmer (there are some really kludgey initialization steps that exist because it kept throwing strange errors when I did simpler things that should've worked, and I didn't have the patience to figure out the underlying problem).

It is, as I expected, kind of fun to play around with. I think there might be some bias built in that ends up pushing things to the right, but I'm not sure whether that's real or just my inability to recognize randomness. As expected, for small numbers of sites, you see frequent fluctuations down to zero, and as you increase the number of sites, significant decreases in entropy become much rarer.

I haven't attempted to do anything quantitative with this, because I don't know how to write data out from VPython into a form that any of my other analysis programs might use. If I think of a good way to do it, I might try to quantify this a little more, but for now, I'm happy just to have a working toy.

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There could be H2O ice on Vesta [Greg Laden's Blog]

Posted: 25 Jan 2012 12:29 PM PST

Vesta is the second biggest asteroid in the famous asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It has generally been thought that Vesta would get enough sun over its entire surface that water would not survive, but a recent survey of the surface indicates that deeply buried water has a chance of remaining on the asteroid near the poles, or possibly at the bottom of some deep craters.

Vesta Up Close (image by NASA)

This is interesting, in part, because of questions about the role of water in the early formation of the solar system. One of the main objectives of the Dawn spacecraft mission is to examine water (or the lack of water) on Vesta and Ceres (another asteroid).

Dawn is looking for water using the gamma ray and neutron detector (GRaND) spectrometer, which can identify hydrogen-rich deposits that could be associated with water ice. The spacecraft recently entered a low orbit that is well suited to collecting gamma ray and neutron data.
"Our perceptions of Vesta have been transformed in a few months as the Dawn spacecraft has entered orbit and spiraled closer to its surface," says Lucy McFadden, a planetary scientist at NASA Goddard and a Dawn mission co-investigator. "More importantly, our new views of Vesta tell us about the early processes of solar system formation. If we can detect evidence for water beneath the surface, the next question will be is it very old or very young, and that would be exciting to ponder."

The modeling done by Stubbs and Wang, for example, relies on information about Vesta's shape. Before Dawn, the best source of that information was a set of images taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope in 1994 and 1996. But now, Dawn and its camera are getting a much closer view of Vesta.

"The Dawn mission gives researchers a rare opportunity to observe Vesta for an extended period of time, the equivalent of about one season on Vesta," says Stubbs. "Hopefully, we'll know in the next few months whether the GRaND spectrometer sees evidence for water ice in Vesta's regolith. This is an important and exciting time in planetary exploration."

NASA press release

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The National Academy of Sciences Recognizes the Festival at the 149th Annual Meeting! [USA Science and Engineering Festival: The Blog]

Posted: 25 Jan 2012 07:00 AM PST

The USA Science and Engineering Festival is a part of the National Academy of Sciences 149th Annual Meeting! The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a private, non-profit society of distinguished scholars engaged in scientific and engineering research, dedicated to the furtherance of science and technology and to their use for the public good.

The NAS 149th Annual Meeting will feature the Festival on Saturday, April 28th from 10am-4pm. In this special activity for guests and family members of new members, registered guests may attend the opening of the USA Science and Engineering Festival at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center.

We are thrilled to be a part of this annual tradition!

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Opportunity Mars Rover Still Working After Eight Years [Aardvarchaeology]

Posted: 25 Jan 2012 05:20 AM PST

Dear Reader, remember the remote-controlled Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity? How long is it since the last time you thought of them? Opportunity landed on Mars eight Earth calendar years ago today, and it still works fine! It's mate Spirit was mobile on the Red Planet for over five years and then functioned as a stationary science platform for another year before getting killed off by a Martian winter it couldn't avoid. Amazing engineering that keeps working year after year without a technician so much as touching it.

Oppy is now at Endeavour crater and will spend the Martian winter in a sunny spot (good for battery charging), studying an interesting outcrop (image above) named Greeley Haven after planetary geologist Ronald Greeley (1939-2011). Check out the project's web site for news! And meanwhile, the Curiosity rover is cruising on towards Mars...

[More about astronomy, space, mars, nasa]

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ScienceBlogs Channel : Life Science

2012-01-26T05:12:00.001-08:00

ScienceBlogs Channel : Life Science

Dolphins might be able to learn new language [Life Lines]

Posted: 25 Jan 2012 07:38 PM PST

Researchers have discovered that dolphins might be able to learn a new language! Four captive bottlenose dolphins in Port-Saint-Pere, France have repeatedly heard recorded whale sounds during their various performances at the aquatic park. When researchers recorded the dolphins talking in their sleep, they found that the animals actually made whale-like noises as opposed to dolphin sounds. It was suggested that the dolphins might actually be practicing their performances during their sleep and might have the ability to learn a new language if studies can confirm that the sounds are in fact whale language.

To find out more and hear the dolphins sleep talking, visit Science Now.

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Botanical Wednesday: The Deadly Brazilian Killer Plant! [Pharyngula]

Posted: 25 Jan 2012 04:04 PM PST

Tremble in fear, and behold this terrifying homicidal vegetable!

The larger denizens of Brazil may be unaware of the carnage beneath their feet, but trust me — the far more numerous inhabitants of the country, roundworms and such, feel nothing but terror at encountering their roots.

(via NatGeo)

(Also on FtB)

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ScienceBlogs Channel : Medicine & Health

2012-01-26T05:09:00.001-08:00

ScienceBlogs Channel : Medicine & Health

Still more evidence that Morgellons disease is most likely delusional parasitosis, 2012 edition [Respectful Insolence]
Perfluorinated Compounds (PFCs) in the bloodstream can interfere with vaccine response [erv]
$#*! skeptics say [Respectful Insolence]

Still more evidence that Morgellons disease is most likely delusional parasitosis, 2012 edition [Respectful Insolence]

Posted: 26 Jan 2012 12:00 AM PST

It's been nearly a year since I last discussed a most unusual malady. Part of the reason is that the opportunity to discuss it hasn't occurred recently; usually I need some spark or incident to "inspire" me to write about something, and there just hasn't been any Morgellons news that's caught my eye since 2010. However, another part of the reason, I must admit, is that writing about this particular condition almost always brings sufferers out of the woodwork, castigating me the way antivaccinationists like to castigate me for challenging the scientific basis of their preferred pseudoscience. I catch enough hostility from the antivaccine contingent. Before I'm reading to leap into a fray that's likely to bring more hostility--who knows? I might even be graced by a visit from a certain particularly loony advocate of this condition--my way from an entirely different contingent of woo-meisters. On the other hand, sometimes I need a change of pace, a new area to look at the application of science-based medicine to health and disease.

I'm referring, of course, to Morgellons disease. To recap (for those of you who are familiar with the condition) or to provide some background (for those of you who are not), people suffering (or claiming to suffer) from this condition complain of an intense itching, and the condition is characterized by a number of primary symptoms. These include:

Sponanteously Erupting Skin lesions
Sensation of crawling, biting on and under the skin
Appearance of blue, black or red fibers and granules beneath and/or extruding from the skin
Fatigue
Short-term memory loss
Attention Deficit, Bipolar or Obsessive-Compulsive disorders
Impaired thought processing (brain fog)
Depression and feelings of isolation

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Perfluorinated Compounds (PFCs) in the bloodstream can interfere with vaccine response [erv]

Posted: 25 Jan 2012 09:00 AM PST

Non-stick pans, water-proof clothing, stain-proof carpet, pizza boxes, microwave popcorn bags, the air outdoors, the air indoors-- if youve ever been exposed to these things, you have been exposed to 'Perfluorinated Compounds' (PFCs).

Because the most common PFCs have a relatively long half-life (~4 years!), and because weve basically all been exposed, you can find PFCs in the blood of about 90% of us here in the US. Its ubiquitous. And, like with a lot of things, 'some' isnt that big of a deal, but 'more' can cause problems. The questions are where that 'some' to 'more' threshold is, and what kinds of problems can emerge.

A rather unexpected correlation emerged today in JAMA:

Serum Vaccine Antibody Concentrations in Children Exposed to Perfluorinated Compounds

Previous research indicated that PFCs had a negative impact on the immune systems of mice. How can we find out if they have a negative impact on humans? We cant inject humans with PFCs and cut out their spleens to study their white blood cells. But mice arent humans-- maybe what they saw was an artifact of 'mice' and PFCs have no impact on humans.

'Maybe' isnt good enough. So, this group of scientists went to a place where the folks eat a lot of fish (a common source of PFCs, so, if youve eaten fish, welcome to the 90%). Then they did two things:
1-- Looked at the immune response of kids (5 years old) to tetanus and diphtheria vaccines, and correlated it with the blood PFC concentration of their moms in pregnancy.
2-- Looked at the memory antibody response (aka how much the kids were protected from the pathogen) two years later (7 years old), and correlated it with their blood PFC concentration.

The higher the PFC concentration, the worse the kids reacted to the vaccines.

Enter media circus, stage left. And some of the circus was fuels by the lead author of this study himself, Dr. Philippe Grandjean.

"When the PFC concentration increases in the body, the immune system gets more sluggish and is less capable of maintaining a defense mechanism against microorganism"

You dont have data to support that statement in your paper. And wtf is 'immune system gets more sluggish'? That is a meaningless phrase. Talk like a grown up, people are not stupid.

Although the findings don't prove the chemicals themselves are harming the immune system, Grandjean said he thought that is "very likely" to be the case.

And Judy Mikovits thought XMRV was 'very likely' to cause CFS. We dont say things to the public without evidence to back it up, Grandjean.

"I don't feel comfortable with the compounds for myself and my family and would rather eliminate them," he told Reuters Health.

*frown*

He added that parents might want to avoid microwave popcorn, and treatment of furniture, carpets and clothing with stain repellants to reduce their family's exposure to PFCs.

*double-frown-all-the-way*

Say it with me everyone: Correlation does not equal causation.

What Grandjean has is a very interesting observation. The biochemical and physiological ins-and-outs of that observation are still unknown. He did not do studies with microorganisms-- he did studies with vaccines. Maybe there is some genetic quirk that has a negative effect on processing PFCs that also disturbs immune function. Maybe exposure to PFCs interferes with vaccine adjuvents (it seems PFCs and alum are in the same size range). Maybe there is something else about eating more fish that is negatively effecting vaccine responses (MERCURY!!!!!WARBLEGARBLE!!!), and PFCs are just a proxy measure that have no direct effect on the phenotype. An innocent correlation without causation, while the real culprit goes unrecognized.

Absolutely, if scientists can turn this observation into a causation, we would then know to keep an eye on PFC exposure and PFC waste in our environment. Of course. But screaming 'WOLF!!!!' when you find a dead goat that may or may not have died from a wolf attack helps no one, and can in fact be a snipe we waste time and money chasing if it turns out the wolf had nothing to do with it. I know youre excited, but be more careful with your statements, Grandjean.

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$#*! skeptics say [Respectful Insolence]

Posted: 25 Jan 2012 06:00 AM PST

Ha! I must admit, I've said probably about 50% of these things at one time or another, maybe more:

Hmmmm. Maybe I need to come up with new "shit."

Oh, and, by the way, I've been mentioned on PZ's blog more times than I can remember over the last seven years. So there! (Oh, wait. Does that mean PZ won't ever mention me again. Never mind. I take it back.)

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TechGeeze.com: Internet overuse can cause severe structural damage to your brain

2012-01-25T17:03:00.001-08:00

TechGeeze.com: Internet overuse can cause severe structural damage to your brain

Internet overuse can cause severe structural damage to your brain

Posted: 25 Jan 2012 06:33 AM PST

The universe with its stars and planets could be significantly related with the internet in terms of its complexity and infinite information lies on its network constellation. As of today,... Related posts: Infogeeze: In 60 Seconds These 21 Things Happen On the Internet Internet Explorer falls...

>> Continue reading by hitting the title link above

The Touch & Go System in the All-new Toyota Yaris

Posted: 25 Jan 2012 12:46 AM PST

Last year before the IAA/Frankfurt Auto Show, Harman have announced that it has developed the Toyota Touch & Go and Toyota Touch & Go Plus multimedia systems to be fitted... Related posts: More BlackBerry leaks appear including the Monaco Touch, Bold Touch & Sedona New Kobo eReader...

>> Continue reading by hitting the title link above

ScienceBlogs Channel : Humanities & Social Science

2012-01-25T05:19:00.001-08:00

ScienceBlogs Channel : Humanities & Social Science

Another Round on Adam and Eve [EvolutionBlog]

Posted: 24 Jan 2012 10:33 PM PST

Since my little break has turned out to be longer than I anticipated, I fear that my blog muscles have atrophied a bit. So let's start flexing them again by revisiting a familiar topic: Adam and Eve.

Over at HuffPo, Peter Enns makes another contribution to the genre that tries to explain why evangelical Christians should not be troubled by the fact that science completely refutes the traditional understanding of Adam and Eve. He gets off to a good start:

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Super Bowl XLVI NY Giants to New England Patriots: "Stomp You Out!" [Dean's Corner]

Posted: 24 Jan 2012 05:07 PM PST

Photo: :The New York Giants in a December 2008 game against the w:Cincinnati Bengals (Flickr tedkerwin)

In 2004, I had a memorable evening dining with NY Giants player Michael Strahan (see "Football Helmet Hits and Brain Injury - What Should Be Done?") With a repeat match of the NY Giants battling with the New England Patriots coming up in the Super Bowl on February 5, I was reminded of this:

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ScienceBlogs Channel : Medicine & Health

2012-01-25T05:16:00.000-08:00

ScienceBlogs Channel : Medicine & Health

If this is true, the Dutch must be drinking in lots of information! [Respectful Insolence]

Posted: 25 Jan 2012 12:00 AM PST

If there's one thing about homeopaths, it's that they're indefatigable in their dedication to their unique brand of pseudoscience. They're also endlessly protean in their ability to induce their explanations for how homeopathy is supposed to "work" to evolve into endless forms not so beautiful. If it's not the claim that "like cures like" is some sort of immutable law of nature or that diluting a remedy somehow makes it stronger, it's pivoting to the claim that water has "memory." If it's not that, then homeopaths and homeopathy apologists invoke quantum entanglement that somehow works at the macro level, that "nanocrystalloids" are involved, hilariously off-base explanations of energy, or that there's somehow a quantum gyroscopic interaction between practitioner and patient. They also seem to have a hard time understanding that explaining exactly what homeopathy is, why it's pseudoscience, and why it's quackery is not a "misinformation campaign," as homeopath Dana Ullman has characterized it.

So when a reader e-mailed this little gem entitled Scientists investigate water memory, I couldn't help but take a look, particularly since there's this spiffy video to go with it:

And this introduction:

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HIV Snake Oil 'cure' leads to arrests in Uganda [erv]

Posted: 24 Jan 2012 09:00 AM PST

We in the skeptic community like to make fun of naturopaths and homeopaths and all the snake oil salesmen out there. While its a good ol laugh here in the West, if not nostalgic, the damage these charlatans can do in other parts of the world is not funny at all.

Long-time readers of SciBlogs might remember someone named Matthias Rath

In the battle of science versus woo...
The Dr. Will Sue You Now - A stolen chapter from Ben Goldacre's book Bad Science

Homeboy got rich taking advantage of desperate HIV/AIDS patients in Africa. Gave them some 'magic potion' of Vitamin C to ~~cure HIV/AIDS~~ HE TOTALLY DIDNT SAY IT WOULD CURE HIV/AIDS (except when he did). Men, women, children, he didnt care.

The Guardian described a case in which a pregnant woman newly diagnosed with HIV was visited at home by Rath Health Foundation employees and convinced to stop taking her antiretroviral medication in favor of Rath's vitamins; she died 3 months later.

Yes, Gary Null taking megadoses of his stupid supplements and getting sick is funny. A pregnant woman dying from AIDS complications because some quack told her to take (supposedly, could have been water) Vitamin C? Not funny.

The good news is, it appears as if African officials are becoming more aware of quackery and are cracking down on their local charlatans. From a few days ago:

Uganda's National Drug Authority recently arrested sales representatives of a company selling a drug that purports to cure HIV; the firm's owners are not licensed to sell medicine and are being sought by the police.

The drug, known as Virol ZAPPER, was being sold in 37-milliliter liquid doses, each costing about US$210; patients were advised to take 10 drops daily. It was being advertised on local radio and TV stations as a miracle cure for HIV.

$210. $210. I couldnt afford that. Disgusting.

What I really like about that second link though is that the author put together a 'trail of tears' quacks have created in Africa over the years (including Rath). A few examples:

Uganda - In 2006, the Ugandan government banned the use of a popular anti-AIDS herb remedy known as "Khomeini" , after tests found it provided no cure. Iranian Sheikh Allagholi Elahi claimed the drug - which contained olive oil and honey and cost $1,650 per dose - could cure HIV/AIDS and TB in three weeks.

Gambia - In 2007, President Yahya Jammeh was roundly denounced by AIDS activists when he said he had found a cure for HIV/AIDS and began treating citizens. Shortly after his announcement, Jammeh expelled the most senior UN official in the country for questioning his "cure".

Tanzania - In 2011, tens of thousands of people from all over East Africa flocked to the tiny village of Loliondo in Tanzania seeking a cure for several diseases, including diabetes, tuberculosis and HIV. Ambilikile Mwasapile, a former Lutheran pastor, was charging 500 Tanzanian shillings - about $0.33 - for a cup for his concoction.

Remember this the next time you are laughing at some rich, fundamentally healthy individual mindlessly repeating bullshit about homeopathy or herbal medicine or naturopathy or whatever. Disgusting.

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