Behold, the West Mata ocean volcano eruption:

Over 50 hours (!) of hi-def footage was captured of this western Pacific ocean volcano, which is 1,200 meters underwater, by a remotely operated vehicle (ROV)—named Jason—from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. The footage was unveiled recently at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

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Video: NSF & NOAA via YouTube / djxatlanta

Hot on the heels of the story of lab-built red blood cells that DISCOVER covered on Tuesday, a different team of scientists have announced another step forward. Bioengineer Erin Lavik announced that her team built synthetic platelets that, when given intravenously to rodents, could slow their bleeding after a cut. The study appears in Science Translational Medicine.

Your normal platelets exist in the bloodstream and use proteins to bind together and close off the bleeding when you get a cut. Lavik’s synthetic version is a nanoparticle that her team injected into the rodents intravenously. The synthetic platelets augment this process, bonding with natural blood platelets and acting as a nanostructure boosting the natural platelets’ ability to form a solid barrier that stops bleeding [Popular Science]. The rodents with synthetic platelets stopped bleeding 23 percent faster than those without.

Lavik’s particle is a third the size of a natural platelet, and the team was careful not to make it too sticky. “There’s a balance between the two edges of the sword–bleeding too much and clotting too much,” says Mortimer Poncz, a physician at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, in Philadelphia, who was not involved in the research. “You don’t want to stop bleeding in the leg but die of a heart attack or have stroke” [Technology Review].

The scientists now must do pig and then human tests to determine the platelets’ effectiveness in people. So it would take years before synthetics nanoparticles are slowing the bleeding for accident or battlefield trauma victims. Lavik, though, is hopeful can be just as helpful for humans. “All we’re doing is leveraging what biology does naturally,” Lavik said [Bloomberg].

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Image: Science/AAAS

A Newsweek writer better known as Fake Steve Jobs is so fed up with AT&T’s service for his iPhone that he’s calling on his fellow AT&T customers to clog up the 3G wireless network today in protest of AT&T’s plan to impose service fees on “bandwidth hogs.”

According to the Inquirer:

Dan Lyons, blogging as Fake Steve Jobs, has called on AT&T users to show their service dissatisfaction by trying to overwhelm the network with data-intensive tasks. “Operation Chokehold”, as he called his incitement to flash-mob mischief, hopes to shut down the US AT&T 3G network at 3pm today and appears to have gained some support from the iPhone rabble.

Thousands have pledged their support for Operation Chokehold (on Facebook, so take that as you will). However most tech blogs are calling Lyons and his protesters jerks for attempting to disrupt service. The FCC and AT&T are calling the stunt irresponsible because it would be an intentional disruption to AT&T’s 80 million customers. However, a disruption, if one even happens, wouldn’t affect voice service, so the claim that 911 calls would be blocked isn’t true.

Some blogs don’t think anyone will participate outside of New York and San Francisco, but if the thousands do materialize, and the network is bumped off-line, the Inquirer speculates that Lyons could face legal trouble for inciting the stunt.

Just to play it safe, if you need to use any of your amazing iPhone apps to access the internet, you might want to do it before 3 p.m. today.

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Image: flickr / William Hook

Over at Mother Jones’ blog “Blue Marble,” I’ve got a post/essay on a topic that I started thinking about after my Wednesday night panel with the Guardian’s George Monbiot in Copenhagen–namely, why is there suddenly a new surge of climate denial? The post starts like this:

George Monbiot, the Guardian columnist and global warming author who combines pugilistic defenses of climate science with Monty Pythonesque levity, is struck by a paradox at the heart of the attempt to achieve action here in Copenhagen. For, as he put it to a full room last night at a panel hosted by the Danish science magazine FORSKERForum, “In the past year, there has been a massive upsurge in climate change denial in the United States, even as the science gets stronger.”

Opinion polls certainly support Monbiot’s contention. According to results released in October by the Pew Research Center, considerably fewer Americans now believe the Earth is warming (the decline has been from 71 percent to 57 percent over the space of a year and a half). And as for agreement with scientists about the cause of global warming—human activities, human emissions—that too has sloped downwards, to just 36 percent today.

How is this possible?

Keep reading here for Monbiot’s, and my, answer.

I hate to make the obvious jokes, so I’ll simply say I was on this week’s Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe talking about methane on Mars and the tilt of Uranus. I’m glad they invited me on; I hadn’t heard of either of these stories until Steve Novella alerted me to them before we did the interview.

Basically, a new hypothesis has come out that the large tilt of Uranus (98°) is not from a collision, but instead had its natural tilt reinforced by a large moon that has since been ejected. Also, scientists tested the idea that the methane seen to change on Mars with the seasons might be from meteorites, and find that they don’t supply nearly enough to explain the observations. We also talk JREF, solar power, the Norway lights, and the usual nonsense. I just finished listening to the whole episode, and thought it was pretty good despite me being on it, so go give it a listen!

My favorite example of a recent Hollywood blockbuster that scientists should like is Iron Man. Yes, it’s implausible that a prisoner in a cave in Afghanistan could build a lethal flying suit out of scrap metal, etc. But plausibility should never be the criterion for judging a science-fiction/fantasy scenario; sometimes you just have to bend the rules of the real world to get the required dramatic effects. Consistency, on the other hand, is crucial; the non-real world you invent should follow some set of rules, even if they veer away from the actual world. (Nobody complains that the Enterprise travels faster than light, but there are plenty of complaints about the bizarre use of time travel in the Star Trek franchise.)

Even better is when a film does a decent job at reflecting the practice of science. And that’s why I loved Iron Man — the whole second act revolves around Tony Stark in his lab, engineering designs and using trial-and-error to determine experimentally what works and what doesn’t. It makes for compelling viewing, which should be a lesson to people.

So we’re all excited about Iron Man 2, right?

The Science and Entertainment Exchange had a small hand in this one — apparently they needed a particle physicist to help get some of the scenes right. I don’t think it was the scene with the whips.

Eric has an interesting post up on the age distribution for recipients of NIH grants since 1980:

He writes that it’s difficult for young U.S. researchers to obtain funding and points to Darwin and Einstein as examples of scientists with revolutionary ideas in their 20s–even though we tend to remember them as old men in photos.

While it’s a thought-provoking point, to be fair we really need to consider that there is more to this discussion than the most obvious factors. Yes, older PIs receive the lion’s share of funding, but these trends also reflect the large hiring periods in the past as university faculty members age. I agree that in many instances, scientists may be doing their most creative, groundbreaking research early, however, success during this time is not necessarily measured by obtaining large grants given few can land the job to be eligible until their mid-30s. Rather, it’s a crucial period for obtaining a faculty position, so the most promising young scientists may go on to recruit a lab, and eventually apply for such grants from a stronger position.

The trend’s shift right over decades may also reflect that postdocs are no longer allowed to be PIs on grants at many universities that do not want to lose a portion of overhead when the person leaves. In addition, agencies such as NIH provide a vast amount of fellowships to fund legions of graduate students (especially in the biomedical sciences) so it’s important to acknowledge that support to young scientists comes in many forms. NIH provides an enormous number of postdoc fellowships as well.

I do like Eric’s point that perhaps we should consider young Darwin and Einstein as iconic figures before their hair whitened. Still, we must remember that many complex factors are at play influencing the initial graph. The real question to consider is whether such grants are adequately funding early tenure track professors.