As I write this, it’s about -15 C outside where I live in Boulder, and even the snow looks like it’s shivering. So I’m not sure if I’m happy to share the grief or feel badly about the weather for folks in the UK, who generally don’t get (metric, I suppose) tons of snow. But then I saw this image from NASA’s Earth observing Terra satellite:

Holy Haleakala, that’s gorgeous! I won’t say I’m exactly glad they got lots of snow, but still, wow. Sorry, my anglic friends, but your suffering has produced this stunning beauty.

The image was taken on January 7, 2010 at around noon local time. The image above has 1 km pixels, but you can also grab the image in higher-res 500 meter and 250 meter versions, too.

Ladies and gentlemen, for your viewing and listening pleasure, it’s the fourth installment of “Symphony of Science.” If you missed the first three iterations of John Boswell’s creation, he auto-tunes the syncopated scientific stylings of Carl Sagan’s monologues from “Cosmos,” combined with guest stars like Stephen Hawking, Neil deGrasse Tyson (of DISCOVER’s StarTalk podcast, among many other media ventures), and Richard Feynman. If you need to catch up, all four are available on Boswell’s site. The first can even be had on vinyl through the label of the White Stripes’ Jack White—Third Man Records.

Here’s the newest, “The Unbroken Thread.” Watch and enjoy.

Related Content:
Cosmic Variance: AutoTuned Sagan
The Loom: The Continuing Return of Carl Sagan
Bad Astronomy: What I Learned from Carl Sagan

You could’ve seen this one coming a mile away—the high seas tensions between Japanese whalers and the environmental groups that harass them degenerated into downright naval warfare this week. A Japanese whaling ship collided with a environmental group’s boat in waters near Antarctica yesterday, sparking finger-pointing, international bickering, and even more bad blood.

The collision late yesterday damaged the Ady Gil, a powerboat that is part of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society protest against the Japan’s annual whaling expedition to the Southern Ocean. Six crew members were rescued by another protest vessel and the boat may sink, Sea Shepherd said in a statement [Business Week]. The governments of Australia and New Zealand say they plan to investigate the crash; the Ady Gil is registered in New Zealand, which opposes the Japanese whaling.

Unsurprisingly, each sides blamed the other. The Japanese boat released a video shot from its deck. The video shows a frothy wake coming from the stern of the Ady Gil, although it is unclear whether the trimaran (the Ady Gil) was moving. The Shonan Maru 2 was directing a water cannon at the Ady Gil before and during the collision, which is clearly seen on the video, and the bow of the Ady Gil was sheared off [The New York Times]. However, the Sea Shepherd people released their own video which shows the whalers veering to intercept. Take a look:

Sea Shepherd boats routinely dog the Japanese whaling vessels, which operate under a loophole in the international moratorium on whaling that allows a certain amount of whale killings for research purposes. DISCOVER has documented complaints by American scientists that killing whales isn’t necessary for the research Japanese scientists are conducting, and also the stealthy killings of other cetaceans, like bottlenose dolphins. The International Whaling Commission continues to try to figure out how to amend its rules to contain Japan’s whaling efforts, thus far without success.

No one on board the Ady Gil died this time around, but one activist reported cracked ribs. The vessel’s six crew members were rescued from the stricken craft by the crew of the Bob Barker, a former Norwegian whaler recently purchased and refitted with a $5-million donation from Bob Barker, who hosted the TV game show “The Price Is Right” for 35 years [Los Angeles Times]. In the aftermath of the close call, a détente seems far out of reach. Sea Shepherd spokesman Paul Watson said the incident had turned the confrontations into a “real whale war” [BBC News].

Related Content:
80beats: Is the Whaling Ban Really the Best Way to Save the Whales?
80beats: Controversial Deal Could Allow Japan To Hunt More Whales
80beats: Commando Filmmakers Expose Secret Dolphin Slaughter in Japan
Discoblog: Japan Whaling Redux: American Scientists Say Slaughter Was Unnecessary
Discoblog: Say What? Japanese Whaling Ships Accuse Animal Planet of Eco-Terrorism

Surprise, surprise…. Fast food restaurants might be lying to your face.

According to the Los Angeles Times health blog, Booster Shots:

Researchers from Tufts University took commercially prepared foods — both prepackaged and from restaurants — and analyzed them in a bomb calorimeter. The measured energy values of 10 frozen meals purchased from supermarkets averaged 8% more than originally stated, and foods from 29 restaurants (both fast-food and sit-down venues) were on average 18% more than reported.

The most egregious offender? Denny’s, whose dry toast is advertised to contain 92 calories but actually packs a diet-busting 283 calories! If they can’t even get the numbers on toast right, just imagine the true caloric content of one of their Grand Slamwiches.

So if your New Year’s resolution includes getting back in shape, help yourself out by resolving to stop eating fast food and frozen meals all together.

Related Content:
Discoblog: Food Fraud: High Schoolers Use DNA Tests to Expose Fake Caviar
Discoblog: Fiber-Filled, Antioxidant-Packed Ice Cream—Brilliant? Sacrilegious? Nasty?
Discoblog: Heart-Stopping Cinematic Excitement: Guess How Much Fat Is in Movie Popcorn?

Image: flickr / fotographix.ca

Four hundred years ago tonight, a man from Pisa, Italy took a newly-made telescope with a magnifying power of 33X, pointed it at one of the brighter lights in the sky, and changed mankind forever.

The man, of course, was Galileo, and the light he observed on January 7, 1610 was Jupiter. He spotted "three fixed stars" that were invisible to the eye near the planet, and a fourth a few days later.

Here is how he drew this, 400 years ago:

He noted the stars moved around Jupiter as they followed it across the sky, and so was the first to figure out that other planets had moons like our own. It wasn’t an easy observation; his telescope was still small, the field of view narrow (so not all the moons were visible at the same time), and the moons faint next to Jupiter’s brilliant glare. But Galileo persisted, and figured it out. We call these four the Galilean moons in his honor: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.

Here’s how we see them today:

The image above [click to embiggen] is from the New Horizons spacecraft as it shot past Jupiter in early 2007, showing all four moons. Each is scaled to show its true relative size to the others. It’s impossible not to wonder what Galileo would have thought, knowing that just shy of 400 years after he made his first observations, we would fling our robotic proxies out into the solar system and get close up views of the objects he discovered.

Think of it! For all of time before, Jupiter was just a light in the sky. And then, forever after that night forty decades ago, it was a world, surrounded by more worlds.

[See more pictures of Jupiter and its moons in a gallery over at 80 Beats.]

Galileo went on to observe craters on the Moon, spots on the Sun, and the phases of Venus. It was that last that may have been his crowning achievement, because the way Venus showed phases meant it could not possibly orbit the Earth, and that it must orbit the Sun. The geocentric theory had held sway for over a thousand years, but Galileo proved it was wrong almost overnight. Of course, the Church wasn’t thrilled with this, though I suspect they might have rolled with it if Galileo hadn’t been such an arrogant jerk and published a manuscript insulting the Pope, a man who used to be his friend and supporter.

If there is a lesson in there, I leave it to my readers to suss it out.

Now, all these years later, a lot of legends exist over the man. He didn’t invent the telescope, he wasn’t the first to point it at the sky, and he wasn’t even the first to publish his drawings. But he was a merciless self-promoter, and because of that we do remember him now (again, any lessons learned here are up to you). And it’s not entirely unfair to do so; he was a tireless observer, a wonderful artist, a great inventor (he may not have been the first to build a telescope, but he made his far better than its predecessors) and a brilliant scientist who, even if he hadn’t done so much for astronomy, would still be remembered today for his other work.

Tonight, just after sunset, Jupiter will be a glowing white beacon in the southwest. I have a Galileoscope, an inexpensive telescope created as part of the International Year of Astronomy 2009, an effort to get as many people on Earth to look up as possible. I think perhaps it would be fitting if I brave the subzero temperature outside, maybe for just a few minutes, and take a look at the mighty planet. Tonight’s display is better than Galileo himself had it: all four moons will be perfectly arrayed, two on each side of Jupiter’s face.

I’m not a very religious man, nor am I a very spiritual man. But I know there will still be a sense of connection, a sense of wonder that I will have tonight that I will share with a man long dead, but whose life and achievements still echo through time.

On January 7, 1610, Galileo Galilei pointed his “spyglass” to the heavens and stared up at Jupiter, one of the brightest lights in the evening sky, and noted what he at first assumed to be three bright stars near the planet. But over the following nights, he realized that those three bright bodies weren’t fixed in the heavens like stars, but rather seemed to dance around Jupiter along with a fourth, smaller body.

Galileo triumphantly announced his discovery of four “planets” that revolved around Jupiter in his March treatise, Starry Messenger [pdf]. Thinking of his pocketbook, he dutifully proposed naming them the Medicean Stars in honor of his patron, Cosimo de Medici. But the name didn’t stick, and today we honor the scientist rather than the patron by calling Jupiter’s four largest satellites the Galilean moons.

The discovery dealt a death blow to the Ptolemaic understanding of the universe, in which all planets and stars were believed to orbit the Earth. For, as Galileo wrote in his treatise, “our own eyes show us four stars which wander around Jupiter as does the moon around the earth.”

In the 400 years that have passed since Galileo first laid eyes on them, we’ve learned a great deal about the moons Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto (all named after the mythological paramours of Jupiter). If all goes according to plan we’ll soon get to know them much more intimately–NASA and the European Space Agency are currently planning missions to closely observe three of the moons. Click though this gallery to view NASA’s most stunning photos of the four satellites, and to find out what we’ve discovered in the four centuries since Galileo began the work.

(For more on Galileo’s discovery and what it meant to science, check out this post from DISCOVER’s Phil Plait.)

Image: NASA/JPL/DLR

Back and forth go the studies investigating whether cell phone uses increases the risk of brain cancer (the latest one to get major press, released last month, found nothing there). This week, though, new research has grabbed the headlines by declaring that our ubiquitous communication and time-wasting devices could actually provide a health benefit.

In a study set to come out today in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease (and funded in part by the National Institute on Aging), a group led by Gary Arendash argues that the radiation from cell phones that we’ve been worrying about could protect against Alzheimer’s Disease. But it’s far too soon to advise people to start medicating themselves by talking even longer on the phone.

Researchers at the Florida Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center arranged about 70 mouse cages in a circle around a central antenna that emitted electromagnetic waves typical of what would emanate from a phone pressed to a human head. They were exposed to the radiation for two hours a day over seven to nine months. About two dozen other mice served as controls [Los Angeles Times]. Arendash’s team used mice they had genetically engineered to develop the brain buildups and memory problems typical of Alzheimer’s when they got older. The team says that the memory problems of those mice exposed to the radiation began to disappear during the study. Not only that, but normal mice (that hadn’t been genetically engineered) also showed memory improvements after exposure.

Why? The researchers showed that exposing old Alzheimer’s mice to the electromagnetic waves generated by cell phones erased brain deposits of beta-amyloid, a protein strongly associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Clumps of beta-amyloid form so-called brain plaques that are a hallmark of the disease [LiveScience]. According to the scientists, the slight increase in brain temperature brought on by the radiation could’ve caused the mouse brains to release those plaques.

Arendash surprised himself, saying that before the study he’d expected to see that cell phone use would make dementia worse. “Quite to the contrary, those mice were protected if the cell phone exposure was stared [sic] in early adulthood. Or if the cellphone exposure was started after they were already memory- impaired, it reversed that impairment,” Arendash said [Reuters]. When the benefits for the mice continued without any noticeable detriments, he was sold.

Glowing from success, Arendash and USF colleagues said future research could determine the best “dosage” of radiation for targeting these brain plaque deposits: the 918 megaHerz in US mobile phones, 800 megaHerz in European phones, or another frequency — and how long effective “treatment” would have to be [AFP].

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, though. The work by Arendash opens up all kinds of avenues for possible research, but research on the health effects of cell phones seems prone to long, drawn out studies and occasionally contradictory headlines, like those we see about red wine or coffee being good or bad. William Thies, chief medical and scientific officer of the Alzheimer’s Association, warned against self-medicating with extra cell use based on these findings. (And just yesterday we covered the scientist smackdown over whether a virus truly causes chronic fatigue syndrome, with the British researchers now arguing that the link isn’t proven, and warning people not to seek out antiretroviral drugs.)

The next steps: Other researchers will try to replicate Arendash results in mice, and if they do so, scientists can go on to test whether electromagnetic waves have the same effect on humans.

Related Content:
80beats: Can You Fear Me Now? Cell Phone Use Not Linked to Brain Cancer
80beats: Cancer Doctor Issues Warning About Cell Phones, And Causes Panic
80beats: Scientist Smackdown: Is a Virus Really the Cause of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?
80beats: Lack of ZZZZs Linked to Alzheimer’s in Mice
80beats: Electrical Brain Stimulation Prompts Big Hopes—And a Dash of Concern

Image: University of South Florida

First light from WISE. Image Credit: NASA/JP-Caltech/UCLA

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer also known as WISE gets its first view of the sky. I have to say, this is pretty remarkable, less than a month between launch and releasing a first light image.

Among the ambitious plans for the WISE mission is the detection of Brown Dwarf stars down to a temperature of 150^o K out to 10 light years, and 450^oK out to 75 light years. This of course is very interesting because at the moment if the failed stars are there they are invisible to us.

Another very exciting aspect of this mission is the hunt for asteroids and an extensive education and public outreach program led by UC Berkeley. Apparently they are going to involve the public in searching for the asteroids including students. So that IMHO makes this one of the most exciting missions in a while.  More about the education and public outreach.  Oh and you may note the 150^oK is around -190^oF/-123^oC!!

Pay a visit to the WISE website by clicking the link below for more details about this mission.

About the image from the WISE website:

This infrared snapshot of a region in the constellation Carina near the Milky Way was taken shortly after NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) ejected its cover. The “first-light” picture shows thousands of stars and covers an area three times the size of the Moon. WISE will take more than a million similar pictures covering the whole sky. The image was captured as the spacecraft stared in a fixed direction, in order to help calibrate its pointing system. The mission’s survey will be done while the satellite continuously scans the sky, and an internal scan mirror counteracts the motion to create freeze-frame images. The team is working now to match the motions of the spacecraft and the scan mirror precisely. This eight-second exposure shows infrared light from three of WISE’s four wavelength bands: Blue, green and red correspond to 3.4, 4.6, and 12 microns, respectively.