African chimpanzees know how to handle wildfire, as DISCOVER noted last month. But lava is a different deal. Nyamulagira, a volcano in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, began to erupt over the weekend and threatened not only the people nearby, but also the endangered primates that live in the area. The southerly lava flow appears to have spared most human settlements and the mountain gorillas of Virunga National Park, but the native chimps haven’t been so lucky.

The 40 eastern chimpanzees that live on Nyamulagira itself could still be at risk if they are surrounded by lava, and as the plants they rely on for food become coated by abrasive volcanic ash. Park officials hope animals in the lava’s path will simply move away from it [New Scientist]. United Nations peacekeepers, who are in the Congo to protect civilians from the seemingly unending war there, have offered the country’s leaders the use of UN planes and helicopters to monitor the situation.

Innocent Mburanumwe, a warden of the nature reserve, didn’t even recognize the disaster at first. “I thought there was fighting again near our park station,” he said, referring to the conflicts which have wracked eastern DR Congo. “Then I saw the mountain was on fire with sparks flying” [BBC News]. Due in large part to that Congolese warfare, the chimp population was already in decline before this eruption. The so-called “Tonga group” of chimps most directly affected by the eruption is estimated to have been reduced to as few as 40 animals prior to the latest threat [The Independent]. No official count is available, though, because it’s simply too dangerous for conservationists to work in the area.

Virunga National Park is Africa’s oldest, and its mountain gorillas account for 200 of the 720 remaining in the world. But this has always been a precarious area. Nyamulagira tends to erupt every three or four years; its last explosion came in 2006.

In happier volcano news, the lingering threat to the Philippines seems to be waning. For weeks Mt. Mayon threatened to erupt, sending many people scrambling to get away. But the government says that volcanic earthquakes have diminished in number, and officials reduced the alert level for Mayon. Still, the volcano may yet emit many tons of sulfur dioxide as it degases.

Related Content:
80beats: Chimps Don’t Run From Fire—They Dance with It
80beats: Do Hot, Dry Conditions Cause More African Civil Wars?
80beats: Drilling Into a Stirring Volcano Is (Probably) Safe
DISCOVER: 20 Species We Might Lose, including mountain gorillas
DISCOVER: Gorillas Learn to Keep the Peace

Image: iStockphoto

It’s a classic case of bolting the barn door after the horses are gone. Politicians are angry that the “crotch bomber” (who tried to blow up an airplane of Christmas day) got through airport security with his explosives undetected, and have demanded that full-body scanners be placed in all airports. So far, 19 U.S. airports are using the scanners, and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) hopes to put hundreds more in airports across the country.

Proponents of this technology argue that it’s worth sacrificing privacy (and modesty) for safety. But in their rush to do something policymakers be ignoring five big problems with rolling out this technology:

1. Manufacturers aren’t willing to fill orders. According to a spokesperson for Smiths Detection, a manufacturer of millimeter-wave body scanners, the scanner technology has not yet been certified as fit for purpose by national governments – and manufacturers will not invest in mass production until it has [New Scientist]. Until the TSA and the European Union certify the technology, don’t expect manufactures to rush into production, seeing as how the scanners cost around $125,000 each.

2. They won’t actually catch that many threats. According to a spokesperson for QinetiQ, another body scanner manufacturer, airport body scanners would be “unlikely” to detect many of the explosive devices used by terrorist groups [BBC News]. QinetiQ said the technology probably wouldn’t have detected the Christmas day underwear bomb. Neither would the scanners have caught the explosives from the 2006 airliner liquid bomb plot, nor the explosives used in the 2005 London Tube train bombing. The body scanners aren’t very useful for detecting liquids and plastics and can only help spotlight irregularities under a person’s clothes, said the spokesperson. Singling out every irregularity for further screening will place a heavy burden on airport security (read: bring a pillow with you to the airport).

3. The scanners may violate child pornography laws. A trial run of the scanners in Britain was only allowed to proceed after children under 18 were exempt from screening. The decision followed a warning from Terri Dowty, of Action for Rights of Children, that the scanners could breach the Protection of Children Act 1978, under which it is illegal to create an indecent image or a “pseudo-image” of a child [Guardian]. It’s not clear if children would continue to be exempt from screening should the scanners become widely used, or where the United States stands on screening children. (And then there’s other types of pornography to worry about–imagine the media frenzy that would ensue should a celebrity body scan make its way to the tabloids. The images are not supposed to be stored after their creation, but many critics say the security personnel analyzing the images are poorly monitored to ensure the scans are disposed properly.)

4. Other countries won’t use them. A year ago, Germany said “nein” to the idea of using full body scanners in its airports, saying the technology is little more than security theater. There is some indication that the German government has recently softened its stance, but its new position has a lot of “ifs.” German Interior Minister Thomas de Mazière said he is ready to introduce full body scanners if they are safe and “fully guarantee” the privacy rights of passengers. Wolfgang Bosbach, Bundestag interior committee chief, told Germany’s Tagesspiegel: “If this technology [full body scanners] has demonstrated its usefulness in practice, i.e. it works reliably and is quick, we should use it” [Christian Science Monitor]. See reasons 2 and 3 above.

5. Full body scanners can’t see inside your body. Generally, the machines can’t find items stashed in a body cavity. So the scanners wouldn’t stop at least one common smuggling method used by drug traffickers [New York Daily News]. It’s not hard to imagine terrorists following in drug smugglers’ footsteps–in fact, one already has. In September, an Al Qaeda suicide bomber hid explosives in his rectum in an attempt to kill a Saudi Prince (but because the bomber’s flesh absorbed most of the blast, he died and the prince survived).

The bottom line? Playing catch-up with evildoers probably won’t do much good, which is essentially what the TSA is doing with its embrace of full body scanning technology–along with its current rules about liquids and removing one’s shoes, for that matter.

Related Content:
80beats: Editing Goof Puts TSA Airport Screening Secrets on the Web
80beats: Are Digital Strip Searches Coming Soon To Every Airport Near You?
80beats: TSA Threatens Bloggers Who Published Security Info, Then Backs Off

Image: TSA

You may have heard the recent news that an expert panel of pediatricians reviewed the literature on gastrointestinal disorders and autism, and found no link between them. A key phrase in their findings was

The existence of a gastrointestinal disturbance specific to persons with ASDs (eg, "autistic enterocolitis") has not been established.

They also found that there was no evidence that special diets help autistic kids. Mind you, this was a panel of 28 experts, scientists who have devoted their careers and lives to investigating autism.

So if you were a reporter at ABC News, who would you turn to to get an opinion on this? If you said Jenny McCarthy, then give yourself a gold star, because that’s just what ABC News did. Go and watch that interview (have some antacid ready). In it, she says that scientists need to take anecdotes seriously, a statement so awful it’s hard to know where to start with it.

First of all, scientists did take the anecdotes seriously. That’s why they investigated any possible links between GI disorders, diets, and autism. What they found was that there is no link.

Second, McCarthy confuses anecdotes with data. As I have said before, anecdotes are where you start an investigation, not where you finish one. That’s the difference between science (aka reality) and nonsense. You can convince yourself of all manners of silliness through personal experience. I decide to whistle before drinking my coffee one morning, and I find a $20 bill in the street. So does that mean if I whistle every morning before my java I will find money? No, of course not. But that’s precisely the type of thinking McCarthy is promoting.

Getting back to ABC News, they also posted a story that tries to throw all sorts of doubt on the results of the report by the pediatric experts. I suppose they’re trying to find balance and all that in this issue, but again, as I have said before, sometimes stories don’t have two sides. There is reality, and there’s fantasy.

Should they post a rebuttal by an astrologer every time we find a new extrasolar planet? How about getting a creationist’s opinion on a new malaria vaccine?

Sadly, Jenny McCarthy is news because she’s the voice of a group of people who listen to her, but that’s at least in part due to the fact that the news organizations treat her seriously. It’s a self-fulfilling news cycle, and ABC News just gave it another nice little boost.

Shame on you, ABC News. Shame.

Happily, not every news outlet is so gullible. USA Today just posted a great article about the dangers of not vaccinating your kids, and they don’t pull any punches. Because people like Jenny McCarthy muddy the waters and add so much noise to the real science, people are turning away from real medicine and embracing "alternative" methods that we know don’t work.

The result it not just that kids who need help aren’t getting it (the so-called "what’s the harm?" fallacy). The result is that kids are getting sick, and some of them are dying. When you reject reality and turn to nonsense, it has real effects. And it’s not just affecting your kids, it affects all kids.

Talk to your physician about vaccines, autism, and diets. Read the real work being done.

Tip o’ the syringe to Gary Schwitzer.

When it comes to peculiar penises, there’s no shortage in the animal kingdom. Just last month DISCOVER blogger Carl Zimmer documented new research into why many male ducks have such an extravagant spiral-shaped phallus. This week, in a paper (in press) in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the study of goofy genitalia follows fruit flies.

The male fruit fly has a penis that resembles a medieval weapon, dotted with hooks and spines. Are those barbs there to remove rival sperm, or pierce the female’s genital tract to allow sperm a shortcut, or something else? There was one way to find out: lasers.

Scientists used lasers to shave the extra equipment off male fruit flies’ penises and set them free to try to mate. And, as it turned out, the hooks and spines simply help a male hang onto a female for the whole 10 minutes it take them to mate; without them, he didn’t do so well. From “Not Exactly Rocket Science”:

They found that a partial shave did nothing, but the full treatment significantly reduced the odds of the males mating with females. With the spines, they were virtually guaranteed to mate if a female was around; without them, their chances fell to around 20%. It wasn’t for lack of trying either – all of the shorn males tried to woo a female and almost all tried to mate. They simply failed. They did all the right things – mounting, placing their genitals in the right place – but it was for nought. And if the spineless males were placed in direct competition with a normal one over a female, they almost always lost.

Related Content:
Discoblog: The Strange, Violent Sex Lives of Fruit Flies & Beeltes
80beats: Meet the Sexually Irresistible Fruit Fly
The Loom: Kinkiness Beyond Kinky

Image: Wikimedia Commons / André Karwath

A few weeks ago the American Museum of Natural History posted a video showing a voyage from the surface of the Earth to the last-scattering surface (at the “edge” of the Universe). What makes the video unique is that it is based on real data, not an artist’s conception. The thin ellipses represent actual satellites orbiting the Earth; the dots represent the location of actual quasars billions of lightyears away. (No, the Universe is not composed of pie slices of galaxies, as in the movie. They used data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which is one of our most comprehensive views of the Universe, but which has only surveyed certain areas of the sky.) Perhaps most amazingly, the video has gone viral–with over 1.9 million views and thousands of comments to date.

I was lucky enough to see an (interactive) preview of this video while I was in New York attending the Amaldi meeting. It is a modern retelling of the Powers of Ten video by Charles and Ray Eames (who, as it happens, also designed fabulous furniture; I’ve been lusting after an Eames recliner for years [how many pieces of furniture have their own wikipedia entry?]). The videos help us develop a healthy perspective, which is a good way to start off the New Year. It is humbling, after all, to realize how insignificant we really are. Yes, we have the gall to change our planet, and threaten all living beings on its fragile surface. But, still, in the grand scheme of things, we’re a grain of sand in a vast and beautiful ocean. We’re totally irrelevant. I find this to be oddly reassuring and calming.

Back in December 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope created the now-famous “deep field” image, which took more than 300 exposures over the course of 10 days to peer deep into the history of the universe and spot more than 1,500 galaxies. A decade and a half later—after failures, upgrades, and the “ultra deep field“—Hubble marches on. Yesterday at the American Astronomical Society meeting, astronomers announced they’d used the telescope to look deeper into the past than ever before.

The new image captures 7,500 galaxies of all kinds and shapes. The oldest galaxies in the image glow an intense blue, indicating high concentrations of the lighter elements hydrogen and helium. Hydrogen fusion inside active stars creates heavier elements such as iron and nickel, which get spread across the universe when massive stars explode. These elements cause modern galaxies to glow in a rainbow of colors, so the extreme blueness of the newfound galaxies suggests that they formed before very many massive stars had lived and died [National Geographic News].

The ancient galaxies are also tiny by galactic standards, containing just one percent of the mass of our own Milky Way galaxy. But they could play an important role in showing astronomers how galaxies formed as the universe aged. These galaxies started forming just 500 million years after the big bang, which is thought to have occurred around 13.7 billion years ago. That pushes back the known start of galaxy formation by about 1.5 billion years [National Geographic News].

Hubble captured this newest image with its Wide Field Camera 3, a new piece of equipment that the last space shuttle flight to upgrade the telescope installed last year. But unanswered questions remain. The big mystery is the era when ultraviolet light from the youngest stars electrically charged early clouds of interstellar gas, triggering magnetic effects that played a role in later galaxy formation, says astrophysicist Mario Livio…. This “re-ionization” era probably played out just before or during the time when the lives of the early galaxies turned up in the new Hubble images [USA Today]. Hubble’s would-be successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, could help sort out this era’s history when it launches in 2014.

Related Content:
80beats: Prepare to Be Amazed: First Pics from the Repaired Hubble Are Stunning
80beats: Space Shuttle Grabs Hubble, and Astronauts Begin Repairs
80beats: A Hot Piece of Hardware: NASA’s New Orbiter Will Map the Entire Sky in Infrared
Cosmic Variance: Well, That Was Fast, on the upgraded Hubble’s initial data
Bad Astronomy: Hubble’s Back, and Spying on Wailing Baby Stars

Image: NASA