This past Sunday was the sixth anniversary of the NASA rover Spirit’s landing on Mars and the beginning of its adventures on the red planet. However, this anniversary is shaping up to be its last. As we’ve previously covered here at DISCOVER, Spirit has gotten itself into a jam.

A sand trap and balky wheels are challenges to Spirit’s mobility that could prevent NASA’s rover team from using a key survival strategy for the rover. The team may not be able to position the robot’s solar panels to tilt toward the sun to collect power for heat to survive the severe Martian winter [NASA]. The rover has been stuck in the Martian sand for nine months with only four of its six wheels functioning. Now, NASA says the rover may run out of power and shut down by May.

NASA is close to throwing in the towel on its attempts to extract Spirit from its rut, so the sandpit known as “Troy” may be Spirit’s final resting place. To conserve power, the rescue operation may come to a halt this month. Unless Sprit can angle its solar arrays to capture the maximum possible sunlight, it faces the prospect of freezing to death when winter arrives in five months, since it won’t be able to power the internal heaters which protect its electronics. NASA explains that the current tilt is “nearly five degrees toward the south”, which is “unfavorable because the winter sun crosses low in the northern sky” [Register].

Whether or not Spirit can break free of the sand trap, the rover has already exceeded expectations with its research on Mars’ environment–it was initially scheduled to perform only a 90-day mission. In fact, until it kicks the bucket, Spirit can keep gathering data while bogged down in the sand. NASA scientists believe they can use the rover to gather data about the interior of Mars, Martian weather, and any interesting deposits near the rover’s wheels.

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Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

This fall, I gave a number of lectures about the evolution of swine flu. By the time I got to the end of the talk, I could tell that a lot of people in the audience were feeling a bit resigned, given the way evolution allows viruses like the flu to evade our best attacks. (Here’s the full video of my lecture at the University of British Columbia.)

To try to cheer up the crowd, I’d offer a note of hope–the notion that we could turn the evolution of viruses against them, by pushing them into mutation overdrive. (This slide gets across the basic idea–the flu virus is like a sports car. Going fast is cool. Going too fast–not so cool.)

In tomorrow’s New York Times, I lay out this intriguing idea, that goes by the profoundly cool name of lethal mutagenesis. Check it out.

I received a mysterious email recently, promoting what to me sounds like a great idea: a concerted effort in the UK to increase the public awareness that homeopathy is quackery, pure and simple. It’s called the 10:23 Campaign, and it’s being promoted by various skeptic groups in Britain. The website is a placeholder for now, but you can sign up there for updates.

Why do this? Well, as they say,

Homeopathy is an ancient, pre-scientific and absurd pseudoscience. Yet it persists today as an accepted complementary medicine, largely because people don’t know what it is.

The 10:23 Campaign aims to show the public what homeopathy is and explain how we know it doesn’t work. It will launch in early 2010.

Excellent. And why call it the 10:23 Campaign? Well, happily I have a mole who informs me of such things.

Remember the embarrassment that the Transportation Security Administration suffered last month, when a bout of lax editing allowed the TSA standard operating manual to leak across the Web? Last week, the TSA inflicted another public relations snafu upon itself. Agents subpoenaed two travel bloggers who published the organization’s temporary procedures in the wake of the attempted Christmas Day airline bombing, only to drop the subpoenas shortly thereafter.

The document, which the two bloggers published within minutes of each other Dec. 27, was sent by TSA to airlines and airports around the world and described temporary new requirements for screening passengers through Dec. 30, including conducting “pat-downs” of legs and torsos. The document, which was not classified, was posted by numerous bloggers. Information from it was also published on some airline websites [Wired.com]. Still, the TSA (which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS) decided to target the two bloggers, Chris Elliott and Steven Frischling, to make them reveal who leaked the information to them. And the strong-arm tactics the agency used quickly made it look draconian and repressive.

After both men published accounts (Elliott, Frischling) of the TSA threats on their blogs, media outlets picked up the story and the TSA dropped both subpoenas. Public embarrassment could have induced the TSA to leave the bloggers be, but the agency may have already had what it wanted by the time the story broke. DHS officials returned to Mr Frischling’s home on Wednesday morning and forced him to hand over his laptop computer. The TSA has since dropped both subpoenas, but it’s certainly possible that the agency was able to discern the leaker’s identity by sifting through the information on Mr Frischling’s computer [The Economist].

Perhaps the TSA simply wanted to find out who sends its info to members of the media, even though the information in this case wasn’t actually classified. In a statement Friday, the the agency wrote, “TSA takes any breach in security very seriously. In light of the posting of sensitive security information on the web, TSA sought to identify where the information came from. The investigation is nearing a successful conclusion and the subpoenas are no longer in effect” [CNN]. Frischling said the TSA also apologized to him, but only after taking the laptop and threatening to get him fired from his job writing a blog for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Wired.com reports. Frischling also says the TSA agents indicated that they could have him declared a security risk, which presumably meant he’d be flagged for additional screening at airports.

The TSA’s public stance, expecting privacy for information sent to thousands of people around the world (and posted on some airline Web sites), smacks of the same unfair finger-pointing that the U.S. Senate was guilty of when it lambasted the TSA in response to the leak of the standard operation manual in early December. At that time, the TSA lacked an official head because of a political fight in the Senate over nominee Erroll Southers, led by Senator Jim DeMint. The South Carolina Republican wants Mr. Southers to promise that he would oppose granting collective-bargaining rights to the TSA’s tens of thousands of employees [Wall Street Journal]. A month later, that fight still goes on, and the TSA remains without a Senate-approved leader.

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Image: TSA

Relax, Indiana Jones. Snakes aren’t so scary… as long as you’re wearing a good pair of jeans.

According to research done by scientists in California, denim provides more than classic American fashion statement. While this may seem somewhat obvious, the researchers are happy to announce that covering your legs with jeans doesn’t just reduce the amount of venom that a snakebite can inject into your system—it reduces it by a lot. From Reuters:

Drs. Shelton S. Herbert and William K. Hayes used latex gloves filled with saline to simulate a human appendage, then exposed the gloves to bites from small and large southern Pacific rattlesnakes. Some of the latex “limbs” were covered in a layer of denim.

The researchers found that compared with the jeans-less gloves, those covered in denim absorbed about two-thirds less venom from the rattlesnake bites. Instead, a high proportion of the venom “spilled harmlessly” onto the denim, the researchers report in the Annals of Emergency Medicine.

Two things come to mind as a result of this study. One: Yes, scientists will study anything. And two: If you’re planning to hike in rattlesnake country, forget about working on your leg tan and just throw on those old Levi’s.

Come to think of it, perhaps this explains President Obama wearing those thick, high-waisted “mom jeans” to throw out the first pitch at this summer’s Major League Baseball All-Star Game. The St. Louis Cardinals’ home stadium is presumably free of venomous snakes, but the Secret Service takes nothing for granted.

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Image: flickr / Marcy Reiford

In an area of the sky obscured from us by the Milky Way Galaxy there lies a gravity anomaly called “The Great Attractor”.  Noticed first in 1973, and again in 1978, by variations in the expected expansion of the universe.  Something was pulling galaxies toward it; in fact, it was believed to be pulling the Milky Way and Andromeda toward it.

The Great Attractor, as it has been called, is not a galaxy.  It’s not a cluster of galaxies.  It’s believed to be a “supercluster” of galaxies.

NASA/JPL IPAC/CalTech, by Thomas Jarrett

Looking at this chart, you can see the Great Attractor slightly below the plane of the Milky Way (follow the blue arrow).  Now, look above it.  Do you see something called the Shapley Concentration (yellow arrow)?  It’s behind the Great Attractor, and much further out.  It’s also what we’re being drawn toward.

I hear gasps of dismay.  In 2005, X-ray surveys in the “Zone of Avoidance” (the area behind the Milky Way which we normally can’t study very well) confirmed that it was the Shapley Concentration we were being pulled toward, not the Great Attractor.  In all fairness, it was the Great Attractor and its gravity anomaly which caused scientists to study the area so closely, only to rediscover this huge concentration behind it.

Richard Powell Atlas of the Universe, all rights reserved.

The Shapley Concentration is a massive overdensity in the constellation of Centaurus.  It is the largest concentration of matter in the observable universe.  Astronomers have long known the Milky Way is moving toward the constellation Centaurus, and at quite a respectable 1.4 million miles per hour.  Many thought the pull was the Great Attractor, but with the use of X-rays to peer beyond the Milky Way’s dust, they learned the Great Attractor didn’t have nearly the matter they had originally thought.  They also got a good look at the Shapley Concentration, and saw that it did have the matter.  As a matter of fact, the Great Attractor is being pulled toward the Shapley Concentration.

Containing many thousands of times the mass of the Milky Way, and about 650 Mly away (that’s million light years), the Shapley Concentration is a rare supermassive cluster of many galaxies.  We are being drawn inexorably toward it, and will one day become a part of the cluster ourselves.

Oh, not “us” as in you and me… I mean “us” as in this galaxy.  Humanity will be long gone by then, extinct on a planet no longer able to support life as we know it.  In fact, we’ll probably run into Andromeda long before we become a bug on the windshield of the Shapley Concentration.

So to speak.

Click here to see a larger view of the first image.  It’s really cool.

1. A tower in Dubai that opens today has earned the title of world’s tallest building with a height of 2,717 feet (828 meters). That’s more than half a mile high. Actually, it grabbed that title during construction back in July 2007 when it passed Taipei 101, which stands 500 meters tall.

2. Until its official opening today, the building’s exact height was a closely held secret known by only a few people. The building’s architects, Chicago-based Skidmore, Owings, and Merril, speculated last week that someone might try to steal the thunder from the big announcement by measuring the building’s shadow to figure out its height.

3. The opening ceremony included another surprise. The tower, which had been known as the Burj Dubai, was renamed the Burj Khalifa, in honor of Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the president of the neighboring emirate Abu Dhabi. The last-minute switch carries a symbolic weight in light of the billions of dollars oil-rich Abu Dhabi has poured into Dubai in order to cover its debts [The New York Times].

4. The Burj is not only the tallest building in the world, it’s also home to the highest observation deck, swimming pool, elevator, restaurant, and fountain in the world.

5. Speaking of the acrophobia inducing elevator, it travels at speeds roughly 40 miles per hour (65 kilometers per hour) and reaches the observation deck in about 2 minutes.

6. Once at the top, visitors can enjoy temperatures that are nearly 15 degrees cooler than at the building’s base.

7. Dubai is built in the middle of the desert, so to withstand the UAE’s 120-degree blistering summer heat the tower is covered with 24,348 cladding panels.

8. Many skyscrapers are built to bend with the wind—the Burj, which will be exposed to strong desert winds, more than others. According to lead architect George Efstathiou, “the building is tuned to sway slowly so your middle ear doesn’t pick it up,” Efstathiou explained. “They tune it just like a musical instrument so that the harmonics of the building don’t coincide with the harmonics caused by the wind…. We tune it so that on the floors where people are going to be, you don’t feel it that much” [CNN].

9. Before all those floors fill up with people, Burj Khalifa has an empty weight of 500,000 tons.

10. The building won’t be empty much longer, however. So if you want in, you better hurry; 90 percent of the 900 residences (not including the soon-to-open Giorgio Armani-designed hotel) have been sold.

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Image: flickr / joi

It’s been simultaneously amusing and horrifying to read through the comments on my post about the misguided atheist holiday display in Illinois. This is still the Internet after all, and “reading comprehension” is not a highly valued skill, even among subsamples self-selected for their logic and reasoning abilities.

In brief: thinking that atheists shouldn’t be needlessly obnoxious doesn’t make me a “faithiest” or an “accommodationist” or someone without the courage of my convictions. Those would be hard charges to support against someone who wrote this or this or this or this. I just think it’s possible to have convictions without being a jerk about them. “I disagree with you” and “You are a contemptible idiot” are not logically equivalent.

Phil just pointed to a good post by Steve Cumo about precisely the same issue, with “atheism” replaced by “skepticism.” A lot of skeptics/atheists are truly excited and passionate about their worldviews, and that’s unquestionably a good thing. But it can turn into a bad thing if we allow that passion to manifest itself as contempt for everyone who disagrees with us. (For certain worthy targets, sure.) There’s certainly a place for telling jokes, or calling a crackpot a crackpot; being too afraid of stepping on people’s toes is just as bad as stomping on feet for the sheer joy of it. But there’s also a place for letting things slide, living to dispute another day.

We atheists/skeptics have a huge advantage when it comes to reasonable, evidence-based argumentation: we’re right. (Provisionally, with appropriate humble caveats about those aspects of the natural world we don’t yet understand.) We don’t need to stoop to insults to win debates; reality is on our side. And there are many people out there who are willing to listen to logic and evidence, when presented reasonably and in good faith. We should always presume that people who disagree with us are amenable to reasonable discussion, until proven otherwise. (Cf. the Grid of Disputation. See also Dr. Free-Ride.)

That’s very different than “accommodationism,” which holds that science and religion aren’t really in conflict. The problem with accommodationism isn’t that its adherents aren’t sufficiently macho or strident; it’s that they’re wrong. And when respected organizations like the National Academy of Sciences, the National Center for Science Education, or the American Association for the Advancement of Science go on record as claiming that science and religion are completely compatible, as if they were speaking for scientists, that’s unconscionable and should be stopped. They don’t have to go on at great length about how a scientific worldview undermines religious belief, even if it’s true; they can just choose not to say anything at all about religion. That’s not their job.

It’s also wrong to fetishize politeness for its own sake. Some people manage to forfeit the right to be taken seriously or treated politely. But that shouldn’t be the default position. And being polite doesn’t make you more likely to be correct, or vice-versa. And — to keep piling on the caveats — being “polite” doesn’t mean “keeping quiet,” at least as a general principle. We all know people who will resort to a cowardly tactic of claiming to be “offended” when you say something perfectly reasonable with which they happen to disagree. There’s no reason to give into that; but the solution is not to valorize obnoxiousness for its own sake.

The irony is that the pro-obnoxious crowd (obnoxionists?) is ultimately making the same mistake as the accommodationist crowd. Namely: blurring the lines between the truth of a claim and the manner in which the claim is presented. Accommodationists slide from “we can work together, in a spirit of mutual respect, with religious people on issues about which we agree” to “we should pretend that science and religion are compatible.” But obnoxionists tend to slide from “we disagree with those people” to “we should treat those people with contempt.” Neither move is really logically supportable.

A lot of the pro-obnoxiousness sentiment stems from a feeling that atheism is a disrespected minority viewpoint in our culture, and I have some sympathy with that. Atheists should never be ashamed of their beliefs, or afraid to support them vigorously. And — let’s be honest — there’s a certain amount of pleasure to be found in being part of a group where everyone sits around congratulating each other on their superior intellect and reasoning abilities, while deriding their opponents with terms like “superstition” and “brain damage” and “child abuse.” But these are temptations to be avoided, not badges of honor.

Within the self-reinforcing culture of vocal non-believers, it’s gotten to the point where saying that someone is “nice” has become an insult. Let me hereby stake out a brave, contrarian position: in favor of being nice. I think that folks in the reality-based community should be the paragons of reasonableness and even niceness, while not yielding an inch on the correctness of their views. We should be the good guys. We are in possession of some incredible truths about this amazing universe in which we live, and we should be promoting positive messages about the liberating aspects of a life in which human beings are responsible for creating justice and beauty, rather than having them handed to us by supernatural overseers. Remarkably, I think it’s possible to be positive and nice (when appropriate) and say true things at the same time. But maybe that’s just my crazy utopian streak.

The mysterious and deadly facial cancer that has sent populations of Tasmanian devils crashing now has a known source, according to findings published last week in the journal Science. The ailment originated in nerve cells of the devils themselves.

A genetic analysis of tumors from Tasmanian devils widely separated geographically shows that all the tumors are virtually identical and distinct from the animals’ own genomes…. The tumors probably arose from Schwann cells, which normally play a role in protecting and cushioning nerves [Los Angeles Times]. Tasmanian devils have a lot of nerves on their faces near their whiskers, the researchers note, and therefore have Schwann cells there. Team member Jenny Graves says the tumor could have arisen in one cell in one animal two decades ago, and then passed from devil to devil as they bit each other. The disease has already killed 60 percent of the population.

Graves says the findings have real practical value. “The good news is that one of the active proteins is easy to detect and it will give us the chance to diagnose the cancer early, which is important for setting up cancer-free ‘insurance populations’,” she added. “It also allows us to study the way the cancer changes over a long period, which potentially offers new insights for all cancer research” [The Times]. Hopefully new insights for these marsupials will come fast; at present rates the cancer could wipe out all Tasmanian devils in 30 to 50 years.

Tasmanian devils are an easy target for such a plague because they’re such a small, inbred population. Tasmanian devils are so genetically similar to one another that their immune systems don’t recognize infectious cancer cells from another individual as foreign [Science News]. The same kind of phenomenon showed up in 2006 in dogs.

For more on the Tasmanian devil paper, check out DISCOVER blogger Carl Zimmer’s post at The Loom.

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Image: flickr / JLplusAL