The poor potato seems to be suffering from an identity crisis. Particularly in the United Kingdom, where there seems to be a great deal of confusion among consumers over whether the potato is a vegetable or just a starchy carbohydrate or both.

In order to vanquish this confusion and get people to pile on the potatoes, The Potato Council in the U.K. has put forth a petition to Downing Street to re-classify the spud as a “supercarb”–a new food group that, according to the council’s website, would help highlight “how much goodness potatoes contain.”

The Council hope this re-branding restores the potatoes tattered image that has suffered in the hands of those health-conscious folks who believe that a carb is a four-letter word.

The BBC reports:

Spurned by dieters on low-carbohydrate regimens such as Atkins, the vegetable also appeared to score poorly on the Glycaemic Index (GI) — which measures how quickly foods are broken down. The slower, the better — and the potato was quick. And then it seemed it was no longer a vegetable at all, passed over by the Department of Health when it compiled its list of “five-a-day.”

In the United Kingdom, the potato is classified a starchy carbohydrate. But while it is starchy, research published in the British Nutrition Journal argued that the vegetable had been subject to “unjustified generalization” and pointed out that the potato’s nutrition was entirely dependent on the way it was cooked, pointing out that an overcooked french fry was quite different from a boiled new potato.

So should we or not scarf down that order of fries?

Tom Sanders, professor of nutrition and dietetics at King’s College, London told the BBC that potatoes are an important source of Vitamin C and several other important nutrients, and noted that they’re healthiest when baked or boiled. He added that big, freshly cut fries only take up about 7% fat because of their relatively small surface area, and fries baked in the oven are even better with just 5 percent fat.

We’ll take that as a yes.

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Image: iStockphoto

Brown dwarfs are poorly named: they’re not really brown. They’re objects that are too small to really be called stars; they lack the oomph needed to fuse hydrogen into helium in their cores, which is the the mark of a true star. Because of this, they are far cooler than actual stars. Since cool stars are red, you’d think brown dwarfs would actually be really red.

And they are. Unless they’re blue.

Yeah, let me explain this one. First, here are two images of a newly discovered brown dwarf, perhaps the coolest ever seen, and certainly one of the closest to the Earth:

[Click to redgiantize.]

The star SDSS1416+13A is the brighter one in the image, and is a regular ol’ brown dwarf. The other star is its lower mass and cooler companion, called SDSS1416+13B. How cool is it? Scientists estimate that it’s at about 200 Celsius (400° F). I ate chicken last night hotter than that! So as stars go, 1416+13B is pretty cool.

Observations taken some time apart show that the two stars are in fact binary, orbiting around each other. Since we don’t know exactly how far away these two are, we can’t say exactly just what their masses are, but the way they give off light is a dead giveaway they are both brown dwarfs. It’s possible to estimate their distance, and scientists think they are between 15 and 50 light years away. That makes them very close to us as stars go! The Milky Way is 100,000 light years across, so these guys are basically sitting in our front yard.

Now, let me take a sec to explain some jargon. Blue light has a shorter wavelength than red light. Because of this, astronomers sometimes use the words "blue" and "red" as adjectives, meaning shorter and longer wavelengths, respectively. So blue is bluer than red, and red is redder than blue. Duh. But they can also say with a straight face that red is bluer than infrared, and infrared is redder than red! That’s because red has a shorter wavelength than IR, and is therefore "bluer", while the IR is longer wavelength than red, and is therefore "redder". Got it? It actually makes sense, and you eventually get used to it. I’ll be using this jargon below, so be ye fairly warned.

The pictures above are false color; both are in infrared light (the left is from the ground-based UKIRT telescope, while the one on the right is from the space-based Spitzer telescope). You might expect that since 1416+13B is cooler than its companion, it should be giving off more long-wavelength (redder) IR light. But in the case of the left image, the blue color still means 1416+13B is giving off more light at the shorter (bluer) end of the IR part of the spectrum. What gives?

Brown dwarfs are weird, that’s what gives. They have atmospheres almost like planets do, and that air is filled with methane, water vapor (steam!), and sometimes even vaporized iron for hotter ones — in cooler brown dwarfs, that iron precipitates out… in other words, it rains molten iron droplets!

In the case of 1416+13B, the atmosphere is cool enough that methane and steam absorb the light coming from below. Those two molecules are picky about what light they absorb, and they soak up quite a bit of IR at different wavelengths, allowing other wavelengths through. So what’s happening here is that some of the redder IR light gets sucked up, while bluer IR passes right through. What we see from outside is the star emitting bluer IR light, so images taken in IR make the star look blue.

This spectrum, taken with the Subaru telescope, might help:

Think of the vertical axis telling you how much light the gas in the star’s atmosphere lets through, and the horizontal is the color. Bluer IR is on the left, redder on the right. You can see that a handful of blue colors blast right through, but the star emits very little in the red. So when we look at it with our infrared telescopes, we see it looking blue.

Mind you, to our eyes, this guy would look very, very red. But that’s in visible light, off to the left (blue) of this graph.

So, given all this, why does the star look red in the Spitzer image? Aiiiiieeee!

OK, don’t panic. That’s because Spitzer looks at a different part of the IR spectrum. It sees light at 3.6 and 4.5 microns, well off to the right (red) of the spectrum shown above. In those wavelengths, 1416+13B looks redder.

So here we have a brown dwarf that looks red, or maybe blue. It all depends on how you look at it.

But that’s the whole point! By looking at stars at different wavelengths, we can find out a lot about them. In this case, we can estimate the distance to the star, its temperature, and even what’s in its atmosphere… all from hundreds of trillions of kilometers away!

Things like this never cease to amaze me. Science! I love this stuff.

Image credits: JAC/UKIRT, Spitzer Space Telescope, University of Hertfordshire, and Subaru Telescope (NAOJ), University of Hertfordshire.

Last week in Aspen we learned that this week would be when a major decision was reached by CERN at the annual Chamonix meeting as to how to operate the LHC at high energy. Following the magnet quench incident in September 2008, a year-long shutdown ensued for repairs to the magnets, and retrofitting of the rest of the machine for better quench protection circuitry and helium pressure release valves. Not all sectors were warmed up to room temperature for the retrofit last year, but all magnets were trained to go as high as beam energies of 5 TeV (design energy is 7 TeV per beam).

In November and December the LHC commissioning resumed, and it became the world’s highest energy collider on December 8, eventually delivering about 50,000 collisions at 2.36 TeV to CMS and ATLAS before shutting down for Christmas.

But the question facing the LHC managers this week was whether attempting to operate the LHC at 5 TeV on 5 TeV in 2010 was worth the risk to the machine itself. Clearly another disaster of the scale of the one in 2008 would cripple the program for a long time. In the end the decision is to operate the LHC at 3.5 TeV on 3.5 TeV (7 TeV collision energy, 3.5 times that of the Tevatron) and accumulate a substantial amount of physics-quality data: 1 inverse femtobarn, or stop by the end f 2011, whichever comes first. This corresponds to something like ten trillion proton-proton collisions, of which only a small fraction will yield events interesting enough to record for later analysis by the experiments, and of these, only a tiny fraction yielding data relevant for physics.

After a one to one-and-a-half year shutdown in 2012 to retrofit the rest of the machine and make other preparations, the LHC will attempt to double the energy, to 14 TeV in the center of mass, in 2013 and accumulate substantial physics data. My best guess is that if the Higgs boson is to be discovered, it will be at high energy with this large sample of 14 TeV data. We might be able to rule it out at 95% confidence in certain mass ranges if it’s not there, but we ought not be able to do that if it is, right? Patience, patience!

Nevertheless, there is no question that in a few weeks, when operated at 7 TeV collision energy, the LHC will become an awesome discovery machine. There are many new physics scenarios in which we will be able to see new phenomena with just a fraction of the full 1 fb^-1 sample. Will nature give up her secrets so readily though? She may not – we may spend this year and the next rediscovering the Standard Model, building up understanding of the detector, and sharpening our analysis tools in order to discover quite subtle effects. No matter what happens, this is the most exciting time in particle physics in decades.

I’m not the only person to find it endlessly amusing that Jürgen Habermas, octogenarian theorist of communicative rationality, has taken to Twitter. (The account seems to be legit, but it’s hard to be sure.) This is so over-determined that just last year Lauren Fisher gave a presentation entitled “If Habermas could Twitter.” Well, now we know.

He’s still trying to master the 140-character limit, though. Here’s his latest set of tweets:

Well, yeah. The internet is (in some sense) an egalitarian public sphere, but it raises the danger of fragmentation into self-reinforcing interest groups. Remains to be seen how it will all ultimately play out.

The Shorty Award nomination process ends tonight at midnight Pacific time (08:00 UT Saturday). If you have an existing Twitter account, please help my friend and quack-fighter Rachael Dunlop beat out that alt-med gufru^* Joe Mercola. You can vote for her here, and you can get some backstory in this earlier post.

This is just the nomination process, but it simply makes my heart sing to know that someone who represents actual science and a real defender of health gets the most votes. Thanks.

As if soccer, wars of incredible length, and the relative worth of wine vs. beer didn’t account for enough disagreements between Britain and France, add another spat to the pile: whether or not the G-spot really exists.

A few weeks ago, a team of scientists from King’s College London joined the ongoing scientific fray by publishing a new study on the much-debated female erogenous zone. It was the biggest to date, involving 1,800 women – all of whom were pairs of identical or non-identical twins. If the G-spot did exist, it said, then genetically identical twins would have been expected to both report having one. However, no such pattern emerged [The Telegraph]. As a result of the study, coauthor Tim Spector said, the study “shows fairly conclusively that the idea of a G-spot is subjective.”

It didn’t take long, however, for this news to reach the French, who aren’t about to start taking sex advice from across the channel. A group of gynecologists there convened their own conference in Paris to denounce this assault on female pleasure. Surgeon Pierre Foldes told a “G-Day” conference across La Manche: “The King’s College study shows a lack of respect for what women say. The conclusions were completely erroneous because they were based solely on genetic observations” [The Register].

The angry French gynecologists said they’d found the real problem with their British counterparts: that they’re British. The King’s College study, they said, had fallen victim to an Anglo-Saxon tendency to reduce the mysteries of sexuality to absolutes. This attempt to set clear parameters on something variable and ambiguous, they said, was characteristic of British scientific attitudes to sex [The Guardian].

Gynecologist Odile Buisson went even further in blaming national sex attitudes for supposedly leading the British researchers astray: “I don’t want to stigmatise at all but I think the Protestant, liberal, Anglo-Saxon character means you are very pragmatic. There has to be a cause for everything, a gene for everything,” she said, adding: “I think it’s totalitarian” [The Guardian]. She also told The Telegraph that the G-spot is real for upwards of 60 percent of women, and that saying anything else is “medical machismo.”

No word yet of the British team responding to this challenge to their study (and national pride).

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Image: flickr/ takomabibelot

Human parents can get into a huge lather about keeping their kids safe. So why should some species of frog be any different? Male Tungara frogs (Engystomops pustulous) will huff and puff and literally kick up a huge clump of foam that serves as a nest to shelter his mate’s eggs. The floating foam nests sound flimsy, but they’re actually incredibly durable–surviving the sun, high temperatures, infections, and parasites for four whole days until the eggs housed inside mature into tadpoles.

While scientists already knew of these foam nests, they didn’t know quite how the frogs made them. Now research (pdf) published in the Royal Society’s journal Biology Letters provides some answers. New footage filmed of an amorous pair of Tungara frogs foaming up a nest in the West Indies shows a carefully calibrated approach to nest-building that’s part yoga, part physics.

In the first stage of foam-making, the male hops onto the female’s back and begins to collect a foam-precursor fluid. Then he begins kicking his legs in short bursts, mixing air bubbles into the fluid just like an eggbeater does. In the next stage, he carefully pushes in eggs from the female underneath him into the center of the foam before eventually slowing down and stopping.

Scientists are hopeful that understanding the nest building process would help us create a similar “bio-foam” in the laboratory.

Study coauthor Malcolm Kennedy, an evolutionary biologist from University of Glasgow, told the BBC:

“This material is resistant to bacterial and microbial damage — and if you could make a spray can that could produce this, it could potentially be used on burn victims, for example, because it would prevent them from infection, but it doesn’t damage cells.”

Check out the eggbeater action for yourself:

Related Content:
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Image: Malcolm Kennedy

Today’s xkcd comic takes a somewhat different stance on the plight of Spirit than I did.

Still, it’s funny how we anthropomorphize objects, especially when they are vaguely human or animal looking. Especially if they’re cute. And Spirit is very cute.

Who’s a good rover? Hmmm? You are! You’re a good rover!

This is the third in a series of guest posts by Joel Barkan, a previous contributor to “The Intersection” and a graduate student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The renowned Scripps marine biologist Jeremy Jackson is teaching his famed “Marine Science, Economics, and Policy” course for what may be the last time this year (along with Jennifer Jacquet), and Joel will be reporting each week on the contents of the course.

Last week, I wrote about raising fish in our own backyards using aquaculture. Today, I’ll discuss fish that don’t come from farms, but instead make their way to our dinner plates from very far away: the high seas. The high seas, or international waters, are areas more than 200 miles offshore from any country and thus not regulated by any individual nation. The huge factory fishing fleets of rival nations compete on the high seas to out-fish the other boats, reenacting Garret Hardin’s famous “The Tragedy of the Commons” in the middle of the ocean.

This week, it was my turn, along with three other classmates, to present to the rest of the class about high seas fishing. We highlighted two different fishing methods: drift netting and bottom trawling. Drift nets pluck fish like tuna and swordfish from the top of the water column, while bottom trawls drag the seafloor for valuable halibut and orange roughy. Both methods are indiscriminate: you’re almost as likely to catch a common dolphin in a drift net as an albacore tuna, and bottom trawling is akin to plowing a whole forest just to harvest a few edible mushrooms. Both sound pretty bad, right? Consider this: high seas drift netting was banned in 1991 by a UN resolution, but several countries still bottom trawl within international waters to this day.

The moratorium on high seas drift net fishing succeeded because most countries agreed that the fishery’s immense bycatch was unsustainable. In class, we discussed what might need to happen to raise the necessary two-thirds majority for a similar UN resolution on destructive high seas bottom trawling. Striking images of charismatic animals like dolphins and albatrosses tangled in nets made drift netting an easy target for a moratorium. How can we raise awareness about a dark ecosystem no one sees and obscure species like deep-water coral that most people don’t care about?

A potential solution may be tied to that familiar influential source: money. Countries like Spain, Russia, Iceland, and a few others continue to bottom trawl on the high seas because they profit from it. Opposition from these nations has stymied efforts to ban deep sea trawling in international waters. Can we give these countries economic incentives to change their ways? Perhaps the deep sea trawlers would be willing to employ new gear types or limit their trawling to State waters if a wealthy country such as the U.S. or Australia subsidized their gear overhauls.

It’s obvious that conservation takes a backseat to political and economic influences when dealing with multilateral agreements. Let’s hope the superpowers can work something out before we turn our shared deep sea ecosystems into wastelands.