Hubble's look at a brown dwarf and mystery companion. Click for larger. Credit: Hubblesite

Everybody remembers the shock of the news when Pluto was demoted from being a planet into becoming a hapless minor planet. The IAU hardly saw the ensuing furor coming. You don’t just go messing with the planets for any old reason. What they really did was underestimate the value of public relations. In the eyes of the public they “demoted” a perfectly good planet to MINOR planet status…minor indeed! Hmmph!

I for one do understand why the IAU did what they did. All they really needed to do was to use better salesmanship, maybe something like mini-planet or maybe dainty-planet or something along those lines, but never minor. It seems pretty obvious the public will toss out a tried and true anything for a pig-in-a-poke if it is marketed correctly, we do it all the time. Heck sometimes all we have to do is be told we will like it, and that’s good enough until we unwrap the package to see what really awaits us and by then it’s too late one way or the other.

Now enter Hubble and the image above of a Brown Dwarf Star and a mystery companion.  Is it a planet?  Is it a star?  Where is the dividing line?  Somehow if when the discussion is reversed on the Pluto topic I don’t think we would have the same problem.

Background from Hubblesite:

As our telescopes grow more powerful, astronomers are uncovering objects that defy conventional wisdom. This latest example is the discovery of a planet-like object circling a brown dwarf. It’s the right size for a planet, estimated to be 5-10 times the mass of Jupiter. There has been a lot of discussion in the context of the Pluto debate over how small an object can be and still be called a planet. This new observation addresses the question at the other end of the size spectrum: How small can an object be and still be a brown dwarf rather than a planet? This new companion is within the range of masses observed for planets around stars — less than 15 Jupiter masses. But should it be called a planet? The answer is strongly connected to the mechanism by which the companion most likely formed. What’s even more puzzling is that the object formed in just 1 million years, a very short time to make a planet according to conventional theory.

Read the full story and see more images at Hubblesite.

The Cassini spacecraft just had a few close encounters with some of the odder moons in the Saturn system… and given how weird Saturn is, that’s saying something. I was particularly enthralled with these two small worlds:

On the left is the moon Janus and on the right is Epimetheus. The scales are not quite the same; Janus is roughly half again as big as Epimetheus’ size of 135 x 110 x 105 km (81 x 66 x 63 miles). Cassini was a little over 100,000 km from Epimetheus and 75,000 km from Janus when these images a were taken.

These are raw images, so they haven’t been processed yet to remove cosmic ray hits, brightness variations, and so on. But they are still fascinating. Epimetheus looks to me exactly how I picture a big asteroid; beaten, battered, looming. The low angle of sunlight on the side accentuates the craters there, making this almost a caricature of what an asteroid looks like. Technically it’s not an asteroid; it’s a moon. And even if it weren’t orbiting Saturn we might not call it an asteroid; it has a high reflectivity indicating a lot of ice on the surface (and a low density consistent with that too). If it orbited the Sun on an elliptical path, we might very well call it a comet!

But there’s more to these moons. Amazingly, Janus and Epimetheus are on almost — but not quite — the same orbit around Saturn! Currently, Janus is a bit closer to Saturn than Epimetheus.

I say "currently", because every four years these moons swap orbits! Since Janus has an orbit slightly closer to Saturn, it is moving faster around the planet than Epimetheus. It slowly but eventually catches up to the outer moon. As they approach, Janus pulls back slightly on Epimetheus, and Epimetheus pulls Janus forward. In other words, Janus steals orbital energy Epimetheus! This means Epimetheus drops into a slightly lower orbit, and Janus gets boosted into a slightly higher one, effectively swapping the orbits of the two moons. Although the two orbital paths are separated by only about 50 km (30 miles) — smaller than the radii of either moon — they never collide. The swap takes place when the moons are still more than 10,000 km apart, so they never get a chance to bump uglies.

How did this weird situation arise? Perhaps, in the distant past, there was one bigger moon orbiting Saturn, and it got whacked by an interloper. The moon disrupted, breaking into two big pieces and lots of littler ones. The debris got cleaned up by the gravity of the two big pieces and other gravitational effects, leaving these two square-dancing satellites on slightly different but still interacting paths.

However, the actual cause of this still isn’t known for sure. Cassini observations like this one may help astronomers figure out how it is these two little moons came to be, and why it is that although they can always approach each other, they can never actually touch.

Over the years of our addiction to the great idiot box, television, we’ve gradually learned to block out the pesky commercials that interrupt and interfere with our viewing pleasure with their yammering attempts to sell us things. Unfortunately, this has only led marketers to wonder how they could influence our buying decisions in more subtle ways, ushering in a new era of creepy ideas that smack of brainwashing.

The first idea was product placement, where the stars of TV shows drank a certain brand of fizzy soda or typed on a certain brand of computer. But now that most viewers are hip to these product placements, the marketers and networks have stepped it up a notch to reclaim our attention again. NBC has introduced “behavior placement,” wherein certain behaviors are written into the show’s narrative in order to foist a more nebulous kind of marketing on us.

For a week in April, NBC will use its shows to convince viewers to “get green,” compost, or otherwise save the planet. The benefits for advertisers are two-fold. Some companies simply want to link their brand to a feel-good and socially aware show, while other companies–like those that sell energy-efficient lightbulbs or organic household cleaning products–think advertising on these shows will directly boost sales.

In an in-depth article, The Wall Street Journal writes of an earlier marketing push:

In just one week on NBC, the detectives on “Law and Order” investigated a cash-for-clunkers scam, a nurse on “Mercy” organized a group bike ride, Al Gore made a guest appearance on “30 Rock,” and “The Office” turned Dwight Schrute into a cape-wearing superhero obsessed with recycling.

The marketers say they don’t want to come across as being too pushy or preachy, so getting characters in a show to plug for certain behaviors is a safer bet. NBC Universal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker told The Wall Street Journal:

“People don’t want to be hit over the head with it…. Putting it in programming is what makes it resonate with viewers.”

Since fall 2007, NBC executives have asked producers of almost every prime-time and daytime show to incorporate a green storyline at least once a year. Show producers, like Tim Kring of “Heroes,” told The Journal that behavior placement was easier than incorporating a specific brand. This past fall, he said, members of a carnival in the show loaded a pickup truck with recyclables as one of the characters talked about giving back to the Earth.

“Someone has to pay for our big, expensive television shows,” Mr. Kring says.

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Image: iStockphoto

When I was 9 years old I desperately wanted to be a paleontologist, but sadly, daydreams of unearthing dinosaurs led to no significant fossil finds in my backyard. So I must confess unending respect for Matthew Berger, who, at age 9, quite by accident made a stunning scientific find. In the journal Science this week, Matthew’s father paleoanthropologist Lee Berger describes the fossils of a brand-new hominid species that they turned up in South Africa: Australopithecus sediba, which dates back to between 1.78 and 1.95 million years and could offer new hints about that era of human evolution.

Matthew was chasing his dog near a site where his father had long hunted for fossils when he tripped over the find. The bones belong to a pre-teenage boy and a woman estimated to be in her late 20s or early 30s; the individuals died at about the same time, and before their remains had fully decomposed, they were entombed in an avalanche of sediment and nearly perfectly preserved deep in the Malapa cave north of Johannesburg, South Africa [TIME]. As a result, Lee Berger says, the bones are in an astonishing state for their nearly 2-million-year age.

While such a find was bound to bring out the “missing link” cliches, we don’t know for sure where Australopithecus sediba would belong on the evolutionary tree with respect to us. “There’s no compelling evidence that this newly proposed species was ancestral to Homo,” remarks Bernard Wood of George Washington University in Washington, D.C. [Science News]. These bones date to a time when the genus Australopithecus was beginning to give way to Homo, our own. The New York Times reports, however, that while Berger’s team places its find within Australopithecus, not all anthropologists are sure it can be so easily classified.

For instance, the Australopithecus sediba arms are long like an ape’s, suggesting these hominids were competent tree climbers. But the hands are smaller, like ours. The boy’s skull is small, like Australopithecus. But his nose and cheekbones more closely resemble Homo. “They are a fascinating mosaic of features,” said Rick Potts, director of the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian Institution. “It reminds us of the combining and recombining of characteristics, the tinkering and experimentation, that go on in evolution” [The New York Times]. Donald Johanson, the discoverer of Lucy (which is classified under Australopithecus), praised the find but says Berger’s interpretation is way off. He think the fossil is a variety of Homo.

The debate over these bones will go on and on. But while Lee Berger reaps his kudos, there’s one person who’s not receiving due respect: Matthew. In an insult to 9-year-old scientists everywhere, Science reportedly shot down Lee Berger’s request to list his son as a co-author. But the younger Berger is still left with good stories to tell. On Aug. 15, 2008, when Matthew called his father to look at the bones he had found, Dr. Berger began cursing wildly as he neared his son. The boy mistook his father’s profanity for anger…. “I couldn’t believe it,” Dr. Berger giddily recalled. “I took the rock, and I turned it” and “sticking out of the back of the rock was a mandible with a tooth, a canine, sticking out. And I almost died,” he said, adding “What are the odds?” [The New York Times].

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Image: Brett Eloff

In Slate today, I take a look at the newly unveiled fossils of a strange new hominin, Australopithecus sediba. I try to separate the hype from the significance of this long-legged, long-armed, tiny-brained beast. My conclusion: let’s not turn this into another Darwinius affair!

Check it out.

[Photo by Brett Eloff courtesy of Lee Berger and University of Witwatersrand]

I am very pleased and excited to announce that I will be moderating a fascinating panel in Pasadena California on Tuesday, April 21. The topic is "The Quest for a Living World": how modern astronomy is edging closer to finding another Earth orbiting a distant star.

[Click for a higher-res version.]

The panelists are all-stars in the field: Caltech astronomy professor John Johnson, Berkeley astronomer Gibor Basri, MIT planetary astronomer Sara Seager, and NASA Ames Research Center’s Tori Hoehler. We’ll be talking about how we’re looking for these new worlds, what the state of the art is, and perhaps toss around some of the philosophy of why we’re looking for them. You might think the answer is obvious, but I’ve found that astronomers have lots of intriguing reasons for why they do the work they do.

The event is sponsored by Discover Magazine, the Thirty Meter Telescope (yes, a project to build a telescope with a 30 meter mirror!), and Caltech. It will be at 7:30 p.m. at Caltech’s Beckman auditorium. It’s also free! Send an email to exoplanets@tmt.org if you want to attend.

We’ll be taking questions from the audience, and if you have a question you’d like to submit in advance then we have an online form where you can send it it.

Last year’s panel on astronomy frontiers was a lot of fun, and very well-attended. If you’re in the LA area, then I highly recommend you come! I know you’ll have a great time, and you’ll get a taste for some of the astronomical adventures in store for us in the next couple of years.

There's an intriguing geoengineering discussion going on here: PRI has brought in the economist Scott Barrett of Columbia, who thinks the economics of geoengineering are just going to be irresistable to most countries, especially when compared with the economics of carbon emissions cuts. That's a scary thought, although not exactly a surprising one. You can read Barrett's academic paper on the topic here, and head over here to join in the dialogue it has occasioned. Meanwhile, we're finishing up the next Point of Inquiry, and I promise my intro isn't as soapbox long this time. (Hey, I'm learning.) Eli Kintisch was a great guest, so tune in tomorrow....

I’ve got a feature in the latest issue of New Scientist. It’s sort of a four-step guide to interpreting studies looking at genes and behaviour, using one particular gene as a case study. The piece is out today, but it harkens back to lines of thinking that began over a century ago.

Italy, 1876. The criminologist and physician Cesare Lombroso has just published L’uomo delinquente (The Criminal Man), a work that will define European understanding of criminal behaviour for several decades. Lombroso believed that some people were born criminals, whose penchant for crime was set from birth and who had diminished responsibility for their own misdeeds.

Skip forward 133 years, and Lombroso’s theories seem antiquated, even distasteful. Our modern understanding of biology has put paid to simplistic ideas about the origins of criminality and violence. Discoveries from the growing field of ‘behavioural genetics’ show us how nature and nurture conspire to influence our actions. But because of these same discoveries, the idea of the born criminal has resurfaced in modern Italy under a different guise, a century after Lombroso’s death.

Last year, Italian courts cut the sentence of a convicted murderer by one year, on the basis that his genetic make-up supposedly predisposed him to violence. The man, Abdelmalek Bayout, carried a version of a gene called monoamine oxidase A, or MAOA, which has been linked to aggression and violence. The gene has a history of controversy. It has been linked to gang membership and psychological disorders, and it has been used to define an entire ethnic group as warriors.

The story of MAOA is the perfect case study for how gradual revelations about the tango between genes and environment can be translated into unconvincing applications and overplayed interpretations. There is no better example of the dangerous state of modern behavioural genetics, no better poster child for how to miscommunicate, misinterpret and misuse genetic discoveries.

The feature takes the form of four lessons, each covering a different area of research or controversy around MAOA:

1. A catchy name is bound to be misleading
2. Nature and nurture are inextricably linked
3. Beware of reinforcing stereotypes
4. Genes do not dictate behaviour

Go read the article to find out more.