Marian at work

Okay, I got wa-a-a-a-a-ay behind today, and looking over my post (intended for this evening), I think I’ll hold it until tomorrow.  It still needs work.  Since I’ll be up most of tonight trying to catch up on “things”, I should be able to work on it all night.

I try to take one day at a time, but sometimes several days attack me at once.

Rats.

The shuttle Discovery and crew will remain is orbit for another 24 hours.  The clouds at KSC just would not cooperate, just as we got to the Go/No Go decision, they decided not to land today and hope for better conditions tomorrow.

The NOAA weather forecast:

Tonight: A 20 percent chance of showers before midnight. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 61. Northeast wind between 5 and 10 mph.

Tuesday: A 30 percent chance of showers after 2pm. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 75. East wind around 10 mph.

Effects of a whole-body spandex garment on rectal temperature and oxygen consumption in healthy dogs.

“OBJECTIVE: To determine whether a full-body spandex garment would alter rectal temperatures of healthy dogs at rest in cool and warm environments… …PROCEDURES: Each dog was evaluated at a low (20 degrees to 25 degrees C [68 degrees to 77 degrees F]) or high (30 degrees to 35 degrees C [86 degrees to 95 degrees F]) ambient temperature while wearing or not wearing a commercially available whole-body spandex garment designed for dogs. Oxygen consumption was measured by placing dogs in a flow-through indirect calorimeter for 90 to 120 minutes. Rectal temperature was measured before dogs were placed in the calorimeter and after they were removed. RESULTS: Rectal temperature increased significantly more at the higher ambient temperature than at the lower temperature and when dogs were not wearing the garment than when they were wearing it. The specific rate of oxygen consumption was significantly higher at the lower ambient temperature than at the higher temperature. CONCLUSIONS AND CLINICAL RELEVANCE: Results suggest that wearing a snug spandex body garment does not increase the possibility that dogs will overheat while in moderate ambient temperatures. Instead, wearing such a garment may enable dogs to better maintain body temperature during moderate heat loading. These results suggest that such garments might be used for purposes such as wound or suture protection without causing dogs to overheat.”

Photo: flickr/zebedee.zebedee

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The next time someone asks you to take the trash out, don’t make a big deal about it. Because, as Namgyal Sherpa will tell you, at least you don’t have to climb a mountain to take out the garbage. Namgyal is leading a team of 20 sherpas who, come May 1st, will be climbing up to the world’s highest garbage dump–on Mount Everest.

The Nepalese mountain climbers will trek to above 26,000 feet to an area known as the “death zone” due to its lack of oxygen, Reuters reports. Once there, they’ll gather up the trash left behind by previous expeditions.

The Mount Everest spring cleaning trip is expected to yield tons of garbage like food wrappings, torn tents, and discarded oxygen bottles left between an area called South Col at 26,000 feet and the summit at 29,035 feet. The sherpas also hope to bring back the dead bodies of three mountaineers who were killed in the death zone, and plan to cremate them near the base camp.

Namgyal Sherpa has already scaled the summit seven times and will be with a team comprised of equally expert mountaineers, including one teammate who has made the trip up Everest 14 times. They’ll all be toting empty sacks to haul the trash back in.

Namgyal, who goes by one name only, says some of the rubbish has been lying around since Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay first scaled the world’s highest peak in 1953; he says that the trash creates problems for other climbers as they trek through the treacherous terrain. He told Reuters:

“This is the first time we are cleaning at that height, the death zone. It is very difficult and dangerous…. The garbage was buried under snow in the past. But now it has come out on the surface because of the melting of snow due to global warming.”

Many climbers leave their gear and trash behind as they descend due to exhaustion and lack of oxygen, Reuters adds. And garbage left behind on the mountain has become a source of environmental concern for the Nepalese government, which started imposing strict rules 15 years ago requiring climbers to bring back all their trash. But there are still no estimates on how much trash remains on the mountain.

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Image: Wikimedia

Kaleidoscopic. Delightfully odd. And too numerous to truly grasp.

There are many more words one could deploy to describe the worlds unknown under the sea. An international group of scientists has been scouring them for life for the last decade, and later this year, on October 4, the Census of Marine Life will release it catalog of marine inhabitants. “The number could be astonishingly large, perhaps a million or more, if all small animals and protists are included,” the organization says.

Octopuses, jellyfish, and other sprawling sea creatures dominated the census’ prior reports. But this time they’ve dived even deeper, surveying tiny life. Remotely operated deep-sea vehicles discovered that roundworms dominate the deepest, darkest abyss. Sometimes, more than 500,000 can exist in just over a square yard of soft clay [AP].

And then there are the microbes. The scientists conservatively estimate that there must be at least 20 million kinds of microbe in the oceans. The true number may even be billions or trillions [Nature]. Individual microbes reach even more astronomical number. There are probably a nonillion of them in the sea, the scientists estimate. That’s a billion cubed, and then times 1,000. Or, if you prefer your measurements given in the weight of African elephants, it’d be 240 billion of them.

Take a peek through this quick slideshow of some of the weirdest ocean life seen so far.

Image: David Patterson et. al.

A guy walks into a bar, but instead of the customary lame joke or flat beer, this guy actually finds the next, unreleased generation of the iPhone, according to Gizmodo.

The phone, apparently retrieved from a bar in Redwood City, California was camouflaged to look like a regular 3GS phone. Since reports later surfaced that Apple was indeed missing an experimental iPhone 4 from its offices, Gizmodo is now convinced that this is the missing prototype.

Tinkering around with the prototype, Gizmodo found a lot of new and improved features. The happy investigators report that the prototype not only sports a front-facing camera for video chats, but also boasts an improved regular back camera with a flash and larger lens. The display is reported to be better, and the unit pops out a Micro-SIM instead of a standard SIM card. Gizmodo adds that there are split buttons for volume, and notes that the power, mute, and volume buttons are all metallic in color.

Sadly, they didn’t get a chance to suss the operating system out, as Apple remotely disconnected the phone.

So, what else can you expect from the new iPhone? Gizmodo describes:

The back is entirely flat, made of either glass (more likely) or ceramic or shiny plastic in order for the cell signal to poke through. Tapping on the back makes a more hollow and higher pitched sound compared to tapping on the glass on the front/screen, but that could just be the orientation of components inside making for a different sound
• An aluminum border going completely around the outside
• Slightly smaller screen than the 3GS (but seemingly higher resolution)
• Everything is more squared off
• 3 grams heavier
• 16% Larger battery
• Internals components are shrunken, miniaturized and reduced to make room for the larger battery

Gizmodo says it is confident that the lost and found phone is the 2010 model of the new iPhone, as the device behaves like an iPhone when connected to a computer, but has obvious hardware differences from existing iPhones. What’s more, when the tinkerers disassembled the phone, they found “multiple components that were clearly labeled APPLE.” And they believe this to be the 2010 model because they say it’s too early for Apple to be testing out its 2011 model in such a finished form.

With its sleek looks, flash, better back camera, and another microphone for superior voice clarity, Gizmodo’s final verdict was that the upgraded phone is a winner.

People who bought the 3G two years ago and are now in the perfect position to upgrade and get a dramatically different, and better, phone.

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Why religion can lead to racism. I think the correlations are real, but am skeptical of the causation because I think think the correlation is cultural-specific. For example, my personal experience with Muslims is that those who espouse the most “Fundamentalist” world views are the least racist. The contrast with white American Protestants probably emerges from the fact that white American Protestants and Arab Muslims have had very different recent histories (if Arab Muslims want a racial ideology, they had a good candidate in secular Baathism. Some of the same applies to Turks and Persians, who got on the 20th century racial-nationalist bandwagon, as evident in the attempt by the Shah to emphasize Iran’s Aryan antecedents, while Ataturk funded research on the racial characteristics of the Turkish people which allowed them to be a conquering race).

Air Travel Crisis Deepens as Europe Fears Wider Impact. This shows the downside of a JIT world, where we squeeze efficiencies by pushing everything to the margin and assuming stable background conditions. I worry that as the world economy becomes more interdependent, and squeezes efficiencies out through complementation via comparative advantages, there emerge problems whenever we get buffeted by a big “exogenous shock.” I think there’s some evidence that we as a species have cognitive biases toward focus on near-term conditions and discounting volatility toward the tails of the distribution. Such is nature.

S.E. Cupp On Being An Atheist & A Conservative. Some of her arguments strike me as surprisingly superficial, and I think it’s likely that she’ll convert to Roman Catholicism at some point in the next 20 years. My minimal experience with atheists who want to be religious is that they generally get their wish if they don’t die too early. Also, apparently she’s getting her masters in Religious Studies, which is a field that is often suspicious of unvarnished naturalism in the study of religion. Warning: I suspect some readers of this weblog will find her responses & viewpoints somewhat cringe-worthy. A young Heather Mac Donald she’s not, take a look at this clip, who does she remind you of? Can’t wait until she’s firmly in the Christian column.

For Goldman, a Bet’s Stakes Keep Growing. Some people are saying that investors will now be cautious of making recourse to Goldman’s services for fear that they’ll be screwed. But remember that it is assumed that many of Bernie Madoff’s investors suspected that he was front running. In other words, as long as it’s someone else being screwed they should be fine with it. The people at Goldman are the best tools you have out there, but a tool is a tool and can be used for good or ill. In any case I thought Goldman was making most of its money by trading with its own capital, leveraging the ability to get cash cheaply via the Fed window and also taking advantage of the guaranteed implicit backing of the government. I do believe that capitalism needs virtue, but I also believe that the revolution of morals has to start up top. I’m not holding my breath. Cultures go through cycles, and we’re probably due for a “correction.”

Where Paris Chefs, Not Prices, Rise. If you’re going through Paris, worth a read.

I get a lot of books and such sent to me, and I rarely have time to look them over. It’s a blessing and a curse, I guess. I want to see what everyone else is doing, but I’m doing too much to look!

But I got an email from James Dunbar, asking if I’d look over his rhyming verse comic book called BANG! The Universe Verse. He made it easy, since there’s a small version online I could look through.

I like it! It describes the Big Bang model using simple terms, and goes through the timeline breezily, making it easy to read. Someone unfamiliar with the science will get a passing familiarity with it from reading this, and enough info to go online and find out more.

And if you are familiar with the science, you might get a kick out of the drawings anyway. I really liked this one:

Clever use of visual similes, with the iris resembling an explosion.

BANG! is freely available as an e-book, and you can ping him if you want a PDF. He also sells a bound copy for $10, which is pretty reasonable given he’s self-publishing it.

He’s a talented guy, and I hope he can do more stuff like this. I wonder how many kids he can inspire to get more interested in science?

Can Changing Diet Improve Real-World Health? I defend salt! Remember you can subscribe via iTunes (or search for “ResearchBlogCast” in iTunes store).

When whales die, their massive bodies slowly sink to the ocean deaths where they provide a feast of riches for bottom-dwelling scavengers. These “whalefalls” are ecosystems unto themselves with thriving communities of living things all eking out an existence on the giant carcasses. These scavengers even include a group of worms called Osedax or “bone-eaters” that live and feed solely on the bones of fallen animals. They were discovered by humans in 2002, but their relationship with whales is an ancient one. Two new 30-million-year-old fossils suggest that as long as there have been whales, there have been Osedax worms feeding off their bones.

Osedax worms have neither stomach nor mouth. They feed by sending a system of “roots” into the bones of its fallen meals. These roots are full of bacterial partners that digest whale fat and collagen proteins, releasing nutrients that the worms can then absorb. At the centre of these roots is the worm itself, which sticks feathery gills out of a hole in the bone. Take out the worm and you’d see a central hole with a connected tangle of thin tunnels. And that’s exactly what Steffen Kiel from Christian-Albrechts University found in a pair of new fossils.

Kiel unearthed the specimens in Washington State, USA. They were small, toothed whales, no more than 4 metres in length. Time hasn’t been kind to the remains. Not only did Osedax worms corrode them but sharks clearly had a go at the carcasses too, as evidenced by small teeth that are still lodged there today.

But among the fragments that have been reasonably preserved, Kiel found the tell-tale signs of Osedax activity. The bones contain boreholes at their surface, each leading to an excavated inner chamber with a network of finer tubes branching off it that are distinct from the channels carved by the whales’ own blood vessels.

Could other culprits be behind these hollows? Kiel thinks not. Bone diseases can create large cavities in bones but they don’t create circular holes at the surface. Other deep-sea creatures, including various shellfish, sponges, and other worms, can bore into hard substances, but they leave behind holes that are very differently shaped to those of Osedax. And at the very least, no other living animal bores into whale bones. When scientists studied six whale carcasses that had sunk in Monterey Bay, they found no other bone-drilling species apart from Osedax.

Kiel dated the fossils to the Oligocene period around 30 million years ago, a time when the whale dynasty truly started to take off, diversifying into new species that would ultimately spread throughout the world’s oceans. It’s tempting to suggest that the evolution of new Osedax species tied into the spread of its food source. Indeed, the corrosive power of these worms means that uncovering good, undamaged whale fossils might be a daunting task for modern palaeontologists, something that Kiel called the “Osedax effect”.

However, the group may be even earlier than the whales. Differences between the DNA of Osedax worms suggest that the group first evolved either during the Oligocene, which coincides with the rise of the whales, or the earlier Cretaceous period, when the oceans were dominated by giant reptiles. Perhaps the bone-eaters were feasting on the remains of the long-necked plesiosaurs or the crocodile-like mosasaurs long before the whales provided them with an even more substantial banquet. That’s Kiel’s next challenge: to investigate the bones of ancient marine reptiles to see if any of them bear the traces of hungry Osedax.

Reference: PNAS http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1002014107

Poking around the GSS for another reason I stumbled onto something weird. Something which I’d seen hints of, or seen referred to before, but never followed up myself. It seems that support for abortion-on-demand and the death penalty peaked concurrently in the span between 1980-2000. This is evident in two GSS variables, ABANY and CAPPUN, which ask if you support a woman’s right to an abortion for any reason and the death penalty for murder. Additionally, I decided to look at attitudes toward homosexuality using HOMOSEX as a reference as a point of contrast. Unlike abortion or the death penalty attitudes toward homosexuality have been changing in the same direction for the past 30 years. Additionally, the magnitude of the change seems to be much greater than in regards to the other two controversial social issues, and especially abortion, which has exhibited notable stability.

I was particularly interested in differences by religion, so I limited the sample to whites and broke it down by Protestant, Catholic, Jew and None. To reduce sample size volatility I clustered by decade, so that “1970s” is inclusive of every year in the 1970s that the GSS asked the question for that variable.

The only thing I note beyond the concurrency is that the more socially liberal groups, Jews for example, seem to exhibit more fluctuation by decade. Conservatives are conservative in part because they reflect older norms on issues where they are conservative. The issues which defined liberal vs. conservative in the 1960s, for example attitudes toward desegregation, are no longer salient because conservatives how now aligned themselves with liberals (there are other issues where the reverse may be true, especially when it comes to the failure of Great Society. I suspect that many, though not all, 1960s liberals would admit that AFDC as it was implemented before the Clinton era reform was not a success in defeating the culture of poverty). It is also notable that in the 1980s Jews were more pro-death penalty than Catholics or those with no religion. I think this might have to do with the massive urban crime wave which was peaking back then. I remember how much preparation for street crime people went through in the 1980s when visiting New York City. Jewish concentration in large urban centers where violent street crime was common might explain the shift toward the death penalty.

Next, I wanted to compare the relationship of support for death penalty and abortion rights. The columns below indicate those who favor or oppose capital punishment for murder, and the rows indicate support for or opposition to abortion on demand. At the bottom you also see a ratio of those who are pro-choice and pro-life among those who support to the death penalty.

So first, it seems that among Roman Catholics being pro-life suggests a small but significant tendency to oppose capital punishment above expectation. The seamless garment isn’t a total illusion, though do note that pro-choice and pro-death penalty Catholics still outnumber anti-death penalty anti-abortion Catholics. The death penalty for murderers is really popular. Among Protestants the two views seem independent, as there wasn’t a correlation in either direction. In contrast, Jews and those with no religion go the other direction as Catholics. Those who are pro-choice are more likely to oppose the death penalty, and those who are pro-life are more likely to support the death penalty. Also, look at the really huge ratio between the proportion of Jews who support the death penalty and abortion rights, over half, and those who oppose both, around 1 in 50!

Note: I limited the data to the year 2000 and after, and there isn’t much of a change in direction, though the magnitude is tweaked a bit.

Addendum: Abortion rates have been dropping since 1990.