Click here to view the embedded video.

It was 40 years ago today.  NASA encounters a major problem.  I do remember this very well, it was the start of one of the most monumental success stories that has unfolded at NASA.

A story that united a nation, all for naught probably.  Well I still care!

“The main objective of this study was to compare the heating patterns of chicken fingers deep-fried conventionally and using a microwave. Two dimensional internal temperature maps of fried chicken fingers with rectangular geometry were measured post frying using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Frying was performed in a microwave oven at 365 W power level for 0.5 and 1.5 min after bringing the oil temperature to 180 +/- 1 degrees C. Samples were also fried in a conventional fryer at 180 degrees C for 2 and 5 min for comparison. Variations in internal temperature distribution increased proportionally to frying time in both microwave and conventional frying. Internal thermal equilibrium is reached in all samples after 13 min of holding time. Internal structural changes, void formation, were also visualized in the images. Void formation did not significantly impact cooling rates.”

Photo: flickr/adamjackson1984

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In October 2009, a man and two women walked into a renowned Los Angeles restaurant called The Hump and ordered some sushi. This seemingly innocuous act was the start of a fascinating chain of events that would involve hidden cameras, genetic sequencing, a few arrests, and the first solid proof of an illegal international trade in whale meat.

The man in question was Charles Hambleton, a keen diver and assistant director of The Cove, an Oscar-winning documentary that exposed the annual killing of dolphins in a Japanese national park. Hambleton had heard that The Hump was serving whale meat and decided to investigate.

Hambleton ordered an “omakase meal”, a challenging assortment of different meats chosen by the chef, only offered to the “adventurous” and priced at a hefty $800. Sure enough, the platter included four strips of whale sashimi. The receipt said as much, but Hambleton wanted proof. When the waiters and chef weren’t looking, he slipped a sample of the meat into a plastic bag and sent it to Scott Baker from Oregon State University.

By sequencing the meat’s DNA, Baker confirmed that it came from an endangered sei whale. In fact, the meat was an exact genetic match to products bought in Japan in September 2007. The whale in question must have been killed in those years during one of Japan’s controversial “scientific hunts”. From there, its meat had been illegally exported to the US, flouting a strict ban on the international trade of whale meat.

Together with Cove director Louis Psihoyos, Hambleton took his evidence to officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). When the duo returned to California to attend the Academy Awards, they conducted their final stings. Psihoyos says, “Charles and I did two more operations to buy whale meat from the same restaurant with federal officials watching so we could establish a chain of custody.” The Hump was forced to close its doors a few weeks later. On 10 March 2010, federal prosecutors filed criminal charges against both the restaurant and its chef.

The Hump wasn’t the only restaurant to be stung by the team. They found whale meat being sold in other diners in LA and Seoul, proving that the international trade spanned South Korea as well as the US. The Seoul restaurant served no less than 13 whale meat products, which came from minke, sei and fin whales, and one Risso’s dolphin. Once again, genetic analyses revealed that the fin whale meat came from a single animal that had been caught in Japan and had been sold in Japanese markets since September 2007.

Baker is just one of a wave of scientists who are using modern scientific techniques to track the trade of endangered species. Last year, Jacob Lowenstein found that some sushi restaurants were selling endangered southern bluefin tuna, despite claiming otherwise. And Ullas Karanth used photo-recognition software to match illegally sold tiger skins to animals once photographed in India’s national parks.

Needless to say, whale hunting is controversial – it’s cruel and unethical to some, but economically and culturally necessary to others. In 1982, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) set up a moratorium on commercial whaling that came into force in 1986. Both sides of the debate have pushed for the moratorium to be shifted, but Japan has neatly skirted around it by claiming to hunt whales for scientific research.

Japan’s Institute for Cetacean Research says that it aims to provide “information on the role of whales in the ecosystem and the effects of environmental changes on whales”. It allegedly studies population structures, age and diet, although critics are hardly convinced. Baker says, “It is widely recognised that scientific whaling is primarily a front for limited (but expanding) commercial whaling.” And Psihoyos adds, “There has not been a single peer reviewed paper the Japanese whalers have done since 1987, when their “scientific whaling” program began, to justify the killing of a single whale.”

Under the banner of research, Japanese boats kill minke, Bryde’s and sperm whales, as well as the endangered sei and fin species. Meanwhile, whales are sometimes killed as “bycatch”, ensnared within fishing nets that target smaller swimmers. If caught in this way, their flesh can be sold commercially, and they sell very well. Despite this thriving national trade, it’s generally assumed that Japan’s slaughtered whales stay within national boundaries.

The IWC regulates 13 species of whale and according to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), none of these species can be traded commercially between countries. Japan, Iceland and Norway have permits that allow for some limited trade between each other, but they’re absolutely forbidden from trading whale products with countries that don’t hold permits, including the US and South Korea. Nonetheless, this new study clearly shows that this legislation is being flouted.

Both Norway and Japan keep DNA registers of whales that are killed for “scientific” purposes, or that are sold after being accidentally killed. You could easily work out if a suspicious product came from an authorised source by comparing it to these registers. But neither country makes their records freely available, even to the IWC’s Secretariat. Nor have they sanctioned market surveys to monitor the origins of whale products.

Baker says that independent surveys and open access to the registers are vital for controlling trade and confirming that countries are staying within their catch quotas. “Like the smuggling of drugs, we cannot hope to stop illegal trade in wildlife,” he says, “but we can impose monitoring and inspection schemes to limit and prosecute these cases.” To that end, Baker’s team have submitted a request to the Government of Japan, via the IWC Secretariat, to access the country’s whale DNA registers.

Reference: Biology Letters http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2010.0239

Image: whale meat by Stefan Powell; fin whale by Lori Mazzuca

More on conservation:

• Photo-recognition software catches tigers by their stripes
• Buzzing bees scare elephants away
• Genetic study puts damper on gray whales’ comeback
• Noise pollution drives away some birds, but benefits those that stay behind
• How research saved the Large Blue butterfly
• Human hunters unwittingly shrink their prey species at incredible rates

This is so cool: 3D anaglyphs of some of the Apollo landing sites as seen by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter!

That’s the Apollo 14 site. Click to embiggen — and I urge you to do so. You can really see the lander popping right off the surface. In the Apollo 11 image you can even see that the lander feet are farther away from you than the top of the lander. It’s incredible!

These were done by Nathanial Burton-Bradford, and are part of a set of other 3D space anaglyphs. He took pairs of images taken by LRO (which is orbiting and taking phenomenal images of the Moon) and combined them to make the anaglyphs. They’re all worth perusing. I’m glad I have a set of red/green glasses! If you don’t have one, I again urge you to find ‘em — they can be ordered online, usually pretty cheap.

Normally, I ignore Apollo Deniers, since obviously no amount of evidence will ever wrench them from their fantasy world of ridiculous, top-heavy, and fact-free conspiracy theories… but these images really do hammer home that those landers are sitting on the Moon.

Oh, what we humans can do when we decide to.

Tip o’ the spacesuit helmet to Emily Lakdawalla.

Elaine Howard Ecklund is a sociologist at Rice University; we cited her work on the topic of science and religion in Unscientific America. Now, she is out with a book that is going to seriously undercut some widespread assumptions out there concerning the science religion relationship. The book, soon to be out from Oxford University press, is entitled Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think. And let me give you just a taste of her answers, from the book jacket (I haven't dug in yet):
In the course of her research, Ecklund surveyed nearly 1,700 scientists and interviewed 275 of them. She finds that most of what we believe about the faith lives of elite scientists is wrong. Nearly 50 percent of them are religious. Many others are what she calls "spiritual entrepreneurs," seeking creative ways to work with the tensions between science and faith outside the constraints of traditional religion.....only a small minority are actively hostile to religion. Ecklund reveals how scientists--believers and skeptics alike--are struggling to engage the increasing number of religious students in their classrooms and argues that many scientists are searching for "boundary pioneers" to cross the picket lines separating science and religion. You can learn more about Ecklund's ...

The people who lived in the Amazon regions back before any Europeans showed up on the scene had an ingenious way to survive there. By creating mounds of biochar, the pre-Columbian peoples made beds for their crops that drained far better than the native soil, which is nutrient-poor and prone to flooding. And, it seems, they unintentionally contributed to the biodiversity of the region.

In a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists led by Doyle McKey of France investigated the savannas of French Guiana, in the far northern part of South America. These plains are flooded during the rainy season, dry and parched in the summer, and often burned by fires. It was while walking through this landscape that McKey started wondering about undulations in the terrain [New Scientist]. Just how effective were these people at creating favorable cropland? McKey found that the drainage capacity of the mounds was nine times that of the rest of the savanna.

As DISCOVER noted in the 2007 feature “Black Gold of the Amazon,” the nutrient-rich, fertile soil that resulted from the biochar mounds is a gold mine for local farmers even today. But it was the insects who really appreciated the gifts of the pre-Columbian peoples after those people disappeared. Species of ants and termites settled in the mounds, where their colonies wouldn’t flood. Their burrowing aerated the soil, and plant matter foraged from surrounding areas enriched it further. As a result, the mounds acted like sponges for rainfall, and outsourced insect labor made them rich in key fertilizer nutrients of nitrogen, potassium and calcium [Wired.com]. Because of the plentiful nutrients, plants on these mounds grew more successfully and their roots reached deeper.

All in all, McKey argues, the actions of those humans trying to better their agricultural situation actually improved biodiversity compared to what had been there before, the flat savanna. That’s not bad for a civilization about which our knowledge is extremely limited, and you can count McKey among the people who think that simple agriculture secrets like biochar could teach us something. “When people modified these ecosystems long ago, they changed the way the ecosystems work. We can use that knowledge,” said McKey [Wired.com].

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Image: Pre-Columbian raised fields around French Guiana, including on the left bank of the Mana River (A), near the Sinnamary River (B), west of the city of Kourou (C), and between the town of Macouria and Cayenne Island (D). Credit: McKey et. al. / PNAS

Pre-Columbian agricultural landscapes, ecosystem engineers, and self-organized patchiness in Amazonia. The circumstantial evidence is building that the Amazon is not a “pristine” and “virgin” wilderness. Rather, it may have been “re-wilded” after a massive die-off of the human population due to the spread of European diseases during the “Columbian Exchange.” Charles C Mann reports on this data in 1491.

How financial innovation causes crises. I’m willing to be convinced otherwise, but I strongly suspect that there’s really rapid diminishing returns to economic growth due to efficiencies of financial engineering. Even plainly useful ideas such as the joint-stock corporation aren’t necessary for economic takeoff; because of the South Seas Bubble they were banned in England during the period when the Industrial Revolution was occurring.

Monday Pets: Biological Evidence That Dog is Man’s Best Friend. This post reviews evidence that dogs predate agriculture. There have been enough circumstantial data that I accept this. But, there is new genomic evidence which implies that dogs may have radiated recently from the Middle East within the last 10,000 years, suggesting agriculture did play some role. So what gives? I suspect that one way to resolve this is that the Middle Eastern lineages replaced the others. Wolves are good candidates for domestication, and there’s no reason it couldn’t have happened more than once, with a recent monophyletic clade being due to replacement of other independent lineages.

Williams syndrome children show no racial stereotypes or social fear. That is, this form of mental retardation seems to produce kids who are not racially biased, at least to the level of statistical significance. Though they remain sex aware. I wonder if they’re able to understand theism? Well, I guess we’ve found a way to eliminate racism, and possibly religion and other phenomena not to our liking.

Planned Parenthood fights for freedom to spread AIDS. The title is tabloidesque, but basically like many groups Planned Parenthood is defending the absolute right of HIV positive people not to be forced to divulge their status to potential sex partners. It’s certainly un-libertarian to have a law stipulating you have to do this, but I guess that’s why I’m libertarianish. One can make slippery slope arguments, but I put HIV in a different class than herpes when it comes to the protecting public health at the expense of individual freedom to decide.

I read Noisy Astronomer’s blog every day — she’s a grad student at the University of Virginia, and of course known the world around as Nicole Hasenpfeffer.

Reading her blog today I found out it’s the birthday of the McCormick Observatory! This venerable observatory houses a 26 inch ’scope that I used many times in my career at UVa, and I have many fond memories of it (and some not-so-fond, usually involving long cold nights at the eyepiece).

She also mentions that it’s Thomas Jefferson’s birthday too. I think I’ll celebrate by reading the Declaration of Independence. That’s seriously one of the finest examples of writing in the English language.

And oh, the third one? My brother, of course. Happy birthday Merril!

Ever wonder what might be the perfect vehicle to get around from point A to point B without getting out of your seat?

Introducing Honda’s U3-X Personal Mobility Vehicle–a vehicle that looks like a cross between a Segway and an electric wheelchair. Shaped like a figure 8, the device is omni-directional—it can move forwards, backwards, or even sideways. All you have to do is plop yourself on the device’s cushioned leather seat and then as PC Mag’s Lance Ulanoff describes, some smart tech does the rest:

Since the U3-X balances itself (a trick learned from Honda’s ASIMO robot), you can simply hold the handle and roll it along. Its lithium-ion battery holds an hour charge and features a rather unique omni-directional wheel system (called an Omni Traction Drive System) that can roll forward on the full-size wheel or sideways on dozens of little wheels that sit inside the larger wheel. Balancing is provided by accelerometers and sensors that detect the rider’s center of gravity and make constant adjustments to keep the U3-X and rider in perfect balance. Riding is simply a matter of leaning, slightly, in the direction you want to go.

It’s also a portable fella, weighing 22 pounds, which can be packed up neatly and stowed away in a car or under the desk.

But don’t expect to see the Personal Mobility Vehicle zipping across offices anytime soon, as it is still in prototype stage and not available in the market.

Bloggers, meanwhile, have already jumped on the prototype, pointing out that Ducktales’ fans would recognize Honda’s offering to be similar to GizmoDuck’s armor.

Here’s Honda’s own, more extensive, and sort of odd, video teaser (which is just begging for some spoof captioning):

It’s up. This time we discuss lactose intolerance in ancient Swedes. Dave has submitted it to iTunes, so I’ll put a notice up when that’s ready.

NEXT>

Thousands of people have applied to with NASA to be astronauts since 1959, but less than 400 have been chosen. The lucky few must complete about four years of training before getting launched into space. This training includes miles of sustained running in 120-pound space suits while holding weights, enduring extreme temperatures, and being plunged into frigid water, dropped from airplanes, and flung about in motion simulators. All this punishment makes for great pictures, allowing the rest of us to simply watch and perhaps feel a little better about being earthbound.

All images courtesy NASA

1957: The Gimbal Rig was engineered to simulate the tumbling and rolling motions of a space capsule and train the Mercury astronauts to control roll, pitch and yaw by activating nitrogen jets, used as brakes and bring the vehicle back into control. This facility was built at the Lewis Research Center, now John H. Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field.

Astronomers keep turning up new exoplanets, and as the count rises, they keep edging closer to finding worlds like our own pale blue dot. Astronomer Jay Farihi thinks Earth-like worlds might be even more common in the universe than previously expected, based on evidence from rocky planets few astronomers are studying: The ones that don’t exist anymore.

Farihi’s research subjects are white dwarfs. In our galaxy, about 90 percent of stars will end their lives in this incredibly dense state once the star sheds its outer material and only the core remains. This is the fate of our sun. White dwarfs usually have atmospheres composed of the light elements helium and hydrogen, as the heavy elements have settled to the core. But about 20 percent of white dwarfs are different, showing heavy elements—what astronomers call “metals”—in their atmospheres. For decades, astronomers attributed this metallic pollution to the interstellar medium, the thin gas that permeates the space between stars. The idea was that white dwarfs were old stars that had been on several orbits around the Milky Way and had picked up bits of the interstellar medium as they went around [Space.com]. But Farihi thinks those elements are evidence of something else.

His hypothesis: the heavy elements came not from the interstellar medium, but rather from the remains of rocky planets that once orbited the stars back in their younger days. For a study he presented at the Royal Astronomical Society meeting in Scotland this week, he looked at 146 white dwarfs that showed calcium pollution in their atmosphere, and which haven’t hung around near the interstellar medium anytime in the recent past. If the heavy elements in these stars had come from the medium, he argues, it would’ve sunk to the core long ago—it wouldn’t be dancing around with the light elements in the upper atmosphere. Ruling out the interstellar medium, Farihi says there are two possibilities: the debris could come from an asteroid belt similar to our own, which essential represents a planet that didn’t form, or the pieces of a shattered planet [Space.com].

If he’s right it could be further evidence that rocky planets are rather common around stars like our sun. The proportion could be even greater than 20 per cent, as some planetary systems might be entirely destroyed and leave no trace rather than leaving behind a debris ring to pollute their parent star [New Scientist].

Farihi also argues that white dwarfs could hold secrets about long-gone watery planets, too. He saw a lot of stars with atmospheres of nearly pure helium. But atmospheres that showed hydrogen traces also tended to contain the heavier elements. If the two are connected, he surmises, then the hydrogen would have come on board the same rocks as the metals, and that means the rocks could have carried water as well.

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Image: NASA / Casey Reed

My post on the religious make up of the Supreme Court is getting a bit of traffic spike due to current events. Specifically, John Paul Stevens, the high court’s lone Protestant, is set to retire, and two out of the three front runners are Jewish. Let’s assume that the future nominee is not Protestant (Elena Kagan, who is Jewish, is arguably the first choice). Statistically this is curious because ~50% of the the American population is Protestant. Assuming that a a Supreme Court justice is randomly drawn from the population you have a 0.20% probability that this would occur in a sequence of nine draws. Of course if Kagan is the nominee and confirmed all of the justices will be graduates of Ivy League universities, so there’s nothing random about the selection process.

Some of the commenters on the first post observed that the pipeline is probably going to shape the demographics of the high court. That is, elite law schools may simply have fewer Protestants than Jews or Catholics. I don’t know about that, but let’s look at Harvard University’s total demographic balance. I don’t see Catholic or Protestant breakdowns, but ethnic breakdown is public:

69% white
16% Asian
8% black
7% Hispanic

Hillel estimates that ~25% of Harvard’s undergraduate student body is Jewish. This means that no more than 44% of student body are white Christians (lower than the national average interestingly). Let’s use the American Religious Identification Survey to estimate Protestant/Catholic numbers according to proportions by each ethnic group. I get 47% Protestant and 17% Catholic at Harvard. This is probably an overestimate for both since I suspect that the irreligious would be a higher proportion within the Harvard student body than the general population, but the ratio between proportions may be more accurate. There are major caveats here, as I think the Catholic numbers are probably somewhat higher because of regional biases and such.

Why there are two, and possibly soon three, Jews on the high court doesn’t require much thinking to understand. There are a lot of Jews at elite academic institutions which produce future justices. With the filters we know of two or three Jews seems entirely reasonable, even expected. But I doubt there’s an enormous dearth of Protestants coming out of elite law schools. Rather, if there is a reason that we see so many Catholics, I think has to do with what some commenters were pointing out in regards to George W. Bush wanting to make sure he nominated people who had the “right” attitudes on abortion and the like. There of course plenty of Protestants with conservative attitudes, but they’re evangelical Christians who are underrepresented at elite institutions.

Which brings me to the point of this post, and the reason for the title: the exact numbers of Protestants, Catholics and Jews is pretty much irrelevant today in the United States. That is because Americans who are Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, and even irreligious, have a fundamentally Protestant understand of how one “does” religion. To understand how and why I say American Catholics and Jews have a Protestant understanding of religion I recommend In Search of an American Catholicism: A History of Religion and Culture in Tension and American Judaism: A History. In Catholicism and American Freedom: A History John T. McGreevy outlines the realignment in the 1950s of Jews with elite east coast Protestants in the culture wars against traditional Catholicism, a reversal of the historical white ethnic coalitions within the Democratic party which emerged in the wake of the Civil War. In The Impossibility of Religious Freedom Winnifred Sullivan argues that American jurisprudence in the domain of church-state separation and accommodation is rooted in Protestant presuppositions. Finally, in The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, Civil Warfare, And The Triumph Of Anglo-America Kevin Phillips asserts that American Protestantism is fundamentally a dissenting faith which was aligned with the Whig party. I believe that this is most precisely the influence which frames how Americans of all faiths and no faiths understand religion.

And that is why it doesn’t matter if there’s a Protestant in name on the high court, Americans view religion through a lens which dissenting Protestants of the English speaking world pioneered in the 18th and 19th century. Recall that the Baptists of Virginia were aligned with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in their drive to disentangle the state from the church.

This means that on the coarse level you can’t tell much about a person when you find out they are Protestant or Catholic. Their views range across the full arc of American public opinion, and their conception of what their religious tradition entails is going to be strongly inflected by their politics. Social justice Protestants and Catholics arguably share much more with each other than with their more conservative or traditionalist co-religionists.

I’ll make this concrete and quantitative. The General Social Survey has a range of questions it asks. I looked at four of them which are “hot button”, constrained the time period from 1990-2008, and examined a range of religious groups and how they shook out. I combined some categories, so for Protestants the Evangelical includes Fundamentalists and Mainline includes Liberals (these two categories are for Protestants only). For Methodists, Presbyterians and Lutherans I threw all of the various sub-denominations into the same pot. I do know that there’s a lot of division between conservatives and liberals by sub-denomination in these groups, but I wanted a general sense of denominational diversity at a coarser scale.

The variables are:

ABANY- “Please tell me whether or not you think it should be possible for a pregnant woman to obtain a legal abortion if the woman wants it for any reason?”

HOMOSEX – “What about sexual relations between two adults of the same sex?” [Always wrong to not wrong at all]

PRAYER – “The United States Supreme Court has ruled that no state or local government may require the reading of the Lor’s Prayer or Bible verses in public schools. What are your views on this – do you approve or disapprove of the court ruling?”

SPKATH – “There are always some people whose ideas are considered bad or dangerous by other people. For instance, somebody who is against churches and religion….if such a person wanted to make a speech in your (city/town/community) against churches and religion, should he be allowed to speak, or not?”

Below all the proportions are for the more liberal response. Some of them, such HOMOSEX, have a wide range of potential responses and I simply picked out the most extreme liberal one (in that case, that homosexual sex is not wrong at all).

Here are the raw percentages:

The variables are strongly correlated with each other, as is evident in this correlation matrix:

I took each variable and simply averaged them out into a “Social issues index.” The higher the index, the more liberal.

There are two big take aways from this chart:

1) The group “Protestant” has a huge range of views contingent on denomination or theological conservatism

2) The group “Catholic” is solidly in the middle of the distribution between very liberal groups (Jews) and very conservative ones (Evangelicals)

As a point of fact it is obviously not correct to say that all Catholics are moderates. Rather, the class “Catholic” includes many different viewpoints, from those presumably as conservative as Evangelicals to as liberal as Jews. Similarly, though Jews are very liberal, the small orthodox minority is often very conservative (Eric Cantor, who is minority whip in the House is an example of this). And, unless one is a member of Opus Dei, a Hasidic Jew or Theonomist, arguably the vast majority of Catholics, Jews and Protestants in the United States share common presuppositions about the outer bounds of what is religion in a pluralistic society.

Addendum: Just so readers know, I’m really not the type too concerned about the race, religion or sex of Supreme Court nominees personally. As a straight atheist brown libertarianish man with a “Muslim name” I’ve never gotten into the habit of wishing for mentors, colleagues or friends were people who I could “identify with,” because frankly I’m a very special person with a unique perspective and experience which is unlikely to be replicated. This doesn’t change the structure of my argument above, but I thought I would head off any bidding war as to the relevance of diversity X or Y in the comments under the preconception that the person writing the post here actually cares about such things. My main concern is intelligence, curiosity, and frankly in the case of something with political importance, ideological affinity. That’s it. The rest are accidents. Though broader American society disagrees with my own viewpoint on this issue.