Since Twitter blew up into the mainstream last year, it’s become rife with teenybopper types who join the microblogging service just to follow their favorite airheaded celebrities. Which raises the question: Which airheaded celebrity has the, uh, most unsophisticated teenybopper followers?

Comedian and geek Tom Scott got his creative juices cranking to create Stupid Fight–a website that lets you compare whose Twitter followers are dumber. This is great, in case you’ve ever wondered what sort of a person would follow actor Ashton Kutcher or all-around diva Kim Kardashian and try to send them messages.

Scott proclaims on his website:

FACT: A lot of people on Twitter are stupid. Many of these people follow celebrities and try to send them messages. But which celebrity’s fans are most stupid? It’s time to find out.

The idea itself is pretty simple. Scott explains:

Stupid Fight can’t go out and administer an intelligence test to each person that’s sending messages to a celebrity. So instead, it estimates based on several stupid indicators. Are they using twenty exclamation marks in a row? Do they endlessly use the abbreviation ‘OMG’? Do they seem incapable of working out where their Shift key is? These indicators have a strong correlation with the message, and its sender, being stupid.

Just go to the site, plug in the names of two people you want to compare and bam! The indicator tells you whose followers are dumber. Of course, the caveat is that this is not a scientific process and Scott himself says, it’s a lot like calculating your Body Mass Index: It works perfectly for some and not at all for a few others.

So, when we plugged in Glenn Beck to compare his followers with Rachel Maddow’s, here’s what we found.

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Image: Stupid Fight

Stupid reality, always mucking about with our ideas. How dare it!

In this case, reality is interfering with how we think planets form around stars. And the monkey in the wrench belongs to a handful of newly discovered planets that go around their stars the wrong way.

That’s an artist’s illustration of one of these planets. As you can see in the diagram, the star rotates left-to-right, but the planet orbits right-to-left. That’s a bit of a puzzler, and here’s why.

First, how do we think planets form? If you look at my last post, you’ll see a giant cloud of gas and dust collapsing in places to form stars. The stars form from little knots of overdense regions in the cloud. As the material collapses, any slight amount of rotation it has — from eddies and vortices in the gas, say — get amplified (think ice skater as she draws her arms in and spins faster). Random collisions of particles inside the cloud tend to drop more of the matter toward the center, along the equator of the spin, forming a flat disk there.

The disk spins, rotating around its center like a DVD (though stuff toward the center goes around faster than stuff near the outer edge). The middle of the disk is where the star forms. Farther out, local eddies and vortices can form planets. But the important thing to note is that in this scenario, everything spins in the same way. If the disk appears to be spinning clockwise, say, then the star will spin that same way, the planets will orbit that same way, and the planets will spin that same way. We’re pretty sure this is how things work because that’s pretty much what’s happening in our own solar system.

This theory has been tested by observation and by increasingly complex modeling. Sometimes there are problems with it, but in general new ideas have been added that fix those problems, and over time we’ve been pretty happy overall with the idea that stars and planets form this way.

However, a bunch of newly discovered planets have messed this nice idea up. They orbit their stars the wrong way!

How do we know? That part is pretty cool. First, these are transiting planets. As the illustration above shows, from our point of view the planets pass directly in front of their stars every time they make an orbit. When that happens, they block a fraction (usually around 1%) of the star, and we see that as a slight dip in the light detected from the star. A lot of planets have been found this way, and it’s a pretty good method of finding planets.

Now picture the star in the image above. It’s spinning, so the left side of the star in the diagram appears to be headed toward us, and the right side moving away from us. But that means there’s a Doppler shift, a slight change in the color of the light from the star. Just like a car roaring past you makes that "EEEEEEeoooooooow!" sound, light changes pitch if the source is moving toward or away from us, and that change in pitch is seen as a shift in color.

The light from the part of the star rotating toward us shifts a bit to the blue, and the side moving away shifts a bit to the red. That shift is very small, but measurable.

But the planet messes that up. As it transits (moves in front of) the star, it blocks first one side, and then the other. If it orbits the star in the same direction as the star spins, it will first block the blueshifted side, and then a bit later the redshifted side. That change in the starlight can be seen and measured.

But for some of these planets just discovered, it’s all backwards! The redshifted side gets blocked first, and then the blueshifted side. That means the planet is going around the star the wrong way. The press release about this discovery has a nice video which makes this a bit more clear.

Does this mean our theory is wrong? Well, not exactly. It probably means that overall the theory is solid, but that there are exceptions, modifications, we don’t understand. Most likely the planets that form around other stars start off revolving around the star the same way, but then some sort of gravitational interaction with other forming planets knocks them off course. Some of these newly discovered systems do appear to have outer planets that could do the trick; the tug-of-war resulting from a close encounter could slingshot one of the planets into a retrograde (backwards) orbit.

This would play hell with the system. The planet knocked backwards would migrate in close to the star, tossing other smaller planets either into the star or out of the system entirely. If that’s true, then it means these weird planet systems won’t have many planets, just the one backwards-revolving one and one or two outer planets. That’s a nice prediction, in fact, and one that can be confirmed or falsified with more observations.

And it’s not like this is a rare event: fully 6 out of 27 systems appear to have these backwards-moving planets! That means that however these planets get knocked about, it has to happen fairly often. Obviously, we need to observe a lot more of these systems so we can get better statistics, and be able to see what similarities and differences they have with each other. That’s the best way to figure out what the heck is going on.

What does all this mean? Well, it means, as usual, that Nature is a bit more clever than we are, thinking up all sorts of ways of forming planets and systems of planets that didn’t initially occur to us. But that’s how science works. Things get complicated, so the first thing to do is simplify. Make your idea general. Then start adding complexity to it to explain what you actually see. As observation techniques get better, the idea has to get modified to account for new data.

In this case, it’s a pretty big modification, but that’s not surprising: we’re new at this planet finding thing. We’re bound to get plenty of surprises for a while, until we have a better grasp of the situation. Surprises are good: they help us test the theory, they help us understand reality a little better, and they help us learn a little bit more.

But they’re also fun. Who wants a Universe we understand completely and utterly? How boring that would be! Science is all about peeking around the next corner and seeing what’s there. And there are always more corners. Always.

ESO/L. Calçada

As discussed on the latest episode of Point of Inquiry (stream, download), Eli Kintisch's Hack the Planet isn't the only book just out on this subject. There is also How to Cool the Planet by Jeff Goodell, author of Big Coal and a writer for Rolling Stone. This in and of itself is a phenomenon--the two books were clearly racing each other and ended up coming out at about the same time. The question is, is that timing right? I have no doubt we are going to have a big public debate about geoengineering at some point in the future. At that time, one or both of these books could be considered essential reading. However, thus far, neither seems to be having its big publishing breakout moment. Indeed, neither has any reviews yet on Amazon. I myself can't speak to the books' comparative quality: I was only sent, and have only read, Kintisch's, and it's excellent. For all I know, Goodell's is equally worthy. If you're interested, I recommend that you buy both of them. But you are not the general public. And as we've learned, 97 percent of Americans have no clue what geoengineering even is. They all ought to be reading these ...

A few years ago I was hearing a lot about mirror neurons. There was a hyped up article on The Edge website about them, MIRROR NEURONS and imitation learning as the driving force behind “the great leap forward” in human evolution. But I haven’t heard much since then, though I’m not neuro nerd so perhaps I’m out of the loop. So I pass on this link with interest, Single-Neuron Responses in Humans during Execution and Observation of Actions:

Direct recordings in monkeys have demonstrated that neurons in frontal and parietal areas discharge during execution and perception of actions…Because these discharges “reflect” the perceptual aspects of actions of others onto the motor repertoire of the perceiver, these cells have been called mirror neurons. Their overlapping sensory-motor representations have been implicated in observational learning and imitation, two important forms of learning [9]. In humans, indirect measures of neural activity support the existence of sensory-motor mirroring mechanisms in homolog frontal and parietal areas…other motor regions…and also the existence of multisensory mirroring mechanisms in nonmotor region…We recorded extracellular activity from 1177 cells in human medial frontal and temporal cortices while patients executed or observed hand grasping actions and facial emotional expressions. A significant proportion of neurons in supplementary motor area, and hippocampus and environs, responded to both observation and execution of these actions. A subset of these neurons demonstrated excitation during action-execution and inhibition during action-observation. These findings suggest that multiple systems in humans may be endowed with neural mechanisms of mirroring for both the integration and differentiation of perceptual and motor aspects of actions performed by self and others.

ScienceDaily has a hyped-up headline, First Direct Recording Made of Mirror Neurons in Human Brain.

Update: Neuroskepticcritic has much more.

Welcome to this week’s installment of the From Eternity to Here book club. We’re on to Chapter Fourteen, “Inflation and the Multiverse.” Only one more episode to go! It’s like the upcoming finale of Lost, with a slightly lower level of message-board frenzy.

Excerpt:

There is a lot to say about eternal inflation, but let’s just focus on one consequence: While the universe we see looks very smooth on large scales, on even larger (unobservable) scales the universe would be very far from smooth. The large-scale uniformity of our observed universe sometimes tempts cosmologists into assuming that it must keep going like that infinitely far in every direction. But that was always an assumption that made our lives easier, not a conclusion from any rigorous chain of reasoning. The scenario of eternal inflation predicts that the universe does not continue on smoothly as far as it goes; far beyond our observable horizon, things eventually begin to look very different. Indeed, somewhere out there, inflation is still going on. This scenario is obviously very speculative at this point, but it’s important to keep in mind that the universe on ultra-large scales is, if anything, likely to be very different than the tiny patch of universe to which we have immediate access.

This is a fairly straightforward chapter, trying to explain how inflation works. Given that by this point the reader already is familiar with dark energy making the universe accelerate, and with the fine-tuning problem represented by the low entropy of the early universe, the basic case isn’t that hard to put together. Of course we have an additional non-traditional goal as well: to illuminate the tension between the usual story we tell about inflation and the “information-conserving evolution of our comoving patch” story we told in the last chapter. Here’s where I argue that inflation is not the panacea it’s sometimes presented as, primarily because it’s not that easy to take all the degrees of freedom within the universe we observe and pack them delicately into a tiny patch dominated by false vacuum energy. Put that way, it doesn’t seem all that surprising, but too many people don’t want to get the message.

This is also the chapter where we first introduce the idea of the multiverse. (The multiverse occupies less than 15 pages or so in the entire book, but to read some reactions you would think it was the dominant theme. The publicists and I must share some of the blame for that perspective, as it is an irresistible thing to mention when talking about the book.) Mostly I wanted to demystify the idea of the multiverse, presenting it as a perfectly natural outgrowth of the idea of inflation. What we’re supposed to make of it is of course a different story.

Looking back, I think the chapter is a mixed success. I like the gripping narrative of the opening pages. But the actual explanation of inflation is kind of workmanlike and uninspiring. I really put a lot of effort into coming up with novel explanations of entropy and quantum mechanics, which didn’t simply rehash the expositions found in other books; but for inflation I didn’t try as hard. Partly simply because of looming deadlines, partly because I was eager to get to the rest of the book. Hopefully the basic points are more or less clear.

Last night I was at a bar with my new friend Adam discussing emo music and whether it emerged out of Seattle grunge or something else altogether. Personally I can appreciate Bright Eyes once in a while, but on the whole I just don't get it. After shifting to 70s punk--which I can really get into--it happened...
"So I googled you. Science, eh?" Adam grins. Here we go again. "Uh, yeah." "I gotta ask. Climate change. Prove yourself. Make me believe."
And it starts... You see, I'm used to this challenge. Climate change might as well be the Yankees vs the Sox. It's a pub conversation about who's 'winning' when everyone is really loses unless we act. And I can already tell Adam's a bright guy. He's a skeptical thinker who doesn't have access to journal articles, but does hear the news media fallout. He's got a lot of questions about so-called email conspiracies, but at least he's interested in a discussion. So we have another drink and I tell him a little more about what's going on in oceans, on land, and in the atmosphere. He listens politely, and soon we're back to Kurt Cobain.

Last week, Lee Berger unveiled for the world the stunningly intact fossil finds (that his 9-year-old son actually made while with his dad in South Africa) from what he is calling a new hominid species, Australopithecus sediba. Yesterday, he announced another surprise: Berger says that brain scans just finished in France show that insects that might have feasted on the person after death, and even possibly a piece of the hominid’s brain, may be preserved inside the recovered skull.

Experts at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in France have been analyzing the find. The ESRF uses a technique known as micro-tomography to assemble its images. This involves taking a series of a high-contrast, high-resolution X-ray radiographs of the target fossil in rotation to build up a 3D representation [BBC News]. The scientists were trying to study the teeth; the skull comes from a young boy, Berger says, and they hoped tooth analysis could help them pin down his exact age at death. But the 3-D representation revealed these other unexpected finds, including a low-density cavity in the skull that could—could—represent a brain remnant.

Soft tissue like the brain, of course, does not usually fossilize. But in this unusual case, ESRF examiner Paul Tafforeau suggests that perhaps the brain shrank after being decayed by bacteria, leaving the odd cavity that his scanners picked up. “One way to explain that cavity is that when this individual died, it was mummified, and the mummification made the brain shrink by losing water, leading to an odd shape,” Tafforeau said. “Later you had water with sediment come up, fossilizing the individual and filling the brain case, but you still had that brain remnant inside” [LiveScience]. If it’s true, the brain remnant is only one-twentieth the size of the original brain, and wouldn’t prove particularly helpful in reconstructing the structure, and unfortunately it’s unlikely DNA would be preserved.

And then there are the insects. Three fossilized insect eggs, each about a tenth of an inch (two or three millimeters) large, were seen within the skull, potentially hatching larvae that fed on the flesh of the hominid after death, researchers added. Two eggs belonged to wasps and apparently had already hatched, while the third, a fly egg, remained unopened [LiveScience]. While Tafforeau says the density would suggest fossil insects, he can’t rule out that they are modern insects that sneaked in until all the data comes in. Both he and Berger are giving few details as their work continues to go through the peer-review process.

Berger also found some fossils from a female Australopithecus sediba he’d like to study in the same way. But for now, the two are traveling separately for security reasons.

Related Content:
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DISCOVER: Meet the Ancestors (The Hall of Human Origins exhibit review)
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Image: European Synchrotron Radiation Facility

Every now and again a new picture from a space telescope comes down the pipe^* that’s a little bit different, a little bit of a step to the left. I think this image counts:

Kewwwwl. That’s the Rosette Nebula as seen by the Herschel far infrared observatory. The Rosette is a huge star forming region, and one that’s been around a while. In optical images its name is obvious; it resembles a huge flower in space. The central region looks empty, and that’s because it mainly is: fierce winds from newborn stars have excavated a giant bubble in the center of the nebula. Acting like a snowplow, they have pushed the material from the middle of the gas cloud out to the edges, where it piles up.

That’s what you’re seeing here; the inner wall of the nebula. This image is a long walk from the optical, though. It’s false color, where blue, green, and red represent the light from the nebula at 70, 160, and 250 microns. For comparison, the reddest light your eye can see is less than one micron in wavelength, so this is way far out in the IR. The reddest light in the image is coming from dust that’s only a few degrees above absolute zero!

The bright spots you see peppering the image are cocoons of gas and dust surrounding stars in the process of birth. They’re not alone; see the finger-like tendrils all pointing off to the right? Those are regions of slightly denser dust which have resisted the winds from the central stars of the nebula (off the edge of this image to the right). Like sandbars forming behind rocks in a stream, these fingers indicate that the tips are denser, and are probably where stars are forming as well.

What I can’t get over is how three-dimensional this image looks! It’s like the mouth to Hell from Poltergeist. Well, a little bit. If the mouth were 5000 light years away, 100 light years (a quadrillion km, or 600 trillion miles!) across, and kept at a chilly -260° C.

That’s a big, cold, far away mouth.

And the analogy isn’t fair, anyway. In the movie, that mouth was where you went after you die, but in reality, this cavernous cloud is where life gets started. Maybe our own Sun was born in a nebula like this; some research indicates it may have been. So while this picture may look a little bit frightening, to me it’s comforting. Even sweet.

After all, who can resist a nursery full of babies?

Image Credit: ESA/PACS & SPIRE Consortium/HOBYS Key Programme Consortia