Some good news today: The Daily Progress is reporting that the University of Virginia will fight the state attorney general’s attacks on academic freedom.

A few weeks ago, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli started investigating noted climate scientist Michael Mann. While at UVa, Mann was researching climate change. Cuccinelli has submitted a subpoena to get documents about Mann’s research, to see if he was abusing public funds. Cuccinelli’s motivations for doing this are suspect to say the least: Mann has already been cleared of any research wrongdoing. If Cuccinelli is trying to ride the "climategate" propaganda, he’s a day late and a docket short; that whole thing has already died with a fizzle.

But the attacks continue, so the administration at UVa has filed a petition with a judge to set aside Cuccinelli’s subpoena, saying:

"Academic freedom is essential to the mission of our Nation’s institutions of higher learning and a core First Amendment concern," UVa’s petition says. "As Thomas Jefferson intended, the University of Virginia has a long and proud tradition of embracing the ‘illimitable freedom of the human mind’ by fully endorsing and supporting faculty research and scholarly pursuits. Our Nation also has a long and proud tradition of limited government framed by enumerated powers which Jefferson ardently believed was necessary for a civil society to endure."

The Jefferson quote is particularly apt; Jefferson founded the University of Virginia, and even designed much of its architecture. A lot of the principles established by him are still apparent at UVa today. I attended the University for six years to get my doctorate, and so I know first-hand that the climate there is steeped in Jeffersonia, and his love of personal and academic freedoms.

Cuccinelli’s investigation appears to me to be an attempt to slow or smear research on climate change; an attack on the freedom of academic and scientific research, and cannot stand. I’m very glad to see UVa fighting back, and I hope this case becomes a national symbol of the recent attempts to silence science.

Tip o’ the thermometer to my fellow Wahoo Noisy Astronomer, aka Nicole Gooventargenyehelfen.

The bones of our ancestors do not speak across time with ultimate clarity. The fossils with which scientists reconstruct our family tree are often fragments that offer hints and clues to where we came from. So it comes as no surprise when, as part of the flow of science, researchers offer counter-interpretations to even the most famous of finds.

That’s what happening to Ardi.

Last October Ardipithecus ramidus hit the main stage when, after 17 years of study, a large team led by paleoanthropologist Tim White published its work in the journal Science. The 4.4-million-year-old find shakes up our understanding of our own history, White said—primarily the story of how and when we learned to walk.

Ardi cast doubt on the widely accepted view that our ancestors became bipeds because they left the forest and entered a flatland savanna habitat that demanded it. But Ardi appeared to be a kind of hybrid, comfortable in the trees and on the ground. And, White said, analysis of the site where the fossil was found indicated that Ardi lived in a woodland habitat. If it’s true that early humans walked in the woods, then the “savanna hypothesis” would be swept away.

But not so fast. In today’s edition of Science, two teams of scientists respond (1, 2) with doubts about the story of Ardi.

The question of Ardi’s habitat was raised by Thure E. Cerling, a geochemist at the University of Utah, and seven other geologists and anthropologists. They said they used the White team’s own data for soils and silica from ancient plants, and found it did not support an interpretation that Ardi lived in thick woods. Instead, Dr. Cerling’s group said, “We find the environmental context of Ar. ramidus at Aramis to be represented by what is commonly referred to as tree- or bush-savanna, with 25 percent or less woody canopy cover” [The New York Times].

The second paper questions whether Ardi is really an early human at all, rather than a member of the chimpanzee line.

Ardi’s age is so close to that divergence date that no unequivocal determination can be made about whether she is in the ape or human lineage, says [primatologist Esteban] Sarmiento, who conducts research from home in East Brunswick, New Jersey. But White and co-authors disagree. In their response, the group says Sarmiento’s “tortuous, nonparsimonius evolutionary pathways” are not supported by many of the fossil’s characteristics [Nature].

White and colleagues issued responses to both questions (1, 2) in the same issue, and struck back in the press, too.

If Ardi were really ancestral to chimps, certain features of its teeth, pelvis, and skull would have had to later evolve back to their more ape-like conditions, an “evolutionary reversal that’s highly unlikely,” White said in an interview [AP].

White is sticking to his guns regarding Ardi’s habitat, too. While it’s true that the fossil record seems to show grasses where Ardi lived, there are also many fossils of forest-dwelling animals that suggest a wooded area, he argues.

Related Content:
The Loom: Ardipithecus: We Meet at Last
DISCOVER: Meet Ardi, Your First Human Ancestor
DISCOVER: The 2% Difference examines what sets us apart from chimpanzees
80beats: A Fossil Named Ardi Shakes Up Humanity’s Family Tree
80beats: No Tarzans Here: Earliest Humans Quickly Lost Their Ape-Like Climbing Abilities

Image: J.H. Matternes

When other Albertans saw landfill fodder, 17-year-old Kyle Schole saw electricity. His project, “Microbial Degredation of Vehicle Tires,” which uses a strain of bacteria to harness energy from decomposing rubber tires, hasn’t yet hit the journal circuit. But it has won the farm-raised teenager a gold-prize at his national science fair.

Schole devised his plan while driving past an Alberta tire recycling plant. Though his town was already transforming tires into speed bumps and surfacing, he wanted to pop those wheelies into something more. He decided to make a few calls, and chatted up a few microbiologists from Canada, Scotland, and Australia. He then had to find the perfect rubber-munching bacteria.

His farm wasn’t equipped to deal with biohazardous materials so he spent his summer in labs at the Westlock Health Care Centre. He estimates that the project took him over 400 hours, but in the end he successfully created a microbial fuel cell that converts chemical energy released during the tire’s microbial decomposition into electricity. For his efforts, he won a $6,000 cash prize and a $10,000 scholarship to the Canadian university of his choice.

The “science fair manic” told the The Edmonton Journal:

“I’m a very curious guy–whether it’s tinkering on the farm with my dad or working on science projects,” said Schole. “So I’m often thinking, ‘What would be a neat thing to test and improve on?’”

For more warm-fuzzies, see the CTV video coverage, with interview.

Related content:
DISCOVER: Science Fair for a Better Planet
Discoblog: It’s In the Bag! Teenager Wins Science Fair, Solves Massive Environmental Problem
The Loom: Microbial Art
The Loom: I For One Welcome Our Microbial Overlords

Image: flickr/Mykl Roventine

Poke a snail with a stick and it remembers for a day. Poke a snail with a stick after you’ve given it methamphetamine and it remembers for much longer.

Getting gastropods hooked on meth perhaps sounds cruel, but Barbara Sorg and her team are among those scientists trying to figure out how the drug works in the brain to produce intense connections that feed the addiction cycle. In a study forthcoming in the Journal of Experimental Biology, the scientists show that, in snails at least, meth makes it hard to forget things that happened while on the drug.

Here’s the test: The snails Sorg studied can breathe two ways, through their skin underwater and also through a breathing tube they can deploy when they surface. The team kept two groups of snails—one on meth, one not—in separate tanks of shallow water. And if the snails tried to surface and breathe that way, the scientists would poke them.

By poking the snails, Sorg’s team trained them to associate using the tubes with an unpleasant experience, and so keep them shut. Only the snails on speed remembered their training the following morning, and in a separate experiment it took longer for them to “unlearn” the memory [New Scientist].

The drug induces changes in the brain that last after the chemical is out of a snail’s system.

“These drugs of abuse produce very persistent memories,” explained Dr Sorg. “It’s a learning process – drug addiction is learning unwittingly. All of these visual, environmental and odour cues are being paired with the drug” [BBC News].

Pinning down just what physical changes in the brain allow for that effect is the key to the ultimate end of this kind of research: Targeting the intense memory associations that feed addiction as a part of drug treatment. And the research on learning and forgetting could have wider implications as well, says George Kemenes of the University of Sussex, who also does mollusk research:

“Ultimately, the humble snail could help prevent and treat memory disorders or even enhance normal memory” [BBC News].

Related Content:
80beats: Can Erasing a Drug Memory Erase the Need for a Fix?
80beats: How the Brain Makes Space for New Memories: By Replacing a Few Old Ones
80beats: How Ritalin Works in the Brain: With a One-Two Dopamine Punch
DISCOVER: How to Erase a Single Memory
DISCOVER: Disremembrance of Things Past

Image: Wikimedia Commons

This is a guest post from Vanessa Woods, author of the new book, Bonobo Handshake. Vanessa is a Research Scientist in Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke University and studies the cognition of chimpanzees and bonobos in Congo. We like to think that murderers are psychopaths, with some kind of abnormal psychology that would never appear in us, or someone we know. And yet most of us think we would kill in certain situations, like if we were at war, or someone was about to kill a person we loved. How 'natural' is this instinct in us, and can we ever obliterate it completely? In my new book, Bonobo Handshake, I talk about lethal aggression in one of our closest relatives, chimpanzees. Chimpanzees and humans have a lot in common when it comes to killing: #1 Killers are mostly male. Though female chimpanzees can participate in killing, usually the killers are males. In humans too, the FBI reported in 2005 that 89% of killers are male . #2 Males usually attack when the ratio is 3:1. Wrangham and Wilson reported that both chimpanzees and young men in gangs attack when they outnumber their victim 3 to 1 or more. The reason for this? This is the minimum number ...

Ralf Vandebergh, an astronomer in The Netherlands, has sent me many of his outstanding images of space vehicles in the past. But he just sent one to me that I have to admit, rather shocked me: an image of a Keyhole 11 spy satellite!

At the time Ralf took these images, the satellite was about 600 km (360 miles) away, a considerable distance for a small object. Mind you, this satellite is about 5 meters (16 feet) long, so the fact that any detail is seen at all is amazing. It would appear to be less than 2 arcseconds in length at best — that’s the same apparent size as a U.S. quarter seen at a distance of about 3 km (nearly two miles!). For comparison, the Moon is 1800 arcseconds across, or 900 times bigger, so we’re talking weensy weensy here.

The Keyhole satellites are pretty well-known in space circles, and the KH-11s have been around a while (the next-generation KH-12s have been around a while too, but not much is known about them). The 11s are pretty much like Hubble Space Telescope, but pointed down at us — well, presumably not us, but as opposed to pointed out toward the heavens. Given some basic physics, and assuming the same optics as Hubble has, it’s easy to calculate that they should be able to spot objects as small as perhaps 10 cm (4 inches) across, though this would require either some very precise tracking or very short exposures to prevent blurring. Or maybe both. It’s also possible to improve on that resolution a bit using sophisticated mathematical techniques, too.

While little or no orbital data is known for the KH-12s, the orbits of KH-11s (at least, some of them, dun dun dunnnn) are online. Ralf used that data to predict where and when to get these images. In the picture above he compares what he got to a simplified Hubble-like drawing, and with some small amount of imagination you can see the resemblance. I wouldn’t put too much stock in the exact configuration, but it does appear he got some detail on the satellite. He also has a neat animation showing the satellite; details are harder to see but he catches some hint of solar panels, as well as catching a flash of sunlight off a reflective surface.

Also note he’s done all this with a 25 cm (10″) telescope. With something bigger, higher resolution is possible. Not so much because the image can be magnified more, but because shorter exposures are possible (bigger ’scopes capture more light from an object), freezing the atmospheric distortion better. I have seen some pretty big ’scopes that are used to track satellites, which makes me wonder how much detail they capture… and who else is out there tracking our satellites as well.

Image courtesy Ralf Vandebergh

Two children, Anne and Carla, have worked together to make a cake and they have to split it between them. Anne says that she’s the bigger cake aficionado and deserves the lion’s share. But Carla demands the bigger slice since she did most of the cooking. A nosy third party, Brenda, argues that the only fair call would be for the two girls to split the cake equally. Which is the right path?

There’s no obvious right answer and different people will probably side with different viewpoints. Dilemmas like this have been the subject of much philosophical debate, and they’re a common part of everyday life. How do you allocate pay rises between your staff? How should the UK’s new government split its budget among its various departments?

According to Norwegian scientist Ingvild Almås, our attitudes to such questions change during our childhood and adolescence, as we start changing our opinions on what counts as ‘fair’. Children tend to shun any form of inequality – they’d agree with Brenda. But as they enter the turmoil of adolescence, they become more meritocratic and are happier to divide wealth according to individual achievements, as Carla suggested. As their teens draw to a close, they (like Anne) pay greater heed to efficiency, making choices of maximum benefit to the group.

Almås studied these shifts by working with 486 Norwegian children between the 5^th and 13^th grade (ages 10-11 and 18-19 respectively). She asked them to play a version of a money-sharing task called the dictator game. To begin with, the kids had 45 minutes to spend between two websites. In the first, they could earn points by spotting specific numbers among a digit-filled screen. The other was full of videos, cartoons and games but bereft of point-scoring opportunities. Afterwards, their points were traded for actual cash at either a high or low exchange rate. Their total earnings reflected their own achievements and efforts, as well as a smattering of luck.

In the next phase, the kids were paired with others from the same grade. Each one knew how long their partner had spent earning points, how well they had done, and what their exchange rate was. The pair’s winnings were pooled and one of them – the dictator – had to choose how to split the total. Overall, the children were remarkably fair. On average, dictators from all the age groups gave their partner around 45% of the total pot. However, a closer look within each age group revealed a striking difference.

The majority of 5^th-graders (around two-thirds) were egalitarians, who shared their money equally no matter the circumstance. But this philosophy became less popular with age and by the 9^th grade, just a quarter of the children held this attitude. By contrast, meritocrats, who gave more money to the child who had earned the most points, became more common with age. They accounted for just 5% of 5^th-graders but made up around 40% of 11^th and 13^th-graders. A third group – the libertarians, who were generally happy with any division of wealth, even based on luck – made up a third or so of the group at all ages.

So adolescents are happier to accept inequalities as long as they’re based on merit. What about efficiency? To study that, Almås modified the game so that the children’s points were only exchanged for cash after the dictator’s choice. They would get one krone (the Norwegian currency) for each point they kept, but their partner’s share would be multiplied by either 1, 2, 3 or 4 times. In the latter scenarios, the pair would gain the most total money if the dictator gave away all the points.

The 5^th and 7^th graders didn’t particularly care. Even when their partner’s points would be quadrupled, they only gave away slightly more points. However, the late adolescents were more swayed and parted with significantly more points as their partner’s multiplier increased. On the whole, efficiency factored into the kids’ decisions a few years after they began to give more weight to merit. And unlike merit, which influenced both boys and girls equally, boys placed greater importance upon efficiency than girls did.

Why the changes? Almås says that it’s easy to be completely egalitarian or libertarian; based on these philosophies, you can divide wealth with relative ease. It’s far more complicated to consider merit and efficiency, where you’d need to filter relevant information and make calculations. These are things that get easier as children mature.

However, this hypothesis can’t account for the fact that fewer adolescents stick to the egalitarian attitude of childhood. An alternative explanation is that as they grow up, children become increasingly exposed to competitive areas where they are rewarded based on their achievements, be they in the classroom or in a sporting ground.

Like many studies of this sort, the volunteers all come from a WEIRD country (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic), which makes them psychologically, well, weird from a global perspective. Do the same experiments in other parts of the world and you might well find different results.

Reference: Science http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1187300

Photo by Knut Egil Wang

More on fairness:

• Clean smells promote generosity and fair play; dark rooms and sunglasses promote deceit and selfishness
• Genes affect our likelihood to punish unfair play
• Dogs frown on unfair rewards
• The right side of fair play
• Children learn to share by age 7-8
• Selfless monkeys find personal reward in helping others

ABC news is reporting that the Air Force tested the X-51A scramjet yesterday, and that it successfully fired for 200 seconds, blowing away — literally — the previous record of 12 seconds.

Very cool. So screw getting your own jet pack. When do we get our own Mach 6 personal scrampacks^*?

Tip o’ the windscreen to Slashdot.

PLoS Biology has a review of Elements of Evolutionary Genetics up, Evolution Is a Quantitative Science:

But why has evolutionary genetics stood apart from biology’s resolutely qualitative, rather than quantitative, tradition? Most remarkably, while biomechanics employs the laws of physics, and biochemistry is founded on the quantitative science of chemistry, evolutionary genetics is based on axiomatic foundations that are entirely biological, and yet are capable of precise mathematical formulation. The rules of Mendelian genetics, encapsulated by unbiased inheritance and random mating in a diploid genetic system, predict Hardy-Weinberg frequencies, the binomial sampling of gametes in finite populations determines the properties of genetic drift, and, with a Poisson process of mutation, the complex theory of neutral genetic variation can be established on the basis of very simple assumptions.

A few books to get a historical perspective of the origins of modern evolutionary genetics (albeit with a pop gen focus), The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics, Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology and R.A. Fisher: The Life of a Scientist.

It’s BMJ week (again) on NCBI ROFL! After the success of our first BMJ week, we decided to devote another week to fun articles from holiday issues of the British Medical Journal. Enjoy!

“Objective: To assess the evidence for a genetic basis to magic. Setting: Harry Potter novels of J K Rowling. Participants: Muggles, witches, wizards, and squibs. Interventions: Limited. Main outcome measures: Family and twin studies, magical ability, and specific magical skills. Results: Magic shows strong evidence of heritability, with familial aggregation and concordance in twins. Evidence suggests magical ability to be a quantitative trait. Specific magical skills, notably being able to speak to snakes, predict the future, and change hair colour, all seem heritable. Conclusions: A multilocus model with a dominant gene for magic might exist, controlled epistatically by one or more loci, possibly recessive in nature. Magical enhancers regulating gene expression may be involved, combined with mutations at specific genes implicated in speech and hair colour such as FOXP2 and MCR1.”

Bonus from the full text:

Glossary

Photo: flickr/Jodi Hebert

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Quadruple feature: Harry Potter and the curse of headache.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Accio medical degree!
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: The history of poisoning in the future: lessons from Star Trek.

WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

Do I smell a banana? Nope. It’s a blue light I’m smelling.

Fruit fly larvae made this mistake while participating in a study recently published in Frontiers in Neuroscience Behavior. By adding a light-sensitive protein to certain smell receptors in the larvae, German scientists allowed the genetically engineered bugs to essentially smell light.

The team, under the guidance of Klemens Störtkuhl at Ruhr University Bochum, is attempting to understand “olfactory coding”–how the brain transforms chemical signals into perceptible smells. Normally, a fly’s olfactory receptor neurons only send an electrical signal to its brain when the fly smells something, but by adding a protein the researchers caused a neuron to fire when the one-millimeter bug was basking in blue light.

The fly brain uses some of its 28 olfactory neurons to detect bad smells, and others for good ones. Protein puppeteers, the researchers could pick which neuron to add the light-sensing protein to. The good-smelling neurons respond to a smorgasbord of fly-friendly scents: like banana, marzipan, and glue (apparently rotting fruit gives off these scents). By attaching the light-sensitive protein to one of these neurons, researchers caused the typically light-fearing insects to crawl straight towards the blue glow.

According to a ScienceDaily article, given their successful mapping of these larvae olfactory neurons, the researchers next hope to make adult fruit flies go bananas.

Related content:
Discoblog: Neuroscientist Says We Perceive “Smounds”—Half Sound, Half Smell
80beats: A Life-Extending Coup: Flies That Can’t Smell Food Live 30 Percent Longer
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Smell a lady, shrug off flu – how female odours give male mice an immune boost
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Elephants smell the difference between human ethnic groups
DISCOVER: The Brain: The First Yardstick for Measuring Smells

Image: flickr / Jason Gulledge

After nearly forty days of wandering in the wilderness of failure and frustration, is this the time that BP finally closes off its oil leak?

There’s a glimmer of optimism in the Gulf of Mexico right now, as the “top kill” appears to have stopped the flow of oil. But with everything that’s happened so far, people are watching nervously and holding off on any celebration until we know the leak is sealed at last.

“They’ve been able to stabilize the wellhead, they’re pumping mud down it. They’ve stopped the hydrocarbons from coming up,” said Coast Guard chief Thad Allen, who is coordinating the US government’s battle against the oil spill. He told local radio WWL First News that BP “had some success overnight” but cautioned the British energy giant was “in a period of kind of wait and see right now where they see how the well stabilizes” [Discovery News].

The likelihood of long-term success grows with the passing hours, though, for the sake of caution, it may be tomorrow before BP declares victory on this. It took a lot of pumping heavy mud just to get to this point:

At first, most of the mud was carried away by the oil and gas streaming up through the well at high pressure, but with enough mud being pumped in at a fast enough rate, it started accumulating inside the well as intended. Unless something goes wrong, at some point, enough mud — and thus enough weight — would accumulate to overcome the upward pressure of the escaping oil and gas, and seal the well [The New York Times].

Even if BP does succeed, which we greatly hope that it does, the company then will have a furious public and U.S. government to face. As we noted earlier today, the new flow rate estimates by the U.S. Geological Survey mean that, even at best, the BP spill is already worse than the Exxon Valdez.

And then there are the shortcuts. During the Congressional investigation, witnesses have said BP chose a cheaper but riskier casing that provided just a single protective seal on the system rather than two.

BP’s decision was “without a doubt a riskier way to go,” said Greg McCormack, director of the Petroleum Extension Service at the University of Texas at Austin [CNBC].

Today, the Wall Street Journal published a long investigation into what caused the explosion in the first place. Behind schedule and over budget, they say, BP skipped quality control tests on Halliburton’s cement job, didn’t complete a test to remove gas from the well, and had a project manager who wasn’t experienced in deepwater drilling. That’s not all.

There were warning signs of a valve leak nearly five hours before the deadly gulf oil rig explosion, according to an internal BP investigation, which also found that a number of equipment and system failures may have caused the Deepwater Horizon disaster [Los Angeles Times].

Recent posts on the BP oil spill:
80beats: We Did the Math: BP Oil Spill Is Now Worse Than the Exxon Valdez
80beats: “Top Kill” Operation Is Under Way in Attempt to Stop Gulf Oil Leak
80beats: BP To Switch Dispersants; Will Kevin Costner Save Us All?
80beats: Scientists Say Gulf Spill Is Way Worse Than Estimated. How’d We Get It So Wrong?
80beats: 5 Offshore Oil Hotspots Beyond the Gulf That Could Boom—Or Go Boom

Image: U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Ann Marie Gorden.

Indonesia, because it’s an archipelago, might not look like it has a lot of land area. But it’s home to the third largest forest area of any country, and has half the tropical peatlands in the entire world. These forested lands are home to many endangered species, and also store greenhouse gases. Now, thanks to international cooperation (and a big check), more of that area will be saved—for now.

This week, Indonesia pledged to stop giving permits for the destruction of virgin forests:

“We will conduct a moratorium for two years where we stop the conversion of peat land and of forest,” President Yudhoyono said at a joint news conference with Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg. The pledge comes ahead of Thursday’s climate and forest conference in Oslo, which is expected to be attended by officials from some 50 countries [BBC News].

Environmentalists are cheering the reprieve, noting that vast swaths of forest have already been cleared in Indonesia to provide wood for timber and paper industries, and to provide space for palm oil plantations.

While the Copenhagen conference on climate back in December was a failure in creating greenhouse gas emissions limits, it did succeed in putting a larger focus on slowing deforestation. Under a program called REDD Plus (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation), wealthier nations have agreed to provide funding to slow deforestation in tree-rich nations like Indonesia, hoping to save carbon dioxide-absorbing forests that way.

The United States, Australia, France, Japan, Britain and Norway had specifically agreed on $3.5 billion from 2010-12 to save forests, a pool of money which has now grown to $4 billion, according to Norway which chaired the climate conference [Reuters].

Once REDD Plus gets going, the organization says it will keep a close watch to make sure agreements aren’t broken. (In December, we reported that Google volunteered to help out with satellite imaging.) But more so than espionage, the money talks.

“Forests are worth more dead than alive. Today we commit to change that equation,” said Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg [AP].

Related Content:
80beats: Is Google the Guardian Angel of Rainforests?
80beats: Truce Between Green Groups And Timber Companies Could Save Canadian Forests
80beats: Saving the Rainforest Could Make Economic Sense
80beats: Drought + Warmer Temperatures = a “Double Whammy” of Tree Deaths

Image: Wikimedia Commons

While I don't have anything to link to yet, I've learned that the University of Virginia has responded in court to Ken Cuccinelli's abusive legal move, opposing his discovery attempt on academic freedom grounds. Bravo! I hope to update this post with a link to the legal document as soon as I can. Update: A news report on this latest development is here. The UVA legal filing is here.

“How will we remember the 2000s? What were the high and low points? Who were the heroes and villains?” William Saletan asked in a Slate article last week.

Do you remember when Senator Joe Lieberman voted to convict President Clinton at his impeachment trial, when President George W. Bush chilled at his Texas ranch with Roger Clemens while Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans, and when Hillary Clinton used Jeremiah Wright in a 2008 TV attack ad against Barack Obama?

You shouldn’t remember any of these things, because they didn’t happen. But Slate made pictures to use as evidence that these events did actually occur as an exercise in “altering political memories.” Slate mixed doctored photos of these fake events with other photos of real ones, and asked the readers which they remembered. The readers had no idea they were part on an experiment in memory hacking.

More people remembered the real ones, Slate reports:

In the first three days the experiment was posted, 5,279 subjects participated. All of the true incidents outscored the false ones. Our subjects were more likely to remember seeing Powell’s Iraq presentation (75 percent), Katherine Harris presiding over the Florida recount (67 percent), or Tom DeLay leading the congressional effort to save Schiavo (50 percent) than any of the five fake scenes.

But people remembered the fakes too. A fake screenshot of the Hillary Clinton ad, for example, fooled 36 percent of readers into thinking it had actually happened. “At that time I was backing Hillary for President. I didn’t like it that she used this rather sleazy ad, but her campaign did remove it,” one respondent said.

The stunt paid homage to memory research; a series of articles on Elizabeth Loftus‘ human memory research at the University of California at Irvine will follow. Slate meant to show the power of images in producing false memories. Besides quoting George Orwell, they also mentioned a 2002 experiment that, with a little Photoshop magic, fooled 10 out of 20 college students into believing they had gone up in hot-air balloons as children.

Related content:
80beats: Lasers Write False, Fearful Memories into the Brains of Flies
80beats: Neuroscientist Says Torture Produces False Memories and Bad Intel
DISCOVER: Are Recovered Memories Real?
DISCOVER: How Much of Your Memory Is True?

Image: flickr / Nrbelex

3 Quarks Daily has embarked on an annual hunt for the best blog posts in four areas: science, politics, philosophy, and arts & literature. Nominations have now opened for this year’s science prize; you have until May 31 to suggest your favorite science blog post from the last year; then there will be a round of public voting, and a final award bestowed by a celebrity judge. Last year the science prize was awarded by Steven Pinker; this year it will be Richard Dawkins. Someday I’m sure they’ll work their way up to having a physicist serve as judge.

Feel free, of course, to nominate your favorite posts from Cosmic Variance; I’m far too shallow to be reluctant to win awards. But even better would be to find a really great post at a smaller blog that not as many people know about, and use this contest as a vehicle for bringing more attention to really good writing. There’s too much good stuff out there, it’s impossible to follow all of it, so it’s always nice to hear about new bloggers doing great things.

The U.S. Coast Guard is saying today that the “top kill” procedure looks like it’s having success at stemming BP’s oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. We hope they’re right.

In the meantime, you can now say that the BP oil spill is the worst in our nation’s history, eclipsing the 11 million gallons spill by the Exxon Valdez.

In a teleconference this morning, U.S. Geological Survey head Marcia McNutt released the new estimates by her scientists trying to gauge the flow rate of the oil leak. There were two teams working—one watching the surface and the other monitoring the video feed from the leak site. The low estimate is now 12,000 barrels per day, but it may be more like 19,000 to 25,000, the teams found. (The previous estimate, repeated throughout the first month of the spill, was just 5,000 barrels per day).

McNutt wouldn’t say explicitly if the BP spill is now the worst the United States has ever seen, but the numbers speak for themselves. If we do a very conservative calculation and say that 12,000 barrels leaked every day between April 22, when the Deepwater Horizon rig sank, and May 17, when BP installed the siphon to catch some of the oil, you get approximately 13.1 million gallons of oil released into the Gulf’s waters (there are 42 gallons in a barrel of oil).

And keep in mind that’s just the conservative estimate; it’s probably a lot worse than that. The AP did a similar calculation, assuming that either 12,000 or 25,000 barrels leaked every day from the rig’s explosion on April 20 to the present moment, and came up with even more dire figures.

The new government estimate means at least 19 million gallons and maybe as much as 39 million gallons have leaked in the five weeks since an oil rig exploded and sank [AP].

Recent posts on the BP oil spill:

80beats: “Top Kill” Operation Is Under Way in Attempt to Stop Gulf Oil Leak
80beats: BP To Switch Dispersants; Will Kevin Costner Save Us All?
80beats: Scientists Say Gulf Spill Is Way Worse Than Estimated. How’d We Get It So Wrong?
80beats: Testimony Highlights 3 Major Failures That Caused Gulf Spill
80beats: 5 Offshore Oil Hotspots Beyond the Gulf That Could Boom—Or Go Boom

Image: NOAA (the Exxon Valdez)

The excellent blog 3 Quarks Daily have opened nominations for their second Prize in Science. This, year, the prize will be judged by Richard Dawkins and there will be three winners.

If any of you would like to nominate a post from Not Exactly Rocket Science for this prestigious award, I would obviously be very grateful. Here’s how:

• Place the URL for the blog post of your choice in the comments section of this post. You may also add a brief comment describing the entry and saying why you think it should win.
• Each of you can only nominate one blog post.
• The post must have been written after May 23, 2009, which gives you around 250 to choose from.
• Nominations are limited to the first 200 entries so get in there quickly.
• Try not to choose duck sex. That’s been done

Thanks folks.

You’re watching a video of a needle piercing an anonymous hand, sinking slowly into the web between the thumb and index finger. You wince as you imagine the pain that the other person must feel, and for good reason. As you watch, you nervous system essentially duplicates the experience, responding as if you were vicariously feeling the pain yourself. This is typical of what happens when people see others in pain, but Italian scientist Alessio Avenanti has found an important exception to the rule. Racial bias can negate this ability to feel the pain of someone from a different ethnic group.

Avenanti recruited white and black Italian volunteers and asked them to watch videos of a stranger’s hand being poked. When people watch such scenes, it’s actually possible to measure their brain’s empathic tendencies. By simulating how the prick would feel, the brain activates the neurons of the observer’s hand in roughly the same place. These neurons become less excitable in the future. By checking their sensitivity, Avenanti could measure the effect that the video had on his recruits

He found the hallmarks of an empathic response only when the hands in the videos were prodded by a needle rather than a blunt piece of plastic, and only when he took measurements at the same part of the hand. But most interestingly of all, he found that the recruits (both white and black) only responded empathetically when they saw hands that were the same skin tone as their own. If the hands belonged to a different ethnic group, the volunteers were unmoved by the pain they saw.

So are we all just naturally and worryingly prejudiced? Far from it – Avenanti actually thinks that empathy is the default state, which only later gets disrupted by racial biases. He repeated his experiment using brightly coloured violet hands, which clearly didn’t belong to any known ethnic group. Despite the hands’ weird hues, when they were poked with needles, the recruits all showed a strong empathic response, reacting as they would to hands of their own skin tone.

The purple-hand experiment is a vital part of Avenanti’s study. Other scientists have suggested that people are less responsive to the pain of other ethnic groups, simply because their skin tones are less familiar and harder to identify with. But what could be more unfamiliar and less identifiable than a violet hand? It’s strong evidence that the lack of empathy from the first experiment stems not from mere novelty, but from racial biases.

Avenanti also found that the stronger these biases are, the weaker their empathic response. Each of his recruits did an ‘Implicit Association Test’, which looks for hidden biases by measuring how easily people make positive or negative connections between different ethnic groups. For example, white Italians are typically quicker to associate positive words with the term “Italian” and negative ones with the term “African”. And the faster they make those connections, the greater the differences in their responses to the stabbed black and white hands.

The recruit’s bodies betrayed their prejudices in other ways. On seeing the penetrating needles, their skins became moist and better at conducting electricity, a reflexive sign of emotional arousal. The needles evoked the same effect regardless of the hand they pierced, but the response was longer in coming if the hand belonged to a different ethnic group.

All in all, Avenanti says when we see pain befall a person from our own racial group, it immediately triggers resonant activity in our own nervous system. When we see the same event happening to someone of a different race, these simulations are weaker and take longer to form.

It’s a sad state of affairs but probably not an unpredictable one. After all, other studies have found that racial prejudices can make us dehumanise members of a different ethnic group. But more promisingly, Avenanti’s experiments suggest that things don’t have to be this way. Our default reaction, freed from the shackles of prejudice, is empathy with our fellow people, even if they do have freaky violet hands.

Reference: Current Biology http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2010.03.071

More on race:

• Williams syndrome children show no racial stereotypes or social fear
• Even on mute, TV can perpetuate racial bias
• How light or dark is Barack Obama’s skin? Depends on your political stance…
• Social status shapes racial identity
• People overestimate their reactions to racism
• They don’t all look the same – could better facial discrimination lead to less racial discrimination?

Yesterday morning, about 70,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean, the Boeing-designed X-51A Waverider “scramjet” set a new record. Reaching Mach 5 (almost 4,000 miles per hour), it wasn’t the fastest jet flight, but by burning for over 200 seconds it became the longest flight of its kind. The previous scramjet record, held by the NASA X-43, was 12 seconds.

A scramjet is similar to a simpler engine called a ramjet, but faster. The engines on most commercial jets have turbines to push air inside, but a ramjet is basically a tapered tube. As air flows through it, the shape of the tube compresses the air and, once the engine mixes this air with fuel, it ignites.

Unlike well-understood ordinary ramjets, which slow the air passing through them to subsonic speeds, the X-51 is intended to maintain combustion in a supersonic internal airflow — hence the name scramjet, for supersonic combustion ramjet — a feat often likened to “striking a match in a hurricane”. [The Register]

Since it needs moving air to fire, a ramjet can’t start from a standstill. Yesterday, a NASA-operated B-52 Stratofortress took the unmanned jet under its wing and dropped it at about 50,000 feet. Then a solid rocket booster accelerated the X-51 to about Mach 4.5. Then, on its own power, the scramjet climbed 20,000 feet, accelerated to Mach 5, and burned it engine for a total flight time of about 200 seconds.

“We are ecstatic to have accomplished most of our test points on the X-51A’s very first hypersonic mission,” said Charlie Brink, a X-51A program manager with the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. “We equate this leap in engine technology as equivalent to the post-World War II jump from propeller-driven aircraft to jet engines.” [U.S. Air Force]

NASA’s X-43A scramjet still holds the record for fastest jet engine flight, achieving about a 12 second run at Mach 9.6 in 2004. But the X-43A used hydrogen, which would require huge tanks if the jet found commercial use. The X-51A does not have this liability; it uses an easier-to-carry hydrocarbon fuel.

Joe Vogel, Boeing’s director of hypersonics, said, “This is a new world record and sets the foundation for several hypersonic applications, including access to space, reconnaissance, strike, global reach and commercial transportation.” [Washington Post]

Related content:
DISCOVER: Cheaper Rides Into Space
DISCOVER: It’s 2008. Here’s Your Jet Pack
80beats: DARPA Wants a Biofuel Jet, While Germany Works on a Hydrogen Plane
80beats: Super-Green, Algae-Derived Jet Fuel Passes Tests With Flying Colors
80beats: DARPA Loses Contact with Mach 20 “Hypersonic Glider” During Test Flight