It’s time for more amazing images to add to your collection, and maybe update your wallpaper.  I can never get enough gorgeous wallpapers to put on my desktop, and these seemed to fit well.

I’ll start off with this one from the GLOBE at Night study for 2010.  It’s their dark sky image, and it makes a beautiful desktop.

Here’s an image from NASA, showing the Vulcepula constellation.  This was presented May 6, 2010, and credit goes to ESA.

Isn’t that incredible?

Another one from ESO.  This is Cerro Armazones at night:

This next image is the Sombrero Galaxy in infrared, brought to you by Hubble.

Next, from the Astronomy Picture of the Day website, PSR B1509-58.  Courtesy of the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and NASA, this is just one of hundreds of beautiful images you can look at here.

And finally this beauty, from the NASA/ESA SOHO project, showing CMEs with aurorae.  SOHO has new information up daily, with special emphasis now on sunspots since we seem to be shaking off a “mini-minimum”.  See more gorgeous images of the Sun at the SOHO home page.

You’ll have to let me know which is your favorite.  I have to say, in this collection the SOHO image is my favorite, with the GLOBE at Night coming a close second.  In my post yesterday about telescopes, I said something about Hubble, et al, “rocking our world” daily with images like these.

Don’t they just?

Not Exactly Pocket Science is a set of shorter write-ups on new stories with links to more detailed takes by the world’s best journalists and bloggers. It is meant to complement the usual fare of detailed pieces that are typical for this blog.

Mum’s voice as good as a hug

For many children facing times of stress and worry, there are few things more soothing than a hug or a kind word from mum. Peer into a child’s bloodstream, and you can see this comforting effect manifesting itself at in the molecules that pass by. A simple hug can release hormones that combat stress and strengthen the bond between parent and child but according to a new study, this effect can happen without any contact. The mere sound of a mother’s voice, channelled down a phone line, can trigger the same biochemical changes in a distressed child.

Leslie Seltzer from the University of Wisconsin-Madison asked 61 girls, aged 7-12, to complete a series of exercises involving public speaking and maths challenges, all done in front of an audience. Even many adults would find this stressful and the children were no different. Their saliva betrayed higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol. If mum stepped in, these levels were back to normal within an hour, regardless of whether she was allowed to hug her child or merely to speak to her down the line. Either way, the comforted children also showed raised levels of oxytocin, a hormonal jack-of-all-traders with roles in solidifying social bonds, controlling stress and even, it’s said, love and trust.

Studies in mice have suggested that only touch can release oxytocin, but Seltzer’s work suggests that in humans, a voice can have the same effect. A gentle word from human creates the biochemical equivalent of a supportive nuzzle from a mouse. So far, Seltzer has only looked at communication between mothers and young daughters. It will be interesting to see if a comforting voice can have the same effect on boys or adults, or if it’s delivered by a father, a friend or even a sympathetic stranger.

Reference: Proc Roy Soc B http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2010.0567

A nursery for Megalodon, the world’s largest shark

Megalodon was the largest shark of all time: 16 metres in length, 50-100 tonnes in weight, and possessing the strongest bite of any animal. But like every other animal, Megalodon grew from humble and vulnerable beginnings. A new set of fossil teeth suggest that it used a strategy that its living relatives share – baby sharks huddled in shallow waters where they found not only ample food, but also shelter from predators (including, mostly, other sharks). Today, a set of 21 teeth recovered from Panama’s Gatun formation have revealed the clearest evidence yet that the world’s greatest shark used such a nursery.

Catalina Pimiento from the University of Florida uncovered the teeth and confidently classified them as Megalodon chompers based on their shape. However, all of them were surprisingly small. They compared the teeth to other Megalodon specimens from younger and older rock formations to show that the animal wasn’t evolving towards a smaller size as the millennia ticked past. They compared the individual teeth to full sets to make sure that they weren’t just looking at the smaller rear teeth from larger sharks.

Instead, Pimiento says that the teeth belonged to juvenile sharks. Using a model based on great whites, she estimated the length of each tooth’s owner, and found that they fell within the length estimates for juvenile sharks. Even as a newborn, Megalodon could have reached 2 metres in length. That’s still pretty sizeable, but small enough to make a meal for other mega-sharks, including the great hammerhead, the snaggletooth and other adult Megalodons. Today, other sharks including Megalodon’s closest relative, the great white, uses similar nurseries, where pregnant females swim in the company of newborns, who stay there for their first weeks, months or years of life. It’s a strategy that has apparently been around for at least 10 million years.

Reference: PLoS ONE http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0010552

More from Brian Switek at Laelaps

"The aim of this study was to investigate whether the eating behaviors of people at all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets differs depending upon their body mass. The resulting findings could confirm or disconfirm previous laboratory research that has been criticized for being artificial. METHODS AND PROCEDURES: Trained observers recorded the height, weight, sex, age, and behavior of 213 patrons at Chinese all-you-can-eat restaurants. Various seating, serving, and eating behaviors were then compared across BMI levels. RESULTS: Patrons with higher levels of BMI were more likely to be associated with using larger plates vs. smaller plates (OR 1.16, P < 0.01) and facing the buffet vs. side or back (OR 1.10, P < 0.001). Patrons with higher levels of BMI were less likely to be associated with using chopsticks vs. forks (OR 0.90,P < 0.05), browsing the buffet before eating vs. serving themselves immediately (OR 0.92, P < 0.001), and having a napkin on their lap vs. not having a napkin on their lap (OR 0.92, P < 0.01). Patrons with lower BMIs left more food on their plates (10.6% vs. 6.0%, P < 0.05) and chewed more per bite of food (14.8 vs. 11.9, P < 0.001). DISCUSSION: These observational findings of ...

NASA’s Aqua satellite took this incredible shot of the Iceland volcano Garvenblagentralfamadoran (pronounced "Eyjafjalajökull") on May 10, 2010:

I know I’ve posted several of these, but this is my favorite; we can actually see the ground in this one, instead of clouds and ice. You can also trace the plume from the volcano for hundreds of kilometers as well, showing just why this event is making such a mess of things in Europe. NASA’s Earth Observatory Picture of the Day is a must-see for anyone interested in these incredibly images coming from space.

Sometimes you have to change your vantage point to really see something.

The New York Times today reports on the work of Diane and Arlen Chase, who spent more than 20 years cutting through the Central American jungle to survey the Ancient Mayan city of Caracol in present-day Belize. But when they were turned on to the possibility of using flyover missions equipped with laser technology that could see to the jungle floor, their research accelerated dramatically.

In only four days, a twin-engine aircraft equipped with an advanced version of lidar (light detection and ranging) flew back and forth over the jungle and collected data surpassing the results of two and a half decades of on-the-ground mapping, the archaeologists said. After three weeks of laboratory processing, the almost 10 hours of laser measurements showed topographic detail over an area of 80 square miles, notably settlement patterns of grand architecture and modest house mounds, roadways and agricultural terraces [The New York Times].

Given such dramatic results, you might think the scientists would have started working from above earlier. After all, learning by bouncing lasers around isn’t new: Satellites have measured the Antarctic ice by reflecting lasers of the sheet and back into space, then measuring how long it took. Scientists have bounced lasers off reflectors that U.S. and Russian moon missions left behind, measuring the moon’s slow progression away from the Earth.

But previous laser measurement techniques suffered when applied to archaeology, and especially trying to see through the thick jungle. Even earlier lidar efforts suffered from poor resolution.

At first, Payson D. Sheets, a University of Colorado archaeologist, was not impressed with lidar. A NASA aircraft tested the laser system over his research area in Costa Rica, he said, “but when I saw it recorded the water in a lake sloping at 14 degrees, I did not use it again.” [The New York Times].

Because of that failure, Arlen Chase tells DISCOVER, many archaeologists didn’t think much about lidar for a while. But, working with biologist John Weishampel, the Chases used a new-and-improved method of lidar called “swath mapping,” in which “you get overlaps on the pass-throughs,” Arlen Chase tells us. As a result, the team was able to get 20 data points per square meter over the entire Caracol area. “It was the first time it was done on this big an area,” Arlen Chase says. “No one knew if it would work.”

But by using this technique, plus doing it during the dry season when there was less prevalent foliage, the team got these great images. According to the Chases, the city of Caracol thrived between about 550 and 900 A.D. And with the size of the city that aerial measurements were able to take, they say 115,000 people could have lived there during its peak.

“Finally, we have a nondestructive and rapid means of documenting the present ground surface through heavy vegetation cover,” Dr. Sheets said, adding, “One can easily imagine, given the Caracol success, how important this would be in Southeast Asia, with the Khmer civilization at places like Angkor Wat” [The New York Times]

Related Content:
80beats: Found on the Moon: A Soviet Laser Reflector That Was Lost for 40 Years
DISCOVER: Uncovering America’s Pyramid Builders
DISCOVER: Royal Tomb Reveals Secrets of the Maya
DISCOVER: 5 Reasons Science Hearts Google

Image: Caracol Archaeological Project

The USA Patriot Act and the Bioterrorism Preparedness Act, both enacted not long after the 9/11 attacks, contained measures to make it harder for anybody to get their hands on the kind of pathogens one might need to launch a bioterror attack. There was just one problem: The rules also slowed down and constrained our own scientists’ abilities to learn about those pathogens, according to a study out this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

To be specific, lead researcher Elizabeth Casman found while there was a touch of good news—the laws didn’t appear to deter new scientists from entering the field—the major effect of those acts has been to make research on ebola virus and anthrax much more expensive, and much slower.

The researchers did find an increase in the total number of papers published. But before the laws, 17 anthrax papers appeared per million dollars of funding. With the restrictions, only three papers appeared per million dollars of funding. For ebola, the numbers dropped from 14 to six papers per million dollars. Figures for the control stayed the same [Scientific American].

In other words, a scientific paper on anthrax became five or six times more expensive, and a paper on ebola twice as expensive. And a lot of the problem is simply the exhaustive record-keeping required.

The laws’ new regulations govern the exhaustive documentation of the transportation, guarding, and use of select agents. As a result, they are burying researchers studying select agents with administrative duties, Casman noted. Researchers to whom Casman spoke “all complained of the paperwork,” she said. “A lot of it, they just find overwhelming” [The Scientist].

One might argue that the paperwork headaches are worth it if they keep our samples of deadly pathogens secure (especially after an affair like the Bruce Ivins case, in which the longtime Army researcher was convicted for was the lead suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks before he died in 2008 in an apparent suicide). But biodefense policy expert Vickie Sutton told Nature that the Patriot Bioterrorism Preparedness acts aren’t securing out lab supplies of ebola and anthrax—they’re just slowing down our own knowledge about them.

For example, regulations require researchers to create an inventory of each sample of a select agent and to document any changes. A missing test tube would draw immediate attention from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says Sutton. But the system does nothing to prevent the use of samples withdrawn from a live culture to seed a new culture. “You could every day be giving this agent out to someone,” she says. “It’s nonsense” [Nature].

Related Content:
80beats: Bioterror Attack Likely in the Next 5 Years, Congressional Report Says
80beats: Army Biodefense Lab Shuts Down To Check if Anything Is Missing
80beats: Army Researcher’s Alleged Anthrax Attack Raises Concerns Over Biodefense Labs
DISCOVER: Infectious Defense asks whether a determined bioterrorist can be stopped

Image: U.S. Army

A man in Boulder — yes, my home town — is trying to meditate the oil leak away. His idea?

"The basic concept is to try and get as many people to visualize that the valve is actually functioning and is working and closing."

This is part of the Intention Experiment, what is basically telekinesis:

Lynne McTaggart, who started the Intention Experiment, has organized more than a half dozen mind-over-matter experiments — most recently to try to improve the water quality in Lake Biwa, Japan — that involve people focusing their thoughts on something in the physical world to make change. She claims to have scientific evidence that it works.

Scientific evidence? Really? I wonder if she’s interested in making a quick million bucks.

Look, we’ve seen this before. People have prayed for rain, and tried to pray the stock market into obedience. These efforts fail, always. Or at best they might coincidentally align with some event, but it’s never clear in advance just what event they were aiming at (making it easy for them to claim success after the fact).

I know that people who believe in this sort of thing have their heart in the right place. I’m frustrated by horrific events like the oil leak too, and I wish I could do something tangible. But trying to pray it away won’t work. One believer said this:

"I completely understand that most people would have a healthy skepticism about these things," said Jahnavi Stenflo, also of Boulder, in an e-mail. "To all those skeptics, I would simply ask them to participate in the exercise if they would like to try. … Ultimately, there is nothing to lose in trying to visualize the valve shutting off. It either will help or it will not."

These "What’s the Harm?" arguments are extremely misleading. Of course there is something to lose. This kind of thing has been tested over and again, and shown to be a waste of time. The time spent by the participants is one obvious thing lost. But more than that, what we lose when we do things like this is our ability to separate fantasy from reality. And we do know quite a bit about human behavior: people who will try to meditate the oil leak away will almost certainly not conclude meditation doesn’t work when it fails. Instead they’ll find excuses why it didn’t work, and try it again next time something happens.

The more we wish for something to be true, the more we must hold it up to scrutiny lest we fool ourselves.

I am not saying things like this shouldn’t be tested. The point is, they already have been. Repeatedly. And they never work. If this oil leak is to be stopped, it’ll have to be done using engineering, using science, using actual physical work. And at the moment there’s not much you or I or anyone outside of the engineers at BP can do to help.

However, I’ll add that thinking about the problem is important. When the root causes of the leak are found — and I don’t mean the physical problems, but what failures allowed the situation to arise in the first place, both in the company and in the political environment — we need to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. That means keeping up with the news, being aware of the situation, and contacting politicians so that they hear our voices about it.

That is where thinking makes a difference.

If lightning strikes nearby, you might be in for some incredible hallucinations that resemble what is known as "ball lightning," according to a pair of scientists from the University of Innsbruck in Austria. In the lab, test subjects can experience these visions of shining spheres and lines when they undergo transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, which use huge superconducting magnets create electric fields in the brain up to 0.5 Tesla. (That's a lot; a plain-old bar magnet is only around .01 T.) According to Technology Review:
"If this happens in the lab, then why not in the real world too, say [researchers] Joseph Peer and Alexander Kendl... They calculate that the rapidly changing fields associated with repeated lightning strikes are powerful enough to cause a similar phenomenon in humans within 200 metres."
So when lightning strikes nearby, it can induce fields similar to the ones created by transcranial stimulation. That means you could experience luminous lines and spheres, just like subjects do in the lab.
"As a conservative estimate, roughly 1% of (otherwise unharmed) close lightning experiencers are likely to perceive transcranially induced above-threshold cortical stimuli," say Peer and Kendl. They add that these observers need not be outside but could be otherwise safely inside ...

There’s a very long review out which presents a theory for how sauropod dinosaurs could scale up to such enormous sizes, Biology of the sauropod dinosaurs: the evolution of gigantism. ScienceDaily is promoting the likelihood that sauropods did not chew, and so could make do with very small heads which could be supported by long necks, as the big factor. But this is a model with many moving parts. Here’s the verbal list from the conclusion:

(1) Sauropod dinosaurs as the largest terrestrial animals ever represent a challenge to evolutionary biologists trying to understand body size evolution.

(2) The study of the upper limit of body size must address extrinsic as well as intrinsic factors, and it must be determined whether this limit is set by the bauplan of the organisms or by physical and ecological constraints imposed by the environment. Among several possible approaches, we chose the resource perspective because it has been shown that resource availability and maximal body size correlate closely (Burness et al., 2001).

(3) In the interplay of the biology of sauropod dinosaurs with their environment, a unique combination of plesiomorphic features (i.e., inherited from their ancestors) and evolutionary novelties emerge as the key for a more efficient use of resources by sauropods than by other terrestrial herbivore lineages. Plesiomorphic features of sauropods were many small offspring, the lack of mastication and the lack of a gastric mill. The evolutionary innovations were an avian-style respiratory system and a high basal metabolic rate.

(4) We posit that the long neck of sauropods was central to the energy-efficient food uptake of sauropods because it permitted food uptake over a large volume with a stationary body.

(5) In the Late Triassic and Early Jurassic (210–175 million years ago), the combination of biological properties listed above led to an evolutionary cascade in the sauropodomorph lineage characterized by selection for ever larger body size, mainly driven by predation pressure from theropod dinosaurs.

(6)From the Middle Jurassic onward, sauropod dinosaurs dominated global terrestrial ecosystems only to succumb to the catastrophic environmental change at the end of the Cretaceous 65 million years ago.

And here’s a schematic illustrating the interplay of evolutionary forces & constraints:

The paper is open access, so you should read it yourself if you’re interested.

Pliny the Elder wrote in “The Natural History” on the qualities of amber, “So highly valued is this as an object of luxury, that a very diminutive human effigy, made of amber, has been known to sell at a higher price than living men even, in stout and vigorous health.”

The amber-bound insect you see here is around 95 million years old. Initially this amber was purchased by a Vienna-based mineral dealer in Addis Ababa. Later realizing the potential paleontological value, the dealer sold a big piece to the Natural History Museum in Vienna and several smaller pieces to paleontologists of the University of Vienna. The amber received by Dr. Alexander Schmidt was totally opaque, covered by a dark crust. Dr. Alexander Schmidt: “My colleague Saskia Jancke started to grind and polish the piece randomly to remove the opaque crust, by manual grinding, and stopped (actually, without seeing the insect) a millimeter before reaching the trichogrammatid. We then polished very carefully and it was amazing to see that this wonderful insect was oriented almost parallel to the polished amber surface and that it was not damaged by grinding.”

A tiny trichogrammatid wasp belonging to the hymenopterans order is among the first amber inclusions discovered from the African continent.

Photograph courtesy of Alexander R. Schmidt/PNAS

Detroit's economy might be seriously suffering, but for one industry, business is booming: Medical marijuana. Since Michigan enacted a law legalizing medicinal marijuana last April, the crop has generated "tens of millions of dollars collectively," according to a statement from Med Grow Cannabis College, located just outside of Detroit:
""With a vast majority of the community in Metro Detroit supporting safe medical marijuana use, many people are looking into the industry as a viable career path," said [president and founder of Med Grow] Nick Tennant."
The school opened in September and has since had more than a thousand graduates. The demand for doctor-advised, medical use of marijuana seems to be growing like a weed, so to speak. And according to Med Grow, the canna-business is an open field with plenty of room for those left unemployed in the state's infamously bad economy:
"With an unemployment rate of over 15%, why not become educated for a career in what could perhaps be Michigan's last true growth industry (no-pun [sic] intended)? For an unemployed Detroit resident, the aforementioned may be his or her last glimpse of hope."
Can Detroit save itself? Looks like it might take a joint effort with a helpful plant. Image: flickr / cannabicas

Here’s the newly anointed best visual illusion of 2010. No fancy computer graphics. Just cardboard, glue, and some wooden balls. Fabulous.

[Update: Thanks to Sam Mackrill for directing us to the inventor's web site, which includes building instructions.]