Let’s get this straight.

An ad attacks a Republican candidate for governor in Alabama, Bradley Byrne, for the horrible crime of defending the teaching of evolution.

Byrne lashes back, stating

As a member of the Alabama Board of Education, the record clearly shows that I fought to ensure the teaching of creationism in our school textbooks. Those who attack me have distorted, twisted and misrepresented my comments and are spewing utter lies to the people of this state.

The nerve of some people to make such horrible accusations.

But wait! As Talking Points Memo observes, the ad that made that scurrilous charge that Byrne might have a bias towards reality has an important back story:

The group behind the ad and others attacking Byrne’s conservative credentials is called the True Republican PAC. Interestingly, as the Montgomery Advertiser reported last month, the PAC has gotten most of its money from the teachers’ union — or, more accurately, from a collection of other PACs heavily funded by the union.

According to the Advertiser, members of the Alabama Education Association have a beef with Byrne for his past attempts to ban the employees of two-year colleges from serving in the state legislature.

Emphasis mine. So does this mean the teachers of Alabama support an attack on a political candidate for not being a creationist (an attack that sadly is not even true)? Is anybody standing up for science in Alabama?

Male cichlid fish apparently don't like what they see in the mirror--in fact, they dislike their own reflections even more than enemy fish, according to new research published in Biology Letters. Wired writes:
"[The] fish readily attack other males as well as mirror images of themselves, posturing and lunging with the same aggression... the reflection-fighting males show heightened activity in [the amygdala] a part of the brain associated with fear and other negative reactions in vertebrates, [Stanford University researchers] have found. Tangling with a real male doesn’t stir up that response."
The researchers emphasized that the study doesn't mean fish recognize themselves in the mirror. And although the fishes' reactions to their reflections are negative, they are not necessarily "fearful" in the human sense of the word. Still, the research could change the way studies are constructed, in which mirrors are used to investigate psychological phenomena separate from self-recognition.
"Researchers may want to show a fish or other creature another of the same size and species, for example. If animals are sensing that something is off about the mirror, “I think mirrors need to be used with caution,” [lead author Julie K.] Desjardin says."
Image: Wikimedia Commons Tangling with a real male doesn’t stir up that ...

Last spring, researchers confirmed that brown fat—the kind that burns energy rather than storing it and is especially prevalent in newborns—can be found in small pockets in adults, too, and slimmer adults have more of it. This spring, a team says it might have found one of the first steps in activating that fat-burning fat in adults. Their study comes out in Science this week.

Brown fat is packed with energy-producing mitochondria, and babies have a lot of it because it helps them keep warm. Once humans begin to regulate their own body temperature they don’t need as much brown fat anymore, so it gets replaced by energy-storing white fat, which helps store energy but leads to expanded waistlines in this age of affluence.

Testing on mice, the team led by Stephan Herzig upped the use of an enzyme called cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2). While the enzyme plays a role in many physiological functions, the researchers found that pushing it in mice could induce their white fat to act more like energy-burning brown fat, and their weight dropped by around 20 percent.

“There has been a lot of excitement around brown fat, but … there wasn’t any clear indication that turning up brown fat would make animals lose weight,” says Chad Cowan, a professor in the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard Medical School who studies fat cell development. “What this paper does is make a good link to something that might be clinically beneficial [TIME].

Don’t get too excited just yet. This is a test on mice, not people, and there’s another problem: This transformation in the animals, white fat acting like brown fat, happened only when Herzig and his colleagues tricked the mice’s bodies into thinking they were at a colder temperature than they actually were:

That caveat is important because the COX-2 enzyme is present in a wide range of body tissues, and revving up its activity may lead to some serious side effects such as clotting problems, increased sensitivity to pain and even muscle abnormalities. Herzig found that manipulating the COX-2 pathway switched white fat to brown fat in the mice only when he simulated cold temperatures through metabolic tweaks — dilating small blood vessels and increasing the pumping of the heart — and made the rodents act as if they were shivering [TIME].

So Herzig’s team has only just started to figure out how humans might take advantage of our tiny brown fat deposits to battle our ever-growing white fat deposits. But, he says, if we find a way to do it that doesn’t involve the weird side effects, it might not take much brown fat to make a difference.

Scientists estimate that as little as 50 grams of brown adipose tissue in a normal adult human would be enough to increase energy consumption by 20 percent.”That’s not a lot of brown fat, but a big increase in energy burn,” said Herzig. “And this type of transplantation idea has been tried out with other types of animals and other types of cells, so in principle it works” [Reuters].

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Image: Colorado State University

I was delighted to discover this morning that the journal The American Biology Teacher gives thumbs-up to The Tangled Bank. From the review:

“For students of evolution or scholars who want to know the specifics about particular evolutionary processes, this is an excellent read. The fact that it is understandable to beginners and fascinating to scientists makes this book truly unique and valuable.”

Need a refill on your cup of awesome today?

As someone who spends a lot of time thinking about astronomy and the weird stuff that happens on a daily basis in space, I see a lot of amazing things. You’d think I’d get used to the awesomeness of astronomy, but the opposite is true: I’m always spellbound by what I find.

Still, it takes a lot to seriously impress me, to really make me say Holy Frak.

Well, astronomers have just announced that they have found a massive star that has been flung out of the cluster in which it was born. The star is huge — 90 times the mass of the Sun — and is screaming away from its nursery at 400,000 kilometers per hour.

Holy Frak.

This incredible image is from the ESO’s 2.2 meter telescope in Chile. It shows an overview of the sprawling 30 Doradus star-forming cloud, located about 180,000 light years away in the satellite galaxy to the Milky Way called the Large Magellanic Cloud (or the LMC to those in the know). In the center of 30 Dor sits a vast cluster of stars called R136. The total combined mass of all the stars in R136 is unclear, but it has several that tip the cosmic scale at 100 times the mass of the Sun, which is the upper limit of how big a star can get without tearing itself apart.

The inset image is from Hubble, and shows the runaway star, named 30 Dor 016. It’s been suspected for some time of being a cannonball blasting its way across space away from the cluster, but new observations have pretty much clinched it. They’ve also pinned the mass of this star to that whopping amount of 90 times the mass of the Sun. If you don’t think that’s a big deal, I’ll note that this equals 180 octillion tons — that’s 180,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons, for those of you who have stock in the ASCII character for "0".

Yeah. Holy Frak.

The new observations, using Hubble’s new ultraviolet camera called the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, confirm that this is a single star (and not, say, a binary with two members each with 45 solar masses), making it one of the most massive stars ever seen. This kind of star is extremely rare!

The UV observations also confirm that the star is plowing through the gas that lies in interstellar space in the LMC. You can get a good idea of what’s going on in this closeup of the star:

It’s moving to the upper right in this image. You can see it’s near the edge of a curved bubble of gas, with a sharp edge delineated to the right of the star. That edge is a bow shock, a vast supersonic shock wave formed when the fierce wind of subatomic particles emitted by the star — a super solar wind – slams into the gas around it. If the star were just sitting there this bubble would be spherical with the star at the center. But you can see the bubble is actually elongated, and the star is near the edge. That’s a sure sign we’re looking at a star on the move.

Amazingly, it appears that the star is 375 light years from the cluster! A star this massive can’t live very long, a few million years at most. At 400,000 kph, it takes about a million years to travel that distance, so that fits.

How the heck can you kick a star up to such incredible speeds? There are two ways we can think of: have it tossed around by the gravity of other stars in the cluster, or have it ejected when (if it’s a binary star) its companion explodes as a supernova.

For the latter supernova scenario, it’s not the explosion that accelerates the star, it’s the slingshot effect. The two stars orbit each other at high speed, and when one blows up it loses so much mass it can’t hold onto the other star. Like an athlete spinning around for the hammer toss and then letting go, the star gets shot away at high speed. The thing is, the cluster itself is too young to have seen such a supernova a million years ago, when the star must have begun its flight. Plus, there’s no indication of the type of a mess left by such an explosion.

So the star must have been ejected when it reacted gravitationally to other stars. If you take three stars, say, and let them interact, the least massive one will get flung away. Take a few dozen and you get a beehive of activity, with several stars tossed out, some with very high speed. The thing is, this star has 90 times the Sun’s mass! That means the stars left behind are even more massive… and we do see several stars in the cluster with masses as high as 100 – 120 times that of the Sun.

Yeah again. Holy Frak.

So let me explain… no, there is too much. Let me sum up.

We have a stellar cluster with thousands of times the Sun’s mass embedded in a nebula furiously cranking out newborn stars. A lot of them are near the physical upper limit of how big a star can get. The whole thing is only a couple of million years old, a fraction of the galaxy’s lifespan. One beefy star with 90 times the Sun’s mass got too close to some other stars, which summarily flung it out of the cluster at high speed, fast enough to cross the distance from the Earth to the Moon in an hour (it took Apollo three days). The star is barreling through the flotsam in that galaxy, its violent stellar wind carving out a bubble of gas that points right back to the scene of the crime, nearly 4 quadrillion kilometers and a million years behind it.

Hmmm.

Y’know, there are days I have a hard time getting out of bed. The humdrum routine of the day yawns ahead of me… but every now and again, as I lie there mustering up the courage to throw off the blanket and face the world, I get a glimmer that maybe today the Universe will once again refill my tank, make me look above and outside me, and remind me that truly, the place is full of awesome.

Today was such a day.

Image credit: Hubble: NASA, ESA, J. Walsh (ST-ECF) Acknowledgment: Z. Levay (STScI). ESO image: ESO Acknowledgments: J. Alves (Calar Alto, Spain), B. Vandame, and Y. Beletski (ESO), processing by B. Fosbury (ST-ECF).