Simon & Schuster has a new book out on its Free Press label by Maceleo Gleiser, A Tear At The Edge Of Creation.

Dr. Gleiser, long a believer and researcher for the String Theory, has given up his ideals of a unified, universal “answer” to the origins of matter and the universe and takes off in an entirely new direction.  His book, “A radical new vision for life in an imperfect universe”, stems from his new belief that life, as complex organisms, is extremely rare.  So rare, in fact, that we are virtually “alone” in the universe.  Dr. Gleiser then believes that we have an overwhelming mission to preserve life here on Earth, and even to spread our version of it further out into the universe.

In his book, Dr. Gleiser puts forth the idea that nature and the universe are basically asymmetrical and imperfect, and that we all stem from these imperfections.  That there is no “final theory” (as in the String Theory).

A Tear At The Edge Of Creation is an engaging and interesting read.  Dr. Gleiser presents his ideas cleanly, and his position is well-thought and well-researched.  The book is logically presented and easily followed.  At about 255 pages of text (hardback), it is a great “rainy day” book to keep you awake and alert.  I think it’s a good selection for your home library.   I certainly enjoyed it, especially the “We Are All Mutants” chapter.

Dr. Gleiser is a professor at Dartmouth College, and the author of three other books:  The Prophet and the Astronomer, The Dancing Universe, and A Harmonia Do Mundo.  He has been featured in several TV documentaries, including Stephen Hawking’s Universe, and The History Channel’s Beyond the Big Bang.

Evulvalution: The Portrayal of Women's External Genitalia and Physique Across Time and the Current Barbie Doll Ideals. "Media images of the female body commonly represent reigning appearance ideals of the era in which they are published. To date, limited documentation of the genital appearance ideals in mainstream media exists. Analysis 1 sought to describe genital appearance ideals (i.e., mons pubis and labia majora visibility, labia minora size and color, and pubic hair style) and general physique ideals (i.e., hip, waist, and bust size, height, weight, and body mass index [BMI]) across time based on 647 Playboy Magazine centerfolds published between 1953 and 2007. Analysis 2 focused exclusively on the genital appearance ideals embodied by models in 185 Playboy photographs published between 2007 and 2008. Taken together, results suggest the perpetuation of a "Barbie Doll" ideal characterized by a low BMI, narrow hips, a prominent bust, and hairless, undefined genitalia resembling those of a prepubescent female." Image: flickr/SantaRosa OLD SKOOL Related content:
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Who needs big silicon panels? MIT scientists just coated paper with solar cells, reportedly the first team to ever do that. Vladimir Bulovic, director of the Eni-MIT Solar Frontiers Research Center, unveiled them this week, and said the design was being submitted for peer review.

The printed solar cells, which Bulovic showed at a press conference Tuesday, are still in the research phase and are years from being commercialized. However, the technique, in which paper is coated with organic semiconductor material using a process similar to an inkjet printer, is a promising way to lower the weight of solar panels. “If you could use a staple gun to install a solar panel, there could be a lot of value,” Bulovic said [CNN].

Right now the solar cells on paper get just 1 to 2 percent efficiency at converting sunlight to electricity (some cells have achieved 40 percent or more in lab trials). But they carry the advantages of being flexible, and Bulovic says he could potentially use a number of different materials, not just the carbon-based dye used in these first attempts. And they’re tunable:

MIT is focusing much of its effort on quantum dots, or tiny crystals that are only a few nanometers in size. A human hair is about 50,000 to 100,000 nanometers thick. By using different materials and sizes, researchers can fine-tune the colors of light that quantum dots can absorb, a way of isolating good candidates for quantum dot solar cells [CNN].

Bulovic gives the standard warning about new technologies—it could be a decade before it’s ready for commercial development.

And once it is? There’s no telling how it could revolutionize the home solar industry, which currently relies on pricey professional installers to set up panels [Inhabitat].

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Image: Martin LaMonica at CNET

Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth may have had the right idea when she scrubbed her hands following the murder of King Duncan. An odd new study suggests that hand washing may help people deal with the emotional consequences of decisions–and not just big decisions, like whether or not to participate in regicide, but also minor calls, like which free CD to take home.

[Psychology researcher Spike W. S. Lee] and a colleague named Norbert Schwarz decided to test hand washing’s effect on one kind of bad feeling: the lingering tension we feel after being forced to choose between two attractive options, because picking one option makes us feel that we’ve lost the other. Psychologists know that people usually try to soothe this inner conflict by later exaggerating the positive aspects of their choice. “In other words, after they make the choice, they will like the chosen option more than before the choice,” Lee explains [NPR].

For the study, published in Science, the researchers told students they were evaluating products for a consumer survey. The students first ranked 10 CDs in order of preference, and were then told they could take home either their fifth- or sixth-ranked CD as a token of appreciation. After they made their choices, they were told it was time to evaluate a liquid soap–but some students washed with the soap, while others only looked at its packaging. Finally, the students were asked to rank the same set of CDs again.

When the two groups re-ranked their ten CDs, students that did not wash their hands ranked the CD they chose higher, as if to indicate to themselves that they wanted that CD anyway. Students that did wash their hands, though, ranked their chosen CD about the same, showing that hand-washing somehow dispensed with the need to justify a choice [Ars Technica].

The results suggest that hand washing “wiped the slate clean,” Lee says, and removed the emotional baggage and rationalizations associated with the students’ choices. In another version of the experiment, researchers got the same results when students cleaned their hands with an antiseptic wipe after choosing a jam, which implies that a traditional scrub down with soap and water isn’t required.

While this is a neat trick, Lee notes that the typical mental processes that surround decision making have served humans well.

“Justification has a purpose, it makes people feel good. Washing away the need to justify past decisions also washes away the cognitive good.” It’s possible that those who washed their hands won’t enjoy the CD or jam as much as their unwashed counterparts will, he says [New Scientist].

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Image: flickr / Arlington County

The show website is here; you can listen here and download/subscribe here. Here is the description of the program:
It’s hard to think of an issue more contentious these days than the relationship between faith and science. If you have any doubt, just flip over to the science blogosphere: You’ll see the argument everywhere.
In the scholarly arena, meanwhile, the topic has been approached from a number of angles: by historians of science, for example, and philosophers. However, relatively little data from the social sciences has been available concerning what today’s scientists actually think about faith.
Today’s Point of Inquiry guest, sociologist Dr. Elaine Ecklund of Rice University, is changing that. Over the past four years, she has undertaken a massive survey of the religious beliefs of elite American scientists at 21 top universities. It’s all reported in her new book Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think.
Ecklund’s findings are pretty surprising. The scientists in her survey are much less religious than the American public, of course—but they’re also much more religious, and more “spiritual,” than you might expect. For those interested in debating the relationship between science and religion, it seems safe to say that her new data will be hard to ignore. Once ...

I assume by now that everyone has read A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome. It’s free to all, so you should. At least look at the figures. Also, if you haven’t at least skimmed the supplement, you should do that as well. It’s nearly 200 pages, and basically feels more like a collection of minimally edited papers than anything else. There’s no point in me reviewing the paper, since you can read it, and plenty of others have hit the relevant ground already.

Since there seem to be three main segments of the paper, here are a few minimal thoughts on each.

First, the draft genome. What would you have said if someone came up to you ten years ago and told you that you’d live to to see this? Svante Paabo himself admitted he didn’t think he’d see something like this in his lifetime. There was a lot of hard work that went into figuring out how to get at the genetic material, purify it, and confirm that it was actually from the samples in question and not handler contamination and such (remember that there was a problem with contamination a few years back). To a great extent the focus on the results, instead of the methods, is like critiquing a set of landscape photographs taken from a very high peak. We can’t forget the effort and energy that went into scaling the peak itself. A lot of labor input obviously went into this, but additionally we can thank the fact that we live in a technological society where progress is not only expected, but often can’t be accounted for in our projections of future possibilities. I think that’s a very hopeful thing which makes me a little less pessimistic about the possibility of the magic carpet economy.

Second, the are the comparisons between Neandertals, modern humans, and chimpanzees. As Carl Zimmer noted there are an alphabet soup of genes thrown at you in the results. It is hard to make sense of it all, though I did note that genes involved in skin function and phenotype seem to have been the subject of differential evolution between Neandertals and modern humans (i.e., SNP differences in regards to substitutions in the lineages). We already know that there are suggestive signs that Neandertals lost function on pigmentation independently from modern humans. That shouldn’t be too surprising, given that it seems that West and East Eurasians evolved light skin independently. There are some uncertainties about the timing of this, but the different genetic architecture implies that it was unlikely to have occurred immediately after the Out-of-Africa event, and in fact some of the loci imply that depigmentation may have occurred in the Holocene. Skin is famously our biggest organ, so it shouldn’t be that shocking that it is possibly a target of selection, but curious nonetheless (recall that it seems that humans evolved darker skin from a paler ancestor as we lost our fur in the tropics).

Additionally, I think the finding that Neandertals and modern humans seem to share most of the same HARs, regions of the genome where our human lineage seems to differ from other mammals in exhibiting a lot of evolutionary change, is of great interest, though not necessarily surprising. When pointing to Luke Jostins’ post on rates of encephalization, I observed that in some ways it seems like there was a very powerful and consistent lineage specific trend toward greater cranial capacity which had incredible time depth. In The Dawn of Human Culture Richard Klein puts the emphasis on the sharp break between those populations before ~50 thousand years ago, and after. This period is marked by the shift toward behavioral, as opposed to just anatomical, modernity (there were anatomically modern humans in Africa ~200 thousand years ago). Klein’s thesis is that some mutation triggered a radical biocultural change, and was responsible for the Great Leap Forward, the efflorescence of creative symbolic culture which we truly consider the sin qua non of culture. The sharing of HARs between Neandertals and pure humans, and the consistent trend toward encephalization (aside from the post-Ice Age reversal), makes me shift the priors a touch more toward inevitable continuity and away from contingency. I find much of the politics of Robert J. Sawyer’s Neanderthal Parallax series a bit heavy-handed, but his depiction of Neandertals as fundamentally intelligent creatures who differ only on the margins seems a lot more plausible to me now than it was when I first read it in the early to mid-aughts.

Third, and finally, there’s the story of admixture and sex. This is getting all the press, but of course this is the most uncertain, inferential, and speculative aspect of the paper. It’s impressive, but it should open to skepticism, especially after the Out-of-Africa totalism which was ascendant until recently. John Hawks accepts the thrust of the findings, but obviously has his own ideas as to modifications, extensions and qualifications. Dienekes Pontikos favors an alternative interpretation of the data, which the authors point to in the text but dismiss as less parsimonious. My own inclination is to favor the authors in their interpretation of parsimony, but I will admit that this assertion is disputable. Dienekes and others would suggest that it is just as, or more, plausible that the shared variants between non-Africans and Neandertals arise from their common northeast African ancestral population (or some ancestral population of non-Africans and Neandertals). He rightly points out that there may be ancient population substructure within Africa, and using a particular African group as a “reference” for the whole continent may lead to false inferences. The main issue is that the probability of retrieving ancient DNA from northeast African samples in the near future seems low because the conditions for preservation are not optimal (tropical climates famously degrade and recycle biological material more efficiently than temperate or boreal climates). Additionally, using modern northeast African populations is somewhat problematic because there has clearly been some back-migration from the nearby Arabian populations into this area in the medium-term past (the languages of the Ethiopian highlands are Semitic). One supposes that one could differentiate between the African and Arabian components of the genome of Ethiopians and Somalis, but if the admixture event was two to three thousand years ago I presume it would be technically more challenging than an African American, where very few generations have passed since admixture for recombination to fragment long genomic regions attributable to one ancestral population. In other words, how do you distinguish Neandertal variants which arrived back from Eurasia from ancient African ones? (I suppose that the haplotypes would differ so that the genuinely African ones would be more diverse)

But even if you reject the top-line finding, that most of us are not pure human, I think the paper is a game-changer in terms of shifting your priors in relation to evaluating the plausibility of a result which suggests admixture from an ancient non-African population. I found out about the high likelihood of this paper just before the UNM results were presented at the American Anthropological Society meeting, and it is clear in hindsight with the large author list that many people knew what was coming down the pipepline and had recalibrated their assessment of results which indicated admixture. It is perhaps time to go back and take a second look at papers which you skipped over before because it seemed that they may have been spurious or reporting a statistical quirk because they lay outside of the orthodox paradigm. This is clearly a case where it is good to live in interesting times.

Citation: Green, R., Krause, J., Briggs, A., Maricic, T., Stenzel, U., Kircher, M., Patterson, N., Li, H., Zhai, W., Fritz, M., Hansen, N., Durand, E., Malaspinas, A., Jensen, J., Marques-Bonet, T., Alkan, C., Prufer, K., Meyer, M., Burbano, H., Good, J., Schultz, R., Aximu-Petri, A., Butthof, A., Hober, B., Hoffner, B., Siegemund, M., Weihmann, A., Nusbaum, C., Lander, E., Russ, C., Novod, N., Affourtit, J., Egholm, M., Verna, C., Rudan, P., Brajkovic, D., Kucan, Z., Gusic, I., Doronichev, V., Golovanova, L., Lalueza-Fox, C., de la Rasilla, M., Fortea, J., Rosas, A., Schmitz, R., Johnson, P., Eichler, E., Falush, D., Birney, E., Mullikin, J., Slatkin, M., Nielsen, R., Kelso, J., Lachmann, M., Reich, D., & Paabo, S. (2010). A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome Science, 328 (5979), 710-722 DOI: 10.1126/science.1188021

Yesterday, a government entity called the President’s Cancer Panel released an alarming report declaring that environmental toxins are causing “grievous harm” to Americans. The authors of the report (pdf) went on to say that while much more research needs to be done to determine the long-term effects of exposure, they believe that the “true burden of environmentally induced cancer has been grossly underestimated.”

But no sooner had they released the report than other cancer experts came forward to say that it wasn’t alarming, but rather alarmist.

First, the panel’s findings. In the 240-page report, the advisory panel noted that Americans are exposed to chemicals whose safety hasn’t yet been definitively established–like the chemical BPA that’s found in some everyday plastics, pesticides, and the substances found in industrial pollution. They write:

“With nearly 80,000 chemicals on the market in the United States, many of which are used by millions of Americans in their daily lives and are un- or understudied and largely unregulated, exposure to potential environmental carcinogens is widespread” [TIME].

The authors go on to suggest a more precautionary approach to approving new chemicals, and argue that under the current regulatory system the government doesn’t act until there’s some proof of harm. They write that cancers could be prevented if the government required more proof of safety from companies before approving a new chemical.

But the report’s release brought an immediate rebuttal from an authoritative source: the American Cancer Society.

Dr. Michael Thun, an epidemiologist from the cancer society, said in an online statement that the report was “unbalanced by its implication that pollution is the major cause of cancer,” and had presented an unproven theory — that environmentally caused cases are grossly underestimated — as if it were a fact. The cancer society estimates that about 6 percent of all cancers in the United States — 34,000 cases a year — are related to environmental causes (4 percent from occupational exposures, 2 percent from the community or other settings) [The New York Times].

Thun went on to say that the report does a disservice to the public by suggesting that the risk of environmentally caused cancer is much higher than 6 percent, thus diverting attention from the real top cancer causes, like smoking and obesity.

“If we could get rid of tobacco, we could get rid of 30 percent of cancer deaths,” he said [The New York Times].

The report’s authors maintain that their findings were balanced and judicious, so the spat doesn’t seem likely to end anytime soon. But the opponents do all agree on one thing: More research on the effects of exposure to everyday chemicals would be tremendously useful.

Taking pictures at a Vancouver airport long-time BABloggee Michael Lonergan was, when spotted this odd cloud he did.

When 30,000 feet you reach, look as good you will not.

Too bad this didn’t come out on May the 4th. Of course, the dark side clouds everything…

It’s big, it’s loud, it’s Iron Man 2, and it opens today.

Like a lot of summer blockbusters, this sequel stretches the laws of physics and the capabilities of modern technology. But, admirably, a lot of the tech in Iron Man 2 is grounded in fact.

Spoiler Alert! Read on at your own risk.

Palladium and particle colliders

Being Iron Man is killing Tony Stark. As this sequel begins, the palladium core that powers the suit and keeps Stark alive is raising toxicity levels in his bloodstream to alarming highs. It’s not hard to see why Iron Man would try palladium—the now-infamous cold fusion experiments that created a storm of hype in 1989 relied on the metal. And it’s true that palladium does have some toxicity, though it’s been used in alloys for dentistry and jewelry-making.

Having exhausted the known elements in the search for a better power source, Stark, ever the DIY enthusiast, builds a particle collider in his workshop. This is actually not crazy: Physicist Todd Satogata of Brookhaven National Lab says you can build tiny particle colliders; even whiz-kid teenagers do it.

Powering the accelerator, however, might be an issue. 2.5 miles long, Brookhaven’s superconducting collider needs 10 to 15 megawatts of power—enough for 10,000 or 15,000 homes. “For Stark to run his accelerator, he’s gotta make a deal with his power company or he’s gotta have some sort of serious power plant in his backyard,” Satogata says [Popular Mechanics].

In addition, Stark doesn’t appear to have the magnets needed to focus a beam as tightly as he does in the film, where it shreds his shop before he gets it focused in the right place. And, as we covered with the recent discovery of element 117, the ultra-heavy lab-created elements that Stark could have created in his accelerator don’t last long. However, back in 1994 when only 106 elements dotted the periodic table, DISCOVER discussed the idea some physicists have of an “island of stability” where elements we’ve yet to discover/create might be able to exist in a stable way. Perhaps Tony found it.

The guts of the suit

After a long quest, the U.S. military gets its hands on Stark’s most magnificent piece of technology, the Iron Man suit. What they saw when they looked inside was the work of special effect wiz Clark Schaffer.

The silvery suit, originally seen in the first “Iron Man,” is shown again in the new movie in an “autopsy” scene in which the government begins tearing it apart to see how it works. “[The filmmakers] wanted it to look like what you see under the skin of a jet,” said Schaffer, who, along with friend and modeler Randy Cooper, worked on the suit in Los Angeles for six weeks. “There’s an aesthetic to it. I try to make it look as functional and practical as possible but also something that has beauty to it. That was my baby” [Salt Lake Tribune].

But how might the Iron Man suit be able to stand up to the punishment Stark continually receives? Tech News Daily proposes that he took advantage of something scientists are developing now: carbon nanotube foam with great cushioning power.

Plasma weaponry

Iron Man’s nemesis in this second installment is Ivan Vanko, played by the villainous and murky Mickey Rourke, who you might have seen in previews stalking around a racetrack with seemingly electrified prostheses attached to his arms. The explanation in the film is hand-waved a bit, but it seems Vanko’s weapons rely on plasma.

Scientists actually are developing weapons based on plasma, such as the StunStrike, which essentially fires a bolt of lightning, creating an electrical charge through a stream of plasma. Researchers have recently even created what appears to be ball lightning in microwave ovens, which Iron Man’s “repulsor blasts” resemble [Tech News Daily].

Drones and hacking

Vanko isn’t happy with just amazing plasma tentacles, though. Working for Stark’s rival military-industrialist Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell), he develops a horde of ghastly humanoid drones for each branch of the military. That, of course, is straight out of science fact—our military relies increasing on robots, be they unmanned aerial vehicles, bots on the ground that investigate roadside bombs, or even unmanned subs currently under development.

He’s a hacker, too, seizing control of an Iron Man suit worn by Don Cheadle as Stark sidekick James Rhodes. As DISCOVER covered in December, that’s a real-life worry, too. Hackers figured out how to steal the video feeds from our Predator drones because of an encryption lapse at one step in the process.

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While perusing the latest issue of the Journal of the History of Neurosciences, I was surprised to discover a review of my book Soul Made Flesh. It’s been six years since it came out. I guess the stack by their nightstand is pretty tall!

But I certainly don’t mind the wait when it’s a review like this:

This book is a joy to read. Zimmer has crafted a pleasant style, leveraging his talents that were cultivated during his time as a newspaper journalist. The texture of the pages and the typesetting suggest an old-fashioned printing and binding for the book; it’s pleasant to handle and easy reading. Several chapters are adorned with period illustrations by Christopher Wren. For anyone interested in the birth of contemporary medicine, social philosophy, and religion, this is a wonderland of enticing history. In fact, most people interested in this period of history will find the book is an entertaining read; one that is difficult to put down.

Fortunately, the book is also still in print six years later, so you can get yourself a copy if you’re interested. Since the book looks at the birth of neurology 350 years ago, it’s not out of date!

Penn State's college football team has a new trick in its playbook--courtesy of acoustical science.
Penn State graduate student Andrew Barnard's acoustic mapping research illustrates how the relocation of 20,000 student-fans in Penn State's Beaver Stadium could lead to more wins for the Nittany Lions football team.
Last year, during three homes games, Barnard recorded and measured crowd noise at the stadium using a series of strategically placed acoustic meters. He found when the Nittany Lions had the ball, the crowd noise reached 75 decibels on the field. But when the opposing team played offense, the noise climbed to 110 decibels. As a result, the visiting quarterback's calls could only be heard within about 18 inches from him.
Barnard wondered whether he could make it even tougher for visiting QBs. So when the stadium was empty, he used a loudspeaker to create noise in various seating locations and measured the sound intensity on the field. According to Gizmodo, Barnard zeroed in on the stadium's acoustical sweet spot, where the loudest fans could be the most effective against opposing teams:
When the stadium was empty, he searched for the best spots for an audible assault by carrying a noisy speaker around to 45 different seats ...