Seems like we don’t pay much attention to the 7th planet.  We know it’s out there, and it’s blue (but not as blue as Neptune).  We know it’s cold, and a gas giant, and … well … it’s cold, and blue, and it’s the 7th planet…

NASA/JPL, Voyager II 1986 image of Uranus

While it’s not a media star like Jupiter and Saturn, and doesn’t even get the attention Neptune and Pluto receive, Uranus is certainly no slouch when it comes to beauty or mystery.  While the 1986 Voyager II image is wonderful (lovely, startling, mysterious, remote), the Hubble has been showing us some even more breath-taking views of this magnificent giant.  Take a look at this:

This of course shows the rings and moons of Uranus, along with the false coloration to show altitude and atmospheric features.  And speaking of those rings, William Herschel (who discovered Uranus) described a possible ring system around the planet in 1789.  For the next 200 years, nobody else saw the rings around Uranus until 1977, when they were “discovered”.  We have so far counted 13 rings in the Uranian system, and 27 moons.  Quite a complex system.

Uranian ring system with inner moons, Image in public domain

Uranus has an axial tilt like none other in the solar system; it’s almost 98 degrees, making Uranus “lay over” on its side.  Its poles are positioned where its equator should be.  Scientists speculate that the dramatic axial tilt was caused by Uranus being impacted with an Earth-sized protoplanet early in the life of the solar system.

NASA/JPL Uranus/Earth to scale - Uranus showing true color variation

Although Uranus is visible to the unaided eye, just barely, it was not recognized as a planet because it’s so dim and its orbit is so slow.  It was the first planet to be discovered by telescope, March 13, 1781, but William Herschel thought he had discovered a comet or a new star.  It takes Uranus a little over 84 years to complete an orbit.  With the way its axial tilt works, each pole spends about 42  years in either total darkness or total sunlight.  Of course, Uranus only receives a tiny percentage of the sunlight the Earth receives.

NASA/ESA Hubble ST 2005, Uranus, natural color, showing rings and clouds

I’ve barely touched the surface of the mystery and beauty of our 7th planet.  We all knew it was out there, but hopefully we’ll take a longer look at this ancient Greek god of the sky.  It’s certainly worth our awe and our interest.

Emotional and persuasive perception of fonts. "The aim of this study was to explore the latent affective and persuasive meaning attributed to text when appearing in two commonly used fonts. Two satirical readings were selected from the New York Times. These readings (one addressing government issues, the other education policy) were each printed in Times New Roman and Arial fonts of the same size and presented in randomized order to 102 university students, who ranked the readings on a number of adjective descriptors. Analysis showed that satirical readings in Times New Roman were perceived as more funny and angry than those in Arial, the combination of emotional perception which is congruent with the definition of satire. This apparent interaction of font type with emotional qualities of text has implications for marketing, advertising, and the persuasive literature." Photo: flickr/micahdowty Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: How extraverted is honey.bunny77@hotmail.de? Inferring personality from e-mail addresses.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Why Facebook is ruining your marriage.

I waited until the series was complete so you could see all the posts at once: Nancy Atkinson of Universe Today has written a very cool series called 13 Things That Saved Apollo 13 (link goes to #13, which has links to the previous 12). From the team itself to measles to duct tape, this is a pretty interesting look into NASA’s most successful failure, and a great reminder of what NASA accomplished 40 years ago.

Just how fast is Google's Web browser, Chrome? According to a new video from these absurd and talented Google people, this is how fast: Related Content:
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We know that skimping on sleep gives many of us heavy eyes and sends us on an early afternoon run for a large coffee (or, for those with an iron stomach who don’t mind ingesting 8,300 percent of our daily value of vitamin B12, an energy drink). But studies out this week outline possibly dire health consequences for depriving ourselves of lengthy slumber.

A small study In the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism says that even a single of night of sleep deprivation can cause the body to show signs of insulin resistance, a warning sign of diabetes. And in the journal Sleep, a long-term study by a different team chillingly suggests that continuously snoozing less than six hours per night can increase your risk for an early death.

First, the insulin study: Esther Donga and colleagues examined nine patients, first after the patients had slept a full eight hours and then again after they’d slept just four. The scientists say that insulin sensitivity was reduced by as much as 25 percent when the patients were sleep deprived.

“Our data indicate that insulin sensitivity is not fixed in healthy (people), but depends on the duration of sleep in the preceding night,” Donga wrote in the study. “In fact it is tempting to speculate that the negative effects of multiple nights of shortened sleep on glucose tolerance can be reproduced, at least in part, by just one sleepless night.” A study by U.S. scientists published last year found that people who slept less than six hours a night were 4.5 times more likely to develop abnormal blood sugar readings in six years compared with those who slept longer [Reuters].

Overeating typically takes the rap for contributing to the ballooning number of people with diabetes. But the scientists speculate that if their findings on insulin resistance in this small subset of people can be extrapolated to most people, then perhaps another unhealthy aspect of this modern life—sleeping too little—could contribute as well.

And then the second study, which deals with early death: British and Italian researchers compiled 16 studies done all over the world in the course of a quarter-century to see if there was a discernible connection between sleeping too little and the risk of dying too soon. They studies they looked at surveyed people about their sleep habits and then tracked when they met their bitter end. In all, more than 1,300,000 people were part of this meta-study.

It found that those who generally slept for less than six hours a night were 12% more likely to experience a premature death over a period of 25 years than those who consistently got six to eight hours’ sleep. Evidence for the link was unequivocal, the researchers concluded [The Guardian].

Some researchers outside the study, though, wondered whether sleep was truly the factor causing early death.

Professor Jim Horne, of the Loughborough Sleep Research Centre, said other factors may be involved rather than sleep per se. “Sleep is just a litmus paper to physical and mental health. Sleep is affected by many diseases and conditions, including depression,” he said [BBC News].

Indeed, the researchers involved with the study concluded the same thing might be at work with their other finding—that not only will too little sleep raise your risk for early death, too much sleep will also up the risk. But, they say, that “too much”—more than 9 hours—might just be a symptom of something else that’s already wrong.

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Image: iStockphoto

I missed this late yesterday in Slate, but it is priceless. Among other things, Lithwick shows that Cuccinelli's investigation holds no benefit for Virginia taxpayers:
...State Sen. Donald McEachin estimates that the Cuccinelli lawsuit will cost Virginia taxpayers between $250,000 and $500,000 if it goes all the way to the Supreme Court. Spending half a million dollars of taxpayer funds to possibly recover some part of half a million dollars of misspent grant money doesn't even begin to make sense. But it's not just Mann on the hook here. "With a weapon like this in Cuccinelli's hands, any faculty member at a public university in Virginia has got to be thinking twice about doing politically controversial research or communicating with other scholars about it," says Rachel Levinson, senior counsel with the American Association of University Professors. UVA environmental science professor Howard Epstein, a former colleague of Mann's, puts it this way: "Who is going to want to be on our faculty when they realize Virginia is the state where the A.G. investigates climate scientists?" If researchers are really afraid to do cutting-edge research in Virginia, the state's flagship university is in enormous trouble.
Well, yeah. But is UVA standing up for itself and ...

The media-savvy eco-pirates of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society have a new target in their sights: commercial fishing boats that illegally scoop endangered bluefin tuna out of the sea.

The Sea Shepherd activists have become famous for harassing Japanese whaling ships; a reality TV show about their exploits documented the many tricks the activists used to slow down the whalers, including shooting stink bombs onto their ships and attempting to disable their propellers. With their new project, dubbed Operation Blue Rage, the activists hope to bring the same level of attention to the fight to save endangered tuna.

Stocks of bluefin tuna have fallen by roughly 85% since the industrial fishing era began…. Yet despite quotas that are arguably too high to begin with, quotas are still being ignored in many places [Ecopolitology].

Conservationists suffered a major setback this spring, when an international meeting failed to pass new protections for the bluefin tuna, which is highly valued by sushi chefs. In light of this political inaction, Sea Shepherd decided to act. Its flagship, the Steve Irwin, is now en route to the Mediterranean to begin a harassment campaign against ships that are illegally pulling the endangered fish from the sea.

Steve Irwin First Officer Locky Maclean acknowledges that it will be somewhat difficult to find tuna poachers among those fishing boats that comply with the lax laws, but says there are a few tricks the activists can use.

First, the legal season for bluefin tuna is just 30-days. “Where we come into play, where we can operate and enforce, is on vessels fishing outside that season, after the June 15th cutoff or before the May 15th start date. If we come across vessels purse seining outside of that time frame…we’re in a position to enforce [the law].” Second, there is the ICCAT list of vessels, “enables us to know the names of the vessels which cannot fish in that area” [Treehugger].

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Image: Wikimedia

What does it look like to stare into infinity? Like this:

Oh yes, you need to click that to see it in its glory. Because there’s a lesson here…

When you look up at night, you might see a thousand stars. With binoculars, you might see tens of thousands. With a decent telescope, that number goes up to a seemingly amazing tens of millions.

This one image shows tens of thousands of trillions of stars. A million stars for every man, woman, and child on Earth, with more to spare. And it’s only one small part of the sky.

The stars are contained in thousands of galaxies, each so far away that their might and power is reduced to a smudge. Some are big enough to reveal some structure, a pretty splash of a spiral or a delicate swirl, but most are so distant they are mere points of light.

The image is dominated by Abell 315, a cluster of galaxies located two billion light years away. It’s a sprawling city of galaxies, hundreds of island universes bound by their mutual gravity. If each has 100 billion stars — a fair guess — then there are trillions of stars visible here in a glance… and that’s dwarfed, crushed, by the other galaxies scattered in this cosmic portrait.

The picture was taken by the European Southern Observatory’s 2.2-meter telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile. Incredibly, this picture is the combination of only about 2.5 hours’ worth of exposures! There are a handful of individual stars in the image; they are located in the foreground, in our own galaxy. They might be a few hundred or even a few thousand light years away. Everything else in the picture is millions or billions of light years away.

… or, almost everything. See those colored streaks, the red, green, and blue lines? Those are asteroids, rocks a couple of kilometers across. They have different colors because this image is a composite of three separate exposures using a red, green, and blue filter. During each exposure, the asteroids moved a bit compared to the background stars and galaxies due to the combined motion of the rocks and the Earth, leaving streaks. The color of the streak corresponds to the filter used in the exposure.

Assuming these are main belt asteroids, they are perhaps 100 – 200 million kilometers away. Our space probes take months or years to get that far from Earth, yet these are the nearest objects by far in this picture! The most distant galaxy you can find in this image is something like 100,000,000,000,000 times farther away.

Every now and again, as does everyone, I find myself consumed with the drama in my life. Personal interactions, local troubles, global issues. These are all important, sometimes even crucial. But when I can, I try to remember to leverage myself out, to try to gain some perspective.

Gazing into the depths of space, plummeting into the environs of a hundred quadrillion suns… that’s where true perspective can be found.

Credit: ESO/J. Dietrich

...apparently. A viewer sends this picture. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is airing a talk I gave in March at the National Press Club in Canberra, as the keynote address for the Science Meets Parliament annual event hosted by the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies. The talk, composed in a burst of inspiration on the flight across the Pacific, is one I've never given before or since--but I'm kinda proud of it. I am going to see if it will be available in any watchable format stateside, and then I may say some more about the subject matter.

Is the Roundup Ready revolution coming to a close? In the early 1990s, agribusiness giant Monsanto introduced its line of genetically modified crops that could tolerate the pesticide Roundup, allowing farmers to spray it far and wide without worrying about damaging their product.

Now, reports are bubbling up about the increased resistance some weeds are showing to Roundup, which could be the source of great worry, as 90 percent of the soybeans and 70 percent of corn currently grown in the United States are the Roundup Ready varieties.

[F]armers sprayed so much Roundup that weeds quickly evolved to survive it. “What we’re talking about here is Darwinian evolution in fast-forward,” Mike Owen, a weed scientist at Iowa State University, said [The New York Times].

And for the environmentally-minded, here’s something else to consider:

That threatens to reverse one of the agricultural advances bolstered by the Roundup revolution: minimum-till farming. By combining Roundup and Roundup Ready crops, farmers did not have to plow under the weeds to control them. That reduced erosion, the runoff of chemicals into waterways and the use of fuel for tractors [The New York Times].

For an in-depth take, and a historical reminder of how weeds have always evolved to thwart our means of killing them, check out DISCOVER blogger Carl Zimmer’s post.

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Image: flickr / Peter Blanchard

There’s new paper in Genome Biology (tip: Dienekes) which doesn’t present too much in terms of new results, Characterizing the admixed African ancestry of African Americans, but has really, really, good visualization of the data:

Results
From cluster analysis, we found that all the African Americans are admixed in their African components of ancestry, with the majority contributions being from West and West-Central Africa, and only modest variation in these African-ancestry proportions among individuals. Furthermore, by principal components analysis, we found little evidence of genetic structure within the African component of ancestry in African Americans.

Conclusions
These results are consistent with historic mating patterns among African Americans that are largely uncorrelated to African ancestral origins, and they cast doubt on the general utility of mtDNA or Y-chromosome markers alone to delineate the full African ancestry of African Americans. Our results also indicate that the genetic architecture of African Americans is distinct from that of Africans, and that the greatest source of potential genetic stratification bias in case-control studies of African Americans derives from the proportion of European ancestry.

I want to emphasize the part about lack of utility of uniparental markers. These were the first markers which became widely used in scientific genealogy, and African Americans made a great deal of recourse to these so as to identify the tribe from which their ancestors came. There are obvious historical reasons why this would have more valence for this group than for others, as their ancestral identity was consciously erased during the period of slavery.

But even though generating trees of mtDNA or Y markers is more tractable using a coalescent model, and it gives you a clean answer, it’s only a tiny slice of your ancestry. And not necessarily a representative one. Perhaps better than nothing 10 years ago, but in the days of 450 K SNP chips probably outdated. As I said above I think the paper is interesting mostly because the graphical representation is really good. Most of the time I add labels, but this figure needs no additional explanatory editing!

The blue represents European ancestry in individual African Americans, and in the text they note that the frappe bar plot nearly perfectly aligns with the distribution on the PCA plot. Remember that the two axes on the PCA plot represent the two largest axes of variation, with the first component (largest) on the x, and the second component (second largest) on the y. The largest component naturally separates Europeans from the African groups, while the second largest component separates the various African groups. The difference between the two Pygmy groups is not surprising, the Biaka have been found to be much more admixed with their Bantu neighbors than the Mbuti. I wouldn’t put too much weight in the closeness of the San and Mbuti on the plot, because you’re seeing only a two-dimensional view of the total genomic variation, the two largest dimensions as evaluated by looking at the total range of variation of genes among the set of individuals (European, African American and African) within the data set. The relationships may differ if you constrain the sample space of genetic variation to African genotypes only, and other dimensions may also indicate different relationships.

Here are the estimates of ancestral quanta for African Americans by region against different potential ancestral groups. They had 136 African Americans, so I wouldn’t put too much weight on the interregional differences.

22% of the ancestry of African Americans in the sample is European, with a standard deviation of 12%. It seems that around 10% of the African American population is more than half European in ancestry. Interestingly, in Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s Faces of America, all three of the people with black ancestry, two of whom clearly identified as African American, were more than 50% European in ancestry.* When it comes to African ancestry the affinity with the region of the west of the Bight of Benin seems clear if you view the data through a more granular lens.

The Mandenka are from the western fringe of West Africa, while the Bantu are a linguistic group which seems to have emerged just to the east of Nigeria, and swept east and south with the spread of a particular agricultural lifestyle until pushed up against the Nilotic and Khoisan groups of East and South Africa respectively. But this is on the population level. Could it be that individuals exhibit variance by African region, as they do on European ancestry? Not too much (at least beyond a level of noise, and perhaps a few outliers).

The two figures below are based on African genotypes within the African American population.

Note the contrast with the linear topology evident when European ancestry is added into the mix. Verbally what is clear is that while some African Americans have more European ancestry than others, on an individual level very few are reasonably identified as Yoruba people, or Mandenka people. Rather, individual African Americans exhibit a mix of African lineages in proportion to the various weights of sources in the slave trade.

Why might this be? I have observed before that the vast majority of the ancestry of African Americans is likely colonial. Though a few African American communities, such as the Gullah of coastal South Carolina, preserve distinctive regional African folkways, by and large black Americans as a culture are American, and derive many of their distinctive aspects from elaborations on Anglo norms or a novel synthesis of African ones (in particular, it seems clear that black Americans have been strongly influenced by the two Southern British settler folkways in their speech and religion). The deep history of African Americans within this country means that a great deal of time has elapsed whereby people of Yoruba, Mandenka or Kongo ancestry could have intermarried. Without positive assortative mating by tribe the various ancestral quanta would have become intermixed in subsequent generations. The Gullah exception supports this model, because they lived in relative isolation from whites. The rice agriculture which they practiced required less direct supervision than cotton or tobacco to extract economic productivity, and the South Carolina coastal country was notoriously unhealthful for whites. The relatively humane nature of rice agriculture as opposed to cotton (and especially sugar) also manifested in the more stable family life of the ancestors of the Gullah. So the relationship between white planters and Africans in this region was closer to that between lord and serf than owner and property, and the ancestors of the Gullah could develop their culture in America more organically than African Americans elsewhere.

In contrast, white ancestry does exhibit a great deal of individual variation. Why? There are two obvious ones that jump out. First, much of the ancestry may be much more recent. Recent ancestry has less time to be “dispersed” across the population through intermarriage. Though certainly whites and blacks mixed genetically in the colonial era, the process continued uninterrupted down to emancipation, while the addition of new African ancestry ceased in near totality by 1810 (there was some trade in slavery which reached the United States of America after this period, but not much), and had greatly diminished in the decades before 1810. The endogenous population growth of the black American community was sufficient to provide slaves for the new cotton lands of the early 19th century. After 1865 white-black relations were more surreptitious but continued nonetheless (e.g., Malcolm X’s mother’s father was white). Second, there is naturally the reality that there was, assortative mating for European features (e.g., “good hair”, skin lighter than “a brown paper bag”) among the African American elite. Though ancestry and phenotype can become decoupled, this takes time, and as I suggest above much of the European ancestry is recent. The image above is of a black American Congressman, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. I assume most readers are aware that W. E. B. Du Bois’ “Talented Tenth” were disproportionately what in other societies would be recognized as people of mixed-race, but who in the United States were classed within the general black population because of the white Southern paradigm of hypodescent.

Overall, nothing too new in the paper, but really great charts!

Citation: Zakharia F, Basu A, Absher D, Assimes TL, Go AS, Hlatky MA, Iribarren C, Knowles JW, Li J, Narasimhan B, Sidney S, Southwick A, Myers RM, Quertermous T, Risch N, & Tang H (2009). Characterizing the admixed African ancestry of African Americans. Genome biology, 10 (12) PMID: 20025784

* Gates is more than 50% European, while Elizabeth Wright is 65% European in ancestry. This aligns with intuition based on physical appearance. Malcolm Gladwell, who may not identify as African American (his father was a white Englishman, his mother a mixed-race Jamaican, and he is a Canadian immigrant), is likely to be ~75% European, though the number was not noted in the special.

Image Credit: Library of Congress

The necessary parts: one salad spinner, some hair combs, a yogurt container, plastic lids, and a glue gun. The finished product: a manual, push-pump centrifuge that could be a lifesaver in developing world medical clinics. Its name: the Sally Centrifuge.
A team of college students invented this low-cost centrifuge, which can be built for about $30, as a project for a global health class at Rice University. The teacher challenged them to build an inexpensive, portable tool that could diagnose anemia without access to electricity, and the tinkerers got to work.
The students, Lila Kerr and Lauren Theis, found that spinning tiny tubes of blood in the device for 10 minutes was enough to separate the blood into heavier red blood cells and lighter plasma. Then they used a gauge to measure the hematocrit, the ratio of red blood cells to the total volume. That information tells a doctor whether a patient is anemic, which can in turn help to diagnose conditions like malnutrition, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and malaria.
In a press release, Rice University listed some of the advantages of the Sally Centrifuge:
It requires no electricity - just a bit of muscle. "We've pumped it for 20 minutes with no problem," Theis said. ...

As neuroscientists refine their techniques for imaging the brain, scans like the fMRI keep creeping toward the courtroom and getting closer to joining to polygraph tests as means to sort liars from truth-tellers through physiology. In Brooklyn, lawyer David Levin is now offering the fMRI brain scan of a witness as proof of her honesty. If the court accepts it, it could be the first time such a brain scan was ever admitted as evidence. For what would be a legal breakthrough, the case is a rather minor one: Levin's client, Cynette Wilson, claims she was treated poorly at her job at a staffing center after filing a sexual harassment complaint. The lawyer found a coworker of Wilson's to corroborate her story, but wanted to bolster his credibility. Wired.com reports:
So, Levin had the coworker undergo an fMRI brain scan by the company Cephos, which claims to provide “independent, scientific validation that someone is telling the truth.”
Laboratory studies using fMRI, which measures blood-oxygen levels in the brain, have suggested that when someone lies, the brain sends more blood to the ventrolateral area of the prefrontal cortex. In a very small number of studies, researchers have identified lying in study subjects (.pdf) with ...