Current Status: GO

Launch Date: Friday, 2:20 pm ET (10 minute window)

Odds of Launch: 70 percent

Shuttle: Atlantis (OV-104) – Sad to say this is the final scheduled flight for Atlantis.

Mission: STS-132

Mission Length: 12 days

EVA’s: 3 (on flight days: 4,6,8)

Primary Objectives: deliver an Integrated Cargo Carrier and a Russian-built Mini Research Module to the
International Space Station.

Commander: Ken Ham

Pilot: Tony Antonelli

Mission Specialists: Garrett Reisman, Michael Good, Piers Sellers and Steve Bowen

Launch Pad 39A — Webcam Image courtesy: NASA/Kennedy Space Center

NOAA’s Forecast:

Tomorrow: Sunny, with a high near 83. East southeast wind between 10 and 15 mph.

To keep current with the news about the launch, I recommend you go to NASA’s Launch Blog which should be live around 9:00 am ET. You will need to refresh your browser to get the latest from that site, but it’s THE place to get the up to the minute stuff especially if you can’t watch NASA TV.

I will be watching the launch itself on NASA-TV

Image Credits: NASA / NOAA

Check out the #bg2010 hash-tag on twitter. There’s a lot of interesting tidbits. Here are some tweets from the presentation on the Neandertal genome in relation to the Denisova hominin (a.k.a. “X-woman”):

lukejostins SP: The Denisova finger is from the Neanderthal line, but didn’t interbreed with humans, hence looking like an outgroup
…
dgmacarthur: SP claims that Neanderthals and Denisova archaics are more closely related than either are to humans; intriguing.
…
dgmacarthur: SP: next steps: generate 10-20X coverage of Neanderthal, sequence other archaic humans (e.g. Denisova).

I hope Dr. Daniel MacAthur and Luke Jostins will say more when they get back to Perfidious Albion.

Mythologist of Our Age: Why Ray Bradbury’s stories have seeped into the culture:

Science fiction dates as quickly as any genre, and Bradbury is not entirely immune to this. The futuristic rocket ships he wrote about in 1950 look a lot like the first-generation NASA rockets; the music of the future is Rachmaninoff and Duke Ellington; and in the terrifying “Mars is Heaven,” the planet bears an eerie resemblance to Green Bluff, Ill., right down to Victorian houses “covered with scrolls and rococo.” But the reason Bradbury’s stories still sing on the page is that, despite all his humanoid robots, automated houses, and rocket men, his interest is not in future technologies but in people as they live now—and how the proliferation of convenient technology alters the way we think and the way we treat each other.

One of the aspects of science fiction as a genre is that the masters of the field when viewed from outside of the core science fiction reading audience are often not necessarily dominant within the subculture. The core science fiction readership, those who immerse themselves in the genre, and might actually show up at a science fiction convention, are not the typical casual readers who might pick something up at the airport bookstore. They’re disproportionately male, disproportionately virgin, disproportionately young, and disproportionately nerdy, with a strong technical bent. For a quantitative overview of the reality of the demographic assertions I’m making, I point you to William Sims Bainbridge’s Dimensions of Science Fiction. For a more impressionistic “insider” view, you might check out Isaac Asimov’s memoirs. For examples of the “literature” which confirm that the audience for science fiction is really peculiar, I point you to Hal Clement’s oeuvre. His stories and novels would simply be unpublishable outside of the confines of the genre, they’re difficult to read for the typical person. Certainly there is action-packed space opera galore, socially conscious works of Ursula K. Le Guin, and authors who can be called literary stylists, such as Gene Wolfe. But these are in some ways deviations from type (notably, Le Guin and Wolfe are more fantasists than science fiction authors).

The heart of science fiction as a genre is “hard science fiction,” the other variants are to a great extent dilutions or modifications on the elements which you find within hard sf, with its outward focus on space, future orientation, and its embeddedness in a world where engineering is paramount. It is also notable that authors who become prominent outside of science fiction are not necessarily thought of as science fiction authors once they’ve achieved mainstream success. Sometimes this is due to the author’s own wishes, case in point being Kurt Vonnegut, who in his early years published in genre pulp magazines before becoming a literary sensation. Vonnegut pulled off the equivalent of going from working in porn to being a mainstream actor.

This weirdness of science fiction is due, I think, to the psychological diversity of mankind. Socially awkward teenage men with minimal interpersonal skills and no sexual experience with the opposite or same sex, but great fluency in the language of technology and science, are going to produce fiction which reflects their experiences, priorities and biases. They will consume fiction which reflects their experiences, priorities and biases. One reason that science fiction has traditionally been weak on character development is that many of the writers and readers are themselves tone deaf to the textured reality of most human social experiences (reading Isaac Asimov’s memoirs it seems clear that many of the early science fiction writers and fans were nerdy types who lacked social skills but made up for it with their raw intelligence).

All this makes it comprehensible why Ray Bradbury’s work has seeped into our culture; his works are only superficially science fiction. They have the exterior of science fiction, but at their heart they speak to the typical man on the street, not the nerds who form the genre’s core. Bradbury shrugged off his technical blunders without much self-consciousness. His errors were so numerous and blatant that fans, editors and critics such as Damon Knight took to mocking him in print. This is not to say that most science fiction is very technically coherent or thought out. Obviously it isn’t, else the authors wouldn’t be writers, they’d be NASA engineers designing FTL space ships. But Bradbury’s errors were often embarrassing howlers which went beyond the pale. But that’s fine for the general public, their focus would be on Bradbury’s abilities to write compelling characters and weave narrative which speaks to non-scientific issues. Which is why Ray Bradbury matters to the general public, and Larry Niven does not, and someone who considers themself a “crunchy conservative” and traditionalist Christian was intrigued by the possibilities in his fiction. Reality check: if someone who is enamored with St. Benedict and the Church Fathers thinks your literature might speak to him, you probably aren’t producing very good science fiction (as opposed to fiction).

Note: I’m focusing here on people who have read science fiction in book form. Not people who like Star Trek films. Science fiction films are generally space opera for obvious reasons, and some such as Star Wars really have more fantasy than science fiction elements (though there is good evidence that Star Wars took many of its ideas from 1930s space opera, especially E. E. Smith’s stories).

Image Credit: IMDB

"This study investigated the physiological and psychological effects of sanitary napkins (SN) on women in hemorrhage treatment during the menstrual phase. Mesh and non-woven napkins were employed, and the effects were studied during the follicular and menstrual phases; mesh SN presented a higher textural surface-roughness. In both phases, the increases in systolic and diastolic blood pressure were significantly dependent on the application intervals. The low-frequency component of systolic blood pressure variability significantly increased, while the salivary secretion rate decreased with the use of mesh SN during the follicular phase compared with non-woven SN. In addition, the heart rate during the menstrual phase significantly increased in subjects after the replacement of mesh SN compared with non-woven SN. In cases of wearing the unpleasant mesh SN, electroencephalography (EEG) manifested bilateral enhancements in beta and alpha2 waves in the frontal areas increased arousal level during both phases. From the above findings, napkin use increased physiological loading and wearing napkins with higher textural surface-roughness tended to increase activities of the autonomic nervous system and brain arousal level." Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Uh, no. Aunt Flo means no ho, bro!
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Best materials and methods ever.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: analysis taken too far WTF is NCBI ROFL? ...

I’ll be at SETIcon, a celebration of 50 years of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, August 13 – 15. It’ll be a lot of fun, featuring some famous scientists and actors from Star Trek.

Part of the festivities will be a night of Rock Band hosted by me. If people pander enough, then I might take the stage as well. Can I sing or play drums? Come and find out.

They’ve also announced some new guests, including my friends Robert Sawyer (who wrote the novel Flash Forward) and astronomer Gibor Basri, who was a panelist on the recent Quest for a Living World event I moderated last month. Gibor is actively involved in the Kepler mission, which is looking for new Earths orbiting other stars.

Also — and this is very cool — there will be a copy of the novel Contact signed by Carl Sagan, Jodie Foster, and Jill Tarter auctioned at the event. Cripes, I may bid on that myself.

I plan on having a blast. I wind up working hard at these meetings a lot of the time, but for this one I think there will be some kicking back and actually enjoying it. You should come, too.

Tibetans not only occupy one of the most extreme locations on Earth, they’ve been doing it for thousands of years. This week in a study in the journal Science, scientists have for the first time picked out the particular genetic features that allow these people to survive in the low oxygen levels of the Tibetan Plateau, which is around 15,000 feet above sea level. Curiously, the way they have evolved to survive is unlike that of other high-altitude dwellers around the world.

The American and Chinese researchers doing the study started by keying on 247 genes that looked like good candidates—they tended to change across populations, and seemed to play a role in controlling a person’s blood oxygen level.

Then they analyzed segments of DNA that include those 247 genes in 31 unrelated Tibetans, 45 Chinese, and 45 Japanese lowland people whose DNA was genotyped in the HapMap Project. By identifying regions that had a characteristic signature of being strongly altered by natural selection, they were able to identify relatively new gene variants that had swept through highland Tibetans, but not Chinese or Japanese lowlanders [ScienceNOW].

Ten of the genes turned out to be particularly promising, with two, called EGLN1 and PPARA, showing up in the Tibetans who had the lowest levels of oxygen in their bloodstream.

That sounds strange at first. Typically, people who visit high-altitude locales tend to develop higher red blood cell counts and high concentrations of hemoglobin—which carries oxygen from the lungs—as their bodies try to adapt to the decreased oxygen in the atmosphere. Even some permanent mountain dwellers, like people in the Andes Mountains of South America, show this pattern. They’ve adopted high hemoglobin concentrations to survive there.

But not so the Tibetans. Increasing one’s hemoglobin can make blood too viscous, which is part of the reason people who visit Tibet often end up suffering health problems. Instead, over the presumably many thousands of years in Tibet, the people evolved to live with relatively low concentrations of hemoglobin, which must then act with great efficiency to keep enough oxygen in their blood. Scientists had seen this before, but now that they have pinned down some of the genes responsible, they can begin to investigate how exactly the Tibetans’ systems pull this off.

“What’s unique about Tibetans is they don’t develop high red blood cells counts,” Dr. Josef T. Prchal, study co-author and a hematologist and professor of internal medicine at the University of Utah, said in a news release. “If we can understand this, we can develop therapies for human disease” [BusinessWeek].

Related Content:
80beats: Tiny Soot Particles May Be Melting Mighty Himalayan Glaciers
DISCOVER: High-Altitude Determines Who Survives in Tibet
Bad Astronomy: From Tibet to Infinity And Back Again
Gene Expression: Tibet & Tibetans, Not Coterminus

Image: Wikimedia Commons

We mentioned on Monday that Bill Gates was giving $300,000 to a geoengineering scheme that would shoot seawater skyward to seed clouds. But the billionaire doesn’t just wanted to save the planet and stop the AIDS crisis—he would also like to improve your sex life.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded 78 promising but offbeat projects this week, one of those gifts being $100,000 to James Tsuruta and Paul Dayton of the University of North Carolina to pursue their idea of using ultrasound as a temporary and reversible male contraceptive.

Ultrasound produces a mild heating that appears to disable sperm cells and deplete the supply of stem cells that are required to replenish sperm reserves in the testes. Post-treatment images of the rat testes showed the tubules inside the testes completely lacking in sperm with almost no immature stem cells [The Times].

The scientists have already tried the test on male rats, with promising results. With the Gates’ money and more success in animal trials, they could extend this to human tests by next year, Tsuruta says.

“Our long-term goal is to use ultrasound from therapeutic instruments that are commonly found in sports medicine or physical therapy clinics as an inexpensive, long-term, reversible male contraceptive suitable for use in developing to first world countries” [BBC News].

First, however, they have to fully understand the process. It’s not clear exactly how the mechanism works—we know sperm don’t like excessive heat, but the scientists say it could be heating and shaking working in combination. The Times says that tests have show no long-term damage to the cells that produce sperm. But that doesn’t mean men will line up for this treatment when and if it’s approved.

Allan Pacey, a senior lecturer in andrology at the University of Sheffield, said: “There is certainly a place for an effective non-hormonal contraceptive in men, but whether men would find it acceptable to have their testicles scanned regularly remains to be seen” [The Times].

Related Content:
80beats: Bill Gates Funds Seawater Cloud Seeding, “The Most Benign Form of Geoengineering”
80beats: With $4.5 Million of Pocket Change, Bill Gates Funds Geoengineering Research
80beats: Bill Gates Patents a Device Aimed at Halting Hurricanes
Discoblog: Warning All Male Competitive Cyclists: Less Than 5% of Your Sperm May Be Normal

Image: iStockphoto

UVA is filing an extension in response to Cuccinelli's egregious request--but it should be fighting back in court, writes the paper:
Mr. Cuccinelli, apparently, speculates that Mr. Mann defrauded taxpayers by obtaining research grants to study global temperatures. It's clear from his statements that the "Climategate" controversy -- in which hackers stole records of e-mails between climate researchers that global warming skeptics then distorted -- inspired his witch hunt. Is there any doubt that the attorney general is trying to restoke that row with a fresh batch of e-mails?
In the process, he would deal grave harm to scientific inquiry throughout Virginia's public higher education system. Science progresses when researchers can propose ideas freely, differ in their methods and argue about the interpretations of their results. The commonwealth should nurture that process, not make scientists fear that they will be subject to investigation if a politician dislikes their conclusions. There comes a time when one has to stand up to bullying tactics--not to mention fundamental assaults on the ability of scientists to do their work. This is one of those times. UVA needs to stand up and be counted in defense of reason.